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Petra Soroka     Inside Ayin's mindscape, the world crumbles bit by bit. At each chordal progression of the orchestra's dirge, the grand concert hall becomes slightly more grotesque, rows of opulent upholstered seating melting together and rolling viscously downhill towards the stage, the shadows inhabiting them sagging and slumped over, running with silhouetted ichor. The glass of the enormous chandeliers is now all test tubes and syringes, casting a sickly green undertone to the light of the stage.

    The crown piece of the Sephirot's orchestra, Ayin's colossal organ, has red veins running up the bone-white pipes now, pounding with blood to the tempo indicated by the conducting Carmen. Each note from his monumental instrument smothers the rest of the orchestra, nearly drowning them out now, as its room-shaking, rumbling pitch bypasses your skin like tissue paper to grasp your gut and lungs and crush them in its presence. Rather than simply producing its sorrow for you to hear, the organ's mournful tones force their way inside, removing the option not to sympathize, demanding that you not only listen, but feel its suffocating pressure imposed on you too.

    The Sephirot are stained in blood, and the coil of glossy red viscera forming clockwork Carmen's ponytail gradually slicks her hair and drips down her neck into the churning gears and mechanisms keeping her running. Ayin, by constrast, sits at his sprawling ivory and gold keyboard with his conductor's labcoat pristine, only dampening his hair with sweat from the exertion of the performance. Hibiki, settling down closer to him, can see that his fingers are purple-bruised, nails cracked with blood welling up from them to leave smears on the keys.

"If you didn't... she wouldn't have left that dream, that her heart was too broken to keep trying to reach, to you."

    Hibiki's words cut through the lumbering ritardando of the closing measures of the organ's song. Ayin's eyes flicker down, to the sheet music in front of him, insofar as it can be called that: formulas, manifestos, sketches of the Kabbalah, every lower Sephirot etched out in splattered ink all the way up to Keter. Without directly acknowledging Hibiki, he shakily swipes the music to the next page while pedaling the final tones of the organ, to pages of red-- Carmen's handwriting, undoubtedly-- sermons and speeches to the people in the Backstreets. Ayin pauses, lingering on it, and then turns away from the organ, stepping off the bench and smoothing his labcoat down, hands hidden in the pockets.

    After the fracturing of his trifold speech, he closes his eyes and takes a breath, barely piecing the world back together into its disintegrating state. The organ pedals stay flat to the floor even after he's stood up to pace around the half-moon arrangement of the Sephirot playing their instruments, leaving a low chord shuddering out of the pipes like an impending earthquake. Even the fact that he seems to have emotionally regathered himself somewhat feels lurchingly unstable, with the entire mindscape wobbling on a house of cards eaten away by the thousands of loops of those mind-erasing pills used to create 'X'.

    The murky clouds of guilt and misery stirred up by rifling through his memory prevent this Ayin from strutting as haughtily as he did on your first pass through the hall. The way he hangs back, a distance away from the Sephirot with his hands in his pockets, the cold shine of his eyes visible through his shadowed hair over a flat, melancholic smile, is more like the sullen retrospective energy of a guilty scientist than the spotlight gluttony of someone vying for the throne. He rests his gaze on Lisa, dwarfed by her orchestral chair more than the others, and practically more flayed-open flesh than child visible in her dress.
Petra Soroka     "Lisa. From the very beginning... perhaps we were avoiding the truth. But what sort of truth is it, if it's horrifying enough for even Carmen to turn away her eyes? The nature of the Seed of Light is that only the people who most deserved to live could die in order to plant it. The most worthy, dying for the sake of the least. What kind of foundation is that for a dream?"

    "If Carmen's first calculations had been correct, and Enoch wasn't just a possible candidate, but an equally viable one to Carmen..." He briefly lowers his eyes to the ground, unable to keep looking at her, and then directs them out to the disintegrating audience to appear introspective rather than unhappy. "Would you have made peace with it? Would Carmen? Would I? Progress demands sacrifices, but those sacrifices still color what comes next."

    He tilts his chin up, looking all the way to the top of the organs' pipes, crawling across the ceiling and coiling into angular spirals like the monochrome walls of Architecture. "If the Seed of Light reaches completion, then the world will remember me. As the man who saw fit to sacrifice a child I cared for for this cesspool of failed humanity. --No, not for the City; for her. And then even she followed after. I'll be remembered as the one who made the choice and had to live with it; the cold, rational, man of science with a heart shut off to the world, able to weigh the scales and come away with the determination to slaughter some to save the others."

"You care more about someone who's dead than all the people who are alive and helping you!"

    Ayin tilts his head down, side-eyeing Sougo with a baleful stare. "Is that so? Then who do you care for?" He lets out a slow breath, and the mindscape wavers. "I've walked this path for much longer than you've known it's existed. You come in here with your preconceived opinions and your petty little demands, absolutely certain *you* know better than I do, without understanding anything about what *I* have lived through."

    "Knowing what I do, would you willingly walk the opposite path? Would you sacrifice the world for 'her', and still scorn me for mourning Carmen? Your tears prove how little you could possible, ever, have a say in my path. Elijah," He says without needing to look at her, or at Sougo. "Would you mind informing them all of the fate of the Sephirot?"

"It should have been you."

    Lisa's words to Carmen cause the pistons and gears inside her to grind and squeal early. The machine shudders, baton raised, her painted-on smile and sideways eyes as if looking at someone beside her who isn't there unmoving. Ayin sucks in a sharp gasp and pushes Lisa and Kali's chairs aside to run to her, stepping up onto the podium to hold her, trying to nudge her stiff limbs into moving again.

    "She knew. Of course she knew. She made sure I knew, as well. I remember those doors, those two doors, that once opened, could never be closed."
Petra Soroka     Ayin's grip falls from the jammed gears in Carmen's shoulders, down her bicep, and onto her wrists. With a dull throb from the organ, painful behind your eyes, the scene shifts like blacking out and then suddenly shooting upright. For the first time, the new setting of the mindscape is a familiar one. Ayin's office, the one modeled in Architecture, with its brown walls and brown leather that seems to ooze 'melancholic nostalgia', imprinted with the tan and red logo of Lobotomy Corporation. Ayin is sitting in his chair behind his old-looking computer, slumped, different in a similar way to how the Ayin in the penthouse was different.

    Patchy stubble, overgrown hair that's been a few days too long without a wash, bags under his eyes. This Ayin is utterly stripped of the poise that he's 'meant' to have, but unlike X, there's still a certain gravitas to him. Rather than hapless and bumbling, this Ayin's misery is sucking like quicksand, dolorous and inevitable.

    "Two doors. The foundation of Lobotomy Corporation is built on what happened when I opened them, so it's only fair that you, you who have stepped into this story, have to open them too. Or else you'll never understand."

    There's a knocking at the door into the office, and Ayin doesn't move to take it, so someone else has to. When it opens, Carmen comes through-- not a mechanical one, but the real one, in the flesh. She has a sheaf of papers held to her chest, a weighty but steady clip to her walk as she passes by the Elites as if they aren't even there, solemn with her chin held high. The long brown ponytail with a red scrunchie, the lab coat over a brown shirt, it's all exactly as she 'should' be, except for two things. She's silent, even when it seems like she should be speaking, and her face is completely obscured by a mass of black scribble lines, shifting around without ever revealing what she looked like underneath.

    Ayin narrates for her, as Carmen walks to the whiteboard across the room from his desk, and begins drawing on it. "Enoch was dead. A pall had fallen over everyone, back then, but not a single one had their faith shaken in the project. No, it was Carmen they were struggling to believe in."

    Carmen turns towards Ayin's chair and says something, body language neutral and muted. It's definitely not the kind of animated expressiveness that would come from the fiery 'Backstreets Preacher' that all the other Sephirot have talked about, even without being able to hear her words. "It was never easy for her to hold this role. To treat her as infalliable, or the savior of this entire world... her heart wasn't stronger than anyone else's, she would say. Letting Enoch be hurt instead of herself was the last straw before she fell. It was only the case that her end would have to reinforce the beliefs of all the others, so that her martyrdom could carry through and justify finishing the project on her behalf."

    "... It made sense, as she explained it. She always made more sense than anyone; I never had any room to disagree. But the calm way she talked about it... it was as if it wasn't my concern at all. That I was the one person in all the City that she wasn't doing it for."
Angela Gebura can be healed--The Sephirah aren't badly injured, though. The blood splatters aren't from wounds so much as they are psychic scars across their body as the spirit remembers how one is killed. But Rita can heal anyway. The blood splatter doesn't fade, but Kali's breathing in the space gets a bit less tight, the body relaxes--the weight of it seems to, for a time, pull off of her.

"Thanks--" Kali says. "This has all gotta be pretty distressing huh?"

Kali, strangely, seems even more at ease when Rita tells Ayin it's his duty to die. Benjamin, of course, looks uncomfortable but seems resigned, looking down at his hands with a little sigh as his own love of Ayin is brought to the forefront.

''I couldn't call myself someone that really cares about anyone if I let myself get scared off by...Um...''

"Difficulty." Seems to be Yesod's immediate offer of an answer.

Lisa remains a little off as she has been throughout all this, still visible through the gore. In time, that phrase has weighed more heavily on her. She wonders if she should have said it all. Even if it was true.

"I think anyone would turn from that kind of truth. ... Anyone except my brother, I guess. He seemed excited. Maybe he thought it would've made a better life for me, or maybe he wanted to stir the River himself. He always understood the project better than I did. I'm sure Enoch would've been fine if he had been in that spot, but I don't think I would've ever been okay with it. Maybe eventually I would've been able to face the reality of it directly, or maybe I would've needed the help to face it like happened in our world."

Lisa can't look at him directly. At this point in time, she remember her 'adoptive' parents more than her true ones. She doesn't even remember if they died or were simply away when they were found. She doesn't know. It feels like a million eternities ago.

"But..."

"You can reset time but you cannot reset a tale, and those tales are starting to pile on us, Ayin." Benjamin says.
Angela But then...

The Sephirah are startled when Ayin asks Elijah what seems to be a simple question. Elijah opens her mouth--

"Don't--" Kali says.

