Creation began on 07-17-19
Creation ended on 07-31-19
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Hope from the Sky: Titanus Yggdrasilus
The night was blissfully quiet as Kaede and Shinji slept, undisturbed by the minor troubles that might've been occurring in other parts of the city this very hour. That was until Kaede awoke to answer the call of nature that occurred in her bladder just now.
Crazy dream about a waterfall, she thought as she got up and vacated her room.
As she closed the door to have privacy, Shinji awoke to the minor feeling of separation from Kaede, like she had disappeared from his presence.
"Huh?" He went, raising his head up off the floor and seeing her empty bed. "Where'd she go?"
The sound of a toilet flushing answered his question as Kaede returned to the room.
"A waterfall woke me up," she explained when she saw that he was awake.
"The feeling that you were not here woke me up," he responded as she climbed back into bed.
"It's late."
"Yes, it is."
"Back to bed we go. Good night again."
"Good night to you, too, Kaede."
-x-
"…You don't seem to be having better days, Mrs. Ikari," went Misato to Yui as they met in the NERV cafeteria.
"I wish I was having a better day," Yui responded, poking at her salad. "Gendo left yesterday, said he had something to take care of, only I get the feeling that he was lying to me. I think he's still upset about Shinji choosing to side with the people of that island over returning here and surrendering his girlfriend to NERV…"
"Basically, he's likely still upset about everything Shinji's done since he ended up in that other universe and defected after he tried to coerce him through force when he declined on returning to this one. Sometimes, I wonder what about Shinji's defection upset his father the most, the fact that he serves a young girl that's the ruler of an entire race of people that were discovered to be capable of being turned into giant man-eaters…or that he fell in love with a girl that might be the second most powerful person he's ever known in terms of abilities while the young queen is the most powerful due to her position, and both teens serve her as advisers. What is it about Shinji that makes it impossible or just difficult for his father to see him as a person and not as some pilot or a traitor?"
Somehow, I don't believe even he knows, anymore, thought Yui as she couldn't understand where and when her family just seemed to implode upon itself and left her with an angry husband that lost his position at GEHIRN's successor agency…and a distant son that felt like his life was going nowhere when he got drafted into the operation to defeat the Angels and the Human Instrumentality Project that he knew nothing about (and would've most likely been against had he known)…and chose to leave his life here behind permanently after his father threatened to bomb an entire island to get him to surrender himself and his girlfriend. Shinji wasn't as happy here as he is over there. If anything were to happen to the people there, and it was our fault, I don't want to imagine what he'd do to us if he wanted revenge.
"On a lighter note," Misato informed her, "Shinji volunteered for a blood drive that started about two days ago in the other world on Paradis."
"He used to hate shots."
"Apparently, there is a scientific theory that regards those who either possess or possessed the power of the Titans."
"Oh, and what theory is that?"
-x-
"The blood types of people who have or had the power of the Titans change and stay changed even after losing the power due to being exposed to Kaede's Dark Titan spinal fluid," Hange explained to Erwin and Levi as they were in the hospital the next day, watching as Shinji and Kaede were getting their blood drawn by a nurse.
"But Bertolt was never exposed to her spinal fluid," Erwin reminded them.
"That's true; Bertolt lost his Titan power after being defeated by Shinji's Eva. We had his blood drawn and tested, and his was likely changed like previous Titan Shifters, but returned to normal after losing the Colossal Titan. He was this B-Negative type, but it's theorized that when he became a Titan Shifter, his blood was mutated to include this O-Negative blood type. Reiner and Annie's blood were tested, both were A-Negative, but showed signs of O-Negative included, even after losing their Titan powers."
"So, being exposed to Ms. Sogen's Dark Titan spinal fluid allows former Titan Shifters to retain this mutated blood type?" Levi questioned.
"That's the theory. If it's true, then their blood is invaluable during situations where blood loss can be alleviated because people with O-Negative blood are universal donors."
"Universal?"
"She means that everyone can receive blood transfusions from them if they have need of it," one of the nurses explained to him as she stepped out of the room Shinji and Kaede were in, carrying a small box of labeled vials of blood. "Although, Ms. Sogen might have the strangest blood out of all the people on the island that have ever possessed the power of the Titans, past and present."
"How is that so?" Erwin asked her.
"It's…hard to describe, really."
