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Priscilla     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vtSlaNg9uQ
    The flat of Janine's saber strikes the side of Zacharie's mask. A porcelain crack bounces off the walls of the cramped, cubic room, echoing from its indistinct black walls and the luminous pool of white plastic. Zacharie reels for a moment, then tilts himself back into place. A corner of his mask flakes off. He scratches the side of his chin it exposes. A little stubble has grown under it. Tired 5 o'clock shadow that ill-suits the man's relentlessly positive, cryptic, upbeat, and opportunistic persona.

    "I said earlier, didn't I? I'm the merchant-type character who always shows up in places like this, one step ahead of you. If I weren't right here, before the last Room, you'd all lament the credits weighing down your pockets, tragically unspent at the very end. Heheh."

    "It'll be fine. Once I've cashed out here, there will be just enough time to join Pablo in our little waiting room. Go forward with heart and pockets unburdened."

    He turns a little to August. "Probably not, if everything goes well for you, but, it's been a pleasure having you as my customers. Keep that spirit for just a little while longer."

    Weird numbers change hands in alarmingly large sums. Inventories are stuffed with items, carefully hoarded with much blood and suffering so far. The Batter takes his final signed bat and white tunic, replacing the one ripped by Seft, and arming the Perfect Alpha, Omega, and Epsilon in silence. The square door in the dark room, the only exit, streams warm white light down the soaring staircase beyond.

    Do you wish to enter?
    »Yes
    No
Tina Natsumi It really does look like the end of theine here. Zacharie selling the last of his wares, the Batter preparing the last of his gear, and Tina's running her SD card's space into the ground with all the recording she's been doing. She takes a moment to uninstall a few apps to free up a nice chunk of space, then tips her hat back while stroling up to the Batter and clapping a hand firmly on his back.

"Don't worry, pard. We'll be back to buy more weird stuff from you soon. We can't leave without buyin' some souvenirs for the return trip, right?" She flashes Zachaire a confident grin, glancing over at that signed bat a moment later to get a better look at it.

"How's the swing on that, anyway? Wouldn't mind giving it a few practice swings myself when we're done. But... First things first. Everyone ready to give the Queen a proper beatdown and put a bow on this whole thing?"
Janine Liberi     "I'm real fucking sick of people underselling their personhood around here," Janine retorts to Zacharie. "You reacted to me hitting you right? You're choosing to go back once we leave, rather than hang around just in case we come back? That's independent thought. You're a person, not a character who exists only for our benefit. Don't do that shit," Janine says curtly.

    As she walks up to the doors, she draws her sabre and taps the blunt side against her shoulders. "So, this is it huh?" she says, before asking the Batter a question. "Anything we should know about the Queen before going in there? Anything to look out for?" She then turns and addresses George. "Are your buddies gonna be with her?"
Starbound Flotilla     "George" gives Zach a soft smile. "Yeah. Good livin' after all this, ain't it? Hangin' out with a good friend and a good lil' cat. Nothing better." He says. "Give J my regards, yeah? Tell 'im, sorry about all this."

    A smiling man that you call "George" takes a place just to the side of the doorway, where he leans and smokes like a loitering teenager. "Sort what needs sorting now, or set what needs setting. This is the climax -- even though it isn't the ending." He shifts the cigarette in his mouth, and considers Janine's question. "They had something set up just in case -- I think they were gonna try to do, uh, we call it a Rush Formation, at the end, but it was supposed to be earlier than this. Seft's the armorsmith, and she's still out hard cold. Can't do the plan, I'm thinking. Even Biteblade wouldn't come at you without some working, proper power armor."

    Looks like whatever the group did in the past, it's precluded a final boss rush sequence. A combination of actions taken during the Moonfin encounter, the Seft encounter, and the Pavo encounter have resulted in an open walk to the last room.
Yuuki Kuran 'Unburdened'. It's a funny word. A word that didn't mean anything to Yuuki Kuran -- or Zero Kiryu -- before a few months ago. Now, here, it's different. It makes sense.

"I don't know if I agree that my heart is unburdened, but seeing you here, at the end, is nice, Zacharie. I hope you survive all this."

Her smile is faint - it's hard to smile in such circumstances even for her - as she winces through Janine cracking Zacharie across the face. "I don't think hitting him was necessary, but I agree with the sentiment. A character wouldn't be quite so interesting, would they?"

George's line about the 'Rush Formation' gets a relieved sigh. "I don't think I could bear fighting them all again. Once was already too much. And them together would be more painful besides. Though, George..."

She indicates his upgraded bat that the captain had gotten when the Batter upgraded. "I thought you were more about batons."
Doctor Strange      >No

     Strange has something else to do, first. Recent days in this world have seen him more passive. Rather than participate in the puzzles, he's instead observed their effects. What action he has taken has primarily been talking. More than anything, he's spoken to George, who clued him in to a place. There is no guarantee that using the Grands will solve everything, and at present they can't be used--not without conflict. His current plan isn't a guarantee, either, but it's better than the other options on the table.

     Strange silently makes the gesture. The Eye opens. He disappears in a flash of green. In the past, he appears. The Sorcerer Supreme makes a slow advance through each of the zones, slightly in advance of the past versions of himself. Moments before Purification, beings within each Zone who can't withstand the erasure of Purification are spirited away--hurried off to Japhet's doomsday bunker in Zone 2.

     In one case, Strange has a very narrow window--he must arrive before a past iteration time-travels, yet after the rest of the party has left, in order to rescue the denizens of the zone without revealing the possibility of such to his past self early. It's difficult, but necessary.
Zero Kiryu "Most of the 'people' here aren't complete, and the ones that are have been torn to pieces along the way. Like somebody forcing their way through thorned brush, and making the best of what they wind up with on the other side." Zero chimes in, in response to Janine's outburst towards Zacharie. His presence probably isn't surprising, but does re-fill a sudden absence that was, perhaps, only lightly conspicious during the final lead-up. He raises something to his mouth and starts chewing on it a moment later.

"The ones who have it together enough to know the score already pieced together how this is probably going to end. They probably pieced it together as soon as the Batter came into existence."

"And if they didn't get it then," he glances 'up', "they probably did as soon as she appeared behind his wheel."

"Just because what he decided to do with that understanding seems foreign to you, doesn't mean that he didn't make a decision for what he wanted to do with himself." He turns his gaze from 'up' towards Zacharie, and then moves to stand at Yuuki's side.
Janine Liberi     Janine fumes lightly at Zero as he explains. "Yeah, I get it, it's still just really fucked up. I'm just... mad at this world more than I am him. He should have joined her the moment we opened that place up. If you were separated form Yuuki for a long time, wouldn't you rush to join her the moment the opportunity was presented?"

    This is all getting really touchy-feely so Janine moves to escape the situation by approaching the doors and opening them.

    >Yes
Yuuki Kuran "Oh, no." Yuuki laughs at that, one of the now-rare-in-this-place uninhibited shows of amusement untainted by sugar or safety or scorching bile.

"He'd probably go sleep in the stable or be totally fine going back to the Association."

Yuuki elbows Zero lightly. "Though I suppose this isn't a class you've already aced you're trying to cut."

She approaches the door with Janine as the other woman opens it.

> yes
Zero Kiryu Zero allows Yuuki to answer Janine's question. The truth is that if either of them was /that/ far gone in the head, things would only get more fucked up for everyone involved. There's no need to burden the situation with a completely serious answer, even if it wasn't a purely humorous one.

He smiles, dimly and briefly, and follows through the doors by virtue of being a PART OF YUUKI'S PARTY and therefore leashed to her movement path.
Tina Natsumi Tina bites back a snicker at that little moment between Yuuki, Zero, and Janine, but the smirk is right there when she steps up to the door with them. She hesitates for a moment, then tilts her head back a bit while turning her head juuust enough to attempt to look cool.

"You comin', Georgie? Even if they're out of it, you can still be their eyes for later. They'll understand."
August Kohler August nods to Zacharie. "Well, then. Take care." August brushes a hand through his hair, and then, looks over to the others as they talk. "Zacharie's definitely a person. He might not survive whatever happens next, but, at least we can remember him, right? He's been the most helpful person there is. Let's get to work."

As Janine and Yuuki approach the door, August prepares his mirrored bracelet, but doesn't summon his Persona just yet. He steps up towards the door, sighs, and steels himself.

"I didn't think I'd feel sympathetic for the Queen after all of this, but knowing what we discovered in those rooms and in that picture...shit. Still, let's not let it blind us."

>yes
Priscilla     The Batter, expectedly, has little to say. It comes out not with a tone of guardedness, but with one that begets the feeling that explaining anything now wouldn't matter --that it's so late to ask that one might as well just see for themselves. "Only that she's done everything wrong." he replies. Zacharie smiles, and as you're off, he repeats himself one final time, wrapping his merchandise back up.

    "Bis Vincit, Qui Se Vincit In Victoria."

                Chapter 1
                The Queen

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evjc7UFyqdo

    The world beyond the landing opens up into bright light. For a moment, it seems as if you'll be hit with the pure white brightness that haunts you at times, but instead, after a second's discomfort, you find yourselves bathed in warm, effusive sunlight. You stand on marble black steps over a bottomless void of brilliant blue sky, supported on pillars that disappear into the fluffy white clouds below. The air tingles with a queer, implacable, vitalizing power, showering down on you like lifegiving rain in the scintillating rays of the sun above.

    The stairs lead up and up, straight and true, guiding your narrow walk through the sky all the way up to the only thing around: the last of the Room's solid black foundation, raised as a platform above the stratospheric void, and upon it, the last and most developed thing resembling artwork in this whole place, the rare, meaningless pattern depicting an elaborate, growing tree across the floor. In the midst of it is stood one woman, and in that very instant, you can tell that whatever she is, she is exactly what the Batter is too. Clad in immaculate, pure white dress, with almost ankle length hair in the same snow shade, the monotone contrast comes from her dark grey skin. Her bare footsteps make no sound as she walks, her form radiates white, Pure light, and she is followed, side to side and back, by a trio of floating symbols of light, each as baroque akin to musical notation, as opposed to the Batter's austere halos.

