Memes vs. eldritch abominations… Never mind me, I like weird thoughts. Still, Cthulhu is relatively easy to kill - the Great Old Ones are just as powerless and insignificant in the face of the universe as we humans are, no matter how terrifying (or not) they are to us. If it bleeds, you can kill it. Unless it's an airborne pathogen and shooting the host just helps it spread, of course.

I probably shouldn't shift POV as much as I do in this chapter, especially when it's different degrees of third-person limited, aka the 'over the shoulder' perspective. If things don't make sense, well, one person doesn't want them to and the other main person is currently made of snips, snails & WTF. I do hope it's still entertaining?

Ciel, Copy-X and three of the cyber-elves just sort of… stared. Ciel and Copy-X's heads tilted to the side at the same time, as though hoping what Weil had just said might make more sense if looked at from a different angle. It didn't. Or rather, it kind of did, they thought they might be able to make out a sort of outline, but it still didn't make sense.

Watching them, the other cyber-elf could make out the moment when Ciel's brow furrowed and both of them decided that they didn't want to understand, really they didn't, because that might involve having the kind of mind that could understand a concept like that and what if insanity was catching?

They were right to be worried that too much time around monsters, around the kind of mind that didn't see anything wrong with violence and death, could destroy a person.

Still, innocence let inherent curiosity (in Ciel's case) and a need to understand what made people do things like this (in the Copy's case) override basic self-preservation. Because even if being able to think like the enemy made it easier to defeat them, if either of them was ever to think like Weil, to be able to understand what drove someone to do things like this?

No, it would take more than just a logical understanding of Weil's illogic to do that, he knew. It would take loss, and fear, and madness.

These two had grown up in a sane world, where a reploid going insane was a rare, bad, sad thing instead of a terrifying inevitability. Where murders were shocking. They couldn't understand the protective numbness of not-feeling that came when the horrible came so often as to seem normal. When humans hadn't really been afraid of maverick attack, not as such, because all fear at root was a fear of the unknown and slaughter had become something very familiar.

The world had lived in dread, not fear. Fear required hope, the possibility that what was feared might not come to pass. Dread was knowledge of the inevitable, and with dread, like with grief, could come acceptance.

The world had accepted that the struggle against the mavericks was the way things were. It had let them keep fighting, let them handle it. Let them cope. Let them function. To think that violence, madness and the deaths of innocents were the way of the world.

So they hadn't wanted hope. Because hearing someone talk of peace, of an end to the wars, gave them hope and hope brought fear and despair, when that hope was crushed.

To people who accepted a world like that, the idea of peace was madness. Weil was far from the only one who had wanted a return to sanity. So many had rallied to his banner...

It was Lark that answered him first, even if her answer came not with words but with diving towards the screen. She wasn't sure how to travel through a system, but Weil had to die, so she'd figure it out.

Once again, he pulled her back.

Although Copy-X's systems registered the movement of the cyber-elves (out of the corner of his eye, a human would say), he personally didn't. What Weil had said, implying that the world he was trying to create was justice?

There was so much wrong with that Copy-X didn't know what to say, what to think, or how to feel about it. He just couldn't frame the idea, it was so far outside everything he thought about how to run a world right, which he thought about a lot. It was just… wasn't looking after people the point? How could you think that making people live in hell was looking after them? Was right? It wasn't even wrong, because if something was a wrong answer than it was still and answer, and an answer had the possibility of being right. It was like… like adding up what the generators could be relied on to produce tomorrow and subtracting the absolutely necessary things they needed to use that power for and getting magenta. It wasn't even ridiculous, it was just…

It was like death, Copy-X realized. Killing that reploid just now: that was the only thing Copy-X could think of that was like Weil. He didn't, he couldn't know what to feel about either of these things. They were something… No.

They were nothing. An absence. Emptyness. Killing a person, when he was supposed to keep them safe. Ruining a world, making it a hell, when he was supposed to fix it, make it a better place for Ciel and everyone.

Anathema.

Mostly he used his internal dictionary to look up the old words the guardians used sometimes, but it felt right, to use a word that he never would have used for anything else. An old, dead word that really wasn't a word anyone used in Neo Arcadia, in his city.

He hadn't really been afraid of Weil before, he realized. He'd been afraid that he might mess up, that he might fail. That Ciel would be killed or Neo Arcadia conquered. He hadn't been afraid for his own sake.

But now he felt aware at the core of him what Weil was madness, Weil was death, and had already seen past X's face, the armor he wore. Would try to reach into him and twist him, the way Weil wanted to twist everything.

Poison and madness and death: he felt suddenly nauseous and knew it wasn't a sensation but a memory, and not even one of his own memories. The body's memories, of something like Weil. Of being close to something like Weil, something that corrupted all it touched. That tried to crawl into his systems and…

They'd called Weil's supporters mavericks, hadn't they? Even though the virus had been cured. Even the humans. Most of the reploids had been controlled by the dark elves, and that was almost the same thing, but this kind of sickness, that got into people's heads, made them into dark copies of someone else, into mad killers…

X and Weil had been fighting for the soul of the world, Fefnir had said, and Copy-X had thought he was just being poetic. All the guardians were sometimes, even Fefnir, because they'd had lots of time to think of exactly how to put things. Lots of time to think things over.

But there was Neo Arcadia, and family, and building, and looking after other people, and trying to make there be enough even when there wasn't, and then there was… this, that stared them in the face and smiled, because it saw the looks on their faces and was happy, because thinking of death and twisted justice was a good thing to him. It.