Erwin looked through the observation window at Kaede, who was examining her arm after the needle had been removed, looking as though she preferred a bandage over the instantaneous regeneration that occurred afterward. Then she looked at him and shrugged her shoulders like there was a problem. He just gave a small smile.
-x-
A small diner on the side of the road was not what Gendo had in mind, but it was where he was ordered to be after he got in touch with a contact for a last resort move he had to share. So here he was, having a cup of black coffee and a plate of pancakes.
"Are the pancakes here any good?" He heard a man ask him as he sat on his left, setting down a newspaper and cell phone.
"I wouldn't know for certain," he responded. "I haven't been here before."
"How you respond has consequences for everyone."
"The grand design can no longer be implemented, so why not make do with the acquisition of what lies beyond our world?"
"That place has no governmental relations with us. What are the chances of there being such after that reckless attempt you pulled not too long ago to decimate an island one of your lackeys initially got stranded on just to reclaim him and this young lady friend of his?"
"Do we really need to establish a relationship with these people? They have nothing to offer as a whole…except what they possess in resources. And there is one man from there that they disposed of who could be invaluable…if he's still alive, that is."
"If he's still alive, the footage you was able to acquire and sent to my superiors indicated that he was buried at sea at a trench that goes deep. This…Titania's Abyss, as they called it."
"The Third Child ruined everything by defecting from NERV of his own accord after he was rediscovered by the agency, and he didn't know anything about the master plan, which would've prevailed so long as he stayed in check. Now…now, this is a chance to ruin his life over there…and take everything from those people for our own exploitation."
"And what of this girl that has all of this power that your son is involved with? What's to keep him from acting in a way that is…unstoppable should we make a move on her?"
"He's only a petulant child that refuses to grow up and accept the harsh reality of how unfair the world is. The people there see him as a worthless hero that gave them hope, but he can't save the ones that matter the most to him, including a girl who is better served as a pet project."
"You had best hope, for your sake, that the man they buried at sea is still alive. If he was capable of turning the people he worked for into those giants while retaining their intelligence and memories, he'd be invaluable."
"Still, they have the means to reach below an extreme depth and attempt a salvaging operation, don't they? Those people the boy defected for viewed this man as an enemy and cast him out. The enemy of my enemy is just another potential resource."
-x-
"…Titanus Yggdrasilus?" Kaede spoke when Commander Pixis had informed her, Historia, Ymir and Shinji along with Erwin, Hange and Levi about what Anastasia Tybur had informed him when he and his men were escorting her daughter and her around the city. "It sounds familiar, but this is the first I'm hearing of it."
"And she says that it still exists?" Erwin asks Dot as they sat in one of the empty hospital rooms.
"According to Mrs. Tybus, as a whole, Marley fears and admires it too much to attempt anything to get rid of it. She suggested it as a place to attempt a permanent ceasefire with Marley."
"But…what is Titanus Yggdrasilus?" Shinji asked, as he had no clue.
"Titanus Yggdrasilus," Kaede uttered, "is the Tree of the Titans, planted by Ymir Fritz herself a year after she became the first Titan Shifter."
"It's a tree that exists for the Titans?" Historia questioned, unsure if such a thing was possible.
"Supposedly, it's also where Ymir Fritz spent her final days and where she was buried. There's…there's supposed to be a building built right into its trunk."
"Can you tell us…how high it reaches up?" Ymir asked her.
Kaede thought about it, and then saw a glimpse of a memory belonging to one of the previous Titan Shifters that had been around during and after Ymir Fritz's passing, and looked up at the ceiling in the room, as if imagining herself near the tree.
"Higher than the trees here," she answered her, "higher than the skyscrapers in this city, even higher than the highest mountain out there."
"It reaches into the sky?" Levi asked.
"If it's still there, it most certainly does."
"But…we've been in the air a few times surveying the landscape, and nobody's ever reported seeing a tall tree of any sort," Hange reminded Erwin and Levi.
Kaede looked out a window nearby in the room and spoke, "That's because it wasn't planted on Marley's primary continent. When Ymir Fritz was alive, she planted it at the center of the largest landmass on the planet so it would have plenty of nutrients to grow to its titanic height and reach deep into the ground. We need to look for the Island of Gigante."
"Gi…Gigante Island?" Historia questioned. "What does that name mean, Gigante?"
"Giant," went Erwin. "An island that's big enough for a giant tree to flourish for eternity."
-x-
"…And what more do you see from these memories of that other life?" Eren's therapist asked him as he looked up at the ceiling.
