Seele Vollerei: The end of reality, and what came after.

[Baughn]

It takes time to explain how Veliona became your sister. More time to feel confident about calling her that, though you tell yourself that nothing's really changed. All you're doing is acknowledge what was already true, like you did for Bronya all those years ago.

It helps that Veliona's body language, whenever you do, tells you she's about as happy as you've ever seen her.

It's half an hour later when Theresa brings up something that makes you a great deal more confused about it all. Why does Veliona look so much like you, you've wondered? She doesn't act like it…

"But she does!" Kiana says, while laughing. "She's got that pretend 'demon' thing going on, but she acts just like you when she's sneaking out to buy snacks, or presents, or stuff like that. So long as she doesn't spot me, anyway! It's kind of cute."

You find yourself smiling at the thought, both happy and a little puzzled. Kiana never told you about anything like that… and she's the second person now to mention Veliona sneaking out, and there was that time last year when she gave you that terrifying present for your eighteenth birthday. It's the only time you've seen her blushing. It was cute.

You blushed a great deal more when you opened it, as did Bronya, but that's the sort of thing you've come to expect from Vel.

Thinking about it… that was the fifth time she celebrated your birthday. The first should be… that time with the diary. She claimed the captain bought it, but…

You've never once celebrated hers. You don't even know what time of year you should do so.

You have a lot of neglect to make up for. Either way, she seems strangely happy about the discussion. She smiles back at Kiana.

Which is a weird thing to watch in itself, but she's always looked like your identical twin. Palette swap aside, and you know well enough that that's a choice she makes, not fundamental.

You've thought it's because she was born from your stigma. That, if you'd looked any different, then so would Veliona, but Theresa tells you that's wrong. Walking nervously around the room, her smile a little too quick, she tells you about a shrine maiden named Yae Sakura and what ended up happening to her.

That natural stigmata are made, primarily, from people…

It's something you could have lived without knowing about.

"She seemed real," Kiana tells you. "She was trapped in a loop, but if you didn't spend time with her—if you didn't get to know her—you'd never have noticed. She couldn't remember her past, or what had trapped her that way. At least, not at first. Spending time with her, getting to know her, it was… it was fun. She seemed to be getting better, too. Less… trapped in a stereotype. She made new memories to replace the broken ones. Whenever she borrowed Mei's body, it was… like having a friend visit…"

Kiana wipes her eyes, and sniffles a little.

"I'll miss her. She was a sweet girl…"

You exchange glances with Vel. This all seems very familiar. If not in the details, then in the broad strokes. The parallels are uncanny.

The hairs on the back of your neck prickle uncomfortably.

"But Sakura looked nothing like Mei," Kiana says, forcing a smile. "It was obvious when she took over, because Mei would grow a pair of long, floppy rabbit ears. Can you believe it? That was in a virtual world, though…"

"And Veliona does look like me," you say.

To prove your point, you shift your own palette a little. Blue highlights to red, white fields to black… if you weren't used to Vel doing the same, you could never have done it so fluently. As it is, it takes you five or six seconds to turn into a perfect copy of her.

Kiana stares.

"That's uncanny," she says.

If you switched places, you doubt she'd even be able to tell--

Okay, no. Vel's laughing, suppressed giggles that shake her shoulders. She's not going to help you out here.

Kiana's looking from you to Vel and back again, a little puzzled.

"What…?" she asks slowly.

Vel lets out another chuckle, and a second later she's the one using your color scheme.

"Hi," she tells you, "I don't think we've met. I'm Seele. And you're the voice in the back of my head, right?"

"What," you mouth back silently.

Kiana's eyes fly open in shock. You wait for her to put two and two together.

"I… you…" she stutters.

The two of you shrug.

"Can't you tell who's who? We're color coded and everything," you say. "Hmm, I wonder if I can do tentacles?"

"They help in practice, but not in theory," Vel says.

Kiana stares at the two of you as if in a trance.

"I really hope you won't keep doing that," she says finally.

"Do what?" you ask.

"Switch in the middle of the conversation like that."

"Why not? It's fun."

She frowns.

"Now, now," Theresa says. "Interesting. So your appearance is a matter of choice."

"Only the colors," you say, glancing at Vel.

"As far as I know, this is just what I look like," she says.

"Interesting. So do you have an actual preference, or did you just… settle on this?" she asks.

You and Vel look at each other. You like blue, and it's the first time you've tried dressing like this, but you think you like black and red too. It's a bit cooler. Makes you feel confident. Maybe that's just because you look like Vel usually does, but you like it. Is Vel thinking the same thing, you wonder?

"It looks good," you say together.

Kiana rolls her eyes.

"Hey, Kiana. You should smile more. It looks good on you," you say innocently.

The girl's eyes widen in shock for a second, then she frowns.

"Don't try to pretend you're Vel," she says.

"Doesn't work?"

"It works too well." She shakes her head. "The two of you together are… I dunno. I miss my best friend, and she's gone. But the two of you together are just…"

She sighs. The two of you exchange a look, then shrug. You don't quite understand, but you feel quite a bit of sympathy for her.

You're about to open your mouth to reassure her, when you realize you're not sure how. Bronya is… losing Bronya makes you want to curl up and cry, but at least you have hope for getting her back. Kiana doesn't have that, and you aren't sure how she isn't falling apart.

Then again, that's very like her. You quietly swap back, and Veliona does the same.

"Kiana, do you want us to stay for a while?" you ask. "Only, we did sort of leave the twins hanging, and it's the middle of the night here. If you're going to sleep, then we'll go deal with the twins, and then we'll come back to visit you in the morning. If you want us to stay, then we will."

"I'm not sure if I can sleep," she sighs. "What you found, who that made me find, makes it difficult to even imagine resting. But I'm not, I don't…" There's the confusion your antics were allowing her to hide. Fear, too, but of a very different sort to before.

"Do you think we can help?" Vel asks. Kiana shakes her head helplessly.

"I don't know. I just, I can't let her down."

You don't really get what she means, but you nod.

"We're here for you!" you say, with a little more excitement than is probably appropriate. "Why don't you tell us about her?"

She shakes her head again.

"I don't have the words," she says softly. "There's so much about her that I'm still not sure of. I'm not even sure if she knows who she was, before Schicksal–" She cuts off, shuddering. "They did things to her, Seele. Horrible things."

You look at your sister, unsure of what to say. You knew that Sirin must have suffered, Herrschers don't just happen. But you're getting the impression that what was done to her was no accident. That Schicksal made her become a Herrscher. You feel Vel tense beside you, her realisation following your own, but with something more beside it. That's something for later.

"I keep thinking about all the things I should have recognised. That it's my fault she's like this."

"You can't think like that," Vel says, her voice quiet yet firm. "If you do, you won't be any use to her now."

Kiana nods, and rubs at her face with one of her hands.

"I want to help her," she whispers. "But I've no idea where to start."

"I think you've already made one," you say. "You reached out to her, accepted her. It took years for me to do that for Vel, Kiana." And Bronya being in mortal danger, you weren't proud to admit. Vel nudges your shoulder.

"Just build on that," your sister says encouragingly. "Ask her about her life, and offer her the chance to be a part of yours. Part of ours."

Kiana looks up at the two of you, and there's a flicker of a smile on her face. "I think I can do that," she nods, then reaches up and catches each of you in a one-armed hug. "Thank you. Both of you."

You both return the hug, then step back. Kiana's smile is brighter than it was. That's a good sign. Now you need to make sure she keeps it.

"Kiana," Theresa asks, sitting down carefully near the girl, but not too close. Trying to give her space, you think. "Will you be alright now?"

Kiana looks up, and there's a moment's hesitation. Then she nods. Her smile loses a little of its brightness, but it's still there. More than that, it's genuine.

"I think so," she says. "I'll be alright, at least for now. I think we have a lot to talk about, Aunt Teri."

"Yes," Theresa swallows heavily. "I believe we do."

Vel looks over at you after the door to the dorm closes behind you. "Do you think she'll be ok?"

"I think we have to trust her," you reply. "But we should check on her tomorrow."

ooOOoo

It's at least half an hour's hiking later that you find your way back to the twins, and that description belies the weariness you're feeling.

'Hiking…' you guess it isn't a bad description. Mountain climbing, maybe. Any one of the broken areas isn't hard to pass through, but you were tired to begin with and it's been dozens. All you really want is to reintroduce your sister to them, and have a quiet chat, and go to bed. The best laid plans of men and mice, alas…

They startle as you round the corner, looking up with something approaching guilt on their faces.

"Seele," says Liliya softly. "Vel. You're back."

You nod, smiling a bit.

"What are you doing?" you ask. "Stealing cookies?"

Rozaliya smiles sheepishly.

"Not this time," she says. "We actually wanted to talk to you. You're the experts on quantum stuff, right? We've got a… we've got a problem we were hoping to resolve. Can you…"

Rozaliya isn't this hesitant, ever. You immediately start to worry, and your smile fails.

"What's going on?" you ask.

Liliya takes your hand and leads you into a random office, while Rozaliya closes the door behind you.

"Just… think of the weirdest thing you can," she says, "the impossible. Then, multiply that by a million. Did you notice I haven't fallen asleep yet?"

You take a deep breath.

"I didn't," you say. "Time's warped quite a lot. How long has it been since I left?"

Liliya bites her lip.

"About three hours," she says softly. "I've… I've been awake almost twelve hours, Seele. I know, it doesn't seem like a bad thing, but I know why it's happening and…" She trails off, looking up at you with tears in her eyes. "I'm scared."

"Liliya," you say, grabbing her hand. "Tell me everything."

ooOOoo

The four of you find some seats, and you study Liliya carefully. Your little sister looks good—like she's blooming, almost—and far from looking tired, her skin has a healthy glow and her eyes are clear.

"I'm guessing you haven't napped," you say.

"Correct." Liliya nods. "I haven't been sleepy at all. My energy… it's not infinite, but it feels like it is. Like I could go on like this forever.

"She can't," Rozaliya supplies. "She'll fall asleep in an hour. Of course…"

Of course, that'd be thirteen hours. Most days she's lucky to reach ten. Liliya falls asleep at seven every day, like clockwork, and that's only if she's in good health and had a good night's sleep, neither of which has been at all likely these last few months. Besides, thirteen hours is about how long Roza's usually awake.

"You'd better start from the beginning," Veliona says.

"Right." Liliya nods. "So, it started right after the end of the world. Teri had asked us to go to the deck, to clear a landing spot for Durandal once she escaped, but we didn't make it in time and were trapped in a corridor. It was…" She hesitates. "I don't remember much after that."

"It was no fun," Rozaliya says. "We were trapped there by broken pieces of space. I got nauseous after a few minutes, and then Lili– Lili, she–" Rozaliya drops her head into her hands, then looks up. "We're alright now, you know? But I started throwing up, and Lili lost consciousness. I've never seen her that pale. After that, I'm not really sure what happened. I passed out as well, and woke up a little later, feeling like I was about to die. I'm not sure how long we spent like that."

"We weren't out for that long." Liliya tries to smile. "Just a few hours. We were trapped in that corridor for longer, but it got better eventually. After…"

You look at them in shock.

"It felt like forever," Rozaliya says. "I started hallucinating, thinking Zofia and Isabella were there. I think I even talked to them. I really miss them, you know, but I couldn't reach them. I could barely crawl."

Her voice gets quieter and quieter.

The picture your sister is painting isn't a pretty one. Not one bit. They're alive; they're in front of you, and seem unhurt, and that's the only reason why you aren't hugging the life out of them right now. The only reason.

"So, what happened? How did you get free?" you ask.

"We didn't," Rozaliya says. "Not in time. Liliya… she was getting colder, and her breath was really shallow. I could barely feel it. I got desperate."

She hesitates, looking down at her hands, before looking at Veliona.

"I've often had a thought. If things ever get really bad, if Liliya's sickness keeps getting worse, I'd do whatever it takes to save her. Even if that means giving her my organs, or risking my life. Well, they couldn't get much worse. Liliya was dying!" Rozaliya says, her voice breaking. "And I was dying too, but I didn't really care. So, I…"

She falls silent.

"Roza-idiotka," Liliya says, her voice gentle. "I'd never want you to give up your life for me."

"I wanted to. At least we'd have stayed together," Roza says, smiling with tears in her eyes. "But I'm not sure what happened next. Just that one minute I was on the floor next to Liliya, clinging to her for dear life—I couldn't stand, anyway—as if holding her tightly enough could stop her from dying—and the next, we'd… no, I'd better show you," she says.

She turns, and raises her hand. Liliya raises hers too, and the two clasp hands. Then…

You can't make out what happens next. It's like reality slips a gear, and everything goes to hell. They're still holding hands—then they're joined at the wrist. Their flesh bubbles, seemingly wanting to drag them together. They stand like that for a moment, expressions strained, before pulling apart.

And then they're two people again.

"Wow," you say. "Did… did you just do what I think you did?"

Your voice is trembling.

"We've gotten pretty fast," Liliya says, smiling. She looks, if anything, even healthier than before.

