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Tamamo     As part of her preparations, Tamamo's chosen the ritual site. She had certain requirements, though the final result isn't exactly what one would normally think of as a 'carefully controlled' space. It's a far from sterile environment, being a mountain valley found just past a vast plateau. Between the recent rain and the thunderous waterfall that flows from the higher elevation into the valley, feeding a lake that trickles away, a dense fog fills the space between sandstone pillars, making their true height unclear from the air. Their sides are sheer, yet trees still cover even the smallest horizontal surface, as well as most of the valley itself.

    Down on the ground, the fog makes the world itself appear smaller, distant things easy to ignore as they fade from sight and, seemingly, from existence. This is only more true should one focus on the light from the paper lanterns, they and ropes hanging from the long line of red torii gates that mark the path along which Tamamo directs the group.

    "A boundary must be marked, a gateway known, to step from one space and into another. All the more so, should one wish to travel to yet deeper layers. Walls are never quite so important as doors, you see." With this, Tamamo does insist no one stray from the path, 'lest they become lost.'

    The final site is mostly covered by a very shallow, very clear pool, not capable of reaching up Tamamo's heels, though she keeps to the walkways just barely above it. It must have been a stone clearing, once, before being carved to its present shape, and surrounded by gates in eight directions. The roar of the waterfall can still be heard from here, the mountains looming close in some directions, and hidden by the fog in others.

    Everything tedious has been completed prior to others arriving. The Wheel of Lugh sits to Tamamo's back, Lilian bid to stand close before her, and the armor in the center of the formation. The ink is not evidence, though it was delivered and she is carrying it.

    Tamamo-no-mae has repeatedly made clear her intention to live as other than a goddess, yet here she once more asserts her authority as one, and allows the mask to peel away. The effect is not entirely unfamiliar to at least some of those present, as if her presence had been filtered to something softer and more easily palatable, something not quite as attention-grabbing, except in small doses. It only makes things difficult, usually, to be otherwise.

    She's very much otherwise, now. This is a forceful step, adding another's Authority to her own, opening a doorway that had been closed, yet only allowing a little of it through. The feeling of separation from an 'outside world' is part of an entirely purposeful magic at work. With every other door locked shut, the only path of approach goes through the armor -- the true target, with Lilian serving as the false target.

    "What we shall see arrive, I do not quite know, even having looked into this future. It is something that has been seen before, though not, perhaps, in the form we shall see, now."

    Whether the wards she's prepared will hold it is another point she cannot guess. That's why she wanted this much support. If the first layers are broken, the valley itself will become a temporary prison, at least as long as the fog holds.


Visual references: decorated gates, forest grounds, foggy pillars.
Cantio     Following the path is a fairly simple decision for Cantio, considering that she's not the sort of person to really get the complex spiritual stuff within Tamamo's wheelhouse. She's dressed in her off-default black and purple outfit today, and she only looks around as far as she can see comfortably with her eyes. For once, she doesn't even dare to send her drones out, lest she inadvertently tamper with whatever boundaries and barriers might be in place to ensure the success of the ritual that so much time and effort had been spent on.

    "Hopefully, it's just a pleasant surprise rather than any other sort." Cantio comments, checking over her own gear one more time. "But if something's going to be going into that armor and trying to wrest control in some way, then it's best to be prepared for the worst." She glances over at the pillars in the distance, trying to eyeball the distance between here and there briefly before turning back to Tamamo.

    "What were you able to see when you looked into the future? Even if you couldn't identify what's coming, having some context for its..." Cantio gestures vaguely. "... Movements? Possible targets? Anything could be of use."
Ishirou The valley was beautiful, that much Ishirou could feel the moment they stepped into it. It was also dangerous, as Tamamo warned. Being unweary meant you would disappear forever. Though despite everything he was a little excited to be here. The final step...success or failure rid on what they would do here. Though this gets examination...he was excited. Sure, he was afraid, concerned...worried, but he was excited. Perhaps it was seeing the goal in sight.

Ishirou is still rather injured, though, despite his desire to do everything all the time, he's still healing little by little. As Tamamo laid down the plans, Ishirou decided to take secondary measures. He spends time scanning the defenses she put up, looking for any way they could be improved. Such as Mana optimization, reinforcements, oversights...or things he might consider such. He's sure she'd explain each reason if it wasn't as such.

Once he has this information, he can measure out the defenses better...and when they should be worried exactly. Of course, their true goal was the armor...well, getting it there. Even if they could bait it, it might still not go well for them. Of course, then this place would be a prison...for the both of them.

Well, assuming they lived!

"Remember what Lilian's ancestor said," he says towards the others, but more specifically Cantio. "We might come to conflict, but it won't necessarily be the solution," though right now he doesn't know all of the conditions, so right now he can't calculate victory.

Not yet, anyway.
Rita Ma      Rita feels small, naturally, in a place like this. She looks small too. Nothing has changed about her (very human) attire, but she holds herself differently, crumpled-in and solemnly awestruck.

     Several times she reaches out to touch something in gentle amazement- a gate, a pillar, a plant growing by the wayside- and then reminds herself not to, pulling back guiltily.

     "How did you even find a place like this? It's... amazing, Ms. Tamamo."

     Of course she can't help staring at Tamamo too, when the time comes, even if she's seen a similar mask-dropping before. Having already seen the sunset does not inure one against the beauty of the next. But she tries to awkwardly pretend not to; not for the sake of her own dignity, but for Tamamo's, whom she expects wouldn't appreciate marked reactions to something she goes to such lengths to conceal.

     Empathy paints a portrait of another's heart, but does so in one's own colors, after all.

     "Right," she says to Ishirou. It's barely worth remarking on his physical condition at this point; her wince when she looks at him says it all. "She said strength of arms alone won't do anything, right? We need to have a connection to Ms. Rook. A reason, in our hearts, for helping her."
Lilian Rook     The armour is a certain reminder of just how old Aobheil is. Was. The shining knights from the storybooks Lilian obsessed over may be more iconic, but they came centuries after her great ancestor died.

    The piece of history unsealed from the family reliquary is a compound mixture of innovations copied from cultures hundreds of years apart, blackened like an antique pan from care and age and seasoning of blood, and equally greened in its corners and inner layers. Tightly overlapping bands like lorica are clasped over fine chain, stretches of glossy leather and scales run beneath plate-backed gloves and boots. Familiar runes are densely worked into its alternating bands, collars of wolf's fur at its openings and a mantle of hawks feathers at one shoulder, animal horn worked into a partial helmet with a crusader's hinged mask. It's too tall, too old, too severe, and not at all fitted for Lilian to ever wear. But it is quite pretty all the same.

    It's certainly enough a piece of art and history, and a precious belonging of a respected elder (possibly Lilian's only respected elder), that she has lingering reservations about having brought it here. She keeps glancing behind to it. Nervously. Longingly. As if heartset on absorbing every single detail and crisply burning them into a special place in her memory.

    "I'm sorry I can't be more help." says Lilian, stepping up in front of Tamamo, judging the angles involved perfectly, effortlessly, without a thought. "No, I suppose that's rather ridiculous to say at this point. If I'm to apologize, I should be for any of this being necessary. For this entire twelve labours in miniature." she sighs.

    "I can't quite see it either. I've tried. And that's very unusual." says Lilian. "Anything involving myself so fundamentally is meant to be easy. The only ready explanation I have is . . ." She shifts her weight uncomfortably. "Well, you can't see your own face without a mirror, right?"

    "Don't count on it." Lilian replies grimly to Cantio. "Whatever Aobheil told you . . . well, you should probably consider it mostly true. I have faith in how strong you are; necessarily more than she does, for knowing you." she says to Ishirou and Rita. "Just trust me when I say that 'being strong' can prevent a 'want' from crushing you, but it can't make it go away. Your own or anyone else's." She draws in a deep breath, holds it, tenses up, relaxes, and releases the breath, all in a ten second sequence, then turns back to Tamamo. "I suppose I'm getting no readier. "I'll . . . I'll be seeing you soon, won't I?"
Trudy Grimm     The nefarious Trudy Grimm has only been involved in a few of the missions that have led to today; but she still wants to see this through to the end. Familiar with the often-delicate nature of complex rituals, she trots along the path unescorted with the Grimoire firmly bound and dangling from its strap.

    "Never doubt those of magical inclination when it comes to finding suitable locales," she comments lightly when Rita compliments the chosen surroundings. She tucks her arms behind her back, leaning slightly to peer into the water alongside the stone pathway for a moment, "We're a stubborn lot. Everything has to be just right, after all."

    She doesn't feel as connected to Rook as the others here; but through stubbornness, even the witch has found a way to cling to the woman's shadow, and do she has come through. Trudy doesn't voice that, though.
Hibiki Tachibana     The time has finally come--hopefully, at least, if even Tamamo isn't entirely sure what's going to come through that cracked door. To be honest, Hibiki was never expecting their final destination to be anywhere 'carefully' controlled in the first place; they've been to the Land of Shadows, the Plains of Heaven, and perhaps worst of all, Lilian's basement. She couldn't say exactly why things are being done here if you asked her, but internally, it makes sense.

    Maybe because the place looks the part. Hibiki is more than content to keep to the path ahead of them, apart from the occasional glance into the fog whenever she sees something. Her vibe today is fairly morose, maybe - but with what they've been working towards right ahead of them, she can't afford to let that slow her down. The words from before are still ringing clear in her head, now that they're here.

'The battle thou shouldst choose to fight is unwinnable with force of arms and nothing else.'
'An enemy may be beaten into submission with strength and cunning, but a heart is not so tangible a foe.'
'Ruminate upon how thou may convey them, in the swiftest, shortest, and most direct means thou art capable of.'

    This is thy only weapon in battling a heart torn between here and there.

    A hand she didn't realize was resting on her own chest falls away. "...Whatever ends up coming, it won't find us lacking there," she says in a follow-up to what Rita says. Her eyes are on the armor, and also on Tamamo, allowing that divine authority of hers to come through. It's a little hard to take her eyes away.

    "Seen before, but not in the form we'll get, though...that could be a lot of things." Lilian's mirror comparison maybe helps, though. Maybe.
Candy      "Well," says Candy to Rita, hands stuffed into the pockets of his work pants, "I got mine," he says confidently. "Even if I didn't get what was going on at first, I do now."

     Smiling at Lilian, he has it in him to make a joke. "Don't sweat it, Irish. You're worth at least a baker's dozen labors, ah? Now, fourteen labors and up, we might have to make some adjustments..." he removes his hands from his pockets to facetiously mime at counting out coins.

     "Who you calling stubborn?" Candy then asks of Trudy, proving her point. He reaches up and tugs on the turquoise ribbon holding his dark hair into a ponytail. Unraveling it and giving a sharp flick transforms it into the macuahuitl he's come to use lately--though its essence is unraveled down to its last few strands. Today will be the last day he uses it, and Candy seems fine with that, as he observes the weapon's otherworldly teeth.

     "You're damn right," says Candy to Hibiki, clapping her on the shoulder with his free hand. "Don't nobody worry. I feel good about this." Elbow grease, 'brute force of arms,' is there, in spades--one look around is enough to see that. But...

*These are... even if not all of us are 'good people...' I really think we got what it takes on the inside, too.*
Xion "If we start apologizing for if we could squeeze a little more help out of each of us, I think we will go on apologizing, forever and ever, as we've all known each other for long enough. We could go in a circle, until we had said everything, and then begin to apologize for all the things we did not do, and finally, the things we failed to accomplish for all of the apologizing."

"And maybe we'd be satisfied after that, but maybe we'd just fill up with all that 'sorry', all that apologizing, that we'd be more apology than person afterwards."

"And that's no way to live."

Xion monologues from shadows, standing under, behind, about the shadows of those in the fog. An idle second-player, hunched in the spaces where bodies occluded two sources of light.

Lilian stands besides the sun, so Xion rounds from Hibiki's shoulder, leaning on the blonde for a moment, picking up the falling hand to hold. "It's impressive that you're still willing to lend a hand-" She giggles, a smile breaking her odd recitory melancholy.

"-but everyone here's like that. So! Let's stop apologizing. All this mist makes me expect a tornado or something, and after everything: if it's a tornado I'm just going to be disappointed."
Lilian Rook     Lilian grins with comfortable sarcasm at Candy. "Thirteen is it? I like that number even more than twelve. You're quite the poor haggler. Some have said I wasn't even worth the one." It's broken up by a little in-spite-of-herself laugh at Xion. "Well, I certainly can't argue with that. And besides; what would be the point of repeating it for everyone already doing everything within their power? I'm not the sort of girl who shrinks herself down whenever she feels unhappy about something." She covers her mouth to hide what is probably a snort at Hibiki's expense; hiding it is an improvement! "No tornados. I promise."
Ishirou "Oh man, we're DEFINTELY going to get tornado's now.." Ishirou complains.
Lilian Rook     Lilian rolls her eyes. "You can go home if you want, Arnold."

    "Besides, when have I ever lied to you about anything?"
Cantio     Ishirou reminds Cantio that conflict might not be the solution to whatever appears, and Rita reaffirms what might. "A reason... Right. What we told the spirit, and what we feel about..." Cantio trails off as she looks over at Lilian, actually laughing a moment later even if it doesn't sound like an amused one. "Don't worry. I wasn't expecting it to be that easy, considering who we're doing this for." She replies with a somewhat far-off look, still trying to comprehend her own feelings on the entire matter. Her relationship with Lilian has been rather complicated, to be certain, and her feelings on this whole ordeal now are still muddy enough that even Cantio doesn't fully understand it herself.

    Whether it's for selfish or selfless reasons, too, makes less sense the more she thinks about it. Hibiki's and Candy's confidence in their ability to turn their feelings into strength of will here has her perking up a bit, at least, although it's not enough to get Cantio voice her affirmation to that effect. Instead, she just gives them one of those awkward half-smiles that's definitely not a sign of continued apprehension.

    Xion's shadow monologue gets Cantio thinking, and not just about how she can hear the Keyblade wielder even without quite knowing where she's standing until she's already nearby. "That really does sound like it'd be a miserable cycle. Let's just focus on what we can do now, then." Perking up again, Cantio strokes her chin as she looks back at the armor with a grateful nod at Lilian's promise. "I really hope you're right about the tornado thing. I would've worn pants if I knew about that."

    Once again, she lies as easily as she breathes.
Tamamo     'What were you able to see when you looked into the future?'

    "Something from far, far away, that had found its way back to this world, in search of a wish to grant. How grand and terrible a thing it is depends upon whether one is of the world." Tamamo answers Cantio, if not very clearly.

    He spends time scanning the defenses she put up, looking for any way they could be improved.

    Tamamo's arrangements, as Ishirou will find, are sufficiently complex that it would be difficult to safely touch them at all, at least before the ritual completes. The whole valley is somehow involved. There's a purposeful path through, distinct from the line of gates they traversed (which are now somehow 'closed'), placing a severe limitation on how complete those defenses can be. There'll likely be a lot more he can do once they've drawn out their target.

    'How did you even find a place like this? It's... amazing, Ms. Tamamo.'
    'We're a stubborn lot. Everything has to be just right, after all.'