    She wears no crown, nor jewelry, nor holds any scepter. She looks like a woman one would dream up from memories of home, quaint yet unearthly --unassuming in appearance, and yet tall and graceful and radiating the sheer, unassailable confidence of romanticized adulthood.

    The first thing she said was

"You are finally here, Batter. Long has been the wait for your arrival. But your way was in vain; you will only cause embarrassment here. Go back home.

    Always keeping his icy confidence, the Batter replied

"That's what I did. This cradle is the home of my father. The Guardians have fallen. You are Queen of a kingdom that no longer exists."

    Surprised, but not at all disconcerted, she asked him

"Why have you destroyed the land that I had rebuilt?"

    The answer was simple.

"You've never been here to do such a thing. Your role was to take care of him, and you have failed your task. And because of you, I must now complete my sacred mission."

    Forcing their monotonous dialogue despite the Batter's attacks, the Queen explained her actions as such

"I have created all of this only for him. I desire nothing more than the happiness of my children."

"Lost in preparing the birthday party, you forgot who it was for."

    This final retort completed eroded the patience of the Queen

"You have spoilt the carnival. I will not let you lay a hand on the son who brought us into the world. Today, you will fall."
Janine Liberi     Janine raises an arm to block the bright light, wincing and clenching her teeth in pain. Thankfully, it does dim, leaving them all in a bright, colourful place. The sky below, the dark marble and elegant engravings... it's easily the prettiest place in this whole world.

    And before them is the Queen. Janine does not interrupt her conversation with the Batter, but even she winces at the venom in the words they throw at each other. She hasn't ever experienced a domestic dispute herself, but she now understands what they're like. This whole argument has the energy of one. Two adults arguing over what is best for a child, and using it as a platform to launch personal attacks at each other.

    The Queen's final line catches her by surprise though. 'The son that brought us into this world?' Did she misspeak in her anger? No, that kind of thing just doesn't happen here.

    "Hey, Your Majesty," she says, striding up to stand to the Batter's side. "I don't know what the last time you came out of your pretty little hole here was, but if you call the world out there 'happiness,' you have a really messed up idea of what that is. I don't know the degree to which it was your idea or the idea of each of the Guardians, but this whole collective world is a miserable shithole. And if you're the root of it, you gotta go."

    Janine's reflection is observed in the gleam of her blade, and Catherine erupts from her form in a flash of gold. A thin length of golden wire lashes out from the Persona's handcuffs to loop around the Queen's waist, in a gambit to ensnare her and pull her towards them at high speed.

    Like a baseball being launched towards the Batter's holy weapon.
Tina Natsumi The black marble is somewhat refreshing to see after so many seas of plastic and smoke-fileld mines. It's not the realism of it all, but the classiness of the location and the magnificent view of the sky below them that make things feel all too real for the streamer as she moves upwards with the group aiding the Batter in his quest.

And there she is. The one that they've been pursuing this whole time. The one that looks just like the Batter, yet is exactly what the Batter has sworn to destroy. The one remaining person between them and theend of their journey in this strange land.

"The Queen..." Tina murmurs as she steadies herself, facing the otherwordly woman with her head held high and her camera peeking out of her front pocket. She keeps quiet when the Queen and the Batter have their exchange, merely glancing between the two with a steady gaze and nodding as if she understands completely.

She has no idea what they're going on about, and she's done pretending like she does. Tina calls out her Persona with a brief flash of her phone, and the red-white-blue robot takes up a stance right in front of her.

"A crappy party ain't gonna get any less crappy just because you shut down everyone that says it sucks. Nah, that just makes the suck stick out even harder. If you want your kid to really have fun at this here carnival, then..." As Tina speaks, she starts sweating. Is there any impressive way to end this sentence? It sounded alright in her head, but... Well, something lame would be better than literally nothing. "... Let's burn it down and enjoy the lightshow!"

So lame.
August Kohler The bright light has August flinching, but he keeps moving. He steps into the wonderful place, and steps towards the Queen. She talks with the Batter. August listens carefully, and then, once she's angered, speaks up himself. He does not move to attack her like Janine did. He has one question for her.

"Do you regret anything at all? Any of this? Or are you blinded by it? Is Hugo telling you how to do this?" It's probably his sympathy giving him a second to ask, but even as he does so, he's summoning Dietrich in preparation for both an assault and defense. The black knight appears in front of him, August climbing onto his back, and he waits to see what happens from Janine's attack.
Doctor Strange      Strange returns, in a flash of green light. He heaves a sigh of simultaneous relief and exertion. Hard work has been done, but he's glad to have done it.

>Yes

     The Sorcerer Supreme waits on the pattern of a tree, still silent but for the earlier sigh. The Queen hears no words from him, though she does get a brief, apologetic gleam in his emerald eyes. It quickly dies, replaced by quiet determination. Strange's fists are brought up in a guarded, martial stance, his legs spread apart. The gesture is quick, like a sword brought to bear. With a hiss-chime, the orange mandalas appear before his hands.

     Looking between the Queen and the Batter, it strikes him that, if he has something akin to the Batter's halos or the Queen's neumes, it is these mandalas. He finds a measure of comfort in that as the glyph-rings slowly rotate, waiting for a command from the sorcerer. The sorcerer himself waits, too, for something to happen. Janine is that something. Strange opens the Eye.

     Time speeds up for the Batter, allowing him to move and react faster.
Starbound Flotilla     Yuuki gets a quick answer from a smiling man as they move through. "Maybe. But batons are real unpleasant, aren't they? Come in swingin' a truncheon and nobody's happy. But everybody loves a Batter. What's comin' up... it's gonna be miserable. I don't like addin' to that. Every ounce of soft is worth it."

    "Vader Eloha! How you been, girl?" "George" approaches with the gang, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. "Sorry, and you know I mean it when I say that. But you want and want, and want too hard. The people who only want their friends to have competences wind up surrounded by idiots. The people who only want love wind up ignored and cast out. The people who only want to make everyone happy just lay with the miserably dependent. And people who just want to watch what happens..."

    "I'm real sorry. You know these cruel physics. I know you love him. You know I can't do what comes next." He says, leaving a soft smile around the cigarette, a brief reprieve from a more dangeorus grin. "And I know you know what happens next -- I just want you to know it won't hurt, if we survive you. This don't gotta be unhappy. It don't gotta be torture, whoever loses. It can just be bittersweet."

    Is he trying to gaslight the Queen about something? Or does he really intend to be friendly? Perhaps there's no such thing as anything that makes sense about the smiling man drawing his heavy bat, who we call "George". He would normally attack, but for whatever reason, he isn't. Anyone who would know such things would know it's because purification is not yet in progress...
Zero Kiryu Zero already knows what he's supporting here. It doesn't really have anything to do with the morality of the situation, /or/ anything in particular to do with the local actors at this point. Digging got him nowhere, and in that regard the Batter was right. Sometimes the truth doesn't help at all. He glances towards "George", silent, a little agitated. There's no point in probing into /that/ matter any further, either.

All of the rest comes down to a mix of varied responsibilities for what is about to happen, and dim personal curiosity about the last few dregs of what's going on here.

The Batter isn't really his own person, exactly. There's something there, but he's been hollowed out for a long time. When he moves by himself it's easily noticed from the 'back end', like an old machine that barely works struggling and sputtering to turn over and function. Eventually getting there, reluctantly, stubbornly.

He turns his mind's eye on the Queen, seeking a sense of who /she/ really is, behind it all.

"Do you think the Batter does?" He asks August, bluntly.

"Do you?"
Yuuki Kuran "Stephen!" Yuuki emotes her pleased surprise for the Sorcerer Supreme to re-appear in their presence. He had been quiet - and idle - in the intervening moments, distant in a way she felt was importat but did not pry about.

She had voiced her confidence in his ability, even if she felt he had lied to her about his expectations. He had all the power to try - and all the wherewithal to do. That he had returned, seemingly successful, was buoying.

"I hope that you've accomplished what you wanted. But if I have two of the Grands..."

"Well. I presume you'll be telling me when's the right time." A look is cast towards "George", a meaningful saccade flicker of her red-brown dinnerplates towards the 'last' Captain standing. "But if you think I'll understand when the time comes, I suggest using direct action words and not subtle wizard ones."

Her fingers brush Strange's arm as he powers up the Batter. Her lips move, but her voice is heard at a conversational volume in his head.

<<I'm very bad at puzzles, Stephen.>>

The Queen, and the Batter, stand across, and with Janine leaping in while the others hold back, there's a decision point -- one that Yuuki falls on George's side of.

"You know, George, I never figured you for the hero type. That was always Seft's role. But I doubt that bat is padded at all."

"Medicine is always a miserable thing, but you keep going for the promise of something better at the end. A less unpleasant state."
Starbound Flotilla     "George" readies his bat like he's at the plate.

    "Spoonful of sugar, you know." He says, softly. "It's not just substance. It's atmosphere -- mood. How people feel at the end is the only thing that matters when everything's said and done. Everything else is a means to an end."

    "Don't you want this to feel better, at the end?"
Priscilla     Unperturbed, the Queen answered them

"Everything I have done has been for our child. I have rebuilt the world just for our son. This world will take care of him. I have done everything right."

    Unimpressed, the Batter added thus

"The world never takes care of children. They have only their mother and father to rely on. You might've known that when you came to pick him up,those years ago. But all that time you were away, you prepared only this."