"People," he explains to her, "Eldians. I keep telling myself that I'm saving them, but when I see them getting turned into Titans against their will, just to fight an enemy that they've never truly met… I see the harsh realization of my actions against them just to do what I say I was doing."
"Which is?"
"My half-brother and I were doing nothing more than hurting the people I wanted to protect from the enemy. I severed my ties with my friends, allowed the Survey Corps to be ruined, and it led to me getting my head shot off my neck."
"That sounds terrible. But which part of that other life do you believe is what led to that end?"
Eren thought about it, but despite each choice he recalled making in that alternate life that echoed in his mind seeming like nothing but a series of the worst choices made by a violent youth that didn't seek any means to attempt peace with an enemy that hated him, he couldn't erase the image of Mikasa and Armin being hurt, physically, verbally and emotionally by him. They were his friends, they stood by him through the hardest of times, and despite how things had been, he had severed his ties with them. He became a loner, all for the sake of freeing the Eldian people of Paradis…and he had no absolute guarantee of ensuring their freedom, which he had to accept from Kaede Sogen's perception as being completely different from peace.
"I hurt my friends with my attempts," he told her. "I cast them aside, said some hurtful things I should've regretted saying to them. I became no better than the people that hated us."
"And how does it make you feel, despite none of that happening in this life?"
"It just reminds me what I said to Ms. Sogen when she found me at Utgard Castle. I called her a killer, because she and Shinji did kill more Marleyans than anyone else on the island combined. I said she was a cruel person for possessing all the power of the Titans for herself and not being more combative against people. I'm still grateful that she kept my mother from being killed and eaten by a Titan, but she could've been more forceful. It's like everything that she does has to have a sense of subtlety, not with force. And then she tells me…"
"I killed many Marleyans when they tried to attack us at sea," Kaede responded to Eren's remark about her being a monster, "but I'm not a monster, Eren Yeager. In defense of the people that live here on this island, that don't want to fight with another nation, that don't have to fight with another nation, I do what I must to ensure their future is one with the potential for peace to go with freedom…but I don't see myself as a killer. Yes, I practically robbed the power of the Nine Titans of Ymir Fritz from virtually everyone that possessed them on this island, including you, and while I admit to using such power in ways that none of the previous shifters were able to, I'm not a cruel woman. Yes, I can hurt anyone if I so desired…but that's not who I am. Just because you can label me a dangerous person, that doesn't mean I choose to own up to it. Before I gained all the power of the Titans, I was just a girl with a small taste of power she didn't even want. Before I became one of Historia's advisors, I was just a common village girl trying to keep away from others because she feared being outed as a monster or forced to bear children that would eventually become monsters like she feared herself to have become. And before Wall Maria fell, before a man so cruel in his ambitions laid his cold fingers on my body, I was just a girl that saw hope in the days that had yet to come, filled with possibility. So, you and anyone else for that matter can think whatever you will of me, but no matter what you think, I aim to do what I can to help the people in a way that doesn't cast a shadow on me. I do this so that one day we'll all be able to forget about all this in the future, and when it's all over… Nobody will ever have to fight again."
"I don't understand how she can view the world unlike how others can," he expresses. "It's a black and white world, us and them."
"It isn't entirely a black and white world, Mr. Yeager," the therapist explained. "Between the black and white, there is a third world. A world of gray, where right and wrong converge upon one another. It is only because of these two conflicting worlds that this gray area exists, and it is also where the possibilities for resolution can sometimes be found. So, Ms. Sogen admits to her faults, but refuses to believe that they make her a bad person. She didn't try to stop you from turning yourself back into a Titan Shifter using a serum developed by her step-grandfather, but you kept hesitating from injecting the substance into your arm. However, she did say that she would stop you the second you did do so, which of course meant that no matter which choice you made, there was no guarantee that you would possess the power again for an extended period. Do you believe her to be a bad person because she is able to or is trying to see alternatives in what is over what others think should or could be? How does that make her anything like the Marleyans that hate us? How do her actions make her any different from yourself when you were full of anger? And when you look past your anger, what do you see beneath it?"
"I see…more anger. More anger because I don't want to believe that Kaede's in control of the situation, that she might be under the influence of the First King and is hiding it from everyone, that she's likely to lead us to our doom because she lacks the will to fight."
"And what do you suppose would happen if you confronted her over this?"
