New World 120: Hold That Thought
"Void!? Void are you awake?"
"What?" Charles opened his eyes. "Where.." He saw the stark white ceiling of Dharma's own room. Here he woke up as himself in his human body, not as the duelist who'd helped defeat the Creator only a few minutes ago. But was that actually true, did all of that take place recently? How did he get from there to here? A gap existed in his memory. "His name is Charles. Not Void." And he was not alone here. He saw several people standing around him, people who'd been conscious for some time now. "Hydra?" He recognized one of them at least as Fredrick Muller: also known as the formerly invisible duelist Hydra. "You're better now?" The fact that he could talk to them at all astonished Charles. By al accounts his memories should have been erased. "I have been for some time now actually. You were out for more than an hour, Charles. Just like the others." Hydra directed his eyes towards a few other duelists in the living room. "Ah! Dharma! Aurora?" The others were here as well, twitching and slowly regaining consciousness themselves. "What happened, why are we here?"
"You know I was kinda hoping you could tell us, I dont have a clue." Another younger man spoke up, a duelist with bright hair and even brighter eyes. "Uhm.. Sorry but... Have we met before?" Charles had no memory of ever seeing this guy before; this guy who clearly knew him. "Huh? Oh! Right! You've never seen me in real life! It's me, Charles! Neo!" The duelist happily exclaimed. "Neo!? But you were.." Hearing about this recovery hit ten times as hard. "In a coma? Yeah that's what the doctors said too.. But I got out of it! I even heard about your message to call for help from all the other duelists in the world! Except they wouldn't let me move or even talk to you! By the time I managed to sneak out, you guys were already making your attack against the Obelisks or something! Leave it to me to be late even for this, right?" Neo laughed sheepishly.
"Oh so I am not just dreaming this all up." Dharma rose with a groan and took in the miraculous news. "Neo? Geez, what's next? Am I going to find the Easter bunny in my garden?" She inspected her room to see just who else made it back. "Abigail? Jenna? When did they get here?" She saw a handful of her friends in various states of awareness: Cherry, Nakana, Abigail, Wagner, Jenna, Bionis, Nakana and Zanbatou. "They were already here when I arrived. Wagner and Abigail must have carried them back before the second wave hit. Between that and the first attack, its taking some of them longer to shake off the effects." Hydra started to explain. "Second wave? Oh! That must have been the moment when we defeated the Creator!" Dharma snapped her fingers. "Defeated? So you did win!? At first I was worried that he cast you out like he did with me." Hydra still felt a little too cautious to celebrate. "Oh yeah! You should have seen it, we literally couldn't have done without you!" Blanche smirked proudly. "It all kinda turned into a blur after that though. I think we asked him to bring the world back to normal, and then he placed us back here?"
"That was his promise." Aurora finally stood up, though she found it difficult to keep her balance. "Careful, Aurora!" Wagner immediately rushed to her side, but nearly stumbled over someone else in the process. "Watch it, rockfeet!" Cherry Anise grumbled as she slipped out of his way and let him fall on his own face. "Ow! Geez... Okay it definitely feels more real now." The Valkyrie duelist rubbed his sore nose. "It looks disgustingly real too." Cherry Anise stared at her own reflection in the clean white floor and sighed in disappointment.
"Ah! Where did they all go!" On the other side of the house, Jenna was having her own little panic attack. "Scura? Whoa whoa.. calm down. What's wrong? What do you mean?" Neo tried to get her to relax a little. "My mom and dad! My sisters and brothers! They were here in this house too, but now I cannot find them anywhere!" She had a very good reason not to be upset. "Oh ehr.. those guys? Yeah I was wondering what was up. I saw a few of them before we all lost our minds. Literally. I dont know where they could have gone." Neo would know that while their thoughts were being drained, one could not exactly find the motivation to walk out on your own. "Continuum must have attacked them! Taken them as hostages! Why else are we the only ones here!"