    What Zero finds isn't so very different. He peers into the heart of an apparition, a spirit of a thing, moreso than a person. A propped up shell not of confidence and purpose and resolve, but of longing and of love. The abstract things that make her still tick are all alone with themselves, her hollowness bereft of a living hand to guide it. Gears of memories and emotions turn her heart in a never ending, never wavering, never deviating circle, played to the end, worn down, and sticking. There are no strings, but subtle hitches and missed ticks, and the faint, hissing grinding of scattered and contradicting meanings. She is substantiated solely by doting motherhood, craftsman's pride, intellectualism, vague, distant loneliness, deep love for a son, and love for . . . the Batter?

    Janine takes the offensive, golden wire fastening around the Queen's willowy waist. Her bare feet skid soundlessly across the floor as she's reeled in, spreading her arms for balance, but when the time is right for the pitch to come home, the Batter fails to swing.

    The sky darkens to midnight black. Glowing white in the gloom, the Queen's Add-Ons swing to the fore, and the black floor grinds beneath them. Towering shapes erupt from them, briefly inscrutable blobs of marble, but resolving as man-sized pieces of chess; the royal's game after the long string of playing card motifs leading all this way. Whispering in the dark, the sounds not quite matching her words, overlapping and irregular, the Queen says:

"I am gravely disappointed in you."

    The Queen used Scholar's Mate!

    A black marble pawn erupts out from under Janine to launch her back through the group, sliding effortlessly to the side to crash through the ranks and put her at cross angles with the group. A bishop rises from a blind angle, and with a short charging period, gathering Pure light, it blitzes right through the whole group at a seemingly instantaneous diagonal, leaving only a streaking glow and afterimage behind it. The setup and following blow is dizzying in the worst ways, knocking the wind out of someone before they can even do anything with their stance --the kind that blacks out vision, seizes muscles, and leaves ears ringing.

    Only then does the Batter finally move.

The Batter used Wide Angle!

The Qu¿ÆÑ¥¤--
Eloha Vader
Fourth Boss.


Purification in Progress . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MuygMqV8eE
August Kohler August turns to Zero as he asks. He considers briefly. "The Batter doesn't regret it, I'm sure, but the Puppeteer might. Me? I don't regret killing them. It had to happen. But...I do regret my vitriol. Not a shred of sympathy for anyone, for anything. Not even for the Elsen, until we learned what they were. I was just...angry." August says, as he prepares for the fight.

But before he can attack, that bishop comes flying forward, and slams straight into him and Dietrich. They're sent collapsing backwards, muscles seized, August unable to see, clutching his ears. "Shit!"

As soon as he gets back to his senses, it's time to fight Eloha Vader. The sword rises, and normally, August might start off soft. But he had a desperate mission here. He had a prize from Zacharie. He has a goal.

The sword blazes red-hot, before darkness starts swirling around with the flames. The mix of orange and black turns into a beacon, a pillar, as Dietrich charges with blinding speed. The massive blade comes swinging down, with all the power of someone being hit by a speeding train.

"I'm sorry, but your mission is over. Good night."

Slash.
Tina Natsumi "So you made the world into the kid's personal babysitter? That's some real bad helicopter parenting right there!" Tina's feeling a little better about that line compared to the last one, and the confidence is evident even in her Persona as it rises to meet whatever it is the Queen's doing head on.

What she does is not quite what Tina was expecting. She jerks her foot up when the ground starts making noises, then hops onto the Persona's back in preparation for something to attack her from below. That, however, turns out to not be the case when nothing actually happens beyond the pawn and bishop appear.

"... Oh. Queen. Chess. Heh. Of course the Queen's got that kind of th-" Tina doesn't quite finish her quip as the bishop barrels right into the whole lot of them, her mind not quite registering the attack until Uncle Sam is already getting slammed backwards by it. Persona and Persona user stagger backwards, the latter nearly losing her grip on the former as she sees stars from the speedy bludgeoning.

"Goddang... Alright, if that's how you wanna do it, then prepare to be extra disappointed in us!" Drawing a revolver from her jacket, she unloads a quick volley of shots at the Queen's center mass to try and draw her attention while Uncle Sam matches that with a short burst of SMG fire.
Doctor Strange      At first, there doesn't seem to be a response to Yuuki. He's silent. It's soon revealed that this isn't as intentional as it usually is. When Yuuki mentions being bad at puzzles, he cracks a smile and quietly laughs in spite of the gravitry of the fight. He still faces the Queen, but there is a calm, relieved resignation in his voice. He won't need to give her a signal. They can both get what they want without using the Grands. "Direct, right," he says, trailing off. A moment passes.

     "We don't need the Grands. You will understand later."

     Strange's air of confidence isn't just for show. He seems to be completely prepared for this fight. He ducks under Janine as she's thrown back, muttering a command under his breath. The Cloak of Levitation lifts briefly off of his shoulders and flies after her. It attempts to help her to her feet, then quickly flies back to Strange, who is already in the middle of making a move.

     Strange's hands are still in motion as the Cloak settles upon him and lifts him out of harm's way. The stone before him shudders and grinds against itself. Brutalist, geometric pillars rise from the floor, stone folding and shifting off of their figures like some kind of non-Euclidian sculptor is at work, until they are revealed. Pawns, formed from the white portion of the floor, are hurled across its surface, making a forward charge at the Queen just as Tina's guns go off.

     Strange's /actual/ spell goes off, then, a spear of black entropic energy that seems to cast everything around it in negative. Where it scours the ground, it leaves a deep black gash which seems the polar opposite of the bishop the Queen just sent after them.
Starbound Flotilla     "George" takes the dead-on impact of the Bishop's Opening in this Scholar's Mate. Crimson armor peels in chunks. His cigarette is knocked from his mouth. "Yeah. Disappointing, isn't it? But, maybe it doesn't have to be all bad." He manages to struggle the words out. "Tough to live up to expectations like that. But when you try, sometimes you can make something worth being proud of. Can't ya be happy about that, maybe?"

    He manages to make his way back into his battle position, but only after he gets a frech cigarette into his mouth. "Maybe not. But it's worth it to try to see the light in all this." He says. Microthrusters jet him forward hard, and he swings heavily with the mighty bat in a tremendous thwacking impact -- at least, that is, if he can land it. One for each Add-On, and then a final, heavy fourth swing! One that almost seems to bounce backwards into his jet-assisted retreat towards the party.
Zero Kiryu The truth doesn't help now, either.

Zero stares into the Queen's mind and finds... he's not certain that he'd say he expected /all/ of it, but he expected enough of it. Not the last part, but the last part is still comprehensible to him. A little too much so, he supposes. But he relates to it enough that he can't help but be bothered that the Batter has such a robust support structure and the Queen is just a rusted-out machine running on auto-pilot.

He staggers backwards as the Bishop strikes across the chamber, vines pouring off of him at strange angles to snake across the board towards the Queen and her Add-Ons in irregular zigzagging patterns that don't seem to have a particular rhyme or reason to them other than 'get the thing that hit me'. It might not even be entirely consciously directed at that exact moment.

After a moment the shape of Zero emerges from amidst the brambles, violet eyes cutting towards August.

"There is nothing here that is not regrettable. Not the Batter, or the Queen, or the Guardians." He says, simply.
Yuuki Kuran "No? That's good, Stephen."

A twinkle of sugar and a puff of smoke pour out of both of her coat pockets as she fidgits with the contents. "I wouldn't know what to do with my hands if we needed them."

Her tired, honest quipping is cut short by... PLANES OF PURE FORCE?

Getting blasted by a Diagonal is an experience that Yuuki has had a long time coming, really, and in its painful wake it leaves her in a puddle on the floor, hands clutching at her temples. Groaning with pained exertion, she places a knee under her for steadiness to recoup herself, her eyes still popping with stars and blurry dark splotches but her nose - the smell of purity without the pine of his slugger guides a roiling lance of telekinetic force up from her shoulders like an aura, and then out, like a viper from her body towads the Queen.

"I will certainly feel better when this is over, George. I just have a hope things will all end more positively than when they started. For all of us."

"Even the 'us' we met here in this strange place."
Janine Liberi     She sets the Batter up but... he doesn't swing? Did she jump the gun? There's no way the Batter would hesitate... maybe the Puppeteer didn't have a battle interface up yet? Either way, she looks a bit silly, and is knocked back by the sudden emergence of a pawn underneath her feet. Her forced movement is far less graceful than the Queen's, and she's caught in the blast of light.

    When it fades, Janine is on her back, grimacing as her body aches and spasms. "Ugh... don't talk to me like that. You're not my mom," she groans as she kips herself back up and readies her stance. A strong headwind begins pushing her back before she moves, herself and Catherine vanishing in a flurry of movement.

    In an instant, she's behind the Queen, the winds swirling around her. A massive, tornado-force gusts erupts, aiming to hit the Queen in the back and knock her off-balance, leaving her more open for the incoming attacks. "Take this!"
Priscilla     The bishop's thrust grazes right by the Batter, Alpha Omega and Epsilon scattering like pins, but without a drop of blood, he stumbles off the blazing path it cuts, as if wounded in some way regardless. Stopping a moment to gather himself, and his Add-Ons back, more floral patterns flash black and white in interlocking diamonds --checkered patterns-- over the Queen's entourage.

Delta
Royal Add-On.
Sigma
Royal Add-On.
Ipsilon
Royal Add-On.

    The Queen is not a Guardian. Not a human, nor a cat, or a bird. She is no Spectre either. She is a Pure being. The one entity the Batter has not condemned for wickedness nor promised salvation --someone he speaks to as if he's known her forever, and the two of them long since grown distant and tired with one another. The spirit of 'a very important and busy person', as Dedan had once put it, channeling 'the endless power of the sun', as had said Enoch, is mightier than them all.