"I'd be considered an unstable person and pronounced unfit to continue being a part of the Survey Corps…and I don't want that. But I don't know who she really is…just like I don't know what I'm supposed to believe in. Do I believe that she'll do right by the people…or do I believe in my own beliefs? There's no definite answer for either question."
"No," the therapist admitted, "there isn't."
-x-
"Are you sure you're alright, Kaede?" Shinji asked her as he noticed she seemed a little fatigued as they walked with Historia and Ymir down the street. "You look like you gave too much blood back there."
"I'm fine, Shinji, I promise," Kaede responded. "I'll be better in another half-hour."
"You should sit down, Kaede," Historia suggested. "Even if you can recover from the blood loss faster than anyone else can, it doesn't mean anything if you don't stop and rest."
Kaede stopped walking and sat on the sidewalk to catch her breath.
"Thank you for your concern," she praised them.
"Everyone is concerned about your well-being, Kaede," Ymir stated as Shinji sat down next to her. "I don't even know why they think there's something special about your blood."
"It's Hange," Kaede said. "She's the only one crazy enough to try something new, access to ancient technology that's like new or not, expanded knowledge or not. Crazy…but not insane. Whatever it is that she finds, I trust her enough to give us the details when she finds it's something new."
"Just tell me this, though," Historia spoke, "because I don't know if it's true or not. Did one of her experiments involving you really cause her to…embarrass herself in front of everyone?"
"Heh-heh," Kaede chuckled, and then sighed. "She's the only person we know that loves Titan abilities more than usual. Yeah, she did embarrass herself. Maybe this is her attempting to take a step back from the study of Titans to studying the people behind them."
"Anything about Titan Shifters that stands out in a way that we can't see?" Shinji asked her.
"Nothing that Hange hasn't told us yet."
Shinji then placed his left hand on her right shoulder.
FLASH! His eyes widened and he found himself standing before a large tree.
Huh?! He reacted, noticing that the tree in question was nothing like the ones he had seen on Paradis that were massive.
No, this tree was bigger. It was so big that it had a width of what he could only guesstimate at best to be about ten city blocks! He couldn't even tell what type of tree it was, except for that it pointed upward and that he couldn't see many of the branches from where he stood. In front of the expansive trunk base was a gravestone with an engraving upon it. He approached it and read a name and designation written from some time ago.
"Titanus Yggdrasilus," he read, "the Tree of the Titans. Eternal resting place of Ymir Fritz, the Founding Titan of Eldia and the Mother of all Subjects of Ymir. May peace, freedom and prosperity for all that seek them be afforded to those who believe in the unity of all people."
Stomp, stomp, stomp! He heard footsteps and turned around, seeing three young ladies accompanied by nine Titans of varying sizes, draped minimally in thin sashes.
He could only describe the three women as being beautiful and somewhat saddened by something, but the Titans could only be described by their designation as the nine remnants of Ymir Fritz's soul passed down to the people that came to possess them over the years. The Nine Titans of Ymir Fritz.
One of the three women then stepped forward and placed a small bouquet of flowers in front of the gravestone and brought her hands together in prayer, the same as the other two women.
"Shinji… Shinji…" He heard someone call out his name, and he fell backwards. "Shinji."
He looked up and saw Kaede looking down at him, a worried expression on her face.
"Whoa," he went, blinking his eyes a few times before slowly rising up. "What happened?"
"You touched my shoulder and then zoned out for a while," she explained. "Did you have a daydream or something?"
"Maybe. I think I saw the tree. Titanus Yggdrasilus. Maybe it was one of the earlier memories you got when you took the Founding Titan, but it was huge. Judging from the width of the trunk alone, the tree's base is bigger than a small village. Maybe even the size of one of the former districts here. There were three women and the Nine Titans, too."
"How did the women look?" Historia asked him.
"Beautiful…and sad."
"Beautiful and sad?" Ymir questioned.
"Did you see one of them place a bouquet of flowers in front of the tree?" Kaede asked.
"Yeah, in front of a gravestone," Shinji answered.
"That had to be from the memory of one of Ymir Fritz's grandchildren, eight years after she died and was buried by her tree. It was a memorial service for her; her daughters and all Nine Titans would go to Gigante Island and spend the day there paying respects to her."
"One of her grandchildren, you say?" Historia questioned.
