When Ajimui was born, she was three-point-three trillion years too early for any universe to exist.

There wasn't much that Was, back then. A small handful of proto-gods, busy debating whether to Begin or not. A pair of cosmic observers. The odd time traveller who'd drastically overshot.

Her "childhood" was rather lonely. The gods dismissed her as a fluke that didn't deserve to Be. The observers watched her quietly, but said nothing. The time travellers actually fled screaming when she approached their tiny, desperate bubbles of Existence.

Incidentally, that was how she found out that her name was Ajimui.

She was left with literal Nothing to play with, and play she did. She invented worlds and stories and places and people, and watched them play out inside her imagination. With her [Little big planet] and [New game plus] Skills, she could create and recreate the universes that the gods were dragging their feet on.

But they weren't real. Just figments of her imagination. Just little pieces of her.

She quickly realised that there was no fun in her crafted worlds when she knew how they would end before she'd even started forming them. She'd despaired for a trillion years or so, before eventually hitting on the idea of blindfolding herself. Using [Emergency override], she could turn off [Read the game guide], [After-credits scene], [Memories of Merlin], and the other two billion or so Skills that would let her see the future. She missed [Final Countdown], the Skill that told her how much longer she'd have to wait for a real world to be made, but only briefly. The novelty of actually being surprised at the unexpected wouldn't wear off for a hundred billion years or so.

But her despair had only been delayed, not banished. She'd deactivated her omniscience, not her omnipotence. The worlds she'd made were just tiny parts of her dreams, so everything she tried she succeeded at without issue.

She'd tried dreaming up opposition to herself, other entities who would oppose her, cause her to try. Let her pretend, even for only a few seconds of this eternity, that she wasn't just talking to herself. But it hadn't worked. Even when she'd successfully learned how to not use most of her Skills, and to dream up some truly terrifying abomination, a creature she had designed expressly to defeat her, she had always "escaped". Several of her Skills would override her control and whisk her out of harm's way in just the nick of time.

She'd realised later that making a Level One playthough without allowing herself to block or heal wasn't actually a way to challenge herself. She was trying to see if she could create something that could truly defy her, or whether all attackers would just freeze up when she hit 1 HP.

Whether the world she'd created would allow her to End.

That was how she'd completely missed that the next universe she'd 'played' in was real. She'd gotten so good at surprising herself that she didn't think it was strange at all that she didn't remember Beginning this one.

And, of course, her four quadrillion Skills meant that when she wanted something done, it happened. No different to the dream worlds from before.

She was pleasantly surprised when she met people who didn't seem to be just a limited version of her, but quickly realised that they couldn't defy her either. She reasoned that she had spent so long doing this that she was now creating intelligence fully sealed off from herself without knowing it, all in the pursuit of truly being surprised.

The her-that-was-Kumagawa was particularly dogged about insisting that this world was real, which was rather sweet of him. It was nonetheless pointless – she'd been telling that lie to herself for over two hundred times longer than this particular universe had existed, and she'd long since learned to stop listening to herself.

The her-that-was-Kumagawa got so passionate about proving this one point, that he'd ripped her face off and stolen her [Hundred gauntlets] Skill, modifying it into [All fiction]. Using both that and his own [Book maker], he'd actually shoved her outside of the universe altogether.

It was so cute. She'd been born in Nonexistance, but it had been so long that she'd truly been back there that she easily amused herself for three years teasing the her-that-was-Hanten, who struggled to maintain his stoic aura while he didn't exist.

But it wasn't like looking at 'Reality' from outside was going to convince her that it deserved that name.

When she'd come back, she'd recognised the her-that-was-Madoka for what she was. A "main character", one of the creatures she'd made to defeat herself. And defeat her they would – that was the whole point – but they'd never finish her off, never truly defeat her. All she was doing was trying (and failing) to pretend otherwise.

Even without her future-seeing Skills, she could see where this was going. So she decided to mix things up. Avoid the her-that-was-Madoka until her "story" was over, and then get back to her various impossible tasks, hoping blindly that one of them would actually fail this time.