    Ranks of massive pawns rise from the fields of marble in an instant, catching bullets and entangling seeking vines, scratching, breaking, chipping and cracking, sending flecks of splintered marble hurtling from crumbling stone peons. A colossal rook shoots up from just under Dietrich's blade with a raise of Eloha Vader's hand, crashing up into the sword on its way down, splitting it nearly to the base, but arresting the blow at the last second, where the Queen twirls away like a dancer, neither singed nor cut, but leaving behind just a stippled train of uncanny red blood, joining the scarlet stained marble fragments. Broken pawns go hurtling like rows of charging soldiers, a thrust of the Queen's palm turning them into comets of Purest light and blasting them across the field. A second rook rises up behind August in a heartbeat, and then slams inward to crush him against the first.

    Strange's white pawns rise against her black, and the platform becomes a board, and the board a flurry of motion --a sea of pieces rising and falling, multiplied in bent space and crashing into each other, mutually annihilating and resurfacing once again. The spear of entropic energy flies dead towards the Queen, weaving through the fray with waltzing, effortless grace, and she turns to face it, flicking her fingers, and overpowering it --obliterating it-- completely with a spontaneous, blinding nova of Purity. The white light explodes, then collapses back together again, reshaping itself as an exact replica of Strange's attack in photo negative, coruscating with increased power, and thunders back at him, cleaving through rows of pieces effortlessly.
Priscilla     George leaps into the fray to engage the Add-Ons directly. The moving field on all sides complicates his efforts, catching and deflecting his bat just where he has the right moments to strike, only clipping the royal notes here and there with musical chimes of impact, and more uncanny blood. They whirl around him, and begin diving down on him, swooping from his blind spots to batter and slice him with their spiritual forms, one attacking while he is occupied with two others.

    While they're busy with him, Janine's tornado wind catches Eloha Vader, causing her to stagger in her step, and finally Yuuki's force viper weaves through the field in an instant, fluidly filling the shifting gaps and stabbing straight into her, showering the tiles with her immaterial blood from no true wound, causing her to stagger in her step. The Add-Ons snap to attention and blaze angrily, all three locking together and firing a tremendous beam of purifying energy back at her, catching Zero alongside her in the blast.

"There is nothing but the void after me."

    Insisted the Queen. The Batter said instead

"There was a world before you, and now there's nothing but the dead behind you."

    The Batter finally crosses the board in a flash, moving in that impossibly swift way that's only gotten quicker with time, maneuvering without loosening his batting stance. The Add-Ons fly back to the queen, and only just catch the head of his bat --the last gift from Zacharie, and from the Choir-- in time, blasting them back into the Queen, and her tumbling back, painfully across the floor, to the edge of the board.
Janine Liberi     Janine smirks with obvious triumph as the Queen is knocked off-guard. She moves again in a blur, getting away from the woman before she can retaliate. But in her speed, she fails to stop in time to avoid the massive retaliatory blast aimed at Yuuki and Zero, and gets clipped by it. Her movement comes to a halt, her dark brown hair now visibly bleaching from the Pure white rays.

    "There was nothing but a void before you either," she retorts. "A world void of any kind of love or grace. Get off your high horse, you cow." As the Queen staggers towards the edge of the stage, Catherine's fingers begin to dance. The rubble and ruin of all the chess pieces used and destroyed by the Queen and Strange both are ensnared in golden threads, before another massive gust of wind launches them all at the Queen, a barrage of ruined beauty.

    The strings seem superfluous at first, until they start battering her. They now connect the rubber, forming an intricate net aimed at wrapping around her as they hit her and fly past her into the sky blue void. Janine is trying to throw her off the edge.
Starbound Flotilla     "George" is being engaged, properly, in close quarters, which is where the man thrives. The Add-Ons fall upon him to slice, and he maneuvers like water. Unlike the massive Bishop's Opening, this is where he can live easily, in the gaps between blades and contempt. The pawns and other such pieces become an effective field of maneuvering. Others may see hazards, but "George" will always see opportunities. Cover, something to brace off of, a place to move -- as long as he's faster than the piece. It's the perfect merging of his penchant for navigating industrial terrain, and his habit of maneuvering around crowds to enhance combat.

    He splits off from the party as the Add-Ons start engaging it with artillery-style beams. "Why's the void so bad?" He asks. "Nothin' but sweet dreams to dream after sleep, you know. A little void here and a little void there isn't so awful. All you've ever known is the sun, all that not-at-all void. Void ain't gotta be so sad. Sometimes it can be a nice rest." He moves quick, leaving behind a trail of red light as the only easy thing to see as his components push and strain, trying to keep up an assault on those Add-Ons more than the Queen herself. After all, might give his wording a little less of an edge to deliver them with violence.
Tina Natsumi "Of course it wouldn't be that easy..." Tina mutters under her breath as yet more pawns erupt from the marble, taking those shots meant for the mighty Queen. She watches the strange being's movements for openings, but it's tough enough just figuring out how it even works at all amidst the flying debris, bodies, and blinding lights thrown every which way. She only barely notices when more of those pawns are being hurled around as straight up projectiles, and Uncle Sam tips sideways in an attempt to avoid getting hit head on.

It doesn't work as well as Tina would hope. She gets knocked clean off the Persona and cries out as she goes tumbling back a few times, only saved from further blasts of light from Uncle Sam finally landing right in front of her. She staggers a couple of times as she pulls herself up behind the robotic Persona, then punches the back of its leg once to pop a panel open.

"No sense wastin' time with the weak shit, then... Hey, Queen! What kinda mom are you, anyway?! Kids need room to grow, too!" Pulling out a strangely blocky bazooka from that panel, Tina braces it against Uncle Sam's leg while her Persona continues firing on the black pawns. A small screen pops out from the blocky weapon, and it makes a long series of beeping noises. "You can't just keep 'em locked up away from everything, or they'll never grow! They'll never learn how to function like a normal person!"

Says the girl dressed up like a cowboy with the obviously fake drawl. A few seconds later, and missiles start pouring out of her bazooka, shooting up into the air before twisting and rocketing downwards at Eloha Vader.
Zero Kiryu Brambles burn and crumble away as white light crashes into Zero Kiryu and the growing jungle around him. He vanishes into a wall of plants, smoking and burning-- only to reappear from a stray bramble, disconnected from his mass but still clinging to life in the middle of the field. He pushes back from it, spreading a new wall of slashing, constricting tendrils that crash across the board towards the Queen and her Add-ons in a binding mass.

"Sorry, but..." He seems to be talking to Janine.

"If there is one being who is actually loving in this place, it is the Queen. It may not be easy to hear, but the only difference between these two is methodology and the reality of having an outside entity influencing him..." He points towards the Batter.

"They're angels. Or perhaps it's more accurate to call them perspectives put into motion. I don't know... but between the two of them," Zero nods at the Queen, "she's the loving one."
August Kohler August's fatal blow isn't as successful as he hoped it had been, even if he makes her bleed. He speaks to Zero as Zero speaks to him, with a "You're right."

And then, pawns slam into Dietrich, who is able to block most of them, but that rook comes from behind, slamming into the riding August's back and causing him to yell in pain as he's staggered forwards, pushed into the other rook and crushed. Both him and dietrich stretch out, forcibly /pushing/ the rooks away with sheer strength, and then Dietrich spins, moving to carve through the rooks and force them backwards or into destruction.

"What's the alternative, then? The Guardians are dead. The world is almost completely purified. What can you do from here, to change that?!"

The beacon dies down on the blade, and then, August flicks it forward. It changes mid-swing, a lashing chainsaw whip moving to try and grapple Eloha Vader and cut into her torso, igniting at the last second and attempting to engulf her in flame.
Zero Kiryu "I wasn't suggesting that you change anything at all. There is no happy ending to be found in this place. I just want you to understand what the score is, here at the end." Zero answers, dispassionately.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki would like to THINK of herself as 'pure'. Certainly actions taken to address psychological landmines left by years of being the feature character in a shitty romance rag about moody cats had left her stained with the impurities of character development and embracing of who-and-what she is could have changed that.

But her positive life outlook was as pure as it ever was! She still cried at pictures of cute animals! Surely, this was pure enough to resist--

NOPE.

Blasted by the sterile Pure energy, Yuuki resists it not on purity of heart but by having a heckload of blood, shielding herself from being atomized by erecting a barrier of force that has the energy wash around her primarily. Hair, cloth, skin, and blood besides still fleck and scour off, but past the cosmetic damage, she remains mostly-whole at the end of things, glowing cracks in her skin dimming incrementally as the seconds extend on.

"It really doesn't matter... Part of attaining peace is just like George says - accepting that everything will slip away, evetually, even if it takes a very, very long time. This isn't living in the now, this isn't even living. It's just existing. And we were brought here to be the Chorus - to help this task."

Yuuki rubs at her eyes with a seared wrist-and-sleeve. "I'm lecturing. I'm sorry."

Bringing her fists together, her power swells around her feet and ripples around her clothing -- before she pulls her fists apart, and two vectors lash out like ribbons to seize two halves of one of the Queen's Add-Ons and attempt to tear it in half.
Doctor Strange      Everything goes back to nothing, in time. Even his accomplishments here will gradually fade away--the knowledge that this is a fundamental truth of existence adds a bitter taste to the sweetness of his tiny victory with the Bunker. Even so... it's comforting that everyone here is helping to return the cruel machinery of this world to the nothing from which it came.

     Floating in the air, Strange furrows his brow, looking down at the Queen as she redirects and inverts his attack. It's fitting, that the one at the end of all this would be the most prepared for his tricks. He makes a one-inch punch at the air. Reality shatters, and the Queen's attack is swallowed by the Mirror Dimension.

     He does have a lot of tricks. With a palm thrust, Strange sends the wall of shattered reality racing towards the Queen. The strength of his will or the force of the blow causes it to cave mid-flight, as if some spherical force were behind the curtain of broken reality, pushing it onward. It folds into itself, changing from a wall to an orb of miniscule shards of reality which cut like razors as they pass, spiriting away the matter they touch in bits and pieces.
Priscilla     On the edge of the board, the Queen rejected the very idea, on one simple fact alone

"You have no right to decide. He loves you not."

