Hey, everyone! It's Monday, so that means that I'm updating with another chapter. I think that this chapter is the shortest out of all of them (4k words without the AN) because I couldn't fit the scenes together well. Expect this chapter to be more of a transition period before things start to heat up again. Still, some important stuff happens, so I wouldn't recommend skipping it. :)
Also, we have not one but two cliffhangers. :D
Review Responses:
Shimo no ko: Yeah, if Ana can feel bad for Minerva after all she's done then I'm not surprised that you do as well. And my intention was to depict Minerva as a grey character from the start. She tries to help the universe and struggles in the face of monumental failure. It's a pretty common narrative. The official process for turning someone into a savant is something that I don't have many details about; my explanation is "Minerva did it with fancy starman-esque technology." Yeah, it's going to end soon, but we still have a while to go. I wonder if Ceres 3 is going to be this long... And yeah, more chapters than book one and already about 25k words up. Dalaam's a busy place. :)
The-Great-Me-sama: Considering how often I put cliffhangers in, I doubt that would get positive reception. xD We still have Ninten's storyline to finish as well as tying a bunch of things up between Ness, Paula, Poo, and General Kim. This will be over relatively soon, but I still need to clean some things up. :)
A Fan: I know; I got no writing done during my vacation. Pretty much, yeah. xD I've been planning the death of Minerva and Ana's parents through the poison thing for a long time, but the others died to keep the story going. Yep, you're right about the empirist arc. In the end, they burn out and end up as ashes... but all of the hatred that they've fostered won't die as easily. Yep, Dr. Andonuts' lab is pretty big, bigger than it's depicted in Earthbound. I don't know why I made that choice; it just kind of came out. Yep, bringing down more stuff would have put Ana in a bad position (she can survive a lot of punishment, but that doesn't really matter if she gets crushed to death), but Morgan got overconfident and didn't expect Minerva's sudden burst of life. Yeah, not exactly a dignified way to go.
crabbyTomato: Well, I ended up killing all three, so... the "please don't kill this one too" list just got rejected. D: Gasping at the screen after you read it? Hopefully not because it was written terribly. xD An airlock would help with the altitude difference, but the Shard is still enchanted to prevent teleportation. Besides, making an airlock could be pretty tough without access to a lot of materials (although I wouldn't really know how one is made). Yeah, I took a little inspiration from the Halloween hack, even though I've never played it. Yeah, not a great situation for Ninten and Claus. I wonder how it could get any worse... ;)
Yep, that was basically what I was going for with Minerva's death. She definitely suffered from quite a bit of guilt. I don't know if she really had to tear her stomach out, but I thought of the idea and really liked it. Mostly for the heroic sacrifice thing that you were talking about. We'll hear a bit more about Morgan this chapter, so we'll see how that goes. Yeah, Ness and Paula are coming back into the story... soon. Not this chapter, but soon.
Some people find sorrow in endings, but I rejoice in the inevitable destruction of everything that I know. I suppose that makes me sound like a nihilist.
But if life lasted forever, would we ever really enjoy it?
Mortality pushes us towards greatness. We do what we love because life is too damn short to be spent solely on routines and chores.
I think that's worth celebrating.
"Schizophrenia?" Jeff asked. "Nobody ever told me that my dad has schizophrenia!"
"Ugh," Voice said, bobbing above the screen on the ground. "From his description, it sounds like paranoid schizophrenia. You know, the one with delusions and hallucinations. Lovely stuff."
"Why did my dad never tell me about this?" Jeff asked. "He sent me away to psyching Ceres and didn't even tell me that insanity runs in the family?"
"Relax," Voice said. "Genetics are only one component involved in developing schizophrenia. Even if he passed down the bad genes, there's a good chance that it won't trigger. Besides, people don't usually develop serious symptoms until after age 18."
"That doesn't make me feel any better!"
"Well, that's all I've got."