"If the Founding Titan looked like a woman, then it was one of her granddaughters. If it looked like a man, then it was one of her grandsons. It was Maria's eldest daughter, Samantha Fritz, who volunteered to inherit the Founding Titan from her grandmother upon her death."
"But…if she became the Founding Titan after Ymir Fritz passed, then how did they bury her if she was…"
"She wasn't devoured," Kaede revealed, clarifying what she knew. "She just died, and upon her last breath, her essence fractured into the Nine Titans…and the Founding Titan…which was actually a little bigger than it used to be after it was split from the other eight…was passed onto her granddaughter. It's not even necessary to eat the whole person, though the Titans of today have no conscious control over biting into a person's spine subtly…and eating a whole person."
Kaede then felt rested and got up and resumed walking with them down the street.
"There…there was something else about Titanus Yggdrasilus that I saw in that memory," Shinji expressed further, needing to share what he'd seen from Kaede. "Starting at the foot of the trunk and leading up, there was a building that I think was made of hardened Titan flesh built right into the tree."
"Because the tree was partially affected by the power of the Titans," Kaede explained. "That's probably why the tree can't be identified properly. It's not a regular tree, anymore. It's…greater than a regular tree. It has more…life than a regular tree would…and some people state that out of all life on the planet, trees are the oldest organism, even more so than the dinosaurs. A…"
"World tree?" Ymir suggested, getting their attention.
"Yeah," Shinji agreed with her. "World trees aren't like regular trees, unbound by the laws of mortality and such."
"So, they're like gods?" Historia asked.
"Yeah, that's one way of describing them," Kaede admitted.
"We seriously need to go see this tree."
"When?" Ymir asked.
"Whenever we can."
-x-
Thinking. Always thinking. That was all he could do right now as he lay in the isolated darkness. His thoughts varying between formulas and the days of freedom he missed.
And vengeance. Oh, how he longed for vengeance against the Eldians and that Asian boy that buried him here. He had been willing to sacrifice everything he had for a new life…and as much as he had sacrificed for his chance to escape the life he had on Paradis, he was willing to sacrifice all that he had left for one thing he wanted more than anything else a man could want: Payback against the ones that defeated him. There was no power greater than that of vengeance.
Grausam Zanki was willing to sacrifice even his very soul to achieve such an objective. In his mind, the face of his enemy was many, but the top face was that of his greatest foe. In his eyes, however glazed over, however diminished from the lack of light at the bottom of this abyss, he could see her. He could still see Kaede, the little bitch he experimented upon to perfect his initial formula that gave him the power to defy the Walls' ability to keep them trapped within such a confined space with their rules and regulations…and the virtual immortality that she could possess if she wanted…and he wanted to put her down like the rabid dog he turned her out as just to see the look on her loved ones' faces showing that he was the Devil of the Titans.
If he could hear his own voice, he'd speak the names of his enemies and swear death upon their souls without any hesitation or mercy.
You don't deserve the power I sought to escape that wretched place, Kaede Sogen, he thought, unable to recognize his own voice due to the silence of his prison, and I was foolish to give it to you to see if it could work for me. But you were the Guinea pig, the prototype, and your purpose was to test out the flaws that needed to be corrected…and the biggest flaw was yourself! What was given to you, I hope someone finds a way to take from you!
-x-
"…Hey, what's with those big planes being brought here?" A female member of the security personnel at the NERV branch in Nevada asked a man as they saw saw several large airships flying their way across the vast desert.
"I don't know," he responded, seeing a bunch of trucks approaching their base, "but maybe it has something to do with those big rigs coming this way."
There were at least fifteen large trucks with trailers riding towards the facility. Someone from the passenger side of the lead truck popped out from behind the window…and the two security guards saw that they had a bazooka.
-x-
Lorenz Kiel wasn't too invested in the idea, but with SEELE's control over the UN gone, their identities made public knowledge and scores of people after them for their crimes of mass genocide and attempted global genocide, the people that sought to become gods had to pool their limited resources and attempt relocation to this alternate Earth and initiate a takeover of their resources and reassert control of the situation here from over there. And to to do that, they would need a new ally…or resource that could change their position as the hunted back into the hunter. They would need this Grausam Zanki and his Titan knowledge.
-x-
"…Where are you going, Gendo?" Yui asked her husband as she saw him with a suitcase just outside their apartment.
"Just something new that I gotta do," he answered her. "I'll be gone for a few days."