    The Batter's following blow, raised high overhead to finish the woman, sent sprawling to her knees already and yet to stand back up against him, suddenly misses. There's a moment's hitch in the killer swing, and the bat cracks down into a web of broken marble tile, as its wielder stumbles forward again. Unearthly red blood flicks across the last platform left remaining in space, and it's difficult to tell if it's hers or his.

    Yuuki reaches out to seize the Royal Add-Ons, and almost has one in her telekinetic grip, but they break formation and zip away as if drawn back on strings when Janine's gale sends the woman slipping off the edge. No matter how she twists and turns, always somehow never where the debris is, no matter how the winds rage and howl, the golden strings are absolute clothesline her out into the void, just up until the Add-Ons snap together beneath her, and create a baroquely designed floating platform of her own.

    The chainsword whip, burning with fire and black fumes, reaches for her, and somehow the Queen bats it imperiously away with her wrist, shedding spiritual blood across the edge of the board to divert the grapnel through a row of pawns and cause it to stick. A squadron of knights forms at the edge of the board and leaps high into the air, bravely charging headlong into the shower of bazooka shots, and raining back down as smoking rubble, as dangerous to everyone else as her. As the Royals carry her back to the platform, where she disembarks with the lightest of soundless steps, another row of loyal steeds jumps the lines to hurl themselves before the onslaught of vines, thorny tendrils flicking at her fingers and scoring her cheek, then crushed together. George closes in through the field somehow almost without effort, walling off the Add-Ons from their owner again, beating the mysterious lifeblood from them in flecks and puddles, while the seemingly unavoidable onrush of Strange's distortion in the very reality of the Room comes for her, chewing up the board inexorably in its path.

Eloha Vader used Castling Queen!

    The board inverts, and the Queen somehow mirrors another layer through it. The intact rook is stood in her place, and mulched to pieces by Strange, stippled with only scattered red, whereas she herself is now behind him --behind everyone. Abruptly, her pieces or white --or the white pieces are hers-- and towering rooks move in flashing diagonals, cleaving through the board like blades, while bishops rocket forward in orthagonal directions like missiles, detonating in spectacular fireworks of obliterating light and searing, ricocheting sparks, crisscrossing the entire board.

"It was his feelings that brought us into this world, but you do not understand them. You have never even met him."

    The Queen continued in earnest, her words contradicting but not without their mark. The Batter knew these to be wrong, yet right, but they weren't meant for his ears.

"Even so, it is too late for you to decide to give him your love now."

    Locked in their deadly dance, the two wouldn't hear each other, but only exchange words more cutting than their blows. The Queen spoke past the Batter, to the those he trusted, and the Batter spoke past the Queen, to the reason of their existence.

    Though lacking any real injuries, the Batter lags behind, weathering the storm in silence. Alpha, Omega, and Epsilon leap to the fore, lining up with their false mirrors, and exchanging streaking volleys of fire across the board, opening up new alleys to move where the slate is intermittently wiped clean by deadly columns of Purity, flashing back and forth, clashing together again and again.
August Kohler "There doesn't need to be a happy ending...as long as there's a bittersweet one instead of a downer." August replies to Zero, as his chainsaw whip is deflected. "I'm realizing some things about this business and myself. This entire journey, over the last year, has been...enlightening."
Hisnd speaking of enlightening, the rubble of knights, the slashing of white rooks, and the rocketing bishops smash into August. He's battered, beaten, and bloodied, and as much as he tries to regenerate through it, it's going to drain his ability to do so.

But August knows he needs some help. He reaches into his pocket, and pulls out two tickets. He clutches them in his fist, using their power, and charges forward, the whipsword returning to a greatsword.

"I may not know him...but I know this isn't the way to go, in my heart. And I can't back down now, no matter how sorry I feel for you. I've come too far."

The greatsword moves to swipe heavy, super strong hits into Eloha Vader, trying to break her guard so the others can get a better hit on her.
Starbound Flotilla     "George" steps with caution, determination, and a powerful stride. He's straining, not for his brain to keep up with what's going on, but rather to force his brain into an instictive zone of action on deeper instincts. The board flips -- and that means he has more ground to cover, bringing him over dangerous zones twice. But the way he moves is... uncanny.

    "Do you understand feelings, though? Not just his -- your own. What made you the thing you are. You were born out of pain, out of that desperate need. But you don't need to hold that pain inside every gear and spring. Whoever walks out of this, the ending don't gotta be painful. C'mon, Eloha. All I need is a smile from you. Don't make me die with a mother's pain on my conscience. Please?" His wide grin goes on display, as if to give her an example to follow.

    He has kept the bat over his shoulder carefully, all throughout the uncanny, nearly-inhuman motions over the chessboard. He's deciding to not just focus on the Add-Ons, but to narrow his assault to trying to finish off one -- in this case, Sigma's on the Queen's right hand. Arbitrary the decision may be, but she leans persistently on that right leg as if it were wounded or that side more heavy. He's starting to run low on his cigarette and his armor's energy reserves, but even still, he maintains his lethal momentum and tries to tear into Delta.
Doctor Strange      Strange takes off like a dart, weaving in between the falling rubble from the exploding chess pieces. He rolls, loops, even reverses his own gravity, making a chaotic pass around the marble battlefield. He lands briefly, to begin casting a spell. As he makes the necessary motions, the board is suddenly alive with motion once more. Strange drops through a hole in the floor, emerging above the criss-crossing pieces and positioned upside-down relative to the rest of the battle.

     The motions continue. The portals through which he stepped shift positions, guided by the hand bearing the Sling ring, which makes arcane mudras in rapid succession. The Eye of Agamotto opens, bathing him in brilliant green light. As he turns back the band of congealed time which forms upon his wrist, the fallen rubble from exploded pieces leaps back into the air, each piece making an exact reverse of its trajectory.

     When time once more moves forwards, the pieces fall--right into a portal. A conentrated stream of broken, jagged chunks of various chess pieces menaces the Queen. Then, the spell. With a motion like a swordsman makinga killing thrust, Strange strikes out with his fist, the other held behind him with index and middle fingers extended. A jet of white-hot flame bursts from the mandala before his fist as the rings lock into place. The flame melts the rubble into slag, essentially creating a fountain of molten rubble for the Queen to avoid.

     "I understand torture when I see it," he says coolly. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself."
Janine Liberi     Janine scowls as her gambit is thrwarted by the Queen's elegant Add-Ons. But she has no time to follow it up as the Queen continues the game. Her blade and wind barrier is overpowered by the criss-crossing pieces, send flying by an exploding bishop, slammed by a charging rook. This time, she's the one who nearly flies off the stage, but a swirl of wind catches her like a cushion. She tucks her blade under her arm and produces two things from her pocket. One is a ticket, which she scrunches against her palm. The other is the Expiration.

    "You're a real self-righteous bitch. Trust me, it takes one to know one," Janine says as Catherine arises behind her once more. She moves again, bouncing all around the area, using strings to conserve her momentum as she springs from them, spins around them and slides along them.

    The Queen is a tricky opponent, so she does this dance, blurring around her over and over again to disorient her, letting others make their move so she is lost in the chaos of the fight. When suddenly, the Queen's Pure light glints off Janine's blade from above her.

    But Janine is not holding it. It's just spinning in mid-air.

    In that instant, Janine is beside the Queen and slamming the Expiration against her side. Her sabre suddenly yanks towards her on a string attached to the hilt and Janine catches it, whirling to preserve it's momentum and slash through the Queen's dress and chop her thigh.
Tina Natsumi Is it working? Tina's having trouble telling if her missiles are working, but they certainly look like they are. If only thatQueen didn't have so many knights to replenish her ranks!

Wait. She has something for this... Sort of. Climbing atop Uncle Sam once again, she braces herself against the Persona and relies on it to bear the brunt of the next attack: GODDAMN PIECES EVERYWHERE. She had thought that Strange's pieces were white and the Queen's were black, but it's hard to tell which ones are which with so many lights blinding her.

"So is he your kid, or is he your creator that happens to be a kid? Stop talkin' in all this cryptic nonsense!" Tina shouts as the mechanical Persona eats blast after blast of diagonal light, swerving this way and that just to avoid having the blonde take a hit directly to the head. She canc ertainly feel the searing pain in the everything-else, and a large part of her wants to just back off now, but...

Well, it's not like she's ever won over any viewers by playing it safe. Besides, getting maimed might still make for a good highlight reel later. "Kids these days... Heck, some folks my age are already parents, but event hey know talkin' in riddles arund their kids just creates resentment. If you really wanna understand your kid.. Creator... /Whoever/, how about you try talkin' instead of buildin' up all this bullshit?!"

As Tina shouts atthe Queen in some hmafisted attempt at reasoning, Uncle Sam takes over entirely on the combat end. A large nuclear warning symbol appears on the bazooka as it fires off another series of missiles, but these are a little more ominous.

It's the nuke symbol, isn't it? Where those missiles explode, they leave tiny mushroom clouds that strike deeper than the previous explosives. These would strike at the very core of the minions' beings!

If they hit, anyway.
Zero Kiryu "What does 'bittersweet' mean to you, August Kohler?" Zero asks, as blades close in from two sides of him and sparks dance in from all directions. The blades open up each of his sides, staining the surroundings red with a line of blood. Grotesque plants begin to bloom among the blood, vines twisting throughout -- seemingly without Zero's direction -- as countless miniscule berries grow and resolve into heart-like shapes that greatly resemble the original Fruit of Einnashe.

Feebly and with little motivation, Zero Kiryu summons up new growth from ruined plants along the board, producing another array of tangling vines and brambles to try and bog the Queen and her pieces down.