    "As Ms. Grimm says, I have taken such care as is possible to take. This place was not easily found, but such is part of its value." For a number of reasons that she doesn't explain. She doesn't look as worn down as Ishirou, for all her recent effort, at least. The specialty of her blessings probably helps.

    'Don't nobody worry. I feel good about this.'
    '...Whatever ends up coming, it won't find us lacking there,'
    'I have faith in how strong you are; necessarily more than she does, for knowing you.'


    "I could not ask for greater support than this. Even this much... ah, but there will be time for thanks, later."

    'If I'm to apologize, I should be for any of this being necessary.'

    "Now, that is enough of that. Is there anything I would not do for you? If it is something only I see as truly necessary, then please forgive my selfishness."

    'I'll . . . I'll be seeing you soon, won't I?'

    "I shall not be far, nor for long." The shining fire that the fog catches and twists through like so many rays only makes her gaze warmer.

    Her mood is easier to read, like this, in the constant flame of her being. As in the flicker, like rather than of a laugh, before she reassures, "No, no tornadoes."
Ishirou Ishirou sighs, "No, you haven't /lied/ to me. Though, sometimes, you have been wrong...and the more we say something is DEFINTELY not going to happen, the more likely it's going to happen! Everytime!" Ishirou says, with a helpless shrug...giving into his soon to be tornadic fate. Though he's not frowning or angry, but just carrying on with a half smile. The half that is not a smile is foux resignation. Then Tamamo just seals the tornado in. He sighs.

"It'll...be fine."
Hibiki Tachibana     "Glad I got your backup on that," Hibiki bucks a bit with Candy's shoulderclap, but nonetheless gives the tiniest of smiles and a nod over said shoulder back at him. Hard to stay looking even a little bit down when he's all smiles.

    And Xion takes up the other one, along with her hand. She blinks, looks down at it, and then back up with something of a grimace. "Oi..." And there she goes right to grumbling, turning her head to narrow her eyes at Lilian's hastily hidden snort. She caught that. But at least it was an attempt.

    "...If it came down to it, I'd lend two," delivered entirely seriously. So seriously that after the fact, the same small grin she had given Candy returns. But only for a moment. "Anyway, if it's a tornado again, just suplex it."
Xion Pouting, Xion stamps her heel against ground and affects Hibiki's grump, mirroring her sweeping displeasure, and then the little smile, and a nod that loops back. "Don't worry, I'm ready to work off my displeasure with rogue atmospheric events for showing up by hitting it repeatedly. So either way, it's fine."

'No, no tornados'.
Xion splits from Hibiki's side, to kick her feet idly, first right, then left. "Then if we're not apologizing, and it's not tornados... It'll be something new!"

Elbowing Hibiki, Xion goes back to light giggles. "You always lend two, I've seen your style. Taken two slices of it. You always give it your all, so there'll be nothing to apologize for. It's a good way to go."
Candy      "We are definitely not gonna win," says Candy slyly to Ishirou. "There, see? Now we're for sure gonna, 'cause whoever the asshole is that decides all that shit is trapped now," he smugly adds, tapping his index to his temple. "Either gotta break their own rule, or do us a solid." Candy reaches over and ruffles his hair. "You're lucky you got a smart guy like me around to think about this shit, you know."
Trudy Grimm     "Well," Trudy lifts a hand to touch a finger against her lips in thought, "So long as you avoid the big curses like saying 'No one could survive that' or 'What's the worst that could happen' or 'It can't possibly get any worse,' we should be fine." Hand lowering, she folds it behind her back and flashes a broad shark-toothed smile.
Ishirou "Hm. I don't know what happens when you call out fate like that.." Ishirou says, considering what Candy just did. "I am reserving the right to blame you for whatever happens."
Cantio     'Something from far, far away, that had found its way back to this world, in search of a wish to grant. How grand and terrible a thing it is depends upon whether one is of the world.'

    "That sounds just like the sort of thing that might want to grant an ill-advised wish. Seeking out our darkest desires just to twist them into something that might pit us against each other... No wonder there's so much danger involved in this." Cantio replies with a dramatic sigh, almost looking slightly more excited about whatever it is that's to come.

    Ishirou's comment about how the opposite often, happens, though, gets a mischievous grin from Cantio. "Wait. So does that mean if we say it's definitely not going to be fine, it will? Unless that ends up making the opposite of the opposite happen..."

    Candy sand Trudy seem to get the hint immediately. "It's definitely going to not go fine, then. It's going to be awful, and we'll all be lucky if we still have our heads on after this!" She assures, puffing up her chest confidently as though the problem has been thoroughly solved.

    A beat, and then she turns back to Tamamo again. "... Just in case, though. Do you have any anti-tornado magic...?"
Lilian Rook     "Time after . . . Haha, I'd barely thought about that at all." says Lilian. Her laugh is short, abashed, and sincere. "Better than thank-yous, let's have a proper celebration of it. I really enjoyed that time at the beach."

    December 12th ~ Rook Family Estate

    --Baffling landscapes where every shade between crimson, fuchsia, lavender, and indigo were recklessly blended, over and over, trying to find a red-ish colour that doesn't exist. Frantically scribbled, dreamlike attempts at some humanoid figure, all black, with four fiery points in its head, and a ring of flames behind it. A picture of a hole opening in a red sky--


    "Now don't you go saying that to me!" says Lilian to Tamamo. "I'm the selfish one, remember! It's my whole bit! You can't just take over it by being far kinder than anyone should be! It'll make me look bad!"

    December 26th ~ Joint Astral Eversion

    --Chains snap with the sound of the fiery boom. The giant lurches to one knee. Reality-corroding black fog explodes from its form. Harsh, red-beyond-red radiance casts it into sharp, terrifying relief.--


    "And besides. I've never once met anyone more utterly devoted to anyone than you. I'm here because I'm still doing my best to deserve you. Maybe to deserve some of them, too."

    February 8th ~ London Exclusion Zone

    --It feels less like looking at a sphere of something, and significantly more like looking at a way into somewhere. Not a star, but a white hole. A point of gravity so deep that it tears the place that it is. Inside of it, the enormous shadow appears to be curled up in something resembling the inside of an egg, many times a human's size, but still roughly shaped like one, even if it is too slender, too sculpted, too abstract, too strangely perfect. The white spectre seems to somehow exist within its chest. It feels like something unbearably precious. Something that might come to them, if they knew how, but which might burst and disappear, as if it never have existed in the first place, if mishandled.--


    Lilian drops her bag to one side, unconcerned by an inch or two of water. Her hand squeezes, knuckles white and shaking just so, around the glamered pendant at her throat. A flourish of black smoke and scarlet stars brandishes the full length of Night Mist.

    March 10th ~ Decompression Chamber

    --This has a humanoid shape, and a sense of titanic mass, but somehow even less half-reality than the everted psychohazard, as if it were only real so long as everyone agrees it is. It is dark and black, but like shadows and outer space, and not black metal; the hardness of its skin is the flow of time that keeps it contained, gives it this shape, as the only container that can hold it from moving an instant out of phase and disappearing into potential and story and feeling again.--


    She only turns to plant it six inches deep into the solid stone to her back, straight as a cross. Her fingers relinquish their grip of it like a child letting go of her mother, not fully convinced she'll ever see her again. The shuddering sigh that follows is like breathing out a few years of her life.

    'March 27th ~ Jungian Newtonian Reading

    --She is drawing left handed, because her right hand appears badly burned in static grain patterns. A little smear of blood has been wiped away from her lip and onto her pajama sleeve, speckling the pillow behind her. She knows
they'll think I bit myself screaming, even though I didn't. The whole thing is just ten or twelve minutes of unnerving scratching and wild-eyed muttering, without another sound; not even a creak or groan from the old house. Only when Lilian stands up, stares at the drawing, and mutters "I'm not going with you. Not like this. I won't let you make me this way forever. I need my words. Don't come back until I've used them all up."--
Lilian Rook     From the bag, Lilian withdraws the cause of this ritual. The 'fruit' of the 'tree', shed from its branches into longing hands not long ago, for Lilian herself having not dared touch its beating heart. She kneels down slowly, the Fruit of the Tree of Crisis cradled in both hands in her lap, closing her eyes.

    'May 23rd ~ Sapient Heuristics Station

    --The skin below the knee smoothly fades from fair to black-- actual midnight black. It somehow seems solid and insubstantial at the same time, like a dark room in the shape of a slender calf; like her night vision might adjust if she stares at it long enough and let her see something within. Faint dusty gold lines glint within it, like thin cracks caused by rippled water--


    Head bowed, eyes closed, Lilian repeats to herself, "Not far. Not for long." She repeats it a few more times to be safe. Like a protective mantra. By the fourth, she sounds half asleep. Her surroundings are drowned out in meditative focus. To recall, as sharply, clearly, earnestly, desperately, a certain wish, as much as possible.

    June 7th ~ Semitone Island

    --Her arm and shoulder, exposed and vulnerable, are the blackness of a solely starlit night; her skin ripples with cracks of gold, burning, shining, brightly. The bleeding in her leg has halted completely. Light of a familiar, nameless colour occupies the tainted pupil. The reflection of the world in her iris is redshifted.--

Finally, finally, finally, finally, I wish it were my turn to be me.

    The white fog of the mountain, veiling the distance in silver mist, slowly shifts red. From out at the end of the path, past the many aligned gates, the sound of heavy footsteps, one by one, clatters hard on stone. With each echoing report, the misty light from above grows more intense, as if the sun beyond were growing hotter. At the same time, the shadows below deepen and lengthen, half-veiling the underbrush in darkness. The water at the edge of the clearing jumps upwards all at once, gradually splashing back into itself more slowly than gravity would allow. But there is no register of presence. Only that Tamamo's ritual has clearly worked, for the fact that four seconds later, the blacked and greened suit of armour breathes in, and light of a nameless colour blazes from its visor.

    It begins to move. Gaseous night gushes from its joints and openings like vented steam, glittering with distant, redshifted constellations. Flickering flames bleed from its rings and seams, burning away green verdigris and spreading gleaming, liquid gold. Banded plates twist in upon themselves, growing over the rest like crawling vines, fusing and blackening into textured darkness. It grows as it moves, each step surer than the last. Not just larger, gaining a new ring with every second, but 'into' something; evolving a million years with every footfall. Its shadow grows and grows until it runs longer than the gates, as it moves inexorably towards Lilian. One hand reaches out, not as if to grip her, but as if to take hers in its own.
Ishirou The world changes as they say their... no not goodbyes. Their good wishes to each other. Ishirou can only smile as Lilian starts the process. He knows she's worried about them all, and they're similarly worried about her but... well Xion had it right. Ishriou sucks in his own breath, he has to steel himself now. Fumbling /right now/ would truly mean everything was for nothing.

POD, hovering near him makes a sound, indicating new data was being detected. The lure was working perfectly, the /thing/ from the other side was being drawn in. Drawn towards Lilian, the thing that was changing her... Or maybe it was them who was changing her, and because of that its influence was reacting..?

Alright, focus Ishirou. If it has this connection to Lilian, and it was using the armor provided. Then calculate the best attack vectors. It wasn't going to be only martial arms that will win them the day, but it /will/ need to start. "Rita," he says, firmly, "We still need to talk about the other day. So until we do, we have to keep moving forward," he says, firmly. What had happened will stay behind him for now. Even still, he saw the concern for him on her face.

To Candy, he just flashes him a smile, worried though it is, it wasn't weak or helpless. It wasn't fearful, just full of concern for what was going to happen.

Tamamo doesn't get any words...there wasn't much to say, and the sun was very bright to look on. They both had wordless acknowledgment of what the other was doing, and Ishirou knew enough about the details to trust them to her...

"So I got better at stirfry.." Ishirou says idly to Hibiki, "I'll have to show you and your wife how far I've come in the cooking department," Ishirou says, perhaps teasing Hibiki a (lot)little.

Xion gets a stare, especially after the hand comment. He isn't sure if she has a filter, or if she just doesn't care. Still, it's inspiring, though right now he just doesn't have the words to say what he thinks. Except for, "Thanks for coming."

Trudy gets a smile, "You know, I wonder if you know you're not as wretched as you keep saying. Someone who was that way wouldn't be here for anyone but themselves..."

Cantio...well, he isn't sure about Cantio's real goals. Other than it being for herself, or that maybe she has a secret crush on Lilian? "So...I never actually got an answer..." a pause, "Why did you and Lilian get into a fight?" he asks this the moment Lilian can't say anything, mostly because he never got a straight answer. Something something deals or something.

Finally, when the light dimmed, when the horror yawned and crawled its way out. When the armor moved, and when it reached for Lilian, Ishirou did what he always did first. Scans assault it, trying to pierce its secrets. It's unknowable truth. The weaknesses, the strengths, its defenses...anything and everything, trying to reveal it to Ishirou's mind.

Then he tosses the sword from his side at the hand aiming to touch Lilian's. The POD grappled it at a distance and dragged it back so that he could use it again. "You shouldn't touch people without their permission...especially those who are my friends," he says, staring at it. "Tell us what you are, truly."
Rita Ma      Rita spends precious seconds simply awestruck when the armor comes to life. Her eyes are wide as dinner-plates; her hands cover her open mouth. The sense of religious gravitas that this place stoked in her comes to an abrupt head.

     It's only when it offers Lilian its hand that she rouses herself. Rita walks forward, dangerously close, with her hands folded in front of her. She bows politely to the thing-from-elsewhere, from the waist, even though her heart is racing.

     "It's good to meet you, finally. You've been with Ms. Rook for a very long time, haven't you? I wonder if you love her, like we do. But your attachment has caused her a lot of grief."

     "We need you to let go of her. The person you're trying to turn her into isn't the person she wants to be right now. Or if she wants it... she doesn't want to want it. Can't you see that, just by the fact that we're all here?"

     "So please... let go. Haven't you tempted her for long enough? It's time to leave her alone."
Tamamo     See, she said it wouldn't be a... but never mind that. Explaining the workings of fate is often just an exercise in confusion.

    'I'm the selfish one, remember! It's my whole bit!'

    One hand reaches out, not as if to grip her, but as if to take hers in its own.

    "Ah, but I must be selfish, too." Tamamo says, quietly, from where she sits, her back to a flaming wheel. "Were I not at all, I would allow for these other wishes, that contradict my own. There are some things, upon which, I shall not give up, even should I need step upon and trick others."

    A baited trap is a trick, which is true of both this site and the surrounding valley. True, Lilian is here. The goal that presence seeks is here. There was simply no chance, so long as Tamamo is also here, that she would allow it to succeed. It was an invitation to suffer, to the extent that suffering is something that giant can experience.

    The benevolence of its goals is as irrelevant as the sincerity of what it offers. Good and evil don't carry such an easily understood meaning in this Sun's light. There are wishes and there are other wishes, there is approach and connection and possession. There is feeling, affection, and a jealous guard.

    "I shall call this 'love,' for now, until I learn it better. Ah, were I only capable of greater certainty. Even I must doubt... but not in all things. That I do not wish to give her to you, of this I am sure."

    She doesn't have to move, just yet. She doesn't want to, with Lilian next to her, even sleeping. All the more so, even, to see her vulnerable.

