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Strawberry Princess	The tip of Blueberry's wand, pointed at the Terminarch's core above in a hostage-taking gesture, trembles with emotion. The girl's new form of slick-smooth crystal lacks a face that could betray her feelings, but her voice and body do anyway.      She inspires me to be better. "Me too, but... I could never be good, no matter how hard I tried. I just had to pretend. So she wouldn't stop loving me." I'm unwilling to believe people are THAT terrible. "They're not terrible. I was. Everybody who hated me was right. I deserved it. Only Strawberry was wrong. And I kept her in the dark, so she'd never realize."      Why you lied to her on Samhain. "I- don't say that! I can't get near her again. You know why, if you're like me! I'd just ruin everything!" She probably knows, and she loves you anyway. "You can't say that. You don't understand anything!" Her voice is desperately cracking. "Nobody who understands this could love me! Not even her!"      Blueberry Princess's emotions reach a pathetic crescendo. She sounds like she's on the verge of tears. Her hand instinctively brushes where her eyes would be, as if to wipe them away, but meets only smooth crystal. "No. I'm- I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I can't do this. It's too scary."      There's another brief pulse of magic. In its wake, Blueberry's emotional tenor abruptly changes, as if she's compressed hours of calming down and steeling herself into a single heartbeat. There is no more tremble in her hands. There is no more cracking in her voice.      You are one who longs to join the host of heroes. "Yeah." Another awful, despairing laugh. "But there's something I have to do first." Pack it up, blues sister. "If I just leave... she'll find out. You can't keep a secret. Strawberry has ways of knowing things you don't know anything about."      The pulses build and build until they blur together, forming a continuous aura two hundred feet across with a visible blue border. Just as Strawberry inspired the London Terminarch's replication, Blueberry inspired its precognition. This must be how hers manifests.
Strawberry Princess	Blueberry boils over into ugly laughing again. "Oh. Okay. I see it now." She points her wand at Lilian, more as an emphatic gesture than a threat. "God, you were really trying to guilt-trip me about lying to her? You've lied to everyone about who you are. Even Tamamo. You claim you've never murdered anyone, Rook, but we both know that's not true. What did you do to your mother's son? Tell them!!"      She turns suddenly to point it at Tamamo instead. "And you, 'Tamamo no Mae', trying to talk about heroes. Do you really think you deserve the love of even someone like her? Does that poor girl know what you're doing to her while you pretend she can 'teach you love'? She only likes you because you fooled her. You'll ruin her just like you tried to ruin Emperor Toba, right? Of course a monster like you wants me dead!"      Bond is next. She wheels on him with a kind of furious glee. "You fucking simpering spineless puppet. England's hand is so far up your ass you just couldn't stay away, huh? When my family beat me, at least I fought back, but you just lay there and take it. You say you're done with 'her', but I think you're still a good little boy who's found a new master. You're still out here dancing to the tune of an older woman who wants things you don't understand."      "A little girl who hid in the closet and let her parents be killed right in front of her. A man who's gotten everything through luck, and is too proud of it to see how worthless he is. A slave who thinks he's not one anymore, just because he's got a new body and kneels for different masters he calls 'friends'. A woman who's done unforgivable things just to try- and fail!!- to be as loved as her sisters. A witch with a rotten family and a rotten heart, who still thinks she deserves to stand next to heroes. And a boy who... ahahaha, you're really too bad at hiding it, Arthur! We all know what you are. Go on and smite me~"      She covers where-her-mouth-would-be with one hand, letting out a grating staticky laugh. "You know, maybe you all are right. Maybe, next to you, I'm not so bad~ But I know what I have to do."      "If Strawberry hears about this, if she finds me again, then nobody in the whole world will have loved me. So I'll just have to kill all of you, and then myself. And as a bonus, nobody will ever find out how awful you are either! Doesn't that sound fair?"      Blueberry raises her wand and fires a glowing laser beam- not at the group, but at the Terminarch's core. She has to be stopped from destroying it, or the whole mission will have been for nothing. There's just barely enough time for someone to intercede.
Strawberry Princess	But that's just one more tactic to throw the party into disarray. The Terminarch clones could only use their precognition to avoid timelines where they die, but Blueberry must have found more creative uses for it. She's fought this battle a hundred times in her head already.      After firing at the core, her very next trick is to fire her wand down, piercing through the crater's floor and punching a narrow hole down into a subway tunnel below. The crater's water begins to ever-so-slowly drain, becoming a 'natural body' of 'running water' anathema to Seras.      She sprouts magical wings to zip and skim over the surface of the black water, but her accuracy doesn't suffer for her speed. Against Kale, she aims her laser squarely at his solar plexus, driving the wind out of him repeatedly with its surprisingly blunt, 'concussive' impacts. Against Lilian, she 'pins' her to Tamamo, lining up so the former is always 'in front of' the latter from her perspective- dodging at all would expose her beloved to the attack instead.      The others are subjected to sweeping beams that corral them in, controlling the shape of the engagement. A harsh dynamic soon becomes apparent. Within her enormous blue aura, she can see every exchange ahead of time; she 'misses' only to set up a more devastating exchange later, and she gets hit only when beneficial as a trade, or else when there's absolutely no escape.      On the other hand, the thick fog filling the Crater means that being outside her precognition field makes seeing her impossible. Visibility is simply too low to spot her at even half that distance. She can no longer foresee your actions outside of it, but that hardly makes hitting her easier.
Kale Hearthward	Kale keeps his sword in a ready position, at the front of the group, as the initial discussion with Blueberry Princess occurs. He doesn't trust himself enough to not say the wrong thing here... ... And, mostly, he thinks he gets it. Blueberry being left behind here, and... the only place she exists, besides here, is in memories. Maybe there'd be some appeal, like, it'd be nice if the only place *he* existed was in memories, and people only kept the good ones. ... There'll be time to think on it later. Kale's startled out of his thoughts as Blueberry transitions from talking to aiming at the core. "No, wait-" He moves. Lilian moves too - and probably faster, given that she's not constrained by linear time the same way he is. And she has time to think, and probably had a plan for this already. Kale has none of that. But Kale does have speed. Tabtrack - the pair of boots - flares, taking one fraction of a second to come to full power, and then another fraction of a second to disengage the air-brakes and propel Kale forward, straight on at maximum acceleration, at Blueberry Princess. There's no plan, no thought, no *time* - just action. Just motion. Just a desperate attempt to slam into her with as much force as he can muster, and knock off her aim enough. And then, Kale barely has enough time to come to a halt, before Blueberry is on him - and he quite literally gets the wind knocked out of him. A moment later, his Breath Weapons - the sword and the boots, sputter out as their steady intake of lifebreath dries up. "No..." He manages to draw in a breath - enough to keep standing, not enough to re-activate. "Strawberry might - get hurt, knowing about you here, but -" He manages to get back up straight, and adjusts his grip on his dormant drill sword. "She'll definitely get hurt if - we don't come back!" He charges at her - he realizes she has precognition, and Kale is like an open book, but - maybe if he just digs deep enough, and fights hard enough, there won't be any futures where they *don't* defeat her!
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Smite her     Arthur's fingernails bite into his palms, drawing blood. "Seer, huh?" He says, wincing. His grin stays on, forced. "Naw. Come on. I told you what I'm gonna do. And I'm sticking to it. You can't change my mind. No matter what you say." >Arthur: Make a friend     But that doesn't make him stupid. Plenty of things do, but not that. But he's met Time-aspects before. He's the one to scream the minute he sees a twitch. "The core!! Someone--!!" He shouts. But by that time, what's done is done. Lilian or another will have that, or she won't. He briefly tries to take off and get some elevation, only to be swatted down hard by one of those herding beams swirling around. With clenched teeth, he pulls out out of the rise and into a lower maneuver. "FUCK! That hurts." His body shudders. Then he swings down. "Alright TOP GUN, slick moves!" His side smokes horribly as he moves down to skim the water with her. "You want me close, I'm down for it!"     His rush over the water kicks up a tall, shimmering wake. Her power is a Time power, and that means his powers are significantly countered. He can do nothing beyond the reach of her sight, and his magic is limited. But he pushes as hard as he can anyway. Eyes flick up to the boundary. Time and space are opposed aspects. His magic is hard-countered by her time-sight. Her time magic is hard-countered by the limits of geometry. And Arthur can't do anything like warp his heavy energy weapon above this area, not with the monsters at risk of assaulting it, purifying it. All his biggest options are locked down. Time and space are opposed.     Time and space are opposed. Time and space are opposed... >Arthur: Catch her. Befriend her.     From this moment on, Arthur will be doing nothing but trying to catch up to Blueberry Princess and grab ahold of her. His magical energy is surging, and he has something he plans to do to her. And the moment it hits her, in those hypothetical futures, all her predictive ability, claim nothing will happen. That his shining hand, doused in white fire, has no effect.     But is that really true? There's so much power...     The broom's thrusters blast all the faster. Arthur's plan is decided. "Alright, you havin' a tough time?! Fine! I'll *help you* even if you don't goddamn *want* it!" He shouts. No more attempts to escape. He just rushes to try to close in and grab her. Any effort to evade him means trading around all the more dangerous attacks from others. His hand gleams with unbelievable light... A locking grapple that threatens an effect that precognition cannot see. An illusion, maybe? A fakeout? >Arthur: GRAB HER!     We'll just have to see if a precognitive can get paranoid.
Lilian Rook	Lilian already feels sick. She'd felt this horrid, churning unease since hearing Blueberry's voice. Since reaching the crater. Perhaps Since coming to London. No, since Velt first spoke the other day. Maybe even ever since Strawberry said a few magic words. She'd played hot-cold with this feeling in the back of her mind for so long. All she can do is grit her teeth and try to push through it.     'Don't say that!'     "What, are you suddenly going to decide now that you're not a liar? Are you offended by the suggestion you lied to Strawberry? For the millionth time?" Lilian snaps back. "That was your decision. I wasn't going to get in your way back then, because I trusted what you were doing was to not break her. But what you're doing now is just the opposite! You can't get in our way now!"     She means every word, and for once, it's so very clear that she does, because she already looks ill just feeling Blueberry's emotional crisis secondhand. "You've been here too long Blueberry. You're not the same. 'None shall follow one who countermands their absolute judgement'." Grasping for pieces of Code as handholds. Moving forward one rung at a time. "Maybe it's unfair to you that they all had to be here and not just me. It's true they can't keep a secret. It's true they don't know what you've been through. Even now just hearing it pisses me off. But being a magical girl was never fair to anyone. So, please. If making Strawberry happy was ever important to you . . ."     'What did you do to your mother's son?'     Lilian flinches. Turning her face and raising an arm as if just about to shrink from an incoming blow. She looks right back, and all the intensity has been snuffed out of her eyes. The colour bleached out of her face. She looks like she just woke up from a nightmare. She looks like she's going to be sick. She looks nothing like Lilian Rook. Just limp and pathetic and scared of where she is, like an ordinary person would be.     "Fuck you Blueberry." Lilian croaks. She licks her lips and tries again. "That doesn't have anything to do with anything and we both know it. Not me, not you, and not Strawberry." She clutches her throat, struggling to look the blue specter in the metaphorical eye. "Here and now, this is about the people we can save, and the girl we can protect. You're just being shitty because you know you're not going to get what you want." She really looks like she wishes she could believe that. "We're going ahead with the operation either way. That bratty little taunt doesn't mean anything to me in the slightest."     Blueberry aims at the core. Lilian feels the intent to fire a hair before it happens. Her eyes shoot wide, pupils constrict. She lunges forward, and luminal static stretch fizzles around her body. She stumbles, disoriented. A dry heave. There's no time. She succeeds the second time, but only after Blueberry has already fired. She can't interrupt Blueberry. She races the beam to its target. She appears out of thin air in front of it. Her sword is not at the ready. Lilian fizzles into existence while still fumbling for it.
Lilian Rook	Of course she takes the blast dead on. What else is there to do? With a fraction of a second to decide and the only thing at hand being her sluggish, uncooperative body, it'd happen either way. Lilian is hurled from the top of the Terminarch heap like a ragdoll, crashing and rolling down its hard and jumbled sides with barely the coordination to cradle her head and neck. A melodramatic, watery crash sends her under the filthy water.     It takes too many seconds for her to resurface from it, ungainly pushing herself up by her arms, hacking and spitting vile runoff, soaked and bedraggled hair plastered to her bloodied face. Every front-facing insert on her combat skin cracked at once. She really does heave into the water this time, with her full body. Mercifully nothing comes up but a trickle of crimson spit. "Blueberry--!" Lilian growls, between hacking coughs. "I swear to God I'll--!"     But when it's Tamamo in danger, suddenly Lilian works just fine. Well enough to leap into the way with her weapon ready, at least, slashing through the bolt of magical non-matter. Her hand drops to her sidearm and snaps back up from well-practiced muscle memory. It's thankfully waterproofed. A string of rapidly pulsed blue-white cracks follow, well-aimed. But Lilian's hands are shaking.