"Oh no," Diana said from the other side of the room. "Ah, psych it. I knew that I shouldn't have left that snake alive."
"Hmm?" Jeff asked, walking over to the other screen on the Shard's floor. "Oh my god. What happened here?"
On Diana's screen, Jeff saw Ana kneeling on the ground next to Minerva Carpainter's dead body. The president of Ceres had a gaping hole in her stomach that nearly made Jeff barf.
"Morgan poisoned her," Diana said. "And Ana's parents, by the looks of it. Min just shoved a bit of that poison up Morgan's nose, so she won't be around for much longer either."
"Poison?" Jeff asked. "Can't psions resist it?"
"Not this kind." Diana squeezed her eyes shut. "I was prepared for trouble, but I never imagined… Gah!" Her eyes shot back open. "Why do I have to be here? If I could just head over there…"
"Then your sister would still be dead and you would probably suffer nasty effects from the reduced oxygen levels that high up on a mountain," Voice said. "Either way, nothing changes."
"Psych it." Diana took a deep breath. "Some big sister I was. Min did some terrible things, but she was always trying her best to make the universe a better place. I still think of her as the eager woman who wanted to save Ceres from aristocracy, not the jaded politician that she became."
"I'm sorry," Jeff said. "I wish that I knew President Carpainter before all of that happened to her."
"Thanks, Jeff," Diana said. Turning away, "Psych it! Min was the better part of me. She resisted our father when I was too scared. She captivated the public while I butchered them in the name of God. So why did she have to fall like that?"
"You don't always have to compare yourself to her," Jeff said. "You're both your own people, and you each made your own choices."
"But we're identical twins," Diana said. "We literally share the same DNA, but she tried to build a new future while I tried to destroy it. Do you see this?" She gestured towards Minerva's corpse on the screen. "This is how it ends for a version of me who made the good choices!"
"Not very empowering, huh?" Voice said. "It probably makes you wonder what you could have done to get a happy ending."
Diana nodded, and Jeff could see her eyes welling up with tears. That didn't make sense. Someone as strong as Diana Carpainter shouldn't cry.
"I don't think I can answer that question myself," Voice said. "But all that you can do now is pick yourself up and keep trudging along. Maybe there's nothing that you can do, but it's not like you have anything to lose."
"That actually helps, strangely enough," Diana said, closing her eyes. "Heh. I haven't cried in a long time. Not a proper display of emotion from a hardened killer, you know?"
"It's okay," Jeff said. "Tears are natural. You don't have to hold them in."
Even as Diana squeezed her eyes shut more tightly, the tears kept flowing.
"I'm sorry, Min," Diana said. "There was so much that I wanted to say to you, but now I'll never get the chance. I'll try to make sure that they don't remember you too badly, all right?"
The atmosphere weighed down on Jeff like a sack of bricks; he took a deep breath himself and exhaled out some of his sorrow. He took a look back at the screen and spotted Ana walking out of the room, her robes covered in blood.
"Hey," Jeff said. "Do you think that we could follow Ana for a while?"
In response, the screen rippled like water until it eventually showed Ana's position. She stood amidst a sea of corpses that Jeff identified as Dalaamian nobles. Something or someone had killed them as they tried to escape from the palace
"Divine Rulers!" Jeff said. "Could this situation possibly get any worse?"
The bodies on the floor of the royal palace were vivid enough to make Jeff sick, even if they were just displayed on a screen. Diana looked at the scene with an air of melancholy acceptance.
"Don't tell me that you saw this coming, Carpainter," Voice said.
"You shouldn't be surprised," Diana said. "Why do you think that General Kim didn't help fight off the Revivalists when they attacked Yazhou? Oh, he can claim that they caught him off guard, but do either of you two buy that?"
Jeff and Voice shook their heads.
"Right!" Diana said. "He wanted the Revivalists to succeed. He wanted them to rape and pillage. He was probably in charge of this massacre."
