!UKtea2x1Ks 2011/08/26 (Fri) 17:07 No. 145302 ▼ File 131437846151.jpg - (295.25KB, 800x917 , Fortunately not in gif format.jpg)
[x] How can one restore something written out of history?
[x] Do you know what's going on with this, and what's your involvement?
[x] Can you think of any method of winning the game without murder?
[x] Write-in (Of those that have come to you, have any told you anything important? Did they say anything that could help?)
Keine sits heavily, taking a while to gather her thoughts. After a few interminably long moments of staring at the wall opposite she begins to speak.
"Let's start with the second question, shall we? Yukari - I'm guessing you know her - hasn't been very open with me to be frank, but she's confirmed and asked for me to do enough things for me to make some educated guesses as to what's actually happening." Unconsciously she slips into that same teaching pose that seems standard for lectures, arms gesturing in front of her at an invisible screen. It's a few seconds in that you yourself realise you've dropped into 'inattentive student' mode yourself and start guiltily paying attention again.
"The game you're involved in seems to be some sort of trial, a cruel test to single out a single one of you from the rest. I don't know who set this test, but the administrator seems to have arranged it in such a way that is.." Keine sighs and closes her eyes, as if paraphrasing particularly ugly words.
"Exceedingly destructive to the people of Gensokyo, as well as you of course. I found out originally about the trials when I noticed someone -Yukari, in fact, tampering with people's histories. I found her trapping a group of humans while fighting off these - pattern spiders, or something, I'm not sure if you've seen th-"
"The paradox eaters?" You ask, receiving a wan nod in response.
"That's a good name for them. Yes, the Paradox Eaters. They had gone after a group of humans who's histories had become unravelled from the murder of one of their own by, ah, one of.. you..."
Keine looks from you to your smaller doppelganger and back.
"That version of you.. set off some kind of explosion in the middle of the group, and apparently, if you're killed by a future possibility like that, it's a paradox and they eliminate you. If you remember and were affected by a person who was eliminated as a paradox, you're also a paradox to be eliminated. It'd have been like a slow infection being purged, wiping out the entire group of humans. Yukari was trying to stop it by changing their histories, but, but she hadn't enough precision, and she was being targeted too, having to fight them off as well."
She's visibly reliving the moment, beads of sweat dripping down her face. You'd hold out your hand to comfort her if you thought it'd give her comfort, if she knew you as well as you knew - would know - her.
"She managed to drive the paradox eaters back, but the villagefolk had scattered when I made a hole in her barrier, and then the spiders, they were, and they..."
Keine - that unflappable hakutaku who used to chastise you and keep watch over all the students - looks so unlike herself, young and unsure and full of regret you can't help but reach out to her - and she moves back, letting her hands fall out of grasp.
"It's ok. I'm, I'll be fine. Anyway."
Keine clears her throat, mild embarrassment apparently overriding her sorrow.
"Yukari - after tracking me down and, ah, defeating me, she told me of the battles happening, and how she'd been trying to keep it under control by smoothing out the paradoxes they create, but she wasn't very efficient at it. She needed someone to help, and told me what to look for, to feel the disturbances. And that each time someone was killed, I needed to hide the traces of their histories, make people forget them entirely. And also, to make sure people forget your passage, too. While I can recall my memory of these events each time I see you, I, I've had to wipe out the memory of probably a few... hundred? -people I knew, just, removing memories and their influences on their family, friends, lovers..."
Teacher shakes her head sadly, pained by the memory of it. You nod. What else could you do?
"Yukari has been trying for whatever reason to give you a breathing space between battles, but for whatever reason, she hasn't, or can't do any more. But she's been desperately trying to find some way to stop this absurdity."
Not what you'd expected, not at all. But then, what of your dream? Had Yukari been captured? What of your child - children, even?
"I... don't know, to be honest. The people who were erased I couldn't bring back. You can't change the past, after all. But your children haven't been born, yet. Who knows?" The look on her face was less than hopeful, though. Keine continued.
