Princess Fantasy D X-2
A/N: I have never been inspired enough to write stories about any fanart before, until I saw the work of deviantart artist Skirtzzz, specifically her Final Fantasy Disney Dressphere series. With her blessing, this will be another part of a series of final scene rewrites, using the powers of the dresspheres to possibly change the script, or failing that, make the scene worthy of a Final Fantasy series. Replicating the feel for such an incredible franchise will be a challenge, but I swear I'll do my best!
If you haven't seen any of the movies or their endings, this could be a little spoilerific, but if you have or don't mind, hang on for the ride!
Disclaimer: See Chapter 1.
The Cyber Clairvoyant
"We can't just let her go!"
Sam Flynn watched helplessly as Rinzler pulled Quorra upright and haul her away, knowing that she had just sacrificed everything she and his father had worked for to keep them safe. Looking at his father's face, he could see that he was clearly tormented, but had an air of resignation about him.
"She knew the risks, Sam," Kevin Flynn responded to his son. "She gave herself up to give you a chance. Come on." He began moving along the carrier ship's walkways, Sam following in confusion.
"Give me a chance? What?"
"You're a User yourself, remember? You can use your Disc to get yourself out, and shut Clu down from the outside. All we have to do is get you to that portal…"
"What? No!" Sam interjected, stopping in his tracks and forcing Kevin to turn around. "Even if I make it, you won't last in here, nor will Quorra. They'll turn her into one of them, find you and kill you long before I can stop him!"
"We'll be all right," Kevin answered, but Sam could tell that he didn't fully believe it either. "Come on."
Sam stubbornly stood his ground. "I'm not going home without you."
"Sam…"
"The same team. Remember?"
Kevin stared at his son for a long moment, then sighed. "I was afraid you were gonna say that."
Sam gave his father a half-smile. "Well, it's a start." He glanced to where Rinzler had taken Quorra. "So that used to be Tron, huh?"
"Yeah," responded Kevin. "The guy was really something else; I should've known Clu wouldn't let his talents go to waste."
"This is your system though," Sam said. "Whatever Clu did to him, can't you undo it?"
Kevin let out a huff of breath. "When I was still trying to fight, I did try to reformat one of those repurposed programs, but Clu's repurposing is too well adapted to me. Anything I tried just wormed the repurposing in deeper and made them even more fanatical to Clu."
Sam began to nod in acknowledgement, when suddenly he had a brainwave. "It may be prepared for you, but maybe not for me. The digital world on the outside's changed a lot, and I know my way around a computer. If you can show me how to manipulate someone's code, then if I get my hands on Rinzler's identity disc, maybe I can turn him back to normal."
Kevin stared at Sam like he'd just suggested blindfolded motocross as a sport. "You really think you can learn how to rewrite code you've never seen in your life?"
"It's based off of ENCOM's servers; how different could it be?"
"Well, true… but this isn't like hacking through the firewall of some global mega-corporation! This is some crazy stuff!"
"Crazy enough to work?"
Kevin opened his mouth, but found that he didn't have a comeback. After a moment, he sighed again. "Well, it's already a gamble; might as well go all in. But how are you going to get Tron back here?"
Sam just flashed him a grin. "I'm a User. I'll improvise."
The response had Kevin chuckling ruefully, but his next words were drowned out by Clu's voice suddenly booming through the carrier. He leaned forward to repeat them.
"Well, best get a move on. The big guy won't be speeching forever." He reached behind his son and removed his identity disc, holding it in front of him. "Now, here's how you start…"
A while later, Sam was stealing around the outside walkways of the Rectifier, only half-focused on his destination. The rest of him was concentrating on the world around him, actually feeling the code it was made up of shift and pulse as it worked.
Who knew that his father's Zen attitude was actually him focusing enough to exert the control he had on the Grid? Even now, with the limited tricks he had picked up, he could sense, almost visualize, the lines and lines of code that made up the ship, its workings, even the air itself.
And with a touch of will, he could even tweak it to his liking.
Soon, Sam found what he was looking for, the first doors of the pathway to Clu's control room. He reached out, feeling for the command code of the door controls, and with a simple push, executed it.
Sam quickly jumped up into an alcove above the doors as they slid open. As predicted, the two guards manning the doors stepped outside, looking out over the ledge for the perpetrator.
Without missing a beat, Sam dropped down behind them and spun-kicked the first one off the ledge. The second guard was quicker on the draw and stabbed out with his staff, but Sam dodged and grabbed the end, and with a quick tug, pulled it out of the guard's hands and reaped his legs out from under him, sending him tumbling off as well.
Sam looked at the weapon he now held, taking in the intricacies of its code, feeling out its capabilities and figuring out how to infuse it with his own energy. Once he did, he pushed it in, turning the orange light a bright blue-white. Sam nodded, satisfied at his improving efforts.
As soon as he stepped into the next room, the technicians present took one look at him and sealed themselves in their workstations. At the same time, two chambers on either side of the far door opened and two more guards stepped out.
"Identify yourself, program," one of them said.