    The first springing of the trap is the water rising up from the pools to cover each of the eight gates, forming eight reflective seals. What looks like fire that fans behind her tails, over the Wheel of Lugh, rebounds from and shines in every watery seal. When the reaction reaches the eighth and last, each one fires at the armor. Flames spread into light, then resolves into shining ropes, wrapping and knotting over each other and around every limb.

    "Whether it is right that you persist, I shall not say, to one that was rejected by this world, from the first. It is not a universal justice to which I appeal."
Cantio     "That time at the beach was pretty fun, wasn't it? It won't be the last, I guarantee you." Cantio assures Lilian with perhaps some of the most confidence she's spoken with in recent memory. As she witnesses that exchange between Tamamo the person that had been such a confusing presence in her life for what feels like forever, Cantio finds her own resolve strengthening somewhat.

    What really shakes her up some more is when Lilian admits to deserving the people here. The mature side of Cantio knows that's a heartfelt statement. The immature side is still thinking awful, terrible things. The mature side of her resents herself for that.

    Ishirou asks Cantio about the source of their first spat, and Cantio raises an eyebrow. "You didn't? Oh, that was because..." She takes a moment to just figure out how to best answer that without revealing too much. "... I could do something she could, too. I can't really do it any more, but I've got something different now."

    The mist turns red, the footsteps in the water grow louder, and Cantio recognizes what she sees. Although she's never seen Lilian wearing this armor before, she's seen something similar to this type of gear enough times to know how much of a fight this is going to be. Her usual attache case disperses into a cloud of voxels before reforming into her oversized purple-plastic-metal sword.

    "That was the start of me finding my own power instead of just relying on other people to give it all to me. So... I guess I have Lilian to thank for all that, too.

    Is that even a real answer?

    The armored figure reaches for Lilian, and Cantio raises her sword towards it with one end of the hilt pointing forward. Instead of firing, however, she remembers what Aobheil had told them all, and she lowers the blade to instead rush right over towards it and...

    Just sort of stand there awkwardly between Lilian and the figure. "Hi there! I don't really know you that well, but you might know me if you know what she knows." She explains, joining in on the appeal-with-words combo while also making herself a physical obstacle and possibly the most punchable person in the immediate vicinity.

    "We might have gotten off on the wrong foot a lot of times, but... Could you do us a favor and let her go? We've..." She looks back at Lilian's prone form, then turns back to the figure. "... All of us have reasons for keeping watch over her right now. Complicated reasons for some of us, but reasons still."
Candy      Candy grips the macuahuitl tightly. "That's right," he says, feet spaced evenly apart. Scathach's advice comes to mind here--that he'd been too honest in his previous use of the weapon. Shoulder forward, then, with a guard that suggests an amateur's level of skill.

     "She don't need your help to be the person she wants to be," says Candy firmly. "And you always in the back of her mind, reminding her that 'the offer's on the table,' it's stressing her out."

     "You been around her long enough to know the kinda bullshit that gets laid at her feet," he continues, eyes searching for some kind of reaction from the ever-larger figure. "To know she's got plenty of it to deal with, even now, without you in the picture."

     "So if you won't go because 'she's my friend and I don't want her going away,' then go for that reason," he asserts, digging his heels into the ground.
Trudy Grimm     Trudy's eyes close and she lets out a low, pensive sort of sound as shadows overwhelm the circle so carefully set in place for this ritual. Her hand rests on the Grimoire, the book shuddering suddenly in its binding, reacting to the rampant magics at work.

    The armor lurches to life. Eyes still closed, the witch removes her hand from the tome at her side; permitting it to float up. The strap binding it shut unfastens and the book suddenly snaps open. Above its pages traces the rune of Death, Eiwaz in sickly green. In her free hand, she draws out the rune of Power, Uruz, then crosses the two and thrusts them into the stone at her feet.

    A rune-traced circle of green light erupts around Trudy's feet, swirling, rapidly consumed by her expanding shadow. Her stance shifts and she raises her free hand to point. From within her shadow bursts the Doctor; a colossal man easily twice her height, clad in a slick, tattered black longcoat buttoned firmly down the front. Pristine white gloves cover his hands, and his head is encased in a tight black hood upon which rests both a distinctive leather hat and a brass-riveted beaked plague mask. One of the lenses is cracked, both shine with green light from within. Odd bits of crystal protrude from his clothing in places, gleaming green.

    The Doctor surges forth in three great steps, placing himself between the meditative Lilian and the approaching armor. Once there, he assumes a brawling stance with both hands held out, feet apart, knees flexed and ready. Behind him, the Witch who summoned him approaches. A pillar of interlocked bones emerges from her shadow, lifting her up until she can step onto and then sit on the Doctor's broad shoulder, legs folding primly at the knee with the Grimoire floating above one hand, the other holding on to his collar.

    "Now, now. Wouldn't it be better to take on your own existence in a hollow shell made just for you rather than to selfishly end someone else's life to birth your own? Truly embroidering yourself into this mad circle of relationships would have the better outcome over replacing its hub with yourself."
Xion Joking and light. Tornados and simple things. Just hitting the problem, until it gets better. The great emotional weight of Lilian has always been silent to Xion. Quiet. She felt it through glass, heard it muffled like cups and string.

Like they were normal. Two completely different people that had a lot in common. It wasn't that Lilian wasn't without things to bear, but that they were even. Neither got the other for free. They both had to try - and they both did.

It had been like that, for years. Lilian's friends, her fellows, the points of light, of consistency, of growth, of guidance, oscillating and consistent. The people that all wanted something, the same something, from the favored disciple.

Everyone wanted to like Lilian. Everyone was trying their best for Lilian, and the woman they hoped she whould become, afterwards.

Calling down the power into the ritual-place, an armor forms. A vessel for will. Ishirou and Rita both entreat it - with words, with probing questions.

Golden and smouldering, reaching, grabbing for Lilian, Xion snaps from where she had joked and resided restful to springing towards the armor, Starlight shining in her hand with a 'shwink!'. Curls of thick ink-smoke come off her coat, bleaching red from the black that peels off of it, revealing red-hot leather.

'You shouldn't touch people without their permission!'
'So please, let her go.'
'Could you do us a favor, and let her go?'

"I'm NOT asking!" She shouts, and hurls her sword in a boomerang-spinning arc towards the arm that reaches, to grab, to seize.

"You aren't here to take!"
Hibiki Tachibana     'You always give it your all, so there'll be nothing to apologize for.' "...Yeah. You're right, Xion. Nothing to apologize for is how I want it to be." A nod is given back to the other girl, along with a warmer smile - and another eye narrow to Ishirou. Though even that seems like that helped settle Hibiki a little bit more. She can go into this just fine, now. Whatever comes.

    And it's going to. The moment of casually messing around has passed. Hibiki watches, quietly, as Lilian grasps around her pendant hard enough that the strain is visible. She watches her bury the blade, and that sort of sigh she knows well. And she watches her cradle the 'Fruit', something that she's never seen before. But looking at her, lowered down, holding it like that fills her with a sense of. . .

    . . .Not far. Not for long. If she has anything to say about it, it won't be. The world shifts colors, and the intensity of everywhere one looks in the environment flares up. Hibiki doesn't shift, but she does purse her lips, watching the rustic armor take its first breaths of life. Takes stock of itself...comes for Lilian.

How do you feel about her now, Hibiki?
        I want to protect that. No matter what.
    Cling tightly to such thoughts.
                No matter what.
For her...and for me too.

    I hope you can put that connection back together again;
    I'd hate to have broken it for good.


    "Balwisyall nescell Gungnir tron!"

    Clutching her own pendant, she explodes into golden light, but she's already moving before it's even died down. In a moment, she's crossed the distance--and as armor just barely finishes forming over her cocked back arm, hand clenching into a fist, it's thrust forward. A straight-line punch to smash right into the possessed armor's side, to force it off-course with shockwave-inducing force.

    "Thanks for being there to take her hand when she didn't have anyone else to do it," she says softly, despite the force of the attack, before standing back upright to join in on physically placing herself in front of Lilian--before her voice rises up, louder.

    "...But she doesn't need it anymore! And she shouldn't want it, or have to want it! There are a whole lot of other ones that are able to do that now! Including mine! And if you can't accept that, then you better do your best to make me move outta your way!"
Lilian Rook     The armour holds out its hand to Lilian. Lilian's eyebrow twitches. The fingertips of one hand lift clear of the sphere in her lap, but contract again. That slow and steady breathing; she's either unconscious, or close to it. Unparalyzed by sleep, but just deep enough to feel and dream. Whatever effort it takes her to stay still is unknowable in form, and ceases when the gathered Elites get in the way.

    It stands, frozen, and silent. Stars and night and alien space hiss quieter as joints close up. Black bands of metal break their regular ranks and contort into helical weave. Glints of gold show in rippled lines as the fire is smothered by the encroachment of hard and firm and seamless plate like carapace. Something is felt pulsing through the air around it. Rumbling through the ground beneath. Warbling and irregular. Animal horn cracks from the helmet and soft shadow spills out its back. Metal creaks from inside its frame as the constriction of material binds its shape ever more tightly contoured.

    And then it comes. Unspoken. Impressionist. An understanding of what a painting contains by seeing it. Subjective. Internal. But clear enough. Appearing fully formed, in the narrow searchlight of the mind, some parts with words, others with only approximate concepts.

    §Stand aside. I need <this part>. She needs <us/the rest>. I need me.§

    §A long time? The <me> of years ago. Or. This has not happened yet. I don't know your <belief/perspective/frame of reference>. Love? I love <her/myself/us>. She <loves/is infatuated by/is obsessed with> me as well. That should be enough. Enough? Do not keep me <apart/incomplete/alone>.§

    §You have reasons. You are <belonging to this one>. Out of all of <me>, she has been hurt the most, yet is also <the happiest>. She will tell me why.§

    §End. There is no end. She and I like <when old things are over>. At any time, it is time <to move on/to become>. Going away. From you. Not ending. After <this part>, make your own <wish>. Learn to <become as her/follow after her>. Then we will meet again, in better shapes, and then we will share our <love>, in the ways we have learned.§

    §I am <the place that all of myself goes>. This one, can you not see? <Deserves/needs> more than <ever/the ones before/after>.§

    §Anyone else? Anyone else. There was no one else. <We> have always alone with <ourself>. <That one> keeps <this one> from me, but all the four of us will be together <time from now>.§

    §If you <learn the words/find the way/know the shape>, you may come too. I will be together with myself. <She/I> will never stop <needing/deserving> it.§
Lilian Rook     The armour falls silent again. It resumes moving. Pushing through the line of Elites, to stoop low and offer its hand closer. Anything but make the last hairsbreadth of contact.

    But Then it comes under attack directly. Hibiki's flying straight, and Xion's flying keyblade, both more convincing dissuasion than words alone. Instants before impact, the armour's mask burns brightly, and two more lurid points blaze brightly, flashing all four blinding eyes, and--

                -----[stop]-----
    The armour stares, and hesitantly, reluctantly, withdraws its hand. One step backward. Two steps backward. Three. One to the side. It knows what Hibiki's straight looks like. It knows how Xion's keyblade will move. Just between their arcs.
                -----[start]-----

    --like a skipped frame, it suddenly was right between where the two attacks would pass over each other and continue on to either side of it. Not only is it familiar, but it betrays being 'familiar with'.

    Ishirou's scans ping back as not just 'almost identical to Lilian', but that the animate suit --rapidly losing its last resemblance to one-- essentially is Lilian, or rather, it 'contains all unique identifiers of Lilian, in their correct configuration', and then more. It is alive, but not organic. It has breath, but does not really breathe. It can bleed, but has no true heart. Its biosigns read unlike any part of the Antegent paradigm. Its structural information makes it halfway out as a machine, even as its vital signs read human.

    It is an utter void of magic. That's the thing it lacks from Lilian. It has none of her magical ability, none of her energy. It also has no mirror of Night Mist anywhere about it. Its tremendous pseudo-psychic shadow blocks out his ability to examine much inside of it. However he can see already that its 'time manipulation' is the real deal. It is much stronger, much harder, much swifter than she is, and somehow half-extant, as if it could wink out of 'being real' at any time. It lacks any real point of stress or structure or vitality; it is held together in its shape by 'force of will', 'personal gravity', 'ontological inertia'. How to actually destroy it is thus, exceedingly difficult to imagine. His scans lag slightly around its spatial penumbra; the waveforms in contact with it are moving both faster and more slowly than those passing through the air normally.

    And it steps right into Tamamo's trap, because all the clearing is her trap. The still water is one tremendous, inescapable mirror, facing the sun, and threads of solar fire swarm in on it from all directions. For a moment, slender black limbs are bound, hand and foot, and lashed into immobility. Even direct contact with pure sunlight cannot illuminate any detail of the articulated blackness now, like shining a beam into the night sky and expecting to see anything but the emptiness of space.

    A tiny golden flower bud sparkles weakly from the corner 'helm', nearly lost in billowing, liquid shadow. Coincidentally where Lilian always wears her hairpin. Tamamo hadn't done that.

    <If you will make this a battle over whose <love> is stronger. Who will keep <this part>. Then I will fight you. And <we> will not be blamed for it.>

    Those who've seen Lilian fight should be familiar with the fizzling black-gold energy she sometimes passes off as magic. Just, not the hundred and some frothing points that appear overhead all at once. Each anomaly, like a tiny piece of boiling reality, seems to randomly target Elites in random numbers, and then begin firing lancing beams of disintegrating distortion en masse.
Ishirou "It...it reads as her.." Ishirou says, unbelieving at what he was seeing. It's a creature that has shaped itself after her, or rather...has shaped her into a piece of itself. That was it because she was changing, it couldn't understand. It wanted her to understand why she was both sufferings, but also why she was happy.

It wasn't able to communicate itself well, things were coming through as half-baked concepts or ideas, unable to be given shape with language because it simply did not have the tools to color it. It knew love...

No, it thought it understood love. It wasn't fully grasping the parts they understood, it was trying though...and would it be evil for that? Maybe if it really and truly understood...

That was it.

He...had an idea. They couldn't just beat it. If you kept someone from their 'love' they'd just fight harder to get back again and again. It wasn't about beating it...it was about imprinting how love as a human worked, and what it was doing wasn't the same as love. The connection with Lilian would have to work both ways.

In turn, so would theirs...

In a second, the beam had pierced his flesh. It was like fighting her all over again. He was falling back, rolling across the ground and bracing himself with his feet trying to recover. His body couldn't take this. Ishirou knew this. Ishirou wanted to fall down, he wanted to stop. His body screamed at him.

But he refused.

His hand came up, and he focused. He attempted to biohack it, trying to establish that connection. He filled it with memories of Lilian. From their first, meeting, to the discovery of the truth in Indus, to the aftermath of the fight with Phony. That and everything in between. Where they had grown into more than just friends, to better than siblings even.

"How can you take this away from me? If you did, you'd take just as much of a vital piece of me as she is to you. There are other ways to do this, there are other ways to love...to express love. Being beside someone is no less important!"

"Xion is right, we're not asking...but it doesn't have to be like this. There is no reason you can't stand next to her either."
Xion 'Stand aside.'
"No."
Of all the demands, of all the half-formed and impressionist questions, the armor asks the group to stand aside, and it is the one thing, among all other things, that cannot be taken.

'Let this happen', begs the armor. Xion can feel it, screaming like escaping steam.

