Hey, all! It's Minty. We should probably talk.

So for those of you who lurk my other fandom stuff (bills-pokedex on Tumblr, the Canalave Library Discord), you'll probably know this already, but … I've outgrown fandom. It's weird to think about because I've been with the Pokémon fandom for literally years, but a lot has happened in years since I started this fic. I'd started a career. I moved from one major city to another. I hit an emotional rock-bottom. I went into therapy, found better offline friends, got a partner who loves and supports me and pushes me to improve my life in all these little ways, and finally … survived a pandemic.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I started asking myself if I'm really having fun with fandom and if there's anything I can do to make myself happier. These seem like two unrelated questions, but through therapy and my partner, I realized that … not really. I'd spent a lot of time in fandom, and I personally feel like it's held me back. This isn't to say that dedicating a large part of your life to Pokémon isn't a terrible thing for someone else or that I judge anyone for doing it; I'm saying it wasn't the right decision for me and that I realize that now.

To that end, I've thrown myself into original fic. I've actually been writing consistently since last November after having joined Tumblr's original fiction community, and since then, I've been a lot happier. I've surrounded myself with people who have been both welcoming and nurturing, and though my confidence isn't quite back yet, I'm prouder of what I'm doing. For the first time in a long while, I feel like I might finish a story, and I'm excited to see where my ideas are going to take me.

But the problem with doing that is, well. What this means for Electric Sheep.

To make a long story short, I've decided not to finish Electric Sheep as a fanfiction. Same with Anima Ex Machina, should anyone be reading that too. I'm taking them with me, but I'm retooling them to be original stories that stand on their own, outside of Pokémon. Or in other words, this will be the last update you'll see in fandom spaces.

Because that's quite an overhaul and because I understand that not everyone's going to want to come with me to an original space, I thought it would be nice to write a proper send-off for the fanfic version of this.

That having been said, a summary of Electric Sheep, from Opelucid Gym onwards.

So. Setup for Opelucid Gym. The pokémon Belle gave Door was a woobat named Beat, and I took several liberties here because in the actual gameplay, Beat had died while I was grinding for more party members in preparation for the gym. (Actually, I'd lost about twenty pokémon trying to grind for a full team and somehow survived the gym itself with only Tsunami and Knives. Don't ask. Point is, Beat was my favorite and the one I was hoping would survive to the E4, so Beat gets a shout-out.)

Anyway, Opelucid Gym's puzzle is just a challenge to avoid being knocked off a pair of dragon-shaped walkways by Iris and her dragons. Knives and Tsunami work together to fend off Iris, Opal keeps track of where Iris is (because Iris can fly anywhere she wants in the gym), and Door makes it all the way across. (Unlike the Icirrus Gym, she never knocks out Iris's pokémon because that's not the point.) Iris gives her a badge and compliments her on her teamwork, then wishes her luck on the Elite Four. Door asks about Team Matrix; Iris says Hilda has been gathering gym leaders and that Door shouldn't have to worry.

After retrieving Pyro (who's in the background for most of the rest of the fic), Door and Opal trek through Victory Road rather uneventfully. During this time, Opal is giving Door what initially sounds like advice for the Elite Four, only after Door spaces out, she comes around to realize that Opal is talking about how important the relationship between a Companion and a human is. She says that, to answer a question Door had a long time ago, Opal doesn't see anything all that wrong with the arrangement between the two because ultimately, Companions aren't slaves. They take care of humans, who in turn maintain their bodies, and this exchange grants Companions a freedom they wouldn't otherwise have; it's just that freedom is weirdly defined by humans. Before Door can ask anything else, Opal adds that they could be fully equal, sure, but human companionship is necessary to their continued survival. Door doesn't initially think much of this, but this should probably be a hint.

The Elite Four is literally a gauntlet, as it turns out. Think amusement park haunted house or dark ride kind of deal. After presenting her badges, Door (with Opal and her pokémon in tow) enter a long tunnel that spouts out fauxkémon of each of the E4's teams, which Tsunami and Knives work together to beat in quick succession. (Beat "dies"—more like is knocked out and relegated to pethood with Pyro—partway through.) At the end of this tunnel, they expect to find the champion but instead find Blair, whose team is badly beaten in a parallel to the Dreamyard. (Side point, but to answer a question: Blair had intended on beating Geist and making him wait at the Pokémon League for Door in order to keep Geist from running off on his own and push Door into finishing at least the league challenge. She hadn't anticipated that Hilda wouldn't make it to the League, that Team Matrix would ambush her, or that Geist would use this opportunity to break free from her and run off into N's castle to finish the job himself. This absolute beating forms the basis for her story arc in book II, as her entire journey is about rebuilding her confidence and regaining her agency.) Door runs to her and asks who did this, to which Blair responds by saying Team Matrix has already arrived and that Hilda and the others are too late. Here's where N's Castle rises.

Inside, Door encounters Belle, who gives her a master ball and tells her Geist had already been through. She warns Door to be careful about Magdalene. Starr is noticeably not in this scene, and Door notices this immediately. Belle refuses to talk about what happened to Starr and lets Door proceed into the next room, where she finds Geist and Oppenheimer facing off against each other. (This is basically the stand-in N battle. Obviously, I'd used Knives and Tsunami during the actual gameplay, but I couldn't work that into the story and have it make sense.) At the height of their battle, the room fills with dream smoke, and a copy of Zekrom emerges. Door doesn't think twice before throwing the master ball Belle had given her, and it's right at this point that Geist notices she's there.

So does Magdalene, who grabs her and uses her hydreigon to bust through a wall and into a tunnel that leads to the Entralink.

Insert surreal description here, but the Entralink is a dream smoke-filled wasteland with a single twisted tree growing out of it. Magdalene reveals that the tree is what's left of a Xerneas that had been summoned there by a prior champion. As if on cue, said champion (Calem) shows up with Yveltal and a few demands of Magdalene. As it turns out, Calem had actually been a key member among the Children of the Electric Dream (the cult Team Matrix had stemmed from) because he represented the possible solution Oppenheimer was looking for when he founded the Children. To make a long story short, fifty years ago, Calem (back then Serena, but that's neither here nor there) had taken down Team Flare, but in the process, he had accidentally summoned Yveltal and killed Lysandre. In the years that followed, a grief-stricken Sycamore and a guilty Calem teamed up to locate Xerneas and perhaps resurrect Lysandre, and this quest brought them to the Entralink, which supposedly had the power to bring forth any pokémon from all pokémon's collective dreamscapes. Calem summoned Xerneas on his own, but the clash between his own legendary and this new Xerneas did not resurrect Lysandre but instead rendered Calem virtually immortal.

Oppenheimer, who was on the hunt for a way to restore a certain someone's body, had come across this story through Sycamore and realized he could use Xerneas. So he tracked down Calem and struck a deal with him: if Calem helps him get his hands on Xerneas and allows him to use the legendary's power to restore Bill's body, then he'll help Calem gather enough pokémon to resurrect a very dead Lysandre. And thus, the Children was born.

Before I continue a few small side points:

One: Obviously, this means Calem doesn't actually believe in the Children's tenets.

Two: Belle was right. Neither does Oppenheimer. In fact, all of those stories were really religious-flavored embellishments to gather up as many humans as possible in order to get the manpower (and pokémon) to complete this double mission. Even Magdalene (who does believe in the Children's doctrine because she was programmed to do so) is part of this.

Three: The dream smoke was part of this too. In fact, all real pokémon in Unova were actually escaped or released experiments by Team Matrix. Oppenheimer knew about Amanita's research and used it to create his own pokémon, as he knew Bill would never agree to a solution that involved the deaths of real, living pokémon, but maybe he'd be okay with the deaths of dream ones.)

Four: The reason why Oppenheimer knew all of this is because Oppenheimer is Celio, the storage system administrator for the Sevii Islands. Surprise?

(A fifth side point: Originally, Red, Door's yamask from way back when, was going to be Lysandre, partially resurrected. Then I realized that was a stupid idea and retconned it.)

