They'd thought it was over and done with after the ending at the ship. After Kisshu, Pai, and Taruto had died and been reborn, after the Device had crashed, after everything.
But it's after saving the world that everything goes wrong. Always.
As you can imagine, it wasn't all that easy to hide the rising of an alien god. Nor was it all that easy to hide the existence of the Mews. They'd been in the public eye for months, but it couldn't prepare them for the public knowledge of their actual identities.
The President had summoned them to the seat of the government for a quick little chat, during which they had been informed that they were essentially state property now. There had been nothing Ryou and Keiichiro could do, since they were technically funded by a division of the government. The parents protested, sure, but they were ostracized from society for doing so-most people agreed that the Mews were dangerous weapons and needed to be controlled.
The aliens, watching from afar in their spaceship up in orbit, felt the most intense sorrow they'd ever felt when the news reached them that the Mews were being trained and conditioned to be the Japanese Army's ultimate weapon in what was rapidly escalating into World War Three.
Taruto in particular was hit hard. The most sensitive to suffering of the three Cyniclons, he wept when the first nuclear bomb of the war was detonated. He felt the agony of the plants, the people, the animals, the very earth. The dirt beneath the feet of the soldiers cried out in pain, and he was the only one to hear it.
All through all seven years of the war, he bore the pain of a world at war with itself alone. The only other who'd ever heard what he heard, ever felt what he felt, was locked away behind iron doors, held captive at the threat of harm to her siblings. Her once sunny wheat-blond hair darkened to rich gold, her eyes hardened as the horrors she saw daily took their toll on her spirit.
And on the seventh anniversary of the war's beginning, when that girl was eighteen years old, she saw the sun for the first time in seven years.
The 'upgrade' they gave her destroyed half of Washington DC, including the White House. That was the day the war ended.
She was a war heroine, her and all the other Mews, suddenly idolized after being abandoned by the population and spending so much time in the dark.
In the middle of the parade that celebrated the end of the war and the presence of the Mews, right at the climax when the President was about to congratulate them personally, Mew Ichigo, who'd been publicized as the leader of the Mews, threw herself under a team of horses pulling a carriage.
She hadn't lived. It had caused massive panic among the population. Though they were put under 24/7 supervision after that, the others found a way.
Mew Lettuce went swimming in the ocean one day and never came back. She was listed Missing at Sea, presumed drowned, a presumption proven when she washed up on the coast in Seattle, Washington. She'd made it all the way to America, her body having been towed along with a migrating group of Harbor Porpoises through the Bering Strait. The Americans had treated her body with the proper respect, and she was buried on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with full military honors and a marker recognizing her as Midorikawa Retasu and as Mew Lettuce, a girl driven to suicide by wartime trauma.
Mew Mint had been the next one to go-as part of a publicity tour stunt, she'd gone on a parachuting trip, but when she leapt out of the plane, she didn't pulled the cord on her parachute. The bodyguard who'd gone with her and attempted to save her by holding on to her had been severely injured, but survived.
Minto only succeeded in her attempt because of Zakuro, who visited her in the hospital and unplugged the life support machine before tipping a whole bottle of sleeping pills down her throat. The Wolf Mew fell asleep over the body of her best friend and never woke up.
The only one left was the youngest, little Mew Pudding, who was now being carefully watched by the government to ensure a lack of suicide issues. But even the most vigilant of guards couldn't stop an eighteen-year-old Cyniclon who teleported into her room and took her away with him in the dead of the night.
When Fong Purin awoke, Taruto and her siblings were there to greet her, in a place of safety where war would never touch them again.