"Ugh," Voice said. "Why is Dalaam stuck in the past? That sounds barbaric even by this universe's standards."
"A couple reasons," Diana said. "First, they lack a cohesive communications system. It's easy to resist change when there's nobody there to bring you back to grips with reality. At least Ceres has telecommunicators for the elite to share ideas."
"And the second reason?" Jeff asked.
"Well, you've heard about the disastrous results of the Vulcan campaign," Diana said. "Why do you think that the Dalaamians turn to the past?"
"Because the feel attacked," Jeff realized out loud. "I don't know a whole lot about Dalaam, but I think we forced them into some pretty bad situations."
"If by 'we' you mean the entire empire, then yeah," Diana said wryly. "But basically, you're right. The empire tried to take away their heritage and force them to modernize. It only made them hate us and cling onto their past more tightly."
"That was a rhetorical question," Voice said, "But you might have a point. I witnessed that phenomenon firsthand. When New Pork tried to modernize Tazmily…"
"New Pork?" Jeff asked.
"Voice's universe is crazy," Diana said. "But hey, I think that there were cities on Aphrodite named 'Tazmily' and 'New Pork,' so it might not be that crazy. What seems crazier to me is how some people in this universe look at the Dalaam situation as a justification for racism."
"Really?" Jeff asked.
"Yeah," Diana said. "They pin all of the Revivalists' bad actions on Dalaam, even though we pushed them towards that extreme."
"And the Revivalists aren't even representative of all Dalaamians," Jeff said.
"Try telling that to the Ceresian ex-nobles," Diana said with a snort. "Meanwhile, Ceresian prison camps on Vulcan kill thousands. That seems civilized."
Jeff flinched at the flippant way that Diana said those words.
"How did you reason through all of this without letting your biases get in the way?" Jeff asked. "People call me smart, but I don't think that I could ever do that."
"Oh, it's easy," Diana said. "All that you have to do is go through an experience that teaches you how everything that you think you know about the world is a lie."
Ana Aniah walked through the halls of Dalaam's royal palace, jaw clenched and hands balled into fists.
My parents are dead.
Just put one foot in front of the other.
Monotoli's taking over. He'll screw up this nation even more than Minerva did, and nobody's left to stop him.
Don't think, just walk.
Meanwhile, Giygas is apparently real and he just kidnapped Lucas. I don't know what that means, but even a toddler could tell that it probably won't work in our favor.
Thump, thump, thump. Ana listened to the sounds of her footsteps.
And I'm not sure if the Dalaamian Revivalists are even scattered for good. The only thing that could make this day worse is…
Ana gasped, looking at a line of corpses in front of her. She ran up and identified their clothes as belonging to the Dalaamian nobles. Every corpse bore slash or stab marks; none of them were killed by psionics.
Although…
Ana remembered Pokey's death. Someone clearly killed him with psionics and stuck a knife through his chest afterwards. They never did figure out who killed him, right? Well, either way, it wasn't a likely scenario in this situation. Likely, a group of armed fighters came in and slaughtered everyone in sight.
But that didn't make any sense. These hypothetical warriors weren't part of Morgan's stunt since she could have killed all the nobles in the room with a single psionic power. So what was their goal? Why did they choose to strike now? And how had they even gotten into the city?
Ana tried to remember from when she had visited Dalaam several years ago where the throne room was located. Maybe she could help the king… if he wasn't already dead. Besides, didn't Poo say that he was kind of an asshole? Well, asshole or no, the king brought stability to the kingdom. Ana would have to find who killed all of these nobles and deal with them before they harmed the king.
After wandering around for a few minutes, Ana found the double doors to the throne room located along the hallway with the corpses, which did not seem like a good sign. With considerable effort, Ana forced one of the double doors open, revealing a throne room with walls and floorboards stained red with blood. She spotted more corpses in the room itself, including those of Dalaamian soldiers.