"They'll find out tomorrow if they don't today. They deserve to know." Elijah says before turning back to face Ayin. "After the project the Light will be released into the sky, planting Seeds into all the people of the City. However..." Elijah suddenly smiles hopefully. "I told you before, I told everyone, about how my body was rotting right? ... That's right, we are long dead. All of us. Resurrection technology exists, but there's some pretty significant limitations to it and none of us could really have been properly saved. And we definitely couldn't be 'resurrected' properly right now. Our minds have been forcibly pushed back onto the stage so that we could generate The Seed of Light. That is the purpose of the Sephirah. The very power that keeps us moving and lets us chat like this... is Cogito, the Light that we've drawn from the collective unconsciousness."

Kali glances to Rita, then lowers her head. "...Yeah we were dead before we met you. At some point it felt like you wanted to save us too but... We already made others pay the price for this, it wouldn't be right for us to not pay it too. Least, if we had to."

"Mhm!" Elijah chirps. "So if that power is spread out across The City--that means the very power that keeps us bound to the mortal coil, well, it's going to be gone. It'll be like we fell into a peaceful endless slumber. At least, that's the theory."

"...At least we'll still be together." Hod says. "We'll descend into the River together. ...It would have been nice but..."

Benjamin goes quiet but he looks towards Lilian thoughtfully, then to Rita, like he's trying to gauge their reaction.

When the scenery shifts to the stubbled Ayin, and the muted Carmen...

Kali can't bear to look at her like that but she bites at her lip as if forcing herself to. Lisa stares glumly at her--mother?

"...I was crying all the time back then. It seemed so senseless and unfair." Tiphereth says.

"It was unfair." Chesed says gently. "It was cowardice on our part because some part of us needed her to be how she presented."

"He volunteered, he did volunteer. I don't know if it's because he wanted her to live or because he wanted meaning but...." Lisa murmurs.

"None of us could've stopped her. Especially once she realized Lisa was right." Kali finishes.
Kukuru Kukuru's never really thought about the Seed of Light project before. She's only known it up to this point as the entire reason behind Lobotomy Corporation's existence, but the specifics never crossed her mind until now. She listens quietly as Ayin speaks of Lisa and the nature of the project, pursing her lips slightly as she takes it all in with a a disconcerted noise from the back of her throat. None of the changing mindscape stops her from doing what she's always done since she started helping at the facility, as she's still throwing around healing nanites to keep her friends, family, and everyone in between as healthy as possible.

Unlike all those other times, however, her skull feels like it's about to burst from everything she keeps hearing and all the thoughts swirling inside because of that. She had known that the Sephirah had already died in their past lives, but Elijah telling everyone about the Sephirah's nature to do all this work, to go through so much more heartache, to endure the Meltdowns knowing their ultimate fate finally hits her now when it never quite did before.

"You've all been working like this... Struggling through all these loops all this time, even though... You knew you'd never see it?" Kukuru murmurs, tears welling up in her eyes as she starts graspging the depth of their dedication to the project, to each other, and to Carmen. "That's... Oh, you're all too good. That's too good for..."

". . . only the people who most deserved to live could die in order to plant it."

She feels a twinge of guilt for even letting her thoughts wander that far. Even though she knows that was in the midst of Ayin's despaired thoughts, she can't help but feel that way herself after what she had seen in just one snapshot of the Smoke War. Or was it A Smoke War, from the way Benjamin had spoken about it? Swallowing down the gnawing pit in her gut, Kukuru goes to open that door with another muffled noise of distress, watching again as Carmen's demeanor here contrasts so sharply with what she's seen of her in the past.

"What... What was Lisa right about?" Kukuru turns to Lisa instead of Kali at that, looking like she doesn't really want to know the answer, but still asking about it anyway. She resumes doing her rounds with the group afterwards, checking on their wounds and healing them, although it seems more mechanical than the way she usually does it. She needs to do something with her arms, just to let some of that growing tension out.
Lilian Rook     '... Is that so. The greatest man in the City... is still of the City. Was Carmen also of the City, or not?'

    "Of course she wasn't." Lilian spits the words, with the vehement energy of them being obvious, and the tired hoarseness of them being tragic. "She was something else. You knew that. You all did. She glowed in a way that felt like taking a breath for the very first time when you were around her. I can tell just by the way you talk about her." she says, sliding her hands back off the desk, hanging her head briefly back towards the orchestra as the office melts.

    "She was something the City couldn't spew up if it tried, and she was something it couldn't swallow, either. She couldn't stand it, in such a different way from everyone, because she was something different. She saw things that you couldn't because even as she navigated it, she saw it all from the outside in. The City was something unnatural to Carmen, imposed upon people; but you can only see it as 'the way things are'."

    'All this talk of sacrifices and their worth, and our grand, beautiful goal! How can I take it seriously?! In the end, it wasn't worth consideration how much *I* sacrificed! I lost the world when I lost her!'

    Lilian can't get a word in edgewise with the pounding of the organ. The exact words she uses are lost. She amplifies her voice with magic the second time, out of the damning need to not be drowned out by Ayin. "The world doesn't give a shit about how much you sacrificed! It doesn't care about fair! But if you're the only one who can't bear it, when everyone else could, then you're rotted through by the City that you're closer to than Carmen because it'll tell you that you deserve the sun and the moon for being its special little boy!"

    "Fuck you Ayin. Even between us; me and you; you're the only one who can't seem to resist what it's offering."

    'The most worthy, dying for the sake of the least. What kind of foundation is that for a dream?'

    Lilian lets her voice, and the spell to her throat, drop when the final note rings out. Her shoulders rise and fall with the exertion of yelling. She sweeps her hair back into place as she catches her breath, then pulls at the collar of her formal outfit, not made for this sort of thing. The shaking, the noise, the wasting of breath, all make her feel lightheaded.

    "The same as every other dream." Lilian sighs, clearly exasperated, and perhaps just a little disgusted; at herself, and the commisserating edge that creeps into her voice. "Miracles happen, dreams come true, because someone was special enough to make it real, instead of wallowing in mediocrity and misery. Everything good in the world is carried on the back of the person who deserved the pain least."

    "In that regard, you're not special. I'm not either. I choose to get hurt about it because I couldn't live with the shame of being like everybody else. Can you?"
Lilian Rook     'I'll be remembered as the one who made the choice and had to live with it; the cold, rational, man of science with a heart shut off to the world, able to weigh the scales and come away with the determination to slaughter some to save the others.'

    Lilian takes a deep breath. Her ears are ringing, so she closes her eyes to center herself. It doesn't stop her from seeing the gore-slicked cogs on the inside of her eyelids anyways. Blood and gears mean something else to her, but the way they present in Ayin's mindscape tells her everything she needs to know about him.

    The exhaustion he's carrying. His disgust with the project. The fatigue that settles in once blood and guts turn into so much ketchup on the walls and you can't even feel the bleakness anymore without a shred of light to contrast it against. It's a shame her job is to convince him of something else. She has to search deeper within herself to do it.

    "Those who die for the greater good hath their reward. The many outweigh the few. The righteous outweigh the unjust. Stay thy hand not for unnecessary persons." she says, rote and measured. "That's something I believe. Even though I didn't come up with it. And even though my heart hates it to death." says Lilian, opening her eyes again to test her own steadiness. "Because the single shittiest thing about people, is that they all believe that everything they're doing is justified, that all the costs they incur will be worth it, and that every lie they tell and sacrifice they make is a moral one."

    "And because nobody wants to know anything about each other, no one agrees on anything, and every single person pursuing every single moral end is constantly smashing into everyone else and accomplishing nothing. And because the ends that justified them can never come about, all that's left are the means; nothing but justified misdeeds as far as the eye can see, until they're piled up so staggeringly high they can only be measured in corpses, and all that's left is shit."

    Lilian presses a hand to her face, rubbing her eye in agitation and then sliding it back over the trace of her scar. "So I choose to believe those things, even when I don't agree, so that even a single person might decide to align the same way for a moment, and our actions might actually mean something instead of just cancelling out into the brownian motion of humanity."

    'But the calm way she talked about it... it was as if it wasn't my concern at all. That I was the one person in all the City that she wasn't doing it for.'

    "Do you even believe in Carmen? Do you believe in fucking anything? If she meant anything at all to you, then you'll make the shitty sacrifice that isn't even worth it, just so that someone, anyone, is helped by any of this, and it wasn't all just another waste of time and life."

    Lilian exhales. Exasperated. Exhausted. Frustrated. Angry. The slightest bit pitying. "There's no way for you to get partial credit, Ayin. Believe me because I've tried. It's all or nothing. Looking from the outside in, nobody can tell 'you tried and failed' from 'you didn't try at all'. You execute one thing perfectly, or you might as well not have bothered at all."
Lilian Rook     'The very power that keeps us moving and lets us chat like this... is Cogito, the Light that we've drawn from the collective unconsciousness.'
    '...Yeah we were dead before we met you. At some point it felt like you wanted to save us too but... We already made others pay the price for this, it wouldn't be right for us to not pay it too. Least, if we had to.'
    'It'll be like we fell into a peaceful endless slumber. At least, that's the theory.'


    Lilian takes one more deep breath, to summon up what she'll need shortly; and for a while after that. The change of stage has taken her out of her grad uniform. She's wearing her armour again. Her hand is resting on her planted sword like an old and trusted stuffed bear.

    "I meant what I told Carmen. I gave my word, absolute." Lilian says, softly. "I'll complete the project even if I have to kill you. Sometimes, just before the end, we become the ones who aren't necessary."
Timespace Riders      "I love Woz. And I care about Angela, Petra, the Agents and all the Sephirah. Even the people in the City that I haven't met, I still want them to be happy and safe. I know from experience I can't always give that to them. There's an Agent right now who's gone because of me. Because I was selfish. ...But I still have to try, for the people who aren't gone."

    Would you mind informing them all of the fate of the Sephirot?

    Sougo sighs shakily. This shoe was bound to drop eventually. It's good that he's already had the chance to talk about it with someone who's smart about that kind of thing.

Could you ask people to spend their lives on something like that, just for the chance that things will be better for the ones who come after? Just for the chance that the people who come after you can know something other than hard soil and burning sun?
Until that tree can answer the question itself, and it may never, you have to make even more than a tree, but a place worth being near that tree, to draw the help you'll need. A tree's not a bad dream, but like you said - *can* you ask people to spend their lives for that? You've met Haru - heard him. You know the answer.

    "Don't bother telling me what I already know, Elijah," says Sougo, still focused on Ayin.

    "They're already giving you so much. The least you could do is stop ignoring them and acting like you're the only person who's given anything up, or gone through anything, to be here."