"We are here because that is what the Creator wanted." Crescent spoke up again, loudly enough to get everyone's attention this time. "He put everything back the way it was before any of this even started. So he sent everyone back to their original homes." Her words seemed to settle Jenna's nerves just a little. "The Creator did all that? Crescent, was that what he promised?" Charles looked to the freckled duelist who appeared to remember the sequence of events better than he or Dharma did. "We told him to remove the power of the legacy items, and he did. As you can see, we are not in STHEREA anymore. Well, to be more accurate: STHEREA is no longer in our world." No one here resembled their virtual self. Though in certain cases like Crescent's there hardly seemed to be any difference between their avatar appearance and their real one. "Then if he restored everything.. did he also bring back their memories? And what about the damage itself?" Charles' parents were not here, but they did not have their original home anymore either. It sounded too good to be true. "And why did he send us all here? Why.."
"Oh." Then it came to him, a dreamlike memory no longer than half a minute. "This is not over, is it?" He recalled the Creator snapping his fingers and teleporting them all away, but also recalled His last few words. How he wanted there to be one final game. What it meant, neither he nor Crescent knew yet. She could only confirm that she'd seen and heard the same thing. "He chose us.. specifically. Everyone one of us here he wants to go see back in STHEREA."
"Your hypothesis may well be correct." Another surprise guest walked into the room; Lilah Singleton. "Scarlet! I mean Lilah.. Hey, you made it back too! Did you win too? Did you stop Scarlet Fever I mean." Dharma considered that good news, even if it raised a few eyebrows in the room. "I remember overtaking her in our battle. But I do not remember what came after that. It is possible that she managed to escape because I was forced out of the creator's realm." Lilah's story left a few questions unanswered as well. "So it is possible that she's still out there? What about Continuum, or Echo and Midsummer? Did you see any of them?" Dharma realized that just because they managed to make this world normal again, did not mean that the virtual world would be safe as well. Lilah did not have any assurances here either. "I'm affraid not." The woman shook her head. "But if this Creator did as you told him to do, than their powers should be severely limited right now. What surprises me is that the Creator could still wield this much power over us after his defeat." Some parts of this did not sit right with her. But then nothing about that man lived up to her expectations.
"Yeah, why we gotta do what he says? We have our own stuff to worry about!" Donna Monday growled. "I have to make sure the guys are all in one piece! X and Imperius and everyone else! We dont know how Therese is doing either, or the whole dang company." There were too many unresolved issues. They could not just throw themselves into a whole new quest right away. "There are matters I wish to attend to as well." Nakana said as she shared a look with Zanbatou. She silently assumed that her mother and father would be waiting for them back at the estate, and she could not predict in which state they would be. "But what are we supposed to do? We are as trapped as we always were." One hour ago, it would have been the simplest task for them to just quickjump across the globe. Now they were dependent on the usual mode of traffic again, and Nakana could not even tell how far they were from the horizon. "Bah, you have a point. Going online may be quicker." Donna conceded. For all she knew, Giganoto could be waiting for her in the network right now.
"Wait, Dharma. You have a jet, dont you? Cant we use that to fly to wherever we need to be?" Charles chimed in. It would not be the quickest solution right now, but it could help them get home eventually.
"Hold the phone! You have a frigging plane?" Jenna could not contain her envy after hearing that. "Erhm.. It's not here right now. I let it stay at the airport back when I visited Dyzanthium and gave my pilot the day off. Cant exactly ask him to come back at the drop of a hat." Dharma tried to explain without coming across too much as a spoiled rich girl. "Oh. I dont suppose your plane is a big Boeing or anything..." Jenna pointed at a random white plane flying far above Dharma's home. "Yeah no. More like a small jet. I dont have that much money. Much nicer to fly in that one of those big commercial monsters. I suppose I can try to call the guy, but I wouldn't count on getting anywhere with it any time soon." Dharma said with a snicker. "Maybe later.. I've never even been on a plane before." Jenna sighed and folded her arms. "Either way, I am not going anywhere until I've talked with my family. Can I borrow your phone? I kinda lost mine in this mess." Jenna assumed that the girl of the house would have a dozen phones anyway. "Sure." And the blue-eyed duelist was more than willing to share.
