Chapter 35
Pony and Rock found themselves standing back in the field where their great battle took place. It was now daylight and the sounds of civilization could be heard from the nearby Echo Village. The two took a quick moment to admire the wonder of it all and smiled at each other.
"You're back!" a chipper voice exclaimed from behind them.
"Flora!" Pony and Rock turned to see the happy, bespectacled woman herself as well as Calvin and Dunhill. The three of them sat around Ivy, but stood up when they saw that their friends had returned.
Ivy looked at them solemnly, "I can still feel the presence of the virus and yet everything is back to the way it should be. I take it you were not able to delete him?"
"No," Pony sighed, "He had a back-up plan and if we tried to get rid of him the whole simulation would've crashed. We had to come up with another plan."
Taking turns, Pony and Rock explained everything that happened to them. The others listened intently.
Dunhill talked as soon as they finished, "So Nathan is trapped in some pocket dimension? What happens if he escapes?"
"I don't know," Rock sighed, "Keria and Jack are supposed to keep an eye on him, so we just need to put our trust in them."
"At the very least the virus is now contained," Ivy nodded, "I wish it could be gone for good, but you are all now free to live your lives as was intended by the creation of the Harvest Moon Project," she stood up to leave, "I no longer have to hide. If you ever have need of me, all you have to do is look," she left, leaving the others to ponder many things.
"So what do we do now?" Calvin asked, "Do we tell everyone the truth? That we're all just simulated? How do we go back from this?"
"I don't think anyone would believe us," Pony pulled up blades of grass, "I suppose it doesn't really matter either way."
"I've been doing a lot of thinking…" Rock scratched his chin.
"Well, that's new!" Pony playfully teased.
Rock smiled and gently shoved her, "Anyway, I've been thinking that maybe that this is just how it's all done? Maybe the people who created us live in a simulation too and have their own being or beings that created them? Maybe the whole universe is one giant computer?"
"I believe it," Flora smiled.
"You should be a philosopher, bro," Dunhill grinned.
"Maybe in my spare time," Rock took Rio's hat off his head and looked down at it, "Right now I have a farm to run. I still have a promise to keep."
"I guess I'll see you in Echo Village soon? I'll let the others know that you're coming."
"Thanks, Dunhill."
Pony patted her friend on the back, "I have to warn you about that house, though. I was in it for a little bit and it was a dust bunny breeding ground."
"Heh," Rock put the hat back on his head, "Guess I have my work cut out for me. Great. At any rate, I won't be headed there right away. I do want to go back to Forget-Me-Not Valley first to pack up some things and say goodbye to my mom."
"It's funny to say, Rock, but I'm going to miss you. I'm going to write you as often as possible, so you better reply quickly."
"I'll do my best, Pony."
"Calvin and I will go with you when you head back to the valley," Flora held onto Calvin's arm, "I also need to pack my things and let the professor know that I'm going to be studying with Calvin from now on."
"Carter isn't going to like that…" Rock whispered.
"What was that?"
"Nothing!"
"So what are you going to do, Pony?"
Pony looked up at the sky and took in how brilliant and blue it was, "I'm going back to my farm, of course. However, I'm hanging up my Rancher Extraordinaire cap. I'm still going to farm, but I'm not going to throw my life away doing it anymore. I'm going to take more time off to visit my sister and to see all of you guys! I also want to pay my respects at my mother's grave. I'm not sure if she'll be able to hear me, but I want to apologize to her too."
And so, the five friends traveled onward to their new destinies that each of them had fought so hard for.
O/O
Thirty years later…
Rio Harvester-Bloom ate a rice ball as she walked on the path that would lead her to Echo Village. Today was the day that she would finally inherit her father's farm! Farming ran through the blood of both sides of her family and she couldn't wait to see what she could do. Rio stuffed the rest of the rice ball in her mouth and straightened her aunt's hat on her head. Like the farm, the hat had been a gift from her father. He had said that she was the spitting image of her aunt and seeing her wear that hat had brought up a lot of memories.
Rio didn't know what to expect when she got to Echo Farm. It had only had the occasional check-up by her father during the past twenty years. Her father, woe as Rio was to admit, was not exactly the greatest farmer in the world. No, that title went to her mother. Her father had run Echo Farm to the best of his ability for ten years until her parents couldn't stand being apart any more. He had, however, become a rather famous philosophy writer.
Rio's mother was one of the greatest farmers she had ever known, although she did know when to put up her watering can and have fun too. Rio's little brother, Hart, would one day take over the farm in Forget-Me-Not Valley, if he wanted to. Their parents had instilled in them the courage to chase their dreams, no matter what the dream may be.
"Hey there!" a voice called from the other side of the road.
Rio looked up to see a blond boy about her age also wearing farming attire. She waved to him.
"My name is Ibuki," he said, "What's yours?"
"Rio. I can see from your clothes that you're a farmer too!"
Ibuki nodded, "Yep! I signed up to be one of the new farmers in Oak Tree Town and I just got accepted yesterday! I don't know why, but I've always taken to farming. I like farming almost as much as I like stories about heroes! And hubots. Hubots are cool."
"Maybe you were a hero-farmer guy in a past life?" Rio smiled, "My dad likes to philosophize about such things."
"Maybe? I don't know. I just know I'm ready to write my own story of seasons!"