    "That's not an 'imposition.' Any leader should be able to do that, much less a good one, and especially one who's asking as much of the people following him as you are. I'm not scorning you for mourning her."

    "She touched every single person she spoke to even for a few minutes. The signs of her presence are everywhere around you, even inside of you. But you're trying so hard to keep the version of her you made up in your head alive that you see less and less of the real her every day."

    "The fact that you can't save them... that doesn't excuse you from being kind to them."
Rita Ma      Rita's the one to open the office door for Carmen, if nobody else does. Even hardened and tense as she is, a little startle-breath catches in her throat when she tries to make eye contact and instead finds scribbled lines.

     Even in her absence, everything's about her. Everybody circling her shadow. And the more gone she is, the more about her it gets. ... I don't think I've lost enough people to get it.

     "This has all gotta be pretty distressing huh?"
     "A little," Rita mumbles behind her mask, re-checking its seal while holding Kali's bloody arm. She swallows. It's distracting. Not as distracting, though, as having nobody to hold onto. "It'd be worse if I knew Mr. Ayin." Quieter: "Or cared about him, really. I just want things to go okay for all of you."

     ... Unfortunately, it won't.

     Rita stiffens as she listens to Elijah. She draws in a tight breath, eyes Ayin to see if he'll correct her- but she knows he won't. It has the ring of truth, even before Kali confirms it.

     "...Yeah we were dead before we met you. At some point it felt like you wanted to save us too but..."
     Her hand squeezes Kali's, and trembles. Her eyes drop to the floor. Above her mask, her cheeks grimace, silently resenting Elijah for sounding so perky about it.

     "You sound happy, almost. If you ever could've been saved... would you want to be?" Rita's nose burns. She rubs at her eyes with an un-bloodstained hand, trying to wipe their mistiness away.

     "Don't tell me you're tired of being alive yet, Ms. Gebura. If you were just letting me enjoy it until we had to part, then I forgive you. But if you let me get attached to you while you were hoping to die, that's mi--mean to me." She stumbles, for just a second.

     "I'll complete the project even if I have to kill you."
     Behind Lilian, Rita nods her assent. To make a better City... to reward the work of Noon, and Shajo, and Petra and Cinder, and all the other employees... she'll help make it happen. But the wind's been taken out of her sails.
Hibiki Tachibana     It's just a coincidence, that Hibiki happens to be on a sort of equal wavelength with the solemn and choking dirge that Ayin is playing. It doesn't have to passively smother the air from her lungs or make her stomach twist into knots, because she'd probably be feeling that way anyway. Well, maybe that's why she has any input here at all.

    She doesn't mind not being directly acknowledged; watching him out of the corner of her eyes, the bloodied and bruised fingers struggling to play on, the shuddering shift of pages into standing and pulling his mindscape back together, even if it's just for the moment...

    ...say enough. She pushes back up to her feet as well, giving Sougo an uneasily silent look before her focus goes to Ayin and the clockwork Carmen - just to close her eyes as the surroundings change yet again.

    ...

    For the first time since entering Ayin's head, similar to a few of the others, her own mental perception changes somewhat. It's not a very dramatic alteration; her usual tanktop-jacket-cargoshorts combo traded out for a much more plain gray hoodie and black shorts. In the place of her heart-shaped hairpins, red clips sit instead.

    If she noticed getting so caught up in Ayin's engulfing gravity well of deep and deeper anguish, that's written all over his own physical appearance now, she doesn't comment on it. Standing at the side of the somewhat familiar Architecture office, her half-shut eyes follows the censored-out Carmen, attention half on her and half on Ayin's words.

    But the calm way she talked about it... it was as if it wasn't my concern at all. That I was the one person in all the City that she wasn't doing it for.

    "...I wonder why," she murmurs, and it doesn't sound rhetorical. "...Because you were the one who could see things for how they were. Maybe."

    Though, like a delayed hit...

    So if that power is spread out across The City--that means the very power that keeps us bound to the mortal coil, well, it's going to be gone. It'll be like we fell into a peaceful endless slumber. At least, that's the theory.

    Her exhausted-looking eyes widen somewhat, moving between Malkuth, the rest of the Sephirah, Hod...

    "... ...It'll be it, for all of you...? The work'll be done, and then...?"
Flamel Parsons     Flamel returns to this office, though not the real office. The one saturated with doom, gloom, pain, death. He takes in the nature of what has been happening. The death of Enoch, the pall of despair, the shaken faith in Carmen and the profound agony of commitment to a project like this. How can he interact with such a fixed point here? This is pure memory and there's no way of manipulating it like the hypotheticals.

    "Looking from the outside in, nobody can tell 'you tried and failed' from 'you didn't try at all'."
    He pushes forward. Lilian's words are something to wield. "You won't see it any other way either. You don't want to die as someone who had a shaken faith. That's not the person you want to pass on, you'll hate that and you know it. The one who passes on has to be someone who would want to live in the world you're going to make. So," He braces, starting to push against all this. "You have to think. You have to imagine. You have to see what happens if you plant seeds on this foundation for this dream."

    He strides behind the desk, to charts and screens there. "This can't change. What happened can't change. *Reality* can't change. But you have to still want something beyond what happened." Planting his hands against the screen, he widens it like he widened the photos in the files. Abstractions of needs and fulfillments are turned, for him, to wide landscapes of scrambling, leaping, and running. He's drawing from the hypotheticals of the seed of light, using the idea of it in Ayin's mind to force metrics to rise to meet needs or fall to meet goals, to create a dream of an impossible world -- namely, one where this hadn't happened. A fixation, a wish for something that can't be. The sort of thing that gets one's mind off of the shit state they're in, and prevents the pain of despair.

    "You're right. This is unfair. It's awful. And it'll be more awful. But don't tell me about how you never should have done this. Don't tell me about how, having done this, your misery is too much. None of those things are what you *want*. What you *want* is the dream where everything goes well."

    "But you're trying so hard to keep the version of her you made up in your head alive that you see less and less of the real her every day."
    Flamel tries to work with what Sougo is putting down. "That's what Carmen teaches, right? To dream and want in an impossible way, so hard and so fully that it changes the world that made it impossible? Hold it in your mind in *all* the details. Imagine the people who don't have to worry about day-to-day stresses, or the people who didn't have to agonize about difficult choices. Imagine the *real Carmen* in that world, a Carmen who doesn't have to fight against the City, or worry about any of the people she knew. Imagine a Carmen whose only desire was to have nice meals, or interesting stories, or a fun trip out to the town. Don't think about Carmen the self-sacrificing saint. Keep the *impossible* Carmen in your mind. The one who never had to worry about anything to begin with. The saint as she is in the garden, not the kingdom of man."

    Forcing the metrics of this world to shift to hypotheticals, he tries to generate this mental image of a world where everything was fine, a fragile, brittle concept, an impossible dream. It should be sharp enough to cut through suicidal despair. But a blade so brittle will break before long. "And *hold that in your heart more than the wish to die!*"

    "Because you were the one who could see things for how they were."
    "...And stop holding it against her. That she could confide in you in a comfortable way. That she wasn't gentle with you too. That she could let the walls down for a moment. That she believed in you, enough to dream of a world where it wouldn't put anything at risk to speak plainly." Flamel grumbles when he exits the metrics.
Sarracenia      Sympathy for another is not one of Princess Sarracenia's strong points. Having it forced on her as her body is shaken by the power of the now rather unnerving pipe organ makes her mad...but as she sympathizes with Ayin the anger is tempered with sadness. Tears appear in her eyes quite quickly. The princess has never been good at containing her emotions.

     'If the Seed of Light reaches completion, then...'

     "No..." Sarra says. "If you complete it after so much sacrifice and after enduring such sorrow...then you will be hailed as a hero. If the City is truly saved by it, improved by it, then...well, the histories of many worlds are full of times people overlooked massive cruelties and crimes if the actual greater good was served."

     Sarra huffs. "That is not an endorsement, mind you. It just means it would still be foolish to let the project die now, since if it does then you will be remembered as a failure who did all of those things without ensuring his or his love's dreams come true."

     The scene resets, and Sarra rubs at her eyes for a few moments due to the pressure behind them. She watches Carmen and listens to the narration with a melancholy expression thanks to the effects of the organ. "If she was calm when she talked to you about it, it was because she trusted you to finish her work and believed you were strong enough to do so. Which, you were. You held out this long, and we are now on the brink of seeing it succeed. With one final effort, it could be finished. And you could follow her footsteps by being the martyr that we can follow to the project's completion."

     'The nature of the Seed of Light is that only the people who most deserved to live could die in order to plant it. The most worthy, dying for the sake of the least. What kind of foundation is that for a dream?'

     Sarra gives Ayin a confused look. "What do you mean? That is how the most enduring foundations are made! It has to be made by the strongest individuals. If it was made by the weakest the foundation itself would also be weak. Their strength will fill those they have sacrificed themselves for, and the weak will become stronger in spirit even if not in body, thus making the foundation last for ages. It is the entire reason I am seeking to be strong! To inspire hope in others, to help others see that there -is- a better way and that anyone can do it if they try!" Sarra's voice is full of conviction as she says this, her hands even clenched into fists in front of her chest. "I became a Fixer to help fix this City, and all of us here intend to do just that!"

     Sarra realizes that may not be true and looks around, but since Angela is not here she nods in reaffirmation of it.

     'That's right, we are long dead.'

     Sarra knew that many of the Sephirah were already dead. She didn't realize it was all of them, but she is not too surprised to hear it. She -is- surprised to hear that they will not last once the Seed of Light is finished, and her head turns to Hod." ...I see...so that is what you meant."

     Already tearing up from the mindgames of the organ, Sarra joins Kukuru in crying. The princess pulls out a red handkerchief to cover her mouth, trying not to actually sob. It only works somewhat. "...if what you all say is true, then we -must- find a way to let you experience a full day outside before you go. See a sunrise, a sunset. Enjoy a festival. Have a spa day." A sniffle escapes the princess. "And...we will build a proper memorial for you somewhere. If somehow we cannot bring you back or keep you around."
Sarracenia
     'Those who die for the greater good hath their reward. The many outweigh the few. The righteous outweigh the unjust. Stay thy hand not for unnecessary persons.'

     Sarra hates that saying. She is more than a little surprised to hear that Lilian hates it, though. Her eyes go wide as she hears that, and she ends up listening quite intently to the rest of what Lilian says. It is hard for the princess to keep up with everything Lilian is saying, but...did they just agree on something? or maybe almost agree?