Seras Victoria	'Vampires cannot cross running water.' It seems to be a strange and quirky weakness until you remember that running water WASHES AWAY FILTH. A being tied to the earthen grave cannot stand it.     If this was the Thames or the ocean, it would be over quickly. There'd be no hope for Seras. But... it's neither of those. It's a crater that now drains through the center, the water beginning to steadily swirl.     And as it does, Seras drops down to her knees with a light splash, the strength pulled from her whole body and a deep cold spreading through her limbs. "Guah...nh..."     While her vampiric power ebbs and the water pulls at her cursed soul, her ears are still ringing with the onslaught of insults Blueberry has hurled.     How does precognition lead to MIND READING? She knows. How does she know. And what's more...     "How dare... HOW DARE..." The draculina's face grows cold. "How dare you spew that vile hogwash, you bloody pig!"     Seras has reached a breaking point. She's cold and weak and starving, and the enemy has the advantage. Seras... staggers up to her feet, leaning on the Harkonnen, eyes closed from the strain. "You have no right to say any more, about anyone!" What the heck's happened? There's... a bit of a GROWL in her tone. The girl who's been on the polite and light-hearted side... this girl who seems like a kitten...     Has fangs.     When she opens her mouth with a snarl, oh boy does she -ever- have fangs. Fangs and nothing else, from the look of it. Her eyes steadily open with a red hellish glow above that shark's grimace and she reaches into her supply pack, pulling out a blood pack. She sinks her fangs into it and drinks deeply of the cold, bland liquid of life and the glow of her eyes flashes to a brighter shade. Although her dark nature and Tamamo's divinity may not be a great match, her vampiric powers seem to nevertheless gobble up the healing energies of Tamamo's assistance and Seras once again stands straight despite the draining waters.     Moving with startlingly out-of-character viciousness, she breaks into a dash, becoming an unliving blur with a wind and water spray in her wake. As it turns out, coming with all of those weapons was a good idea even if they're on the cumbersome side. She first takes a few shots with a handgun to get a feel for how Blueberry moves, then stuffs the handgun away and brings up the assault rifle dangling on her shoulder by its straps and unloads an entire clip in several bursts.     Lastly, when the pressure on Blueberry is at maximum... Seras takes aim, crimson gaze and her own precognitive (if nowhere near as controlled) third eye locked onto Blueberry... and pulls the trigger on her massive cannon, the 30mm anti-tank weapon - the Harkonnen.     A huge shell is unleashed with a cacaphanous BOOM that sends Seras back a few steps...!
Trudy Grimm	"Ahahaha..." Trudy's laugh is forced, but she's definitely trying, "Rotten. That's one way to put it." She closes her eyes as she approaches the crater center, scratching at her cheek with one finger. The other hand lifts, holding the Grimoire, which unbuckles and unfurls itself, "I truly am an awful creature. In that way, we have a lot in common, wouldn't you say?"     Beams erupt. In the chaos of lights, the witch is cast from her bony pathway and into the now-running water. After a few impacts, bones lurch up in front of her, deflecting further beams slicing through the water around her.     "This is the first time I've ever met you. I don't know the context at all, but you seem to know something about me and that's enough."     The scattered undead Soldiers likewise dive for cover; whether it is debris, parts of the Terminach's corpse, or boney protrusions produced by Trudy's magic. Two don't make it to cover in time; one sliced neatly in two at the waist, collapsing into the water in multiple pieces. The other's left torso evaporates in a blaze of light, causing him to spin around as he collapses into the water, firing his rifle as he drops. Within seconds, a crossfire of combat rifle and heavy machine gun fire chatters through the misty crater floor. One soldier hauls up out of cover, producing a plunger-shaped grenade in his free hand and hurling it.     "There's one key difference though..."     The Grimoire's pages flip, glowing with the ominous green light of Eiwaz; the Death rune. Her free hand thrusts down; igniting a circle of runes beneath her feet, glowing dimly through the corrupted waters. As the runic circle rotates, the Eiwaz runes interlock; altering their meaning and their power, transitioning from a sickly green to a warm orange-yellow Thurisaz; the Protection rune.     "We aren't /quite/ the same. While we are both wretched, horrible cretins who stain the world's purity with our very existence..."     Shadows cast by the human-like limbs of the Terminarch deepen, turning pitch-black as the void. From within erupts ghastly white pillars of bleached bone, knitted tightly together as solid structures. The bolt aimed at the Terminarch's core passes between these pillars and will have to be contended with by someone faster.     "...Only one of us is trying to become something better. As much as I hate myself, you won't catch me wallowing in self-pity like this."     The bone pillars emit a series of unhealthy-sounding crunching noises, and then unfurl themselves into broad sheets of interlocking bone, forming first a cage around the threatened Core; and then reinforced with additional backing layers, rapidly obscuring the core behind a wall of glistening white bone.
Cantio	Hearing Blueberry Princess and about her connection to Strawberry Princess, her implied idolization of the veteran, and all of that self-loathing has Cantio grimacing in clear discomfort. It's not from any sort of love or adoration for this person she's 'met' only minutes ago, nor from any respect for Strawberry Princess herself, but because those thoughts are all a little too familiar to her. She's taken aback when Blueberry Princess accosts her for something that nobody else would know, and the instinct to recoil and shout back in a miserable attempt at deflecting is strong. "You're probably right about most... Maybe all of these things." Cantio replies, somehow managing to rein in the overpowering instinct to deny everything (although she does visibly recoil at first). "I don't know about most of them, but... Yes,  I have done a lot of things that were terrible in retrospect." She replies with a firm tone, conveniently ignoring her own misgivings even at the time of starting those projects. "And they're not things that I can just take back. And maybe I'll never be loved the same way as my sister might, but that doesn't mean I'll just lay down and cry over it!" Permanently, anyway. She's also getting more heated despite her best efforts earlier. "Even if I can't fix what happened before, I can still make things better going forward." She hears Arthur trying to reassure Blueberry, and she stops herself from continuing with her potentially more poisonous train of thought. Instead... Defense. Flipping her sword forward, Cantio braces it against her shoulder as Blueberry Princess' beams sweep towards her. They rake across that blade and cleave off chunks of it at a time, leaving distinctly painful-looking marks along Cantio as well where the blade loses its structure. She scrambles back to get some distance, not quite noticing the effects of the blue aura or the fog just yet aside from making it relatively easier to see as long as she remains within the field. "I... I might not be the best person to say it, but people like my sister or Strawberry Princess? They believe in us no matter what kind of dumb things we do, and I'm sure she'd believe in you no matter what you're really like. Just let her see it instead of running away!" All at once, a trio of Cantio clones appears in front of the main one. They break off in different directions, swords raised to start firing bursts of light magic at Blueberry Princess in a wide     formation. They're not particularly well-aimed, but serve instead to act as decoys and distractions as Cantio (actual) charges in headfirst to try and capitalize on Arthur trying to grab her. That precognition will reveal that Cantio's going to try and stab her right through the leg with that claymore-esque sword rather than aiming for any vitals, and that's exactly what Cantio aims for without too much regard for the size of the blade or how much damage such a strike could (hypothetically) do.
Ishirou	A slave who thinks he's not one anymore, just because he's got a new body and kneels for different masters he calls 'friends'. Those words hit a bit heavier than perhaps some of her other insults.  Things have been weighing on Ishirou's mind since the incident on Mars.  Those words from Evehime, are stuck in his mind in a way he can't escape, and this sticks right on top of that.  Was he just replacing one group of masters for another?  Was he really afraid of reality?  Was this the reality he was really in..?  This makes his words back then seem hollow.   Ishirou makes a choked sound, the words he just said seem very hollow, because then all he could think about was himself.  That part of him makes him disgusted with it because right now he /should/ care that her words likely are shaking others.  He hears the words about Lilian's family, about Tamamo...he should care but right now all he can do is think about himself. 'Is he even real..?'  These are the thoughts that suddenly got rent in his head.  He shakes his head, it can't be true, he knows he's real.  He knows it!  He was given a body when he hated what he was.  He was given a name when he was just a number...he was supported by these people, and of course, he cares about them!  He loves some of them and cares for the rest.   "...How can someone who can love...not be real..?" he says perhaps to himself, but perhaps also towards Blueberry.  It was right then when the beam came at him, he barely had enough time.  A blue shield appears, just enough to take the edge off of the beam.  He is sent back, digging into the ground as he is sent away.  Damage warnings start being reported to his HUD, but he's fine.  He doesn't have an answer to his reality versus the area around him.   The flight unit dashes straight up and flips into fighter mode.  It seems to boost away, but what he's doing is getting out of her range.  It's true there is fog, but his sensors don't care about that, the fog won't hamper him at all.  Especially, because of what he does next... Sensors start overlapping her, aiming to do more than hinder her, but predict her own movements, and her own offensive options.  He sends that info to others, attempting to boost their ability to strike her, and reduce her ability to predict them.   "I...am not a slave!  I choose to do this of my own free will, and for the love I have for those I fight with.  You are the slave, a slave to your fear!  Your fear that your lies have been seen through this whole time, and that she knows more than you think...but that she has pretended not to notice for you.  If you think she'd stop caring because the lie was revealed...then you never cared for her at all!"
James Bond	Bond is like a statue when Blueberry tears into him. His eyes silently plead. 'Don't take this any further.' She does--and he can't bear to look at her.      "You're right."      He takes a deep breath. Blueberry makes a move on the core. Lilian's got it. His hand flicks towards the sheath on his thigh. Already, she's got a bead on him. Running keeps him clear--but also forces him to move where she wants him.      A path is cored along the uneven ground as Bond takes off. He's just fast enough to keep up, but only just. The duffel bag has never felt heavier than now. He needs to get clear of here.      Bond leaps, a laser grazing his leg. He grits his teeth to keep from screaming as he attempts to ascend the crater. "I am pathetic." he hisses beneath his breath, "A coward. More and more, I go out hoping it'll be the last job." Blueberry hems his ascent with a laser, and he returns fire, aim perfectly levelas he whips backwards and slides back down by a few feet.      But neither of us should be thinking about how to end it. Thinking about how dying means we don't have to worry we'll ever mess anything up again. Not when there are people like...      He whips back around, as Blueberry's focus seems to shift somewhere else, knowing that it can be wherever she needs it to be. It doesn't matter--the smartest play right now is to get out of the crater. Bond's watch fires a second grapnel qith a quiet hiss, ziplining him up the side of the crater.      Dipping one hand into the duffel bag, he procures a two-way radio, turns it on, and tosses it down the slope, just before he disappears above the fog. Keeping his body low to the ground upon cresting the lip of the crater, he scans for the patrolling clones, searching for the nearest available place to wait out their patterns, using the watch's reflective surface to check corners. The goal is to get to a place with a vantage point on the foggy crater--ideally, out of the immediate patrol range.
Tamamo	It is ever the case that Tamamo's control, her experience, her way with words and faces and masks, both ordinary and extraordinary, protects her from both casual and determined readings. It's not even that her mind appears blank -- nothing so obvious. She's far too good at carrying the proper appearance of a proper lady, down to the levels to which few are even capable of looking.     How did that onmyouji find her? It's a mystery that that man isn't around to tell.     It's notable, then, when she answers Blueberry with a hard-edged, sawtooth-sharp, "What do you know?" Not 'why.' Not 'how.' No acknowledgment or confirmation is possible, but that she reacts is clear and unmistakeable. Enough so that the trick, which should likely be obvious, hasn't reached her. If it had, she wouldn't give away even that much.     Blueberry would only have to try saying every plausible accusation until something touched her, true or not. 'Truth' isn't even a relevant consideration, really.     Lilian is saying something about not killing her. Arthur is determined to be her friend. They're both so very fortunate, in their requests, that Tamamo's hands can't reach that crystal neck.     Her talismans can, however. Blessings fly to Lilian, and at her taking a solid strike, healing flies to Seras. There isn't a future in which avoiding the array that Tamamo begins building is possible, except by taking the time to tear up each of the little paper strips she scatters.