"I wish you luck, Ibuki! I'm about to go run my own farm in Echo Village myself."
"Good luck to you too then, Rio!" Ibuki tipped his hat to her before continuing on his way.
And so Rio started walking again. She was on her way to a new beginning.
The End.
Author's Note: And it's done. Thank you to everyone who read this. I hope I was able to give you some entertainment with this little story. :) And a special thank you too Cotton Candy Mareep. You are seriously the best reviewer ever. Every review you gave me made me happier then I can even express. Thank you so much!
I know that this chapter was more of a short epilogue kinda deal, so if anyone still has any lingering questions, feel free to ask and I'll try to come up with an answer. I know I had a bunch of different things going on all at once in this fic, so I know some plot holes probably made it through. XD
Thanks again everyone and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day!
…Now, it's perfectly okay if you don't read the rest of this Author's Note, but if you don't mind humoring me, I want to talk a little bit about how I came up with the idea for The Ivy Wall. I never get to talk about writing with people in real life, or even really Harvest Moon for that matter.
It all started WAY back in June of 2012. I was going through a bit of a Sci-fi craze at the time and was hungry for anything to do with the genre. I also wanted to write a Harvest Moon long fic as HM has always been my fanfiction fandom of choice. I noticed that there weren't very many sci-fi fics and I took it upon myself to write one.
When I started to think of plot ideas, I thought about the things that I always wanted to read a HM fanfiction about, but not a lot of other authors, if any, touched upon. These things included…
-The mines. Why did some of them have murals in them and what was the deal with the mines from HM:DS/Cute? What was up with the shadow bugs and animals? The legendary sword? Keria?!
-Gale and Vivi's name curse. I don't remember ever reading any fics that talked about this. If there are any, I would love to read them. If you romance them, they tell you during the confession event that any human that knows their true name would have the power to control them and only tell it to you after you marry them. I always thought that had great story potential but nobody ever seemed to think much about it, despite Gale being one of the most popular bachelors for a while. Seriously, there is great, CANON fic fodder right there!
-The connections between all of the towns. I head-canon that all of the games take place in the same world (except for the obvious exceptions. Like, the female remakes can't take place at the same time as the male ones.) I just like the idea of everything being interconnected.
As for the sci-fi part, I really wanted to do something with robots. A.I., specifically. I think I had artificial life on the brain at the time because of the absolute tragedy that was the ending of Mass Effect 3. Mass Effect had been a very important series to me when I was a teenager and was what caused my interest in science fiction in the first place. It's a series I no longer recommend to people because the ending was so ill fitting, but let me summarize the bit that I'm going off tangent here about. Basically, one of the plot lines of the game has to do with a robotic species called the Geth and how they want to be recognized as living beings too. Depending on your choices you can either believe that the Geth are nothing but computers or you can agree that they are a form of life too, only a different kind. Basically the ending takes a crap on this whole idea and just is like, "LOL Nope! Robot people need go BOOM! Also random pretty colors! And canon-breaking for everyone!" It's been four years and that ending still makes me mad… If anything it goes to show just how much power stories can have in our lives.
Anyway… XD
So, robots. I want to do something with robots. I decided to play around with the fact that so many of the male farmers looked the same and made them robots. After I thought up all this I remembered that Innocent Life was a thing that existed, but I never had the chance to play it. (Still haven't.) I decided to just roll with my Jack=Robots idea.
As for the whole simulation thing, I forget what exactly triggered that idea in my head. When I was little, I had a story idea that I called The Forth Wall. It wasabout a book character, a video game character, and an animated movie character all meeting up inside a computer and having to journey to a place called The Forth Wall and learning that they were all just fictional characters. Since I was so young at the time, I only wrote a few pages before quitting. When I was older, I watched a show called Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman and the first episode had to do with theories about our creation. One of the theories, believe it or not, was that we ourselves are just living in a giant simulation. There was a surprising amount of evidence for it too. While I don't necessarily believe that we are, I don't think it would make much of a difference if it were true. I'd still be me. You'd still be you.
So…I just combined all of that together and…wha-la! The Ivy Wall was born! I'm actually really proud of the pun in the title. XD
I also tried to work in every single game in the series in some shape or form. I probably missed a few and some of the references were really obscure like Pony and Molly's mom, Sara, being named after the heroine from the GBC games. Kudos to Cotton Candy Mareep for catching that, by the way!
When I started writing, A New Beginning had just released in Japan, so Rio being the child of Pony and traveling to Echo Village had always been my end goal. Rock originally wasn't going to play such a big part, but he is actually my favorite character in the series and he managed to worm his way in there until he became super important. His parts were my favorite to write. :)
The movie Wreck-It Ralph released while I was writing this, so I decided to throw a reference to it in here. I thought it would make good foreshadowing. ;) Other Harvest Moon games came out as I wrote and I had to work them in too. It took me forever to figure out what to do about Dessie. The answer came when I actually played Story of Seasons and I saw her and Witchie interact. I had planned from the very beginning for Chrystal to be Witchie/Witchkin. I was still debating on what to do with Stella and I liked the idea of the two sisters one day meeting up again, even if they didn't know who each other are. But maybe Stella will get her memories back one day. ;)
The whole Natsume and Marvelous split took some finagling too.
Anyway, I've rambled on for long enough here. Thank you so very much for reading this!