"Hey I have a different question. How the hell do you propose we go into STHEREA right now? Unless Blanche here happens to have a couple dozen spare headsets, only one or two of us can log in at the same time." Bionis spoke up, raising a fair point. Charles and Dharma did not have an easy answer there. Charles did not even know how he would get back in without the help of Renner's people. "Actually." But as it turned out, this matter had already been solved. Hydra gestured at Bionis to make him look into the next room. "What the hell?" There he saw a series of headsets just lying on a table. "That's mine!" There he saw his own headset, recognizable due to the many stickers and studs attached to it. "Did you steal it?" He accused Hydra as he grabbed the device from the pile. "No. These showed up at the same time as Charles and the others. You can count them, there is one for each of us. I suppose the Creator wants to make sure we have no reason not to come back to STHEREA."
"We will go, yes. But first things first." Charles picked up his own phone. "There's plenty who deserve to know what is going on."
While this sentiment was shared with everyone else in the room, Charles stepped out and went down some stairs to hold his private talk. He had no idea what to expect once he rang their number, would they even have a phone on hand? "Charles?" His mother answering the call right away with a spring in her step pleasantly surprised him. "Gwen? You're okay!? Where is Arthur?" He'd feared the worst. The last time he saw her, she'd been too stressed to really talk to him. "We're both alright. Why wouldn't we be?" Yet now she spoke as if nothing happened to her or her husband. "You don't remember? About the house and the.." Charles knew that Echo took some of their memories away before Continuum took the rest. How much did they get back?
"The house? Is anything wrong the house!" Charles heard his father panic in the background. "No, Arthur. It's just Charles. I think he's worried about something else." His mother quickly made him quiet down again. "So everything is fine then." Charles would have to believe it: that their home had been rebuilt as well. "Well yes? Honey, are you feeling alright yourself. If anything is wrong, you know you can tell us. Where are you right now?" He was clearly starting to make them more worried as well. "I am with a friend actually." How much could he tell them? "Oh you mean miss Bonnet? I should have known. Well I know these last few days have been strange, but everything seems fine now. So if you want to visit us, you can do it anytime, alright?" She had not forgotten about Dharma at least, she still experienced parts of the chaos. "I will, Gwen... Mom." He could not go any further with this right now. "I will talk to you again later." If their memories were altered, the rest of the world could be the same. But it appeared that the Creator fixed everything that could be fixed in the end. Which meant he owed Him.. "Fine. We will do it your way."
...
Once everyone settled their own affairs with the friends and loved ones they could reach, the thirteen duelists jumped down into the virtual world with their own headsets. "...We're back." Charles did not know which worried him more: that it was this easy to return to the virtual world or that he felt no different on the inside. "In more ways than one, Boss." On the outside though, there were a few changes.. Madam Blanche made her aware of them. "What!?" This self-reflection led Charles to an even more concerning third fact: he looked exactly like Void again. "He even gave me my old avatar back? Why?" Charles did not like this, he wanted to put this appearance behind him and bury it along with Static. "Maybe its because STHEREA is really back to normal, like everything was reset to the factory settings and stuff? Also maybe all the other closed systems are gone now, and this is all that's left?" Blanche looked around and saw that quite a few of the duelists around them were back in their original avatars too, which took Jenna and Bionis some getting used to.