Strawberry Princess	The shot to the core being blocked doesn't seem to displease her. If she did it in the first place, after all, the foreseen outcome must be part of her plan. Trudy's protective encasing, likewise, goes perfectly; Blueberry doesn't deign to interfere with it. "'Trying'," she repeats mockingly. "If you were ever good, you wouldn't have to try."      Blueberry moves with perfect anticipation when Kale approaches: she 'kicks off' the water's surface, soaring backwards to rob his approach of a hard impact. Her speed falls well short of Strawberry's; to avoid taking it head-on, she has to kick up an obscuring spray of black water, duck under the dril, and reverse direction to dash past him while it scrapes along her back. She retaliates by driving the sharp tip of her wand into his stomach in passing, like a jouster.      "Like she cares about you," she spits at him. "Like anyone cares about you. You hurt everyone close to you. Is that why you keep your boyfriend so far away?"      Lilian's bullets don't find their mark. How could they? But Blueberry makes a show of leaning out of the way by the narrowest possible margin. "It's got everything to do with it. You think you deserve to be like Strawberry? She doesn't lie. She doesn't cheat. She gave years to be special, and you're stealing them, you gross fuck."      Seras discovers that opposing precognition can find the 'best option', but only out of the bad choices that Blueberry allows- some kind of maximin strategy. Only bad shots are available; whenever her finger's on the trigger, something's interfering, as if the world were conspiring against her taking the shot. The best opening she can find with her cannon, when Blueberry's tied down with as many other people as possible, is only to strike her leg.
Strawberry Princess	Tamamo distributes her talismans. But of course Blueberry perceives how dangerous they could be if left alone- and her precognition shows her exactly how to get rid of them. She fires her beam at the glossy metal of the Terminarch's main body, a place where angular plates intersect. The beam refracts off of it like a disco ball, and each of its tiny sub-lasers perfectly finds a paper talisman to destroy- a shot with millimeter precision, but executed in a heartbeat. Some of the sub-beams pierce through to strike her in the process.      What do you know? "I know you'll be the death of her someday." Surely that has to be a bluff, but it's delivered with utmost conviction.      Cantio discovers that distractions are of limited use: Blueberry sees the exact zones of threat created by each attack and precisely weaves around them, exerting the minimum effort needed to dodge each one and maneuver back into an advantageous position. She ignores the clones outright, continuing to speak directly to the original: "You're an embarrassment. They think you're disgusting. It'd be better for all of them if you just went away! Just like me."      The final blow to her leg... misses, of course. Instead Blueberry zips past her, slamming the haft of her wand into Cantio's throat in a rough clothesline maneuver.      Like Seras, Ishirou's scans discover that Blueberry's plans have already been chosen to diminish the helpfulness of any opposing prediction or analysis: any critical weakness he could reveal, she's already taken steps to minimize it. They do still help in giving his allies an edge, but his words just might be even more important.      Right up until that last part, she seems smug. But even the suggestion that she might not care for Strawberry makes her scream with unhinged rage. She lunges for him and lashes out with her staff, using the momentum of her flight to add to the vicious weight of its blows. "You don't know her! YOU DON'T KNOW HER! You don't know ME! How dare you-"      That screaming outburst must have taken her off of her predicted path. When she realizes Arthur's lunging for her from behind, she seems genuinely startled. She wheels around on reflex to strike him with the butt of her staff, leaving her crucially open for just one moment while her protective predictions are derailed. That her predictions say his hand is harmless doesn't matter.      "Get away from me," she pleads. "Get away from me. You shouldn't have come here. I just wanted to be alone. Anything else is too scary."      That doesn't last long until her magic pulses again. Her emotional state stabilizes; she moves by precognition once more.
Strawberry Princess	Bond finds that the clones' patrolling patterns are the same as before. He'll have to wait a moment for the optimal west-and-east configuration, but from there he can potentially- if he's careful- make his way to a hollowed-out building that's just barely standing, hardly more than a facade. It still has a third-story window where he could duck out of sight of the clones when they patrol close, or peer down into the crater below.      His bullets hit crystal with a satisfying ping, but she twists so they roll off her body like shaped armor.      What Blueberry does next inadvertently gives Bond an assist. She zips to the western edge of the crater, her magical wings flaring, until her precognition aura encompasses one of the Terminarch clones. Then she fires her beam at it from out of the fog.      Alerted, its spotlights turn to sweep over the crater. Wherever it finds life, it opens up with that terrifying beam as broad as a house, boiling the water and shredding the land. Soon its fellows join in, opening up with overwhelming firepower that burns the body even if one dodges by ample feet.      Eventually the clones cease firing, assuming the fog-shrouded threat must be gone, but the seconds until then are agonizingly long.
Trudy Grimm	Fortunately for Trudy's soldiers, they aren't alive. Unfortunately for Trudy's soldiers, the Terminarch clones don't particularly care because the soldiers are moving objects in a place defined by stillness. Two more are outright evaporated by laser fire from the clones provoked by Blueberry, several more lose limbs or sustain heavy burns to their coats and pants that only don't burst into flames due to the slowly draining waters.     "Trying means Doing. If you don't put in the effort," Trudy states plainly, "You're not going to change anything."     Singed herself, the witch produces a green crystal in her free hand, glowing with some internal light. Clutching this in a cage of her fingers, the circle that forms around her feet is this time a gloomy blue, speckled with incidences of Uruz; the Power rune. This same rune manifests within the crystal she holds, and then corrupts quite suddenly and dramaticly as it dissolves into the light. The crystal promptly cracks, then shatters, crumbling into the water at her feet.     The soldiers' weapons, metal rusted and chipped, takes on a blue hue that shines faintly through the gaps in the metal and wood they're made of. Gunfire resumes from the remaining soldiers once the clone laser bombardment ceases, but as their guns assume this stagnating glow, the bullets they fire likewise chip at Blueberry's own magic. It's clear that Trudy's cursed their weapons, a curse that attaches to the person they're shooting.     Trudy, meanwhile, closes her book with a *thump*. The spell circle around her feet fades; revealing the shadow beneath the water. Promptly, the witch sinks into the waves without so much as a splash.     Across the crater, shadows cast by the bone coccoon she had built around the Terminarch's carcass deepen-- lengthen. A torrent of blackened water spills out, followed by a rather damp Witch who alights on a platform of her own creation.     Trudy Grimm takes a moment to glance down at the battle as it unfolds, then turns her attention to the wall of interlocking bones. It starts to unravel, pulling apart like a zipper in cloth as she approaches it.
Kale Hearthward	> "Like she cares about you." "She - she does, though..." Kale had been trying to draw enough breath again. She knocks it right back out of him with that. And she hits something else, as well. "She cares about me!" He says, trying to keep the doubt from his voice. "We've fought together, we've protected each other, she's..." ... done all of the things a coworker would have done. "She's complimented me!" And that is... a weak defense of the accusation. > "Like anyone cares about you. You hurt everyone close to you." "Ishirou-" No, wait, he *did* hurt him. How long was he bullying him, back then? How quick was Kale to take offense and demand a duel just because Ishirou had said something Kale didn't like? "Lilian-" ... has a relationship with him that seems entirely built on mutual conflict. "Tamamo-" ... he had *just* been talking to about how he didn't know her very well... Even his old allies back at home, his family - how long has it been since he talked to them? > "Is that why you keep your boyfriend so far away?" ... It isn't. Zephyr's the one who's been pushing *him* away. And that hurts yet more to admit - although by this point it's like pouring a bucket of water on top of an already drowning man. Kale tries to focus through it. She keeps knocking the wind out of him with her actions, and taking the wind from his sails with her words, but he can still fight. He tries to get ahead of her, cut her off - he may not be able to land hits on her easily, between her precognition and his weapons being dormant, but if he can slow her down enough, maybe Arthur can catch up again...
Tamamo	The truth of it doesn't matter. Nor does 'belief' matter, where the only goal is 'pain.' An accusation known to be false still wounds, bringing to mind that self-questioning.     Haven't I been careful? Haven't I done enough to avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing? Haven't I done all one could to save face? Was it ever my fault, what happened to him? Hadn't I already settled that question, in my heart?     If it had truly settled, it wouldn't still touch her. The wound wouldn't show through what should have been masking her voice. Not one twitch showed on her face, but her words were enough to betray her.     Did I not cloak my light, when I asked her? A mortal's dimness, and still, she said -- was I careless? Does my memory hold firm? Do I remember what occurred, and not only what was wished?     It hardly matters, even if the talismans she scatters are torn up. Unless she's focused by those attacks, without another defending her, she can cause busywork for her opponent nearly as fast as it can be resolved. Completion of an inescapable array is only a matter of time, and its effects are delayed until that completion. A pity the half-minute limit doesn't apply to Blueberry, or this would be a greater advantage. The talismans she'd told Lilian to mind will still be useful, but more so for the design of the seated cat than the other. A trap that cannot be noticed, even after it's triggered, is the most direct counter she has to this strong a capability in future-sight.     'I know you'll be the death of her someday.'     Either Blueberry's stepped too far for her claims to be plausible, or Tamamo's taken in Lilian's explanation of the trick, or her mask has simply mended itself. Whatever the cause, this, the optimal statement to keep her distracted, only has Tamamo saying, "You hope others to be as near worthless as yourself, even more strongly than you hope for Strawberry-Princess to be perfect. Oh, but that is hardly true, you know? Your hopes are similarly misplaced. It must have been quite the comfort, to think that a truly and remarkably good person loved you, to give that love greater meaning. I can only imagine how terrible it must be, for you to know how truly, utterly ordinary both your troubles and your lifeline were. To be without the refuge of being an especially misfortunate girl, why, that would mean that everything you did wrong was something you could have avoided, no?"     She's in control, again. She hasn't neglected her own reading of the future. It runs up against Blueberry's, but one of them is reading nine people, and the other reading only one. The Terminarch beams require only a single point of prediction. Tamamo appears to be caught in the line of fire, but then she's already away, retreating from the fringes while broken defensive spells spark and shatter, their power expended.     "That would make everything, in entirety, your own fault."
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Dodge, grab     In a thousand futures, Arthur grabs only one way. In a thousand futures, Blueberry maneuvers in all kinds of ways to stop him. In this one, the true Alpha Timeline, she slams her staff square into his head and cracks brutally against flesh. Red pours down his face where his forehead is split open. He skids back over water, trying to stabilize. "I'm not getting away. I'm not smiting you. You--" He swallows down the pain. "I told you. I told you, I told you! I go where I'm not supposed to, because I'm *shit*. And you've stayed where you weren't supposed to, too! I told you I'm gonna be your goddamn friend! So HOLD STILL!!"     His hand only glows brighter. The fragments of energy that make it out of the containment field at his palm are enough to create exotic matter in the local atmosphere. He's gotta use the other hand to grasp Tamamo's boon. Everything he has, including that, pours into whatever he's building at his palm. That hand is beginning to shine like the sun. But when the Terminarchs send their sweeping eyes over the crater... he closes his hand. He can't let them see what he's got. He freezes, hovering slowly and carefully out of those sweeping vision cones. Struggling not to leave a trail of living blood that can be tracked to him... No Gates, he can't afford that. This is agonizing...     But he can speak during the agonizing stealth. "Scary, right? Right? I come in here, and I know, haha, hhhh, I know if I meet a survivor, they're gonna *hate* me! They're gonna hate how I act, they're gonna hate who I am, some shiny bastard wandering in to show off how the world went on without them, right? Because you can't see *that* far. So pour the hate on me, if you gotta. Make me shine less, put my fire out, you, you goddamn... ghhh... But I'm not giving up! You and *me*, we're gonna be *BUDDIES!!*" The sweeping eyes have stopped.     He rushes again. A rush, a small rise, and a slam to the base of the crater, depositing a Gate. One that will dump more of that water into the void, as per the request. And a spot to start his gravity. If she won't stop, he'll pull her in. An absolutely massive gravitational pull starts, trying to yank Blueberry down, to slow her like Kale's doing. He raises his hand. There's that shining grasp he insists on grabbing her with. Whatever he was planning, he's still focused on it, and it's still seemingly impossible to predict.     He takes off. He has to hold her. He has to land the grasp.     Whatever it takes.     Even still, it's likely she can tear through the restricting gravity at greater expense, enduring the attacks of others. Single-touch defeats sure seem to never work, right?
Ishirou	The words get under her skin, and Ishirou sees a path suddenly.  Their backs were to the wall, but he has to consider the best time to use it...abusing it would be bad, and also lose its punch when he might otherwise need it.  It's awful, disgusting, and wrong...he feels absolutely bad about it, but he knows the worst thing for him if she managed to even partially succeed.  He swallows... The staff comes in, and quickly the flight unit swapped back to humanoid mode, hovering in the air, and swung up its laser sword to try and clash with the staff.  For a moment, it looks like Ishirou has predicted her attacks, but one manages to get by him, but he also manages to roll with the attack.  For that, he's knocked through the air ass over kettle for a few feet before correcting.   Arthur is on her, but he's already trying to get deeper scans of her.  She can try and fight his prediction, but there is one thing in his existence he is very certain and confident in...that is his ability to understand things.  He's got a burning passion to understand everything, and that in turn gives him a passion for knowing and understanding.  She can try and counter his predictions. But he just has to understand how she does that and manages to pull ahead.  However, first, he fires a barrage of missiles toward her, attempting to force her back.  However, he puts random timers on them.  Sure they explode if they hit, but some explode early, aiming to try and throw off her predictions.   "Then why are you trying to hurt her even now?  If you killed us, do you think she couldn't find out?  Do you not think she wouldn't come here to see if anyone could be saved?  What if she found out /you/ did it?  She's the only reason I could think past your comments.  One of the only few people who refused to accept that I wasn't a person was her.  I wouldn't be who I was without her kindness...so I won't let you hurt her anymore."
James Bond	Waiting while still inside Blueberry's field is not ideal--but it's necessary to get past the patrols, and she knows it as well as Bond. There's no choice. They aren't looking at him, and he's found cover. But it's too close. The heat burns his skin, feels like it's working even deeper. His fists clench until his knuckles are white, until the skin splits under the heat, his mind devoted wholly to staying quiet.      To cry in pain here would mean spotlights--it would mean death. They stop to fire. He endures, for a few agonizing seconds, until he's made it past, his body screaming as he stalks through the ruins, shoes carefully landing upon solid, quiet footholds.      There's just enough time to get to that third floor, barely intact as it is. The folding-stock, suppressed rifle he'd stuffed into the duffel bag is pulled out, along with a second radio. Bond turns the volume down to what would be a whisper, before he turns it on. Nothing transmitted yet. He'd need to be sure she was within range of it. To do that, he'd need to be able to see her.      He procures, next, the goggles. He flips the switch on, and they power up with a soft whine. Alec always was good at sweet-talking Q. "You know damn well that the magic isn't what makes her special," says Bond into the radio," watching Blueberry's form displayed on the monochrome green of the specialized equipment.      He waits until the outline of her hands is visible. "And if I have to draw these bastards to get you to admit it, then that's fine. If they get lucky, you'll even be rid of me without having to deal with them yourself."      He squeezes the trigger. A called shot, for the hands, meant to shock or startle her into dropping the staff. He ducks below the windowline and makes a run for it, anticipating a response from the clones.
Seras Victoria	Well. Seras said she was going to try and pin Blueberry, but how to actually go about that? She's FLYING. That's so unfair. Rather makes any idea of pinning her rather difficult. Seras realizes the folly of her goal within about ten seconds of speaking it...     But she's not idle. She doesn't quite understand this strange feeling that her instincts are telling her.     It's not in words, but if it could be, it's one thing: DODGE.     Seras takes a flying leap to the side and acrobatically flips through the air moments before a beam swipes through the water where she'd been standing, one she couldn't possibly have seen. The resulting steam explosion and sheer heat of it scorches her and sends pain through her body, but she lands on her feet with only a slight stagger, slamming a fresh clip of bullets - this time, her special stock of blessed silver - into her handgun.     Once again, she takes aim in her unholy fury. Once more, her Third Eye guides her hand as she acts without any real thinking. Her body's moving largely on predatory autopilot with the goal of laying Blueberry low. Bang bang bang, shots are fired again and again!     And as it's emptied, she then quickly reloads her assault rifle and unleashes another torrent of bullets at what her instincts scream are the most opportune moments.     "Just what's -wrong- with you, Blueberry?! I get the feeling you're just being terrible by CHOICE now! You're CHOOSING to be hurtful. This is NOT how one doesn't be terrible!"
Cantio	It's not real. The words are predetermined to target everyone's weakest points, to hit them at their cores. It's not anything that Blueberry actually knows, just the results of her precognition. Even knowing all of that, however, doesn't dull the impact much when Blueberry('s apparition)(?) keeps hammering into those insecurities that have always been floating around in the back of her head, and especially after everything that's transpired. To make matters worse... Nobody here actually knows what happened, do they? Still, they must have heard of it by now. Maybe they're already thinking about it again, reminded by what's just been said just as Cantio's being reminded of it now. That lapse in attention is enough for Blueberry to capitalize with her own speed, slamming that wand right into Cantio's neck and nearly taking her head off in the process until Cantio remembers to actually fling herself backwards instead of just eating the strike head on. Tumbling around briefly, Cantio stops herself by thrusting her sword into the ground, scraping off several chunks of it that scatter at first before zipping around on their own to take aim at Blueberry on their own. They don't fire right away, however, as Cantio realizes what Blueberry's doing with the first Terminarch clone. "Incoming from the outside!" She calls out while trying to split her attention between Blueberry and the giant, finding only a brief moment of respite at that one missing wide before scrambling at the sound and sight of the rest firing into the crater. "If she can even predict those attacks, then..." Seeing little other options available, Cantio closes her eyes momentarily to try and steel herself as she recalls what happened after Ishirou suggested Blueberry might not care for Strawberry. "Blueberry... Maybe we are different after all. I've done terrible things, but I'd never do anything to hurt my sister. Not her friends, not our people, nobody that would ever have a chance." Cantio throws her sword forward, and it explodes into dozens of shards that fly out and spread around her like an array of shining crystals. "Can you really say the same for what you're doing now? Are you so worried about her finding out that you'd be willing to hurt her this much more? Or... Are you worse than I am, and you really just don't care about her at all?" It hurts to try and use that against Blueberry, but following Ishirou's lead is the best option she can find right now. The shards of Cantio's sword start firing a dizzying array of lasers, some in front of her to intercept a potential attack on her from Blueberry, others in front of Ishirou if she winds up going after him instead, and yet more in random directions to try and throw off the magical girl's precognition.
Tamamo	There's no way to avoid Tamamo's words. She does, after all, say a variation of them in every timeline. To check each possibility is only to hear her again and again and again. To tune her out would be the safest option, but her own light and gravity, that which Tamamo is so wary of using around Lilian, makes that as good as impossible. It's more than conviction. It's deeply, inexplicably trustworthy, and that knowledge lingers.     Looking at her makes it harder, not easier, to notice where her talismans are flying, especially the ones that loop around through the air, and into Arthur's hand, carrying an important piece of her outpouring power to commit to his use. He had said he had a way of ending this, after all, and Tamamo would very much like it to end, one way or another.
Lilian Rook	<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook manages to sputter out, between hacking up mouthfuls of stagnant runoff water and bloody spit, "The Terminarch only-- Blueberry doesn't need to be about to die. So-- She's already figuring out her best shot at winning. She knows she can't-- There's no way she beats all of us normally so-- The futures where she wins-- Work backwards to putting us off our game-- All of us at once. It's not real. It's not real it's not real so-- don't fall for it." <J-IC-Scene> Trudy Grimm says, "All we need to win is to secure what we came for, no?" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Don't-- Don't kill her." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "And don't alert the-- the clones." <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell, through gritted teeth: "We're gonna be friends. That's what I decided at the start. Remember whatever whatever you decided at the start and *don't* let the words throw you off." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "She went for-- Tamamo and I first-- Bond and Arthur primaries. So, she's the most-- She needs us to not-- She's seen the group fall apart without us in that order. That has to be it--" <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Then we change up what we're doing, and our role importance." <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell says, "Hate this divine shit. God dammit. Help me grab her. The minute I get my hands on her, this is all over." <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "I'm on the wing, and I got scans on her." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Changing it is-- You know they call them 'optimal moves' for a reason right?" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "That means any other order has even less chance of us winning. N-not that I think we won't . . ." <J-IC-Scene> Cantio says, "I'll do what I can. She's... I know a little of what she's feeling, at least. If we can throw her off with suboptimal moves, though..." <J-IC-Scene> Seras Victoria, heated, "She deserves a solid beating." ... "But we're not here for that. I'll try to pin her, Arthur." <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "I'm no good near her." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Don't fight stupid just so she hasn't-- she'll just fuck you for fighting stupid too. That's what I'd do." <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell says, "Lilian. Lilian! Hey, I don't know what she's talking about, but you're doing great pulling through. Hold on, okay?" <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Lilian, she won't suspect us making suboptimal plays /BECAUSE/ you are here." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Nothing. She's not talking about anything. She's-- It's just words to make responses happen. It doesn't mean anything. It's like-- A shitty brute force hack." <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell says, "She will. This isn't-- she's not guessing. There's no estimates." <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell says, "She's a Seer of Time." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "We have no reason to assume she can-- The terminarch has a different cloning ability than Strawberry, and it doesn't have her-- We don't even know if the specter Blueberry is the same as the flesh one, magically." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "We need intel. Do something about her range. Safeguard the core at all costs. We can't have all of us in her bubble but leaving it means running up against the clones. Fuck this." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I should have just-- If I'd just checked this all yesterday-- This is my fault."
Lilian Rook	<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "If I did what I was supposed to do, I'd have known about this. But I didn't because I didn't want to know." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I'm sorry." <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "Lilian--" <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "What did you just tell me about taking stuff into yourself?" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I can handle it." <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "If you are to blame yourself for not seeing this future, what of myself?" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I should have at least tried." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Tamamo no--" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "You don't deserve any of this." <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Also, this is likely the response she's trying to get from you. Stop blaming yourself, and shoulder it with us." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I shouldn't have let you--" <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "Did I not promise to protect you?" <J-IC-Scene> Trudy Grimm says, "I've begun fortifying the core myself. Thank you for dealing with that beam, I was too slow to do anything about that one. But it should be much safer now." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook hisses through her teeth. "Right. Right, you're right Ishirou." <J-IC-Scene> Cantio says, "It's... It's fine, Lilian. You..." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "That's not--" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Knights protect ladies, Tamamo."     "Shut the fuck up, Blueberry!" Lilian shouts despite herself, frustrating crashing into slow boiling panic and mixing into a torrid whirlpool in her head. She keeps missing; that doesn't ever happen. Not like this. She knows Blueberry should be able to dodge most of them, but she keeps attempting and failing to compensate. It's because her entire arm is shaking. She knows it is. But she can't stop it. "Even if you weren't full of shit, even if you knew anything about it and weren't just regurgitating a script, that is that and this is this!"     As much as she realizes that keeping her pinned to Tamamo is the entire plan --as much as Lilian knows the logical maneuver, the most tactically sound, is to abandon Tamamo to the care of an ally and trust she'll be fine-- her attempts to act on it result in only ten different twitching false starts. Her better self demands that she switch positions and break causal contact, but her selfish emotional core won't let her leave Tamamo to this without her. And under that, maybe she's just a little afraid to leave Tamamo's side at all right now. Blessings of luck, ultimately having little and a lot to do with with fate and predestination, keep the continued onslaught of beams back, but only just. Even if Night Mist can shred these sweeping, solid beams, Lilian's grip on her sword is about to come apart from tension.     'I know you'll be the death of her someday.'     "I don't care if she is." Lilian lets slip, and it's the first clear sentence she's said in the past two minutes.
Lilian Rook	'Why, that would mean that everything you did wrong was something you could have avoided, no?'     "Yeah. Yeah that's-- That's what this is about! I know how you can say any of this! I know you don't even mean it! That-- just shut the fuck up about that, because I'm not ashamed of it! That kind of thing has never driven what I've done! It doesn't matter to who I am now, it's just-- there's nothing wrong with it! What's wrong with me --what's wrong with you-- is that ability! What this is about, why you did everything I know you did, even if nobody else will ever know, is because you've spent too long living in that world, haven't you Blueberry?!"     "How well can you even tell the difference between the me that's standing in front of you and the me 'over there'?! It's blurring together, isn't it?! It was mixed up a long time ago! Even before you died, half of you was asleep-- stuck there. And the other half came loose from reality! You don't believe a single fucking thing you're saying! You don't believe in anything but the idea that Strawberry loves you!"     The Terminarch clones turn on her. That much is a mercy. Lilian isn't afraid of those. Not viscerally They're monsters. They'll try to kill her that's because what monsters do. She moves or she gets hurt; simple. All she has to do is--     §Be more special than them, you gross fuck.§     Lilian flicker-stumbles partway out of a leading beam. The penumbra scorches her back, sending her sprawling face first back into the water with a shriek, barely catching herself on her hands. She's reflexively guarded her carry case. The sound of ticking from inside it is so loud it's audible over her own desperate speech.     "That's right! That's all you can feel is real! That one person loves you! I've been there too! I'd even have sympathy, if it weren't for the fact that you can't stand the idea that she loves me too! Maybe even more than you! Why don't you talk to the 'me' 'over there' and see if that's true, huh?!" Lilian is now playing an incredibly dangerous game. But she hadn't failed to notice what happened before.     "You can't bear that, right?! Because if she loves me more than you, there was no point to lying to her! It means I could be dealt a worse hand than you, and I could still be honest with her! I could try harder, do better, mean something to people, and make something of myself despite everything wrong, and that would mean you don't have an excuse! If I can choose to live and stay with her, do everything better than you, from a worse place than you, and earn more of her love, it proves that I deserve her more than you!"     "Fuck you! You're the disgusting one! All you ever done is steal! I'm trying to give back those years, so what have you ever done for her?! You don't have any idea what it's like to be us, and your power won't tell you! We --the real us-- don't exist in 'that world'! You're choosing this because you can't confront the idea that I'm better than you in every single way and Strawberry deserved to have me there for her instead of you! If I were there for her, none of these awful things would have happened!"     Blueberry, if she's paying attention, can already see Lilian is stanced up in a low-causal-drag position ready to counter in a thousand different permutations if Blueberry attacks her. There's no need to approach her. Actually, doing so is probably kind of stupid; precognition won't protect her from a literally instantaneous sword attack. And Lilian knows that. She knows that Blueberry knows that. She wants to see whether she does anyways.     Her hands are still shaking though. Worse than before. Guilt-sick sweat mingles with blood from her forehead. Her scar and left eye have turned powdery gold at some point.
Strawberry Princess	Blueberry is back in her precognitive rhythm. The Terminarch clones certainly aren't on her side, but their beams can't touch her; she is always exactly where they aren't. She swerves and jukes in the air in baffling ways. Just as one starts to lead her movements, she changes directions, as if she were aware of every crosshair placed on her.      In a way, she is.      Sheer volume of attacks can still ensure that Blueberry can't avoid all of them. Every attack that misses can still force her into a worse position, force her to suffer grazes or even direct hits from the hail of projectiles when she feels she can tolerate them. Kale sticking to her is similarly effective at placing her in rough spots, though he puts himself at greater risk in the process. The randomness of Ishirou's missiles doesn't confuse her in the least, but the sheer density of them still forces her to take a few, spiderwebbing her sapphire body with cracks. "What the fuck do you know, Inspector Unit Four? This is the only way I'll never hurt her again."      All the while, she fights back with an untiring, rabid viciousness, doling out skewering or crushing wand-blows to those nearby and ruthlessly accurate lasers to those further away. Human muscle would have given out minutes ago at her frenzied pace, but her crystal body evidently feels no such fatigue. "I TOLD you I'm worse than you, you stupid purple bitch! Weren't you listening?! Even if it does hurt her, I can't... I can't let her find out how I really am."      Within Blueberry's aura, nothing escapes her notice. Trudy's teleportation would be sneaky by any other measure, but Blueberry registers her going for the mission objective as a critical threat. As soon as the bone cage 'unzips', the magical girl finds an opening to level her staff at Trudy and fire, aiming both at her and the now-unprotected core behind her. If Trudy dodges, she leaves the core undefended- another 'pin'.      "I know it's all my fault," she says to Tamamo, her voice once again on the edge of breaking. "I hurt everyone around me, right? I died and left them alone when they needed me, right? I know I'm awful. You can't get to me that way!" But it sounds like she is, in fact, being gotten to.
Strawberry Princess	Lilian sends her into a nearly convulsive fit, even as she keeps dogfighting the others. "SHUT UP! SHE THINKS YOU'RE SCUM, YOU KNOW THAT?! You WISH you hid it like I did! SHE PITIES YOU. You're not even a shadow of me! You're her fucking REPLACEMENT GOLDFISH!"      In a moment of lower pressure, she pauses. Her voice runs spitefully cold. "There. I found it. The future where you die first, Lilian."      Blueberry dives beneath the surface of the black water. It's only thigh-deep here, but still dark enough to hide her from view; her flight helps her move without a trace, the ripples of her movement concealed perfectly by the chaotic splashing of the battle. Underwater, she circles around to the other side of the fallen Terminarch's corpse, peels a derelict power-copying scale off of its body, supercharges it with her beam at point-blank range, and leaves it on the lake-floor in a specific spot.      After a few seconds of tense absence, Blueberry violently resurfaces, the tip of her wand glowing with hideous energy and pointed directly at Tamamo's back. That seems like it must, itself, be the plan somehow- but when Lilian moves to intervene, the underwater scale is timed to explode the millisecond she stops time, directly in the path of where Blueberry predicts she'll move. It is still concealed, but is now an underwater pocket of horrifyingly intense nuclear-and-magical energy that will mangle Lilian's leg when she steps in it.      Whatever the followup is, it's cut short by one thing Blueberry can't foresee: a bullet delivered from outside her aura. It shatters her hand, breaking her wand in half. "Who-?! BOND! YOU STUPID FUCK! COME BACK AND DIE FOR COUNTRY!" As he'd predicted, the closest Terminarch clone turns and fires at him, dumbly following the sound of the gunshot. Time to get out of dodge.      Blueberry's shattered hand- and her other wounds- slowly begin to mend. It only makes sense; Ishirou's scans show that her body is made of similar stuff as the Terminarch clones are, and they were noted in the tactical report to be able to do the same.      Her fury is similarly undimmed by losing her wand. If anything, it's made worse. Blueberry isn't unusually strong, but her flight can add a car crash's worth of momentum to every fly-by blow. She changes to dispensing shattering punches to everyone within reach, literally- with each one her arm cracks horribly, only to heal a moment later.      When Arthur comes for her, this time she trusts in her precognition. It tells her that his glowing hand won't do anything bad to her. So she takes the chance to wind up and throw a titanic punch, one fit to shatter his skull- it does shatter her arm, all the way down to the shoulder.      But, at the same time- like a cross-counter- he does make contact.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Dodge     No. Arthur's hand locks onto Blueberry's shoulder. "GOT--!!     CRUNCH     Valuable bones in the face are obliterated. With a compressive crunch, the force slams into his face and leaves a bleeding, wrecked mess. His body jolts suddenly, neck snapping back, and then it seems to slump almost completely limp. And yet, still, his grip hit her shoulder. And it locks on there. He's unmoving. Through broken muscles, he barely manages to say: "Hey. Here." He struggles for a breath. "Your new pal Arthur got you a gift, Blues." And then he releases the power he built up, straight into her crystaline eidolon-body. >Arthur: Try to end the fight     Arthur dumps an unbelievable amount of space-aligned energy into her. Arthur supercharges her predictive ability to expand its sphere. Inches, yards, miles. Arthur pours vast reserves energy into it until it can, hopefully, finally, contain enough of the surface of the Earth that it encompasses the Reignition Project -- and Strawberry Princess.
Ishirou	Ishirou's mind is racing at a million miles an hour, while Lilian and Blueberry could see things through the glimpse of time, he processed them at incredible speeds.  He could also calculate what people did based on data he had, it allowed him some advantages and sometimes makes him look like he could see into the future...but in reality, it was just a very good predictive capability.   The fire blasted him, he spun out of control and hit the ground /hard/.  However, the armor was still holding fast, even if he lost some weapons, and his body felt like he was crushed.  Looking down, he did detect damage where he felt crushed.  He groans, pain killers, kicking in to help him push through the pain.  Just a little longer, he thinks to himself.  The flight unit stands up again, and once more takes off.   He notices she fires on Lilian, trying to take her out of the picture.  His eyes see every possibility or attempt to.  She can predict everything, which increases the unpredictability of the situation...but Lilian makes a point about her.  It brings to mind what he was thinking but then realizes what Lilian is saying.  She might hear the words, but she isn't feeling them.  She isn't feeling the weight, just what she needs to do to get to what she wants.   That's what it is...right there.  The path to victory.  "I know she treated me like I was a person, even when I didn't think so myself.." he starts, flying right at her.  He's not trying to avoid her anymore, he's flying right at her.  It's very stupid, it's completely something he wouldn't normally do, she might see every way to beat him...but he's not just aiming to hurt her.  "She treated you the same way, when the world thought you were awful, she kept /believing in you/!" He swings the laser sword, aiming to knock her back before he releases a field of lasers aiming to pelt at her.  "And here you are, trying to hurt her!  Is that what you want, one last knife in her heart?!  Did you even really care about her, or how she made you feel!  You said I was just a slave to friendship, but here you are being a slave to your pain." he then fires a beam from the laser generators at maximum power, aiming to try and focus right on her, before they split again, homing in on her from multiple angles.   "Or do you just hate her because she /refuses/ to hate you, and you can't bear anyone thinking of any quality of yourself that's good!"
Kale Hearthward	Kale takes several more hits as he tries to cut Blueberry off. He can take those hits, though, and - sticking to her is working. If nothing else, the hits are a distraction from what she said to him earlier - a thought that's still lurking in the back of his mind, a thought that isn't easily shaken off. At least she's not literally knocking the wind out of him now, and he's getting a chance to recover his lung capacity. He falls back and swaps swords when he gets a moment, and continues pursuing. He needs to keep it up, Arthur almost has managed to grab her again- "- Arthur!" Kale digs deep. He doesn't know what's going on, but he did see Arthur take that hit - he *heard* Arthur take that hit - and this might be their last chance. He digs deep, and runs, and leaps- - and breathes. The sword sucks all the breath out of his battered lungs with its activation. It's fine. He doesn't need it right now. And then he swings several times, mid leap - not at Blueberry Princess. At the space behind her. Around her. A bright shining blade trail appears along the edge of the sword, trailing behind it - and remaining in place. Afterimages of the blade hang in the air around her now, every bit as sharp as the real thing, removing her avenues of retreat!
Trudy Grimm	Trudy should have seen that coming. Her reaction is a bit slower on account of not being a time-stopper or a precog, though. She does whirl upon sensing an influx of magic aimed at her, though, spreading her arms to either side. The bone platform she stands upon surges, lifting up into a wall in front of her. This is what the beam slams into, blasting the hastily made fortification into pieces and hurling the smoldering Witch backwards--     --Right into the Terminach's boney cocoon. The opening she'd made slams shut behind her. There is, if one's eyes are quick, the briefest moment where she might be raising a finger in one singed hand as she sails through, a shark-toothed grin on her bloodied face.     On the other side, the witch slams into more bones, rolling a few times and coming to a stop on her back. After a pause, she picks herself up, glancing at the bone wall, then turning her head towards the Terminarch's core. Taking in a breath, she lets it out with a rattle, then brings her hands up. Her shadow extends from around her feet, stretching out over the boney floor and then across the monstrosity's corpse.     From within this pitch-black void, numerous skeletal arms reach out. Shards of the broken Core are collected. Each hand grasps a piece and recedes into the Void with its cargo. She looks up at the larger piece, rubbing her chin with one grubby hand. A flash of realization crosses her face. -- Outside     As the fight continues to wage, Trudy's Soldiers are doing their best, but-- again, are rather outclassed by this kind of opponent. The Corporal raises his hand suddenly, the half-dozen remaining troops pausing their suppressive fire to glance his way. Quite suddenly, all of them cease and stand up straight. Their shadows extend around their feet, and the entire platoon sinks out of sight.     Has the wicked Witch abandoned her friends at the final moment?     The air, already unwelcoming as it is, attains a certain unseemly weight. Something intensely Wrong is happening. More Wrong than it already is. Or perhaps a different kind of Wrong. Far less the bizarre otherworldliness of the Terminarch's grave or the somber aftermath of the efforts required to kill it. Something corrupt. Something Evil.     The monstrosity's bone cocoon does not encompass most of it; only the main body where the Core was located; that's all Trudy sought to protect, and so its nightmarish limbs remain exposed. Something twitches. Quivers. The limbs shiver and shake together, writhing like nightmare snakes. Shedding water, the Terminarch's arm-of-arms lifts out of the water in a sweeping motion through the airspace that Blueberry Princess is passing through. A colossal limb made out of dozens of smaller, recursively smaller limbs, all grasping at her crystalline body. Not bothering to halt momentum as it comes crashing back down-- mercifully, mysteriously, clear of the rest of the party.     Though it might have been a close call for those trying to engage her in melee.