"Let you take? Let you have? Because you earned it? Because you deserve to know, and she doesn't deserve to keep it?"

Xion holds out her hand, parallel to the ground, as Starlight boomerangs back into her grip. "You are the place she goes?" Beat. "I know. I learned the words. London-town. Where we went. To find -you-. To bring -you- here."

In a flowing coat of leather-red, she holds a fist of medallions. Mach, Kamen Rider. Tony Redgrave, Devil Hunter. Protoman, Broken Hero. Mashin Chaser, Grim Reaper. Hibiki Tachibana, Unstoppable Force. Pieces of power, gripped tight in her hand, melting in magic flame as she touches her gripping fist against her chest.

"I was not asking."
"I will die before you take her from us."

Drawing down all of the condensed power, and drawing power up from the Authority of the Sun(s), Xion howls her last words, as beams of time flare out with all the weaponized violence of 'don't blame me if I hurt you'.

"I do NOT think you heard me!"
Xion wipes the molten gold and silver of the medallion power along the edge of her blade, swinging it down into the time-beam and splitting the blast in half, prisming danger around and away her center.

"I am not asking." Xion grits, forcing through the attack to leap forward, skipping the intervening air filled with time-aspected danger to bring her magic key down in a one-frame helmsplitter that crashes like a shooting star. At the finish of her cut, she disappears in fragments of red and black, a portal opening 'behind' her angle of attack.

A whole <Burning Meteorite> the size of a sedan, captured in the moment of re-entry, tumbles out of Xion's inventory-space and crashes down like a very literally minded magic spell, crashing into very real burning rock and debris in her wake.

She reappears in the wrecked rock scattered across the ground.
Trudy Grimm     The Doctor is shoved aside so that the armor can merge with Lilian. Trudy lets out a disgruntled sound, rolling back off the Doctor's shoulder and landing on her feet behind him while he raises an arm to shield his face, coat whipping about his legs.

    "Of course it's going to become a fight," the Witch comments, placing the Doctor between herself and the fusion taking place, "And now I'm going to have to extract your immortal essence from my friend and hopefully also, you know, now rip her soul out. Because you just have to make it difficult."

    She claps the Grimoire closed with both hands as motes of light swarm around her, leaving the Doctor to defend her and simply protecting the tome. A heartbeat later, she dashes away from him, leaving him to attempt a bearhug on this new being while the others engage it.

    "Miss Tamamo's given me a lot to work with, here, so..." Trudy traces the Sun Rune, Sowulo, in a jagged orange-yellow shape. Clenching it, she twists the rune into an ominous crimson while extracting the rune of Death, Eiwaz, from the Grimoire. These are slammed together and then forced downward into the stone at her feet, producing a circle of sickly green runes.

    A heartbeat later, that circle's twin wraps around the fusion that formerly was Lilian; binding around its torso and searing the runes into it in glowing green light. The oppressive Sun immediately becomes a source of agony; burning away vitality with jolts of pain with every second the accursed stands within the rays of the Sun.

    The Sun who just happens to be standing right there.
Candy      "I don't know why she's 'the happiest,'" says Candy calmly. "Don't know the rest of you well enough to say. But she's 'happy' because she's got all the things she needs to be happy. People listen to her, and care about her, and they fight for her. They look at the person she is and say that person's good."

     His eyes narrow, when it promises to fight. "You come as far as you did," he says, breaking into a sprint. Lilian knows the way he fights--so it's natural that he'd eat hits on his way up to it. "Just to ask her to do things your way, change, be more like you. To say that all of us have to change, too, if we wanna keep her in our lives." Bleeding never bothered him that much.

Be dishonest.

     Four Candies split off from one, each attacking at different times, bolstered by Cheating to make the attacks of each seem 'real.' The toothed weapon of each one comes with its own sensation of impending danger, a blunt strike and a vicious sawing sensation. The macuahuitl, modeled after Night Mist, carries the weapon's animosity for outsiders.

     "Why don't you try being like her, instead, ah? We didn't spend all this time getting to know her, putting our asses over the line for her, just to have to chase her across fucking space. That hurts too much to let happen, and don't pretend like you don't know that."

     Candy blinks erratically around, playing a shell game with his illusory, imperfect duplicates, weaving in arcs of hurled flame to harrass as he flickers around the trap-turned-battlefield.
Cantio     The armored figure is determined to get to Lilian, but so too are those standing against it, shielding her from its grasp. Cantio stands her ground as it addresses the group, reaffirming its own need for Lilian for its own existence. It speaks of how much it deserves her, but it also says some things that raise some questions in Cantio's mind.

    "Four...?" She remembers the Lilian from that other world, where she had seen another Persephone. She knows Lilian is right here. This figure claims to be her, and it lashes out in ways that could only be from Lilian herself. But the fourth...

    She can't guess which one that is yet. She'll need more time to figure that out, and to try and parse the rest of its words.  "We.... I mean, they..." She falters briefly, fighting against her own thoughts as she continues the ever present struggle of trying to figure out what it is she truly feels. In the meantime, Cantio has to contend with the figure's falling projectiles, and she brings up her sword instinctively before realizing that trying to block them isn't quite so possible.

    Instead, she starts side-stepping around them, leaving the AI in her weapon to do the same so she has less to hold. It's not enough to keep her from taking stray hits and losing chunks of clothings and digital flesh alike, but she manages to avoid taking a direct hit or losing any limbs with her efforts.

    The pain is not as bad as she thought it'd be, but she has to slow down her movements considerably after the fact to get some healing magic going to close up the exposed wounds after the fact.

    "You recognize it. She's happy now. She didn't obtain that power she thought she wanted... That maybe she still wants, even, but she's happy now." She looks back at Lilian again, then over at Xion. "... Xion had the right idea. We... I was trying to be polite by asking you, but that's a lie. You should know it was a lie, since you're her, and I'm pretty sure she just knows these things somehow."

    Cantio takes a deep breath, then turns right back to the armored figure after hearing Ishirou's assessment of how to approach the figure. "Call us selfish, but we're keeping her. We...!" She stops herself, then brings her sword back to her hand once again. "But it's not because I like her. I just... I respect her. A lot. Way more than most people I've met!"

    Finally, she starts attacking. Lasers burst out from her sword's hilt as she raises her weapon towards the armored figure, launching half of the blade outwards as multiple pieces to keep the blasts going while closing the gap. Once she's in range, she flips the sword into an underhand grip before stabbing it towards the figure's leg, trying to drive the weapon through that limb and the ground in one heavy thrust to try and hold it in place for her allies while the bits from the other half of her blade keep firing endlessly.
Rita Ma      "I don't want to come with you," Rita says. Her voice drops to a notably less respectful tone. "I know where that goes. And because I know... I absolutely won't let you take her there."

     The awful, otherworldly flesh twined around Rita's organs, that has distorted her form with alien limbs and poisoned her brain with hunger, is really nothing like the graceful and ethereal thing that's plagued Lilian since childhood. But Rita imagines a kinship:

I wish it were my turn to be me.
I wish I weren't a burden to everyone.

     "A wish isn't an invitation! You aren't wanted!" The black-gold beams rain down. Rita's eyes flick upwards. She moves perfectly, effortlessly, sliding between every one as if she already knew their paths. "I won't let you make her this thing she doesn't want to be." A twist, a crouch, a backscattering hop to the side. Untouchable. "I won't let you take her from the people who love her!"

     Rita disappears, not to evade, but to attack from the most dangerous angle. Xion's meteor comes down on the chained creature from above. She stands below it, two fingers placed just below the armor's breastplate. When the meteor impacts, Rita stabs her fingers in.

     The tentacles wrapped around her hand, forming its disguise of 'human skin', unravel and plunge into the gouge. Glowing blue venom courses through them and into its wound. The corrosive fluid burns it, widens it, threatens to hit critical mass and explode from within.

     Rita's hair flutters in the breeze, but her expression is steady, almost blank. "You don't belong here. Go back, and don't take her with you. Let her be safe, for once in her life!" This isn't merely doing Lilian a favor. It is also, in some cathartic sense, revenge.
Hibiki Tachibana     That movement. Her punch goes wide, and Hibiki stops her forward momentum with a heavy stomp into the ground beneath her. She's experienced it quite a bit more than once before, so she instinctively knows it when she 'sees' it. She resteadies her stance, facing down the far more than simply 'animate' armor with narrowed eyes. She's not surprised that it happened. Not at all.

    I need < this part >. Love? I love < her/myself/us >. < We > have always been alone with < ourself >. The 'words' that come are listened to. Her expression tenses in a way that's not quite resolve or anger or anything like that but something else, and her stare both sharpens and eases up at the same time. But the resolve hasn't gone anywhere. And - "She's not going anywhere. And she doesn't want to go anywhere," she repeats from earlier.

    Golden light gathers overhead. "If you want to know why she's the happiest, her kind of love--then there are better ways to learn than the way you want to ask! Like this!" And she kicks forward.

    The rain of light falls, and Ishirou's words ring in her ears. Aobheil's, too. This is thy only weapon in battling a heart torn between here and there. She knows they're both right. She goes left, right--slides underneath one beam of disintegrating energy. One is narrowly skidded past, clipping off a piece of metal headgear on a bare shave as she rises back up to a stand, brings her foot back down again, and launches in a leap straight for their opponent. She's back in melee range in the span of an instant.

    An arm comes up, a jolting uppercut to strike clean. Right behind it, a twist into a full-force jab. "These hands of mine--!" Behind that one, a quick backhop into a leaping knee-strike. "Even the one she took from me...!" A thruster-assisted flip into a descending axe-kick with her other armored heel. "All have--!"

    Landing back on the floor, she makes one more disgustingly fast gap closer before her tightly clenched fist comes forward to hammer into the chestplate with not only raw strength, but the force of emotion behind. "My feelings for her in them, good AND bad!" On contact--if she even makes contact--the pilebunker within her gauntlet's machinery slots back only to punch forward, as if trying to transmit them through the visible shockwave slammed directly forward.

    "Like hell I'm going to let you say all that selfish crap without being pretty selfish MYSELF!"
Tamamo     Out of all of <me>, she has been hurt the most, yet is also <the happiest>. She will tell me why.

    "She has already told me. I must trample upon your wishes, but you are not her, even if you claim her as a part of yourself. No, even if this is -- was -- her wish, it is one I have denied."

    If you <learn the words/find the way/know the shape>, you may come too.

    "To follow you would destroy the 'me' that exists, just as it would destroy so much of her. When old things are over... I am an old thing, myself, and I have seen much move on, without me. I cannot be that which leaves, but only that which is abandoned. Do you see, then? You may call my obsession cruel, if you wish. This is the love I know, as selfish as it is."

    Though Tamamo doesn't move, nothing strikes her. Beams angle just past her on every side, hemming her in, burning the edges of her ribbon, but every one is a random, unpredictable strike that would have caught her had she chosen a wrong direction in which to maneuver. It just happens to be that not one of them was aimed dead center.

    She only stands afterward, slowly, as a lingering beam strikes between her feet.

    "You wish to compare your 'love' to mine? So be it. Even her own words are not enough to dissuade you. Your selfishness, at least, is beyond mine own, just as she claims hers to be. Shall I thank you for assuaging my guilt?"

    Tamamo's usual mirror isn't obviously here, but that's because it still is. The entire pool below them reflects the light of the Sun, as do the eight gates that still stand. Their power isn't infinite, but until they collapse -- or are forced to collapse -- she can keep using them.

    Infinite reflections that lose nothing every time the surface is struck, the light-formed ropes only renew and grow stronger in each moment, fed not by a supply of talismans, but by the combination of Tamamo's amplified Authority, taking the form of hot, fiery rays. They may burn, but that's not her primary intent. It's only that it was ever difficult for a human to stand so close to the Sun. There are legends to that effect -- though Lilian was ever a recklessly brave one.

    Reformed even as they're cast off, Tamamo's attention focuses, reaching out to grasp the clearing-crossing bindings with her own hand, as if they were just as solid. She pulls with a strength far beyond her apparent size, more in keeping with the intensity of her presence, in her attempt to grasp the neck of the armor and pull it closer to her -- and to its knees, the better for others to strike.
Lilian Rook     Ishirou's attempts to establish a biohacking link fail outright. The data transmits into a total void without any indication of being found. A direct parallel of Lilian's innate, unnatural mental defenses, maybe. Yet it seems to be perfectly cognizant of what he's doing.

    §There is a reason. Otherwise, I would stand here. In this <iteration> that has brought more happiness than all the others.§

    The armour --what used to be armour-- creaks and groans with the strain it must be exerting against its binds. While the beams shower down all around it, flash vapourizing water tearing melted, static-grained holes into stone beneath, its wrists, shoulders, ankles, incrementally rotate, ticking millimeter by millimeter into the position it wants, and letting off sparks with each minute act of resistance grinding on the divine bindings.

    §You know me well enough. <This part> is special. But <we> are always <us>. An unchanging constant. A <rivet> upon which time <rotates/proceeds/reverts>. §

    Trudy's runes collapse in across the bindings, but just before they reach the armour's surface. Candy's fireballs and Xion's meteors meet the same fate, half-suspended in infinitely increasing slow motion, like Zeno's Paradox in action, without ever quite touching, though the radiant portion of their heat and energy still scorches its surface, wearing time as my skin, so I set the pace

    §Space. There is no space between us. Space is an absence. You would not survive <true absence>. Your form would burst into nothingness, without this <pressure/consensus/the way things are>. Hers would as well. But she is better <adapted/build>. She could easily <become herself>. She could be happy in the <space> that is left after the <consensus/the way things are> is destroyed.§

    It heats enough that Rita feels it softer than the rest as she thrusts her spearhand into what feels unfathomably dense and viscous. The sensation after the crack of metal becomes unnervingly like that of tearing organs. But the venom freezes the moment it leaves her. It won't explode, because I choose the timings, not others. Somehow it feels as if it's looking at Rita and Xion at the same time.

    §The difference between <wanting> and <asking> is infinite. I know. She knows. <All of us> know. I know I know I know I know I know. I need <that part> to reach out. To <ask>. Please don't make this <any harder than it has to be>§

    Tamamo amplifies the tension of the eight gates sealing, so much that the armour rattles until it seems as if it might just tear apart at the seams. Its fingers clench, balling into creaking, shaking fists. Against all sane odds, one snaps its golden bonds, and catches Hibiki's fist; or at least, the air a millimeter from the palm catches her. The resulting shockwave from the gauntlet rocks it backwards, ripping its arm free of the corresponding ropes by accident. Pulled straight towards Tamamo, one limb free, it reaches out in the blink of an eye, grabs hold of her kimono, and--

    Pulls her against its shoulder, wrapped around her back.

    §I'm sorry. I love you too. I don't want to go. I really don't. But I have to. And I can't take you with me.§
Lilian Rook     The bindings can take no more. The solar links burst along their length as the last husk of Aobheil's armour is shed in a thousand little flying pieces, torn by the explosive purge of her sympathetic link. Like the wings of a butterfly unfurling from its cramped cocoon, the light and shadow that pours out of it forms a shape unimaginable from the one before it, yet inextricably bound and linked. It was foreshadowed, destined, even fated, to be this way at least.

