"So," Chrom cautiously began, "the gist of what you're saying is that this world is just one of many."
"Yes. The Outrealms are different; there's Outrealms within our world, and then there are other worlds entirely." Robin's voice was patient, but tense.
Chrom winced, well aware of how long his friend had been trying to explain this to him. "Yeah, I know I took a while to get that. And something went wrong with the machine that keeps all our worlds running."
Robin nodded. "Yes. They call it Yggdrassil, the World Tree. It involves a lot of technology and magic even I don't understand."
Chrom made a funny little gesture that doesn't translate well to text. "So now they have most of the many worlds 'looping' in time, in order to try and fix what went wrong."
"Well, it's to stop it from getting any worse, rather than fix it, but yes."
"And sometimes these 'loops' meet up with each other, and different worlds can interact in different ways."
"That is indeed the case."
"And that's why I am a tiny horse and you two are lying naked in a field together."
"Yes!" Lucina replied cheerfully.
Chrom face-hoofed. "I need a drink."
0o0o0
Chrom smiled down at the flesh-coloured young mare he and Robin had found in a cave not far from Ponyville. She smiled back at him, her cobalt mane and deep brown eyes making it clear exactly who her parents were.
"My name is Chrom," he said, introducing himself to his granddaughter, "and apparently my special talent is finding amnesiacs."
It turned out that the Brands of the Exalt on his flanks were not, in fact, his cutie marks. It was bizarre, to say the least, to see a blank book appear over the top of them.
0o0o0
When they'd brought Morgan back into town, Twilight had immediately pulled them aside and politely asked if she could do some examinations on her - she had been lost in the wilderness for some time now, after all. The examinations were taking an unusually long time, and so Robin and Lucina sat outside the town library, waiting to hear from the local Anchor.
Lucina bit her lip, worry on her face. "What's going to happen to her?" she asked, a quaver to her voice.
Robin grabbed her in a reassuring hug, letting her rest her head in the nape of his neck. "Twilight said that children we have in the baseline will be fine, and that they can Loop." He frowned. "We had her in the future of the baseline…didn't we?"
"I don't know!" she snapped, then quietly started sobbing. "I just want my daughter to remember me," she whispered weakly. "I don't care about her old memories; I just want her to remember her new ones."
Robin's eyes hardened. "She will. I promise."
0o0o0
Tiamat looked over the urgent transmission from the Equine Division, a message from the Anchor of the Equis Loops. "What have we got on this 'Morgan'?"
Bahamut flicked a claw idly through the list of the many, many residents of the Fire Emblem loop. "Morgan, daughter of Robin and, uh…" he trailed off into silence.
"Robin and who?" Tiamat demanded, fire in her eyes (and ice, and poison, and lightning, and necromantic energy - it depended on which head you were looking at).
Bahamut gulped. "As cliché as it sounds…'it depends'. Morgan is always Robin's daughter, just like Lucina is always Chrom's."
"That's not helping."
He passed the sheet over to her to examine. "There's some seriously screwed up narrative causality in this universe. For the most part, mothers have the same children, no matter who their father is; but for Chrom and Lucina, and Robin and Morgan, it's reversed."
"So the future children always have the same mothers - or fathers, in their case…"
"But their other parent could be any of the opposite-gender Shepherds."
Tiamat gulped this time, eliciting a short snort from her opposite number. "What happened to the pseudo-stable baseline?" she hissed.
"Well, this is part of the pseudo-stability, it seems. For all we know, it might have been the trigger for the pseudo-stability."
The Queen of Dragons started. "Of course! That's why this happened!"
"What?"
"Morgan - this Morgan at least - was never meant to exist!"
0o0o0
"What!?" Lucina screamed in anguish at Bahamut, Robin's grip the only thing preventing her from trying to tear him to pieces. "She's my daughter! How dare you!?"
Bahamut, here to inform the Loopers of the situation, held up his claws, trying to defuse the tension. "Please. Let me try to explain. It is completely impossible for your Morgan to exist in either baseline. In the first, Robin is not only old enough to be your father - not insurmountable, but creepy - but he also becomes the Fell Dragon before you reach child-bearing age."
"But we had Morgan in the second timeline, didn't we?" Robin spoke up, gently squeezing on his wife's shoulders to try and calm her down.
Bahamut shook his head. "You could have had a child, eventually, but it would not have been your Morgan. Think about it. If your Morgan was the child of that timeline, why would she have returned to the past? The only way to do that was Naga's ritual, which you had no need of and which she never revealed in that timeline. Our initial theory, that she was from an Outrealm, isn't true; the spatial-temporal coordinates don't match up.