In response, Sam removed his disc from his back and spun his purloined staff. Three disc edges lit up with energy.
"I'm not a program," Sam replied. "My name is Sam Flynn." As the guards made for him, he pitched his disc forward with a yell. The disc flew right in between them, causing them to press their advantage.
As Sam staff-blocked the disc slash of the guard on the left, his own disc ricocheted off the back wall and right through the neck of the guard on the right.
As his partner derezzed into a pile of voxel light, Sam's opponent was taken off guard. Though he tried to follow up, his next slash went wide, and Sam ducked to the side, retracting and re-extending the staff's length with lightning speed, right through the guard's ring weapon.
A powerful wrench later, the guard's identity disc was yanked from his hands and sent skittering across the floor, while the guard himself was thrown against a sealed terminal in the vain attempt to keep hold of it. Sam reached behind him, snatched his disc out of the air, and derezzed the guard too with one swipe.
"Huh, I think I'm getting the hang of this," he commented. He lifted his staff, which still had the guard's identity disc looped around it, and with the technicians quaking fearfully, opened the doors and carried on.
Clu's right hand, Jarvis, was suddenly pulled from his master's proclamation to the programs by the sudden screams emanating from outside the main control room. As he moved to get a better view of the doors, they suddenly slid open and a pile of derezzing voxels spilled past.
Jarvis involuntarily gulped as the son of Flynn strode in, eyes hard and weapons ready. In one hand was his identity disc, glowing ominously, but it was the weapon held in his other hand that had Jarvis on edge: a Black Guard's staff baton, with four or five pilfered identity discs ringed around it.
It was both a weapons cache and a trophy belt.
As Sam walked straight towards him and Kevin Flynn's mounted identity disc, the sycophant shrunk back out of his way, mumbling, "Long live the Users."
To his shock, Sam only spared his father's disc a brief glance and nod before latching his disc to his back, grabbing Jarvis by the neck and holding him in place. His eyes promised nothing but pain. "I came with a girl. A Program. I know Rinzler is with her. Where are they?"
Before a quavering Jarvis could respond, Sam's question was answered by the doors at the far end of a corridor directly behind Jarvis sliding open. Rinzler appeared, dragging a shackled Quorra behind him, and both froze at the scene.
Quorra's eyes widened when she saw them. "Sam! Run!"
Rinzler dumped her aside and withdrew his dual discs, standing in his ready stance. But all Sam was focused on were the four light spots on his chest, arranged in a T.
Sam dropped Jarvis and retracted his staff, leaving his stolen identity discs in easy reach. He took the first three and lit them all up, and started hurling them at Rinzler even as he began charging down the corridor.
Clu's elite enforcer scoffed at the pathetic display, instantly going into evasive actions. He flipped over the first, ducked under the second, deflected the third with his left disc, and counter-pitched his right disc out. The glowing chakram sheared clean through the fourth disc, ricocheted off and shattered the fifth, and arced on a beeline straight for Sam's head…
… who, without missing a step, lashed out with his extending staff at the last moment and speared it out of the air.
Sam adjusted his grip so that the captured ring couldn't slide off the pole, took two more steps, and clashed the staff against Rinzler's remaining weapon. "You really shouldn't throw something so important around, buddy; it might fall into someone who can actually use it against you."
A distorted growl issued from Rinzler's helmet as he drew back for a counterattack, but suddenly a pair of legs scissored around his own and twisted him off balance. Sam pressed his advantage, striking at Rinzler's head, grabbing for his remaining disc and forcing him back down the corridor.
With her hands still bound, Quorra leapt to her feet and joined the attack. Rinzler was forced to fend off her slashing roundhouse kick, giving Sam the chance to tear his other identity disc out of his faltering grip. Sam ducked out of the way as Quorra followed up with another kick that sent him stumbling back into the doorway they had entered from.
Seeing his opportunity, Sam dove for the door controls, his mind already mentally interfacing with the coding. With a push, the doors came to life and whipped shut, or at least attempted to with an off-balance orange-lined enforcer in the way.
Sam spared a brief chuckle at the sight of Rinzler pinned and struggling between the sliding doors, before turning his attention to his pilfered identity discs. One click combined them both into one again, which was quickly used to break Quorra's handcuffs.
Quorra rubbed her wrists and looked at Sam in confusion. "What are you doing here?"
"Getting you back, getting that back," Sam jerked his thumb at his dad's identity disc, "and," he waved his hand over Rinzler's disc to materialize his coding, "getting Dad's old friend back."
"What? But Clu will be here any minute!"
"Not if he keeps talking like that," answered Sam, half-keeping an ear out for Clu's speech winding down as he kept working. A few pokes and flicks of his fingers turned it into lines and lines of computer code, all flickering a bright orange.
As Sam opened up a new window which started filling with white code of its own accord, Quorra looked over his shoulder at the devilishly intricate processes. "That still might not be enough time! You really think you can understand all this and reprogram it that fast, without Clu getting stronger from it?"