"Well at least this means we dont need those bozos at that lab anymore." Cherry Anise on the other hand appreciated the subtle differences to her own appearance. She could never quite get the shade of red in her hair right with her new avatar. "Speaking of red. You look more like yourself too, missus Scarlet." The Trickstar duelist said to Lilah, who no longer resembled the frankensteined Aromage Rosemary ADI. "Indeed. It is as if my 'fever' never took place. Perhaps I did defeat her after all." The woman checked the contents of her own deck, revealing the complete lack of Sunvine and other various plantbased cards. Her Viral torment deck filled her dueldisk instead. "Yeah well with our luck I wouldn't count on it. Besides! Where is everyone!?" Cherry rasped.
"That's a damn good question." Donna grunted. The duelists chose the cosmopolis streets as their first destination, since it would normally have been the busiest sector in all of the network. But now the streets were all deserted and quiet, not even a single programmed duel monster roamed the city. "Perhaps they don't know that the area is safe again? Or they were told to stay offline?" Wagner theorized. "That didn't stop anyone from showing up before. But I suppose it does make it easier for us to find what we're looking for.. Whatever the hell that is."
The duelists did not get the chance to do much exploring on their own however, because they were found first. "Whoahuh?" Two figures quickjumped down in front of them; two very welcome faces. "Good afternoon." They were Juan 'Veyron' the speed duelist and Agent Asterisk the SPYRAL duelist. "Asterisk! Veyron!? It's been forever.. How did you know we were here? And since when were you able to.. well you know.. walk?" The others figured that they would have run into the speed duelist sooner or later, but they did not think that he would see the agent again this soon as well. The day seemed to be full of miracles.
"It is good to see you too, Madam Blanche. It seems I was fortunate this day. My condition improved about an hour ago, around the same time everyone else did. I had to check up with V immediately, you understand. Despite his reservations, he assisted me on my return to the network. Once there I managed to track down Veyron and eventually you as well." As Asterisk began to tell his story, one absence become noticeably glaring. "V is not with you? Did he get tired of virtual reality?" Charles quipped. It seemed unlikely that he and the agent would stay separate under these circumstances. "I wish. No, V is not here because he cannot be here. He could not log in, not even with the demo set. You've noticed how barren and empty the world is here. But it is the same everywhere else; the whole of STHEREA is closed off from the rest of humanity. That is why it surprised V and me when we saw any human activity on our scanners at all. We seem to be the only one who can access our avatars. And we are all here now, aren't we? I am sure you can see the common divider."
"We were all chosen by Static before." Charles grunted. "Yes. I do not know why he would let that him decide, when he should have the ability to choose for himself." Crescent agreed in that it all sounded very unusual. "He did claim to be responsible for our every action. As if he wrote us into his grand opus. I guess he is trying to take credit for everything his unintended creations have done as well. That sounds like something he would do. Tsk, I can't believe we still have to follow his rules after everything we have gone through." Times like these reminded Charles why he never much cared for games that could go on forever. "I do not think he it is like that, Charles Adami. Something about this feels final, as if he knows his end has come and he wants to do one last thing for us." Crescent said, while she stared at the virtual skies. "Do you trust in his promise? Do you think he will give up everything if we do this for him?" Charles wished he could share her optimism. Allthough she would not call it neither optimism nor trust. "He has lied before, many times. But I do not think he can lie this time. He wont hide anything from us either. Wherever we need to be, it should be obvious to find.."
"Yeah well whoever this Creator guy is that you're talking about, he probably did some good. Because otherwise it sure is convenient that everyone got better around this time." Bionis said as he glared at Juan. "And where were you all this time anyway? You could have come and helped us as soon as Abigail over her beat your evil clone." Unlike Khan, Veyron did not have a story like 'being sent to the nightmare realm' to excuse his absence. "If you must know, I was detained." Juan had something more bitter.