     'I meant what I told Carmen. I gave my word, absolute.'

     Sarra is not ready to swear she will kill someone, but she is happy to add, "And when Lilian gives her word, she keeps it. Even unto her own destruction, I think."
Petra Soroka "... Anyone except my brother, I guess. He seemed excited."

    Ayin leans on one arm of his office chair, looking past everyone to fixate his eyes on the scribbled-Carmen calmly diagraming dotted severance lines through a figure drawing of herself. He pushes up his bangs, forehead resting in his palm, crushed and barely managing to plod one word after the other.

    "... I wish he hadn't been. If Enoch had been just a little worse, more scared of being offered up as a test subject... I know Carmen couldn't have followed through with him. And if not for the push from losing him, then using herself...."

    He buries his eyes in his hand. Carmen silently pins a stapled set of papers onto the corkboard, detailing the next steps to take with Kali's EGO trials. "... It all only ever gets worse. Every event, every year, every domino that falls. It all trends downwards forever, inescapably, just like everything else in this godforsaken City. We were happy for a time, and in that time, I somehow convinced myself that everyone should have memories like these, with people like these. The other Carmens and Benjamins of the City, wherever they are... even if I gave it to them, isn't this just proof that in the end, we're only worse off than where we began?"

"Everything good in the world is carried on the back of the person who deserved the pain least."

    "Too true, Director." Ayin sighs deeply, a hoarse edge entering his voice. "I would like to say that this is only insincere venting, that it will pass and I'll forge on to the rational path, the proper path. After all: if not being the one whose cold heart can judge the necessary sacrifices and move on, then why was I placed in charge of it all?"

    "... Why was I placed in charge of it all." He repeats, exhausted, side-eyeing to avoid looking at anyone. "I, who didn't share her ambition until we met. Perhaps the Ayin of my youth could have carried her legacy on without a care, but as she was my salvation, so too was she my ruin. The people of this world... if I could view them as purposeless, then the math done with their bodies would be so much simpler."

"Looking from the outside in, nobody can tell 'you tried and failed' from 'you didn't try at all'."

    Ayin silently parts his lips, trying to come up with a justification, and only faintly wheezing instead. "... Wouldn't that be the worst thing? I can't even stomach it. That this was all for no reason at all."

"If she was calm when she talked to you about it, it was because she trusted you to finish her work and believed you were strong enough to do so. Which, you were."
"...Because you were the one who could see things for how they were. Maybe."


    "Trust in me... that I could follow through to a world where I was guaranteed to be miserable." Without uncovering his eyes from where they're buried in his hand, Ayin reaches out his other hand to wordlessly take the papers Carmen offers to him, right on cue. The mindscape hasn't always been here, but the memory has, and he knows the timing will be the same every time. It was reality, and reality can't change. "In that sense, it would be nonsensical to comfort me at all. My death warrant was signed and sent off to the reaper the moment I fell in love with her, and I wouldn't give that up for anything. I...."
Petra Soroka "None of those things are what you *want*. What you *want* is the dream where everything goes well."

    Ayin looks up at Flamel's projections, the imaginary images that Carmen isn't *really* drawing on the whiteboard, but in emotional effect, is. The scene of her death is a scene where she could read stories to Enoch and Lisa in a house away from the Outskirts. The fantasy world where he and Benjamin and Daniel could chat about upcoming projects, and Carmen would pop up from behind the couch and cheerfully shout her own input. An impossible world where 'people' could just live, and a Carmen-who-isn't-Carmen could live among them.

    He shudders and squeezes his eyes shut, tears leaking out. He doesn't manage to say anything for a full minute, then clumsily, unsteadily, pushes his chair back and stands up. Turning away so that his undignified state isn't as visible, he lifts his chin up and drops his hand over his mouth, shaky breaths whistling through his fingers.

    "... A-ah. There it is. I see." He doesn't specify what he means, but it's fairly obvious.

    After a minute, he turns and walks out of the office, through the open door that Carmen came through. Behind him, the office starts to warp and melt, disintegrating into the blackness all around.

    Then, the second door. It's inevitable what this one could be, and it's easy to know even before touching the handle that there won't be any catharsis from seeing what's behind it, but that disheveled Ayin is here too, loitering in the infinite hallway leading up to this door that fades into darkness. If Petra were here, this is a door that she's opened dozens of times before, but she's not, and if it were easy, then Ayin wouldn't feel understood.

    Someone has to open the door.

    Just as that someone's hand touches the handle, Ayin, who had been holding himself back and dreading this next step forwards, makes a sound and reaches out his hand. He grasps Lisa's shoulder, pulling her back. "You don't need to see this, Lisa. You, of everyone... probably understand the most, already."

    He struggles through something, looking away from both Lisa and the other Sephirot, hand tightening on her shoulder. Eventually he works out, like the words are unfamiliar in his mouth, "You're... old enough to decide on your own. I won't stop you if you choose to go in, but you don't have to."

    The steady drip of water of water is audible through the dull metal door, and it creaks heavily when opened. Ayin follows behind, slouching with his hands in his labcoat pockets, as familiar with this room as he was with his office. A bathroom, fairly simple, with a pale arm draped over the side of the tub, blood running out of horizonal gashes down the forearm, over the wrist and dripping off the fingers onto the tile.

    Carmen is sprawled in the tub, eyes closed. Her neck is twisted at an uncomfortable angle, cheek pressed against the tub faucet, scalpel slipped from her bloody fingers to fall into her lap. Despite the deep gouges and the muddy venal river of blood painting the floor, her chest still moves feebly, so little that it's hard to feel even with your hand right up to her chapped lips. Ayin steps in after the Elites, eyes on Carmen's face-- unscribbled, but with her eyes closed and inaccessible.

    "She stepped into the bath herself. Slit her wrists herself. Hurling herself off the cliff only so that gravity would inexorably do the last of the work for us, without needing any of our consent. Sometimes I wonder if she chose to do it this way because the call was too strong to ignore, or because she knew she would hesitate at the last moment if given the chance."
Petra Soroka     "I suppose I took after her example by creating X. What good is Ayin if he can't follow through on the project? What good is Carmen if she can't? Is that all we are worth?" The steady drip-drip of blood echoes in the otherwise flat silence when Ayin stops talking. The pool of blood blots out the tile floor, rising like rainwater. Ayin almost sounds wistful, as he looks into the mirror above the sink. "Kicking open that door... it was the only time I've ever had to 'beg'."

    "Nonetheless. What came next." Ayin shuffles through the Elites to the bathtub, gingerly leaning over to pick up the bloody scalpel with two fingers. He spins it around in his hands to offer out the handle for someone to take hold of. "For the project, I violated her body with my own hands. Because there was no saving her, instead I butchered her. The birth of the Seed of Light happened here, in this gore-slicked lavatory, as Carmen took her last delirious breaths before I sawed through the ligaments of her ribs and peeled her open. Plant the Seed yourselves, if you can stomach it."

    None of the hands passing around the surgical tool to work on Carmen need to be medically skilled. The lines the scalpel follows through her flesh seem to draw themselves, slitting her open and peeling back handfuls of flesh and yellowed adipose tissue, working nerves out of their protective sheathes with the tip of the blade. Each cut drains more blood into the bathroom, filling it implausibly up to your ankles, your knees. Carmen is gradually reduced to a hunk of flesh, a cadaver from which a ghoulishly angelic web of nervous system is lifted, the thing that floats in the Well below the Extraction Department.

    With the blood now up to his waist, sloshing over the rim of the tub, Ayin's own arms are covered in gore up to his elbows, even though he wasn't doing the work on Carmen this time. He touches a fingertip to the fractal end of a branch of nerves, almost like holding her hand. "... When the facility is destroyed, and the world moves on, her corpse will stay here forever. None of us will leave, I suppose, but Carmen... even more than myself, I want her to be remembered. Not as... this... but as herself. But I have no choice but to remember this."
Angela Elijah is flustered a bit when Sougo says he already knows. "Well! It's still good to get everyone on the same page! I know Angela's been sharing a bit here and there but I hardly know to which extent!" She seems to at least assume Angela spilled the beans to Sougo. And Benjamin seems to be presuming she spilled the beans to Lilian even though he doesn't speak it up--his face isn't hard to read when he has one.

''You've all been working like this... Struggling through all these loops like this, even though... You knew you'd never see it?''

"...Even before our various demises, we knew that even if the Seeds were planted without a hitch, it could be some time before they properly sprouted. We would have had to do 'Meltdowns' in some other way."

Lilian puts forward that Carmen couldn't have been from The City. If she hadn't literally, where did Carmen come from? Maybe it doesn't matter, or maybe it's lost forever. She had a spectacular education, how did she get it? If it's more figurative, how did she end up different?

Though the Sephirah do not overtly sign on to Lilian's words, her words seem to embolden them, make them stand up a little straighter and more confidently.

"It's all or nothing." Kali agrees.

''I'll complete the project even if I have to kill you.''

"We won't get in your way." Kali assures Lilian... But Lilian knows full well that it's not the Sephirah here that she has to worry about. Angela wasn't pulled in. What is SHE planning when all this is going down, the first time in her life she's unobserved by her handlers?

''I just want things to go okay for all of you.''

Kali smiles. She can't help herself. "I'm glad you get to see the real me in person, though--" She grimaces as Rita speaks to Elijah but Rita has a demand and--words for her too, and she's the first one who finds what she's looking for because she has been expecting this conversation for a while.

"...At first, I guess I was ready for it. But then I kept running into this kid who...I couldn't help but getting attached to. First I thought 'geeze, this kid looks so out of her depth like she's gonna break if I shove her too hard'--but you kept showing me how strong you were." She jabs a finger towards Rita's heart. "...I guess at some point I stopped wanting to die and instead wanted to see you live." She rubs at her neck, awkwardly, not really accustomed to emotional honesty in such a direct way. "'Course I don't wanna die anymore."

She squints her eyes tight. She forces herself to not say 'but it's the way it has to be' and instead adds, "Sorry for keeping quiet. Even I get scared sometimes." She rubs at her head, taking a moment to glower at Elijah.

"Well... I'm happy to be helpful." Elijah says. "I'm happy to have meaning in my life. I'd rather have an ending with meaning than an eternity without--but it'd be pretty crazy to say an eternity of meaning wouldn't be the preferred outcome but how many people get to make that choice? Especially in a place like this."