Cantio	<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "She's heard me say all of that awful-- she must know I say that to her in some timelines. But it still got to her anyways, because she didn't actually feel the impact." <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Right, when she flew out in a rage at me." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Pain, distress, anger, fear; she's just assuming she'll power through all of them." <J-IC-Scene> Kale Hearthward says, "So - be mean to her?" "If she's as great as..." Cantio pauses, glancing towards everyone else purposefully. "... They say, then she'll be okay with finding out no matter how terrible you are." She starts, almost sounding reassuring for a moment even as she mutters to herself shortly afterwards. "... Especially if you really are worse than I've ever been." She still hasn't forgotten what happened, and this isn't making it any easier to move on. Still, with the  emotional gouging from all around seeming to work against Blueberry's initially impregnable defenses, Cantio's finding a slight boost to her own morale. With Bond's gambit drawing Blueberry's ire by name and Lilian's continued presence making her focus so much energy elsewhere, Cantio draws some of her sword's pieces back to it as she closes in to try and capitalize once more. That is soon met with a massive punch to the face. It sends Cantio hurtling backwards as she gets cold-cocked right in the jaw, yelping and tucking herself into a ball to cushion the impacts as she skips along the ruined ground a few times before starting to slide right back down into that crater. She coughs and spits out a clump of something bloody, holding a hand to her face to stem the bleeding with a hit of healing magic before pushing herself back onto her feet with that techy-looking claymore. It still doesn't make sense to Cantio. In theory, sure, it makes sense. Prediction, precognition, covering all possible angles for optimal results. In practice, though, it's not really possible for her anymore. She no longer has Lilian's ability to act independently of the flow of time, she doesn't have Blueberry's ability to see what's coming or try again and again until something works, and she doesn't have that raw mental processing speed to calculate so many different possibilities all at once. She doesn't even have Arthur's ability to be relentlessly optimistic with trying to win Blueberry over. What she does still have is what her not-actually-but-figuratively older sister gave her. She has what she's learned from so many people here before, and she has what she's learned from this single mission. Cantio swallows once, then forces a smile that's less friendly and more condescending. It's a completely unnatural look for her, entirely forced, and it's clear that she's straining just to get the words out. "But maybe... Maybe you're right. Maybe she really is as bad as you say she is." With her jaw mostly recovered, Cantio throws herself forward again. Those remaining sword-bits fire off lasers at Blueberry Princess once again in anticipation of an anger-fueled strike as Cantio moves in for a feint instead of a thrust, kicking up a cloud of dust after slamming her blade into the ground. As she does, two more swords come swinging out from each side of her as two of those earlier Cantio clones finally return to the fray, trying to pin Blueberry down for Arthur to get his own gambit going. The third clone and the original come in from behind and above to finish off the impromptu formation, fully aimed at redirecting Blueberry's movements via slashing and stabbing (without holding back much at all) to force her towards Arthur's surge of power even if Cantio herself doesn't quite understand how it's going to work.
Seras Victoria	Bullets just aren't doing it. Seras growls. She's not really that great with words. She's said everything she can think of saying at this point. She's a police girl. A monster hunter. A fledgling vampire. Not a magical girl or big damned hero!     And once again the laser comes for her. This time, SEras takes a much closer strike, one that blows her off her feet in a rush of steam and dizzying power. She goes tumbling through the rapidly-draining muck, dropping a few weapons in the confusion. Her scorched skin is much slower to heal now, but she rises nonetheless, panting oujt of what can only be habit..     "Rrrrrgh. Stop this nonsense already! There's no POINT to this fight!" Of course, just because she's disarmed doesn't mean she's got no options left. She reaches down into the muck and picks up debris -rocks, building chunks, whatever - and hurls them with everything she's got, one after another.     That turns out to be 'a lot.' Those chunks fly like missiles!
James Bond	Bond races down the stairs, leaping for a blown-out window on the ground floor as he pulls the goggles down. They hang from the strap, around his neck, jostled by his passage. The beam pierces through the building, as he'd guessed it might. He's made it far, but not far enough to avoid enduring another agonizing second of that convection.      He awkwardly dives clear, hitting the ground as the beam continues to fire. His clothes are singed. His bare arm is badly burned, bloodied. His face is wet with sweat as he nevertheless forces himself to rise, sharp debris digging into his hands as he pushes himself up. They stop moving to fire.      "I'm not doing this for England."      He's repositioned--a shattered storefront, boots avoiding the broken glass that lines the yellowed floors. There isn't a good line on the crater from here, the place being ground-level. But it'll do as a place to keep clear of spotlights until he can shift to someplace better suited for a shot.      "Do you know an Onyx Witch? She was getting ready to burn out. Wasn't taking it well. I was under orders to kill her if she wouldn't go peacefully." Hiding behind a crumbling counter, he checks the watch's reflection, waiting for the ideal moment to move. "They ended up taking her quietly.."      Now. Bond crosses over to the next building, hand over the transmitter of the radio. He'd already turned the radio down before he even turned it on--but this has to go as perfectly as he can guarantee. Without halting his pace, he checks for another good vantage point, expecting that the damage from the clones' fire will have rendered the former unsafe.      The end goal is the same as last time--get a vantage point, line up a disrupting shot. But he's working the radio, every cover stop-off he makes. "I was jealous. Couldn't admit it at the time." He feels himself tense up as the reflection of a clone makes an erratic 'hand' gesture. "I left. Rather than watch someone ask for help and actually get it. She got to leave hell, and I didn't."      "I wanted her to end up like me. Angry. Bitter. Alone. Used up."      "Is that what you want for Strawberry? Do you want to drag her into hell with you?" Moving through the shadows cast by the skeletal leavings of a ruined city, he continues the pressure.      "Because if she's the only one allowed to go back out there after burning out, forever, that's what'll happen."      Goggles back on. Line up a shot. Hands, again."Stop this. Come with us."  He squeezes the trigger.
Tamamo	What Blueberry has been saying could be getting to Tamamo, but if she doesn't show it, it won't appear, no matter how futures are looked through. If all she can do is see, then to hide the causal relation makes the vision useless, without a hundred times the effort. Maybe she'll go through that, after all, just to guess -- if she can keep track, if she can remain focused -- what hurts the most, if not what hurts her the least.     But Tamamo has no intention of letting her focus. Not when she keeps trying to hurt Lilian.     "Oh, were you not listening? It is Strawberry-Princess you have misjudged. Even then, you had not known the truth, but now, even more escapes you."     Not being able to see her is a temporary problem. Even in the midst of this battle, a bit of water isn't enough cover for all that magic. Tamamo tracks her without moving her head, and continues to speak, knowing that the attention given her, the attractive force of her presence, bright and terribly shining within the confines of the fog, will make her words heard.     "Oh, she is better than you, to be sure. You follow an endlessly mirrored and hazy image, seen at night, from afar, daring not to approach. Is it any wonder you are so lost? Who is the Strawberry-Princess you think exists? Where is that creature to be found? A delusion of a ghost's obsession, and nothing more. Your fetter is smoke and nothing."     Tamamo already has her magic ready, when Blueberry emerges. It's not that the blast is that much stronger than she expected. As may be the more likely result, it's Tamamo's own capability she misjudges, together with the wholly implausible scenario of Lilian not quite making it.     But that's fine. That part is fine. Tamamo had promised to protect her, too.     No, to think about that will come later. She hasn't the focus to spare. The pain is agonizing. She's lost control of her voice.     But really, it's fine. The talismans she'd prepared heal the piercing damage all the way through, blood and organs knitting and regaining their perfect, intended form, a divine incarnation that can't help but be what she is, as she is, however she tries to disguise herself. Even her robes can be restored, being made of her own magic, a construct of prana. That doesn't make it hurt any less.     When she can do more than gasp, she says, "But is that not... better? With no idol to worship, no such delusion to defend, you could accept... an ordinary friendship, an ordinary love, an ordinary redemption. A flawed being to accept your flaws."
Lilian Rook	'SHUT UP! SHE THINKS YOU'RE SCUM, YOU KNOW THAT?!'     "Keep seething, you little bitch!" Lilian is already screaming back. "Do you even know how old she is now?! She doesn't love you! Not like she used to! She's grown up and you've stayed a child in her memory forever! You're just going to get more distant and vague and immature until she wonders why she cared about you at all! And then she's going to forget you!"     'You WISH you hid it like I did! SHE PITIES YOU.'     "And you think she wouldn't even do that for you, right?! Wait, you know she wouldn't! You've already seen what happens when you confess to everything a million times, right?! So why hide it?! What's the matter?! Oh, I know!"     "You're this weak, childish, pathetic shell of yourself now, because this is the only way Strawberry could stand you! Whenever you let 'her' know anything about who you were, she hated you, didn't she?! You can say you lied to her, tricked her, covered it all up and made her love you as much as you want, but that's not really true is it? Because theres one Strawberry that thinks she liked you once upon a time, and infinite Strawberries that think you're disgusting! And you created them?!"     There is no art to any of this. No grace. Lilian isn't verbally sparring, or even fighting with Blueberry. There's no back and forth. No deflection and accusation and twist and reversal. No progress made and no face saved. It's just two awful girls screaming the things they know will hurt each other the most, and seeing which one of them buckles first. Because <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Listen to me!" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Fucking-- LISTEN TO ME!" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Remember when I was talking about-- Remember that whole thing about not checking every possible future or it gets to you?" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "She does, but it doesn't for her. Because she's not-- She's working to what she wants, not living all of them out. I think, not if she doesn't want to. When I-- I have to actually do and feel everything. She doesn't." <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Yeah..?" <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "She's making these tactical choices because she's *seen* them happen. She knows she *can* do them." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "But she hasn't actually tried to execute them." <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "She hasn't felt the pain or the weight of her decision." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "She's heard me say all of that awful-- she must know I say that to her in some timelines. But it still got to her anyways, because she didn't actually feel the impact." <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Right, when she flew out in a rage at me." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Pain, distress, anger, fear; she's just assuming she'll power through all of them."     'You're not even a shadow of me!'     "I'm everything you wish you could be! Strawberry cared about you in one world, she loves me in all of them! You know that right?! You've already heard me say these words, right?! But it still pisses you off because it's true! I'm what you could never be! What you never had the spine to be, and blamed it on being born wrong! I'm--!!!"