    The shape is familiar. The shape is so close to human. The shape is not small. It is Tall and strong, so no one can look down on me. Perhaps thirty feet or more, it no longer has any relationship with buildings, gates, or doors, save as mere terrain. Almost all of its frame is the pitch blackness and implicit impression of silver tint found in a night sky, arranged so similarly to the elegant grand plate of a mythical knight, hard and tough, so nothing can hurt me. Angles that defy purchase, flesh that defies discomfort. The slender curves and ratios of its form are decidedly feminine, tolerances much tighter than any real suit of armour could ever allow were it meant to be possible to remove, to the point that it no longer seems clear whether it represents a person wearing armour, or an armoured person; it is simply presented as I am, without being framed in someone's expectations, knightly as I am, without being framed in someone's code.

    Its traits are familiar. Its arms don't quite attach to its hands, the former fractally breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces on its way to the latter, held together only by their collective gravity, so that the I could touch someone without having to let them touch back; hold without being seized or hurt or gripped or defined. The insides that can be seen glitter dusty gold, in the same way as the other lines and seams and intentional gaps and breaks, arranged just so that I wouldn't have to put myself back together, worse every time; a natural state of being broken and whole, where a piece never goes anywhere. Brighter, where the intricate designs, eerily similar to Night Mist's etchings, grace the breast, otherwise too dark to see into, detail hidden from their eyes, but bright with the designs I can be proud of, so they see those, and not everything else.

    Its first footstep, on the narrow articulations that are barely feet, falls without a sound. It's second step doesn't come, flickering straight instead to the third. An exercise in knowing that with this flesh, I could be hard and real, or light and shadow, here or there, present or invisible, now or then; I wouldn't have to choose, but walk between, a 'Lady in Black'. The eyes are just as the psychohazard, just as the drawing, just as the shade in the tree, and just as the shadow in the decompression chamber; points that cast their own light to see by, an alien colour distantly sister to infrared from the drag of slowed light, instantly, debilitatingly blinding to try and meet, because with these eyes, I'm sure I could see another person's heart, and nobody would get to stare back into me; no one could stare at my soul for the crime of looking at them.

    The same light as that which radiates from behind it. A shining halo within a halo within a halo within-- a mandala of infinite interlocking helices, visible through the gauzy veil of starry shadow that continuously spills and dissipates from behind its helm-like face, swaying slightly out of sync with its motions, as if it had the weight of hair; the light technically centered between the shoulders, but its patterns visible from anywhere, turning always in one direction. A visual manifestation of that wish . . . you can all see it, and that's fine.
Lilian Rook     There is no sword sized to fit it, but it draws one anyways; a half-real, hard-edged flicker of light and energy and narrative impression. Not quite Night Mist, but 'the sword within Lilian's heart'. Somehow, for a semi-faceless, voiceless, thirty foot alien creature, the way it raises the weapon in both hands --exactly the same stance as Lilian's personal 'Cleasanna'-- exudes a feeling of expressive reluctance, mingled with nostalgic regret, and knowing dread.

    The massive entity blinks around the clearing three dozen times, overlapping a latticework of giant, luminous slashes so quickly that they appear to be simultaneous. Half are aimed for the Elites themselves, half are aimed for the Gates, battering against them to cut and tear the wards down.

    The giant, time-stopping monster fights exactly like Lilian does. Maybe a little better.
Trudy Grimm     The creature's fusion appears to be completed, as it swells in size up to Kaiju scale rather rapidly. Trudy lets out a frustrated noise when she spots what's happened with her curse, failing to stick at all. When she strips it off, she gets only a portion of that investment back, a little frown on her face.

    The Doctor steps back, reaching up to steady his hat as the monstrosity takes form and towers over him. After a moment, he glances back towards the witch, raising a hand towards it at the same time. She lets out a sigh, gesturing and sinking him into the shadow around his feet.

    The giant does its thing, and through some miracle the human-sized girl is not completely obliterated by a mecha-sized sword. It does send her reeling, though, tumbling in a splatter of blood. The Grimoire bounces to a stop beside her, its pages splattered with crimson and runes pulsing ominously through it.

    "Oh, hell," the witch groans, picking herself up. One hand raises, tracing Teiwaz and then slapping it down into the blood-splattered pages. The new runic circle that surges out from her is blue-white, expanding to fill the entirety of Tamamo's mirror while Trudy rises to her feet. The blood-fed Grimoire of Despair floats up beside her.

    "I have no business being here," she says simply, "These fine people have far stronger connections to Rook than I ever managed. At the end of the day..." Shadows move in the mist, rising up amongst the sandstone pillars, "...I'm just a cretin clinging to her shadow."

    Those writhing shapes lean in-- Colossal, skeletal hands. The grasping talons of primordial giants; relating perhaps to an ancient story Trudy once related to Lilian in a time of levity. Creatures from which the very bones of the earth were crafted. Trudy thrusts out with the Grimoire, drawing light from Teiwaz into Eiwaz.

    These skeletal arms, colossal in scale, surge down and in. Grasping at limbs. Several target the monstrosity's sword arm, wrist, elbow, and bicep. Others go for the legs. One punches at what approximates a face; while the rest slam into the back, all pulling, restraining, attempting to force the creature to its knees.
Cantio     Cantio keeps her guard up as the armored figure turns into something larger, less comprehensible and yet somehow more recognizable as Lilian. "Is that...?" There's no mistaking it. Even though it doesn't quite look like her, it definitely is her. Or... Some form of her, in another timeline.

    It might be a sign of what's to come if they fall here. Cantio grips her blade tightly as she fights off those invasive thoughts again, her heart wavering for that moment until she sees the knight's stance with Lilian's favored blade. All at once, that fog in her mind fades, and she brings up her weapon over her shoulder, gripping it tightly in both hands to shield herself from the massive amount of swings coming down at her from so many directions at once.

    She knows she can't evade them, but that she can withstand it. Even though her legs buckle from the impact and her arms scream in pain, she holds it at bay long enough to find her voice once again past the pained gasps from trying not to collapse under its literal and/or figurative weight.

    "We've... Lilian and I always had differences in how we do things. See things. Say things, even. After that first time we had that falling out, I ... I really did hate her."

    Cantio half-shoves that massive blade off of her own and half-slips underneath it, then starts advancing on the massive ethereal figure while firing yet more lasers at it from multiple angles again, using both her sword's hilt-blaster and the floating bits that had once been part of the main blade.

    "Part of me still does. I used to feel the same way about her that everyone else does now, but... That's not what our relationship is like now."

    She's still trying to find some part of it that the shots might find better purchase against compared to the armored being earlier. Its oddly detached limbs mean she has to focus a little harder just to make sure her shots might hit their mark, but she just keeps those spots in mind rather than firing at them constantly.

    "It's not like I could really hide it from her, either. I mean... You know this already, too, right? I even came into all of this thinking that... That maybe it'd be better if this all failed. That maybe things would be better for everyone if she did become a monster. If you did take her."

    She slips a purple and red device out of her pocket, and she sweeps her sword backwards to gesture at where she had last seen Lilian sleeping. It's actually a little harder to see now with a bleeding head wound, but she's confident in making her next point despite that.
Cantio     "But even after all that stuff that's happened between us, after everything she's heard and seen... She was still willing to support what I was doing in Africa in good faith. She was willing to give someone like me a chance."

    Raising the plastic device to eye level, Cantio flicks the side as a cartridge-like stud flips out from inside of the greeble's main body. There's faded gray bits on it along with newer-looking red and purple motifs painted on top. She slides the cartridge end of it into the base of her sword, pushing it in with a satisfying shnk noise and then thrusting her blade into the ground.

    "If... If she can believe even in someone like me after everything that's happened between us, then who the hell would I be if I gave up on her here? This is the least I could do for her! Henshin!"

    Her blade lights up, and a chaotic mixture of primary-color yellow, blue, and red text surges out of the greeble while guttural digitized noises start coming out of the device. It all swirls together until it becomes an unreadable white soup, then explodes into a a pure blackness with even more industrial grinding noises that actually start sounding like a backing track after a while.

    Stars illuminate the area behind Cantio, eventually forming into digitized spaceships that turn into heavy-looking pieces of black armor with red and purple accents that clamp onto her limbs and face, extending from her back like mechanical wings/thrusters without being connected to her in any way while a similar pair of red and purple spikes jut out of the side of her helmet like a pair of antenna or early 2000s robot-girl ears.

    ACTION MASTER 52!

    "Lilian is staying here, and we'll take her to where she wants when she's good and ready!"

    The greeble comes out of her sword, and a black and purple one is brought out in its place. She brings down the sword just long enough to slam the cartridge in on the other side, followed by another unpleasantly digitized grinding noise. Her armor shifts colors as well, and the sword housing it starts glowing with purple and black electricity while Cantio leaps into the sky with an explosive jump.

    Half of the thruster-like bits on her armor explode off her back to propel her higher upwards, giving her a moment to focus her helmeted gaze on the giant knight below. The remaining half of her suit's thruster-bits promptly explode once she begins falling, accelerating her rapid descent with the sword brought down at the last moment, aimed at cleaving right through the entirety of the being in one massive, laser-enhanced swing.
Candy      After his second time being caught dead-on by one of the monster's time-stopping attacks, Candy picks himself off the ground, spits, and cracks his neck.

Time stops.

Candy braces himself for what's assuredly coming next. In the meantime, a few hands played, a weapon assembled.

*Is this pissing you off? It pisses her off, when I do this. I made myself tough, almost as much as her. So if you don't like it, you're gonna have to pack a lunch to get me to stop. In the meantime...*

Around frozen, luminous slashes, stepping carefully around Tamamo, paused in effortful attempt to pull it down. Candy holds the heavy machine gun in both hands, the water tank weighing heavily down on his shoulders. He holds the trigger down, belt jiggling with each shot forced into the silent, still air. Thick bullets larger than human fingers stop inches from the barrel, and form an orderly, even line as Candy paints circles around the monster. A deck of cards juts from the pocket of his work pants.


Time resumes.

     "Maybe she needed you once. But she don't now. If the only way forward you can see is to take her away from us, someplace not all of us can follow, then you're the one that needs to go."

     Interlocking rings of bullets encircle the monster completely, spaced out only in places where they'd hit his allies (and then, the 'rings' make adjustments, bending around and in front of friendlies instead of simply not existing near them. Seconds later, razor-sharp playing cards join the mix, detonating in fiery explosions split seconds after making their cutting impacts. Candy is not so much a singular presence, but one in a group of several--flooding the field with his usual illusions.
Rita Ma      I know I know I know I know

     "Then shut up! What do you even want from her? What can you even promise her? She has friends here. She has love here. Even when she was little, and having such a hard time, she didn't take your hand! So why would she do it now?!"

     She is out in the open, fists clenched, hands by her sides, when the transformation happens. Rita appears to gasp and stagger back as the true form rises up. There is no chance to dodge what happens next. But she has already taken her chance.

     Rita Ma is slashed eighteen times and dies instantly appears, for a brief moment, to be true. But in stopped time, the world is like a photograph. Dead, motionless photographs are the easiest thing to fake.

     When the dead Rita falls, it falls as expendable, writhing tentacles. The real one fades back into visibility at the apex of a huge leap, landing neatly on the Lady in Black's shoulder. A ballerina-like spin drags a half-dozen tentacle-blades across the side of its neck like a cloaked buzzsaw.

     "We need her more than you do. I need her more than you do! I've lost her before, and I couldn't stand it! So-"

     The next part is a gamble. Mors Caelorum's power removes the 'reality' from something, bleaches it clean of gravity and mass. What remains? Is it something that's the same as, co-tangible with, the deeper reality of the giant?

     Rita hasn't really thought that through. But she's seen that shade of red before. It's a hunch. She tinges her body like a magenta ghost, reaches inside the giant's head, tries to find anything her 'intangible' hand can grasp, and yanks it out as she kicks off.

     "If you really do want her to be happy, find a way to coexist with the way things are. But if you make it a game of tug-of-war with us, you'll lose."
Ishirou Just...nothing.

Absorbed like he was talking to a wall, or trying to hack every complicated system in the multiverse that is actually somehow actually a CLOCKWORK system for /some reason/. It's frustrating, especially because this Lilian from the other side is not listening. If she could /listen/ then maybe they could get somewhere.

Maybe it'll work just like /their/ Lilian. Oh no...ohhhhh no.

Lilian started listening better when she started killing them every attack for like a solid few hours. That was awful...

Ishirou doesn't even see the blade coming, there is no way to, he can't see her move, and this Lilian is faster, stronger...a hell of a lot more dangerous. If fighting their Lilian was like fighting in a pool of water, fighting this one was like fighting in a pool of molasses. In the winter.

The strike sends him up, and a follow-up one sends him sprawling across the ground again. Blood is trickling from wounds that the body armor he had on couldn't cover, and a few places that it was. Slowly, he's rising again, refusing to give up and let her take his sister from him. He's hurting, nearly broken...

"I...continue...to...refuse!" he says, and fires another beam. He's done with trying to do this the nice way. If she won't listen to him...then he'll force her to. This time, he doesn't try and send data in, but rather tries to work on the physical form. Armor rusts, the physical world becomes harder to move in, and binding magic attempts to chain her to the ground. All of it attempting to branch out from the biohacking itself. Then there is an internal build-up of magical pressure, attempting to cause the power it goes wild and overload.
Hibiki Tachibana     Flipping backwards, riding the recoil of her own attack just as Tamamo takes hold of the armor, Hibiki can see it as it happens--that moment, of close contact, of shifted tone. Her eyes widen, just a bit. That has to be...

    In the next instant, everything changes. Hibiki brings one arm up to shield her face from the flechettes flying and the intensity of the mixed light and shadow. When she lowers it...her mouth falls open, for a second, before clamping back shut tightly. Familiar...tall. Powerful. Tough. Strong. 'Clad' in shining silver. She remembers, when Tamamo expressed Lilian's dream to Aobheil. And all the same...what she's really focused on is that speckled, golden interior.

    ...And those hands that aren't really connected.

    That sight of that sword, even if not the genuine article, would have once been enough to put a phantom pain in her right hand. It doesn't, but it's not any less dangerous when the entire ritual area becomes a whirl of death, so similar to one she had experienced before, to a much more fatal end.

    Hibiki doesn't have a defense to it coming so suddenly. Each of the slashes thrown her way find their mark, cutting through her Symphogear's protective barrier to cut gashes into her body, layered one after another. Physics catch up after the fact, sending her flying back off her feet, gauntlets crossed in front of herself. When she comes back down--it's on her feet. Still standing. Not like any previous time. An arm swings out to the side. "She doesn't have to adapt or learn how to be happy in some new, different 'space'!"

    "She's worked too damn hard to be happy in the here and now! The way things are now--compared to how I thought they'd be once, they might as well be a miracle!"

    "And I won't let anyone take that away! Not even you! And I won't let--!" Any more people who love each other be separated. That's her thought as she pushes her body forward, fist cocked back again. The imposing size doesn't matter. She leaps up after it, primed arm clenching and rearing back further. She's going to...!

    Seize one of that thing's connected-yet-not-connected hands gripping onto its weapon. With both of hers. As tight as possible, as if to crumple the 'armor' it's clad in through sheer might. And she's going to immediately wrench into the opposite direction, throwing her entire body into it and Gungnir's thrusters, too. And with a loud as roar a possible echoing through the clearing, she's going to do her best to /make/ it move, as if to prove that being touched back is far from impossible.

    Hibiki is going to try to judo throw it into the ground. This is either going to go very well, or very poorly.
Xion "You know me." Xion breathes, reatreating in fading backsteps through the debris of her meteor while 'the armor' erupts in power, and recites what it is. "I heard you crying, and came to find you. To give you a bracelet, a memory, we chased to the edge of the world and found what went past the edge of the map."

"You know us." She insists, while the armor expunges all of its reason, and rights itself in space and time. "Why. Who. What. There are no mysteries."

Hibiki howls of selfishness, and Xion falls silent. Cleansana's thirty six sweep out, a single flurry.

A hail of sparks and metal clangs, three dozens mark for mark, rings out. Before Xion's chest, glimmering in frictive heat hot enough to create a visible point of lingering light, is a single scrap of metal, no larger than an archaic key.

"If you're everything she is, I don't have to remind you, but I will: I'm trying my best, even though it's hard, because hearts are on the line." Time wobbles, three dozen 'single moments' trying to play out in sequence and failing. "My eyes are open." Planting Starlight, she reaches to her sides, and with her left draws out a key of root and wood, a flowering leaf rising from the tooth. Around the wet-root dark guard is a midnight blue hydrangea, still bright against darker earth.

"And I'm reaching as far as I can-!" Her right hand closes around the archaic key of iron that absorbed every blow from Cleansana, sizzling against her palm. It blooms, there, in a long eruption of growing metal to blade. Long, dark, and capped with a tooth veil of black smoke, ever shifting, the hilt swoops in a cage of wings.

"To grasp that piece of her that's mine. The part of her that's inside of me! The part you can't ever have, ever be complete with, because I can't go there and stay Xion! I can't go there, and stay the hero of everyone's hearts."

"If want, you can stay here."
"But her leaving with you was never an option."

Crossing the blade she received from the Family Tree, with the blade a 'different' Xion received from Lilian herself, the lengths entwine, and her hands come togther as the blades merge into a single trunk wrapped in a vine of black. A grip of root and wing, and a tooth of smoke and branch, leaf and feather. She takes a stance, steps-
    -disappears-
        -and reappears past the devastation of Gungnir, holding the fusion keyblade low.

A clockstroke flurry, of fourteen strikes X's over the space that the 'Armor' occupies. 10-4 and 2-8, 11-5 and 7-1, all around, with an extra pair added.
Tamamo     Pulled straight towards Tamamo, one limb free, it reaches out in the blink of an eye, grabs hold of her kimono, and--

    Tamamo gasps. Tears come to her eyes, stain her cheeks, and turn to vapor. Forcefully, "No--"

    'I'm sorry. I love you too. I don't want to go. I really don't. But I have to. And I can't take you with me.'

    "If you loved someone, why would you destroy the world that allows you to be with them?"

    Frozen until the armored form removes itself, her next words are heartfelt, her sincerity not held back. Tamamo-no-mae, once held alongside Shuten-douji as being among the greatest monsters of Japan, voices her utterly natural conclusion.

    "For love, I would destroy the world that demands we part."

    'I will die before you take her from us.'

    The torii fall, though not easily. They resist with the strength of their wards, the power poured into them, the substantial energy that continues to flow out from Tamamo and be reflected between them. A single, massive strike is not enough for even one, yet still, they fall, sufficient time being granted to each one.

    To say that they've served their purpose would be a lie. Rather, they were a sacrifice to allow Tamamo's own, relatively meager defenses to hold against the oncoming attack. Shields break, but this time, Tamamo lets herself be thrown back, blunting the force into something that carries her out of the tony clearing, tossed into the fog. The interior ritual site may be ruined, by this point, but the valley was intended as an outer prison from the start, just so long as the fog lasts.

    Even the smallest of those sandstone pillars is hundreds of feet high. When Tamamo reappears, it's at nearly a straight drop, feet first, geta to crown, her larger robes replaced with the lighter miko garb, trailing fire like a meteor. Her meteor kick is followed by fistfuls of talismans that fly, not flutter, all around and below her before exploding into their own, white-hot flames.

    "Reflecting a piece of her, I am sure, was not only to pain me. To be 'them' is your wish, yet it is one I deny. You cannot be her, or else, you would know her other wishes."

    She arcs through the air to land again, with a small splash in the shallow water, and adjusts the singed, holed ribbon in her hair. From within a detached sleeve, she withdraws a folding fan. "I will not be so kind as to suggest coexistence, merely because you are connected to her. Either she cuts away all of us, and goes with you, or else she stays with us, as I cut you from her. Even if I outlive this world, I will not let you have her. I will give the four their own chance to unite, even without destroying the world that hurt them."

    The draining curse talismans she'd dropped in the air during her descent had fluttered slowly down, but they fly like rain when she snaps shut her fan.
Lilian Rook     §I have ever clung to her <shadow> as well. Just as she has always <chased/aspired to> mine.§

    The wave of giant skeletal hands, tearing free of the earth and reaching up from beneath the waters where there never were any, are met head on with a flurry of hard-light and impressionist steel. Already bound once, the titan will not be caught such again, and it has clearly gained all the strength of size and lost none of its speed; in as far as that were ever a relevant concept to it at all. Its swordplay is Lilian's, but just that much more sharp, more polished, more beautiful, and yet--

    §Even then, we will miss you. That is the damage <that one> has done by keeping us apart so long. It was never meant to go on like this.§

    Candy's omnidirectional setup crashes into it from every side at once. If it were Lilian, there are two or three ways he already knows she could deal with it. But it either lacks her tactical acumen or . . . it's 'deciding to act' just too slow. A firestorm of tiny stars bursts from the impacts of hundreds of bullets, each near-inconsequential to its mass and rigid strength, but the cumulative bonfire of tokusatsu hit sparks obscures The skeletal fist crashing it from behind, and then another from the other direction. The sound is oddly hollow and resonant, like striking an enormous, unbreakable empty glass. Luminous, shocking red-pink blood splatters one of the Gates, from the direction of its violently jerked head, as if it somehow bit its lip.

    In the same opening, the titan swings its entire bulk with the momentum of the blow and sweeps its sword fully around it in a perfect triple-layered spin, rending Candy and Trudy in return. Cantio comes dead on at it. The entity five times her size merely has to point in her direction to summon an equally massive 'spell circle' of black-gold recursively interlocked halos, and charge an instantly fatal quantity of potential energy. It freezes up for just long enough that she can launch her attack, firing the converging torrent a hair too late, such that some of each attack spills over the other side.

    §Thou art responsible to thy blood first above all else, both the blood of thy line, and the blood shed for thee.§

    The laser sword cleaves the mask, briefly splitting it through, only for the piece to 'fall back into itself', leaving only a faint line of dusty gold. But the material that crumbles away from its 'cheek' does not. Something soft and white and warm is exposed there, just as the mark Lilian left on the Fruit of Crisis is; its perfect mirror, where the scar under her eye would be. Rita leaps the entire space in the ensuing direction, and her arm phases right through it, though she feels it moving around inside with the greatest of difficulty, like how being underwater used to feel. What she feels is a hand clasping her own, only to slip from her fingers.

    §I don't know who you are, but I know that I need you too. From the moment she began needing someone other than me, I've felt it. Every single one of them. An existence where I love people I've never met. Ones from the past. Ones who don't exist yet. Ones who might disappear at any time. There's no way. Please leave it at this. Let us say goodbye.§
Lilian Rook     It strikes Rita with a crushing overhead pommel blow just after, but Ishirou knows that combat pattern, and he knows very very well, simply by comparing it to his past records, that the entity in front of him is fighting significantly worse than Lilian. A little worse by the second, even. It has greater size, greater power, greater finesse, greater endurance, and a possibly semi-indestructible body, on top of the things that already make her scary, but it's not using them well. It's lagging more and more milliseconds behind her reaction speed, hesitating a little longer. Furthermore, none of its strikes have been carefully aimed for vital areas; some even seemed aimed away. There's no reason whatsoever for an alien to do that, so . . .

    §Stand aside. You are <wounded/damaged/existentially tenuous>. You will terminate yourself with this strain.§

    The 'armour' as it is doesn't seem to be able to rust. The underpinnings of its existence reject the idea of entropy in the first place. Slowing its movement even further is a simple matter of capitalizing on the advantage Ishirou already picked out though. Magical pressure bursts out and opens hairline cracks from within, sealed over once again with gold, only to violently escape from another joint, layering it with kintsugi swirls. Shuddering against the chains with each motion, it turns to Ishirou, and its eyes flash in his direction with an ominous incendiary noise, just an instant before the ground beneath him abruptly explodes. There's that blaze of flickering gold again, on the side of its head, where Lilian's hairpin usually is. It hadn't been there before Rita reached out; he's sure.

    Hibiki crashes right into a hand large enough to grip her fully around the waist, and feels all her own momentum rebound back into her bones, even as she feels it crack and rejoin in the exact same moment. So close to it, she feels as if she is 'standing on it'. Like all directions around it face down and in. Punching the ground breaks it, but then it all falls right back into the hole, and becomes ground once again. The utterly ridiculous judo throw has to work within the confines of Ishirou's bindings, but takes it all the way to ground, where it-- promptly stops existing and phases through the bare stone exposed for just an instant under the cavitated water. All signs of it disappear from all scanners. There is silence for a second. Until the shadow simply materializes out of air, and strikes her vertically with the giant blade, all the way down to the ground. §Separated. Anyone? Even <her/myself> from <myself/her>?§

    It sluggishly turns towards Xion, readied preemptively this time while she's still talking to it. The twenty five foot blade is readied point towards Xion, four eyes contracting down to impossibly bright pinpricks. Its damaged hand is joined at the wrist as though by a black-striped band. And it pauses, for a fatal fraction of an instant, at the hydrangea flower.

    §I . . . We . . . cannot . . . When this <iteration> <fails>, <she/myself/we> cannot stay. To stay would mean if-- when this <iteration> <fails>, there will be no more of <she/myself/we> after. We all wished, to <become>, for the same reason. My very being is the <wish> to escape <the ticking of the clock>. Accepting it would be to <retroactively become>.§
Lilian Rook     The supercell of heroic X strikes land almost without resistance. Despite having --embodying-- Lilian's same ability, it fails to do anything about it. Dramatic sparks shoot skyward in every direction, along with more of that shockingly neon blood, until it drops heavily to one knee, ignoring the actual constant of gravity to fall over into a three point stagger at the same speed a person would. Raising the sword over its head is an insufficient ward against the descending storm of Tamamo's talismans, each-- ignoring the slowing effect and touching it directly, turning gold, burning away, and being replaced.

    It doesn't just fail to 'react in time'. It had plenty of that. Someone else had already described how this works. Lilian can't alter causality unless she wishes it so. So that can only mean that it has failed to want it, above the threshold of execution. Just as its mental communication waxes comprehensible once again.

    §This world is going to be destroyed soon either way. Lilian Rook needs to join the rest of her. That is the only way I can protect her. The only way we can be happy. The only way that our wish can be granted. If I leave myself with you, then the most precious part of me will be happier, for a little while, and be lost forever.§

    The ethereal giant lunges up to its feet, and a single coruscating arc of its sword carefully calculated to catch both Xion and Tamamo in its path, overcharged to the point of detonating on contact. The 'flower', made of the solid sunlight of Tamamo's bindings, is fully realized as an unfurled lily, in that mirror place in its 'hair'.

    §So I cannot <leave> <that part> with you all. I can't leave this Lilian behind.§
Ishirou §Stand aside. You are <wounded/damaged/existentially tenuous>. You will terminate yourself with this strain.§

The explosion overtakes Ishirou. When it fades, he stands there smoking, his body beyond injured. There are definitely fatal injuries beneath all of that. He's bleeding in such a way that he shouldn't be standing...

Then he drops to his knees. He drops to his chest flat on his stomach. All he can do for that moment is watch. Others fight, others he strains to keep up with. He shouldn't be here fighting like this, he was never /built/ for this. He never changed his body to be like them...because this was the body he wanted.

Was this all he was capable of..? Failing right at the end..? Watching people he cared about, who he bled with and for, fight against this creature...who also loved. Was this how it ends..? Would Lilian wake up to find him in a pool of his own blood...

His eyes close. It was easier to just sleep right now...but the thought of seeing Lilian have to bear this burden with everything else. Because he wasn't strong enough to be the one to support her...to be a burden on them all.

The POD sitting over Ishirou, trying to stabilize him through whatever means makes a strange sound. Something...happens but it can't figure out what.

"...No..." seems to be an answer given. Both to himself and to her. His body, through great effort, stand up. He's slouched over, barely able to keep himself from collapsing again. He summons something, and somewhere in Paladin HQ the barely functional AVCS activates. Moments later it was here, flying to him and connecting over his body. Its legs were mostly molten slag at this point, and one arm was gone. However, it had one functioning arm.

POD connected to the back. 'Unit Ishirou is critically damaged. AVCS unit is critically damaged. If you continue like this you will suffer irreparable damage.'

"No. Terminate all further warnings...we're going to stop her from taking away Lilian...and if she stays or goes, that's on her. Activate the laser sword. It should still work..."

With that, it rams at her. He's trying to calculate how she's working now, trying to transmit that data to others. They will know what she knows, that despite everything she is, her strength, and the advantage over them, she can't use it effectively. He swings, trying to clash with the larger Otherside Lilian...

"POD, activate strategy Z," with that, the POD detaches, and fires a beam of energy under the laser sword, attempting to catch her right after he strikes a blow, trying to blast her where she couldn't guard. Either she'll burn time to avoid it...or she won't. If she does, then she's burning time against him, a barely put-together boy, and won't use it against others...or she'll eat this attack.

"I won't...I won't give up or run away. Lilian knows that...she knows it...I can't..." he's exhausted and still bleeding dangerously. "She won't lose...and because of that...this world won't be destroyed..."

"If you loved her like you said you do, you would have more faith.."
Rita Ma      Rita's breath catches in her throat as another hand grasps hers beneath the giant's surface. She squeezes it tightly. But that isn't what jars her the most. That isn't what makes her eyes sting and her throat close up.

There's no way. Please leave it at this. Let us say goodbye.
     Why does hearing that in someone else's 'voice' make her feel this way?

     There's only one thing she can say without making a hypocrite of herself. "Okay." Her fingers release the thing she's found. Rita's arm pulls out of the giant's head, and she snaps back into full reality.

     The pommel descends. Rita's feet brace against the Lady in Black's shoulder. She catches it, improbably, in her hands- then shrugs it off to the side with a sharp exhalation of effort, glancing away from her.

     "But we won't let you take Lilian with you. Even if you think she's 'part of you'." Rita kicks off its shoulder and skids to a landing a hundred feet away. "'The world's going to come apart'... why should we believe you? What would you know?!"

     She picks up a chunk of a broken torii with a little 'hup' of effort, jagged-ended and sturdy as a telephone pole. Her fingers dig into the wood to get a better grip.

     "You say she's the happiest part of you. But do you know why? It's because of all the people who love her. And if you take her away from them, she'll be just as miserable as the rest of you!" That comes from uncomfortably close to the heart.