Hod--Michelle--looks towards Hibiki awkwardly and then lightly bonks her head with her fist and makes the 'ehehh' face. "Sorry, Bikki. I'm really glad we got to be friends though." Though despite saying this, her heart isn't quite in those words. "Make sure to live your life to the fullest, okay? Sometimes you don't realize how fun life can be until after it's over, haha..."

Flamel speaks of the impossible dream. A bit of light enters the Sephirah's eyes once more at the encouragement to look at the ideal even while knowing the reality.
Angela ''...I wish he hadn't been.''

"You're probably right. I don't think either of you were the sort to kill a scared child. 'Least not at that point." Lisa admits. "If I learned anything from all my labor, it's that making things better is hard work and sacrifice. But even if you do your very best, sometimes bad things will still happen. It's really unfair." Lisa says.

''I, who didn't share her ambition until we met.''

"Plenty of people here paid the price without even knowing what ambition we were reaching towards. At least we can step forward with the knowledge of our intentionality," Daniel says, a sheepish smile on his face. "I wasn't the best person to be in charge of anything either--I was an 'Elite' just like you. It is a silly little dream, but it's still worth carrying forward."

"You were always a capable man. She let you see sides of herself she wouldn't show the rest of us. Perhaps that is why she thought you could pull through in ways that the rest of us couldn't. Maybe just as the others had an idealized view of her, she had an idealized view of you." Benjamin suggests.

Lisa wonders, briefly, if Angela resents her. She always activated the crusher herself... A world of a new family. It could've been nice, Lisa knows, but that life feels an eternity away.

But before she can dwell on it further. Ayin moves for the second door. Lisa is suddenly gripped by a nausea, a fierce terror that resonates from her heart and moves to her extremities as her fingers shake despite not having those impulses for a long time.

The door needs to open.

She doesn't want him to open it. She'd rather open it herself.

She looks towards Kali with Rita and then swallows. She always acted like she was the responsible and reliable one. Who are the responsible and reliable people SHE ended up looking up to?

And there's only two Sephirah here who really grew up in LobCorp, who needed to be 'old enough' to look through the second door. Michelle reaches and takes Lisa's hand.

"We'll go together, okay Lisa?"

Lisa nods once and pushes forward and...

Experiences she never had, the consequences of a 'kill yourself' hit Lisa and she stumbles, sliding her feet across the moist bathroom floor. Michelle holds her tight so she doesn't fall. "Michelle... I don't think I can do this..." Lisa whispers.

Giovanni takes the scalpel from her, standing tall for the moment.

"I owe it to her. This gonna satisfy you, Ayin? How much longer are you expecting us to work for you without even getting overtime?" They say as they get to work. Lisa breathes out a little sigh of relief, tears welling up in her eyes, unable to turn away as Michelle holds her tightly.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel follows. He watches the woman dying. He watches the man mourning. He watches the butchering. And when he's handed the scalpel, his expression is... a smile. Unaffected? Unempathetic? God, no. A compassionate smile years held, optimism and positivity unending, and it doesn't break here. He takes the scalpel and he cuts.

    He thinks about torturing Lilian and Persephone, or harassing the Kirenais, or killing-and-replacing Love, or fracturing Petra's mind to fracture her walls, or leaving Roy with no pulse for a long, agonizing minute -- or this, driving an empty and shallow man through the worst toxic sentiments in order to bring him over the finish line. He has done this a half-dozen times before. He didn't break then, and he doesn't break now. He'll optimize his guilt to precise metrics later.

    Know this above all else: Flamel Parsons is not a good person. He is disqualified from both terms, in a deliberate effort on his own part. Let any who see his absent response condemn him with no uncertainty in their heart. The surgery is quick, effective, and leaves him bloodstained. And he speaks only friendly, compassionate words, meant to poison the man with enough stimulation and energya and inspiration to survive long enough to move on.

    "When you move on, I'll administer the Sigmund Procedure." A firm, wide cut. "I will come to you with a simple question, asking you what wish you had, what kind of person you want to be when you die." A deep, staggered, forceful slice. "Whether you wish you'd done something else in this moment. Or if you wish Carmen had never walked in here, and done this." Blood spurts across his face, the pressure of a heart's pump driving a stain across half of his expression. "But the only way to move past this despair is to make an impossible wish, and for it to fail now, and for you to die with it in your heart."

    The compassionately smiling man adjusts his sunglasses, but doesn't wipe away the blood. "You got plenty of practice with her, Ayin. Plenty of practice. And she showed you how to do the very last part." He says. "So I know you can do it. I know you can. Wish for an impossibility. Wish for her to leave this facility, for you both to leave. Move on from the death. Wish for something you can't have, and maybe you never could have. Figure out that wish, and hold it. It's the only way forward."

    He passes the scalpel along. "She'll be remembered as herself that way, if you do. I can make sure of it." He turns to look at Ayin directly. "I'm an agent of a vast and ominous mind-control organization, after all!" Blood drips from his cheek as he beams, in total unwavering, absolute encouragement. Synthetic compassion, produced in a laboratory, designed to be felt towards anyone and everyone, forever.
Rita Ma      "...At first, I guess I was ready for it."
     Rita smiles back, in the way that only someone who's been ready-to-die can.

     "this kid who...I couldn't help but getting attached to."
     Her smile wobbles, achily. When Kali jabs a finger towards her chest, Rita reaches up and squeezes the taller woman's shoulder.

     A laugh turns into a little flutter in Rita's chest, turns into a hitch, and gets swallowed before it could turn into a sob.

     "Then that's okay. I didn't tell you either, Ms. Gebura, but... when there was the fight with the Queen... I really thought I was going to die too. I'd be sacrificing myself for the good of the world. Instead we got to have another year as friends, and..."

     Walking down the hall, she looks off to the side, fingers slipping from Kali's grasp.

     "... It hurts to be the one who's going to live, too," she mumbles guiltily. "But I get it. I do."


     Rita can't spare much sympathy for Ayin, who she's just met; who she only knows as a tormentor of Angela. But she can spare sympathy for Carmen. Whether she wants to or not.

     Stepping into the room, the scent of blood hits her like a wall even through her mask. She pulls it down around her neck just to gag into her hand. For the first time in years, that smell turns her stomach more than igniting it.

     Seeing that face, not unlike Angela's, makes her heart skip one beat. Seeing the slight rise and fall of her chest makes it skip two. The words buzz around her, barely-audible through her haze, until...

     "...instead I butchered her."
     Dilated eyes snap to Ayin. The words come slower. "... Oh. That's how it happened."

     "Plant the Seed yourselves, if you can stomach it."
     "I can," Rita says, but her tone isn't certain. She takes the scalpel first, and then kneels by the tub, taking difficult breaths.

     She starts with the arm; holding it steady with one hand, delicately gripping the scalpel like a pencil with the other. "I'm sorry," she says, staring into that life-drained face, as if Carmen were still in a state to feel pain.

     Scalpel touches skin. More blood oozes out. Rita forces herself not to look away from it. Her guts twist into knots.

     I've always done things like this. 'Sacrificing the few for the many'. Miss Rook talks about that, but she doesn't get it like I do. When the blood of the Busan's Upper Decks covered me, I didn't flinch. When it was me who had to die, I didn't flinch. The Seed could save the whole City. I'm sorry Carmen; I'm sorry Angela; it needs to happen.

     ... Why are my fingers shaking, then? Stupid. Stupid, stupid.

     Rita works her way up the right arm, revealing the ghostly-angel limb, and then around back to free part of the spine. Every tremor makes her face tense, inwardly rebuking herself, drawing tighter. And around when the blood is overflowing the tub to reach her knees, she hits her limit. Her gut drops, unable to decide whether to make her drink or throw up. She holds out the scalpel to everyone else, desperately, and looks away from it.

     "Someone else. Please." The next person's turn.
Sarracenia      The scene in the office does not mean much to Sarracenia. She just watches the rest of it without commenting further. She doesn't know enough and has little to no connection to the Sephirah except for the ones that want to kill her. She likes Hod, but doesn't really know Hod and Hod barely notices her.

     They move to the second door. Sarra has no idea what to expect and no idea why Lisa would not want to see it opened.

     When the door does open, Sarracenia gasps and her hands go to cover her mouth before she turns away. She finally understands why Ayin gave up. Why he couldn't find the will to honor Carmen's dream as completely as Sarra was yelling that he should have.

     The princess slowly turns back around, but it takes her a minute or so to fully look. She's rarely seen a dead person, much less one like this. Then she realizes...Carmen wasn't dead when they entered. Her chest was still moving...

     Sarracenia is overwhelmed. Tears flow freely from her eyes now as she listens to Ayin and the other Sephirah. "Oh god...Ayin..." she says, truly sympathizing with him now and second-hand traumatized by the memory. She has no idea how she might react if the person she loved did this after planting such lofty, idyllic dreams in her head. Even the thought has her crying in earnest.

     Then, her thoughts shift...and Sarra sees herself in the tub. She has been told to kill herself or that she should die or that she was going to be killed plenty of times. She's hit low points where she wondered why she was bothering to go on. Of course, in her mind it is even worse because she is uncertain who would even care if she ended up this way. She has no Ayin, no Sephirah, no Lilian or even a Petra. She has a few friends, but how much would they actually care? Are they even really her friends? One she rarely sees, one did something terrible and is for all intents and purposes not a friend anymore, and one may be using her as a shield against the Multiverse.
Sarracenia
     'Because there was no saving her, instead I butchered her. The birth of the Seed of Light happened here, in this gore-slicked lavatory, as Carmen took her last delirious breaths before I sawed through the ligaments of her ribs and peeled her open. Plant the Seed yourselves, if you can stomach it.'

     Sarracenia feels queasy. She takes a step back and her head shakes no instinctively as the scalpel starts getting passed around. Her suppressed sniffles take on more of an actual sob and she just stares in horror as Carmen starts getting dissected. If she doesn't do it, is she a hypocrite? Can she expect Ayin to carry through with this if she can't even do this part when she has no attachment to either him or Carmen? Is this really what had to be done for the project to be started?

     Sarra just stares, frozen, watching. Her horror grows as blood starts to fill the room, and she is very clearly on the verge of losing it as it creeps up over her body and her dress. She just keeps staring, sobbing in a mixture of sadness and horror.

     Rita holds out the scalpel and without thinking Sarra's hand moves. Slowly. Shaking like a leaf. It stops only a few moments later, then recoils back and Sarra coughs and turns to the side as she fights down the urge to vomit. "...just a memory...it is not real...just a memory..." she says to herself, almost chanting to herself.

