"The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away."
- Martin Sheen
"I'm surrounded by idiots."
- Jeremy Irons
All the cataclysmic legions with the power to destroy the entire universe were focused on conquering a certain feline-appreciating conjurer's genetic nebula. The remains of a giant cybernetic reptile had collapsed on her during the battle, reducing her to an unconscious pair of legs with dark purple stockings and a long pink dress skirt sticking out from underneath a lifeless heap of black scales. It was the ideal position for the armies of malevolent seraphim to perform their hasty operation.
She was the only mortal to be seen in the endless waves of neo-Gothic angels and sentient winged flamethrowers. The only other things surrounding her were scattered piles of stone dust. A quirky but primitive specimen, she called herself "Divine Sophia."
The name alone was an insult toward her makers, as true Divinity only belonged to beings created from 4D space. However, she'd been born with peculiar metaphysical traits that evolved outside of the Fourth Dimension's preordained design. As long as she was holding something rare and valuable within her Divine cells, she couldn't be deemed completely obsolete.
Most of the retrieval was handled by a pair of black-gowned cyber-angels wearing tactical / surgical masks and hovering over Sophia's right and left legs. Their primary weapons / instruments for the task were long mechanized tongs attached to data cables. Where the data was going once it left its original hub remained suspiciously unseen.
A third "angel" resembling a Roman goddess crossed with a motorized insect queen hovered in the center of the two angels, keenly watching her servants go about their mission.
"How do you like yours, Welch? Sunny side up?" the celestial leaning over Sophia's left leg asked with a distant buzzing radio voice. She worked like a housemaid weaving a hand vacuum through some very densely packed sofa cushions.
"Naw. That's for lazy people, Olive. I like 'em scrambled," the celestial on Sophia's right replied as she pinched and pried with her tongs like she was picking the choicest berries out of a fresh fruit salad.
"Bleh, that makes them lose all the flavor! You should at least try making them over easy sometime," the celestial on the left chided. Divine Sophia's thighs shuffled weakly as they gradually became less sacred.
"Yeah, right. I bet you boil yours and then won't even eat the yolk," the celestial on the right groaned.
"Ladies! I'd appreciate less chatter on the company channel and more concentration! She still has almost half of her quota left!" the third celestial exclaimed over Sophia's center waist.
"Just sit tight, Sophers. We'll gonna get all that raw data out of your grapes in a GIF." The celestial leaning over Sophia's right leg said this with just a little too much glee in her synthesized voice. It was probably a good thing the fallen enchantress didn't have the mental capacity to hear her.
"Which node do we need to jump more? She's got two of 'em," the celestial on the left asked her superior.
"Let me take a closer look… Left side is 72% sterile. She needs more attention on the right," the center deity said promptly.
The right angel slapped her palm on Sophia's hip and growled "Get a move on!" The unconscious demi-goddess's knee twitched in reflex.
Somewhere deep in her inactive subprocesses, Sophia was dreaming of yarn balls being unraveled. The Great Unloading left her lower body feeling increasingly numb and a few milligrams lighter.
The right angel started to hum an upbeat melody as she adjusted the angle on her pair of tongs.
"You're my little jellybean, pokin' ya diamonds 'till they lose their gleam, dooby dooby doo daa daa-"
"Welch! A little less soundtrack, please! It's interfering with the bio-emulation scanner," the middle angel shouted above. The surrounding armies of thirteen thousand industrial dragons and devilish seraphs were shivering in pain and covering their ears from the high-pitched racket.
"Sure, sure, sorry." The right angel lowered her voice to a defeated mutter. "Boring boss tying up my sound mixer almost as bad as we're tying up Soph's gene compilers." Her metaphor made the left angel giggle bashfully.
"Why do we gotta do all this extra icky stuff, anyway?" the left angel asked as they continued using their strange instruments to chart out the deepest, darkest regions of the Sophia Nebula.
"I dunno. Maybe Blair's gonna splice her stuff together to make another version of Executioners?" the right angel pondered. "Or create some weird lifeform that can use her Connection genes to do stuff in our dimension? Maybe she just wants to keep 'em as a souvenir to remember That Time We Patched Out a Bunch of Anomalies Threatening the Stability of the System. Beats me. The only reason we're plucking this ostrich is because her code is supposed to be more 'Divine.'"