As he walked past her, Yui got the feeling that he was hiding something from her, the same as her keeping what was going on at NERV (and the other Earth their son defected to) hidden from him.
"I love you," she heard him say to her.
"I love you, too," she responded back, and he went into the elevator.
The thought of Shinji ending up in some sort of trouble crossed the former resident of Unit-01's mind, imagining that he was placed in harm, along with his girlfriend made her worry that Gendo might try to do such a thing to their son…just like when he tried to intimidate and threaten him into surrendering himself and Kaede to NERV with the might of the JSSDF and their N² arsenal.
"I meant what I said that day the threat was made," she recalled a conversation between Shinji and Kaede's mother, Christine. "This island is my home…and if it ever comes down to it, it'll become my grave. Even if it were possible for me to go back to that life I had in my world…it wouldn't undo how I feel for the life I have here in this one. There's no going back to before any of this. What's done is done, and I don't want to see it undone."
"You're really a good man, Shinji," Christine stated. "I'm glad Kaede chose you out of the dozens of men that she could've chosen after we left the Walls. You make her smile her best when you're with her."
And in another truth, Yui saw how Shinji was grateful to meet someone's mother, as he'd rarely see anyone back in this world that had one that was still alive instead of deceased, a requirement for the Evangelions to have suitable pilots. A requirement which no longer applied to him, though. And it was perhaps the only time he had ever engaged in any long-term conversations with a woman that wasn't some sort of superior to him, left him confused about how they related to someone he didn't, or was just abusive to him.
If anyone tries to continue harassing the Eldians, they're only going to cause further trouble, either because of what they can do or because of who Shinji is, she suspected.
-x-
"…Are Calvi and some of the people behaving on their day pass?" Historia asked as she saw the Marleyan men and women being escorted around by members of the Garrison down the street when she, her advisors and Ymir noticed them like several other people had the next day.
"So far, they're like tourists," the Garrison man expressed, looking away from them. "They're seeing the people here do whatever it is they do for recreation and their livelihood, and not making a scene. Although, I think some of them were a little wired on the lunch they had earlier when they ate out."
"Why?" Shinji asked him. "What did they eat?"
"Something called Peking duck. I thought everyone liked chicken."
"Culinary arts make an impact on how people are towards new dishes," Shinji said to them, familiar with the mentioned dish.
"I take it, it's something you've tried once, Shinji?" Ymir asked him.
"Once," he admitted. "It's usually a dish to the wealthy before it became a common one that anyone can eat for dinner."
"How'd it taste?" Historia questions.
"Not all that different from a roast chicken, but with less meat on the bones."
"What is that thing?" They heard one of the Marleyan women ask, pointing to a kid that was passing by them on a Segway-like vehicle, accompanied by three other children on skateboards. "Some sort of pet machine?"
"No, that was a Segway," answered Ymir. "It's a self-balancing vehicle that you steer with the handle built into it."
"Bicycles, scooters, motor vehicles, machines that can run on electricity and renewable resources," a male Marleyan said, "this is all stuff that's ages ahead of us, and it all exists now."
"Science and technology, history and information, understanding and acceptance," said Kaede. "It's a new world here, and it gets different with every new day."
"Your world is new," Calvi admitted, almost a tone of self-pity in his voice. "Marley's world is stagnant, slow. I used to think that Marley was the greatest nation in the world because we had usurped control of seven of the Nine Titans…but now…"
"Now?" Shinji questioned.
"Now…Marley's just dying from its own arrogance."
"But if Paradis is able to prevent this, to help you change your ways…do you think they'd be able to let go of their hatred and admit to their faults?" Kaede asked.
"I think I'd have to resign from the military just to keep from being ordered to go to war again," another Marleyan man expressed. "Ever since I can remember, all we've ever heard was 'the Eldians' this and 'the Eldians' that, and come to find that most of it's untrue, and that the Eldians of Paradis have been learning a completely different form of history that's also untrue. What is that old saying that used to be heard? 'Two wrongs don't make a right'?"
"That's right," said Historia to him.
"Hey, what's this talk some of us have been hearing about Gigante Island?" Another Marleyan woman questioned. "That island hasn't been visited in over a century because of the storm system that surrounds its borders."
"Yeah, we found out about this predicament not three hours ago when we finally got the location of the island," Ymir revealed.