Sam let out a dry chuckle, not pausing in his scripting as he noted down the hacking program he knew by heart. "Dad and I thought about it, and we wondered: What if the only reason Clu could adapt to everything Dad did was because Dad both compiled him in his image and gave him the admin authority to run things in his absence? What if he could counter and get stronger from Dad because he could think just like Dad, only a lot faster, and thus learn from and outpredict him?"
"What if, someone with just as much authority as him, but someone he can't predict, learn from or adapt to, tried to undo his repurposing? Someone who was not Kevin Flynn?"
"Someone like another User?"
Sam nodded, finishing up the last bit of code. "And if Clu can't adapt to my tactics, maybe a hacking program written 20 years new might do the trick…"
With a click of his fingers, his hacking program sprang to life, flaring white. Behind it, Clu's internal security code began to dissolve away. Sam let out a breath of relief and resumed his manipulations. "That's a good start. Now where's his source code…?"
His face lit up when he switched to a new window, and saw whole segments of blue-white code with orange code spliced in. As Sam watched, he saw orange code flicker to new lines of blue code, only to turn back to a pulsing orange. The boundary between the two code colours moved back and forth like warring linebackers, as if the blue code was trying to reassert itself only for the orange code to suppress it.
"It's Tron," gasped Quorra, "his code is trying to break free of Clu's repurposing!"
Sam stared at the unusual sight for a moment before refocusing. "Then let's help him along. If I'm right, the Grid still runs off of the object-oriented concepts of ENCOM… and that code can't do anything without its toolbox library. So if the wrong reference is accidentally deleted…"
With a gesture, a line of orange code fizzed and vanished, and almost instantly, the rest of the orange code froze, flickering and twitching. The core blue code took its chance and redoubled its advance, slowly starting to gain ground.
"Jackpot!" Sam grinned. Quorra goggled in amazement.
Just then, a creaking sound behind him caught his attention, and both of them looked back. Rinzler had managed to get a grip on the door and was slowly trying to shove them apart, but he just didn't have the leverage to get more than a tiny bit of leeway.
Sam shook his head. "Allow me," he said, gesturing to the door controls again. With a swish, the sliding doors flew apart, leaving Rinzler stumbling as his resistance suddenly vanished. But before he could get his bearings, the doors suddenly slammed shut again, squashing him in between them and knocking the breath out of him.
Sam didn't waste a moment as he re-opened the doors. While the enforcer was still reeling, he took him by the shoulders, spun him around, and docked his hacked identity disc onto his back. Just like that, the orange highlights on Rinzler's suit went dark, and he collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.
Letting out a breath, Sam stepped back. "Well, that's one problem solved. Quorra, where's Clu n-"
"Sam, he's heading into the ship! I think he's coming here!" Quorra exclaimed, looking out the window at Clu's vanishing form.
"Then we've definitely overstayed our welcome." Sam rushed over to the podium and quickly pulled his father's identity disc from the podium. As an alarm started to announce "Master key disengaged," he turned and grabbed two batons from the wall, his User power instantly telling him what they were.
"Come on, give me a hand," he said, and both of them slung an insensate Rinzler over their shoulders.
Down on the flight deck, Kevin waited next to his commandeered light jet, eyes fixed anxiously on the bridge where he knew his son was. "Come on, kiddo," he muttered under his breath.
Just then, the side window shattered in a cloud of voxels, and three shapes dropped from it. In mid-air, eight orange polygons unfolded, and two of the shapes glided towards him on two light chutes, clumsily supporting the third shape between them.
"Radical, man," Kevin sighed in relief.
The two chutes swooped down to the flight deck, but landed hard enough to send Sam, Quorra, and a still insensate Rinzler tumbling across the floor. Kevin hurried over as Sam and Quorra pulled themselves to their feet.
Kevin looked between his son and his old friend in amazement. "You did it."
Sam just replied with a grin. "Got us a ride?"
With a chuckle, Kevin took Rinzler's arm and slung it over his own shoulder. "Come on."
With Quorra bringing up the rear, the group made it to the commandeered light jet. Quorra jumped into the pilot seat while Sam and Kevin maneuvered Rinzler in between the pilot seats, his head lying on Kevin's lap.
Kevin lit up Rinzler's disc and observed the changes. "Not bad, Sam. He's stable and slowly regaining control over himself. I'll see if I can speed things up."
Sitting in the back seat, Sam reached over and handed his father his identity disc. "Try and hold on to this. You're gonna need it."
Kevin grasped his son's wrist in thanks, and then turned to Quorra, who was running last pre-flight checks. "You got this, Quorra. It's all in the wrist."
Quorra nodded, and as Kevin turned his attention to Rinzler, she took the controls and started up the jet. Orange lights flickered to blue-white as the light jet's wings unfolded and zoomed out of the Rectifier's hangar.
The Sea of Simulation flew by beneath them like a black shadow, Quorra's eyes fixed on the pillar of light that was the exit portal to the Grid. The black-clad enforcer remained insensate on Kevin's lap, as the admin himself continued to look over his programming on his identity disc.
"What do you think?" asked Sam.
"Well, I'll say this much: you did some job scrubbing Clu's repurposing," replied Kevin, "now I just got to make sure rebooting him won't cause any major problems." He fiddled with a polyhedral interface and shifted around a few motes of data. "Where did you learn that falling move?"
Sam shrugged. "ENCOM Tower. Couple of nights ago. The three-person carry move is new though."
"ENCOM Tower. Huh."
Quorra was only partly-listening to them, and only had half her remaining attention on flying. The rest of it was going over the sight of Sam applying his capabilities as a User to manipulate the Grid around him, as well as going over all her memories of Kevin using his powers as well.
She knew what made Users so special and why programs revered them within the digital world: although both Users and programs could both think and feel, programs were incredibly limited by their initial programming and purpose and found it nigh impossible to understand other ways of thinking outside of it, let alone grow or learn past their initial creation. A program was also irrevocably tied to its initial function; no matter how it was reprogrammed or repurposed, a security program would always be focused on defense and protection, and an admin program would always seek efficiency and control.
Users, on the other hand, were human. They could think and grow, dream and imagine, and their emotions could motivate them to take actions that were almost incomprehensible to the more logically minded programs. And it was their outside connection to the very creation of the Grid that enabled them to see the underlying code within it and manipulate it at will. Users also had no purpose except for what they chose to be; they could decide their own destinies.
But how did ISOs like her fit in? They were created within the digital world, so they were obviously not human, but they were not created by a User and so had no predefined purpose or function; instead they were created from the Grid itself, spontaneously evolving from its very essence. And with no predefined function, they were free to choose, free to learn, free to grow, to evolve, to become more than any User-created program ever could be.
A growth that was almost human-like.
Quorra felt something inside her code twitch as she processed those thoughts. ISOs had digital code, but it was less rigid functions and more like the fluid DNA that made up humans. She could quickly learn, adapt, and fulfil any function a program could do, just like a human could learn to accomplish any task they chose. But more than that, she was not limited by programming, not limited by initial creation; she could grow, develop, evolve past her origins as a program and become so much more.
Just like a human.
Could it be then, that ISOs were the representation of the Grid's evolution? Were they the evolution for programs to become more like their creators, the human Users? How much like Users were the ISOs?
And if they were as similar as she thought, could she, as an ISO, evolve to the same capabilities as Users within the Grid? Could she connect to the Grid on the same level as Sam and Kevin? If ISOs were built to evolve… could she somehow tap into that? Gain the power of a User to save her home?
Suddenly, a flash of orange in her rear view broke her out of her thoughts. She glanced down at the light jet's radar, and she sucked in a breath. "Light jets," she hissed.
Kevin looked down at the radar, then out at the pillar of light still a ways away, and then behind him. Out the translucent material of the light jet, he could see four approaching orange trails of light.
"Here they come," he muttered. "Sam, take the turret."
His son nodded, closed his eyes, and executed the right code. His chair rotated around and slid to the tail of the light jet, as the rear gunner's turret deployed around him.
"Man, I'm all over this," he said determinedly, gripping the controls.
The enemy jets flew in, and Sam opened fire with a yell. Light pulses snarled out at the jets, and six light ribbons sparked to life, four orange, two blue. The light jets took evasive action, looping around the bullets and the ribbons to try and outflank the larger craft.
The giant rocky peaks floating over the Sea of Simulation below them provided a dangerous backdrop for the aerial battle. All the jets had to navigate through the maze of stone, while simultaneously try to attack, defend and evade each other.
One enemy light jet was the first casualty. Banking to avoid Quorra's light ribbon and a stone crag, he flew right into the path of Sam's turret assault. The light bullets shattered the jet's structure and derezzed the pilot in an instant, leaving it a dissolving husk that crashed into a cliff and disintegrated.
"Yeah!" Sam whooped. "One down, four to go!"
Quorra glanced back and nodded, but hissed when two more light jets crossed in front of her, forming an orange X of hard light in front of her. Her front guns chattered as they opened fire, chewing through the light ribbons before smashing through them.
"Nice!" Kevin applauded.
His joy didn't last long, though, as the three Black Guard jets regrouped and closed in from above, guns blazing. Quorra was forced to dive to avoid them, keeping a close eye on the Sea of Simulation below them that was growing closer by the moment.
Sam fired at the swarming jets, but the tail-turret was not at a good angle and his targets quickly buzzed out of view. "We got to split them up!"
Quorra nodded and sped up, her maneuvers taking her closer to the cliffs than before. The enemy jets were forced to break off to avoid flying right into a rocky doom, weaving in and out to find a better angle.
One unlucky jet came swooping around a cliff for a better attack angle. Unfortunately, the larger light jet had already passed by, and the jet ended up flying right into the jet's trailing light ribbons. The walls of light sheared off the jet's wings, sending the Black Guard splashing helplessly into the Sea of Simulation.
"Have a nice swim!" Sam called after him.
Kevin wasn't as light-hearted, looking around through the body of his vehicle. The orange lights of the enemy fliers flew in and out of his vision, but the yellow glow of his program counterpart was nowhere to be seen.
"I don't like this," he muttered under his breath. "Where'd he go?"