"So that's what happened," Roza says. "It was messier the first time. Seele, you know we got our augmentations from the Assaka, right? Like, of course we've speculated about this before! It's a honkai beast that splits in two, and if you kill just one then the other dies in a couple hours. It was obvious. We even tried it, once. Didn't work, but I was too scared to really want to. What would happen to us, the two of us, if we merged for real? Besides, Liliya says she'd just sleep all day and let me do everything."

Her tone is light at the end, joking even. But she looks shaken.

"Anyway, we honestly don't know what happens if we keep doing this," she says, after a pause. "Maybe nothing? Maybe we both die horribly? Maybe we'll… I don't know. Is one plus one one, or two, or three?"

She's quiet for a moment.

"Do you know?" she asks, her voice pleading. "Please, do you know what will happen?"

You think back to the last they saw of you, when you left with Veliona. Stepped inside of her, literally. You get why they're asking, but neither of you actually have bodies. What's happening to your little sisters, it's biology. It's messy, irrational, looks almost uncontrollable… they're part honkai beast, not part quantum computer. What this will do to them is far beyond your ability to answer.

It's one of the scarier questions you've been asked today.

You don't know how to answer at all, and the twins can see it in your expression. Their faces fall. Rozaliya seems to collapse in on herself, and Liliya…

Liliya looks like she wants to cry. She looks like she's forcing herself not to.

"You don't know," she says, in a tiny voice. "You can't answer."

You embrace them, clinging like you're the one that needs saving. You want to say something, anything, but the words just aren't there.

"I'm sorry," you say, pressing your face into Liliya's shoulder. "I don't know. I wish I did."

The four of you sit in silence for a while. Veliona looks at her hands, staring at them like they've turned into deadly enemies.

"I'm… I'm scared," Rozaliya admits. "And I'm worried about Liliya. But right now she's doing better than she ever has, so… so I'll focus on that. I'm sure we'll pull through, just like always. We'll be okay. You don't need to worry about us, sis."

You're worried out of your mind. Even Veliona's looking anxious. Right now, they need to hear something uplifting, something positive. Something that will help them through this.

You don't have anything. You're not sure if you know how to lie, either. Not to them.

You can't say goodbye. Not now, not ever. You need them too much. Veliona needs them too much. Without them, you wouldn't have a family—no link to humanity—barely any reason, really, to stick around. You have Kiana and Theresa, yes, and they're friends—but it's one thing to help them, because they're there and you like them. It's another one entirely, if it's ever a choice between them and your siblings. The world can burn, before you ever let these two go. But you have other choices. You don't have to let them go.

You're not letting them go.

"Seele?" Veliona says, suddenly alarmed. "What are you doing?"

You...

Something shimmers in the distance, begging for you to take it.

You hear a sob, Rozaliya's composure finally collapsing. Roza needs you now, while you can worry about whatever that was later. The half-glimpsed correlation whips about, failing to find purchase on your full existence, then fades away with something approaching reluctance. Suddenly you're happy you didn't touch it—whatever it was, you can't shake the feeling that it was alive in some way.

"I don't have an answer," you say, holding them. "Not yet. But I will. I promise you, Roza. We're getting through this. You said it yourself, I'll do anything for you and Liliya. I don't know if that means I'd give up my life for you, necessarily–" You give out a half-choked laugh. "But if it's just walking through hell, I can do that. We'll find an answer somewhere."

Rozaliya nods, taking comfort in your words. You've no idea how you'll deliver on your promise, you just know you mean it. Utterly and without reservation.

"We'll find a way through this," you tell her.

You want to drop everything, take the twins to someone clever, and find a solution right away. There's a part of you—a big part—that finds it hard to care what happens to the rest of the crew, so long as your siblings will be fine. But you can't, and not just because that would spell their doom as surely as anything else. Not just because there's no one you can take them to, either.

You know you aren't the best of people, but you're not a bad one. Roza and Liliya aren't your only friends on the Hyperion, and you promised. You promised Bronya, that all of you would see the festival together. To do that, you need to save more than just your family. Bronya wouldn't like you if you were someone who wouldn't. You wouldn't like you if you were someone who wouldn't. And…

If you're lucky, you'll find a doctor among the crew.

It won't be happening right away. The twins, having cried themselves out, have fallen asleep. But can't sleep now, not with how worried you are. You're still stroking Rozaliya's hair, watching them sleep; they don't stir at all.

Liliya's fallen asleep leaning against Veliona, and your older sister looks completely overwhelmed by the experience. You watch as she slowly lays her down on her lap, treating her like she's made of eggshells, and, glancing repeatedly at you, begins stroking her hair as well. Vel looks worried, like she has no idea what to do; much like yourself, you suspect. She's also trembling, like something deep inside of her has finally burst open.

"Can..." she begins to say, then stops. She tries again, and this time, her voice works. "Can we actually help them?"

It's a strange question. She knows everything you do, so she knows just as well as you how uncertain the answer is. Which means she isn't looking for an answer, she's looking for reassurance. You take a deep breath, and try to find some for her.

The answer, unfortunately, is the same as earlier.

"We can try," you say.

You put one arm around Vel, and leave the other to hold Rozaliya. She lets out a shuddering breath. Veliona, that is; not Rozaliya. Your little sister seems to be deep in sleep already.

"It's not the conversation I wanted to have when we saw them again," you say. "Hey, Vel?"

"Yeah?"

You wonder how you should put it.

"You know what you told Theresa, way back?" you say. "That if it wasn't for me, you'd have destroyed the world long ago. I don't think she really believed you, or she'd have reacted more strongly when we first met her today."

Veliona just nods. You were expecting a bit more of a reaction. Maybe an 'Oh, I wasn't serious,' though you know perfectly well she was. Could she have done it? Probably not. Would she have tried, if they hurt you? Definite yes.

"Well, I think I understand now," you say, letting out a sigh.

There's another pause in the conversation, this one lasting a couple of minutes. You go on holding Roza, running your hand gently through her hair. It's calming. She's right here.

The twins are teenagers now, but they haven't grown much since that first time you saw them after returning from the Sea. Rozaliya is a centimeter taller, if that, and you think a lot of that is her horn.

She insists that it counts, of course.

When you look over at Liliya, you see something that gives you pause. Nothing that's obviously bad, you think, probably—it's just, the prosthetic at the end of her tail is gone. In its place is something that looks like bone. You check Rozaliya as well. Hers still looks normal.

"We should probably get them to bed," you say, but neither of you move.

Your eyes slip shut.

This isn't a great idea…

ooOOoo

Your eyes open. The first thing you notice, as you wake up, is that you're at the bottom of a tangle of limbs. The second thing is, you're almost numb. You would be stiffer than a plank, if stiffness was a thing you could feel.

The twins are pressed to either side of you, and you can feel their breath on your face. They're still sleeping peacefully. Liliya–

You twist, enough to let you look at her face. She's a little pale, but it's somewhere between her usual paleness and the healthy complexion she had last night. Compared to her usual appearance, she's still practically glowing.

If there's anything that gives you hope for the situation, it's that. She looks relaxed and comfortable, even in sleep. Like she hasn't for years.

Veliona is already up. She sees you looking at her, then smiles and hushes you. You didn't even say anything.

After a few minutes Liliya stirs, and opens her eyes. She smiles when she sees you looking at her. "Morning," she says. "How long have you been awake?"

You shrug. "A few minutes."

"Mm," she hums, then closes her eyes and snuggles into you, nuzzling under your chin. Rozaliya shifts against your other arm.

You wrap your free arm around her shoulder and lean your head down to rest on top of hers. She feels nice and warm against you.

It's not exactly your normal way of sleeping. This isn't the first time the twins have snuck into your bed, granted—with or without Bronya—but they're usually eager to show their independence. Always have been, and that's not compatible with snuggling with their big sister.

Which makes you question whether this is all a ruse, and they're planning something right now. Maybe they've just learned how to lay really quietly and still. It would be typical of these two.

You're only mostly joking.

Rozaliya shifts again, and this time your arm comes free. You do a double take when you realize she's gone. You twist around to look behind you, and there she is, grinning and already off the couch.

"Wha..." Lili sits up, rubbing her eyes.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," Roza says with a teasing grin.

Liliya groans and puts her head back down on her cushion. Roza sits on the edge of the couch and leans down to study her, smile mostly gone. After a few minutes she gets back up, seemingly satisfied.

"Come on, get up or we'll leave you behind."

"Leave me behind?" Liliya sits up and yawns. "Sounds good. Breakfast..."

She's a zombie in the mornings. You can't even count how many times she's fallen asleep on her toast.

You shamble to your feet, not fully awake yourself, and clumsily follow them out of the room.

"Come on," Roza says. "Let's not keep Lili waiting for her food."

= = =

And that marks the end of day 1. All's well that ends well.

Right, right. I suppose I should explain.

Some time ago I was faced with a problem: The twins are allergic to the quantum sea, in much the same way as humans are allergic to hydrochloric acid. Theresa has similar issues as well, but Rozaliya and Liliya were explicitly told (in chapter 10 of canon) that, if they get too close, they'll die. This adds to Liliya's seriously limited lifespan, which I don't want any part of either.

That's 'too close', mind you; never mind going inside. Fully protected areas such as the bridge, or the core of Engineering, don't count as being adjacent to the quantum sea—but most of the ship does.

At the same time, we've seen from Delta and Gemina that it's a fixable problem. There are possible configurations of the twins such that they don't die from merely being nearby, and can in fact traverse the Sea safely.

This is my answer. It's not a solution, but it feels like something which could happen by accident. If you want solutions, there are several available… all you have to do is explain why it works.

Just not Delta's, please. Don't do that one.

= = =

Day 2.

Budget: 2 major actions, 2 minor actions. Well, I fully expect plans to get derailed midway, but here's some things you can do that would fill up the day. Defining 'major' as something that takes 3-5 hours, and 'minor' as whatever you can fit into the cracks.

Feel free to write-in anything I haven't thought of. Or ask questions; anything Seele, Veliona or the twins should know is available.

Major
[ ] Finish clearing a path between the twins' group and Engineering.
[ ] Investigate the floating ball and its altar.
[ ] Investigate what happened to Ai-chan
[ ] Investigate the Core of Reason
[ ] Search the ship for other survivors
- [ ] Where?

Minor
[ ] Help Kiana finish the path between Engineering and the bridge.
[ ] (Re)introduce Veliona to the twins
[ ] Talk to Kiana's father
[ ] Talk to Hans

 

[Baughn]

Day 2

Breakfast is military food. It's not bad, but it's bland and boring. You don't eat much. You don't need to, after all; you're snacking a little, only to keep the twins company. The... younger twins. You still haven't gotten used to that, and you're not sure how long it'll take you, but you're constantly aware of Veliona's presence by your side in a way you weren't yesterday.

Things are looking up, though. The four of you have taken a table in a corner of the cafeteria–

That's, well, that's Veliona's doing. She cleared out the path to it early in the morning, while you and the twins were still sleeping. There's a few tufts of grass and other nonsensical intrusions, but it's safe, and that means Hans and the rest of everyone can get around at least a little bit without Roza and Liliya to fetch necessities, which in turn means you can keep them where you can keep an eye on them.

It also means the place is almost boisterous. Everyone's chatting and laughing, and it's almost like a normal morning. Almost like you woke up back home, rather than on a broken ship on the edge of nonexistence.

"Good morning." Hans smiles.

"Morning, Hans," the twins chorus.

You get the impression that he'd like to pat them on the head, but he settles for scooping a second helping of eggs onto Rozaliya's plate. You can't help but smile at him. Anyone Roza and Liliya likes is okay in your book.

You take a sip of your water, and listen in on the conversation.

"So what's the plan for today, Hans?" Liliya asks.

"Taking stock," he says. "I might not look it, but I'm good with numbers. Well, the Hyperion was stocked for a lengthy deployment. Even with the power having failed for a while, there should be plenty of food, water, medical supplies, you name it. For now, I'll be summarizing everything that's accessible in the cleared areas."

"Got it." Roza nods.

He hesitates, then looks at Veliona. "I'm happy to have something to do, but..."

"Those seals? Not my doing," she says, shaking her head. "I've been wondering about that too. We've found three now."

Hans frowns, and scratches his chin. "It's a big ship, but that's three out of eight freezers in this area. I'm worried about how much of our provisions we've lost. Maybe the seals are edible, but..."

"Um, what are you talking about?" you interject.

Veliona blinks, and shrugs her shoulders at you. You blink back.

"There were eight walk-in freezers in this section," Hans says. "We've found five that are intact, their contents still frozen. The other three turned into..." He scratches his chin, once again. "There's no way to say this without sounding crazy, but the entire room was replaced with a single block of ice, containing frozen seals. All three of them. The seals look perfectly intact, but all the same I'd rather not eat them."

"What do you mean, seals?" you ask. "Like, the animals?"

He nods. "Big furry creatures that live in the ocean, like a cross between a fish and a bear."

"That can't possibly be right," you say, imagining the scene.

"It isn't," he agrees. "But there they are, behind a solid wall of ice. I mean, I'm not an idiot. I know what's probably causing this. It's just..." He shakes his head. "Bizarre. Even for me."