Ana looked up to the throne. The man that she recognized as General Kim See-Yoon was sitting on the seat of kings, holding a lance in one hand and the Dalaamian King's severed head in the other. Next to him stood a dozen men wearing Revivalist uniforms.
General Kim dropped the king's head, letting it roll down the steps. He looked up at Ana and smiled.
"You arrived just in time," he said.
"Here," Claus said, shoving a knife in Ninten's face. "Take Phonus."
Phonus? Ninten thought, grabbing onto the knife. Oh, the third Osohe knife. Whose psionic essence got stuck in this one?
"Are you sure that you don't need it?" Ninten asked.
"Positive." Claus drew his sword from its sheath, holding it in both hands. "Your style of poking holes through your opponent isn't as good against these starmen. Trust me; I've fought them before."
So, Ninten thought. He gives me the knife instead. He gives me the power to insert a human cognitive essence into a starman's body, breaking it entirely.
Ninten leapt out of the way just in time for several lasers to graze past his side.
"It's time to kill," Claus said.
Claus advanced towards the starmen, lumbering like a giant. He smashed his greatsword into one of the aliens, denting its outer skin. Ninten found it difficult to believe that someone so physically strong was only 15 years old.
Ninten darted forward, stabbing starmen left and right with Phonus. Each time, he pressed the yellow jewel, waited for it to drain into the alien's wirings, and watched as the starman flailed and collapsed. The starmen warped around and made it difficult for Ninten to chase them, but Ninten's speed allowed him to stab a stray starman every once in a while.
Perhaps that was another reason that Claus gave Ninten Phonus. The starman focused their fire on Ninten without even considering Claus as a potential target; clearly they were after the knife itself. As a result, they took great pains to avoid the knife's edge, forcing Ninten to dart around and expose himself. During this time, Claus was free to skirt around and engage starmen as he pleased. While the aliens didn't ignore him entirely, they made less of an effort to keep him running. The high pitched whirrs and dull thuds of starmen falling to the ground alerted Ninten whenever Claus scored a kill, which occurred far more frequently than Ninten taking out a starman himself.
During the brief glances that Ninten took towards Dr. Andonuts, he saw the inventor firing psionics at a horde of starmen while grinning from ear to ear. The starmen fired lasers at him; he didn't even bother to dodge.
Before long, the room started to reek of starman guts. Ninten found himself slipping over papers and barely dodging puddles of acid as he raced towards his next kill. Just when it seemed like the starmen were starting to thin out, another wave of the alien teleported into the room.
"Psych it!" Ninten shouted. "We already have enough to deal with."
"Since when does life ever give you what you can handle?" Claus asked, kicking a starman corpse aside. "We're taking this on by our own damn selves."
"You two could leave, you know!" Dr. Andonuts shouted. "If the starmen didn't sense the presence of all three knives together, they would probably ignore you!"
Ninten and Claus exchanged a glance.
"Should we?" Ninten asked telepathically.
Claus face tightened. He shook his head before swinging his greatsword into another starman.
Well, Ninten thought. I tried.
The starman adapted by firing lasers at Ninten's hand. While it caused more of them to miss, the ones that did hit provoked a reflex reaction in him to drop everything that he was holding. Ninten found himself scrambling to pick up the knife multiple times between every kill that he scored because another laser knocked it out of his hand.
After a few minutes of battle, Ninten felt his psionic stores run low. He used most of his psionic energy to heal himself from the onslaught of lasers; at his current rate he wouldn't be able to keep up for Claus to kill the rest of them.
"Claus," Ninten said, dashing towards a starman. "We need to change things up."
Right before Ninten could stab the starman, the alien teleported teasingly out of reach.
"I can't keep going like this," Ninten added, panting heavily.
"What the psych do you want me to do?" Claus asked.
"I don't know. Do you have any ideas?"
Claus' face darkened. He sliced a starman's head off and then kicked the corpse into a puddle of acid.
"Claus?"