Three the power of satellite surveillance technology, they discovered the whereabouts of Gigante Island and the discovery of a constant storm system on all sides of its borders. It looked as though the storm acted as a kind of barrier against the outside world to protect whatever resided on the island. But because of the severity of the storm, it seemed as though there was a chance that any civilization that might've existed there was completely cut off from the rest of the world, both socially and technologically.
When Kaede saw the geographical display on the computer screens, her inherited memories of the island sparked up and gave her further insight on the actual reason for the storm's existence, something she didn't think was possible at first, but came to realize that there were many things they all didn't know about completely. A storm system created through Titan power to isolate an island from the rest of the world in order to protect what was there, like a time capsule, not all that different from Paradius City on Paradis, isolated and ignored by the Marleyans for centuries and containing technological resources that brought the Eldians up to modern-day standards. And the more she thought about Ymir Fritz's tree, the more she wanted to see it for herself.
"…How can you be sure that this Titanus Yggdrasilus tree is still there, though?" She heard Calvi ask Historia. "It could've fallen over or something."
"The truth is nobody here knows for sure," the young queen admitted, "not until we get there…and we're going to get there."
-x-
Was he awake…or was he asleep? He wasn't sure if he was even conscious, anymore. There was no sense of hunger, of thirst, not even oxygen deprivation. No, Grausam Zanki was somewhere between life and death, but he couldn't tell where. He was sustained by his Jaeger Titan power, but just barely; his inability to regenerate due to the metal pieces over his stumps prevented his limbs from growing back and restoring him.
If he was reduced to a shriveled, emaciated husk, the lack of light down in the abyss obscured his form from all forms of mortal.
Fate…old whore…Titans…blood…paths, he thought, his mind now struggling just to keep on track of whatever knowledge he had left running through his brain. Paradis…paradise…Eldia…Marley…war…sacrifice… Hell. I'd rather rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven, to be master over servant. The greatest power one can possess…is the power over all others around yourself. So long as you control others, nobody can be greater than yourself. Not even the power of the Titans can give one absolute control.
The silence… Oh, how the silence was as agonizing as the loss of his limbs and his freedom by being trapped down underwater.
I'd rather rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven…and this is Hell.
Rumble. Something he couldn't tell if it was real or not was heard by his ears. Rumble.
The next thing he knew…was a shift in his body's position occurred and he felt moved slightly to his left.
Huh? What?!
Something was happening outside his tomb-like prison. It was either a natural occurrence like an underwater earthquake or a school of sea creatures moving against his prison…or the work of some creature that shouldn't be down here.
What is going on? He wondered.
-x-
With the portal under their control, what remained of SEELE's forces had sent a crew down to the Titan world and established one of their research vessels at Titania's Abyss…along with a submersible to reach down and salvage the sphere of Grausam Zanki. They had the means and know-how to break him from his prison and, if need be, resuscitate him from his prolonged absence. If he couldn't be saved on the physical level, then there was hope that his brain could be salvaged and prodded for its secrets into the creation of Titans.
"We've got contact from the sub," a woman revealed to Gendo, who was also present on the deck of the ship, looking out at the frozen water that was the surface of the abyss. "They located the sphere and are bringing it up. Life signs were confirmed. This Grausam Zanki character is still alive in there."
"Excellent," Gendo responded.
Looking at the frozen tundra around the ship, Gendo couldn't believe that his son abandoned their world for one that was still affected by the changes of season and where snow could be found. A world without Second Impact, unharmed, unchanged and without a threat to the human race…until someone decides to become a threat, that is. While he might've thought that this world was special and a marvel worth living in, he didn't think this world was worth anything except its resources and the power of the Titans to compensate for the removal of Human Instrumentality. Compensation for their losses, indeed.
As the sub began to surface, he thought, We're going to take this world for everything it's worth.
Burst! The sphere of hardened Titan flesh surfaced, held up by several cables attached to seven inflatable balloons, re-exposing it to the world.
"My God," the woman gasps.
"No," Gendo expressed, "this is no god. This is just a man that took a variation of some other power and exploited it for his own purposes, and now he'll hand over his secrets to us for our own purposes."
Part of the ship's side opened up and a small group of snowmobiles ran out onto the thick ice surface and latched chains onto the sides of the sphere.
"Okay!" One of the riders yelled. "Pull it in!"
Seconds later, the sphere was retracted into the hull of the ship.
"Welcome aboard, Grausam Zanki," Gendo uttered.
To be continued…
A/N: Who amongst you readers think this turn of events is bad?