     Her hand moves forward again, shaking no less than before. Her black velvet glove brushes the surgical steel and she yelps softly and recoils again. Having made it that far, some of her stubbornness returns. Sarra mmphs and takes the scalpel, tears still streaming down her face. With an angry grimace she moves to cut quickly and haphazardly, though the magic of the memory guides her hand. Sniffling and coughing and huffing through her tears, she at least contributes to one of the legs before revulsion grabs her again and she has to leap back and turn her head away, fighting her gag reflex once again and frantically waggling the scalpel for someone else to take.
Kukuru "If Enoch had been just a little worse, more scared of being offered up as a test subject..."

"Would that have really changed anything? If... If Carmen went in first, and if she had died wheeen... Before everyone's faith got shook up." Kukuru asks Ayin, her eyes still a little damp while she dabs at them with the back of her sleeve near her shoulder. "If everyone was still going full speed ahead and then that happened..."

She watches Carmen at work for several long seconds, then continues addressing Ayin without turning to him. "Or would it all still be going the same? It's never easy to lose a loved one, and losing someone when they're still in their prime before they've gotten dragged through all sorts of bad stuff... Then it just feels random and too sudden, you know? I dunno if I'd feel any better with that happening, especially not if I found out that there was another option later."

She closes her eyes for a moment, then taps a finger to her chin. "Then you might've just ended up like this again, but in a different order. I... Don't think that would've changed anything, dear. "

"Wouldn't that be the worst thing?"
"My death warrant was signed and sent off to the reaper the moment I fell in love with her, and I wouldn't give that up for anything."


"There's a lot of things that could've gone differently, but... You already sound like you get this way more than I do. So..." Kukruru circles around to the lean against a wall so she can Carmen at work, just watching her in an almost trancelike state. She needs to understand more about this person that Ayin had fallen in love with, that he'd been so enamored by to go through all this suffering, that everyone else followed knowingly into several of their own deaths.

"When you see her again, do you want her to know that you succeeded in what she trusted you with? Or do you want her to know that you didn't?"

Kukuru remains silent when Flamel shows those projections, although there's a strained look on her face as she feels her own heartstrings being tugged at. That really would have been the perfect ending to their project way back when, wouldn't it? That's certainly the ending Kukuru would have hoped for prior to knowing just how this would all turn out, but knowing that it's not has her getting misty-eyed again.

After wiping her face off on her sleeve once more and offering Sarracenia a fresh handkerchief to use in place of that red one, she watches Ayin as he exits the office, barely even flinching when the office disappears and the doors reappear. She listens to his narration, she watches the scene unfolding within the bathroom, and she strains to unsuccessfully hold back pain-filled noise in the back of her throat.

Ayin offers the scalepl. Kukuru steps up, but the Sephirah are faster. Flamel, Rita, and Sarracenia are faster. She sees Sarracenia's unspoken plea, and she finally pulls it together enough to take it from her while her eyes struggle to both open and stay shut at the same time. She doesn't want to look, but she knows she has to in order to understand. This would be so much easier with her claws, but this is how Ayin had to do it. It's not as though Kukuru's never done this before to save members of the Concord, to put them together, but this...

"... There really isn't any choice but to keep moving forward, Ayin. If not, all this-" She says, pausing briefly to inhale and unclog her nose eevn with the stench of so much blood waiting for her. "-would've been completely pointless. All this pain, all this... Terrible stuff you had to do. That she had.. Everyone had to do, just to make things better for people you'd never meet."

Kukuru swallows lightly, and she nods at Flamel. "Someone's gotta tell the story of what happened here. We can... We'll all have our own ways of doing it, but we'll do it for sure. You just need to make sure the story we're telling is about success, okay?"
Lilian Rook     'Too true, Director. I would like to say that this is only insincere venting, that it will pass and I'll forge on to the rational path, the proper path.'

    Now Lilian gets to be uncomfortable. Ayin looking so defeated affords her that luxury. "I've said worse." Lilian says, on edge. "When I've gotten like that."

    'The people of this world... if I could view them as purposeless, then the math done with their bodies would be so much simpler.'

    "I wonder if only Carmen sees them with any compassion at all." Lilian sighs, and then, in that moment, gives away the game. "I don't. I appreciate the people I've taken in to make Trídéag work, but of course they'd be loyal to me, after what I've given them. Ultimately, the way I'm going through with this is practically a bet with Carmen."

    "She believes that, once they're given the power to determine their own fate, the people of the City will come together, care for one another, lift each other up, and destroy the system that was rotting them inside out against their will. I believe that once they're given that power, they'll descend on each other like savages; a pack of frenzied wild animals leveraging everything they have to bite and claw and scrabble one step higher on the totem pole they can't think outside, throwing the City into an orgy of bloodshed that results in its total collapse. Either outcome will satisfy me. Either I can find hope for humanity in her answer, or finally sleep soundly knowing that I was right all along."

    '... Wouldn't that be the worst thing? I can't even stomach it. That this was all for no reason at all.'

    Lilian hesitates for a long time. Her fingers linger on her face, in the predictable spot. Her eyes turn down, then up to search the office, and back. Her hand squeezes her upper shoulder. She continues on with the trudging tone of a half-given confession, as if it were out of respect for a man on his deathbed.

    "That's what kept me from doing it. The idea that I'd go to my grave without anyone ever knowing what battle I was fighting, the enemy would get away with it, and people would only remember what they wanted to."

    The void isn't a relief, but it feels like one. The unshakable sense that she is watching this man's last desperate gasp for life be strangled out of him, and that she is complicit in it, for the sake of people she doesn't know, weighs on her. Were it anything else, anyone else, Lilian would stoke that fire and defend it against everyone else in the room. But the fact that Ayin was consigned to the gallows by this project already doesn't escape her. And so the door has to be opened, and Carmen has to be lying there, and Lilian has to look away from the pitiful sight of decline into death.

    'I suppose I took after her example by creating X. What good is Ayin if he can't follow through on the project? What good is Carmen if she can't? Is that all we are worth?'

    "As I said. Sometimes, right before we're done, we become the unnecessary ones, and we shouldn't stay our hands for ourselves."
Lilian Rook     Unfortunately she has to walk the walk as well. Handed a scalpel by Flamel, her fingertips press against the handle until they turn white. Lilian has a minimal aversion to corpses, but cutting open someone who's still alive, even in facsimile . . .

    No, knowing that she's already dead makes it easier rather than harder. It's just showing her determination at this point. The blade goes into flesh like her larger one has ten thousand times before. The blood spills, the face slips, and it becomes another equation solved by a blade; the only interactions that mean anything.

    'We won't get in your way.'

    "I'm still glad I met you, in particular, Kali." Lilian says. "I'm not certain how far I'd have gotten here, if I hadn't looked into a pair of eyes like mine."
Timespace Riders The other Carmens and Benjamins of the City, wherever they are... even if I gave it to them, isn't this just proof that in the end, we're only worse off than where we began?

    "No," says Woz with flat distaste. After a sigh, "Even a middling success is far from a failure. The faces present in this very room have shown smiles, sighs of relief and even laughter. Like rain traveling down the dunes of a desert, from time to time I see these things in Agents and even Clerks. Those expressions, those signs of inner peace, are as priceless treasures to me. Perhaps it is not the grand gesture which you imagined it would be--yet *someone* will benefit from it. As I said before, the tree is not the seed."

I know Angela's been sharing a bit here and there but I hardly know to which extent!

    "I've suspected it since we lost M.O.M.," Sougo answers with a sad smile. "I went to see him with Kukuru. After I talked with Angela and Benjamin about it, I started thinking about all the Agents who wouldn't make it. Then I started thinking about whether *you* guys would. I didn't know exactly what would happen, but I also didn't... think they'd turn you guys into those if they planned on you having normal lives again. This was... a possibility I considered. And I don't like it, but it's like Woz said--seeing you all happy even for a day is a lot better than seeing you miserable for tens and thousands of them."

    On the other side of the door, Sougo takes a shuddering breath.

    I never know how to handle this. If I should force myself to look, if I should look away. I don't want to handle it. Not that I want to run away, and plug my ears, and shut my eyes. I just don't want there to be any more people who are gone, whose being gone I have to 'handle.'

    Woz's hand, lightly placed on his shoulder, is grasped tightly.

    I hate looking at someone's face and not seeing them in it. I hate watching someone breathe and knowing there's nothing behind it.

Woz frowns bitterly as the blood begins to rise. He and Sougo both take their turns with the scalpel--to say that they're here for Angela, or for the City, and not to, would make them hypocrites.

But I have no choice but to remember this.

    "I've done it," he says shakily, hands bloody. "I helped plant the seed. Not for Carmen, not for you, or even the world, but for Angela, because without the seed there's no world where Angela gets to be free. And for the Sephirah, because if we don't get you through this, then they're right back to suffering along with her."

    "That doesn't mean I don't care about what happened to you, or what you gave up. If I didn't, then my hands wouldn't be shaking right now, and I wouldn't be feeling as sick as I am. I wouldn't be... about to cry, again, over somebody that I've never met."

    "Ayin... you live right here, in this moment, don't you? All of that stuff before was you trying to get past it by building on top of it. That's why... every time someone challenged it, everything started to melt and fall apart. None of that was as real as this moment, in your mind.

Wish for something you can't have, and maybe you never could have. Figure out that wish, and hold it. It's the only way forward.

     Sougo nods, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. "It's fine if this bothers you. It's fine if seeing someone you thought the world of that way hurt you this much. The fact that it does... well, that's probably why she wanted you for the project. But you can't *live* here, and still complete the project."
Hibiki Tachibana     'Course I don't wanna die anymore.
--but it'd be pretty crazy to say an eternity of meaning wouldn't be the preferred outcome but how many people get to make that choice? Especially in a place like this.
Sometimes you don't realize how fun life can be until after it's over, haha...

Sorry, Bikki.

    She doesn't have a response. Not right away, and not after a few seconds, unless you count blank staring and a few shifts of her mouth, as if to speak, before her head tilts down to stare at the office floor.

    For some time, even Ayin's voice - within the fathoms of his own mind - feel like it's distant. Only two things break through the haze of Hibiki's thoughts, briefly.

Miracles happen, dreams come true, because someone was special enough to make it real--
--What good is Ayin if he can't follow through on the project? What good is Carmen if she can't? Is that all we are worth?

