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STAR OCEAN:
CURRENTS OF THE TEAR SOAKED FILAMENTS
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PROLOGUE:
VALKYRIE OF VACUUM DECAY
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Author's Notes: I dedicate this Fanfiction to the now Account Deleted Mirriem, one of the truest friends who a person could hope to have, whose friendship and whose writing are among the largest reasons I'm the person and the writer who I am today.
I highly recommend that you, the readers, listen to the same Soundtrack pieces, or MP3s, I do, as I write each scene, to get the full mood of it. The composition for the Prologue is, 'Fight To the Last,' from STAR OCEAN: THE SECOND STORY. It can be found on Zophar's Domain.
"Be gone, everyone and everything! Righteousness shall prevail!"
Sophia pushed her palms even harder against the surging iridescent barrier of the hemispherical hypersphere that Luther had erected around himself to keep Fayt and the others from preventing him from initiating the Big Rip failsafe he'd programmed into the Eternal Sphere, and this time, Welch could tell from the neon colors of scrolling information holograms in front of her, and all around her, Sophia's Connection gene had at last perforated another route between the false vacuum of the rest of Spiral Tower, and the one surrounding the now smugly self assuredly grinning Luther, secure in the knowledge he'd salvaged his dignity.
Welch let an amused smirk come to her face.
So you think, skinflint!
Even if you live through this, and Sphere's management doesn't fire you on the spot for taking these measures without consulting them first, you just gave my family the chance we've been waiting all these years for to leave you in the dust!
A wash of triumph flooded up through Welch, and she twirled like a ballerina where she was standing in the Maze of Tribulations partition she'd assisted Feria in constructing around three centuries ago, according to the Spacedate Calendar, to then leap into a backwards somersault on top of her chair and point her handy stick down in its Nibelungaling position.
"Pwned, you lamer Sphere dweebs!" she crowed as loudly as she could without risking straining her vocal cords, raising her free arm in the air with her hand in a fist and pumping it up with all the enthusiasm she could harness.
"It's time for the Vineyards to take back the spotlight!"
She harnessed her symbols and bent her knees, intending to leap high into the air, spread her six blue white angelic wings of energy, and hurl a Nibelungaling down at the holographic screen she'd opened as a bypass from the core of the Maze of Tribulations, even though she'd ensured the data flow of her hack was one way from Spiral Tower only.
Two different holograms appeared in front of Welch.
The entirety of anything she could feel, or think, became a frigid vacuum devoid of even the memory of warmth and laughter, grins; and the sheer unfettered eager elation of leaping from rock to rock through a bubbling brook, or standing on the bridge of the Calnus as it vibrated beneath her feet while accelerating wholly to warp speed; knowing with everything in a heart brimming with excited delight and marveling mirth she was aware of even the oceans of the skies weren't the limits of the wonders she could traverse while basking in the mirth and camaraderie Edge and Reimi and Faize and Lymle, Roddick and Millie and Ronyx and Ilia, Claude and Rena and Dias and Leon, Fidel and Miki and Emmerson and Anne, the two playmates she'd given Feria in the form of Gabriel Celeste and the Ethereal Queen, and all the others.
Nothing other than five words, three punctuation marks, one number; and, to its left, relative to the direction she was looking, a holographic text communication from her father, Clovas Marcis Vineyard, Owner of the Vineyard Corporation of the Lost City that had lost its standing to Sphere decades ago, hung for endless forever in suspended preservation in front of Welch, at the same time as they were now indelibly and blindingly gouged scoured cleansed incinerated cleared into the most profound depths of her self, searingshrieking before eyes now swimming with tears.
"Big Rip:
"Process: One Percent Complete."
"Congratulations, younger sister.
"Perhaps you genuinely do deserve to be called a Vineyard.
"When I first said this, and I praised your addled flights of fancy the barbarians of the Eternal Sphere are worthy of your time, it was merely advertising catering to your wish to be accepted by the rest of the family so I could spy on all the glitches in the Eternal Sphere through your Player Character and then leak direct information about just how bad they had become to Sphere's management without letting them know the source, while also further teaching you how to comport yourself in a manner worthy of a Vineyard.
"I'd hoped merely to widen the divisions in the Sphere Company's management, remove Luther as Owner, and simultaneously ensure our return to the standing we deserve while also defending the democratic tenets of the Lost City's government from totally subsidizing off of Sphere's paychecks.
"But now Luther himself may go down with the cesspool of the Eternal Sphere, and I myself may have enough clout to successfully be elected as Senator.