"Do you think we should go in and investigate?" Lili asks.

Hans shakes his head vigorously. "I'd rather leave them alone," he says. "Absurd or not, they're still just dead animals. Frozen, dead animals. They're not going to come alive if we leave them alone, and I'd rather not risk the wrath of the Crawling Plague of R'lyeh."

"The what now?" you ask.

"Highly contagious, morphologically unique virus," Hans explains. "Highly unstable. Gives you superpowers, but makes you broody and dark. You end up slowly turning into a kraken. It's from a novel I was writing in my teens."

"Oh," you say. "Uh... is that a real virus?"

Hans chuckles. "No, no," he says. "It's not a real virus. You'd need a direct injection of squid DNA to contract it."

You scratch your head.

Veliona grins. "Does it turn you into a tentacle monster?" she asks. "That sounds really cool."

"It sucks," Hans says. "You spend all your time in the ocean, you have to kill yourself or become a complete psychopath who lives to hurt others, and there's no way to turn back. All you can do is brood. And defeat the Herrschers, but that's just a way to suppress the dark cravings in your heart."

Hans brightens up. "I should write a book," he says. "What do you think, Veliona?"

"Uh huh," she says. "That's a great idea. I'm sure it'll be a bestseller."

"You think so?" he asks. "Really?"

The five of you look at each other, then collapse into laughter.

"Yes, really," you say, wiping a tear from your eye. "Thanks, Hans. I needed that. Roza, Liliya–" You take a deep breath. It's not unlikely you'll be spending the day with them, and you could tell them about your sister later, when it's just the four of you. You could. You could, but... she's not a secret. You don't want her to be a secret. You might as well do this now.

"Veliona," you say, "is my sister."

Hans looks surprised. Roza and Liliya look surprised. Veliona smirks and folds her arms, rolling her eyes.

"Really? I had no idea," Hans says, scratching his head. "Seele, that's fairly obvious. You look exactly alike."

"We do," Veliona agrees. "Although now that you mention it, we've always been a little different. Seele was always the quiet, timid one. And I... well, as you know, I'm not."

You palm your face. You really, really should have seen this coming. Hans looks at you, then at Veliona, then at Roza and Liliya for confirmation.

"You're... right," you say. "It's obvious. She's my twin sister. The thing is, I didn't realize that before Rozaliya said so yesterday, and I should have. We've been together... six years now?" you say questioningly, looking at Veliona.

"Or a hundred," she says, shrugging. "You shouldn't be beating yourself up about this, Seele. My memory is hazy that far back, but I know we didn't get off on the right foot. Honestly, I'm not surprised you thought I was a demon."

"Please, Vel. You're not a demon. You're my sister," you say.

She smiles slightly. "Of course I am, silly."

You look away, feeling the beginnings of tears in your eyes.

"Seele, are you alright?" Liliya asks.

"Yeah... I'm just happy," you say, rubbing your eyes. "Anyway, Hans, here's the thing. Veliona was born from my stigmata, somehow–" And you'll keep your guess that she wasn't to yourself, for now. "–And it's only four years ago, or thereabouts, that I started seeing her as a person. I'm not proud of that, but it's true. It took Rozaliya stating the obvious to make me realize that we're family."

You take her hand, squeezing it softly. She squeezes back.

"Seele, you don't need to explain yourself," she says. "I know you didn't mean to. And I get it. I probably would have done the same thing, had our roles been reversed."

You give her a sad smile. "Thanks, Vel. In any case, that's... that, I guess. She's my twin sister. It's not that complicated. I just wish I'd let her out a bit earlier, like when we were in the orphanage."

Vel winces. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, but that would've been a really bad idea. I would have murdered Sin."

You sigh. "Yeah, you're probably right."

"The point is, you're stuck with me," she says, smirking. "Now, as for your punishment..." Vel looks at Roza. "What do you think I should do? You're the expert. How do you handle overly quiet little sisters?"

"I'm not that much younger than you," you say.

It's probably true. Probably.

"So what?" Vel grins. "We're twins. They're twins. I'm sure Rozaliya's got plenty of ideas, and I want to hear all of them."

She corners Roza, who smiles back nervously. This? This could be a real problem. For you, for Theresa, for everyone whose sanity isn't already in question. You should probably stop them.

"Come on," Vel says, leading Rozaliya out of the room. Liliya follows like a lost lamb.

After briefly weighing your options, you decide the best course of action is to...

Ignore them, and hope for an impossible miracle.

ooOOoo

Nothing like yesterday's disaster happens, and after the first two or three rifts, closing them becomes second nature.

True, your patches aren't as clean as Kiana's. Sometimes the patches turn into holes into the abyssal void, and sometimes into floating patches of grass, or pinecones, or other things that don't belong. When that happens, you try it again until they're at least traversable. Veliona, on her side of the corridor, seems to have found a trick for reliably turning the ones in the floor into flagstones.

You could swear you saw something moving inside one of them, but it was only an illusion, a shadow playing tricks on your eyes. There's nothing to worry about.

Nothing at all.

Which doesn't stop you asking the twins to stay well back. They obey—or rather, Rozaliya seems reluctant to approach them at all. Is that because of the spiders? Was it the spiders? It was the spiders, wasn't it. You feel a smile playing about your lips. Of all the things to make Rozaliya stay back, you didn't think plastic spiders would be it.

You spend the morning mostly like that, making about a foot of headway per minute, while the four of you have a half-shouted conversation about nothing of importance. Who cares about the exact shade of pink that goes best with blue and white?

Rozaliya, evidently, and you find yourself smiling at her frustration, born of trying to match both you and Liliya simultaneously. Veliona joins in to disagree with everything Rozaliya suggests, both of them turn on you—Liliya pointing out she did blue first—and you end up dressed in brown for a while. Vel might have an evil streak a lightyear wide, but she has good taste. It's great to see them getting along, whatever long-term consequences that may have, and you're happy to just sit back and be…

You're falling.

Reality crumbles, all around you. You get a brief but crystal-clear glimpse of Liliya screaming as you tumble to the floor, a spear of white-hot agony lancing your side. Veliona bursts, like a soap bubble that's been pricked, and you feel her attention tear outwards. Away from the Hyperion.

It's like looking through a kaleidoscope. Sounds, colors, sensations run past your vision like a whirlwind. Rozaliya is begging for you to get up, but you can barely understand her words. The world has shattered around you, and you're helplessly falling through the cracks. It takes you a moment to realize that it isn't the hallway that shattered, but you.

ooOOoo

Your mind is awash with fragments of memory, and you can't for the life of you remember what's real and what isn't.

You almost feel as if you're in two places at once.

You're on the floor of the hallway, body broken in half, but you're also in a void, a butterfly wrapped around the Hyperion. A shattered butterfly. Everything's tearing, and you can't keep up. You have a blinding headache, and if you try to look at the damage or focus on what's important, you feel as if you'll lose your mind.

You can't afford to lose your mind.

Painfully, you drag yourself away from the Hyperion, from the broken body in that hallway, glitching and fuzzing out. It isn't really doing either of those things, but Veliona's own panicky exertions are making it impossible to keep it synced with the Hyperion's reality, something that should normally be automatic.

Your own panic isn't helping.

The world resolves itself piece by piece.

You're in the quantum sea. You're nailed to the Hyperion, a lance of white nothingness piercing your side. The horizon is a wave of beasts, of quantum shadows, of something or other that your headache is making it hard to resolve.

From that perspective, Veliona is fighting a desperate but hopeless fight to protect you from an onslaught of what must be thousands of the beasts, enough of them to fill the sky. They aren't acting normally. They're faster, stronger… bigger than normal, and they're not just aiming at Vel. In fact, they're barely aiming at her at all. They're going for the ship as a whole, and it's defenseless. Vel is forced to put herself between their attacks and the Hyperion, her efforts to protect you and the rest of the ship making the fight even more one-sided.

Your vision swims, your attackers' appearance shifting from honkai beast, to quantum shadow, to an all-encompassing flood of consumption that threatens to swallow you up when you look at it. The only constant is the white lance of energy protruding from your side.

The beasts are relentless. They're deadlier than any shadow should be, slipping into every crack, every weakness, every fault and fractional timeline of the ship, making it impossible for Veliona to find a clear shot without risking damage. It's an impossible fight, one even Durandal would have trouble with. Your entire left side is gone, torn to pieces, large chunks of it simply missing. Pinned to the ship, you're struggling to maintain your form.

That's how a human would see it.

Good thing, then, that you aren't forced to conform to that perspective. This is dangerous, but not yet a disaster.

ooOOoo

It would be wrong, to say you must be a native of the quantum sea to fight the things that are. All you need is the ability to see them, and shoot at them, or hit them, or do whatever act of violence you're best at—and the Sea will take care of the rest. All you need is to pick out the right correlations, through serendipity or nature, that let you treat your enemies as 'someone you already know how to fight'.

As above, so below. The instant something in the Sea matches well enough with events in a higher world, the Sea will conform to that story instead of its own. That's what you mean by 'correlations'.

The same applies to movement, or breathing, or existence in general. Anyone who wasn't born here is, by definition, a juggernaut. Mountain-sized, or planet-sized, compared to the gnats that are the native life. Efficiency isn't needed, only the ability to aim at them at all, and if the creatures you might have seen your scythe slicing through in the past weren't as real as you, then that didn't change the outcome at all. But that's only true for someone like Bronya, fighting something that—in a Tesla-esque sense—barely exists at all, relative to her.

That it was still a fight at all goes a long way to demonstrating how inefficient this is, and for someone who can't do that—like Roza, or Liliya, or most people really—wading into the quantum sea would mean being slowly worn down by enemies they can't even see, their life stolen away until there's nothing left at all.

None of that is optional. If you're human, then the true nature of the fight you're in is literally unimaginable. No human could possibly fight a battle that's even close to equal, mired in the depths of the quantum sea. Not like Veliona's doing right now.

But Vel isn't human.

Vel is something else entirely, and by this time, so are you.

ooOOoo

Your human form melts away, discarded, and a disintegrating butterfly-of-light welds itself back together as if time is reversing. You spread your wings high above the battlefield.

That's not what's really happening. These aren't honkai beasts. They aren't even quantum shadows. Their concepts, almost all the ones that are exposed to you, all just say 'enemy', 'predator'; their appearance is hardly meaningful. Their original attack, the one that happened maybe three seconds ago, was to impale you with a spear made of the concept of disintegration. You don't think all of that through in the moment, you just feel the confusion.

They didn't hit your sister first. That was a mistake. That lost them the fight.

Since they didn't…

It's a nuisance. But that doesn't calm you, your heart still racing as you imagine how this could have gone so horribly wrong. Your teeth, if you had them, would clench, creaking with entirely justified anger. And all you want to do is tear them to pieces. These things tried to kill you.

You finish evaporating the lance, its remnants quickly catalogued by your stigma, and feel your insides realign themselves the way they're supposed to. Zero damage, a little 'bruising'—you can feel a few pieces missing, but nothing you don't have copies of. It'll fix itself in a matter of minutes, and you jolt Veliona with a burst of anger and eagerness, letting her know you're ready to help.

Your sister is the icy focus of a stalking predator. And with your presence secure, there's nothing holding her back. She appreciates your offer somewhere, you think. She just doesn't need it.

Shadows crawl out all around you, everywhere these entities are not; a denial of all existence other than your own. The world contracts. The beasts are around you; then they're in front of you; then they're arriving from a single point, a single pathway that's the only way to or from the ship. Another rain of lances arrives, to be swallowed up by the darkness.

She's trying to cut them off, at the cost of placing herself between you, and all the creatures and weapons raining down on you. Again. That's a fight she can't hope to endure for very long.

You don't think, you just hurl yourself down that sole remaining connection, arriving as a wrecking ball in their midst just as Vel's tide of dark and death crashes into the horde of monsters.

Vel's looking to slice away their ability to reach the Hyperion. You help, as best you can, throwing chaff in their way, amplifying their shouts to confuse them, and cutting one or two of them open when they aren't watching carefully enough. If you were still operating on that level, you'd imagine yourself as a whirling ball of death.

The way they react is odd. Ill-coordinated, panicky. Almost animalistic. Not like honkai beasts, which always throw themselves on your scythe regardless, and definitely not like people. Your crude intervention works, the chaos receding a little as Veliona's shadows solidify into shredded space, then no space at all, and that gives you a little time to think. The attacks against you, in the beginning and now, they were… simple. Undoubtedly powerful, but crude. That's an opportunity.

It's easy to win a fight when you outweigh them a trillion to one. Any human can do that to an ant. Harder when you're on equal ground, but whatever these things expected, it wasn't Vel. Or, for that matter, you. You aren't sure if they were expecting anything at all. Their insides leak out, and your stigma catalogues them—panic, confusion, hunger—pieces of humans, but nothing like intelligence. To your senses, their minds feel like the mass of writhing maggots that one sometimes sees on a corpse.

Animals?

Your view of the Hyperion has narrowed to a single, needle-like eye that passes right through the middle of Veliona. That fight is won; there's no way for them to harm it, now.