As disinclined as he is to stand on the other side of all of this, Zero clearly doesn't feel especially strongly about defeating Eloha Vader.

The Batter had put it well already-- this is /his/ world, and they have their own to get back to. Zero doesn't approve of the means by which they were steered to this conclusion, but he isn't so offended as to turn coat over it.

No matter how grotesque this is, in the end.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki continues being blasted and disoriented as the board flips around on itself, the add-on flitting away from her telekinetic grasp as her telekinetic shield is blasted by chesspiece directed 'chess debris' some more, in addition to the sparking detonations and cutting paths. A hazy cloud surrounds her on the dark, reversed board as batwing like wisps peel of jagged wounds rather than blood. Her eyes are firmy shut at this point, her blindfold having been left behind after the Pure zone. It's a bit too much for her corneas, and so she spares herself by fighting on instinct - and smell.

"I don't have the gumption of Albert, to fight against impossible odds. I don't have the wisdom of Moonfin, to try to shift the narrative around me and make myself right. I don't have the charisma of Pavo - I've always faltered before greatness and have friends, not followers. I don't have the conviction of Seft, who stood before this great evil that threatened to swallow up what they believed in, even if it wore the face of a friend. I don't have the vicious fortitude of Biteblade, to see victory in the hunt - in a world - that had all but died so long ago."

Yuuki speaks, but mostly she speaks for herself -- and 'George'.

"But if George wants you to smile before this is all over, maybe I don't have the commitment George has, either. I was so furious at the first two Guardians, but the third merely horrified me. And you, Queen... I think I understand you. Maybe, just a little bit. But probably not."

Charging up another swelling of telekinetic power, Yuuki shifts to stand atop one of Zero's blooming vines, hurling down counter-templates against the chesspieces to deprive the queen of her 'board presence' - literally.

"This isn't what you were afraid of, is it, George? This seems like those fights where we all shout at each other until one side wins, and one side loses!"
Priscilla     The vines do not reach her. The Queen is beyond such half-hearted attacks now. The Purifying light radiating from her, luminescing as the moon reflecting the vanished sun in the night, scorches and melts away the metallic thorn tips as they approach, gradually bleaching more and more of the checkered marble field white. He waxing power continues to struggle violently with Doctor Strange over dominion of this last spit of land in the void at the center of the world, the geometry of the field turning over and over again. The newest trick to come back almost strikes home, but just then--

    Eloha Vader used Immortal Andersson!

    --every last piece on the board swivels to him, locking stone cold eyes with his, and all at once, crashing into his attack, boldly throwing themselves on his wrath in a wave of fearless, even somehow heroic, sacrificial marble. The straggling remnants of them plough through, melting and sagging knights and pawns streaking into Tina's rockets, Eloha Vader stood across from the two of them.

    Intolerant of being spoken to with ignorance, the Queen exclaimed back with rising venom, quietly and icily

"You don't even know his last name."

    August has his opening, carving through a momentarily thinned army of pieces, scattered amidst the rumble of waves and waves of their cracked and shattered fellow sentinels. His great flaming sword batters against the Add-Ons that become Eloha Vader's shield, acting solely to her accord, rather than with a mind of their own like the Batter's. Pinned in position, George rips into the ornate gates of Delta, and with a sound like tearing paper, splits it in half, drenching the ground in the symbol's blood and letting cold, dark iron fall into it.

    Janine slips through the gaps. The Queen almost pirouettes around her, the dress of hers so clearly becoming that of a dancer's, as the Batter is defined in image by his sport. Her blade only nicks her, but the item she slams against the woman's side explodes into a coruscating fireball of brilliance. Zacharie had not sold her a dud. Prepared for this final encounter, he'd left her with a purifying fireball of immense proportions, like a miniature sun collapsing in her hands, though it feels only like warm sunshine to herself. She is promptly launched back across the board by a wall of titanic rooks thrown up in self-defense, crashing into her with bone-breaking force.

    Yuuki tears through the great rooks stood stoically at the defensive behind them, and through the gap in the shield, one of Tina's weapons of mass destruction lands, and shatters the far side of the board into a ripples of splintered marble dunes, blowing waves of dutifully pulverized sculptures back towards her with the blastwave, showering the board with fresh corpses of the marble defenders.

    §ç涡£¤ used Golden Flesh x3!

    The Batter used Magic Homerun!

    The white sportsman flashes through the smoke and rubble, splitting the smoke and shimmering heat haze wide, and striking with the crisp, clean, spring air crack of a bat hitting ball, and the sharp, alarming, nauseating crunch of breaking bone and splattering of blood. The blow connects with the Queen's upraised forearms, held over her head to shield her face, filling the space between the two with another splash of their mixed, bloody essentia.
Priscilla     The strike lands true, holy sparks flying with the blood, without corruption to purify, but the pose is gut wrenching. Even in battle, looking on it, the Queen looks like a wife frozen in the midst of domestic violence, hurling verbal abuse while shielding herself from the physical. The Batter's face is not cooly, confidently calm, but cast in such deep shadow from his cap that it is no longer readable. His elbows tremble almost imperceptibly as he draws the bat back.

    The Queen shrunk back, yet with even greater defiance, gasped out

"You have never even laid eyes on him."

    The rushed, stilted, overlapping word-sounds all crash over each other even more severely than before. They sound jumbled and glitched, skittering across the field like so many hundreds of knifepoint fingers. Waves of crawling sound and force gently wash over the Choir, then slit open their skin with the words' razor edges, and the venom of truth carried in them, for those strangers telling her what must be for the best. The Batter is too close to be hit. No blood drains from his corporeal form, yet he reels back as if hit --or rather, if a horrid wind had rushed through the marionette's strings. He stands, bat gripped in white knuckles, breathing fast and heavy, in a shallow pool of luminous crimson, but just as much as his body slows down, so do the commands coming to it.

    The board is bleached almost completely white. There are so few black squares left. Where the pure white spreads, melted and pulverized sentinels rise again, laboriously piecing themselves back together, shuddering and grinding towards the Choir as if a chess piece could be motivated by some great willpower of its own, ignoring the non-pain of its broken stone bones. They rise each time they're broken down, hemming them in, picking up speed, shooting in wave after wave at a time, streaking like constellations of pure white missiles across the checkered impurity in the middle of the smooth, pristine expanse around them.

    Eloha Vader used Check!
August Kohler August stops talking to Eloha Vader. It's Zero he focuses on. "Bittersweet...is where there's still hope. Hope of making things better, even when currently, it sucks. A clear vision of it, too. That's what bittersweet means to me."

The pure white missiles made of chess pieces slam into Dietrich again, and manage to chip off heavy arm. Dietrich loses quite a bit of blood, as limbs are broken and regenerated, and August gets woozy. But he grabs some more tickets, and keeps himself going. He needs another big attack.

Dietrich leaps. It soars into the air, overhead, and starts to come crashing back down. As it does, it aims the sword straight for Eloha Vader, the Queen, and ignites it in another massive bonfire. The flames light up the night, a huge outpouring of psychic power into a single attack. There's no heroic outcry. She doesn't need it.

They simply need to win, as the flaming bonfire comes crashing down, hopefully straight on top of their enemy.
Starbound Flotilla     "George" takes one of the heaviest hits he's taken so far. A brutal barrage of a strike manages to crush him between two of the heavy incoming chess pieces. His armor groans and crumples like paper, and for the first time in a while, George screams in pain with what little breath is left after his midsection out of his mouth. The cigarette falls, and he begins to pant with the pain.

    "Yhhhh... yeah." George squeezes out through a crunched midsection. "Don't know his last name. But you know I've put eyes on him. I'll level with ya! Honestly, I will. When the Flotilla met up hwere, I was gonna head back there and see how easy it'd be to put a bullet in that skull myself while you were doing that. But you-- we both know why I couldn't do that. Why that couldn't happen. I'm not able to do what that would'a needed. Not that good a guy, right?"

    Why?

    "The only reason all this is goin' on is 'cause I can't just hurt 'im, you know. Ghhhh! Way easier time of all this if I could, you know. Started my own fire, and burned myself. You think I'da done that if he was just a goalpost? C'mon. Everyone cares about him here, even the folks that don't know it. Don't put yourself through the pain of bein' the only one who cares. This can be easier than that. You don't have to make yourself that miserable."

    He seems to renew his determination, speaking on the topic of his particular ideal here. With a deep breath, for the first time he dips into the amassed healing materials for a Fortune Ticket and a Golden Flesh, then amps his armor's strength-enhancers to their maximum settings to wrench himself out from between the chesspieces. Bleeding, crunched, and in desperate need of another omnizine cigarette, he grabs the bat he dropped and moves in on Sigma. He looks like he's walking, but he covers tremendous amounts of distance to get right in its face and smash it as hard as he can in a heavy overhead shot that will hit so hard it'll knock a shockwave out from the body of the Add-On if it makes contact.
Tina Natsumi Tina can't quite celebrate having her mini-nukes crashing into those knights and pawns. The battle is only becoming fiercer, and she can feel her stamina starting to wane as the fight drags on further and further. Each volley of words between the Queen and the Batter has her on edge, the discomfort apparent with each barb and swing tossed at the other.

Yuuki's observation, though, about the nature of shouting at each other has the cowgirl chortling, then breaking into laughter. Said laughter gets cut off abruptly when the spreading whiteness permits yet more of those chess piece soldiers to reform, and there's a sickening spray of blood as she feels something cut deep into her almost without warning. Several somethings, even, and several impacts that have Tina reeling and doubling over in pain. She nearly falls off the Persona and right onto the ground moments before Uncle Sam steadies itself to sling the cowgirl around its neck like some kind of human scarf.