    When she looks up again, her legs have carried her along with the others into the bathroom. Her eyes, still somewhat dilated from the gutpunch before, only constrict further at the sight. From the pool of blood beneath the limp hand...

    ...to the gouged wrists...

    ...and up more still, to Carmen's closed eyes.

    Up until now, she's had a one-sided empathy with Ayin. With the feelings that come with the unconsolable loss of something-- someone, you can't live without. With the feeling of grasping at the straws of something left to you, when you're barely the person to take it up. Even the unsaid desire of that impossible and ideal world... that could never be reality, when she is who and how she is.

    But this is one thing that has to be done to be understood.

    And if it were easy, then Ayin wouldn't feel understood.

    Every fiber and every instinct in her body fights against taking up the scalpel, when it comes her way. Logic like 'it already happened' or 'it's just a memory' has no place here. If logic was enough to take how much something like this hurt away, they wouldn't be here right this moment at all.

    Her next couple breaths come heavy - and then they level out again. A shaky hand, holding the implement, comes down towards the small remainder of flesh. It's not because she wants to. Her chest caves in on itself. She doesn't want to at all.

    It's because it's the only way to understand.

    And what she understands, after the fact, after what was said before by the Sephirah, her stomach twisting and mouth dry...

    ...is a fraction of what Ayin must've felt, doing it...

    ...And that, despite enough similarities to empathize with, the thing where the two of them differ - is what they're personally willing to give up and let become memory for the Seed of Light project to succeed.

    When she steps away, hand still shaking, she looks like she's going to vomit. And her focus is somewhere else, far, far past the walls of the room. Out of his mind, and into her own.
Angela It's made abundantly clear why X asked Flamel for help when he's being this horrifying. The guy seems so benign and encouraging sometimes, but then you see him like this. It's naturally Michelle who is the most weirded out by it, and Benjamin is--surprisingly to himself--the least. He had to face Ayin's end as part of his own Meltdown so now it seems like...formality.

''Then that's okay. I didn't tell you either, Ms. Gebura.''

"I was freaking out back at base, to be honest. I wish I could've been there to lend my hand, it was agony having to stay back and order Agents around and hope they could manage." And she lost half her team.

''It hurts to be the one who gets to live. But I get it. I do.''

Kali's heart shatters in a million pieces. "...A year of friendship isn't so bad. Some people never find real friends in their whole lives. It's them I pity the most. Even if they don't know what they missed out on." And she is there when Rita hits her limit, resting a hand on her shoulder to help steady her.

To be honest, none of the Sephirah expected Sarracenia had it in her. The fact that she's willing to do it helps steel the others' resolve, though Lisa can't take that scalpel at all. Kali gives Sarracenia a small nod of gratitude for taking the blade from Rita but isn't about to say thanks out luod. She has seen Kukuru tear apart bodies with her bare claws before, but somehow it feels wrong when Kukuru does so with a scalpel. Gabriel. stares at her as she does the bloody business.

Lilian then even voices she suspects that the project will only hurt people, actually, which isn't a great feeling when you planned your life and death around the results this project will achieve. Kali feels...strangely affected by it, even though they had plenty of naysayers before, because it comes from Lilian. And it's not just because she respects her as a warrior and a commander nor is it because she thinks she's entirely right. She has no idea how tumultous the journey forward will be, but she has to imagine there will at least be some tumult. She hopes it means more than satisfying a bet--but in the end, even if the project fails--Giovanni is correct that they can't just sit here forever endlessly looping.

"Glad I met you too, Lilian. I'm sorry that meeting me probably has all sorts of weirdos getting involved in your life, but some of them aren't so bad."

''I've suspected since we've lost M.O.M''

"it is pity. His body is stable. If only there was a way to have woken him up." Benjamin sighs, Yesod glumly nodding along.

"Yeah... that was never the plan. A return to normal life." Elijah does, at least, sound saddened that time. "But you're right. One good day is better than an eternity of bad ones."

''Not for Carmen, not for you, or even the world, but for Angela.''

Elijah opens her mouth to tell Sougo that Angela is a Sephirah too--but thinks better of it. A sudden uneasy feeling comes over her. She remembers one day when Woz and Sougo visited Angela and Angela was acting strangely afterwards, like a calm had come over her after a raging storm.

Michelle looks up to Hibiki as she approaches the Carmen. She swallows faintly.

And Garion, far in the back, emits a faint humming noise.

"...Don't forget... Like the Bird, this beast has three heads..."
Petra Soroka "But even if you do your very best, sometimes bad things will still happen. It's really unfair."

    Ayin's hand slides off his face, looking over his desk at Lisa. After a few seconds, he suddenly makes a hoarse laugh, doubling over to brace himself on his knees. "Oh, Lisa. This past year has made you really smart, hasn't it?" He takes a deep breath and sits up, resting a hand on his desk and digging his fingers into his palm impotently. "Sometimes I wish I hadn't missed it. But on the other hand... maybe if I was around, we wouldn't have made it this far at all."

"Maybe just as the others had an idealized view of her, she had an idealized view of you."

    Ayin sighs, defeated. In this miserably unkempt state, the smile that creeps onto his face feels both more sincere and less true. This is an Ayin that would normally never be seen outside of his stripped-bare and crumbling mindscape, except maybe to Benjamin, just like the subdued and resolute Carmen would never have stepped out of this office. It's not Ayin smiling, or listening to all of these words, so much as it is the face of a bleeding cut on his heart that never healed.

    "... You were always such a damned romantic. For her to think of me that way... to be that comfortable with me right up to the moment of her death.... It's better than someone like me, who was never meant to feel that kind of warmth, deserved. I would..." He trails off, eyes shifting. "... like, to live up to that, I suppose."

"That's what kept me from doing it. The idea that I'd go to my grave without anyone ever knowing what battle I was fighting, the enemy would get away with it, and people would only remember what they wanted to."

    Slightly teary-eyed, hunched over and woundedly vulnerable, Ayin shudders when taking a long breath in. "Maybe... fresh eyes on the project help, sometimes. If only to remind me of what I should already know. ... Thank you. I'm sorry."

    Then, in the bathroom, the site of Carmen's ad-hoc, fatal surgery. As the scalpel is passed around and the blood seeps up higher, Ayin can't possibly look 'pleased' at all, but the queasy-tense expression he has is easily readable as 'relieved' in some sense, as no one rejects their turn. In this most-vulnerable space in his entire mindscape, the centerpiece around so much of the blood and misery orbits, the sympathetic shuddering and retching reaches him better than almost anyone's words have before. 'Being hurt, too' is sometimes the only way to get through to someone.

"When you move on, I'll administer the Sigmund Procedure."

    "...I see." With the mind of a scientist, even a specifically psychic-adjacent one as he is, he does see, almost. Flamel's cheerfulness elicits a baleful glare, but the same part of him that built Angela and wrote her role in the Script has to acknowledge the value of a deeply unsympathetic doctoral role for harming your psyche in a very specific way that improves you as a person in the short time before your death. After all, it's what everyone else needed, and Angela could never have been allowed into this space.

    "After this, then. After it's all, finally... resolved. And in return... Carmen will be better remembered as herself, as long as her work benefits someone, somewhere. It wouldn't be 'her', if it didn't."
Petra Soroka "Ayin... you live right here, in this moment, don't you?"

    Ayin almost never looks away from the butchered remains of Carmen during the entire bloody scene. He can trace the path of the scalpel with his eyes before it moves, he knows each flutter of her breath, he exists more naturally in the deepening pool of blood than he does outside of it. That her face is visible and moving here, where it never has been before, gives off the impression that every other memory of her face is overwritten by this pale and silent one, compensated for in desperate yearning in some way or another, but never completely.

    "... I lived for years after this moment, before TimeTrack was engaged. Years, shambling forwards in time, while the other Sephirot dropped around me like flies, through the Smoke War and the establishment of Lobotomy Corporation as a Wing." How old is Ayin, actually? Thirty? When Carmen died, he couldn't have been any older than his mid-twenties. "But this... I never truly lived past this. Not past her."

    "That the world had gone dark, and my hand had flipped its switch. All the rest was... followthrough. Just followthrough, momentum; a man reduced to a stumbling, rotting machine, even without the Sephirah protocol."

    "I understand better than you might think, you know. I'm not as critically unaware of my own obsessions and flaws as some other parts of myself might lead you to believe. Of course, this room sunk its claws into me and burrowed into my thoughts, appearing in my dreams, shooting tremors in my hands: but in return, I gripped back. What kind of man would I be if I let it slip away? If this loss wasn't the most important, defining thing to the rest of my life, then it's as if she wasn't the most important to me. If my mind isn't built in such a way that all roads eventually lead to this room, then that means there could be a day where I follow a train of thought to its completion and pass her by entirely."

    "... I couldn't stand that. I couldn't live with myself. In the end, I was only a human, too."

"The fact that it does... well, that's probably why she wanted you for the project. But you can't *live* here, and still complete the project."

    Ayin falls silent, throat tensed shut. He stares at the corpse of Carmen, jaw tight, eyes bloodshot. Eventually, he hoarsely murmurs, barely audible, "Yeah."

    "There's... a third door, that wasn't in the story. Someone... if you could please...."

    The door on the far side of the bathroom isn't 'really' in the bathroom. There's no room it moves on to, in the literal building that this tragedy happened in, or in the structure of Ayin's mind. Opening the door causes the scene to melt away, swirling down the drain like so much blood.

Back to the concert hall. For what has to be the last time. It has to be the last time.

    What's left of the once-beautiful stage is near-unrecognizable and revolting. Lines and boundaries run together, gore leaks from the walls and oozes up from the floor. The furthest corner of the hall from the stage is corroded into the void, a hole that leads out into nowhere, with it eating further and further away at the remaining wood. Abstract bulging eyes and patches of brain matter replace where golden carvings used to decorate the space, gyri squirming in the corner of your vision. The organ's pipes have grown like mycelium to cover three of the four walls, spiraling into geometric eyes as a harsh, angular contrast to the wavering lines of the wood behind them.

BGM: https://looptube.io/?videoId=I2j3ZfwG1Xo&start=161.4816176470587&end=363&rate=1
Petra Soroka     And unlike before, neither the Elites or the Sephirot are on stage. Only the grand organ, its performer, and the mechanical conductor are left. Ayin, the 'whole' one, that isn't miserably decrepit or ostentatiously rich, plays a slow, ominous tune on the organ, deep, walking notes that gradually speed up and fall apart into runs and arpeggios of broken notes, up and down. There's almost a sense of peace to the scene, to Ayin playing alone to Carmen's direction, until his fingers slip across the keys mid-song, ending his playing abruptly with a discordant clang.