"You are now invited to my forthcoming rally, where I'll credit your minor contributions in delivering Sphere an embarrassment from which it may never recover.
"Off with all the forked tongues of the vipers of Sphere!
"Let us cast them unto the sediment of the same swamp within which the savages of the Eternal Sphere have now drowned!
"If I ask you to appear at any rallies for my election, do show proper decorum and propriety, rather than persisting in your empty headed fawning over the grotesque shantytowns such as Energy Nede and Aster Four you refuse to shut up about publicly naming wonders of a starry frontier, or your incessant drivel about this 'UP3.'
"Your promotion of this Underdeveloped Planet Preservation Pact is the very thing that just ensured the Vineyards reclaim our own manifest destiny.
"You're this close to convincing me to take you under my wing as my attache keeping my things in order on my business trips.
"Don't let that opportunity slip by.
"Your doting older brother.
"Clovas."
No way.
No.
Welch had learned long since what people like Fayt, Sophia, and Maria were capable of at their most determined, and she knew, with Fayt's Symbol of Alteration, he was a walking, talking, vacuum decay event who could literally rewrite the laws of all of the Eternal Sphere as he wished.
Far more so with the Symbol of Alteration, and the Symbol of Connection, added to it.
But if matters progressed as Welch believed they would, that meant she'd never be able to see a single one of them again.
Why hadn't she stolen one of them away!?
Claude, Fidel… Even Roddick and Edge, and Ronyx and Daril themselves, would have understood.
She'd long since given up on her dreams a glorious flyboy would swoop in on the bridge, or cockpit, of his shiny spacecraft and carry her off to the farthest horizons of the great unknown to blow up mercantilist snobs like Brother, and Luther, to her heart's content.
But that had been when she'd at last believed Brother was finally beginning to become proud of her.
A familiar sick, coiling and serrated despairing hatred warped her insides, so drawn this time Welch was convinced she was going to violently retch until she was too exhausted to even dry heave.
As always, she should have known better.
All Brother knew how to do was one thing, and one thing solely.
Line his pockets, and his stuffed shirt, through false advertising.
She should have known the acceptance as a true Vineyard she'd at last gained from him had been nothing more than his worst attempt to use her, and then throw her away, yet.
And now he'd cost her the sole true family, and home, she'd had, that didn't treat her as though she was supposedly nothing more than a component rolled off an assembly line in a factory that could be recorded or deleted from a ledger at whim.
Even if Fayt and Sophia and Maria pulled through this, she'd never see them, or anyone, or anywhere else, she loved, and had laughed together with, so much, once again.
If she hadn't abided by the UP3, she could have shattered the Symbol of Annihilation the second she'd discovered how Gabriel had set it up.
But she hadn't.
And now she'd lost the Pangalactic Federation, and everywhere she'd jumped through the fountaining spray at the base of a waterfall while its warm droplets had cascaded all over her skin; grinning so hard she believed the bones of her skull themselves would fissure as Erys or Leon or, far more rarely, Arumat or Dias, smiled a little, or perhaps laughed, at one of her most far fetched jokes or quips, or one of the poses she made with her handy stick as she flew through the air; howling with laughter as she bent doubled over while holding her aching sides at one of Millie's or Emmerson's latest escapades.
And for what?
So Brother could apply his worst attempt yet to use her up and then once more seek to discard her as though she was supposedly garbage to wither away, desiccated and dusty, the same way Nede had the Lantises, and their Tionysius descendants?
For the first time, Welch believed she truly understood Gabriel, and Myuria.
Desperate lightness cleared up through any self and existence, and Welch's lungs wouldn't move.
She blinked the tears out of her eyes, and called upon the Symbol of the Smooth Crystal.
The Symbol of Divinity.
If she combined that with the Symbol of Destruction, the Symbol of Annihilation, and the Symbol of Alteration, then maybe, just maybe
Faize was right.
Alma was right.
The UP3 was nothing more than the sickest joke of all.
Welch spoke a quick cantrip, and a holographic keyboard appeared in front of her, opening a direct bypass to Nox Obscurus, in the year Spacedate Ten.
When the Big Rip was complete, it would stop time itself.
In all of space and time, all faerie tales and realms within the dimensions, if Welch didn't type immeasurable warp speeds faster than the Symbol of the Missing Procedure could churn at its swiftest, Welch would no longer have any histories, heres in the nows, or tomorrows.
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Begin
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BOOK ONE: ONCE UPON A RELIA TALE
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"She wanted you to laugh together."-Misato Katsuragi
EVANGELLION: 2.22:
YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE
