"C.C... HOW COULD YOU..." a floored Suzaku demanded, developing lightheadedness from blood loss.
"I'm amazed you're not screaming," Lloyd remarked as he reached for a phone.
"Allow me to explain," Noel commented, flourishing a second and third hovering blade against Lloyd's and Cécile's necks.
"You can try to call Jeremiah, but you'll find your portable electronics are also dead," Noel pointed out.
"She's not bluffing; this outage appears to be the consequence of an EMP," Lloyd nonchalantly stated, attempting to turn on his phone.
"Suzaku, you attacked us because you viewed what she was about to do as creating an infinitude of Black Beasts," Noel explained.
"Black Beasts?" Suzaku asked confusedly.
"Lelouch summoned me here to perform heuristic software updates on my daughter—and everyone who lives here as an extension of her," Noel explained. "Another term for an Azure Grimoire is a Boundary. Surely you're familiar with that term, Doctor," she commented, glancing to her right at Lloyd.
"...It might have come up in the notes from the Directorate," he answered.
"An Azure Grimoire is a Boundary-fragment that has been refined to possess the properties of the whole. It's a portable Atziluth—the term for the realm of causes on the opposite side of a Thought Elevator," Noel elaborated. "The Asplund bosons called Azure that people's souls are generated from within the Boundary are actually a poison that would cause most humans to die and dissolve into seithr like it; they are highly corrosive. More fascinatingly, they're alive and able to think."
"Those particles... are alive?!" Lloyd shouted.
"The Black Beast is a monstrosity that occurs when a Boundary takes shape on Earth. Or rather, from its own perspective, it loses its shape as the realm of the dead and becomes human. In the source world I was cloned from a human gamete and genetically modified Black Beast genes," Noel added. "But C.C. here never was."
"Okay, but I don't get why you had to fucking dismember me!" Suzaku screamed at her.
"You are a vessel for the force called Order, this world's antibody against the Boundary, against seithr manifest," Noel monologued. "It restores the balance when it detects an inordinate influx of seithr. What my intervention has done is ensure every human a Boundary. Including you."
"What... you mean I'm dead already?!"
"You said it. Lelouch's summoning of me, Master Unit Amaterasu—" she gestured with her thumb at the flying cocoon, "unlocked the restrictions on the Boundary of every human soul. It did so by planting the seed of liberation in them. Though some might call it Rebellion."
"Okay, but you said your name's Noel," Cécile argued.
"I'm just gonna pretend this is all a hallucination," Lloyd mused aloud. "You're talking fantasyland, and I was under the impression that I was our government's most indispensible scientist."
"Surely it's not any more fantasy than the Thought Elevators and the resurrection of Code Bearers like her that you witnessed," Noel bit back, now gesturing at her own corpus. "You've seen violations of Boltzmann's Law and still you do not believe. But you can have Ms. Scientific Anomaly back."
The blades at the party's necks fizzed out like a hologram.
"...I was conscious for all of that," C.C. immediately looked down and gripped her head, noting. "I hear that's how people with Dissociative Identity Disorder feel, like they have no control over their actions and are watching someone else use them as an avatar."
"AAAAH!" Suzaku shouted from pain.
"Your Geass command should be gone, Suzaku; I don't get why you're suddenly hurting," C.C. questioned.
"No, no; you don't get it," Lloyd explained. "His Geass was suppressing his ability to die until now by preventing the pain from registering to his brain. The shock of losing a limb or simple pain can itself kill a person sometimes."
"AAAAHHH!" Suzaku's screaming loudened.
"Oh!—Aw, fuck!" C.C. shouted.