Your Morgan broke the rules of causality. She is responsible for the Fire Emblem Loops."
"What…?" Lucina was no longer angry, merely shocked beyond belief. Tears started welling up in her eyes, and Robin felt himself begin to cry in response.
"This part is simpler," Bahamut said. "Morgan had to come from somewhere, and that place never existed in the baseline. Fire Emblem, in the past at least, was incredibly stable - it's not used to adapting to changes, it just ignores them and keeps going. Morgan's existence couldn't be ignored without totally destabilizing the timeline, would have required at least one alternate universe, and the Loop wasn't capable of changing to fit. So it had to go into emergency mode, and that meant Loops."
Incidentally, that's why you were in the first Loop, Lucina," he explained as an aside. "Since you're the source of the instability, the system effectively did a diagnostics check by Awakening you."
Husband and wife slumped down onto the ground, clinging to each other for dear life. "W-What now?" Robin choked out. "How do we get our daughter back?"
Bahamut looked down on them as only an administrator of Yggdrassil can; with sympathy, but without a shred of false hope. "I'm sorry, Robin. Nidhogg is editing the baseline as we speak; you'll marry Cordelia, Lucina will marry Inigo, and none of this will have happened. The Loops are a mistake, and we're fixing them as best we can."
Even knowing it was futile, Robin beat his fists onto the Platinum Dragon's avatar for what felt like hours, screaming and cursing and pleading. Lucina almost hit him with the Falchion, but he simply dismissed the blade with his administrative powers, then paralysed her.
"I'm allowing this," he gestured towards Robin, "because he needs to vent, and he can't hurt me. You, on the other hand, tried to chop my head off with a sword designed to kill dragons. It probably wouldn't kill me, but it's the principle of the thing."
0o0o0
Nidhogg sighed, hinging and unhinging his jaw, much like a mammalian admin would have smacked his lips together. Getting a coherent explanation of why the Loops had started and how they could fix them had taken longer than expected, but they were ready now.
Managing the pseudo-stable relationships of the baseline was a mess, but he figured out a quick and dirty fix: simply put an impenetrable mental block in Robin's mind that prevented him from marrying any of the time travellers. While he would have preferred him to always marry Cordelia - that killed at least two birds with one stone - any of the regular Shepherds would stabilise the timeline.
("That's enough.")
Lucina's pseudo-stable relationship dynamics didn't even need altering after that; all her other suitors were fellow time travellers, and therefore their children were irrelevant. On a whim, he decided to fix that niggling bug that let her marry her cousin - how had that gotten past the testers?
As he busied himself with preventing incest in the royalty of Ylisse, he failed to notice some old programming mesh itself into Robin's mental block, opening up a little 'keyhole' to a place that never should have been.
0o0o0
"I'm sorry, Rufure! I know this is wrong…I know this is cold-blooded murder! But I have to do it, for the future! The Fell Dragon must be stopped!" Lucina shouted, Falchion raised and pointed at Robin's chest.
"…Alright. I accept your judgement, Lucina." Rufure held his head high, took a deep breath through his nose, and met her gaze. "I will lay down my life. For Ylisse. For the whole world." He closed his eyes and thought of his beloved Cordelia, and his darling daughters Severa and Morgan. "And for the ones I love."
"…Thank you, Rufure." Lucina said quietly. She stepped forward, and touched Falchion to his chest in order to line up a quick, clean blow. It began to glow with an azure light, and they both leaned forward the tiniest amount to examine it closer. Then it flashed a brilliant blue, a burning pain ran through Rufure's right hand, and everything went white.
When he woke up, it was like the sun rising. His eyes filled with love and light, and he stumbled backwards, falling over with an audible 'oof!' He…he remembered. So many memories spiralled through his mind, hundreds of lifetimes of pain and anguish, all so he could be with the woman who stood before him, sword in hand, as she covered her mouth in one hand as tears streaked down her face.
"Lucina…" he mumbled. "What did they do to you?"
He looked down at his chest, then back to the woman he loved. "What did they do to me?"
("End executable file.")
0o0o0
Nidhogg stared in disbelief as the baseline of the now read-only Fire Emblem Loops collapsed into instability once more, tongue absently sliding in and out to taste the air. "Xylem."
Sleipnir nickered. "There's only one thing to do now."
The Serpent Under The Tree glanced at him. "What genius idea have you got now, son of Loki?"
A song began to well up in the background, and the pair got swept up in the power of Sleipnir's heart-song. (Tempo roughly similar to the Zazu sections of "I Just Can't Wait to be King".)