"Yukari, as far as I know, doesn't care about the outcome itself, only to eliminate the cause of it - if you tell her about what you've heard in your dreams, about your brother and what you've seen, she'd probably see you as a bit more useful - it might help you out in the end. As for winning without murder? I.. wish there was a way, but as you know, you can't change the past. You're an only child, I think-" That means unless others choose to give up their chance of being part of the 'right' timeline, only one of you will be born."
You glance across at the other possibility. She is clutching at the hem of her skirt so tightly part of the seam is coming loose.
"I can't really give you any hints about the others, I'm afraid. There were many, some who knew me, others who didn't. I tried to help at first, but it was soon I realised the possibilities being killed off also sometimes knew me, that there wasn't any who didn't also want to live. I stopped trying to help after that. You two -" At last, a weary smile.
"are the first in a long time who've asked for how to stop the violence. -There was one other," she muses. "A doctor, who just wanted to hide from the fighting. I helped her out long ago. I'm not sure if that helps. But either way, I hope you two do well out of all this."
You do, too.
---
"At least we've got a bit of information about all this, even if we didn't really get any help from her. Though I guess it means we should try to help the gap youkai more." Keine's house is a fair ways back. After giving you something to eat and telling you to stay safe, she had let you out the back door where the two of you had crept out. The bamboo grove feels quiet, and when you look at your companion you note her body tensed up like a coiled spring and her mistlike wings had formed into black spikes.
The hackles on the
flashes of colour as she speeds up beyond light itself
back of your
a high pitched thrum on the edge of hearing modulates into a whine of horribly overclocked machinery
neck begin
suddenly, blossoming pain from a shallow graze on your right thigh that had ripped through your skirt, and an almost blinding one as another silver knife bounces off the bone in your upper left arm
to
and everything seems to happen at once as you finally manage to slow down time
rise.
She lies in front of you, writhing in slow thrashes, a dozen or more knives stabbed deep into her arms, legs and chest. Silver knives; just like the ones now littering the clearing, thin little strips of sharpened points of balanced metal embedded in her clothes and skin, blood just now starting to boil away in streams of dirty smoke, not unlike her guttering, fading wings. And clutched in her hand is part of the thing that did this to her, a clattering clockwork monstrosity of a limb formed from metal and cogs and emaciated flesh. It bleeds an oily ichor. Strewn across the rest of the clearing is the rest of it, barely humanoid in form, a nightmarish steampunk cyborg or possibly click a horrible victim of a clock factory explosion. Lidless eyesockets have glass-covered watch-faces buried in them, a half-gear embedded across a toothed, ratcheted jawbone. Freakish attachments of metal blades as support for the tattered, many-jointed limbs and broken tubes and gears and click puffs of steam, barely moving in the slow time - did it just move?
cli-click
It flickers between positions like a cheap quality stop-motion film, its 'mouth' going from open to closed and back with a clockwork clunk as if missing the frames inbetween. Abruptly, it is pointing a gunlike protrusion at you, three skeletal digits mated to the dented barrel, twitching as if pulling a trigger.
clicliclicliklch-
Nothing happens, thankfully. It suddenly jerks forward, the singular arm dragging its biomechanical carcass over to another limb torn off and flopping about on the forest floor, picking it up and driving it into the gaping socket, gears interlocking as the tick-tock, click-click-clickclickclick sound accelerates into a thrum and then a whine.
You stop time.
[ ] Help your sister.
-[ ] Carry her to the relative safety of Keine's place; if you can get the knives out of her they won't do any more damage to her and Keine can hide you.
-[ ] She needs help and a boost now as well as the knives removed - pull the knives from her right now and let her drink your blood.
[ ] You need to finish off the - creature? Enemy? before it regenerates. You can help your partner's wounds after you're both safe. Kill it without mercy when it's weak.
[ ] Your children won't be saved by dying here. Run. After one of them kills the other they'll vanish anyway.