"You were detained? For what reason?" Abigail reacted with outrage. "Because of what 'my evil clone' did. He broke my brother out of his own holding cell, and the cameras all saw him do it. Saw.. me do it. Once I woke up as myself again, the investigation team could not exactly like trust me. It was only when everything calmed down that they were willing to give me a chance to prove myself, since they couldn't get into STHEREA themselves. I wish we could have met again under happier circumstances." At least he could talk to his friends again, with his own voice and mind. Abigail would not mince words around him either. "Those people do not know what they are doing. They cannot hold you responsible for what your other self did!" She made herself clear, clear enough for a scornful Nakana to give her an unnoticed glare in the background. "It still feels like I did it, I saw him do it..through his own eyes. And he came from me. That's also why they could not let me go because they had to apprehend my brother again. They did find him eventually, but not thanks to my help.."
"How is he?" Lilah started to ask. "Hhm? You want to know? Why is that, if you do not mind me asking?" Her sudden interest combined with her 'scarlet appearance' put the speed duelist in a distrusting mood. "Because I had to do some experimentations on his own clone a while back, and I wonder if he retained any memory of that." The doctor casually confessed. "Experimentation? Wh..No he did not say anything about that. He seemed awfully at peace actually." Juan "Then perhaps some experienced phased back into him after all, subconsciously. Either way the assessment is correct. While I find it ineffective to quantify someone as 'evil', it is proven that these duplicates lacked a certain morality. Veyron released your brother and your brother attacked other dueltainers simply because they could not see any reason not to." To her it made no sense to blame him for Veyron's actions either. Though to Juan it also sounded like she herself did not want to blamed for what Scarlet Fever did. And he could at least respect that. "Well it seems like it all worked out then."
"We should get back to the issue at hand." Charles coughed. "Yeah, what that guy said. This is a big place, and I dont feel like wandering around looking for clues.. If I find out that this final game is a fetch quest, I am gonna strangle this Creator dude myself." Bionis cursed impatiently. "I do not believe we will have to look around far and wide. There is already one notable set of coordinates." The Agent declared and he raised his dueldisk to show off a set of numbers. "What am I looking at?" Numbers that were less familiar to some like Bionis and more familiar to others. "Those are... the coordinates for the Arena beyond?" Charles'd memorized those damned variables by heart. "V is watching us currently. And based on the fact that only the sixteen of us are allowed to be here, he came up with a theory. Let's test that theory right now." Asterisk would only have to push a button, to get everyone close to him teleported to those coordinates. "I don't see what else we can do."
...
At the other side of the jump, only unpleasant memories waited. "Why? Why is this back here?" They arrived inside the Arena beyond, Static's original battle stage of hatred. It floated among the clouds of the virtual world again, causing everyone to gasp with a mixture of dread and anger.
"Ah..Uhn.. That better not be what I think it is." Jenna gasped softly by herself as well when she caught sight of the shining treasure at the center of the stage. They all saw it: a light orb with colors swirling on its round spherical surface like a sea of liquid paint. "I don't think you'll get your wish." Charles shook his head. "It's the Orb of Memories. Or Project Flute. Whatever it wants to be called." It resembled the sphere that Echo carried with her at all times, only it looked ten times bigger. "This must be.. what he wanted to leave to us." He concluded. Though he did not know what this said about Echo's or Continuum's current status. "The memories? What?! What are we supposed to do with that? Why didn't he get rid of it as well?"
"He cannot. The world of thoughts was not his creation." Crescent said as she walked up to the sphere. "This place will still exist without him, this place will still be there for people to take advantage of.. And as long as they do.. as long as we do.. there will be entities born out of our emotions. He cannot destroy them, he cannot destroy their creations. He cannot do anything anymore. He can only leave it to us to decide what we do with it. It is up to us." She tried to approach the orb but got pushed back by forcefield. "This is what he wants us to do." The forcefield emerged from the arena floor, from a network of lines connected by sixteen symbols. This image almost resembled the shape of a bracket. "He wants us to fight for it. This is his final game. A final tournament, where the winner gets to decide the fate of STHEREA."
(To Be Continued in New World 121: Euphoria Bias)