"Urrgh…" a low groan and made him look down, to see the black form slumped on him start to stir. The lines on his uniform buzzed, flickered, then slowly began to light up with their familiar blue-white hue, especially the four dots arranged in a T on his chest.
"Tron!" Seeing the program blearily fumble around his helmet and try to remove it, Kevin gave him a hand. The foreboding black helmet was removed and cast aside, revealing the face of the security program that was Kevin's staunchest ally through all his time in the digital age, shared with his creator Alan Bradley.
Tron's eyes blinked blearily open to see Kevin looking concernedly down at him. "F-Flynn…" he croaked, feeling the memories of what he had been doing for the past several years slowly start to trickle back. "I… I'm…"
"Don't sweat it, man," replied Kevin, his eyes conspicuously damp. "Just glad you're back."
Quorra glanced over at the reunion with a fond smile.
That was a mistake.
One second the route in front of them was free, the next, a sinister yellow jet shot up in front of them like a bolt of lightning, filling Quorra and Kevin's vision with a single vertical line of yellow in their path.
Kevin's yell of alarm came too late. The light ribbon struck the large craft and burned right through, derezzing and bisecting its structure like a bandsaw through wood. It was a miracle that Kevin managed to haul Tron out of the way before he was sliced in two as well, but as it was, the light ribbon sliced a curved cut into the jet, splitting it into two derezzing parts. Quorra's world turned upside down as she, the Flynns, Tron, and the light jet's remnants plummeted the short distance into the Sea of Simulation.
Quorra only barely heard Sam's despairing swears before the pixelated waters closed over her.
ProgramID: Quorra
Type: ISO
- Diagnostic mode entered.
- Changes to source code detected. Attempting to recompile…
- Compilation successful. Executing…
- Sudo command executed. Administrative privileges assigned to ProgramID: Quorra
- Attempting to establish admin connection with Grid…
- Admin connection established. Running internal check…
- Typechange: ISO - ISO_User
- Changes accepted. Exiting Diagnostic mode…
Execute.
"Commands: Isolate; Freeze. Execute."
Sam didn't know what happened; one moment he was floundering in pixelated waters, the next, there was a flash of blue light and the Sea suddenly surged away as if commanded by a digital Moses, leaving him, his father and Tron suspended in the middle of a hemispherical depression of seawater. The faintest outline of an energy bubble kept the roiling sea at bay, with the fragments of the light jet frozen in mid-air around them like images in a still photograph.
The two Users and one Program suddenly became aware of a flanged buzzing, and they looked to see where it was coming from. Their eyes fell on a geodesic dome made out of light polygons floating in the very middle of the hemisphere… with someone inside it.
"Command: Render. Execute."
Sam heard Quorra speak from within the sphere, and when it evaporated, he could hardly believe his eyes.
Gone was the ISO's original sleek black bodysuit patterned in blue-white; it appeared to have been reduced to a shiny back sweater, inlaid with glowing light ribbons that trailed along the chest and arms. Beneath it, she wore a white sleeveless blouse with a glowing cyan tie, and a similarly glowing pleated skirt that left her long legs on full display, giving her a somewhat schoolgirlish look. Loose white patterned socks and glowing black shoes adorned her feet, two shimmering light ribbons hung from her shoulders almost to her calves, and a futuristic, stylized visor and headpiece covered her eyes. She hovered amidst the floating debris like she was walking on air, and coronas of blue-white energy glimmered from her palms.
"Q…Quorra?" Sam found himself exclaiming. "What happened?"
Kevin was staring at his apprentice as if he had witnessed a genuine miracle right before his eyes. "Digital evolution…" he murmured, "… a Grid-created program transcending its origins to become a User… to become human… Quorra, you truly are the Miracle."
Quorra turned a beatific smile on her mentor. "I learned from the best. Now please, Kevin, lend me your assistance." She gestured down at the light jet pieces floating around them.
Kevin's cloak rippled as he exerted his will on the Grid, floating down towards a piece of debris. "It would be my honor."
His identity disc flared with light as he touched his hand to the fragment of light jet, and a wave of force rippled out, enveloping each piece of jet debris that it touched and imbuing them with power. Slowly at first, then faster, the fragments started to float and converge on him, fitting perfectly into each other when they touched like a living jigsaw puzzle.
In mere moments, the light jet had reassembled itself around the foursome, with Kevin seated in the copilot's seat and his eyes closed in concentration.
"Dad, what're you doing?" Sam called from where he was back in the turret.
"He's holding this jet together," Quorra responded, reaching for the controls. "We've got to get to the portal before Clu gets back; he hits us again, we might not be so lucky next time."
"Well that next time might be now; here they come again!" Sam shouted, opening fire on the three remaining light jets that were now arcing back for another attack run. He could almost see Clu's furious expression inside the lead jet.
Quorra nodded and started up the controls, but suddenly Tron put a hand on her shoulder. "Let me do the piloting. With your new powers as a User, you're the best chance we have at taking out Clu from the air."
Quorra looked at him questioningly. "Can you fly?"
"Well enough, thanks to Clu. I still remember a few things he had me do," answered Tron, gently pulling her away and taking the controls himself. He shot a droll glance at Flynn. "In any case, it can't be any worse than Flynn piloting that Recognizer one time."
Kevin opened one eye to shoot an irritated look at Tron, but nodded.
As the light jet flew out of the collapsing depression of water and resumed its journey towards the portal, a hole in its ceiling opened up, and Quorra floated out. Hovering on the jet's roof like a wisp, the evolved ISO stared fearlessly at the approaching light jets, as they weaved around Sam's defensive assault and returned fire. Her hands pulsed with energy and she thrust them out.
"Command: Establish network firewall. Execute."
A vibrant blue light sphere expanded from her hands and enveloped their light jet like a soap bubble. The orange bullets struck the sphere and were absorbed with merely a ripple, and the three jets arced away again, their attack run a failure.
As Sam began to shoot after them, Quorra narrowed her eyes behind her visor, which began to shine brightly. "Command: Delete. Execute."
A bright blue laser beam lanced out of her visor and struck the fleeing light jet that was too focused on dodging Sam's counter-assault to dodge her. The beam burned right through the pilot's head and derezzed him in an instant, leaving his plummeting light jet to be chewed up by Sam's bullets.
Barely a moment later, Clu and his last Black Guard came swooping up from below, aiming for the jet's underbelly. Their guns blazed, striking the same spot on the barrier over and over again, and the light sphere's surface began to ripple faster, as if it could burst.
Tron tried taking evasive manoeuvres through the floating crags, but Clu's jet suddenly put on a burst of speed and was ahead of them in the blink of an eye. Once again, a yellow light ribbon bisected Tron's vision, completely obstructing the jet's path in between two cliffs.
It was only Tron's warrior reflexes that saved them from being sliced again. He pulled a swift aileron roll, and with the wings now perpendicular to the ground, the light jet just managed to squeeze past the cliff and the light ribbon. Sparks and voxels flew as the sphere and the ribbon grated against each other, both wearing down at the contact.
Above them, Clu pulled a kulbit and came diving down at them again, as the Black Guard closed in from below. Light pulses hammered at the shield, slowly wearing it down iota by iota, as the jets drew closer to them with every passing moment.
"I can't get a clear shot!" Sam shouted to Tron in frustration, firing futilely at the light jets that were just out of his aiming arc. He glanced at the steadily flickering bubble; he could tell it wouldn't last for much longer.
Floating above the jet roof like a suspended magnet, Quorra held on through the violent manoeuvres as Tron tried to shake their pursuers. Her eyes flicked between the two enemy light jets as a plan unfolded in her head.
"Tron, get ahead of them and roll!" she shouted down through the hole in the jet.
The ISO focused on keeping herself steady as the blue light jet accelerated and the world around her turned upside down. Once the orange light jet beneath them came into full view, she extended one arm out towards it.
"Command: Relocate file. Execute."
A wave of blue-tinted telekinetic force rippled out from her glowing palm and closed around the Black Guard and his jet like an invisible hand. As their light jet came out of its roll, Quorra twisted her arm with a shout of exertion, dragging the smaller craft through the air and hurling it right at Clu.
The force bubble around them disintegrated them in a shower of voxels as Clu's last few shots broke through, but Clu barely had a moment to enjoy his success before he abruptly had bigger problems to worry about.
The enemy light jets smashed together in a brilliant conflagration of orange and yellow, flinging them into a crazy arc and scattering debris in all directions. Quorra briefly caught sight of a black-suited figure and his helmet disintegrating into marigold-coloured specks before the explosion fizzled out and all was still.
"Yeah! Suck on that, Clu!" Sam was heard crowing from the turret.
Quorra glanced down to see Kevin's eyes closed in solemn regret, but they suddenly shot open in alarm.
The reason was obvious to everyone: someone had landed on the wing of the light jet.
The yellow-lined figure slowly pulled himself upright on the wing, fingers digging into the wing's metal and glaring at Quorra with eyes full of disgust and loathing. The ISO stared right into the snarling face of the renegade program, so much like a clean-shaven version of his creator and yet… not.
"Do you have any idea how insulted I am right now, anomaly?" the sheer vitriol in Clu's voice was enough to melt steel. "I spend all this time creating the perfect system, clearing out all the junk data and imposing order, and now I find one that has slipped through the cracks, posing as some mockery of a User? I don't know what the Sea did to make you even more of an abomination, but I will not allow it to contaminate my world any longer."
Quorra's eyes narrowed as she held her ground. "I merely figured out the entire purpose of my race: to become the bridge between the programs and their Users." Her hands flared brighter as she took a defensive stance. "I can do everything they can, and you can't adapt to it, which makes me the perfect one to end your tyranny for good."
Clu's face contorted murderously. "You claim that this mutation is superior to the perfection I made? I have seen the imperfection that the Users are, and if I'd known this is what your kind would've become, I'd have made sure the Purge was more thorough!"
In a sudden burst of movement, he was in front of Quorra, reaching out for her. Her glowing hands went up, but not quickly enough to prevent him from seizing her collar in a death-grip.
His free hand clenched into a fist. "I had planned to repurpose you and use you to hunt down your precious Flynn, but that seems too merciful now. Today, I not only fulfill my plan of reaching the world of the Users, I finish cleansing my system of you anomalies!"
Quorra made to exert a point-blank deletion command, but Clu's lightning-fast punch came before she could finish executing it, striking her like a wayward light runner. Her body was flung the length of the jet, and she only managed to catch herself with her powers before she tumbled clear off the roof.
Barely a moment after she adhered herself to the fuselage, she heard Sam bellow, "Tron, throw him off!" and the light jet plunged into a barrel roll that sent the world spinning crazily around them. But when the sound of screeching metal was heard, Quorra looked up in dismay to see Clu grimly holding on, fingers digging into the metal like it was clay.
Clu's suit lines blazed gold as he adjusted his grip, and Quorra realized what he was doing. Uttering the command, her visor blazed and her deletion eyebeams lanced out, but the renegade program had already hauled up a chunk of metal in front of him. Although the beam burned through the metal plate in a moment, it was more than enough time for Clu to vanish into the jet's interior.
Ignoring the pain in her abdomen, Quorra was up and running in the next second and she made a running dive into the hole after him, already hearing the sounds of a scuffle and Sam's yells of pain. She landed in a crouch and quickly stood up, but the first thing she saw was Clu inside the jet's tail-turret, nonchalantly redirecting Sam's disc from his face, embedding it into the jet wall instead.
With almost dismissive ease, Clu seized Sam and slammed him to the floor, and with his free hand, he drew a light baton and pinned the younger Flynn there by the throat, Sam's hands scrabbling futilely at the weapon.
"Clu!" Kevin bellowed in anguish. "Stop this! Remember what you came for!"
Clu turned his gaze to his creator, but froze when Sam managed to choke out, "Don't worry about me, Dad, just keep this plane flying straight. This cheap knock-off doesn't scare me!"
As if a button had been pressed, Clu's head whipped back to glare daggers at Sam. "What. Did. You. Call. Me?" he gritted out.
"Sam-!" Quorra's mouth fell open in shock at his nerve, but blinked when she saw Sam's free hand gesture an "OK" sign at her, then point at a clearly distracted Clu. Getting the message, she redirected her attention.
"Command: Overclock…"
"You heard me, brother," Sam's weak grin turned into a sneer, "you're a cheap knock-off whose been trying and failing to fill my Dad's shoes. I mean, if a newcomer like me could clear your brainwashing and turn your most loyal enforcer back to normal, what does that say for the rest of your so-called perfect system?"
Sam didn't even know it was possible for programs to pop veins in their forehead until then. "You undid my…"
"… Thrash…"
"Face it, Clu-less," Sam continued, fingers gripping the baton lodged against his throat, "you spent all these years trying to upstage Dad as a User and the creator, and all you've proved is that you can't hack it! Hell, maybe that's why you're so sore at Quorra: 'cause she managed to ascend to the level of a User, and you didn't!"
"GRAH‼" Clu roared, now so apoplectic that his suit lines were sparking. "Quiet, you son of a gli-"
"…EXECUTE!"
Before Clu had even finished saying "quiet", Quorra was suddenly behind him in a flash of blue light, and her glowing hands clutched against his temple. Clu's suit lines guttered and fizzed as his mind and memory were suddenly filled with garbled nonsense, and he choked and winced, his grip loosening involuntarily.
Sam didn't miss a beat, forcing his will into Clu's baton and activating its functions. A blue light cable shot out the end, grazing Clu's side, and locked around Sam's identity disc that was still lodged in the wall. With a flick, Sam retracted it back into his hand and took a swipe at Clu.
There was a howl of agony as a chunk of Clu's side was sliced away, yellow voxels spilling from around the clean cut.
Sam rolled away, baton in hand, as Quorra shoved the renegade further down the passageway towards the rear of the jet. Clu flailed out at them with a clenched fist, but all he managed to do was break the wall open, dislodging its fractured pieces and making them fall away into the open air.
"Damn, man, what are you trying to do; bring this plane down with you?" Sam exclaimed, scrambling to his feet. Clu slashed out around him in a pained, disoriented rage, tearing at the walls around him with one hand clutched to his wound.
"You damned imperfections!" he bellowed. "Where are you, Flynn?!"
"Sam, Quorra, get back to the cockpit and block it off!" called Kevin. "Hurry!"
As Clu thought to grab for his identity disc, Sam aimed his stolen baton and fired the grapnel, snaring his legs and yanking them out from under him. Clu hit the floor hard, giving Sam and Quorra the opportunity to retreat further away.
Clu ripped the light cable away and lunged after them, but Quorra was already erecting her last defense.
"Command: Establish application firewall. Execute."
With a clap of her hands, another wall of solid light blazed to life in front of her, cutting Clu off from them. Clu's identity disc scraped off the surface without even marring it, and despite all the strength granted to him by his increased processing resources, the rogue program could not break through the barrier.
"No!" he snarled. "You…"
"An application firewall with no external means of access, and dedicated repulsion of your exact program signature," Quorra stated calmly. "No matter how much power you put into it, a rigid program like you won't be getting through this."
Kevin rose from his seat and moved to look at his creation through the firewall, face to face, his expression inscrutable behind his beard.
Clu stared back, eyes wild and desperate. "You… imperfect…"
"Perfection," said Kevin musingly. "Something neither of us really understood when I taught you what it meant. Something both easily attainable and impossible at the same time, complete when flawed. You were chasing an incomplete definition of perfection this whole time, and it led you down this wretched path. And for that, I'm truly sorry."
"You're sorry?!" snarled Clu, delivering another futile strike to the barrier. "You promise me we'll change the world together, give me a task, condemn me when I complete that task, bar me from making your world perfect, and all you can say is sorry?"
"Yes," answered Kevin. "I'm sorry for breaking my promise to you, and making it so that you never fully understood your task to begin with."
His expression turned melancholy. "But now I have a chance to fix this mistake, before you managed to kill anyone else, especially my own son."
Clu hammered on the barrier in white-hot fury. "I AM NOT A MISTAKE!"
"No, you're mistaken," corrected Kevin. "When we see each other again, maybe we'll both have learned where we went wrong, learned from our mistakes, and we can keep pursuing that future. But now, it's time for you to take a nap."
With suspiciously bright eyes that never strayed from his creation's face, Kevin knelt down. "See you in the morning, man."
With a touch, the assembled floor beyond the light wall ceased holding together, dropping out from under the renegade program before he could get his head over his anguish. Screaming, Clu plummeted towards the black Sea of Simulation, bereft of any tools, batons or minions that could save him.
In a last spiteful attempt, with all the strength he could muster, he hurled his identity disc straight towards Kevin Flynn's face, which was watching him with nothing but infuriating regret.
The last thing he saw before he sank beneath the waves was the disc shattering against the firewall.
It was barely dawn, when a very drowsy Alan Bradley pulled up alongside Flynn's old arcade. As he entered the roomful of dusty, tarp-covered arcade machines, he heard words coming from the back.
Alan rounded the corner, and his breath caught when he saw who was there. Alongside his son Sam and a young woman he had never seen before was his old friend Kevin Flynn, 10 years older than he last saw him, chatting to the former two without a care in the world.
"…programs that end up in the Sea get put into diagnostic mode, and they have to be rebooted manually by an administrator. It was to prevent stray programs from reaching the portal and getting into the real world, a world they couldn't understand. Quorra rebooting herself and evolving is something that's never happened before, which just makes it even more special."
"So if you wanted to, Clu could be recompiled?"
"It was my fault he was the way he was, and was fixated on such an impossible goal. Doing right by him is the least I can do."
Finally, Alan got over his shock. "Kevin? Is that really you?"
All three of them looked around, and Kevin's face broke into a wide grin. "Alan! Good to see you again, man!" He strode over to clap his hands on his friend's shoulders.
Alan smiled in response, but still looked puzzled. "Where… where have you been all this time?"
"Sorry, man," Kevin shrugged, "got stuck in the Grid for the last 10 years, fighting against my own evil program dictator. Lost track of time."
Alan caught Sam's eye, and both of them suddenly remembered the same words spoke so sarcastically by Sam last night. Unable to help themselves, the two of them broke down in chuckles.
"O-old joke, Kevin," chortled Alan, when Kevin gave him a curious look. "But what are you going to do? The board is going to want to know where you've been."
"I wouldn't worry," shrugged Kevin. "Once they see what Quorra and I have found out about the world, they won't care where I've been." He gestured at the young, raven-haired woman who was closely examining a card in her hand. "Creation, evolution, transcendence, she's living proof that the Grid holds all those secrets and more, just waiting to be unlocked."
Alan stared at Kevin. "Really now."
"Really," Quorra piped up, stepping up to stand beside Kevin. "Tell you what, the first thing today, we'll show you what we're talking about."
Sam nodded in agreement, tucking the flash drive that now contained the entirety of the Grid under his shirt. "And then, we'll get ENCOM back on the right track. The track of free information to the Digital Frontier."
Kevin chuckled, clapping his son on the back as he headed for the arcade door. "You said it, kiddo." He pushed the door open and breathed in the first dawn air in 10 long years.
"And then, we're gonna change the world."
Wow, I didn't know when this one was going to end, but here's another chapter ready for everyone, jumbo-sized! Hope you enjoy it!
Who knew that job-searching, a big move back to your home country, and starting a new job there would take up so much of your time?
Skirtzzz, thank you so, so much for waiting again! I know it's been a long time, but I really hope you enjoy this chapter!
Find Quorra's psychiccer costume, created by the amazing DeviantArtist Skirtzzz here (scrap all the spaces)!:
skirtzzz . deviantart dotcom / art / Psychiccer – Quorra – 306131746
Review and Critique please; I'd really like to know someone's reading this! But please, no flaming!
Next Chapter: Hawaiian Holiday