People used the word it for things, and they'd said not to dehumanize the enemy but it was tempting, so tempting, because he didn't want to think a person could possibly be like that. That this was just some thing, like the virus, something that crawled into people's heads, something that could be killed, destroyed, with the right weapon.

"No," said Ciel, finally. Just, just no. No. She could have demanded to know how was hell on earth justice, but that would have been asking a question, seriously entertaining, even for a moment, that there was any logic, however warped, behind what Weil had said. That it was seriously worth considering.

Even if Weil was right, which he wasn't, it wouldn't have been worth considering. She was a scientist: they were supposed to face reality no matter how little they liked it, no matter how much it clashed with what they believed, but not this time, either. Death was also reality, also inevitability. She hadn't liked it when Passy died, but that was what cyber-elves did, and she'd known that. It didn't mean she had to like it. It didn't mean she had to accept it. It didn't mean she wouldn't have spent the rest of her life, except time spent on generators and other ways to save lives, trying to change it, make things so cyber-elves didn't have to sacrifice themselves like that.

That man finding Passy hadn't been a sign from on high, but it had been asign. Passy had still been out there, and what if Ciel hadn't ever found that out? Because of doing the sensible thing and not looking, accepting that dead was dead?

"Get off my screen," she added, wishing she had a lab coat so she had sleeves to roll up.

Everyone but the largest cyber-elf was too busy watching Ciel try to stare down Weil to notice words in among the sounds of the station, the oddly-echoing metal-on-metal. "It's not that I don't agree with you, I mean, I'm worried about Phantom too, but the best defense isa good offense. I could have gone ahead and…"

"No!" Lark's voice got everyone's attention. "You aren't going to fight him alone!" Absolutely not! Not after what happened! "I couldn't help you!" There hadn't been anything she could do, when Marino was captured, and Axl…

"I'm sorry…" Cinnamon had watched that?

Another reploid cleared her throat. "We could…"

"No," snapped another familiar voice. Copy-X instantly turned around, straightening, eyes bright. "Regroup first, then Weil." Not that she was allowing rookies like these two anywhere near Weil.

The larger cyber-elf dropped a few inches, in a way that somehow suggested someone lowering their head to their desk. It darted towards the screen the way the smaller cyber-elf had: it flared blue-white and when Copy-X turned around, it was displaying what it had been before Weil showed up.

The smaller cyber-elf dashed into the screen, then out again, hovering and darting around in panic. Oh no! Where had he gone? How was she supposed to get back in her body? Not that she minded,

"Leviathan?" Copy-X called, relieved but still forming his buster, just in case. Well, even if she was Leviathan, he'd still need to have his buster formed, because otherwise she'd yell at him.

"Present," she said cheerfully, a moment before appearing around a corner. Copy-X relaxed: that word wasn't an all-clear, but it was one of the recognition signs, so he formed his buster back into his arm. "I brought two more and…" she paused, while the others caught up with her.

"Guardian Leviathan." Ciel bowed, looking embarrassed. "Lark! Are you okay?" And where was Zero?

"Um, actually…"

Leviathan was muttering to herself. "If I'm your aunt, and they're mine… but they're Phantom's… Oh, whatever." She shrugged and looked at Copy-X again, "Kid, I'd like you to meet your great-aunts, Marino and Cinnamon. They're vengeful ghosts." She laughed. "See? He's got this adorable little 'Huh?' expression."

The two she had indicated also laughed, neither of them unkindly. The green-haired one laughed louder, grinning, and the other one laughed quietly yet brightly, raising her hand to cover her mouth.

The other one, "Isn't that… Lieutenant Lark?" Would she be alright, Copy-X wondered.

"That's me," the smallest cyber-elf said apologetically. "He asked me to, so I let, um, Lady Cinnamon have my body."

This did not lower Copy-X's level of confusion, not at all.

"We can do that," Iris explained as Cinnamon told her Lark that she didn't need to use a title. "Regular cyber-elves can't, they don't have the programming to control a reploid body. Only a baby elf could force out a personality that didn't want to move, though."

Okay, that helped a little more, as well as being a bit of a relief.

Leviathan seemed to disagree: had she been hoping that one of them could possess Weil? Deprive him of that immortal body?

Now that he thought about it, why was Weil immortal, anyway? If Ciel could make reploids immortal, sort of like what the virus had done except not evil, then could this be used for good too? Whatever it was, it probably wasn't cheap or easy, if no one had been able to undo it. If they hadn't been able to do it for anyone else, when surely Master X would have wanted that.

Copy-X might have asked, but they needed to stop Weil and Leviathan was looking at Ciel with her hands on her hips, clearly wondering how they were going to get the valuable human out of here without her getting shot, crushed, explosively decompressed, or any of the other things that could happen to humans in unstable space stations. At least they had three, no, two cyber-elves here. It wouldn't be so bad to sacrifice them, not when they would just go back to cyber-space, right? Not that Leviathan knew that yet. Should he tell her though? Here? Where Weil might find out?

Of course, that was when the reploids Weil had dispatched to capture them before he'd made that call (in order to get them to stay put and hopefully get ambushed) arrived, and then things got very busy.

It is a little meta, that Copy-X is terrified of the whole idea of thinking that it's alright to have people live in hell for the sake of some 'justice.' On the other hand, he does have good reason. I do try to make sure that these characters, while pretty alternate reality, are characters who could have gone down the same paths, become the same people they did in canon. Still, in the current 'verse, Copy-X is lucky. That all these older female relatives are not going to pinch his cheeks.

You know, Ciel may have been a couple centuries ahead of her time in more ways than one: she would have fit right in the Classic era. Ciel, Roll & Megamix!Kalinka? Wily should be afraid, very afraid…