Anyway, the whole point of mimicking Hilda's journey and needing the dragons is because the dragons' power would be enough to inspire Oppenheimer's followers, and the inspiration and hope they'd express would resurrect Xerneas. As for why Door's there, Oppenheimer confirms that she was just supposed to lure Geist to the Entralink. Geist shows up, and Door demands an apology from Geist for everything—which he willingly gives, promising that when he fixes everything as Bill, she won't have to worry about her family's mess. They team up to fight Oppenheimer and Magdalene, who at this point summon Reshiram. At the height of this, Xerneas revives, but before Oppenheimer can catch it to use it on Geist, Opal intervenes by walking out into the middle of the battlefield. Xerneas leaps away and vanishes into the smoke.

And here we find out the other twist I was planning: Geist isn't Bill. He's a digital clone of Bill—Bill's backup. Because, you know, no software engineer worth their salt would mess around with anything without having a backup at the ready. Opal even expresses how impressed she is that Geist formed sentience of his own, then muses that it might be because he's got the seeds of a human personality, and that spirit just grew and filled in the blanks itself.

Which is to say, Linus did not give Opal an advanced AI way back in chapter two. Linus gave Opal Bill.

(Point of clarification: Belle was right about the LFA system being named as it was. The full explanation behind what happened to Bill is this: He reopened his pursuit of refined teleportation technology, with the aim of creating a system that would allow instantaneous travel from one region to another—essentially, a souped-up version of teleportation pads, which can only be used across short distances. However, his last experiment went horribly wrong, and it sheared him in half, digitizing the upper half of his body and trapping it in the system while scrambling the lower half and ejecting it all over his lab floor. That's what his family cremated and buried, which is why ejection isn't an option at all for him unless there's legendary intervention. Months after this accident, Bill's sister and Lanette discover the digitized parts of Bill's body trapped in the testing bank of the storage system, and Lanette spent the next few years creating something that would allow Bill to interact with the real world—hence, the LFA system. She didn't recreate Bill, nor did she give Bill's spirit a body to inhabit. That is literally, physically half of Bill, piloting a robot body. Companions were an off-shoot of this, because it was far easier to lie and say she created a robot clone of Bill than it was to say Bill, who had a very public funeral, is half-alive but trapped in a digital purgatory. Or at least it was at the time. Lanette wasn't thinking clearly and had always been bad at managing situations, and that was more Bill's idea because he realized people weren't exactly taking Lanette seriously when she told them the truth. That should explain more than a few notes at the end of the Project Galatea arc. Including, of course, why Bill was so upset by the fact that Lanette had tried to experiment on herself at one point, but we'll get into that later.)

Opal (or, well, Bill at this point) apologizes for the mess, apologizes to Oppenheimer for not listening ages ago, and finally offers to go with Magdalene to fix everything, basically all in one breath. Magdalene agrees, and they leave, along with a good portion of Team Matrix. She sternly threatens Oppenheimer, after having realized that he didn't care about Companion freedom at all. (She basically says if he doesn't follow her, he'll be the first to die during the Companions' revolution; if he follows her, then he'll be the last.) Oppenheimer, realizing that both Reshiram and Bill are listening to Magdalene and not him, has no choice but to drop the act and apologize to Door. He tells her that Brigette was taken to Team Matrix's base in Kalos and suggests that she go there next. Then, he leaves.

And of course the cavalry that is Hilda and the gym leaders show up at this point. It's revealed during an intermission that they were held up by, of all things, Virginia and agents hired by Halcyon because Virginia was basically Lusamine before it was cool. Speaking of, she enters the castle and finds her daughter, and the end of the Entralink chapter brings us Door and Geist outside of the Pokémon League, reconciling over trauma blankets and apparently really bad coffee. Door reveals that she's going to be hauled off to Castelia until everything blows over, so she can't go to Kalos, but she encourages Geist to go in her place.