    When he stands up, past his rigid back, you can see the blood smeared across the keyboard, enough to drip-drip onto the stage. Already, barely a minute into returning, Carmen's tempo begins to drag, the mechanisms inside her not only creaking, but snapping, springs uncoiling and pressure gauges bursting. Facing away, Ayin's voice somehow reaches across the entire concert hall with the same pressure as the organ.

    "Of course. I see now that there is no path forwards for me besides completing the project. How could I, Ayin, ever dream of something as mundane as failure?"

    Something is deeply, deeply wrong. Ayin grabs his labcoat and rips it off, exposing not his immaculate black shirt underneath, but long white robes patterned with monochrome lines and eyes like Architecture. When it hits the ground, the hall fractures and bleeds enkephalin, like it did with his threefold speech, but this time there's no putting it back together as he continues. Dressed like a fanatic religious leader, Ayin raises a hand up and his robe's sleeve falls away, revealing similar geometric tattoos of black on white skin.

    "But for Carmen's plan to end in pure ruin... that would be unacceptable. If you're right, and it's inevitable human nature for mankind to use what power they're given to tear each other to shreds-- and who am I to argue with you on that, Director?-- then Carmen's legacy will be naught but an ever-increasing spiral of death. No. Humanity cannot be trusted to complete Carmen's wish. Only I can. That is why she left it to me, after all."

    Ayin turns around and leisurely walks downstage, towards you, and towards Carmen. His eyes are perfectly steady, utterly sure, and without a doubt cement 'this' as a third and final fracture of Ayin to complete his Meltdown. He talks, easily, rapturously, with the fiery charisma of a Preacher.

    "How could humanity be trusted with every possible expression of itself? Given a single one, they plunged the earth into Hell. For their Light to be put to their own good, they need a grand, guiding beacon, a new God to replace the wreckage of the bygone age! I shall be the one creating this new world for them! I will be the first to drink deep of the Light!"

    At that ringing proclamation, Ayin takes the steps up the conductor's podium, standing beside the broken clockwork Carmen. Lovingly, he slides the baton out of her brass hand, and wraps his fist around it. He turns towards the audience-- the Elites, the Sephirot, and all the hazy, blurry shadows of the facility and the world beyond-- and brings it down for a first beat, shattering the mindscape completely.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's beaming positivity never wavers. Scorn him as he deserves. His face is still splattered with blood, his clothes soaked to the waist. It's uncomfortable. But this is what he can do. This is how he can work. This is what he's made for: To enter the shallow, explore their depths, and cross the wires and cut the circuits that must be altered. The Psychonauts heal, but in the end, Project Mystic does what is necessary for the world.

    "Come on, Ayin. You're almost through this."

    "But there's no catharsis here either, Ayin. Abdication or abandonment aren't the way to find it. But absolute rule isn't either." His smile cracks, seeping worry in. Still supportive, still encouraging, but with some rational fear. "It's not anywhere. Least of all here. You know that this is still another attachment, it's still another way of not moving on. It's still not what you need, or what the Seed needs. So don't do this."

    He gently rests two fingers on his temple. "Don't..." He breathes, calming and focusing. Blood drips audibly. "Don't embrace that. This..." He looks around. "Get ready. Guys. Get ready now." He's shifted who he's talking to. Uh oh. He takes a few steps back. "The astral boundary is breaking. The psychoportal self-containment..." He laughs, nervously. "It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay, probably. Just, hold on, get ready. The psychoportal got us through two of the three here, but-- Um." He swallows. "You'll get us through the last one. I believe in you!"

    The baton comes down.

    The psychoportal that Flamel left with X *explodes*. Psitanium fragments scatter. Wood and glass pepper the space, fractures shudder in the air. Then the whole construct shrinks, condenses, and the burnt, shattered door sputters and falls to the ground.

    "BRACE!!"

    The mindscape is gone. Flamel's lost the advantage.
Hibiki Tachibana     She can't bring herself to look back at Hod-- Michelle. And Michelle wouldn't want to know what's spinning through the confines of her head right now, either. It's something that can't be voiced. Maybe not much she even has words for right now.

    But one of the many things isn't something that Ayin said. It's from Flamel.

    ...the only way to move past this despair is to make an impossible wish, and for it to fail now, and for you to die with it in your heart.

    "...No..." She murmurs, seemingly at random. Entirely to herself, if even audible at all over the sudden shifting of the mentalscape around them, out of the bloodied restroom and...

    ...

    Just like the previous time... or perhaps, more than ever now, the ruin of the grand concert hall doesn't seem to reach Hibiki at all, slumped forward in a front row seat. The endless void. The morbid, fleshy replacements for decoation. The music from that gargantuan, more demanding of attention than ever organ, no longer discordant and desperate, but so much more...

    ... ...the music.

    She can hear it. But it doesn't reach her.

    Not like the ones played before. Her head having still been hanging to listlessly stare down at the floor between her legs, her slack jaw slowly closes itself - and for the first time since stepping into Ayin's mind, a spark of light finally comes back to her eyes.

    "...That power is meant to help people forge their own future."

    It's only a whisper, but it comes through clearly enough, her hands clenching into fists in her lap. First slowly, and then steadily closer to becoming white-knuckled. Her lips purse tightly together in a grimace.

    "...It's not for somebody else to decide who it can or can't be 'trusted' with. Or what 'good for everybody' looks like."

    She lets out a shuddering breath, then heavily pushes herself up to a stand again to raise her head, brow furrowed. This entire Meltdown, she's immersed herself deeply in Ayin's hurt and dejection, letting-- or rather, not having a choice but to let her own bubble up to the surface to create an understanding with him.

    The moment the news of the Sephirah's fate hit her like a blow to the chest, combined with the hurt inside that bathroom... felt like too much to handle. Grinding her own thoughts to a halt when they were only here to push his own along.

    'This' Ayin isn't one she's capable of empathizing with. 'This' Ayin is horrendously more dangerous than any of the others. A self-styled savior of humanity. Like every other Meltdown, they can't escape violence.

    Maybe that's all why, even if the weight in her chest isn't any lighter, her mind feels more clear than ever now. Even clearer than when she walked into Architecture. The out-of-control spiral feels like it has somewhere to direct itself now. Now... ...and maybe after.

    Flamel rightfully screams to brace. But she faces the shattering of the sickening mindscape without blinking.

    "If you're going to use the Light to call yourself a God-- then I'll stop you!"
Timespace Riders How could I, Ayin, ever dream of something as mundane as failure?

    There's a moment in which both Woz and Sougo want to believe that this is some moment of glorious sublimation--that it's the breakthrough needed to complete the Meltdown. Maybe it's a little operatic, but Woz respects that kind of thing, and Sougo hears a lot of it from Woz.

    It passes, quickly, when the labcoat is shed for the garb of a hierophant.

    Sougo sighs. You still don't get it. But that's okay... there's plenty of time.

    "You're doing it again," Sougo says. "You're acting like there aren't hundreds, or even thousands, of Benjamins and Carmens out in the City. Carmen made time for you, more than anyone else."

    "But she was the sort of person who'd make time even for the least of those people out there. For you to say that you're continuing her work, but to talk about people that way, isn't right at all--"

BRACE!!

    Woz flings his scarf outwards; it protectively wraps around himself and Sougo.
Lilian Rook     'Maybe... fresh eyes on the project help, sometimes. If only to remind me of what I should already know. ... Thank you. I'm sorry.'

    "You're the one going through it." says Lilian, stiffly. "I don't exactly envy you. At the end of all this, you don't get to walk forward into the rest of your life." She squeezes her arm one more time, then releases it. "But you at least have a script. Don't take it for granted that there's a guarantee that there's something at the end of this. I didn't get that."

    'That the world had gone dark, and my hand had flipped its switch. All the rest was... followthrough. Just followthrough, momentum; a man reduced to a stumbling, rotting machine, even without the Sephirah protocol.'

    The reek of blood has already drowned out Lilian's ability to notice it. The stench of necrotizing viscera and shutting-down organs leaves her reeling and sick. The grisly work has her put back to the point where she struggles to pointpoint even a talking mouth. Dazed by it all, stomach turning as she hands over the scalpel again, she talks to Ayin almost for no other reason than but to center herself.

    "Tomorrow happens in twenty four hours either way. Again and again and again. If you've got nothing else to put one foot in front of the other with, the miserable followthrough is better than nothing. Anything but standing in place."

    'If my mind isn't built in such a way that all roads eventually lead to this room, then that means there could be a day where I follow a train of thought to its completion and pass her by entirely.'

    Lilian searches her thoughts, then her feelings, in the miserable, awkward, squelching quiet that follows, and turns over the bile feeling that she would probably do the same. For a while.

    "But whether you're aware of it or not, everything you do will forerever will be affected by her. If you forget her, or turn your eyes, the gravity of her existence is still there; invisible and warping your path around it. It's already happened to 'X'. The definitive proof that she existed is etched on even the version that doesn't remember at all. That's what it means to say that you can't undo a tale."

    Her heart feels like it drops through the floor at the third door. She wants this to be over. No more. No special exceptions. She can't raise her hopes at this point. She knows perfectly well she can still soak up more misery.

    'If you're right, and it's inevitable human nature for mankind to use what power they're given to tear each other to shreds-- and who am I to argue with you on that, Director?-- then Carmen's legacy will be naught but an ever-increasing spiral of death.'

    Lilian takes in a sharp breath. This never happens. No one ever listens to her over others to the extend that the crisis bends around her words. What now? It's not as if she can take them back. She fully meant them anyways. There's no point in lying to this third, diverging, abberant version. There's just one, single, useful truth to hold onto, and she declares it with far more body and volume than just moments before; moments before the mindscape collapss into the dark.

    "Carmen wants them to be free. No one said anything about 'happy and safe'. If they misuse it, if they butcher and gorge themselves on each other, and only a worthy few are left, or even none, Carmen was at peace with that outcome too. Freedom isn't happiness, but a reckoning; the people are enslaved to the City by fear of responsibility for themselves as much as fear of the violence of the Head. If their nature is so ugly as you and I believe, Ayin, then the experiment called humanity has failed, and a god still won't change the truth."