She starts laughing. "Shouting's good sometimes... 's one of the things I'm best at. But I don't have much reason to be shoutin' right now." Tina glances at the Batter, then the Queen, and then points upwards like a baseball player signaling at the stands. "This is the Batter's time, and I ain't about to steal that spotlight or hit that homer. Nah, my part's just to set him up the grand slam!"

Tina's grin grows a little wider. That one felt pretty good in her head.With that line delivered, she puts her all into one final maneuver: Guns get pulled out of Uncle Sam's shoulders left and right as she and the red, white, and blue Persona shower the Queen with suppressing fire. Machineguns one second, shotguns the next, a few grenades here and there, and even resorting to a basic handgun once the rest of the ammo is spent.

She doesn't need to put the Queen down with all this. She doesn't expect to. She just needs to keep the path clear for everyone else to finish the job after her Persona dissipates and she takes a nice, face-down nap.
Doctor Strange      At last, the duel for control over the realm begins to turn. The Queen's words cut into Strange's flesh and mind alike--he had tried to let them roll off of him like water, but his efforts are for not. In his efforts to dodge them, he has let them get under his skin. As he channels dimensional energy to quell the bleeding, his opponent--everyone's opponent--can see, if she hazards a glance, an incensed twitch of the corner of his mouth. The torn fabric of his tunic mends itself.

     "I'm not /supposed/ to lay eyes on him," says Strange, leveling out in the air after reeling from being hit. There is no more rubble to power his stream of magma, but the portals remain. They will do. He hurls them at her, deadly discs of spatial displacement meant to cut what remains of her soldiers as her words have cut him. "But /you/ are," he says, whipping them around for another pass as they fly through what remains of her soldiers. Shapes begin to rise out of the scant few squares remaining. "You're his mother." The shapes stand in contrast to the color of the Queen's pieces, as they did before.

     It doesn't completely keep them from reaching him--decapitated swords still fly his way, chunks of determined rubble still strike him as he prepares another spell. Still, orange mandalas begin to fill the air like lingering fireworks that refuse to die out. "You wanna go down this road? Fine. Have you read his little notes?" Shapes begin to emerge from the centers of those mandalas. "The ones where he mentions trying and trying and trying to get just a minute of your time? Or were you too busy?" He fumes, lifting a hand and further shaping the energy. Weapons of all sorts slowly push forth from the mandalas. "Where were you when his friends were slowly losing their minds? When they were turning the zones into cruel parodies of what they used to be?"

     "You were in here," he says, matching the cold venom of the Queen's voice. He flicks his wrist. "Planning your god damned carnival." At the flick of his wrist, the weapons fly out in a swarm, heading straight for the Queen. They're guided by his hand, banking and turning midair like a swarm of stinging insects.
Zero Kiryu "Still hope..."

Zero draws all of the plant matter he's produced in around himself, shielding his body from the battering force of the gamepieces that keep reconstituting themselves over and over again. This isn't what draws his attention though. Not really. It's the way the Batter looks, the peculiarities of how he sways, the... /lag/? Is it lag?

Did the Queen just attack the Puppeteer?

He goes tumbling across the plane they currently exist on even as the thought drifts through his head. Hopeful isn't the word that he would use to describe what they're doing here. A part of Zero is surprised that anybody else could have it at all.

It's not like he hasn't put the writing on the walls. Doctor Strange changed his goals because of it, after all.

He raises himself up on new branches.

"Hey. You. Are you okay?" He asks the Puppeteer, bolstering the question with a minute amount of psychic pressure directed "out" into the ether.

A great vine creeps its way out of the fresh brush, sweeping out towards the Queen thoughtlessly, but not quite /so/ bereft of care and interest.
Janine Liberi     Janine laughs as the orb of light blossoms from the item, consuming the Queen. "Gotcha bitch!" she shouts, only to be repulsed by a row of rooks erupting between them and pushing her back. They slam hard into Janine, pressing her bandaged arm against her form and slamming against it with such force that a vicious, horrifying snap emits from it.

    Janine screams, and tumbles, and screams some more. She lies there, crying as she struggles to get it together, breathing hard to will her way past the pain. Anger boils up in her chest, rushing up her throat and threatening to become a barrage of slurs to hurl at the Queen.

    But Catherine floats before Janine. The girl looks at the obscured face of her Persona, and somewhere in that veil, she finds what she needs. With a pained hiss, she gets back up. With a long breath, she centres herself.

    "I don't think I can relate to you," she says to the Queen. "But, I'm not a mother. Probably never will be. That changes you, that much I do know." She presses multiple tickets against herself, and chews on a hunk of flesh to reinvigorate herself. "Your child becomes your reason, right? And that just consumes you. Anything you do if it's 'for their own good' immediately becomes good and upright and Pure. Even if it's not, as long as you tell yourself it is, you're in the right."

    The physical abuse of the Batter. The emotional abuse of the Queen. Both utterly self-righteous. It kind of turns her stomach, like when you're at a friend's house and they begin arguing with their parents and things get personal. Janine assumes her fencing stance once again. "You did your best. Even if you didn't really know what you were doing."

    Golden thread spills from Catherine, tracing along the pure white ground to mark the checkerboard pattern anew. Looping around the chess pieces and continuing on, wrapping around the Queen and her Add-Ons in an intricate array whose purpose only becomes apparent when Janine lunges. The ground cracks under her feet as winds whip about her. She ploughs through the front line of pawns, the winds launching them into the void, the strings tightening and pulling the next piece, also jostled and launched and tugging on the piece behind it in a massive domino effect.

    And then, at the back row, the last pieces fly off, and pull the Queen's Add-Ons with them. Removing her trusty sword and shield, they all go tumbling down, the threads whirling about the Pure woman and biting into her woundless skin. For the threads don't stop there. They also wrap around Janine's arm, the falling of the pieces pulling on her and guiding her blade to strike the Queen's chest, aiming to bury itself into her heart.
Yuuki Kuran There's a lot of shouting. A lot of words that go past the Queen - her entire speech, really, because it wasn't meant for the Queen in the first place.

The Queen retorts with words that don't really land on Yuuki. Oh, they do 'physically', slicing about her body and tearing at the bat-fringes of her power, slipping past her barriers to carve another series of long gashes, turning the sleeves of her coat and the legs of her pants into more ribbons. The knife-like words place deep furrows into her neck and cheeks, and blooms of dark red on her abused shirt and sides of her coat. What comes after - the chess-piece push - shatter her guard, and she ceases her offensive to just hide behind Zero's vines as he asks if the Puppeteer is alright.

But the cutting words do cut both ways. Janine's voice carries Yuuki's heart back to surity, even if it is an extremely harsh critique of the angle that the Queen is coming from.

"I never really got to know my mother." Yuuki begins. "But even so... I believe she would not wish for me to live in an eternal torment. It's too depressing to think of a mother outliving their children, but it's as Janine says:"

All at once, Yuuki sends out her telekinetic powers to join with Janine's Add-On pinning strikes, tearing and biting as phantom wolves erupt from the vectors with jet black bodies.

"I really don't think I can relate with you! I've always thought that moving forward was the best course!"
Priscilla     Eloha Vader strides slowly towards the center of the board, slowly turning and weaving as the fury of the battlefield intensifies, shining like the sun; she *is* the sun, and has been since it vanished from the sky that once existed here.

    Tina's hail of fire suppresses her way forward, causing the elusive white and black figure to revolve around and between her rooks, castling to the next when they become a deadly shower of rubble on top of her. A great metallic vine rips from the mounting garden of slain pieces, swiping at her from her blind spot, tearing its thorns across her and drawing a gasp along with the arcing lines of too-red blood that flecks the tiles.

    Janine's wires spread throughout the field, seemingly ignored by the Queen, who steps over them toe to toe, with a ballerina's grace. The shuddering, scraping, pitiful game pieces, grinding towards her inexorably, are suddenly gathered up in Janine's wake as she explodes forward, briefly reprieving her allies from their inexorable encroachment while she shoots forth, sword extended outwards; the Queen does not move aside. She spins to a new angle only at the last second, Janine's saber slashing through with all the effort of pushing a knife through a cake, and painting a long red streak ahead of and behind her where she goes sailing into empty air. The two remaining Royal Add-Ons are caught up in the crush of pieces, firing futiley at Yuuki's wolves, but pulled too far away from their master. The Queen gestures to recall them and then . . .

    Her fingers freeze. Hollow a being as she may be, for whatever reason, when Strange loses his cool, those words cause her arms and legs to seize up. Her fingers twitch, then slowly curl closed, squeezing into a clenched fist. She whirls around to him, and--

    --a flurry of slashes cleave through her perpetually immaculate dress, flaying away streamers of that uncanny, bloody essence that comprises these two beings. She withers beneath the assault, scraping together new pieces to protect herself, but Dietrich's sword comes down too fast --too powerfully-- and a ring of loyal pawns only becomes an explosion of dissolving marble and blazing heat, pelting, slashing, burning the woman huddled inside. As the slag splashes her from all sides, clinging to her dress, she shrieks out in not just pain, but fear. Guilt. Grief.

    With George having already sprung into action, the Batter maneuvers all the way up to the opposite flank, moving in tandem with the man who has encouraged the Puppeteer along all this way. Then inn front of her, she glimpses George's bat for a bare instant, and she flinches away from it, curling up with her hands upraised, cowering behind them. The Batter winds back, digs in his heel to throw all his momentum into his strike, and then stumbles over forward, swaying roughly side to side to regain his balance. His eyes are squeezed tightly closed under the shade of his cap.


Zero Kiryu: Hey. You. Are you okay?
Yes
»No

    The Puppeteer whispered to herself in her dark room, fingers clenched motionlessly in the holy abstrata

"Nothing about this is okay."

    Eloha Vader's whispers ripple over the field once more, skittering across the marble as the last checkered black vanishes.

Closing her last move, the Queen left them with this

"You've been wrong since the beginning."

    Eloha Vader used Checkmate!