Lilian Rook	You're her fucking REPLACEMENT GOLDFISH!"     §Oh. I already knew that. Didn't I? All those things I said before. Those times we went out together. The things I tried to do for her. For Velt. For the other girls. For the project. It was pretty obvious in retrospect, wasn't it? I said I was her friend, but I don't know how to be friends with anyone. I just tried to be her Coven. Everything was to try and replace the real friends she didn't have anymore. Even that ridiculous fund. That was just my guilty conscience, wasn't it? That I let her suffer all that in silence, because I wanted her to befriend the better version of me. I let her feel awkward, ashamed, afraid, all this time, because I was afraid the real me wouldn't even surpass the memories of some girls who died almost a decade ago.§     §Ah. That's what Blueberry was maneuvering into getting me to realize. I really am pretty gross, aren't I? It is sort of my fault 'he' died, isn't it. I hurt them trying to defend my vanity, just like I hurt Strawberry. I get it. The only way I'd react if it were true.§     It's Lilian who caves first. Obviously. Wasn't it always going to be? It never mattered if Lilian was overwhelmingly stronger than Blueberry is, mentally, emotionally; if there were even a one in a million chance Blueberry could get to her, she's already done it, right? The entire rest of her planned followthrough is washed right out of her mind with the river of vile thoughts that comes undammed. The tip of her sword sinks, degree by degree, as her grip slackens. Jaw clenched, shoulders bunched up, fingers shaking, chest convulsing. What was she doing here again?     And just as predictably, someone pointing a weapon at Tamamo is the first, and maybe only, thing that will override that useless state. Lilian cries out the first half of her name, suddenly lunging forward and screaming the words "TAMA--!"                 -----[stop]-----     "--MO!" Lilian has no trouble maintaining her power this time. Her entire heart wants nothing more than to stop this from happening. Forgetting everything, even her own pain and fatigue, after she'd already forgotten her strategy and better judgement, Lilian sprints at full tilt towards where Blueberry is, poised with the wand to Tamamo's back like a gun to her head. The sight alone makes her heart pound out of her chest. Bile rises into her throat. That ticking is maddeningly loud. Won't someone shut it off? She wants nothing more than to make it go away right this very second.     Of course she'd only run at Tamamo in a straight line like that, not using her own precognition, while in a panic. Of course she wouldn't read Blueberry's strategy from her own mind while Lilian can barely handle her words. Blueberry knew all the right passwords and keyphrases to get to this point of predictability. It's only Tamamo's blessings of outrageously improbable good fortune that make Lilian's inevitable one wrong step a slippery stumble through it.     Unseen by anyone, Lilian crashes into the muck a third time. Unheard by anyone, she screams the water out of her lungs before she can even breathe. Amidst a crowd of frozen, oblivious, apathetic spectators, Lilian collapses under a feeling of pain exceeding anything she'd previously known shooting up her leg, and then not being able to feel her leg at all. She doesn't dare stop and look. She fights the chemicals trying to lock up her body in shock and pushes herself up with her aching arms again, forcing herself to crawl, pretending she doesn't notice the red swirling in the water around her. If nothing else, she has to gamble on Blueberry's new future trading her life for Tamamo's.                 -----[start]-----
Lilian Rook	--and then inelegantly collapses in front of Tamamo. The only utility she has in taking a shot is her frame, and it looks horrible. The water behind her explodes into a searing magical fireball, cooking off a plume of superheated steam. The steam itself is mottled pink. A murky crimson trail connects where Lilian is and where she just was. She's only just there in time for Bond's bullet to hit Blueberry in the hand.     §Hah . . . finally . . . before she starts over again.§     "So-- So what?" Lilian coughs, picking up her sword again on one knee. "Lying and killing to cover up the disgusting truth . . . It must be nice to be able to take refuge in admitting it. What a privilege-- to be able to say it out loud, without it destroying you. I'm not even your shadow . . . is that true? Could you really have done any better than me Blueberry? We can find out. You've already seen me do this, haven't you? But you haven't lived it."     "Better not leave my range. You know what happens if you get two hundred feet from me." Lilian is all but defenseless. She focuses all of her effort on something Blueberry can't dodge. A suicidal trade, but that darkness in her blood compels her to reach out and touch her mind. "Look me in the eye and tell me you'd do better. Tell me you wouldn't hide it. Look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn't have killed him too." Blueberry is being dragged away from the piano by her hair. Her mother is screaming at her, but she can't even make out the words. A sudden threat to cut it all off strikes her in the chest like a brick of ice. She promises not to touch it ever again. She doesn't even know why it matters, but she's crying too hard to stop. Blueberry is reading a book in the corner of the library. Her father asks her what it is. She hadn't noticed him enter. There is danger in his voice. She has a spare, a fake, but she doesn't move fast enough. He tears it from her hands and hurls it in disgust. Explosive pain to the side of her head sends her sprawling from her seat. Blueberry is standing in front of the bathroom mirror. She is trying to patch up the wounds on her face, but her eyes slide right off her reflection with too-familiar ease. After half an hour of trying and failing, she hyperventilates and vomits in the sink. Blueberry is seated in class. The teacher is furious with her. All she has to do is read aloud a chapter of the book. She can't, because today the sound of her own voice makes her sick. Each word is like tarry black guilt to her ears; hollow betrayal like having cheated and gotten away with it. She'd rather fail. Blueberry is talking to her best friend. She is trying to explain something very complicated. She doesn't know the words, only feelings, but she is trying her hardest. In that moment, she can tell her best friend isn't her friend anymore. The light leaves their eyes. Their smile is forced. It's the last day they spend together. Blueberry is looking at the ground at the bottom of the hill below the fourth storey balcony. The wind is especially strong today. She wonders if the fall would kill her. She hopes it does. She dreams about it. She hopes it doesn't. The thought of her own funeral enrages her. The thought of her ghost terrifies her beyond words. Blueberry is struggling out of bed. She is exhausted, sweat-drenched, feverish, cramped, sick to her stomach, residual hallucinations clinging to the corners of her vision. Her shaking hand is reaching for the pills. They'll make it worse, like they have every single day since she started taking them, but not taking them is scarier. Blueberry is staring at two school uniforms on her bed. One fills her with exhausted dread and nausea verging on tears. The other makes her heart pound until she feels like throwing up. She didn't think this all the way through. She has a week to choose.
Lilian Rook	Blueberry is in the hall. She overhears another student. She glances, and several of them are looking at her. She'd heard what they said a hundred times at home. A million times in her head. But hearing it here makes it real. She has to shut it all out for two hours. Nobody is allowed to move or talk. That's how she gets through every day. She makes them never say it again. Blueberry is out shopping with her new best friends. They've never been anything but kind to her. Nothing is wrong. The day is perfect. The clerks and fitters gush and glow over her. She gets everything she wants. She feels so anxious it becomes light-headed delirium. She wants to go home. She goes to the bathroom to cry it out, stares at the signs long enough to draw attention, and slinks back feeling even worse. Blueberry is with her first crush. Her heart is pounding in her throat. She's been planning this for months. Memorized all the words. Played it out in her head a hundred times. They've been together for half a year. Her faith in them is rewarded by their hands around her neck. She barely remembers breaking their nose, but she remembers that she kept going for a while after. Blueberry is applying for the school she really wants to go to. If she goes, it's like she'll get to keep her magic; she won't burn out, in barely different terms. Her grades are perfect. Her recommendations are glowing. Her connections are impeccable. Her background is top class. She just needs documentation that her parents have. They stopped caring years ago, so they give it to her. She sees they haven't updated it once in all this time. The fact that they lied doesn't surprise her. The fact that they did it out of petty spite hurts anyways. This is supposed to be her new start. Burning out would be better than sending this. Never being a mahou again would be better than making herself this kind of mahou. Blueberry is seated on the folding bed in the doctor's office. It's a new doctor. She liked the old one, but they retired. They're very sweet to her, but she's deeply afraid of the new one. They take her biometrics and bring up her file. She wants to run. Adrenaline surges through her. If she leaves the room, they'll take everything from her. The doctor turns back. They coolly inform her that they're sending her for a psychiatric workup instead. Blueberry is talking to a kindly old woman and a girl she has complicated feelings about. They say that nothing is wrong with her. It's like twisting a knife below her ribs and holding it. If someone told her that ten years ago, maybe things would be different. Now it just makes her furious. All she can think of is all the time she lost. How awful she is now. She wants admit that it's her own fault. She ends up crying into the old woman's shoulder instead. She believed her for a moment, and it aches like nails hammered into her chest. None of this needed to happen. Blueberry is with her lover. The one she really thinks she might marry. A long night indulging in each other's company has lifted a terrible weight from her shoulders. Everything will be okay now. Her lover makes an adoring remark. It is technically true. She should bask in it. It fills her with fear and tension instead. Even here, if just for a moment. She wonders if it's even possible to get away from it. Maybe this has to be good enough. Blueberry is here and now, talking to Lilian. Lilian says something that makes her remember all of the above. She remembers this. It makes her remember the above. This loop has repeated six times already. It'll only stop when she can expend the focus to make it stop. It'll never get easier.     "Arthur . . . Please . . . You said you'd be her friend, right? I'm trusting you!" The real Lilian cries out. "We can't just leave her like this!"
Strawberry Princess	Arthur's touch floods Blueberry's crystalline body with a flickering inner light. She recoils from him abruptly, sounding- for a change- genuinely shocked. "What did you do to me you little shit?!"      Blueberry's aura is expanding. Its blue edge accelerates outwards, gathering speed. It washes over Bond at the edge of the crater. As the aura grows, her predictive model is constantly taking in new information; it is continually in bewildering flux. She staggers, looking almost sick.      Who is the Strawberry-Princess you think exists? Even reeling, she is too full of searing anger and desperate zeal for Tamamo's charms and words to find easy purchase. But they still do find purchase, in the end.      "Please," she says desperately, for once not calculating her words for maximum effect. "'An ordinary friendship'... don't make me think about things like that. I want it, so badly. But I shouldn't have it. I can't have it. I break the things I touch. I have to stay away, for her. She doesn't deserve..." Further words don't come.      Kale tries to enmesh her in the sword-trails. She isn't quite flying blind enough for that: as he swings at her, she finds a future where she can grab his arm and pull him into his own trails, hurting him and clearing an escape route for her at the same time.      Other attacks fare better in her staggered state. Bond's second bullet shatters her other hand; it begins to mend, but not quickly enough. Seras's thrown rubble strikes her in the chest after a couple of initial misses; she charges towards her, only to be accosted by Cantio's clones. This time she seems to be having trouble telling them apart from the originals, suffering a couple of good hits before forcing her way free and soaring into the air, soundly out of reach.      "I WANT WHAT'S BEST FOR HER!" she yells senselessly at Bond's radio, not even knowing if he can hear her reply. "And me being gone is what's best. You don't know how it went! You don't know how I was for her!"      Trying to dodge Ishirou's laser barrage in the air- something she's only partially successful at- ends up bringing her into the path of the Terminarch's reanimated arm, which she only notices descending a heartbeat before impact. "WHAT DID YOU-!!" Even lunging out of the way at top speed, it strikes her legs and swats her out of the air, splashing back down into the black water with a hard impact.
Strawberry Princess	"That's not true," she says to Lilian helplessly, propping herself up on hands and knees. With her precognition 'malfunctioning', she can't escape into hypotheticals to steel herself; she can't craft her words for perfect effect. Without that, she sounds inelegant, overwhelmed, pathetic. "I never... I never looked at a future where she found out. I couldn't stand even a fake Strawberry rejecting me. I don't know what she'd think at all."      Lilian's psychic assault, made all the worse by Tamamo's words having sapped her will, paralyzes her in agony for long seconds. She can do nothing but shudder and clutch her face, still kneeling in the muck. "No. No! STOP! DON'T DO THIS TO ME! I'M ALREADY BROKEN! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS!"      With Arthur's boost, her aura continues to expand at an exponential rate. On a boat in the Channel, its blue edge washes over Director Velt. Velt opens comms to say something in a panic, but at that distance, her voice is unintelligible. Its circumference washes over Europe, over the North Pole, over the Atlantic Ocean, until finally it encompasses a little concrete apartment building in Haiti, at the Reignition Project headquarters.      At last, it stabilizes, and her precognition solidifies again. Blueberry's mind escapes into a hypothetical future, spends subjective minutes squirming out of Lilian's charm, and then many more calming and steeling herself afterwards.      The first time Blueberry tries to get up again, she fumbles and collapses back down into the muck. The second time, she rises with perfect eerie grace, beyond anything she's demonstrated thus far. Across her body, like a dim screen, images of possible futures dance. "God. Arthur Lowell, you fucking idiot," she laughs. "I've got you now."      With newfound clarity, Blueberry finds a future where she kills you all. Images of the battle flash across her facets. There is no escaping her aura this time; nor can there be any outside interference. After the vision of the battle comes a vision of Blueberry killing herself. The next day Strawberry gets the news that nobody came back. She cries and cries for hours, days, maybe weeks. Eventually she sneaks back to the Crater, in some forlorn hope of finding her friends. Strawberry finds-- The vision ends.      Blueberry staggers backwards, clutching her chest as if her heart had stopped. "No. Please. That's not- I can't- I could never- Strawberry..."      A different future plays out across Blueberry's facets. In this one, she surrenders gracefully. It is messy and emotional and ugly, but in the end she gets on a boat with the others, and they take her home. Not 'home', an awful little house in London that doesn't exist anymore, but home, to Strawberry. She stands outside an apartment door, her fist balled up to knock. She looks terrified.      And then Arthur's energy leaves her, expended. Blueberry Princess collapses back into the water. Her aura shrinks down until, once more, it only fills the crater. Then it flickers out. The pulses of magic stop.
Strawberry Princess	Blueberry has no eyes to cry with anymore, no lungs to heave, but she still emits a noise like a choked sob. "I'm sorry," she blubbers. "I'm- scared. I don't... know what to do. Now she'll- there's no way she'll forgive me. I tried to kill her friends. She'll know. She'll know e-ever-y-thing. I..."      There are empty pauses where she ought to be gasping for breath, like her mind still has the reflex, but her body can't comply. It shudders anyway.      "I'm not- good. L-like, like them. I wasn't born good. I'm not- it's just- p-please, I can't do this anymore, I don't want to do this. It's too late. Everything's ruined. It- it could've been okay, if I was a little braver, but I- I ruined it again. Go. Please just- please go! I... I have to be alone. I c-can't, hurt anyone, when I'm alone."      Her body is wracked as if she's going to throw up. But she can't, not with a body like this.