The only way that this will work
Is if you return their child!
Nidhogg scoffed, slithering around the eight prancing legs of his musical partner.
And what of the duties I'd have to shirk
To cower, be meek and mild?
Sleipnir started prodding the serpent in the nose as he sang.
There's precisely zip that you can do
If you refuse to bend!
Slapping his hoof away, Nidhogg snapped back.
Chlorophyll, Sleipnir, I'll prove to you
That this is not my end!
Sleipnir cast his gaze to the ceiling, pointing a pair of hooves.
You'd best hope the higher ups
will overlook this slight!
Rolling his eyes, Nidhogg coiled up around the equine Administrator to look him in the face.
They're all too deep in their cups
to notice my horrible plight!
Sleipnir gestured over towards the Loop as it played out on one of the many displays within the World Tree.
Why can't you accept that these two
They will always challenge fate?
Nidhogg huffed, turning the screen off as he slid over to fiddle with the machinery on the other side of the room.
I might as well just sit and stew
If I leave my work inchoate!
Sleipnir sidled up next to his fellow admin, eyes wide and soulful.
Be truthful, now, my dear Nidhogg,
You do enjoy these little Loops?
Harshly, Nidhogg snapped back with a lengthier reply as he continued to make changes.
I'm merely another little cog
I'm not jumping through any hoops!
I refuse to let these two
Dictate their terms to me
I'll resolve this situation through
The appropriate bureaucracy!
Satisfied, Nidhogg slithered away, leaving Sleipnir, alone and despondent, gazing at the darkened screen on which the Loop had been playing out. The heart-song, beginning to peter out without Nidhogg's cooperation, became slow and mournful.
And so the lovers fated ill
Will never see the light…
Instead their world, it will
Simply fade - into eternal night…
0o0o0
"This really isn't my jurisdiction," the Rainbow Serpent hissed, glancing aside now and then, clearly uncomfortable with the situation. "It never was, isn't now, and never will be."
"I know, I know," Loki said, grumbling a little. "But my children need to be reasoned with, and they won't listen to me."
"Why don't you just smite them?" Zeus asked impatiently, thumbing a lightning bolt at his waist. "A good smiting always worked, back in the old days…"
"We're dealing with a Looper who is smarter than the local admin, and Nidhogg can't handle the blow to his ego," Loki replied. "Brute force doesn't solve anything here."
The trio of top-level administrators worked their way through Yggdrassil, towards the problematic Loop in question. Various demigods, minor deities and incarnations scrambled to clear the way, not wanting to provoke their ire.
Bahamut and Tiamat inclined their heads respectfully, stepping aside to allow their superiors to examine the Loop for themselves. Nidhogg was elsewhere; someone had let Lina Inverse into one of his universes again.
Zeus and Loki spoke in low murmurs as they worked, while the Rainbow Serpent, not restricted by mundane limitations like time and space, sat and absorbed the situation.
(Delving through the fabric of the universe, it made the alterations it needed here and there.)
After a tense few minutes, Loki turned around, immediately drawing the local administrators' attention. "It's been resolved. Monitor it for twenty-four hours, set it to read-only, then we can have you reassigned."
They left, leaving a trail of confusion and paperwork behind them.
Zeus cleared his throat. "I'm personally impressed at how well these two handled the situation; much better than Nidhogg, at any rate."
Loki nodded back. "He was always more of a programmer, as strange as it may seem. That's what made me so confused; his fixes were completely inadequate to the task."
The Rainbow Serpent's tongue flickered, but it said nothing. (Everything that needed to be said had been said.)
0o0o0
Darkness. Confusion. Then, a pair of voices.
"Chrom, we have to do something."
"What do you propose we do?"
"I…I don't know…"
Sunlight. A blue sky. A pair of strangely familiar faces.
"I see you're awake now."
"Hey there!"
"There are better places to take a nap than on the ground, you know."
Beautiful cobalt hair. The Brand of the Exalt. Faint memories of a love pure and strong.
"Here, let me help you up."
She took Chrom's hand (his name was Chrom…wasn't it?), and he pulled her up, with a smile on her face.
0o0o0
Bahamut and Tiamat's six mouths were all agape as they witnessed the new Loop play out. "No way," the Platinum Dragon began weakly, "There is no way they can do that."
Tiamat shook her quintet of heads sadly. "They can, unfortunately. Robin is incredibly pseudo-stable; even changing his gender in the baseline won't break the timeline."