Meanwhile, the Lanette Notes. They continue on through these last few chapters. Specifically, they focus on Bill, who's hammering out his plan to … eject himself into the real world, effectively committing suicide. Brigette finds out and enlists Cassius's help in trapping Bill inside the LFA system and preventing him from hurting himself until they could figure out a proper solution. This is the mistake Cassius was referring to at the beginning of the Lanette Notes. He explains this in a final video, where he pleads with the viewer to help Bill come back to the real world, both mentally and maybe physically.

Also, a few of the Notes briefly touched on an incident that happened sometime around Lanette's death. This was a series of mass Companion black-outs. Basically, every Companion is connected to the LFA system because they're all supposed to be puppet bodies Bill can inhabit whenever he wants. But because he's permanently connected to the LFA system too, any extreme emotion he experiences risks the integrity of the entire Companion network. In other words, his grief took out every Companion within city blocks of him, and this is what drove him to try to eject—a decision that would have not only killed him but probably whoever else was relying on a Companion at the moment of his death.

Book I ends with a prologue, in which Geist is back in Striaton, talking to Amanita, who explains why she didn't tell him about Bill earlier. Namely, she was asked not to. Shortly after this point, Blair, Calem, and a heel-face-turned Belle show up at Amanita's lab to ask if he's interested in kidnapping an heiress and running away to Kalos, and this is where the book ends.

Before getting into Book II, a few clarifying points:

1. I never defeated BW's champion. I'd actually wiped on postgame content. In-story, Tsunami actually does die in the final battle of the fic. Knives survives, making her the only pokémon on Door's team who made it to the end.

2. Originally, Bill and Geist were indeed meant to be the same person, and Book II would have focused on Geist regaining his memories and figuring things out from there. I rewrote the ending of Book I for two reasons. First, everyone guessed the "Bill is Geist" thing as early as chapter 9, and one person even complained that it dragged the story out too long. Second, I realized that having Geist be human would undo a lot of the lessons Door was learning about Companions up to that point and be a really weird message to send because it'd mean a human was dictating the futures of the Companions, rather than having a Companion do it.

That said, Book II: Kill Switch.

I didn't get too far with planning the specifics of Book II, so this summary will likely be far shorter than the one for Book I. I just know that right around Icirrus, I'd realized how long it was taking me to write this whole thing, so I cut a lot of content and decided to refocus Book II on the quest to stop Bill and Magdalene, rather than on the badge quest.

It opens with a timeskip, wherein we're introduced … to the Santalune Gym in the first chapter. To be a bit more specific, it's a chance to open up on what's different between Kalos and Unova, and the answer is a lot. Kalos is solarpunk to Unova's cyberpunk, except there's definitely still something artificial about Kalos. To give you an idea of what it's like there, take solarpunk and imagine if you applied corporate social media techniques to the general idea of solarpunk. As in, you have your plants and your art nouveau and your eco-friendly messages, but there's this constant underlying vibe that it's totally fake and totally commercialized somehow.

Door hates it, of course, but it's less than her hatred for Unova's straight-up capitalism.

Anyway, Companions "own" gyms here. Which is to say, every gym leader is a Companion with a different puzzle, and we see this immediately through Santalune's gym, whose leader forces competitors to walk tightropes made by pokémon to find her. You could defeat pokémon in order to find said gym leader, but that's considered the easy route. We follow one specific trainer through this puzzle to the end, at which point we learn that this trainer is actually a heavily disguised Geist. He completes the puzzle and earns a badge, making him the third one of the group to get it.

By "group," I mean "consisting of Door, Blair, and himself, as all three of them are right now working their way through gyms in order to speed-build teams strong enough to take on Magdalene." (Door is training a fennekin named Kit and a azurill named Dot; Blair has a chespin. Geist is the only one not training Kalos pokémon, as he was the only one to leave Unova with a largely intact team. As such, Door gave him Knives, Pyro, and a recently revitalized Red to add to a team otherwise consisting of just Antares and Vega.) Outside the gym, Belle reveals that Magdalene had taken control of Starr and is planning on spreading that control outwards to every Companion in Kalos, including the gym leaders, to create a Companion army. Because Belle basically lost Starr (and Monkshood, who was killed by the rest of her team off-screen—Magdalene controls fauxkémon too and turned Belle's against Belle herself), she's pissed off enough to claim the final starter (froakie) and null-and-void her contract with Team Matrix. Meaning she basically offers to serve reconnaissance to Door for super-cheap, an offer that Door gladly accepts.

Anyway, that's the setup of the rest of the story. Door, Blair, and Geist travel across Kalos with their teams, defeating puzzle-spewing gym Companions. (Gyms were going to be far more elaborate, as they would lean on puzzles more than battles. There would still be battles because a lot of pokémon would serve as obstacles. Think Odina's gym, but with more robots.) Along the way, they would kinda sorta encounter the same beats as in canon, but they'd be a lot looser because Team Matrix wasn't going to copy Calem's journey to drive Door from city to city. Instead, some highlights, in order of their appearance:

In Lumiose, Door and Blair would meet with an elderly Sycamore, who would give them additional starters. Door chooses bulbasaur because she never got to train a grass-type before; she names it Sage. (Kit, Sage, and Dot become Door's main three. Dot herself is basically the team's new Knives, only a lot less naive and more sassy.)

In Camphrier, Door meets Cassius, who relates the full story of Bill and Lanette at long last to the main character of this whole shebang. I wasn't going to do it on-screen because a lot of that arc would be focused on Geist struggling with the realization that he's just a copy, and also, what does that mean for him? Cassius encourages Door to be there for Geist, even though at this point, she's told about what her role would have been in taking care of him. (Namely, she finds out she was getting groomed to be his caretaker—essentially Bill's servant, who would have to forfeit her own dreams and aspirations to take care of him and keep him a secret. She's initially angry about this until Cassius tells her Geist isn't Bill and that she and Geist are really in the same boat if you think about it. You know, that boat being "people who asked for precisely none of this but are getting it because the older generation said so." This hits her with a revelation, and she begins a side quest in convincing Geist is his own person with his own purpose.)

Shortly after Camphrier, in Parfum Palace, after a silly side quest involving a furfrou, Door and Blair become an official item, even sharing their first kiss. This comes after Blair asks what Door wants to do after they complete their quest in Kalos. Blair finds out that Door has no goddamn clue and still just a bit believes it's her duty to fix her family's mess, so Blair takes it upon herself to convince Door that she has the freedom to be her own person.

In other words, Door is working to convince Geist to think of himself not as a shadow of Bill but instead as a complete person with his own potential; Blair is working to convince Door to think about her own future because her family doesn't have power over her; and Blair is basically the only character who doesn't have to worry about having her future defined by anyone (but herself, because her struggle is just with her self-esteem, and yes there would be gym battles devoted to exploring this).

Every so often, the trio would run into Team Matrix agents, who are actively trying to prevent them from finding Magdalene. At one point, though, these agents lead them to Bill (who's hiding out in the Children's headquarters—which happens to be the Lost Hotel). Bill, who's still in Opal's body but is now very much open about it, apologizes and explains himself as best as possible. Namely, he tells Door his side of things and how difficult it was, first to come to terms with losing his body, then to cut himself off from his old life (because he couldn't face anyone), and finally to live without Lanette, but he recognizes that all the mistakes he'd made while going through all of this were indeed mistakes that hurt people, and he's working to fix them. To this end, he's keeping Brigette safe, but he's working with Magdalene to free the Companions and give them what they want, as he sees them as a brand-new lifeform that are, ultimately, his responsibility, as they were born because of him. He also admits that he has no idea what Geist really is beyond a faulty backup, especially since apparently, something about Geist's programming—the core of whatever he is—is now infecting other Companions. (Geist has the exact same power over the LFA system as Bill … but apparently, he can rewrite how it works too, a power Bill doesn't consciously have. Bill reveals that Magdalene is the same way, having been a copy of Lanette's consciousness, resulting from an experiment Bill had stopped prematurely ages ago. That was the experiment that led to the invention of Melpomene units, by the way, and it's the same experiment that's linked to the rumors of Polyhymnia's existence.)

Every so often, they'd meet up with Belle as well, who would inform the group about Matrix activity. This is how they'd end up doing things like going to the Poké Ball Factory.

Also, Door, Blair, and Geist would totally get mega stones. Door would get one for Sage, Blair would get one for her blastoise, and this story would be blessed with Mega Knives. The last one would be a bit of a plot point o' drama, because Geist would need convincing that he, a non-human, can unlock mega evolution in the first place. (Geist and Knives would spend a lot of time bonding. It'd be cute.)

Around the eighth gym, Magdalene raises her robot army and begins marching to an unknown spot in Kalos. The gang goes after her, and Door battles the Elite Four-bots and Champion-bot along the way.

Their first stop is in the ruins of Geosenge, where Door captures Xerneas (naming it Hope). Geosenge has never been rebuilt after the Team Flare incident, and this causes a bit of stress for Calem. (Calem has been following Team Matrix with Belle this whole time. They'd be working together to gather information, Belle would be delivering not only what she'd dig up but also what Calem would.) We get Calem's backstory in full here, along with regrets and the revelation that Calem has moved on from trying to resurrect Lysandre years ago (but the Children/Team Matrix grew too big and powerful for him to stop).

Their second stop is in Terminus Cave, where Magdalene has lured Door to in order to combine the power of Calem's Yveltal with Door's Xerneas via Zygarde's ability to balance them, all to gift Companions the power of life.

All of a sudden, Magdalene loses control of her army to Geist, who's experiencing the end of his character arc in the most explosive way possible. During this time, Geist tells Bill off for being a spineless coward, seeing as he still hasn't stood up to Magdalene and provided the answers he's promised.

And then they both lose control, and Bill reveals that, actually, getting all three Kalosean legends in one place was his solution because they would do all of the above and more. But before Bill can complete his plan, Blair of all people steps in and reminds Bill of what he was like when he was fully alive. She says he once told everyone that they had a choice in everything they did (even quoting that one line Geist says everyone gets wrong, way back when he and Door first arrived at Halcyon Labs). She argues that he doesn't have the right to make decisions for everyone else, and that's the point. The past is a mess. The present is a mess. The only way to fix things is to work with people, not dictate which choices they should make in order to fix things according to one's vision. In other words, surprise. This is also the end of Blair's character arc too because she stands up for herself at long last.

Door steps forward and … basically agrees with Blair. She thanks Bill for the opportunity to meet him and for driving her family forward, but she wants to make her own decisions. She doesn't know what will happen from there on out, except it wouldn't be right for a human to decide for Companions what they should do … and that, if he goes with them, they'll do everything they can to work together and find a way forward for the both of them.

Bill nearly accepts when Zygarde shows up. Xerneas and Yveltal rear back and ready attacks, which trigger Zygarde to ready its own, and in the confusion, Geist and Bill shove Door and Blair into the next chamber and rush off to face the legendaries themselves, with Calem and Magdalene still in the chamber. Then there's a light, and the last thing we see is Bill reaching for Magdalene.

In the penultimate chapter, Door would have gone back in to find Geist lying in a heap on the ground. She rushes to him, but before she can get to him, somebody else kneels down and fixes him up. He reboots, then looks up, and we find out that … it's Bill. In human form, apparently. Calem notices this and basically cuts himself on a rock to find he's fully mortal again, and Magdalene wakes up and initializes on a clean slate, having apparently lost all her memories.

The epilogue's a bit longer, but to give you an idea of what happened to the Nuzlocke part of things, I had a massively easier time with X compared to White, and consequently, I had very few unintentional deaths. Kit, Dot, and Sage survived to the very end, but it was really difficult settling on a final three. The only real death I lamented was of Biggie, a snorlax, in the Poké Ball factory, but even he wasn't that major of a teammate. In the end, I'd faced the Champion with Kit, Dot, Sage, a swalot named Pudge (my favorite of the B team), a hariyama named Venus, and a scyther named Saber (not my favorite because tbh scyther isn't my fave and this run didn't change that).

Also, the Lanette Notes of this book would be replaced by Bill's journal, which was meant to supplement and further explain the story he told in the Lost Hotel. (In other words, it was the Lanette Notes from his perspective.)

The epilogue covers a lot of different scenes. Oppenheimer goes back to calling himself Celio and announces to the Children that they're disbanding the church, as they've finally reached paradise. He offers to surrender himself for everything he's done, but Brigette shows up, calls him an idiot, and threatens to press charges … unless he agrees to take over the Kanto/Johto storage system and reestablish the admin network. You know. As community service. Celio smiles and does just this, giving his former cult a new purpose in life (free from weird doctrines, no less).

Belle gets Starr back, who starts displaying personality for the first time. She's about to bid farewell to Door (Starr was her "payment" for the recon missions), but instead, Door steps forward and offers Belle a permanent, full-time position as Bill's right hand at Halcyon, as Bill had planned on taking Halcyon over and figuring out the whole Companions-are-now-sentient-so-what-does-that-mean-for-humans thing, and somebody sensible needs to be by his side. She smirks and says she'll be grateful enough with just a security position and a place to crash at night.

Virginia is about to haul Door back to Castelia when Linus steps in and proposes to let their little girl grow up to be whatever she wants, even if that's the owner of a noodle stand. Virginia questions this, but he doesn't respond.

Door, Blair, and Geist head out on a world tour to complete at least one gym circuit on their own. Their first stop is Alola, where the final scene takes place.

Here, Door watches a press conference on her holocaster, in which Bill announces his return to human form, public eye, and leadership at Halcyon, as well as his intent on ushering in a new age for a true human-Companion partnership, given the Companions' newly discovered sentience. (Apparently, the three-legendary attack caused Geist's ability to think for himself to bleed into the LFA network fully, thus giving rise to actually sentient Companions.)

Or so we think. She goes outside to find Geist talking with an older man in a field, surrounded by clefairy. One jumps up into his arms, yet he doesn't seem to notice. And here, Door asks Blair if it's right for Geist to take Bill's place, and thus, we learn the truth: Bill is traveling the world with the girls, not Geist. Blair shrugs and says it would be weirder to have a human call the shots for Companion reformation, and anyway, this is the first time Bill's been able to get out and about in fifty years. He should have the chance to experience life before he gets thrown into all the responsibilities of being who he was again. They watch Bill grasp this man's hand (it's Molayne btw), only to be yanked into an embrace, and it's here that Door realizes Bill has had a character arc of his own for a long while now (well, she doesn't call it a character arc, but still): a journey of (self-)forgiveness.

Blair says she's asked Door this a thousand times, but she can't help but ask again: what is she planning on doing after she's done traveling and competing in leagues? Door says she's not interested in being a scientist anymore, but she's not sure what it is she wants to do with her life. She says she'll have plenty of time to figure it out, but she's just happy that she has the opportunity to do so now. They both look up at a minior shower and muse that the future's this big unknown, and they're looking forward to discovering it together. And as they hold hands, we're led into the final lines of the fic:

Door: "Though … if I had to stick to one thing … I'm kinda thinking of opening a noodle restaurant."
[beat]
Blair: "What."

And that would have been the end of Electric Sheep the Fanfiction. Not to advertise, but should you be interested in Electric Sheep the Original Fic That Might Be Self-Published Someday, you can keep up with my original work on blindthewind on Tumblr.

If not, hey, I get it. But again, thank you, to all of you who've kept up with the fic. Thanks especially to girl-like-substance, Bay (Alexison), and Sike Saner for all of your encouragement over the years, and for putting up with my constant talk about this fic. But also, whether you've been shadow-reading, dropping comments here or there, or anything in between, thank you so much for your support. Writing Electric Sheep has been an adventure, and it meant a lot to see folks liking what I was producing, yelling at Door, freaking out about Geist, and so on. Thanks to all of you. I'll miss this, I'll miss you, and I wish you all the best.

FIN.