"I'm thinking!" the ginger snapped. "Psych. It doesn't look like I have much of a choice left. It's time to pull out my secret weapon."
"You have a secret weapon?" Ninten asked. "Why didn't you say so earlier?"
"Because I don't want to use it. If my secret weapon becomes known, then everyone will expect it. That kind of takes the 'secret' out of it."
"Well, we're going to die here if you don't do something!" Ninten shouted.
Another starman right outside of Ninten's reach teleported several feet away. Ninten gritted his teeth, using psionics to heal himself from the most recent beam attacks.
"I understand," Claus said. "I just… hoped that I wouldn't have to do this."
Ninten caught a twinge of fear in Claus' voice and stopped dead in his tracks. He watched as Claus brought a shaky hand up to his eye patch. A laser struck Claus' chest and another one hit his left leg. He didn't even bother to react. Claus grabbed onto his eye patch and tore it off.
Ninten knew that Claus had lost his eye, but he hadn't expected to see a psionic crystal sitting in its place. Instead of the purple crystals that Ninten was so used to seeing, the gemstone in his eye shone blood red. Ninten squinted, trying to filter out some of the blinding, red light from the crystal.
"It's called Heartstone," Claus said. "This is the last known chunk in the universe. Although, I suppose Aphrodite might be intact enough for people to theoretically mine for more."
Claus ripped the crystal out of his eye socket. More lasers slammed into his body, but one again Claus didn't even seem to notice. Dr. Andonuts laughed uncontrollably in the background.
"Can you use the psyching stone?" Dr. Andonuts asked. "I'm telling you, Morgan would have paid an arm and a leg for a crystal that size."
Claus closed his single eye and took a deep breath. When he opened it, the eye blazed with a fury that Ninten had seen when first meeting Claus on Ceres. It made him want to run back into the cave and hide in the Rainy Circle.
"Please don't judge me too harshly for this," Claus said. "PK Love."
Immediately, Ninten felt his head spinning. For an instant, he felt pure joy unlike anything he had ever experienced. The next instant, the happiness fled and sorrow took its place. Ninten moved Phonus closer to his chest. He couldn't live another second with this overwhelming sadness.
But he didn't have to. The next instant, the sorrow was replaced by anger. Then fear. Then surprise. Soon, everything became jumbled up in Ninten's head. He couldn't see; he couldn't hear. The emotions that raged inside of his head blocked everything else out. He felt too much.
In the back of his mind, he thought that he heard a voice:
"Love is not a single thing. It encompasses everything that we are."
Everything that we are…
Ninten gasped for breath, his senses returning to normal. He realized that he was lying on the floor. He jumped to his feet and looked around. Every single starman that had previously stood in the room had been reduced to a pile of innards on the ground.
Claus killed them all, Ninten thought. He used a power called PK Love. Did it make me see all of that? Was it… real?
Ninten spotted Claus with his eye closed, standing in the exact same position as before. The only difference at all was that the red crystal in his hand was now a colorless grey; all of its life had been sucked out.
"So… cold…" Claus dropped his sword and hugged his arms. "Never… again…"
"Claus!" Ninten shouted, running over to his friend. "Claus, what's wrong?"
"I would keep your distance if I were you," Dr. Andonuts said, standing up and putting on his glasses. "That power doesn't treat people lightly."
"Claus, what did you do?" Ninten asked, putting a hand on Claus' shoulder.
Claus flinched, looking at Ninten in horror.
"Claus?"
Claus buried his face in his hands, turning away. He whispered something that Ninten couldn't make out.
"What?" Ninten asked.
"I said stay away from me!" Claus yelled. "Please. I don't want to hurt you."
"Claus, I know that you would never-"
"Maybe I wouldn't, but this isn't me," Claus said. "Please, just run away. I'll be fine in a couple of hours."