    The graveyard of chess pieces melts into dust, blown away on a wind from the dark like so much of a dissipating dream. The marble board, now solid, glaring white, reflects the rising light of the Queen until it too is a plane of sheer, Pure white light in the void. A forest --an army-- of pieces springs up anew, each one an imperishable construct of Purification, as if the souls of the vanquished board stood up once more to defend their Queen. They cover every position on the board. Every angle is covered by their movement. Every square is threatened.
August Kohler August plunges, and burns. He glows brilliantly. But even so, the Queen does not fall. Chess pieces fill the area, that lbinding light causing him to flinch, as they tear into every space he has, ripping him apart, causing him to bleed, be crushed, armor to break. He almost passes out from the sheer violence.

He should be down for the count. But...he refuses. He's too damn stubborn. This is the finale. The queen he thought they'd have to fight ever since they first learned she existed. He wants to be one of the ones to defeat her. To end this facade of a world. To bring a new hope.

Dietrich pushes through the chess pieces, leaping out again and on top of them. He keeps the beacon blazing - it's not as strong, but it's still pretty strong.

"Even so... I'm not a quitter."

The beacon blade is not slashed overhead. It is thrusted straight into the queen's chest. August does not think he alone can slay her. But with everyone's last collaborative efforts...perhaps they can take her down.

He'll certainly be suffering from this, though. He's taken on a lot of violence, and his muscles are torn. As much as he can regenerate...he doesn't have the energy.
Zero Kiryu "It's not pretty." Zero agrees with the Puppeteer, a rotating field of foliage coming into existence at his feet to ward off the battering march of the Queen's last and greatest assault. He shuts his eyes and rides it out, allowing his buffer to shield him from simply being torn apart by the soldier's march.

But for the moment at least, his hand is apparently stayed. Zero sinks to the ground and remains there, not unable to rise but disinclined to raise arms against the Queen again just now. Instead he reopens his eyes and gazes up into the 'sky' again.

"Do you want to stop?" He asks.
Doctor Strange      The Sorcerer Supreme's wounds are closed, but still plainly evident as dark spots beneath his mended tunic--dark patches of stained red where the cloth sticks to his body. The Queen's words harmed him physically, and brought bubbling forth the anger he thought he'd quelled. "Good," says Strange icily in response to the Queen. Whether she means him, or the Batter, or the Choir, it doesn't matter. After seeing what she's willing to ignore and let pass, he's perfectly fine with this course of action being 'wrong' in her eyes.

     It's all he has time to say before every possible angle of retreat is covered. He attempts to fight his way out of it, naturally. Pieces batter him, slamming into his back, his stomach, his hip, anything. He conjures a staff to aid in warding them off. For every one he manages to shatter or divert, two seem to strike him, barging into him like cars on a busy street. Before long, he's knocked to the ground.

     There, he suffers a litany of injuries, fighting from a disadvantaged position. Wounds reopen, and new ones are made. Each attempt he makes to get up is repaid with a brutal strike from another piece. He resorts to another trick, trying to heal himself. A poor decision--still, he is struck by a flurry of charging pieces. His luck seems to turn when a fortuitous placement of his staff topples a charging pawn--until that pawn is set to land atop him, crushing him beneath its heavy marble form.

     The pawn slams to the ground and shatters. There is no trace of Strange beneath it, but the faint, dispersing motes of a closed portal.

THE SANCTUM SANCTORUM

     Strange lands painfully on his back, deposited onto the grand staircase near the Sanctum's entrance. The edge of the stairs strikes him painfully, but he has no time to bemoan this fate. A portion of the spherical portion of the Queen's pawn, severed by the closing portal, falls through after him. After a hurried roll to the side, the slab crushes the stairs instead of his head. Wong runs to Strange's aid, the Sanctum's alarms having gone off. He finds no intruder, only Strange and a half-sphere of inert marble.

     Master Wong follows Strange's gaze. The two of them now look upon the Grand Finale, safely contained in a case of magical glass upon an enchanted pedestal. "You didn't take it with you," notes Wong.

     "I didn't need it," says Strange with quiet contentment. He passes out on the stairs. Come what may, his task is done.
Starbound Flotilla     George is subjected to an unending tide of purification, an unending assault by the chess army. Like many of his friends before him, he is exposed, raw and somehow naked despite his heavy EVA gear, to the sun itself. He drowns in light; it suffocates men like him.

    "I have been wrong since before the beginning. Wrong is the space beyond known. Wrong is new. Wrong is where wolves feast and men fear. It's awful. I do my best, y'know! We all try our hardest, but for folks like me, harder than most is what you need to not be wrong. I'm wrong in the heart and the bones and the lungs, tip to tail, toes to top, inside, outside, upside, and downside. What kinda guy fights a Queen, an employer, a mom, just for all this? You're right, but that don't make ya happy. Nobody's happy for bein' right, Eloha. Come on. You've been right up to the end, but there's still some time left to stop being right and start making a sweeter ending."

    He steps forward, and among the white is a touch of gray, like he's shedding some strange gray fluid he's soaked in -- maybe the dye of his jumpsuit, under the EVA armor? But there's far too much... "This don't gotta be pain, girl. You're 'bout to kill me, or my pal Bats is gonna kill you, sure. Sure, it's the only right ending to a lot of wrong, a lot of wrong in the bones and not the muscles. But... you could make it a sweeter ending than just bitter. You could gimmie a smile. You could chuckle at one'a my bad jokes. Maybe take a hand when I offer it, or think a little longer on an old man's advice. Would it hurt you so much to sneak a little candy to make this all worth it for you at the end?"

    He sighs as he moves, suffused in light, choking on it; whatever Gray is in him is not enough to survive it cleanly, but it's enough to live through it until he can close the distance. "You were right, ma'am. Always were. Always will be... right." He takes the Batter's stance, as if at the plate, and glances to one side, inviting the Batter to join him. And then... he swings in calm desperation.
Janine Liberi     Janine is at ground zero when it happens. Total board control, and no way to escape. Checkmate. She thought with Catherine, she could do it. She became strong, just like August did. She handled gods like the Woodsman and Brunnhilde. But the Queen is something else. An embodiment of Purity, and a mother fighting to defend her child.

    Janine is battered and launched back, her sword flying from her grip and embedding itself into the ground right before her face. She gazes into her reflection, but can't find the words to bid Catherine forward. August is still going, but she can't. Her arm hurts, her eyes are watering from the speeds she reached without protection, her skin is burned from the blinding white.

    She laughs, bitterly. "Dammit..." she croaks as her vision darkens. "Thought I had... gotten better..." And then darkness claims her.
Yuuki Kuran Chesspieces from every angle. A masterstroke of destruction, of placing every piece on the board into a criss-cross of offense that contained no space to move aside.

But Yuuki had never been one to play chess. Her solution to an unimpeachable, undodgeable swarm is to create a perfect wall. A yig-yang sphere of white butterflies and black bats sworl and solidify as she pushes through the onslaught, moving out from Zero's vine cover to take step after painful step towards the Queen. Witheringly, she staggers and steps, across black tile, then white tile, advancing towards the Queen.

The Batter.

'George'.

"I was wrong... from the start? Mmm..."

"No. I don't think so. Once I woke up, I've been here for George - for the Flotilla."

Tapping George's cocked back shoulder as if 'tagging in' with a hand that reaches through her barrier, the butterflies and bats fluttering outward thus dispelled.

Snapping out her hand holding Artemis as it extends into a long staff, she takes an opposite leftie stance to George as he joins the batter in his baseball finish...

And she joins 'George' in ending suffering, with one cracking swing for the fences.
Priscilla     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evjc7UFyqdo
    The board wiped clean save for the Batter and the most ardent remnants of the Choir, shaken and bloodied but unbroken, the Queen fell to her knees. The Sun's light was exhausted, dimming to smouldering white embers against the blackness of Nothingness outside. Its endless voices, whispering over one another, were pushing to be let in. They'd been kept out so very long --long since their owners had disappeared-- and been so very patient.

    The glorious light slowly fading from her, Sigma, Delta, and Ipsilon laid dead and dark around her, the Queen knelt, exhausted from her battle, at the center of the last place on Earth. Unable to rise again, she allowed herself to finally rest. Though she had corporeal form for only a short while, she had watched over her son for so very long, that this didn't quite feel so bad.

    The Queen spoke

"Have you filled your lives with beauty?"

    The Batter didn't reply. He could only look on as the Queen's eyes finally looked at him clearly.

"That was very irresponsible of you. I made a big cake for the party tonight . . . after all this time, I was finally going hold him again . . ."

The last of the light was dying from the Queen's simple form, shrinking the island of existence around them, until only those few remained floating in the void. The Queen sighed.

"Would you like some coffee, my love?"

"Queen of the flies, it is time to join your disciples. Nothing at all went right. Forget it all, and dream sweet dreams now."

"Look, he has . . . your eyes . . ."


Zero Kiryu: Do you want to stop?
»Yes
No



Yes
»No

    The Batter replied solemnly

    "But his are full of fear."


    The Batter used Ultimate Homerun!

...

...

...

    Purification Complete
Priscilla     The conclusion in quadruplicate happens all at once, and with it, the simultaneous extinction of the light. Arranged around the Queen, August strikes from fourth base, Yuuki strikes from third, George strikes from the second, and the Batter, in his rightful place, stands at home plate, and swings. The last glowing candle of white is extinguished, and the whispers of the Nothingness wash over you.

    You reappear in the room you started in. A small, cubic room, on an island of metal, surrounded by luminous liquid. A narrow corridor ahead of you leads into a familiar room, with a wide, empty communal area to the right, a storage crevice to the left and a single bedroom in the middle, sheltered on both sides. The walls are red. The floor is red. What should be plastic is a pool of saturated, too-red redness.

    There are no windows.


                Chapter 0
                The Batter

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b3Ff84GobY