"Well, I think she picked the right one to backup before they're all gone," the angel hovering over Sophia's left leg said. "She's very pretty. When you can see her face and she's not just some chicken patties sticking out from underneath a dead lizard, I mean."
"Ehh, she doesn't look that bad from this side, either." The right angel shrugged.
"But why does she have to be so… realistic down here? This is the grossest RAR file I've ever unpacked," the left angel complained.
"Hey. She wanted us to treat her like she's real. We're just showing her what it's all about." The angel on the right snickered deviously. The pair of electronic deities went about their task delicately but astutely, like technicians disassembling an organic floppy drive.
"A virtual construct who think she's a person filled with all the same jumblies as us getting unloaded by actual people pretending to be avatars from her environment." The right angel smirked. "Isn't technology wicked cool?"
"I'd feel better if I was just able to plug a serial cable in somewhere and call it a day," the left angel replied with indifference.
"That's why I'm the DBA and you're just the playtester, Olive." The right angel sounded a little pushy when she said this.
"And that's why I have more free time to build my Raydam models, Welch." The left angel stuck out her tongue underneath her mask.
The middle angel was crossing her malformed pincers over her antennae in aggravation.
"Sometimes I don't know why I hired these two…" she mumbled in private.
The right angel lifted her tongs away from the hem of Sophia's billowing pink skirt and wiped her forehead with her hand talons.
"Whew. There we go. Got 'er all cleaned out."
"Same on my side," the angel on the left nodded happily.
"My Admin view says she's all clear as well. We have everything we need," the third angel stoically said from the middle. "Welch, Olive, please nullify her."
Divine Sophia had floated on her last magic wand. It was time to remove this minor deity from the pantheon so the sanctity of her superiors was no longer threatened.
The angel near Sophia's left leg waved her shimmering black gowned arms, flexing her bird-like fingers as if she were typing on an invisible keyboard. This activated a powerful Stasis field that altered Sophia molecule by molecule, transforming her into a calcified sculpture.
The right angel pushed the dead dragon away with a stubborn "Hyugh!" to uncover the Divine's entire now-petrified form. The effect was instant and painless, and the sculpture was so perfect that even the small wrinkles in Sophia's monochromatic dress were frozen in time.
The right angel twirled her tongs above her head. When she stopped and lowered her arms, she was holding a staff with a pointing white glove mounted to the end. The staff and the glove turned into a comically sized iron mallet.
The left angel briefly looked away in revulsion. The central angel continued watching coldly and attentively. The right angel stretched her lips in a demented sneer and brought the mallet swinging down. The ground quaked with a horrific BOOM as the statue of the sleeping demigoddess was crushed into fine gray powder just like the other piles of dust surrounding her.
"That's enough dirty work for today. I'm logging off." The right angel proudly brushed her empty palms together and faded from existence.
"I'll meet you at the server room, Welch. I'll need your help filtering all the recovered code. Please reset these other Executioners to Patrol Mode when you have a minute, Olive." The larger insect-angel hovering in the middle disappeared.
The remaining angel looked back at the ground when it was over. One eye was still closed while she blinked with the other. She smiled in accomplishment once the dust settled.
"Talk about walking on eggshells."
Author's note: Just felt like being weird I guess. Olive (Bertolli) is an OC I originally created for "SchadRenFeude." That story is kinda weird too.
Author's note 2: 12th anniversary of my insane FFnet page or something. I guess. And surprise surprise, I'm still awful.
Author's note 3: I used her Divine Sophia design from the mobile game because it's something I haven't done before, and it increases the strong Ayashi no Ceres parallels. I think I read too much Yuu Watase as a teenager.
Author's note 4: I wonder when Welch learned how to do Pow Hammer. (extra note: The Star Ocean series is like the legally separated cousin of the Tales series due to the less-than-friendly way Tri-Ace was formed after Namco wouldn't let them make the version of Tales of Phantasia they wanted. That's why Sakuraba bounces around between both projects.)