Filling out the PRT had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. When she'd realised that a group of Normals was trying to keep the Abnormals and Minuses in check, it had actually made her laugh. It was a fools errand, anyone could see that. The Strong did what they liked, and the only hope for the Weak was to become Strong or to beg patronage from one of the kinder Strong ones. It was impossible for things to be otherwise.

Upon thinking that last thought, she'd immediately commanded a few dozen thousand of her to sign up. They'd succeed, of course. She always did. But for a while, her contempt of the human race would let her believe that she might fail at something for a change.

The indignation of the her-that-was-Alexandria in particular had amused her. It had been a few hundred billion years since anyone who knew who she was and wasn't a "main character" had stood up to her like that. It was refreshing.

Fighting the White Queen had been an easy decision. She liked that particular group of figments of her imagination, so stepping in to rescue them from one her the hers-that-was-a-final-boss was the act of a momentary whimsy. One of the times she didn't let events play out as they would.

Only, the Queen hadn't played by the rules. She'd slapped aside her attacks and retaliated with attacks that actually made it past her defence Skills.

She'd even blasted the her-that-was-Kumagawa's seal clean off, and Ajimui was actually quite fond of that limiter.

It was hypocritical of her, but now that she wasn't getting her way, she found she didn't like it.

Just this once, she decided to break her multi-trillion year old rule, and invoked [Last page], the Know the Answer to the Mystery Skill. Just a quick peak at what she'd have to do to win this encounter, then –

Oh.

Oh.

In one instant, she saw everything. She saw how the fight would continue to go. She saw the banter she would casually throw out. She saw her unavoidable defeat at the hands of the White Queen.

"Hmm. And here I thought there was only one person who could defy my twelve quadrillion, eight hundred and fifty-eight trillion, fifty-one billion, nine hundred and sixty-eight million, six hundred and thirty-three thousand, eight hundred and sixty-four Skills."

"Really? I don't obey the laws that even the gods have to follow, and you think I'd pay attention to the make-believe of a girl who failed to grow up over three trillion years?"

But more importantly, she saw what came after the White Queen.

Seriously? That's how this story ends? What a pathetic whimper to close with.

"My, you really do think the world is fake, don't you? I obliterated those you were protecting at the start of the fight, and you have yet to shed a single tear. And your boyfriend went to such lengths to keep you from killing yourself…"

"It is true that Kumagawa-kun has a really funny idea of suicide watch, but doesn't your love interest want you dead?"

She wasn't going to win this fight. She wasn't even going to be driven off. She was actually, truly going to die. For all of her unfairly spec'd intellect and computing Skills, she still couldn't really wrap her head around the idea.

She was getting what she'd always dreamed of, and she was dismayed to find out that it terrified her.

"I despise people who don't know when to give up."

"Well, I did have to be sure."

What the hell was she going to do now?

What would the her-that-was-Kumagawa –

…

What would Kumagawa-kun do now?

"Sure about what?"

"Keeping the world from being destroyed really is impossible with people like you around. So I guess that means this world really is real after all."

She didn't need a Skill to work that out.

He'd flip the bird at whatever was coming and tell them to **** off, that same smile still on his face.

"If loosing a fight proves that to you, I would have happily proved it to you long ago."

"And that means that the people in the world are real too. How embarrassing. I wasted so much time…"

Any deaths the White Queen had caused couldn't be undone, but there was nothing stopping her from grabbing their souls and stuffing them into copies of their old bodies. She even spent the effort linking the Parahumans back up to their old Shards.

But if she really wanted to change the future, she'd have to send Hanten-san a message. She needed him to create a new Skill with his [Skill that Makes Skills].

He would likely hate her for it. He had devoted his life to preserving the "Strange thing" that was her, and now she was wasting precious instants sending him a message instead of fleeing, as though the White Queen would have allowed her to do that.

[True Believer]. Without that Skill, there was no possibility for the Bad End to be avoided.

"YOU DARE?!"

With that, Ajimui closed her eyes and embraced oblivion.