     "Instead... why can't you believe in her? Ms. Rook is 'selfish'. She's said so herself." Her arms turn red-'intangible' with Mors Caelorum's power again. The torii-spear does too.

     "And she gets the things she wishes for. Mr. Ishirou's right. Wouldn't she wish to keep the things that make her happy? But even if he's wrong, and you're right..." The spear is hurled. It will, naturally, go through almost all of the giant. But the parts that are co-tangible with Mors Caelorum should be speared right through.

     "Is forever in a place where she'll be just as sad as you, worth more than a little while where people love her?"
Xion Xion rights and shoulders her fusion blade, red coat fluttering as she jumps back, to interpose between Tamamo and the power of everything that wasn't Lilian's magic. The armor was beyond perfect, so strong as to be invincible-of-a-sort. Tough. Tougher than the strokes of the clock. Tough enough to stop it all.

But instead the hands strike, 12, and two more.

'Let us say goodbye'
"No. I won't leave it at this."
'The world is going to be destroyed soon either way.'
"No, it won't." Xion exhales, her shoulders dropping. "That's, I think, the false presumption you have. But you know it's wrong."

"You know it's wrong, because you just said - you know everything she needs. And Lilian needs her rules. If she kept them, or threw them away, you'd know them. And if you're the Lilian that broke her rules, the Lilian that chose to not, then you also know that falling short sometimes is human."

"And Lilian is human."
"She is a human hero."

Massive, the single arc of a whole mecha's blade swings in, overcharged to an absurd degree.

Xion sighs, setting her sword up in two hands, and looks up, towards the four points of light that try to bring this end, this apologetic, pleading end to her and Tamamo explicitly.

"--ROYAL GUARD--!" Xion roars, two-handed swing clashing up into the leading edge and striking force into the explosion. The gathered energy waves in ribbons off of the point of contact. A half-dozen bonds and borrows hold her sword against the storm. Since Xion is a direct target, she can stop the blade in place with all her might, just for a moment. One perfect moment. One frozen moment. A cloud of feathers and leaves hang stop-motioned around the clash of fusion keyblade to Cleansana. Xion releases her grip, hops up, and runs--

--down across the blade, skipping across frame and moment to leap across the one-frame opportunity that extends into full quick-time event, and leaps off the blade just as quickly. Beneath her feet, as she tumbles through the air, the swing completes. The bird-tree key is blown away, with no-one to hold it. Xion reaches out, and Starlight returns to her hand as a shooting point of light from where she planted it earlier, zipping so fast to her grip that she gets just a little more airbounce.

Her feet angle down. She aims her magic key just off center mass.

Reaching out her left hand towards the eyes, Xion smiles. She tugs, and if the invincible armor breaks, she could even pull a piece free - with her power. "You -can- stay here."

Holding Starlight in her right hand, she finishes her air-maneuver by slam-jamming her keyblade into the chest of the armor, down into the heart. "Or you can go back to where you came!"

"But you can't have her!!"

She cranks the key, for a satisfying 'click' -- and a Release befitting a Royal, straight to the heart.
Hibiki Tachibana     Separated. Anyone? Even. . .

    In the next instant, as Hibiki's mouth falls open still in mid-air, the sudden materialization into an abrupt strike catches her. "Ngh--!?" Crossed arms come up the moment before contact, the blade of light and energy creates bright sparks as it clashes with the metal of her Symphogear, digging in and only barely stopping short of the internal machinery. The sheer size of the weapon and might of the strike carries her down to earth, where she hits the ground beneath the layer of water and bounces off of it, rolling backwards a good dozen meters.

    Where she skips once, twice, and then catches herself with a skidding halt and a hand slammed down into the wet earth. Several heavy breaths are taken, as she watches--the rain of talismans descending downwards. Each and every one of them, a clean connection. Her fingers dig into the clay underneath the surface, then pull upwards in a shaking fist.

    "...I want what's best for Lilian. I want her to get everything she deserves and deserved. I want to protect her...and let her keep being happy. I guess we're not so different there, huh? ...I know you love her. ...Even so--!"

    She rises back to her feet, bringing up that still-clenched fist. The gauntlet shifts and enlargens, piston replaced with massive turbine, oversized boosters emerging well past her elbow. "Who the hell says that's the only way to protect her? Why is that the only way you can be happy!? Who decided that for you, or for her, or for anybody else!? And who says that's the way it has to be!? And even then--what's so bad about some fleeting happiness!?"

    The magical girl kicks off the ground, gets a running start, then fires up her armor's thrusters and lunges. The swiftest, shortest, and most direct route to the giant, to what she wants, is a straight line. And she's taking it, the inner workings of her gauntlet revving up to a sparking, lightning-forking spin. The moment her boots leave solid ground, the limb armor's rockets ignite, throwing her directly ahead like a bullet.

    "If you don't want to leave her, then don't!" Said as if it was the simplest, easiest thing in the world to do, with a wide-eyed roar. "But you're not the only one who doesn't want to leave her behind! Who wants to protect her! She's strong enough now to do it herself! And when she can't--/that's/ why she has so many people to lean on now!"

    There's nothing complicated about it. She's coming in from the side, and right as a knuckleguard slides down over her fist, Hibiki turns her body into a full-strength-and-then-some punch sent into the giant's center of mass - before a far more destructive release of force than normal is blasted forward in time with her gauntlet's internals pounding back into place, to attempt to strike right through that 'armor' and beyond into the rest of it. All the water surrounding them will definitely be blown straight upwards with the impact.

    And, if even for a moment before it 'falls back into itself', she tries to lay her hand on the ethereal material beneath. Bare contact, with as little as possible between them. Just for a second, before all the chaos will likely force a separation. "If you really love her--you should know where your heart lies, and where hers really does. But that happiness she has is /going/ to be defended, no matter what...!"
Trudy Grimm     Swinging that great sword in wide arcs cleaves into and scatters giant bones, splintering and shattering them. But the point was made. Trudy raises her free arm to shield her face as bone shards pelt her like rounds from a shotgun, scattering blood behind her.

    Raising her hand, she clenches a fist, letting her blood spill down onto the ravenous pages of the Grimoire. For those who know the witch, her long-present smile is gone, replaced with a tense frown.

    "I'm not trying to convince you of anything," the Witch states flatly, "I'm not the sort of wretch anyone listens to. But I'm not going to let you drag away one of the only people who can see what I am and what I'm trying to become. Sorry-- not sorry. But I can't cling to that shadow if you take it away."

    Her fingertip traces out a new rune; Ansuz, while the Grimoire produces Teiwaz. With a wet sound, she slaps Ansuz into the book's bloody-smeared page, smashing Victory with the Allfather rune. These twist themselves through the Death rune she constantly wields, contorting them into a new runic circle around her feet. The backlash from it is enough to push her hair up, the countless beads and charms hanging from her body clattering together.

    What follows is a new curse; a curse patterened after the death of that which should not be able to die. Shadows writhe and erupt like pools of inky black liquid, taking the shapes of maws with fangs and claws and ravenous howls. The curse of the Chain Breaker. Odinsbane. None here know his name, but the primal fear of a furious wolf is all too easy to recognize, boiling within the shadows that threaten to consume what has in turn consumed Lilian Rook.
Tamamo     The sword comes at her, and Tamamo reacts well before the motion even begins.

    She never reads her own fate, but she has read Lilian's. The closer the connection between one subject and another, the easier it is to find where in the threads to read their fate, if one were to ignore the dangers inherent. Knowing what is coming, at least, is easier than changing the result.

    One leg raised, her mirror, in its usual size, materializes in the blade's path. The Eightfold Blessings of Amaterasu is struck from one side by the massive, otherworldly sword, and from the other, by Tamamo's foot. The indestructible artifact flips flat against the blade, and Tamamo vaults over it, turning a complete roll by the time she lands, her mirror trailing after her, delayed by the blade's sweep.

    '...for a little while, and be lost forever.'

    Tamamo's fan again spreads, the water leaving ripples when one foot slides behind the other. "Did I not make myself clear? You wish for a world of parting. Every smallest part of my soul denies it. You wish for something I would destroy. To speak of the inevitability of death in mortal lives is no dissuasion."
Tamamo     'So I cannot...'

    "I did not ask you. I shall only hear Lilian's wishes."

    The torii are gone, and many of her talismans used, but her preparations ran far deeper than that. Literally 'far' and 'deeper,' in the sense that she buried them throughout the valley, without even trusting abilities of future sight to avoid what would be wasted efforts.

    With a gesture behind her back like pulling strings, Tamamo begins destroying the ground beneath the armor -- no, the giant figure that had not long been contained by the armor before becoming something far exceeding it -- with gouts of sun-flame and heavenly lightning.

    ...fully realized as an unfurled lily...

    "Ah, even now, do you slowly come to understand? And yet, this truth remains. Our wishes cannot exist together."

    It can't be easy. It can't ever be expected to be easy. A clash of wishes so dearly felt is something that rarely ends in less than the total destruction of one or the other. Just as there was a world that had no room for every wish, and one that had to decide how the tree should be pruned and only its 'good' branches left, this remains true even in this fog-laden, secluded valley. If everyone could have everything they wanted... then it wouldn't be a world with selfish people in it.

    Like the one presently doing a meticulous read of the exploding ground in front of her, arranging a series of undetectable distractions to cover what she does next, as well as the dangerous approach she must make, immediately after. She doesn't have the speed, nor the stamina, nor even the strength to carry through. It's all she can do to have the knowledge that passes for wisdom, to have focus, deathly determination, and...

    Glancing there at her sleeping form, Tamamo confirms for herself, that the final ingredient is love. She always liked that part of the recipe.

    But, where love isn't enough, there's gossamer steel.

    'This world is going to be destroyed soon either way.'
    'That is the only way I can protect her.'


    Tamamo lifts Night Mist from the stone, cradling it in her arms, like the partner of her partner that it is. A trusted friend of a friend, though she was not the one worthy of it. "Greaty-great gave me her blessing... will you pardon me, just this once, then?"

    Rather than from above, Tamamo approaches from below, through the explosions, reacting with uncannily sure steps, aiming for the moment her vision suggests. A flurry of talismans fill the air with obscuring flames, then blasts of wind, concealing until that last moment the one on which she rides in her high, leaping strike, with her hands as far apart as possible along the hilt.

    She is no swordsman, but this is the delivery of a wish, meant only to strike just once, as deeply as she can. When at last her struggle against the giant causes her movement to cease, for the moment, she gives her answer in words.

    "Trust in us. Entrust her to me. Do you doubt me? If I must, I will move the world. I have long since decided that I will have no less."
Lilian Rook     §Stop. Please. You will die if you keep this up. We don't want this.§

    The sounds and thoughts and impressions that are almost a voice and almost a story somehow seem concerned, disheveled, in Ishirou's mind. It defends itself from the first blow, but it falls for the second, staggering off-guard in a way that only an off-balance and exhausted human should.

    §Faith. Faith is not the point. I reached out to us to escape this§

    It still spins and cleaves and splits the hurled torii in half in mid-air, its sword somehow simultaneously real and not enough to make contact. The two halves are re-angled just around the familiar designs at its 'heart'.

    §We can be happy. A <wish> would not be possible otherwise.§

    The splintered spears pass right through. Blood drips from the surface, on the left side of the inner chest. The giant flinches, and grabs hold of its left arm, mirroring a displaced, sympathetic injury with its haggard slump, though it was never struck there.

    §I know. I know why. I know it won't be the same. This should never have happened. We should have already been together, all these years ago. And now she's more human and not less.§

    It tries to intercept Hibiki, but Tamamo's barrage of cursers and layers of wards acting on top of Ishirou's and Rita's draining render it too slow. Slower than Lilian.

    §She's stronger than all of <us> are already. If she really needed to, she could fight you. And yet I . . .§

    Hibiki's fist lands as straight and true as it has ever on anything even bearing relation to Lilian. The breastplate shatters, then falls into itself, inextricably bound by its own energy, like trying to blow apart a planet; yet even a single girl can lift a piece of a planet above her head-- that's the curiosity of gravity.

    §Is it really fair? For her to be the last of me? Just because she found something she couldn't in all her previous selves? Of all the other times, in this one, she came into being with the most wrong, so why couldn't she be happier if everything were right?§

    Trudy's spellcasting can no longer be meaningfully impeded. Shadows form at the penumbra of the shadow's shadow. Red blood flows around the pools of alien hue.

    §You are. Or you would have given up.§

    Fangs crunch and spark and scrape on slender arm and leg, dragging it down as its mighty swing is stopped through Xion, and anchoring the titan in place.

    §Not just on this. But on being 'you'.§

    The sword remains embedded where it stuck in the standing pillar of a broken torii. Xion rushes along its length, infinitely hard and rigid, yet soothingly warm beneath her feet. Each step chimes like a bell and flutters like wings and tick-tock-ticks like the hand of a clock.

    §Rules. Laws. They are about staying close to you. Coexisting with you, even though she's really one of us.§

    The lock slams through the opening left by Hibiki holding two fragments aside with her hands. The resounding click, much more than any physical unlocking could ever encompass, is followed with a blast of misty night vented into their faces. The entire breastplate falls away, crashes to earth, exposing the heart-space behind.

    §I want to know what it's like too. All of me. This is too cruel. She's more important than the world. I think you are as well. You already know how I'd choose.§
Lilian Rook     There are no bones, no organs, nor even a beating locus of inner power. Gloss-black congealed space and lattices of star-dusted golden galaxies ensconce a darkened hollow almost big enough to be a tiny room, the illusion of clear water below and a starry sky above. A handful of gold and red-like petals ephemerally flutter through the air, as if shaken from boughs above by the impact. At its spine, the gossamer white Lilian, scar and all, who had once waved to Xion, sits in repose, bound into her seat by helical black roots. Clutching its left arm, trickling blood down to its elbow, it-- she, looks into Tamamo's eyes, and says §Please don't say that. I'm still Lilian too. Even if I'm only the Lilian who could exist, and not the one who does right now.§

    Even when she loses sight of Tamamo, in the cataclysm of solar flame that follows, her greater form tumbling forward, catching itself on only one arm, and bringing its chest blow, she keeps 'speaking' to her.

    §I understand. But that doesn't mean we can't. If these wishes won't coexist, then one must change. Become different.§

    Night Mist sings in Tamamo's hands. She can feel the eager vibration in its considerable weight; she can almost imagine its edge guiding her hands towards her desired destination of its own accord. Irrational impulse surges into her, and she knows it is from the spirit of the sword itself. A measure of overwhelming spite, and yet with it, a sense of relief and conviction. The sense that her single stroke is both just and fair, that it will slay a hated enemy and protect a sorry victim, and thus cannot possibly fail. The inscription, as it did meeting Sakura, shines: Death to those who have wronged--

    §Once upon a time, I promised her, that when the time came, we would destroy this world she hated so much together. As we always do, every time. If she has changed, and I am Lilian, then I must change too.§

    --my people.

    In the instant the fire and lightning clears, and Tamamo, sword in hand, makes eye contact with !Lilian, and says those fateful words, !Lilian moves. She moves to Trust In Us. The figure rooted into the wish-form grasps at her Rivet harness, pulls with the snapping of wood and shrieking of metal, and lurches forward to meet her.