"We should take him up on that," Dr. Andonuts said. "Enhancing PK Love with a Heartstone draws on the power of positive emotions from the psionic essence. With those exhausted, he'll be a ball of hate and rage before long, regardless of neurotransmitters that correspond to positive emotions in the brain."
"You mean…?"
"Yeah, that his psionic self is overriding his body's normal commands. And that psionic self is wounded, Ninten. Psych, I'd take a temporary imbalance of neurotransmitters over this. Psychological disorders don't result in nearly as much violence as you might expect. Remember, you're talking to someone with Schizophrenia."
"Go," Claus said, sinking to his knees. "Now."
Right then, Ninten sensed a psionic aura appear right next to Dr. Andonuts. Fearing the intrusion of another starman, Ninten whirled around to spot a wide-eyed Morgan Lorune. The empirist shook like a leaf; her skin was a sickly pale.
"Morgan!" Dr. Andonuts said. "You can't just teleport from Yazhou to here! The difference in oxygen concentrations due to the altitude change over such a short period of time…"
"Will kill me, yes," Morgan said, her voice surprisingly frail. "But I'm already dead. I'm sorry, Pan."
"Sorry?" Dr. Andonuts asked. "Sorry for what?"
"I just…" Morgan coughed. "I guess I thought that I would live forever. I thought that I would have centuries to be happy. It was so silly to spend so much time plotting revenge, wasn't it? Good and bad are just labels."
Morgan took shaky steps towards Ninten.
"Do you still want to kill me?" Ninten asked.
"Never," Morgan said, her voice quivering. "Ah… psych. I was just angry that you became so bitter even though you hadn't known half of the horrors that Pan and I saw. To see you crack under less…" Morgan laughed. "I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy and I'm not making sense. But I don't want to hurt you. Like I said, I'm going to die soon anyway. I just wanted to say…"
Before Morgan could finish her sentence, Claus lunged forward, picking his sword off of the ground. He dashed in front of Ninten and pointed the blade at Morgan.
"Lorune," Claus said, his voice emotionless. "You bring nothing but pain."
Morgan's eyes widened, and she opened her mouth to respond. Before any words could come out, Claus drove his sword through Morgan's chest.
"Claus!" Ninten shouted. "Stop it!"
"No…" Morgan said, struggling to get that one word out. "Dead… Anyways…"
Claus gave his sword an extra thrust. Morgan gasped as Claus' drove his sword deeper into her flesh. She didn't even close her mouth before her eyes went glassy.
"Morgan!" Dr. Andonuts shouted. "Morgan, please! I'm not ready to say goodbye!"
She was dead regardless, Ninten thought. Even she accepted that. So why the psych do I feel like murdering Claus for what he did to her?
Ninten looked at Claus' neutral face and felt his rage grow.
I guess there's more to life than the outcomes, Ninten thought. Even though she was a dead woman walking, it's a shame to see her go down like that. I don't think she even understood that herself.
"Why are you mad?" Claus asked, looking back and forth between Ninten and Dr. Andonuts. "She was a bad woman, so I killed her. She admitted that she was going to die soon and I didn't want her to pull anything funny."
In a twisted way, Claus' logic made sense. But Ninten knew that it wasn't really him talking. Was this what happened when someone used a Heartstone to empower PK Love? It allowed him to somehow kill all of the starmen, but Ninten didn't know if Claus should have taken the trade.
"You've just made a terrible mistake, my friend," Dr. Andonuts said, throwing off his lab coat. "You see, Morgan was the only thing keeping me civil. Take her out of the equation and…"
Dr. Andonuts whispered an incantation and transformed into another human. This new form looked like an older version of Ninten, even more so than Teddy. He wore a knowing smile; Ninten couldn't tell if it was real or fake. Ninten vaguely recognized him from a picture in the steel cube that Morgan had trapped him in on Vulcan.
"My true name," the new Dr. Andonuts said, "Is Pan Lorune. And you are about to see what it is like to fight someone with nothing to lose."