"I didn't mean that. I mean, this is morally repugnant. They erase a Looper's memory, change his gender in the baseline, then walk away, pretending it's a solution."
The Queen of Dragons shrugged helplessly. "I don't see what we can do."
"I don't know either." Bahamut flopped down onto his hoard (or as most admins would call it, a beanbag). "Come on. Twenty-four hours of this chlorophyll, then we can go back to the Forgotten Realms or some other Loop that doesn't keep imploding on us."
0o0o0
"Father!" Morgan cried out as he ran to embrace Chrom, suddenly leaving a strange coldness at Robin's side. Her son was so beautiful, just like her daughter. Why did she feel this sudden chill? What was going on? Why did that cry of "Father!" touch her so deeply?
(An incomprehensibly powerful being uncoiled in front of Robin, the Rainbow Serpent's stare boring into her soul. "Remember." The creature vanished with equal suddenness, and Robin stumbled, her head splitting in sudden agony.)
She…Robin looked up to her family, down at herself, and crumpled into unconsciousness.
She opened her eyes, and both of the faces she saw bore the Brand in opposite eyes.
"Mother?" they said in unison, perfectly mirrored expressions of worry, and she smiled wanly, her heart shattering.
"Lucina…Morgan…" she murmured softly, and they leaned in closer, gently holding her. "I love you both so much." She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again, tears beginning to well.
"Lucina, I…I need you to get Falchion for me. Morgan…just stay with me, for now." Her daughter nodded lightly, and slowly shifted away to retrieve the holy blade. Her son moved in closer instead, embracing her as she wept.
A few minutes later, her tears dried, Robin grasped the divine dragon's fang in her left hand, shakily moving to press the blade into her right. The tattoo on the back of her hand flared at its touch, and she clenched her eyes shut as she tightened her right hand into a fist. She felt her children place their hands on her shoulders as the holy blade's blue light shone through her eyelids. The sharp pain of a blade in her palm was replaced by burning agony, centred on her tattoo, her Brand, and then-
("End executable file.")
0o0o0
Bahamut pumped a scaly first in exultation as Tiamat laughed in disbelief, the Loop destabilizing once more as their screens piled up with error messages. "Three top-level admins!" he crowed, "And they still can't keep him down! Robin, you're unstoppable!"
"What now, then?" his counterpart asked. "We'll have to report this; an Awake Robin is so destabilizing that there's no way the Loop can go into read-only."
"Send a message up and let them sort it out," he replied. "But append a message from me…"
0o0o0
"'You should give Robin his family back; he isn't going to give up otherwise. Bahamut.' Ugh." Nidhogg made a distinctly un-snakelike grunt as he scrunched the message up.
"Told you so," Sleipnir appended smugly. "Better go ask Dad to fix your mess again."
"Shove it up your cloaca, Sleipnir."
0o0o0
Loki facepalmed with the dread certainty of a top-level administrator. "Time travel!" he snarled beneath his concealing hand. "Why did it have to be time travel!?"
Zeus shrugged casually. "I still think smiting it is the best solution."
"You can't just smite an entire universe willy-nilly, Zeus, as convenient as it would be right now."
"Then what do we do?" he shot back.
The Rainbow Serpent flicked a forked tongue in and out. "Let it Loop."
Loki rubbed his temples in exasperation. "You know what? Fine."
0o0o0
"Temporal safeguards in place?"
"Check."
"Spatial safeguards in place?"
"They're the same thing, but check."
"Monitor synchronisation?"
"Ninety-eight percent."
"Fused Loop capacity?"
"Seventy-eight exabytes."
"Meme suppressor?"
"Nuns with axes - I mean, check."
"Very funny. Looks like we're ready to go." Bahamut, the new joint Head of the Reptilian Division, grinned at his partner.
Tiamat smiled back at her fellow Head Administrator. "You did the right thing, Barmy."
"Thanks, Tia."
Pressing the Big Red Button mandated by the higher level administrators, the pair formally Awakened the Fire Emblem Loops.
0o0o0
Author's Note:
Thanks for reading! Please, leave a review if you have anything to say.
I'm pretty sure someone with more musical talent could fix my horribly mangled meter on that song, but I don't really want to keep messing with it.
Yes, this is where we get both genders of Robin from, in case you were wondering.
If the Rainbow Serpent's interference strikes you as deus ex machina, ("Good. That's precisely the effect I was going for.")
Anyway, the opening act is finished, and the Awakening Loops are now open for submissions! PM me with your own snippets of Loops involving Robin and the other Shepherds - I prefer links to something like Google Docs, but raw text is okay too.
See you next time!
Ungulateman