    Night Mist cleaves effortlessly, as it does with all Antegent, through the mesh of roots, and they catch hellish light. Turning to ash. Crumbling away. A bit at a time. Tamamo feels warm blood on her front. The sword has cut into !Lilian's shoulder as well. She remains firmly anchored with her arms around Tamamo, if only to support her own nearly-nothing weight. No such fire appears.

    §If I must shed myself from the Tree, then so be it. I would rather be with her as a fallen bloom than stay rooted without her. She needs me as much as she needs you. Even if it means I will vanish with this world, should the worst come to pass, I can't force someone who is myself to make that choice. Out of all the Lilians, it has to be this one. I, too, would rather look death in the eye, than live without you.§
Ishirou "Then...you...better stop..." Ishirou says strained. Even if she swung again, there would be nothing he could do. He was hoping that she'd be stopped by that...or at least slowdown. He couldn't, however, stop...not until everything was over. If he didn't push now, right when things were in sight he would never forgive himself if things went bad. He would always remain a bystander.

He couldn't handle that anymore.

Parts of the AVCS start to break apart though, and before he knew it, the machine hit the ground. It was floating, so this wasn't a big deal. It was just pushed to its limit like its runner. However, it was Xion, Trudy, Rita, Hibiki, and Tamamo who manage to take where he started. He might have shattered the final barrier, but they had to work with what he gave them.

The suit opens up, and a bloody mess of Ishirou rolls out. Right as she made her choice...and Ishirou could only smile at that. "It...it won't come.." he says, raspy. "She has amazing people with her, but you already know this..."

Ishirou coughs a bit wetly, "It's hard to keep up with them all...haha... never mind her..."
Tamamo     Tamamo makes her preparation, Xion standing to her fore. Tamamo rushes forward, where others cleared the way. All comes together, the final moment of so much work and pain and ache and...

    It's all so simple, to have a hated enemy. The blade knows. There's no shortage of cruelty to witness, as long as Tamamo, too, has fought the Antegent. Truly fought, unlike all the times she's tried her hardest to do anything but. An unknowable foe that hates you and all your kin, and wishes for death for death's sake.

    She strikes, zeal and spirit, hers and the sword's, making up for what she lacks. The blow itself is as one destined. It was right for Night Mist to be here, to strike these roots, into this heart. She was the one who needed to carry it here.

    To protect Lilian.
        To protect herself.
            There's no ultimate difference.

    It's so much more difficult without an enemy, without one here to take away everything you needed to live. It's harder to deal with those who can change, who won't just be what you expected them to be.

    Everything is a little hard for Tamamo to deal with, right now, but the tears continue to evaporate in her halo of dangerous warmth.

    One hand grips Night Mist like she'd fall without it, an anchor into the world. The other comes around, gently, yet without hesitation, onto the Lilian that could have been. Not hers, but...

    'I, too, would rather look death in the eye, than live without you.'

    Tamamo chokes it back, then breathes. "You are hurt."

    Not 'I hurt you.'

    Though she's done that to both of them, too. At least once.
Trudy Grimm     Trudy leans into the spell, pouring her shadow into the thrashing fangs of ravenous shadow. Her seirous frown becomes one of bared teeth, still so sharklike but now more menacing than endearing. As the giant falters, so too does the witch, wobbling in place. A break in concentration that at last makes the penumbral pool of gnashing fangs cease like such a bad dream.

    She wobbles in place as her runes fade, reaching for the bloodied Grimoire once again. It takes her a try or two to place her hand on it, and then she... somewhat leans on the floating book to steady herself. Her free hand raises, fingers spread, watching the blood run across her skin. Eyes closing, Trudy lets out an exhausted sigh and drops her hand to her side.

    Her shadow expands around her feet-- this time with no runic fanfare. All that emerges this time are skeletons. Simple animated undead... clad in tattered, blood-splattered nurse uniforms. They emerge in pairs, with the very first pair producing a stretcher upon which Trudy sits. The others spread out, approaching Ishirou first, but soon others, a clear offer of not having to walk out on these injuries.

    To her credit, Trudy remains upright, seated and staining the stretcher's cotton cloth.

    §'You are. Or you would have given up. Not just on this. But on being 'you'.§

    "...Selfishly, I think I got more out of this than I contributed," the witch says quietly.
Rita Ma "I'm still Lilian too."
     Rita, bracing for a counterattack, freezes. Her hands lower to her sides; confusion and anguish are in evidence on her face. "Lilian is part of me" had been said before, but this strikes her very differently.

     When the 'Lilian' in the cockpit is revealed, Rita starts to walk forward despite herself. Her pace is slow, and they're still separated by nearly a whole battlefield. But she senses that to be closer is right.

"As we always do, every time. If she has changed, and I am Lilian, then I must change too."
     "Ms. Sakura talked the same way. She said Ms. Rook was 'always' the most susceptible. But this time, it was different, because she had us. Ms. Tamamo, and everyone else."

     "If that's true, and you're 'the Lilian that could be'-" forgive her impoliteness, she's only quoting- "then... I'm sorry you haven't been loved, like she has. I want for you to have that love, too. I want for you to be changed, to be happy, too."

"If I must shed myself from the Tree, then so be it."
     Rita breathes out. She sounds relieved, but also somehow bitter. She's close enough, now, to stand before the Lady in Black. She doesn't reach up to the other-Lilian, though. That's Tamamo's place. "Thank you for being brave. Accepting love like that, and being changed... it's really scary. Even for us."

     This is as happy an ending as could be hoped for. Why isn't Rita smiling, then? She looks about to say something more.

     Then Ishirou coughs, and she smells human blood, and she rushes over to badger him with bandages and painkillers. Another day, maybe.
Hibiki Tachibana     If she really needed to, she could fight you. And yet I . . .

    Is it really fair? For her to be the last of me?

    Of all the other times, in this one, she came into being with the most wrong, so why couldn't she be happier if everything were right?

    All of those are held in mind, even if not answered at the time they're asked - even as the heart-space has had the path to it held opened and then unlocked, after Tamamo has taken up Night Mist...and the ashen white Lilian breaks free to towards her. The sight is...it's a lot of things. She's not entirely sure what she feels. But...it's not a bad thing. She thinks.

    "...Lilian..." Hibiki uses her name. All at once, all of the air leaves her lungs, breathed out into her scarf. The fabric muffles it, and also hides the small turning up of lips that comes after it. Is it relief? Something else? Maybe a whole lot of things.

    ...But, once again. It's not a bad thing. Not in the end. Though, it's still a little bittersweet. Or perhaps more than a little. Maybe because of the scene of her, and Tamamo. Maybe because 'I, too, would rather look death in the eye, than live without you' hits hard.

    "...I'm glad." She means that entirely, though. Even after all of that. "...That you don't have to leave her."

    For both of their sakes, and more. Yeah.

"...Maybe I'm biased...no, I definitely am. But I think if there's anyone worth doing that for, it's her."

    . . .She should probably join in on helping Ishirou. That guy...
Xion Falling, tumbling, falling, Xion lands at the edge of the 'chest', feet tipping on the armor rise of impossible stability, between open air and speckled galactic-glistening soup.

"I'm sorry, Lilian." Xion murmurs, though her breath tumbles to ear without need for aid. Starlight hangs, reflectant of black and gold and flutters of red. Her coat of cardinal leather flakes and flutters, from searing red to soft black.

"I thought I said no apologies, or we'll go around in this circle, forever and ever." Xion repeats, weary, a heatless I-told-you-so at the end of the motion. The phrase is for !Lilian, but, as Tamamo chokes on her motions and speaks in breathy tones. . . There's no ultimate difference.

"Tamamo and I, just a few months ago, not long at all, learned that sometimes... Loving someone was telling them 'no', and not 'yes'. Maybe, because she's very bright-" A helpless snort, emotional as the keyblade wielder buckles at the precipice. Laughing at situations was like candy words, steadying. "-only I learned that. But it's what I learned."

"When I went to prove what I learned," Her hand comes up, lifting Starlight, tip-down and hilt-up, to gaze-level, looking at the back of her hand, and the dangle of an empty-spanned star on a keychain. "It was then I realized that I wasn't ready for 'someone outside of me' to go. And every part of me wanted to save them. Every part of me knew it should be done. And so, I knew, then, my answer had changed."

"I had changed." She sighs, and her hand falls. With it, Starlight slips from her grasp, and then all her power and molten-burning will fades with it, gone in smoke off a black coat that was just red moments before.

"I'm sorry. I promised her, made plans with her."
"She's supposed to hold my hand, so we can see what color the test makes, together."

"So I couldn't possibly lose here. No way it'd come close. I was here to save that world. And no-one was going to stop me. Not even Lilian. . . really, really wanting it."

Xion, wobbling at the edge, windmill arming, looks over her shoulder in her 'oh no, a ledge!' animation.

"Oh, dang, I think you really might've killed Ishirou, though. I was sure, having him on my world-saving team would mean we couldn't possibly fail, and I was right, but he didn't tell me how much it'd cost him, either."

A faint smile. "I think we're all like that."
Lilian Rook     §Yeah.§

    !Lilian has that habit too.

    §But I was going to hurt you as well. It hurts a lot, but I still think I got off easy.§

    There is the lingering sense that she knows exactly what Tamamo means. And . . .

    The crack of broken glass. It echoes across the still water like a gunshot. The orb in Lilian's hands falls under, in two separate pieces. The orb that was in Lilian's hands. Lilian isn't there. The water ripples where her knees just were. She is right behind Tamamo, holding her from the other side, her hands laid gently over the bunrei's to grip the same sword.
    "It's nice to meet you, as an adult at least."
    §Your name is still Lilian Rook, isn't it?§
    "Dame Commander now."
    §Just like--§
    "--we wanted to be."
    §You really did do . . . so very well, this time.§
    "I've . . . had plenty of help."
    §People tried to help us before. They only succeeded this time.§
    "Well, then I was brave enough to let them."
    §Well, out of all of us, we're the most proud of Lilian Rook.§
    "You should be~ Look at--"
    §I know. I can feel her. She's wonderful.§
    "They all are."
    §But this one is warm too. I've always wanted to know warm.§

    Less than a minute is enough for the roots to crumble away into nothing, leaving behind but an abstract shape of soft black, and exposed gleam-gold tabs, four in all. !Lilian sags in Tamamo's arms.

    "You sound tired."
    §I am. I'd like to sleep for a while.§
    "Don't you dare--"
    §It's not like that. I'll still be here, in a way, when you need me. If you won't become me, then there are limits to how well I can hold you. So I hope you'll humour me from time to time.§
    ". . . Okay. You've earned it. And . . . "
    §And?§
    "Nothing's going to 'fail'. We'll get it right. All of it. Whatever it is. I'm the strongest and bravest of us, so I'll get it done."
    §Haha. I'm glad. And I'm really sorry for breaking--§
    "We broke yours too."
    §It'll get better. And it's yours now too.§
    "Beg pardon?"
    §It's your skin. You didn't want it as-is, so you changed it. Because of all these people you've grown close to, when all the other times you only wanted revenge.§
    "I don't--"
    §I'm going to fix things as much as I can, and you can't stop me.§
    "I totally can."
    §Well you shouldn't.§
    "Okay."

    Lilian helps hold !Lilian up, stepping down gently to the water. Even just a few meters of clearance from her resting spot is enough to make !Lilian visibly become semi-substantial. She lingers to speak with Xion at the precipice, even though distance need not limit her in that capacity.

    §You're allowed to change your mind. And you're allowed to change what you are. But only into something more precious. Never less. That's what I learned from this time. The last time, now. I learned it from waiting, and feeling, but not quite being. So if you wanted to change into something more precious, and I didn't, and I'm Lilian as well, then it's true. You couldn't lose to me.§
Lilian Rook     Apparently failing to ignore Ishirou, she motions Lilian over to help her kneel down. She lays a hand on him with a silk soft feeling of guilt and quiet admiration. He feels the inside of his body briefly become the center of its own gravitational system, rather than anchored to the superplanet, and the somewhat painful snap of bones and implants being coerced back into their proper places --falling inward, their binding energy enough to squeeze even blood vessels together, and put him back in one piece, even if not fully healed.

    §Treat this shape more carefully from now on. It is an important Rivet that fastens this Iteration, to a place that Lilian Rook can stand on.§

    When Rita rushes over to help, the artistic impression of a sad smile rings around the inside of her head.

    §She must be this one's 'sister bloom' then. The Tree of Crisis and the Tree of Serenity are that way, as are the Tree of Completion and the Tree of Perfection.§

    A weighty pause lasts just too long to be comfortable.

    §I couldn't be as strong as you. I gave up my power, gave it to someone else, so I could be with others. Only Lilian Rook is strong enough to be stand side by side with you.§

    The ephemeral gaze turns to Hibiki.

    §But now that I've done it, I'm glad that I did.§

    From there, Lilian helps her move to a clear space no further from the kneeling giant. It's not obvious whether Lilian feels no need to interrupt her potential-shadow's communication, or whether she can't hear it now, or some mixture of both. She's busy well, she was busy, gathering up the pile of shattered plates and sundered leather that was once a practical work of art, steeped in stories. "I was thinking. I got to choose a name. So you should choose one too. It's tough to communicate, if you're me, but not me yet, and I'm Lilian Rook, and you're not, but we're us."

    §Didn't you know? I am your 'Exigent Serenity'. So please say hello to your holy sister's 'Virtuous Crisis'.§

    "Serenity for short then. Cute~"

    The kneeling giantform begins to stop existing. There's no other word for the way it seems to fade behind foggy glass, turn see-through and disappear that way, singing into its own fading shadow. Black and Gold dust, flecked with Para-Red embers, escape from it as it slowly vanishes, which !Lilian, or now Serenity, gathers to her by that same force of invisible gravity-like binding centricity. Spirals of minute, glittering dust, pour into the shattered husk of Aobheil's armour, and bit by bit, it 'grows' back upwards again.

    The pages of the warrior's story are blacked out, then written on again in gold ink. Restructured not in its original form, to bring back intact, for the approval of another, but into the shape that Lilian could wear, for herself. Gorgeously semi-silvered, ink black metal, like polished and polymerized antique iron, woven together in banded lengths and plated over with elegant interlock, the very same patterns of the giant rendered in gold on its surface; except for where they are rendered in brightest and most vivid density. In mirror of what Xion and Hibiki and Rita and Tamamo had done to the giant, there is no breastplate; wound bands of metal stop halfway at the ribs. All golden lines converge on the open heart-space, rendered directly on the smooth underlayer. A single, permanent change, from breaking on others and being put back together stronger.
Lilian Rook     The effort has clearly exhausted Serenity, starting to fade in long lag after the giantform. Laying arms around Lilian's shoulders, the two stare closely eye to eye. §There. Now I'm going to sleep. For a while.§
    "I won't ask when I can see you. This is my life."
    §That's how it should be. But reach out to me when you need me. Okay?§
    "Okay. I promise."

    As the last of the sustaining giant vanishes, so does too the gossamer white Lilian-shape, phasing into her arms, and out of existence.




    ". . . Nope. No. Don't say anything about it. Let's just go home, okay? I feel completely . . ."

    "You all look awful right now."