Your own should have been hard-fought. They should have reacted to your arrival, rearranged themselves. The closest should have delayed you, others pulled back to form lines you couldn't so easily pierce through. Instead the closest are as often biting at other beasts as they are towards you, and they're all pulling back, trying to escape. There's no hint of any kind of coordination.

True, you've done your very best, to stop it happening, but–

You're not in any danger, and that is in itself wrong. You aren't able to slaughter them—they aren't really here. But if you can hold them in place for just a little longer, you can cage them. Keep some of them from running away, trap them in a barely-attached slice of space-time for you to study. Or kill them. Or maybe just cut them off from reality entirely, lost until the Sea degrades them into nothingness.

= = =

The abyss of the ocean is a dark and lonely place, filled mostly with dust at maximum entropy, but occasionally the carcass of a whale drops in from above.

[ ] Trap one of the creatures
- [ ] And study it immediately
[ ] Fortify the Hyperion
- [ ] By making it harder to spot
- [ ] By making it dangerous to get to
[ ] Return to Rozaliya and Liliya
[ ] Write-in

 

[Snowfire]

"We need to talk about Kiana."

There are some words that no parent ever wants to hear from their child's headmistress. Theresa looks tired, her perpetually pubescent features pale and drawn, and the bags beneath her eyes are ones you can't envy. But this wouldn't just be a schooling matter. There's no school left. At least no alarms are going off - yet, you chastise yourself. With a Herrscher, one can never be too careful.

"What about her?" you ask, trying to feign nonchalance even as you curse Kevin for taking the Judgement from you. You're in the Hyperion's senior officer's mess, alone for now, but you can't imagine that Otto will eat with the crew.

"I'm not even sure where to begin." Theresa sighs, quickly filling her own tray with lighter fare - there's no shortage of bitter melon, at least. "Seele came to the dorms last night, after vanishing halfway through her SAR mission. She… I don't know, Siegfried. She found a bubble out there, during her mission, a nightmare of Second Impact. A bad one, Sieg." Her eyes are haunted, and you know Theresa well enough to know that that takes some doing.

"What did she see?" you ask, only for Theresa to shake her head.

"Not what, Sieg. Who. Not who you think, either." She pauses, and you notice her shudder. "Seele saw a girl in there, someone who wasn't the Second Herrscher or Kiana. A girl with purple hair, torn open upon the ice. A girl who knew me, and would know you too, I think."

You only remember only one girl like that from Second Impact. The one you fought with Theresa and Welt, who Cecilia died trying to save. What was her name?

"Sirin," Theresa says, and you only then realise that you asked your question aloud. The name brings you to immediate attention, but somehow Theresa's voice keeps you seated. "The girl who Schicksal tortured into becoming a Herrscher. When Otto did… whatever he did to Kiana, Sirin was still in her Core. Just buried, and if Seele and Kiana and… Veliona are right, completely alone."

"Like Welt." You can't quite help your smile, despite the grim circumstances. You wonder if he made it through this last death. "That man has survived death more times than anyone I know."

"Just so." Theresa nods.

There's silence as you process that, cut only by the soft sounds of cutlery. Part of you wants nothing more than to run to your daughter, but the way Theresa looks, you're not sure you'd be able to do anything but make things worse. You were never good at that sort of thing. Cecilia always was but ever since she died you've been struggling to do what she did so effortlessly.

"That's not all," Theresa continues nervously, making sure that the door to the mess is closed. "Siegfried, Kiana was able to talk with her, after Seele convinced her to try. She remembered me. You know what happened at Second Impact." Your mind churns, trying to work out what Theresa is trying to say. Then it hits you.

You drop your fork with a clatter. "Did she," your voice cracks. "Theresa, do you know if she-"

"She didn't say," Theresa says. "But you know Kiana, I can't imagine she'd be able to ignore it if she did. Even so that just puts this off, it doesn't remove the danger. Kiana was never stupid, Sieg. She'll work it out. And when she does..."

"She'll want to kill him," you growl. "She's more right than anyone I know to that life, Theresa. But actually carrying through on that...it could be disastrous right now. "

"So what do we do? Just wait? Hope that she doesn't catch on?" Theresa asks. You shake your head.

"No. We need to tell her, them, tonight." You sigh. "And we need to keep Otto away from them, even more than we were before. He can't learn about this. You know what he'll try to do."

"I know," she sighs. "I'll take care of it, but it won't be easy." She picks up her tray, and begins to stand. For a moment, she looks truly weary, her age seeping through the mask of childhood she can never escape. Then she forces it down. "Let's go."

 

[Baughn]

What lives down here, in the deep, survives on scraps from 'higher' - from closer to the shores of reality. From the leaves and branches of Yggdrasil, where they touch the Sea.

How often, I wonder, does a world fall this deep?

What a feast these little, bitey fish must be having, on the remnants of the world.

And how tempting, to their endless hunger, must look the Hyperion?

Click to shrink...

When I started writing this, I had two choices.

I could use a superficial model. Put the right words, in the right order, to describe the world the way Honkai Impact does. Here's a quantum sea; there are some beasts; it's a place, like any other. "Quantum" isn't an adjective. The same people show up over and over again, in similar stories, because that's just what happens in this sort of fiction.

Or I could work out... what sort of physics would lead to that. It probably couldn't work for real, but it'd be a little more grounded.

= = =

For people who don't want to sit through a half-baked lecture on physics, here's a nice piece of music. It also doubles as Veliona's theme for the moment. If you understand Japanese, it should be fairly obvious why.



(And if you don't, then this version has functional subtitles. Just turn on the automatic translation. ...modern AI is stupidly good at this ...it's a little worrying.)

= = =

In quantum physics, there's something called the measurement problem. Physics predicts that any given event leads to every possible outcome; why, then, is it that we only see one? A simple answer—the one I'm going with here, more or less, often less—is that they all happen, but the physics lead to them being unable to communicate with each other. Which includes brains, and so you only see one outcome because you literally can't see the others. They're still there, being seen by other versions of you.

But that's not a full answer. There are multiple outcomes? Okay; we still want to know what our chance of seeing each outcome is. Not just the raw list, but the probabilities. Every time you walk downstairs, you fall and break your neck; it would be useful to know how long you can expect to survive that.

And nothing in the raw physics, at this level, would tell us that.

What the Schrödinger equation gives us is 'measure'. Never mind what that is, exactly; others have called it 'reality-fluid', but that's just a way to remind us that we don't know. It's a complex number, and you add together all the possibilities that lead to the same outcome to get the true measure of that outcome. Since its value can be anywhere in the unit circle, this means outcomes can cancel out. At its simplest, that means you can shine a lightbeam through a double slit and get a pattern of light and dark stripes, even if you shine a single photon at a time.

The photon goes through both slits, you see, and then the two versions of it interfere with each other. More on that elsewhere; I won't go into detail.

Still just a list of outcomes. If the measure ends up as zero, then you can argue that probably means it won't happen, but what if it's in between? What if it's -0.5? What if it's 0.2 + 0.3i? Those don't look like probabilities, exactly...

The empirical answer is called the Born rule. You take the absolute value of the measure—so 0.5 if it's -0.5, or sqrt(0.2^2 + 0.3^2) if it's 0.2+0.3i—and then you square it. Why do you square it? Well, that formula gives the right answers...

This works. Assuming that many-worlds is correct, which it probably is, the absolute value of your measure decreases by about a factor of 10^(10^100) each and every second—I might be a few thousand orders of magnitude off, but who cares. The absolute value scarcely matters; you can only ever interact with other timelines that are almost perfectly identical to your own. Which, in practice, means only the ones that are the same size as your own. Because they split off very, very recently.

Trying to push that limit as far as it can possibly go is the main difficulty of building quantum computers. The second any information escapes from the internals of the computer into the environment, the universe splits—and the computer splits in half with it, ceasing to function in the way it's supposed to. Because, while 'timelines' (an abstraction, not something fundamentally real) can interfere with each other only while they're nearly identical, really the rule is that they need to be identical in particular ways. Ways which are controllable only so long as we know exactly how they differ.

= = =

But there's another option, one that's more useful for this story.

The Born rule? Instead of being fundamental, it might be that timelines—worlds—which are underneath a certain cutoff size... fail to exist.

It so happens that if you place a cutoff at the median world size—where half of all worlds are larger, and half are smaller—and declare that the smaller ones don't exist, then you get outcomes approximating the Born rule by simply counting worlds. If there are four outcomes where you break your neck climbing down the stairs, and six where you don't, then your chance of breaking your neck is 40%—no squared amplitude needed. Also you should walk more carefully.

This requires a mechanism for having smaller worlds fail to exist, but—

Here's where it gets interesting.

Remember the rule that timelines need to be "identical" to interfere with each other?

I've been assuming that rule is perfectly accurate. That, no matter how large one timeline is compared to another one, unless they're identical to each other (in the right ways) they still can't interfere with each other. This is... well, it's likely enough, and we've never experimentally observed anything else, but it's not really justified. It's just a thing that happens to be the case, and we've never tested it for enormous differences in measure.

Such as, for instance, the difference in measure between a world that's part of the Tree—one that's above that median-size cutoff point—and one that's not, being below it.

(We literally can't run that test. If we could, then building a quantum computer would be simple. Maybe one day, when we've been building them for decades, we'll notice a new sort of interference if we keep them running for long enough at a time...)

(It's literally a tree of timelines. A graph-theoretical tree, not a biological one, but nevertheless. I feel fairly confident in stating that's what they had in mind.)

If it's not that precise—if, given a sufficiently big difference in measure, a larger world can overwhelm and 'mangle' a smaller one, causing it to act as if it's part of the larger one rather than following its own causality—

Why, then you get an ecosystem of sorts, where the unlikelier timelines end up falling apart and being recycled into the larger ones. That's how it would look, from the perspective of such a larger world. The abyssal half of the universe is a place where no life-as-commonly-understood could possibly exist. Physics can't possibly exist. How could anything possibly live there?

But while the 'median world size' cutoff sounds like a hard cutoff, this is a physical process; it won't be that immediate. There'll always be room for places—using that term loosely—which are on the edge. Worlds that are just too large to be mangled, but still too small to be stable; or smaller regions, not quite worlds. The cutoff point will waver back and forth, depending both on local and global conditions at that point in time.

That, and it's a process depending on how similar these worlds are to the larger ones. So... it's something that's controllable, to a certain degree. Regions that fail to control it will fall apart, and be recycled—by the larger worlds, but also by other liminal ones. Regions that succeed... won't, at least not yet.

I've said 'worlds', but this cycle makes equally much sense for smaller objects. A "world" is, normally, the size of a universe... well, from our perspective that's the case. For a liminal world, one on the edge of oblivion, perhaps only a small section of it is stable enough to have its own causality—and because they're this unstable, they can interact with other worlds.

All the ingredients are in place, then, for a full-on ecosystem.

= = =

Lastly, one point.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the above is, in any sense, hard physics. It's inspired by physics, but it is at best something that might accidentally have some grains of truth in it. Life... tends to find a way, and any universe that works like Mangled-Worlds would have it is quite likely to have something like the above...

But for the most part, it's going to be a process operating at the scale of fundamental particles. Getting the right probabilities for electron excitation, etc. If the underlying process was this uncertain, then physics at the larger scale probably wouldn't work at all and we'd only have the 'liminal' worlds.

It certainly wouldn't operate at the scale of, say, human-sized quantum beasts.

Still! It's a fun thing to think about.

It's a pity that, if you live at the top of this garbage heap of a universe, you can't possibly probe the abyssal sections and figure out what's going on there... right? Well, I suppose you'd be justified in doing just about anything if you could; it's not like there could possibly be any life there.

 

[Baughn]

Your biggest worry is the twins. They're... well, this is the second time in two days you've disappeared in front of them. You think you may have screamed. You definitely fell to the floor, possibly in two pieces. The adrenaline stopped you from feeling it while you were fighting, but now that things are calming down, your head is killing you. After taking a spear to your midst, you're lucky to have gotten away with just a headache.

You're worried that your little sisters saw you 'die', is the point. Even if you return right now, before too much time has passed, you don't imagine Rozaliya and Liliya will let you out of their sight ever again, and you don't think you can blame them. This has been a really sucky week. If—no, when things calm down, you're going to take a vacation. Just you, Veliona, Roza and Liliya, and Bronya. Maybe Kiana as well, if she—

Your head pounds.

Yes. You'll do that. All you have to do is resurrect her, it can't be that hard. Then things can be normal again. Just the four—no, five of you, having fun on a beach. Kiana already made one, so you'll graciously let her join. Theresa, too; the twins think she's fun to play with, and you're sure she'd enjoy the break. She looked tired. Siegfried can provide parental guidance, you suppose; you specifically don't want Teri to do it. Tesla is surprisingly good at playing the drums, and you can't leave your teacher out, so Einstein will have to come. It's a pity Schrödinger isn't around, but she'll show up.

You studiously ignore how your beach trip has grown to encompass everyone you know, and instead just imagine the scene. Tesla… Tesla would definitely shout at you, if you even thought about putting her treasured musical instruments close to any amount of sand. Liliya would be annoyed that Kiana's ocean isn't water she can freeze and play with, you suspect, but then you adjust your imagination a little. She's been more energetic; you didn't really notice that, not until Roza said so. She might join you in the games. She's a lot more similar to her sister than most people believe.

It's a happy thought, an innocent one, and you latch onto it to avoid thinking about everything else.

You need to go back, but…

You've finally calmed down. The twins are important, yes, but are they the most important things in the world to you?

...

You couldn't live with yourself if they got hurt, just because you needed reassurance and comfort more than you needed to ensure their safety. No, you can't go home yet.

...

"Seele?"

The voice seems to come from far away.

"Vel?" you say, your voice trembling with exhaustion.

"Yeah?" Vel sounds tired too. That's fine. Fatigue is nothing to fear. Fear is something to overcome. "I'm here. You zoned out. How are you holding up?"

"Sis?"

"...yeah."

"I just… want to thank you." You smile at her.

"For what?"

"Saving my life," you say simply.

Vel chuckles, though it sounds a little strained. "Yeah, no problem. It's my job."

"I guess. I just realized, I never thanked you before." You pause. "We should capture a few of these before they all run away. What exactly are they? Quantum... worms?"

You make up a name on the spot. They're not physical enough to be worm-shaped, or anything-shaped, but they feel worm-like in a lot of other ways. The bitey sort of nightmare worm. It's as good a name as any.

"They sure like running away," Vel says. "I wish we could tell where they're going."

You reply to that with a mental shrug. If wishes were fishes, then the freezers wouldn't be full of seals. In the meantime, you corral two of the worms. On their own, they're no threat whatsoever. Also, and maybe this'll mean something to the scientists, after launching a single easily-deflected spear at you each they both nearly stop moving. That might be its own form of exhaustion, though you have no idea how you would tell.

"Are we keeping them a while?" Vel asks.

You look at the two quivering, sickly things in front of you. One of them glows faintly pink and green, the other a duller red and blue. That's communication of some form, since previously they stuck to just exuding 'enemy'.

"I don't think they'd make good pets, but we probably should. Figuring them out might be important."

"I'll build a cage."

ooOOoo

So she does.

'Build a cage,' she says. Vel's no carpenter, but she doesn't need to be, to warp what passes for space-time into a shape where 'future-wards' is radially inwards. She leaves a flatter section in the middle, by dint of spinning it, so the poor things aren't crushed to death.

You reach in, carefully, and put down one of the worms. It's not hostile anymore, but it emits a quiet, pained squeaking as it passes through the event horizon. It's clearly in pain, and trying to hide from you by curling up, which is odd behaviour for a honkai beast. Odd for anything that's trying to kill you. Normal for an animal?

Black holes always look so simple when Kiana uses them, yet it's taking all your concentration to avoid being drawn in. Vel watches on, her eyes darting from you to the second, slowly approaching worm. You put it in its designated area, where it quickly tries to angle itself to look at you.

"It isn't angry," Vel says, confused. "Usually they're angry."

"Maybe it's confused?" you say.

"Maybe. They look safe enough, at least."

"Yeah. They look safe enough."

You leave them be, putting a box around the whole arrangement. Now, even if they try to escape, they can't. You really shouldn't need to worry, but all the same you're not letting them out of your sight. Vel takes a quick peek, adjusting a few details, before nodding.

"Come on," she says. "We need to do one more thing."

It's been, maybe, a minute. That's all the time it takes for everyone you know to nearly die.

"Add some defences?" you ask hopefully, but no.

"That would take far too long," Veliona says. "We should, don't get me wrong. You should ask Kiana about it as well; you know her better than me. No, I'm talking about this."

She motions to the bridge of pinched space connecting the Hyperion to the rest of reality. Oh. If that's broken...

"We'd be trapped here."

"It's not as sure as all that," she says. "All the same… you go ahead. Go calm everyone down. I need to clean this up."

You give her a hug.

It's not a physical hug. You're a quantum butterfly, and Vel's a sea of shadowy tentacles. To call what you give her a 'hug' is an abuse of the term, but all the same, it's a hug. Your minds are connected, and she can feel the warmth you give her.

Then, you angle yourself back towards the Hyperion and prepare to re-enter normal reality. There's something going on there, you can tell. You can feel Kiana's power over the void starting to reach out towards you.

It isn't even lunchtime yet.

ooOOoo

What you'd expect, having been ejected as brutally as this, is that you'd need to make your way back from the outside of the ship. In principle you can enter a bubble universe at any location, but that's for a normal one that doesn't have Tesla's equipment on it. You don't want to try pushing past that, and not just because it might harm the machinery. It might also harm you. No, the outer hull of the Hyperion should be your best bet.

So when a portal opens up in front of you, leading straight back to where you came from, you're somewhat nonplussed. Kiana cheats, and she cheats hard.

She's probably about to come charging to your rescue...

It's a nice thought, but you find yourself wanting to thump her. She can't have any idea what she's walking into, and doesn't she need to breathe?

Actually, now that you think of it, she doesn't need to breathe. But you've only been out here for two or three minutes, tops! You're starting to get Bronya's complaints, now.

In any case you can't afford to wait. You chase the portal backwards, jumping straight through to where Kiana is coming from. It takes you a moment to get your bearings after you materialize, not even bothering with your butterflies this time. You're far too tired for that.

Kiana screeches to a halt in front of you, nearly pushing you straight back into the portal. "Seele! You're alright!"

You nod, then look around. The corridor seems very familiar. "I'm fine. We're both fine. Are Roza and Liliya—"

Kiana follows your gaze.

You're right back where you started. Kiana must have jumped to where you disappeared from, before aiming at where you disappeared to, and she brought Theresa along for the ride.

That's not important right now.

Your little sisters are right there, clutching Theresa for dear life and sobbing audibly. They're far too upset to notice you've returned, at least until you crouch next to them and gently put your arms around them.

For a moment, they're in shock. Then they throw themselves at you, holding on for dear life. You can feel them sob harder than ever.

You're crying, too. All three of you are. You and your sisters are so overcome with relief to see each other that you can barely speak.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" you keep repeating as you hug them. "I love you."

Veliona touches down next to all of you, but doesn't say anything. She just looks a little sad. After a few moments, she walks over to the portal and stands next to it, as if she can see something there. Then, finally, she speaks.

"We were attacked," she says. "The Hyperion, that is, though I don't think it took any damage. The first few attacks all hit Seele, and after that I was able to block them."

She seems to be talking more to herself than anyone else.

It's not... It's not really fair. You decided to treat her like a sister, but when you both disappeared, it's you that Rozaliya and Liliya shouted for. Inevitable, maybe, but it's got to sting a little.

The old Veliona wouldn't have cared, or would have pretended not to. The new one... You prefer the new one. Someday you'll have to work out what changed, but it's not now. Maybe nothing did. Maybe she was always like this, just on the inside.

"They're all dead or gone now," you say, and it's enough for the twins to raise their heads and listen. You see Theresa visibly relax. "So... Vel, come here?"

Vel complies, cautiously approaching you. You pull her into a brief but tight embrace, then move on to let Rozaliya do the same.

She gets it. She always does.

Vel is stiff at first, until you wrap one arm around her and the other around your sister. She relaxes immediately, falling into the hug. The four of you stand there in silence for a while, enjoying each other's presence. Then, quietly, Vel speaks.

"I'll always be here for you," she says.

You're not sure which of the three of you she means. Maybe all of you.

You and Vel hold the hug for a little while longer, then break. The twins look expectantly at the pair of you.

"Okay, so..." You clear your throat. "Sorry, Theresa. We just had to get that out of the way first."

"I… I understand." She smiles. "You look like you've been through a lot, as do you, Veliona."

"We could use a vacation, to be honest." You sigh. "Maybe later. Reporting to the captain, we were attacked by what I think were several thousand of a new kind of quantum creature. These weren't honkai beasts, or quantum shadows of those. They were, near as I can tell, animals."

"Like, normal animals?" Lili asks. "What do you mean animals?"

You slide down against the wall while you explain the encounter to the group, omitting no details. By the end of it, they're deep in thought.

"That's pretty crazy," Rozaliya says, finally. "What do you think they were?"

"I have no idea," Vel says. "Seele is right, they seem like animals. I think they attacked because they were… my best guess is 'hungry'."

"Anyway, we captured two of them to study," you say, hugging your knees. "We were going to suggest setting some traps for more of them, then trying to find out what they are and where they came from. At the very least, we'll need defenses."

"Not right now." Veliona frowns. "Seele, you took a lot of bad hits out there."

"I'll be fine," you say, quickly. "Anyway, you took a lot more! Trying to defend the ship on your own, what were you thinking?"

There's a moment's pause.

"I was thinking I could handle it, and didn't have a choice." She grimaces. "You were really out of it for a while. I don't think you know how close you came to death."

"I'm sorry, Vel."

"My point is–" She looks at Theresa. "You can't send her out there for at least another hour. Or two, or three. Some of those hits did serious damage, and you're lucky I didn't get knocked out as well. We'd all be dead if that had happened. If anything has to be done in a hurry, I'll deal with it."

"Of course," Theresa says quickly. "Though I'd rather give both of you a rest, if I can. Do you think there's any chance they'll return quickly?"

"Doubt it," Vel says. "They seemed pretty shaken up by the battle. Then again, Seele called them worms, and I don't think they're much smarter than worms. So who knows? Anyway, I'll take a look at the surroundings and see what can be done."

"Vel, you need to rest too," you say.

"I'm fine! I just need to make some adjustments, then I'll be good."

"Vel, please–"

"I'll be fine," she says. "Someone's got to."

You look appealingly at Theresa. She nods.

"Seele's right. You need to rest, Veliona. I won't send someone out straight after a fight unless we absolutely have to, and it sounds like we don't have to."

You take her hand, and look pleadingly at her. Roza and Liliya, too—they won't be happy if either of you leave right now.

"Fine," Vel says, and it's like the air goes out of her. You're both tired. It's not a new experience, but it's been... how many years, now, since you were stopped by simple human weaknesses like that?

"Like I said, I trapped two of them," you tell Theresa quietly, pushing yourself back to your feet. "They're– Here," you say, proffering what looks to all the world like a cardboard box.

Theresa looks at it, then up at you. "A box."

"It's not a trick," you say. "Go on, open it. We trapped them in a..." You laugh, and decide against telling her. It'll be more fun that way.

Theresa takes the box from your hand and looks at it for a while.

"There's a HOMU logo on this," she says. "Seele, did you put two apparently super dangerous beings in a cardboard box meant for game merchandise?"

"It's not just a box," Vel says.

Theresa looks between the two of you, and sighs.

"Do I even want to know? No, I'm sure I don't. Alright then."

"No, go ahead, open it." You motion to the box. "It's perfectly safe."

"I very much doubt that."

"Trust me," you say.

Theresa gives you a look, then rips open the box. After a moment she withdraws her hand, and you see her hastily take a few steps back. The 'cardboard' disperses as a drizzle of blue light, leaving a black hole floating in midair.

There's an event horizon. It bends light, in different directions depending on how close to the hole it gets, and at what angle. If you look closely enough you can see a distorted, ring-shaped reflection of yourself.

"What," she says, "is this?"

A fair question. There's a protective shell of negative gravity around the black hole, but to be perfectly blunt, it's a pencil balanced on its tip. There's no mass in it, so if it collapses in on itself it'll just disappear, taking the worms with it. Einstein was surprisingly excited when you proved it works.

"New pets," you say.

Theresa stares at you, deadpan.

You lean against the wall, smirking.

"It's a prison," you say. "A hole in the universe, where there's only an entrance and no exit. Einstein helped me figure it out. She called it a Kerr metric. It's a black hole, but don't worry, it's perfectly safe. Kiana makes these all the time, you know?"

To prove your point, you pick it up and toss it to Liliya. Kiana does this automatically. You? It took a week of practice before you could keep one stable for more than a minute, before your stigmata caught on and started automating them. She catches it, then giggles.

"It's a ball!" she says, and rolls it across the floor with her foot.

"If you squeeze it hard enough, I guess you might lose your hand…" You make a pretense of thinking it over, then laugh. "It'd take a few hundred tons of force, though. Maybe a car crashing into it? You're safe, Lil."

She beams, then gives it a soft kick. It rolls across the floor, scattering rainbow light everywhere. Light bends around it, chasing itself in circles.

"It's so pretty," she says.

"You put the worms inside a…" Theresa looks at it, then you, then shakes her head. "An artificial black hole? I wouldn't know. I'm not a scientist."

"It's a ball!" Liliya says, and kicks it again.

The ball bounces off the wall, scattering light everywhere.

"Stop," Roza says, irritated. "You'll hit Veli–"

Veliona kicks the ball. You all watch as it bounces around. It loses speed rapidly, seeming to hang in the air for a moment. Then, it falls towards Roza.

Thump.

"That's it." Roza grins. "You're on!"

She kicks the ball straight back towards Liliya, but Veliona moves like lightning, snatching it away and sending it rolling to you. You hit it straight back at her with a smirk.

"Come on!" she taunts. "Is that the best you've got?"

"You probably shouldn't…" Theresa says helplessly.

Vel gives her a cheeky grin, then sends it hurtling back towards you.

You hit it back, harder this time. Veliona snatches it again, sending it straight back. You grit your teeth, then hit it as hard as you can, hard enough that you can almost feel the gravitational shear.

Vel bounces it off the wall to change its direction, then sends it straight at Roza. She sends it over to Liliya, who does a flying leap and rebounds it off the ceiling and towards you. A little awkwardly, you bounce it off the ground and back towards Vel, who returns it straight away.

"Play with us!" Liliya laughs. "You need the break, Teriri."

The bouncing ball slows, then stops.

"Come on," Vel says. "Give it a try."

There's a moment of silence. Then, you bounce the ball to Theresa, who catches it with an expression of surprise.

"It's so pretty…" she says.

"Teri!" Liliya says, a laugh in her voice.

Theresa sends the ball straight back to you. You cheat a little and watch as it slows to a halt in front of you, almost sparkling in the hall lights. Then you punt it back towards Kiana, angling it just above Teriri's maximum reach.

"Oof!" Kiana says, leaning forward to catch it.

ooOOoo

It's not a long game, all told, but it's the most fun thing you've done in a while. A group of tired, bruised and emotional girls spending five or ten minutes bouncing a ball around doesn't sound all that exciting, but it's a huge relief to everyone.

Teriri, in particular, shines. It's got to be hard on her, always having to act the adult. She's older than any of you, sure, but she's always seemed the most like herself when she doesn't try to act older than she looks.

When the ball finally shatters one of the lights and rolls into the corner, you let out a sigh.

"That's enough," Theresa says. "I think we should head on over to engineering. There's only a few dozen meters left, so Kiana, can you take care of these… flaws?"

Kiana nods. "Sure."

ooOOoo

You return to pick up Hans and the other crew members.

Engineering looks far different than the last time you saw it. It has, for one thing, lights. It's also bigger than you remember, although that could be the sleepiness playing tricks on you.

Theresa wastes no time in finding Tesla. She's at the centre, working on the larger of her two devices—the one that goes down the length of the ship. What did she call it, a 'quantum balancer'?

"Theresa!" she exclaims, her eyes scanning the rest of you. "You managed to save some of the crew after all. Good." She looks at your group, lingering on you for a moment, before returning to Theresa. "How many are there?"

"Twenty-two, all told. I need to correct you; Seele's the one who found them."

"I see. We're... very low on power. The reactor shut down again after a few hours; I couldn't spare the time to run it. The auxiliary balancer will burn out in another day or so, but we'll run out of battery power before then. Are any of you fine folks acquainted with honkai reactor operation procedures?"

The woman from earlier steps forward, and Tesla slumps in relief. "I am. I was an engineer at the Nagoya reactor."

"Perfect. You're in charge of restarting the reactor. Take as many as you need from the crew to help." She looks over at you and smiles, though there's a tinge of desperation in it. "Seele, you're on search and rescue? That is good. I need you to find the mop-head. We need her help, whatever…" She pauses. "I'm sure she's stuck in a closet somewhere. You'd know better than me."

You nod silently. Theresa looks at you.

"I'll let you make your own decisions, Seele," she says. "If you feel you need the break, I don't think anyone can blame you. Kiana, please help as well."

= = =

I'm being slightly experimental with the votes here. As is usual, any of these three tasks are also subject to write-ins. You can even attempt to convince Theresa you shouldn't be looking for Einstein, in which case ignore the tasks.

Not that I think that's a good idea here. It might be relevant in the future.

[ ] [Seele] Leave immediately.
+ You'll find Einstein faster.
- Seele will not be in shape to handle any further 'events'.
[ ] [Seele] Take a break.

[ ] [Search] Start in the most accessible locations.
+ You'll find Einstein faster.
- If you don't, she won't be in good shape.
[ ] [Search] Start in the most likely locations.
= This is effectively a middle point between option 2 and 3.
[ ] [Search] Start in the most dangerous locations.

[ ] [Twins] Convince Roza & Liliya to help Tesla.
[ ] [Twins] Do not.

 

[Baughn]

"I'll let you make your own decisions," Theresa says. "If you feel you need the break, I don't think anyone can blame you. Kiana, please help as well."

Engineering is quickly getting… kind of busy. It's a far cry from what you remember, but there are people all over the place now, talking over the situation and running components around. Tesla is issuing orders in rapid fire, and the engineer woman just walked into reactor three dragging four people along.

You don't want to be the only one taking a break, is the thing.

You know she means it. Theresa is the kindest commander you could have asked for, which is pretty much the reason you've let her. Command, and stuff.

You… do feel a little woozy, now that you're standing still. Maybe... maybe a rest would be...

"Seele?" Theresa asks, sharply.

"C-coming..." You say, your voice trailing off. Then, you shake your head to clear it. You're fine. You're just a little tired, that's all. And searching the entire ship from top to bottom would take days, but you're just checking the most likely spots.

You take a step forward, and stumble.

"Are you okay?" asks Kiana.

"I-I... I guess not." Your head's still hurting, and it takes a moment for your eyes to focus on her. You could still overcome this, you're pretty sure, but it's reaching the point of idiocy. If you asked Vel to stop being a separate person, that would do it.

...you're not going to do that. You'll be damned if you're getting her to sacrifice herself for your sake.

Kiana looks at you with concern, just as Vel looks at you with concern, but... in Vel's eyes, there's a touch of fear. You try to ignore it. You can't.

"Vel," you say, "You can... You can take charge. If you need me, I..."

You don't finish. Vel looks at you for a second before nodding. She seems to understand.

"Alright," she says.

You let your avatar blink out. Right now even the slight effort of running two of them feels like too much. Vel can deal with it. Possessed-by-a-demon powers, go!

'Get a good rest, sis,' Vel tells you. 'I'll wake you if anything goes wrong. Of course, I'll also wake you if something goes right.'

You almost want to laugh, but just give a small smile instead. You like her this way. You close your eyes and lose consciousness.

ooOOoo

You are, temporarily, Veliona. It's the best of many poor options.

Seele is gone, but only for a little while. You sigh, and look at the others.

Now what do you do?

Your social skills sum up as 'Threaten passers-by with death if they dare to reveal you're doing something nice.' You're not sure you're up to being on your own. What if you say something wrong? What if you do something wrong? You're not a very good person.

No.

You're not doing this to yourself.

The other girls look suspicious. What a bother. Rozaliya and Liliya look worried, and that actually hurts a little. You know yourself that you tend to come off as a bit of a… Well, you're not sure if 'bully' is the right word. Probably not. 'Demon'? 'Crazy, violent dark side'?

You want Seele back, now, please.

"She's asleep." You sigh, and lean against the wall. You honestly wish you could do the same yourself.

"What happened?" Kiana asks.

"She's asleep," you repeat, your voice a bit more biting than usual. "Just like she should be. She'll be up and about soon enough, but I should have asked her to take a rest earlier."

It's all kind of…

You hadn't realized how much stress a double set of avatars was putting on the stigmata. With the battle damage… it's coping decently, but it'll take a little while to fix. Localized overloads. Bruising and tiredness. That sort of thing. If you stop moving, that will help.

You'd really thought you could keep it from getting this bad.

Kiana seems to accept the explanation, but you can see Rozaliya and Liliya eyeing you with trepidation.

"But where is she?" Roz asks. "She just vanished."

You point at your own chest.

"Right here," you say. "Remember when you saw me sneaking out at night? It's like that. Seele is fine, I promise, she's just sleeping."

Sort of. Very sort of.

"Sorry, Theresa. You'll have to give us an hour," you tell the tiny teacher.

"You'll have one," she says, eyeing the four of you. "Kiana, I'd like you to get a head start. Let's take a look at the schematics."

She leads Kiana to a table a few dozen meters away, and you fall into thought, sitting down cross-legged and closing your eyes. It's weird, innit? You feel both more and less like a normal person than usual.

Saying Seele's asleep isn't quite right, but you guess it'll do.

You actually 'borrowed' her administrative privileges, which you may have forgotten to ever tell her she had, and used them to set her mind on pause. It's not for any reason that would worry her nowadays—you just never wanted to hand her something she could use to actually be rid of you.

At first, because that would clearly reduce your ability to protect the stigmata. A bit later, because you didn't want to die. Later yet, because for a while you worried she'd use it on both of you. Then it just never came up after you got back to reality.

But you've never gotten her this genuinely hurt either, and it makes you want to kick yourself. You should have known the local Sea couldn't be as safe as it looked.

"Vel?"

You open your eyes.

Rozaliya sniffs, her attempt at anger turning tremulous. You kick yourself again, and attempt to reassure her.

"She's perfectly fine, I promise," you tell Seele's little sister honestly. "Just give me, like, an hour, and I can get her back."

That doesn't feel like enough. You turn to Liliya.

"Can you… keep an eye on Roz for a little bit?"

"Sure…" she says, her voice very quiet. "Vel, are you sure she's fine?"

"I promise," you say.

You look at her, trying to burn the image into your mind. A memory of a taller Liliya staring in terror at you flashes through your head. You push it away.

This is Seele's job. All this mushy, emotional stuff is Seele's job. You're good at lots of things, but coddling people isn't among them. Even lately. Especially lately. You feel like you're being torn in a hundred directions, and it's all. Seele's. Fault.

You're remembering things you can't possibly remember, flashes and impressions that can't be yours, and you'd be complaining if you weren't also absolutely sure that many of them can't possibly be Seele's. You won't mince words, won't pull punches: The fragments are the stuff of nightmares, not something Seele would ever have done. They can't possibly be real.

They're horrifying except, sometimes, for when the twins are there. Not the one just now; you don't want to look at her and remember that.

You eye Liliya, and place your hand about half a head above her horn. She should be… about… like that, right?

"Vel? What are you doing?" Liliya asks.

Shortie. Always with the questions.

"Just checking if you're still growing," you say.

"I thought Seele said we'd stopped," she says, her nervousness giving way to curiosity.

You shrug. "She did? Must've been years ago. I'm surprised you remember. It's fine, you don't need to get any taller."

She doesn't say anything to that. Instead, she shifts her weight onto her other leg. She looks at you.

"Vel?"

"Yes?"

"How long have you… really been around for?" she asks, very quietly, as though afraid of the answer.

Quite a while, you think. Probably not as long as Seele thinks, though. You shrug again. "Do you remember when Sin pushed Bronya down the stairs?"

She nods.

"I remember. She was very mean. She got weirdly scared of Seele after that. Was that you?"

"Yeah. I… I wasn't around before that, though. That's my first memory; rage."

She looks at you for a while. You look back, willing her to ignore the lie. After an eternity of silence, she speaks up again.

"Vel? That's scary."

"It took a lot to wake me up. I wasn't supposed to have a personality, I think." You look away from her. "It was an accident. A mistake. I shouldn't be here. Stigmata are broken, just as a whole. World Serpent kept pushing for something that doesn't work, and whoever made them is dead."

"But you're here now, right?"

You nod once. "I'm here now."

She hugs you. You pat her head in return. It's a bit awkward for Liliya, no doubt, but you appreciate the thought.

"Are you feeling better?"

"Yeah," you say.

You still have your low-level headache, a litany of damage reports streaming through reminding you you didn't do your job today, but it's ignorable. The twins are fine. You're fine. You're still alive. And you've still got Seele; she'll be awake soon enough.

They all mean well, but... you're Veliona. This is your burden to bear.

She's gotta have realized that's not your real name, right?

ooOOoo

You're Seele again. That's the name you've always had.

"Morning, sleepyhead."

You find yourself lying with your head in Veliona's lap, staring at the ceiling of Engineering. She's gently brushing her hand through your hair, looking contemplatively down at you.

"Headache gone?"

"I feel... good," you say.

Like you had a strained muscle you didn't notice, and now it's gone. A pleasant warmth spreads through you. Like a fall afternoon cuddled by a fire with Bronya, reading a book. You feel warm and pleasant, like everything is going to be OK.

But you also feel confused. When did you fall asleep? How long have you been here? Where is here, exactly? How did you get here? Why are you lying on the floor when there's a bench next to you? Can't you at least sit up?

"Vel," you say. "I'm confused."

She smiles.

Veliona fills you in over the next couple of minutes. You're not happy with the idea that you can be turned off, to say the least, but you get why she didn't tell you earlier. To be honest, you're a little impressed she went through with it. She could've easily left you in the dark.

"Anyway, the twins are helping carry reactor components," she says. "And Kiana is poking around. I gave her some of Einstein's favorite locations, but she's still your teacher, not mine. Kiana will be back in a couple of minutes, I bet."

You groan and start to get up. Vel helps you.

"Thank you," you say once you're on your feet. "What about Theresa?"

"She's..." Veliona's voice trails off.

"She's what?" you ask.

"She's talking to Otto," Vel says. "I don't know what about. I doubt she'd even want me to know that much, except I heard her yell at him. Roughly fifteen minutes ago."

"What? Why didn't you tell me?"

Veliona puts a finger to her lips.

"I don't want to interrupt whatever it is she's doing, and you needed the sleep," she says. "Come on, Theresa knows what she's doing. She asked us to start searching for Einstein once you wake up, so all's good."

Looks like it's time to go find your teacher. Fine, you guess.

"Einstein would be..." You hesitate, because there are a couple options, but most of them are too obvious. Her quarters? Kiana would already have found her. CIC? Ditto. Mech maintenance?

That's actually a pretty decent chance, but you seriously hope you're wrong. It's far too close to the skin of the Hyperion. Then again, that means you could jump there in a minute, with or without Kiana's help… You just wouldn't be able to get back.

Most of the major locations, Kiana could already have checked. Probably did already check, days ago. The battleship is nearly fully automated, though, and it's the nooks and crannies that have people in them.

She might be in the hobby room? You guess. If she was recording a song during the end of the world. So no.

Drone control... probably not, Eins is better at that. It would be nice to see that silly little AI again, but it can wait.

…

Your teacher's strongest drive is her curiosity. She'd be an asset in almost any situation, sure enough, but where could she be the most helpful during an apocalypse that apparently tore the planet apart, while also satisfying her need for knowledge?

"I don't want to say it," you say, "but if Einstein had a choice, she'd be in the scanner section. Where we already looked. There was nothing there, except a pile of meals and..."

"A bubble universe we sealed up ourselves," Veliona says darkly. "I hope you're wrong about that."

"It was already closed," you point out. "And we didn't look literally everywhere, just the habitable sections. She could have squeezed into a machine space."

Yeah. You didn't close the door, you just locked it. Maybe she's there? Maybe she's not. It's about the most dangerous place you can think of, and a risk either way.

= = =

Thelxiope, please put down the knife. This is @Mizu's fault.

You get a second vote for the twins, because quantum weirdness is unlikely and they might come in handy.

[ ] [Search] Give in, and go to the bubble
- [ ] [Search] Write-in general approach
[ ] [Twins] Ask them to stay behind
[ ] [Twins] Ask them to come along
[ ] Write-in

 

[Baughn]

It shouldn't be that complicated a vote, but I do actually need some votes. Let's see if a time limit works.

Now, on the subject of Veliona. A lot of this is canon, but it's relatively obscure canon, so there's no problem in telling you. Some of it's what I feel is reasonable speculation. If you want to skip these occasional lore dumps, feel free. Hmm.... "Veliona & the God Keys" sounds like the name of a heavy metal band, doesn't it?

Perhaps more than you'd think. "Veliona, the Dark Mother, is the guardian goddess of Earth, water, and subterranean regions. Together with her consort, Velinas, Veliona rules the spirits of the dead known as the Veles who live in her subterranean realm. Her primary function is to protect the dead, but she also guards water, especially subterranean water and hidden treasure."

If you think that description sounds familiar... fine, in reality they modeled Vel after this eastern European goddess of the underworld. In-story it's more likely that Veliona named herself after said goddess, because she had no name of her own. She may be overestimating Seele & the twins in assuming they've heard of her.

= = =

So, obviously Veliona's real name is Seele Vollerei.

She doesn't remember this. Her memories are fragmented at best. Obviously, also, her personality is seriously warped if we compare to the Seele we know, though you can see the points of similarity if you go looking. How did this happen..?

The basic backstory of the Honkai Impact universe is:

• Some fifty thousand years ago there was a modern, 21st century level civilization. This civilization was attacked by the Honkai, was able to defeat the first thirteen Herrschers at ruinous cost, and was destroyed by the fourteenth.
• They made several attempts at surviving that end, ranging from hundreds of people sleeping in cryopods, to computerized knowledge repositories, to the bio-engineered superscience toolkits known as Stigmata.
• Civilization is finally recovering, though they're still a decade or three behind, but the Honkai is also back.

In fact Honkai is back because civilization is recovering. It was a constant presence throughout history, but the really bad things don't start happening before humanity starts playing with it, and as a result producing people such as Sirin.

If everyone would just be nice to each other, then Sirin wouldn't have been so badly hurt that she felt "Destroy everything" could be a reasonable approach to life. Regardless, with eight billion people on the planet, there was no hope of everyone being reasonable.

That's what's going on right now, but Veliona is from the previous era civilization.

Now, here's the thing. History keeps repeating. It's not just that civilization is recovering, and the same rough events are playing out... no, that would be too sensible. The same people end up being born, and for the most part live through the same rough life-stories. They can be derailed, but it takes a lot.

There's a Raiden Mei in the current era; she's a valkyrie. There was a Raiden Mei in the previous era; she was a genius scientist, but also a good warrior who just lacked the Honkai resistance to survive her own work. Amusingly, it's her own past life's development of stigmatas that allows her current self to act as a valkyrie, and in so doing she may have missed her true calling. She's a decent warrior, but she was the pre-eminent scientist of her age.

There's a Seele Vollerei in the current era. She was orphaned in the 2nd honkai eruption, grew up in Cocolia's orphanage, befriended (and romanced) Bronya, and has had to watch her little sisters get steadily more broken down by life. So long as she's at least there, they should be okay, but for a period of years she wasn't.

There was a Seele Vollerei in the previous era. We know little about her life, except that she became the Sixth Herrscher—the Herrscherin of Death. This does not particularly mean she controlled death and life; the Honkai's abilities are almost universally destructive, and come with serious, detrimental mental influence. It can be used to positive ends, in principle, it's just—the fact that she became a Herrscher in the first place guarantees her life was awful, as only people going through truly extreme horror tend to be chosen for this. Though technically, the only real requirement is you have to want to use it.

The power push you towards using them to destroy humanity, yes, but it's possible to overcome. That's why the Will of Honkai picks children who have no desire to overcome those impulses in the first place.

She almost certainly had family—a pair of twins. She didn't have a girlfriend, anymore; the previous era version of Bronya was, somehow, turned into an "AI" by Mei, one going by the name of Prometheus. There's plenty of reason to think that was still Bronya, but it's a Bronya shorn of all her humanity. I don't imagine Seele was impressed, and it may have been the triggering event, once she found out.

We know they had the ability to do that, because it later happened to Seele as well. That's how Veliona exists in the current day—she's the "AI" running Seele's stigmata. Like she says, she wasn't really supposed to have a personality. It's perhaps because she exists in Seele, and could (most likely accidentally) restore the destroyed parts of her mind by cribbing off Seele, that she's now a person again.

Back in the Previous Era she was defeated, and killed, no doubt cursing humanity with her last breath.

...

The previous era version of Raiden Mei was a great scientist, but a terrible person. She would have said it was all forced by circumstance, but there's a lot of that going around, and most of the time those "forced" choices end up causing yet more damage in the future. There are too many examples to count, starting with Sirin.

= = =

However, Herrschers are...

The Herrscher Core appears, when used, to become a clone of sorts of the user. They can be used to resurrect them, in principle; Welt demonstrates that, and in fact resurrects himself in the Quantum Sea arc after Bronya picks up the Core of Reason. Of course, the Core of Reason was specifically given the ability to construct anything the user understands.

This implies they're deeply connected to their user's brain, which also explains how they produce those destructive impulses in the user, but that's besides the point. It doesn't, incidentally, mean the brain stops being the main processor for that person; cores can be removed without any apparent personality changes (besides, occasionally, getting less omnicidal).

Veliona, as in the AI of Seele's version of the stigmata, was created from Seele(PE)'s brain. That's a bit squicky, but she still had a core.

The Core of Death was used to create the sixth God Key, known as the Abyss Flower. That is, in fact, Durandal's lance. Normally this can only be done after the personality embedded in the Core is broken down to the point of giving up on resistance entirely, but in the case of Abyss Flower it has two modes—a "white" and a "black" configuration. The second is immensely more destructive, demonstrating the Herrscher of Death's power in its purest form—an invocation of entropy. The first, in contrast, is the only thing that can undo the damage of the second.

Only the 'white' form of the lance is usable.

Veliona is still fighting back, somewhere in there, fifty thousand years after she was killed. And as for the 'white' form... There's practically zero evidence for this, but there wouldn't be. I don't think there's only been two eras total.

 

[Baughn]

Scheduled vote count started by Baughn on Dec 4, 2020 at 3:56 PM, finished with 15 posts and 5 votes.

• ---

  5 people have voted

  [X] [Search] Give in, and go to the bubble

  • Exterminatus
  • BoundaryPhantasm
  • Thelxiope
  • Alcor
  • Mizu

  3 people have voted

  [X] [Twins] Ask them to come along

  • Thelxiope
  • Alcor
  • Mizu

  2 people have voted

  [X] [Twins] Ask them to stay behind

  • Exterminatus
  • BoundaryPhantasm

 

[Baughn]

You're not afraid of danger. What you're afraid of is that you won't find her there, and that it'll take too long searching through what might be an entire universe, and that you should look somewhere else, first…

But be real, Seele. If she's anywhere, she's there.

You know her. She's a literal genius, in love with finding out how things work. Einstein is sure to be there.

Right.

Be strong, be brave. Godspeed, Seele.

ooOOoo

"I think I know where Einstein is," you tell Theresa. "It's just, um…"

You don't like it when you stutter. You think it's unbecoming. When you do, you try to do it where nobody will see. But the truth is, you may have locked Einstein into a trap just because the trap creeped you out.

"We found an entrance to a bubble universe, back when we were searching the ship earlier," Veliona says. "Time was badly warped there, so we locked it up and left it for later. That one. Unfortunately, Seele thinks there's a good chance that it's where Einstein is."

There's a moment of silence.

"Then I guess we don't have a choice, do we?" Theresa says.

"You're coming?" you say, momentary panic in your voice. "I mean, not that you shouldn't! I'm just not sure it's safe for you. I'm not sure it's safe for anybody. It's…" You rack your brain.

She interrupts you. "I'm not. I wish I could, truth be told. I'm curious about this bubble universe of yours. If the worst happens, perhaps we can use it as a lifeboat? Alas, it won't be today."

You sigh, which makes her laugh.

"I already knew about the bubble," she says. "Veliona mentioned it earlier. That you think Einstein might be there, however… hmm. I should have thought of it. That said, Tesla suspected it might be the case."

"You didn't send Kiana there?"

"There were a lot of options. And…"

Theresa sees something in your face, and smiles.

"I'm not going to send anyone into peril on their own," she says. "Have some faith in us, Seele. You can't do everything on your own, after all, but it won't be her."

You look sharply at Theresa, to which she shrugs. "I noticed you've been trying to keep the twins out of harm's way. I've never had siblings, so I can't know for sure how you feel, but I know the two of them. They'd never say it, but you're the only reason they're keeping it together. Truth be told, I've been trying to make them act a bit more like children. They're still only sixteen, after all…"

And it's not because Theresa herself enjoys the games? You quirk a smile, but you also know she's right. No, the twins aren't dumb. It's not that they're still kids, but…

A lot changed while you were lost in the quantum sea. Your sisters became literal child soldiers, victims of your mother's strange attempts at helping all of you, and while you can't say they've changed too much on the surface—Rozaliya is still Roza, Liliya still Lili—there's a sadness hiding inside them now.

You're not sure how to feel about that; you aren't sure how to feel about a lot of things right now, and you can only imagine how the twins feel.

"But…"

Your objection is vague, half-formed and mostly emotional, but as you look at her in silence she takes a deep breath and nods. "Being near you, even if there's risk involved, is safer for them than staying here."

You flinch just a little at that.

"I'll ask Kiana to stay behind, to search any other parts of the ship Einstein might have survived in. I'd like you to give her a list of the likely spots, but I don't want her to be entirely out of contact. I'm sure you can imagine my reasoning there."

You genuinely feel a little worried about that. "You want to watch over her."

It's a statement, not a question. You see hope in her eyes as she nods. "She has power as deep as yours and Vel's, and with you both absent… Well, after what happened to Mei, I'd like to keep an eye on her."

Your lips pinch together. "I'm sure that'll make her feel safe." There's a note of irony in your tone.

"Mm, well. She'll understand. But there's another element to my reasoning. She's the only one who can potentially save any of us, should the worst happen while you're away, and that's what you've been worrying about, right?"

You suspect she is. "Kiana always insisted she could handle it."

"I know. It's one of her more endearing qualities, in my opinion." Theresa smiles wryly. "She's far stronger than any of us. I think she'll be fine; if not, I want a chance to help. But Seele, take your time on this mission. If the place seems reasonably safe, don't even think about coming back before you've found Einstein. This is your most important task, from now and until you succeed at it. That being said, I believe Tesla has something to tell the two of you."

That catches your attention. Theresa moves to the door. "We can continue this briefing as we walk. Come with me."

You follow her out of the office and down a long, Liliya-decorated corridor, listening to Theresa's chatter, until you come to a closed door. She unlocks it and leads the way inside.

Truthfully, it's not a briefing. You're not entirely sure what it is. She sounds… not nervous, but perhaps like she's trying to pack half a year's worth of lessons and advice into five minutes, and it's a testament to her skill that you get anything out of that at all.

On the inside is a workshop. In the centre is a table with a pile of electronics tools and spare parts, useful for tinkering with mechanical devices. Next to it is a waist-high glass case, containing an assortment of tangled wires, disassembled computers, and a few books on the history and science of quantum mechanics. Beyond that is a workbench full of hand tools and the equipment for more advanced repairs.

There's a woman in this room staring at a soldering iron as if it were a bomb about to explode. Specifically, there's a Tesla, and considering her… history…

You consider edging away from the soldering iron. Veliona glances at you, her eyes twinkling.

Tesla chuckles. "Relax. I'm not going to poke you with it."

"I never know whether to believe you or not, Tess."

She rolls her eyes. "I told you not to call me that. If it wasn't for the situation, I'd tie you up until you admit I'm the world's foremost genius."

You wince. "Not the threat I wanted to hear at all."

She rolls her eyes again. "Given the way you dress in combat? I find that hard to believe. Right. Two things." She holds up a pair of fingers. "First. I owe you an apology, Veliona."

Your twin raises her eyebrows. "Oh?"

"I genuinely was expecting that piece of sheet metal to go straight through you. Hitting your head wasn't intentional. The best I can do is plead sleep deprivation, and hope you won't hold it against me."

Veliona shrugs. "It's fine. And apology accepted."

"Thank you." She looks at you. "As for the second thing, here. It's a small gift."

You edge backwards. "What'd you make for me this time?"

The stuff she's had fun with thus far includes a Sierpinski paperweight made out of wood pulp, a tea cozy modeled after the ruins of the Eiffel tower, and several other things that nobody would ever call sensible or practical.

"Nothing silly this time, I promise." She looks unusually serious. "This one is practical. I also had a hand in the expedition kit, but that's rushed. This is something I'd planned to give you for your eighteenth birthday, if things had been calmer at the time."

"You built it for my last birthday?"

"I built and tested it." She holds up a small metal case. "Happy birthday, Seele."

You give her a dubious look, but she only waits patiently. You take the metal box, and open it nervously.

It's a hand-wound mechanical pocket watch on a small chain. There's delicate machinery inside, the designs of which you don't recognize.

You ask her, "You made this?"

"I wish I could claim all the credit." She acts like she's standing at attention. "Einstein helped. You're her best student. Granted, you're her only student… these last couple of years." She leans forward. "You'll find the mop-head, right?"

Her voice is actually shaking slightly.

You nod seriously. What else can you do?

"Good girl," she says. "I had a hand in the expedition kit too. It's rushed, but it's there. You'll find it."

"I also have a little something for you," Theresa says.

Veliona raises her eyebrows. "What is it?"

Theresa smiles. "Just orders, and a bit of advice. Here." She hands over a small bundle of papers. "If you aren't back in two days, your time, I want you to open that. I spent the last hour thinking of every eventuality; there's no time to go over it now. Don't open it before then, okay?"

You study Theresa, but she smiles guilelessly at you.

"Of course not." You pocket the bundle with little hesitation. "It shouldn't take that long."

"Good. Go get 'em, girls." She grins. "And if there's a fight, try not to break the entire universe. Leave some scraps for the rest of us." With that, she gives you a quick salute.

You look at Veliona, and she looks back at you.

You nod. "Let's do this. Uh, where's the twins?"

"Carrying control rods that weigh several times what they do," Tesla says laconically. "It looks ridiculous. They're in reactor three right now. I made them promise not to goof off too much."

You and Veliona leave her quarters to find out what she's talking about.

In the reactor room, your two younger sisters are holding control rods longer than they are tall, while an engineer is inspecting each. When you enter, they look up at you with huge eyes. "Seele!" says Liliya. "You came back!"

"Of course. I promised she would." Veliona smiles at them. "How are you doing?"

"Fine," says Roza. "These things are heavy, though."

The engineer gives her a look of mild disbelief. "They weigh nearly a ton, each. You shouldn't be able to budge them at all."

"The Vodka Girls are the strongest!" proclaims Roza. "These things aren't even… nah, I'm kidding. They're heavy. Seele, what's up?"

"Do you want to go on a vacation?" you ask, painfully aware that your tone is not entirely steady. "We're going to a bubble universe we found earlier, to search for Einstein. It shouldn't be all that risky, but to be honest, we could use the help."

"You want us to come with you?" It's hard to tell which Vodka Twin is which. They're both speaking too quickly, their voices blending into one another. "With you and Veliona? Can we really come?"

You nod, trying not to smile. "Yes."

They make cheer signs with their free hands. "Seele and Veliona forever!" they say. "Vodka Girls never abandon ship! Okay, wait, what's a vacation again?"

You think the line between hilarious and incredibly frustrating is the hardest thing about being a connoisseur of twins. It's a joke. Probably. In any event, it's a working 'vacation'; they may have a point.

"Put that where it's supposed to go, and let's go," you say.

They both suddenly get very busy.

ooOOoo

The gateway is right where you left it, in the scanner room. The consoles are all still dead, and none of them look like they've been touched in weeks. The entire room is dusty; even your own footprints from when you were here yesterday have nearly faded away.

The gateway looks the way it used to. A massive black sphere, two meters in diameter, like a globe made of tar. The altar it's sitting on also looks a little dusty, a far cry from the polished wood of earlier. You guess no one's touched this room since then.

"What now?" Roza asks. She's wearing a backpack that is, again, almost larger than she is; both of the twins are. They're full of supplies, for the twins mostly, but Tesla spent a good ten minutes filling them up with every tool she thought you might possibly need.

As much as you get into fights sometimes, she's a good person. She always worries about you when you're gone. You, and everyone else she knows.

"Stand back a little," you tell them.

You walk slowly towards the black globe, your hand searching for the sphere's surface. It's hard to find. The dark mass gives off a faint light, just enough to see your hand against, but you can't quite find the surface with your hands. It's like smoke, or mist.

With one last glance at the twins and Vel, you put your hands around the globe. You twisted it, like this, to lock it. So to unlock it, you just–

Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and throw yourself into the abyss.

Veliona is willing to let you do this on your own. If you falter, you're sure she can save you, but you can feel the pulse of her will, like a pillar of light.

Something bright, a shock of white-hot luminance explodes behind your eyes.

It's an instantaneous, intense, burning pain, like standing in the heart of a star. You feel as if you are becoming a star yourself.

You're not sure if you can open your eyes. It's not just the light, but the sense of drifting. Your body is drifting into a cold and alien vastness, adrift in the void between worlds. It takes an effort to push your senses away, to focus on what is rather than what you feel. You won't be able to use your eyes until it's all done. It feels like coming home.

You find yourself standing in infinite darkness. Your eyes, apparently, are open. Distantly, you can still see the Hyperion, like a tiny patch of light growing gradually dimmer.

There's a faint warmth, a glow that suffuses you and draws you like a moth. You aren't sure what it is. By your feet is something small and unstable, almost like a bubble.

A tiny world where people live and die, where emotions are expressed. It isn't something you can help, but it's so small… so fragile. More so than even the Hyperion. If it weren't in your shadow, you think that it'd fall apart.

You build a bridge in the nothingness between worlds, so that if someone tries to cross between them, they will find themselves without a chasm to cross. It's not a bridge from one place to another, but between two states of being. You'll be the gate, and the key.

The bridge takes as long as it takes. It can't be rushed, and you forego setting a goal to reach: it will be finished when it is finished. Days or years here don't matter, anyway.

As you work, you sometimes think of the creatures on the near side of the bridge. Your friends, your sisters. Loved ones. You're… losing something, you think, but it's a temporary loss. It won't last. You know that.

When you finish, you look back at reality and find that only seconds have passed.

It's time to go home.

ooOOoo

"–Seele!"

You open your eyes.

The first thing you see is the scanner room, all grey metal and electronics. The second thing you notice is that you're clutching onto something, as if for dear life. You let go, flexing your fingers as realization dawns on you.

Vel is shaking her hand. You were practically crushing it.

You're in the real world again. It's almost over. That means you can feel again.

You feel cool metal under you, against your side. You raise your hand to touch your face and find that it's wet. Your head is pounding. You feel tired and cold. And you realize with a start that you're also crying.

It hurts. You can feel again.

You flex your fingers, staring at them as if they're foreign objects. Then you look up.

The room is dark, save for the glow of the flickering emergency lights, but that's merely the backdrop, and pales in comparison to what you can see where the sphere was. There's a rift, torn open in mid-air, a deep circular scar raggedly illuminated by the scanner room lights. Beyond is a nighttime landscape, complete with a sliver of a crescent moon.

The simple sight is so alien that at first you can't process it. It's… it's just a normal landscape. There are mountains, trees, the pinpricks of stars… everything looks normal, but it's like you're seeing it for the first time. Everything is different. And beautiful.

You can see the stars. You can see them so clearly and distinctly that it's almost painful to look at them.

"Rozaliya? Lili?" you say, hand fumbling behind you. Your sister grabs it, though you glance back and see that it's Liliya. Your voice is hushed. "You're not feeling nauseous, are you?"

"I was, just a bit, but I feel better now. How are you feeling? You went see-through for a while. Like when you're fighting, but…" Liliya doesn't seem to find the words. "And then you fell down. Just now."

She's squinting at you. It doesn't seem like you took long enough to scare her, but she's definitely considering it.

"I'm a little tired." You stand, testing your legs. "I feel weird, but not terribly. When I went to find Kiana, that was a lot harder. This just lasted longer, and I'm not quite sure if I know what I did, exactly. It doesn't fit in my head. But I'll be alright, I think."

You risk looking away from the rift again. Your two younger sisters are holding hands, but Liliya still clings to your arm.

"Is it safe to go through, you think?" you say, addressing Veliona. The landscape looks like… you squint, and think you can see fires in the distance. A village? The lights flicker, not like the steady light of electrical lamps, but you can only see two or three dots of light peeking out behind a hill. It feels a bit alien. On the other hand, it's not like there's anywhere else really to go.

Between you and the possible village, there's only a dark landscape of what might be a forest and might be grasslands. The absolute darkness is like nothing you've seen in your homeland, except for those few times when the power was out during the night, if Matushka let you go outside.

Veliona pokes a finger into it, then shrugs. "It looks safe enough. Come on, let's go," she says and steps through awkwardly in something between a wavering walk and a stumble.

You step through, your sisters trailing after you, oversized backpacks and all, and in that moment you feel awed.

It's… just a normal forest clearing. You tell yourself that, but as your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can see that the trees are stretching their branches overhead as if they're trying to grab the moon and stars. After days spent thinking you'd never see nature again, after weeks and months spent staying combat-ready on the Hyperion, here is a peaceful, quiet forest. You just want to hug it all, squeeze it in your arms and cover yourself with its greenness. You can hear the sound of birds chirping and bugs buzzing; it's not loud or harsh, but rather soothing.

In the middle of the clearing, on a small hillock covered with grass, there lies a pavilion. You can see columns holding up an ancient roof, though age has weathered it. It looks like it hasn't been touched in years, if not centuries. There's no trace of human life. You can't see anything emitting light.

"It's so beautiful," Liliya cries out, entranced. "I want to look at everything!"

You giggle, partly because you don't know what to say. The three of you are no less in awe.

You cross through the clearing, barely taking in anything else, and come to a stop as you reach the pavilion. There is no sign of anyone ever being there. They must have, right? This was obviously built. Just, not recently. Or, maybe…

You don't know.

There's a wooden altar in the centre of the pavilion, visible through a broken wall, though it's missing its ball of tar. Rather, you've shifted the portal by twenty or so meters, landing you outside the pavilion. Kiana, no doubt, would've been spot-on.

= = =

I'd like to take credit for any improvements in this chapter, but most of it was caused by swapping out the model for one that's fine-tuned on literature, not fanfiction.net. It means less time spent fixing style issues, and more time spent whacking tentacles with a stick.

It's the Lovecraft model, but I feel reasonably sure I can keep it in check.

This is not my usual writing style. I like it, but I've never been able to achieve it. That is, perhaps, the biggest benefit of doing this—it's like having a reasonably decent author holding your hand, even if the poor guy is also horribly amnesiac. The Dragon network didn't give me that impression, but the Lovecraft network? That does. I suspect it's a good way of learning.

Even so, it's still a case of garbage in, garbage out. The difference being, when you left Dragon to its own devices it degraded to lowest common denominator fanfiction.net writing style. When you leave Lovecraft to its own devices, it degrades to… well… to Lovecraft.

The technology turns out to work better than I thought it did, and we're back to the content being 50/50 AI/human.

[ ] Examine the pavilion closer
- [ ] Any element in particular?
[ ] Go directly to the village
- [ ] But study it from afar, without being seen
- [ ] And walk straight in
[ ] Write-in

 

[Baughn]

Scheduled vote count started by Baughn on Dec 10, 2020 at 8:14 PM, finished with 17 posts and 3 votes.

• ---

  2 people have voted

  [X] Go directly to the village
  - [X] But study it from afar, without being seen

  • Alcor
  • Thelxiope

  1 people have voted

  [X] Go directly to the village
  - [X] And walk straight in

  • Exterminatus