Arthur Lowell	>==>     Arthur's too disoriented by pain to stand. When Blueberry collapses, so does he. "Bet you're predicting me saying this." He whispers. "So, if I don't get a chance to say it for real, give it some thinking." He grasps at his face, clearing blood from his nose and mouth to try to speak more clearly.     "Every day, dumbasses like me, trash like me, I hurt people I like, too. I do shit Rook has to clean up. I make problems for Velt and Strawberry. I call people names. I butt in where I'm not wanted. I make problems. Yell. Make fun of people. Fight people. Rile people up." He manages to roll over a little, wiping more blood from his nose.     "Blues, I can't tell you you're really good on the inside, just 'cause of some reason or another. Maybe you're not. I might not be either. Maybe 'good' isn't a real idea, and Strawbs is just faking too. Doesn't matter. Never mattered. Don't know why, but they keep me around and they want me around. And sometimes they toss me out too. And there's no knowing why. God, you can know *so damn much* and just... Never know." >Arthur: Examine the sky     Not much light pollution out here. Arthur can get a clear view of starry skies. "There's no way to really get ready, is the thing. To just, harden the heart and say you'll try anyway. You can't figure out with the future, or with any fuckin' thing. You know, inside, you had the bad thoughts. You know, outside, you did the shitty stuff. And you just... you have some faith. That there's something about it all you don't get, and it's why they want you around."     "It sucks. It's not much of an answer." He spends a long time in a pause. "It gets easier, though. For a while. It hurts a lot. But if we're so bad, maybe that's the price, the punishment, and that makes it okay when--" His voice hitches just a bit. "Maybe that balances the scales when they care about us anyway. What do you think?"     "..."     "Someone, god's sakes, fix my nose. It sucks saying this cringe shit, sounding like this." He laughs, briefly, wiping away blood and some of the water that got into his eyes.
Trudy Grimm	Shortly after the Terminarch's arm crashes into the water, it goes still again. Whatever malovelent, unnatural power was animating it promptly dissipates. The monstrosity returns to its inanimate state; dead, cold, and unmoving. The cocoon of bones surrounding the beast's carcass ripples, then starts receding, sinking into the shadows it casts across the crater floor.     Blueberry's own shadow deepens, extending to one side in some unnatural fashion. The water distresses as it starts swirling down-- which doesn't stop a certain witch from rising out of it with her arms folded. Despite being soaking wet and singed all over, she wears that friendly shark-toothed smile. The water's washed away all of the blood, though still creates rivulets of blackened stains down her face from all the grime and soot it leaves behind.     The witch leans forward, hands resting on her hips, "Change isn't easy, but the first step is the hardest. Every step after that gets easier. And you won't be making the journey alone." One hand shifts and she holds it down, "It'd be far more cruel to leave you all alone in this mausoleum of broken history. As wretched as I am, even I don't think you deserve that."     Mentally, she checks through her archive of friends who have answered her necromantic call; locating First Regent where he sits tucked away in her void of raised undead. When her eyes refocus, she glances back down to Blueberry, her hand still held out, "I even made a friend while I was here. I could introduce you, if you like." Her eyes close, head tilting, "I owe him a phone call, but we've got a boat ride to go through first~."
Ishirou	The beams do what he wanted, he didn't know what the attack was that was coming at the time, only its prediction.  Sometimes, in this field, he can only know something, but not specifics...and has to trust those who he fights with to make good with the opportunities.  Trudy was the one who made it work, and as he flies around to avoid the massive creature, he looks down at her.   He can read that magic and pauses for a moment.  It couldn't have been...she hasn't exactly misled them about what she was, but perhaps there was more there.  He sighs and gives her a wave.  No, he wasn't going to think differently of her.  He refused to because they were friends.   The field washed over them, and Ishirou turned towards Blueberry.  The time she fell down, and the time she got up with perfect, unnerving grace.  He prepared himself because what was going to come next was...bad.  Only, it did not come to pass, how large was that field overcharged?  He could not know his prediction about Strawberry would have come to pass.  Here they were, begging them to let her be alone, to live out her life with nobody and no one.   Ishirou floated down from his altitude to land on the ground.  "Everyone has something ugly about them, you know?  We all have parts of ourselves that we don't want the world to see.  When you hit me at the beginning of the fight...I could only think of myself for a moment there, and I hated it." "I doubted the bonds I had, but...that's a different problem.  You can't...you can't just isolate yourself.  It won't make you feel better, it won't make it go away.  I shut down before, when I couldn't handle things and sometimes coped by pretending I wasn't a person because it'd be less complicated that way." "But it's not that easy, nothing is.  I can't bear to face Strawberry knowing someone she cares about is hurting herself like this, that she's in pain.  So I'm asking you, please...don't make me go back to her and have to tell her this.  Don't make us have to go to her and tell her what happened...that we left her friend here." "Because you are wrong.  You not being there is hurting her.  It's...hard to face reality, and hard to be a human.  It's painful and it hurts sometimes, but there is happiness there.  There are good things, in everyone.  No matter how they think they aren't good," he looks towards Lilian, "Or how awful they think they are," a look towards Trudy.  "So...please.."
Tamamo	Tamamo doesn't have anywhere to which to escape. She can't enter another world in an instant. Time continues at its expected rate, warped only by the speed of her mind. It does accelerate, now. First, from the energy that flows through her from her own healing charms, those prepared reserves that kept her insides on the inside, just now. Second, from the adrenaline-adjacent panic of seeing Lilian collapse in front of her.     "Lilian--! Oh, no, I have you, just--!"     There's something else going on, but it is less important. It barely registers in her mind, and only enters her field of view at all because Lilian is saying it.     'Arthur . . . Please . . .'     Oh, yes, that's right. Arthur can take care of it. Tamamo doesn't need to understand what either of them are doing to Blueberry in this moment, in this combination breaking and befriending. That murderous, self-centered brat certainly deserves whatever Lilian does to her.     Tamamo is far past caring about fog or dust or dirt or severely poisoned waters. She kneels down by Lilian in a hurry, pulling one talisman after another out from her sleeves, remarkably sure with her fingers for how utterly panicked her motions are otherwise, just barely maintaining balance to not fall over when she's off her geta and on her knees.     There's blood in the water, and it's hers, but that's not important, either. She has the perfect distraction from her own pain.     The talismans layer up on Lilian's explosive-struck leg like until they're as solidly, if chaotically, distributed as a cast. Tamamo is possibly not hearing and definitely not listening to anything said in the interim. "Even if you are my knight, and you are, you are still my -- that is, I had promised -- rather --"     She will, at least, get to Arthur's broken nose, at some point.
Cantio	They're getting through. Even though it feels unnatural to say what she did, Cantio can see that the effort to get into Blueberry's head and turn her away from her destructive path is resulting in more concrete admissions of what she really wants. Cantio is still poised to press the attack right up until Blueberry Princess finally withdraws that aura and starts breaking down with apologies and tears. "Very few of us were born good. Or worthy, or brave, or..." Cantio swallows down a pained noise as she approaches Blueberry again, setting her sword aside before moving over to join her and Arthur. She's panting heavily, but not so much that she's collapsing on herself. She even musters together enough power to start casting healing magic on them, keeping a slow stream of it coming instead of going for anything big or flashy that might draw the attention of the Terminarch's clones again. "Even Strawberry or... My sister. Even people like them had to struggle to be what we see now. To be as... Good as we hope they are." She continues in agreement with Arthur, grunting wearily as she takes a knee to focus her energies a little better on getting his nose to stop leaking all over the place, if not necessarily putting it back in place. "And if you're not a good person inside, then..." Cantio hesitates. There's something still unsettling her, and she considers her next words carefully before continuing. "... Well, so what? If they're bad or even terrible people on the inside, does it matter if they're still doing good things for everyone on the outside? Do they really have to be good people to accomplish good things?" She's not saying it, but she's certainly thinking about the flipside to all of that. Cantio tries to distract herself as she looks over at the Terminarch's arm following Trudy's efforts, giving her a light thumbs up before turning back to Blueberry again. "And... For whatever it's worth, it's not the first time some of us have tried to kill each other." She manages an awkward giggle at that, then clears her throat before reaching over to pat Blueberry's back gingerly in case she needs that last little push to throw up. "We've gotten over it, and so can you." Cantio's trying very hard not to look at Lilian or Kale for confirmation on that last part.
James Bond	Bond can hear it--the pained, raw quality of her voice--through the radio. For it to pick up over the din of combat, she must surely have been screaming. He heard it clearly. His finger moves away from the trigger, but his palm squeezes the grip tightly.      For a moment, stalking away from his cover to avoid the laser, Bond accepts that this is his last mission. It's the laugh--enough for him to suspect that Arthur's stunt backfired. In that small moment, scolding the mage for it would be wasted breath. He finds some grim amusement in it--that Arthur remained himself to the last. He may as well be a ghost, the way his body moves through the ruins--staring not at but through his surroundings. He's tensed up, ready to strike, rifle slung over his back and pistol at the ready. For all that it matters. That laugh-- That's it, then. I suppose it makes sense that I'd die, right when I've decided to live for something. That she'd still take this way out. People like us don't get what we want.      That small moment passes.      Bond, having made it to his next hiding spot, finds that he's still alive. He finds that, with his back pressed against a partially collapsed brick wall, Blueberry hasn't worked out exactly where he is and led the clones right to him.      Why?      Then he realizes what that noise is. What it is that's been vibrating against the palm of his hand, muffled as he braved the open streets. Blueberry is crying.      It's trivial for him to cross the patrols by this point--only extreme unluck with the spotlights can reveal him, and however much that bothers him, there's simply no traversing the space without at least some risk of it. When he crosses the curtain of fog, it's just after Arthur's counsel.      Bond turns the radio off. It's no longer needed. "You had me worried," he says. No bravado. No smooth exterior. Worried that she might be right--that he had cheated some cosmic order in finding a measure of lasting warmth and happiness, and that sin would here be atoned for.      Not today. The pistol is holstered--was when he came down. The rifle, slung over his back, stock folded. The goggles are pulled from his neck, stuffed back into the bag. "...I'm not good, either. And I haven't been, for as long as I can remember. But there's someone out there who tells me that it isn't too late for me." he says softly. "I'm twice your age. So if it's not too late for me, why would it be for you?"
Strawberry Princess	"It feels- selfish," Blueberry says to Arthur. Her hands ball up where her eyes should be, trying to wipe away nonexistent tears. "Being near her is... it's bad for her. I'm- bad, for her. It's not, not just that I don't- don't 'deserve' it. After everything, I... it's scary. To do something bad for her, and good for me. I- I don't, want to."      "I think I- I know. I get it. Why the Terminarch brought me back," she adds in a half-whisper. "All they want to do is hurt people. And if I wanted to make something to hurt people... I'd make me, too."      "I'm- I don't think I can change," she says to Trudy, still making sniffle-like noises. "It's not that it's- it's not, impossible. It's not even hard. I'm just... not as strong as other people. I can't- something's wrong with me. I can't... do things, everybody else can. Easy things. I just- get them wrong."      She shrinks away from Trudy's hand. "A friend? ... Maybe- later. Later. I don't... people shouldn't, see me like this. I can't stand it. I hate it."      Ishirou's words get to her particularly effectively, even though she shivers at the idea of causing Strawberry pain. "I know. I know it had to be... hard, for her. For me to be gone. I thought it was better, like that. You know? That'd I'd hurt her more by coming back. But..." But maybe that isn't true.      "I don't," she tells Cantio, shifting from her awkward kneeling position into an exhausted, slouching sitting one. "I don't do good things. Can't- remember many of them." A pause. "If you're strong, maybe you can- you know. Get over having a bad heart. But I'm not. I've always been awful at that."      "It's not the first time some of us have tried to kill each other," Cantio adds. Blueberry looks up at her in dull disbelief. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"      Bond, like the others who've tried to take a similar approach, finds a good measure of success. "I'll... I can try to believe that. Th- thanks. I don't..." A little pause. She'd probably sniffle here, if she still had a nose. "I can't- keep being, this kind of person. I can't stand being this person anymore. So I- I want to believe it. But how?"
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Is you being near Strawberry Princess bad for her?     "...Cigarettes are bad for you. Old movies are bad for you. Food that tastes too good is bad for you. But people still want them." He rolls slightly, wet hair making awful noises. "And she wants you." Even through the facial obliteration, he smiles. A wide row of perfect pearly whites, gleaming with a shit-eating grin. "You plan on saying Strawbs can't have a Deluxe Princesswich anymore, Blues?" The grin gets more tired, strained, when he lies back down more. "You, that's what you can be. Horrible. Awful. Maybe unhealthy. But somehow you'll make her happy anyway." A pause. "Even if the recipe's pain to know."     "Besides. I'm not leaving my *new buddy* on this shitty hell-island. It's against the bro code. You're stuck with me now, you crystaline butthole, and that's a fuckin' fact."
Lilian Rook	"Broken? Hahaha-- hhk!" Lilian starts laughing, cold and exhausted and bitter, and shivering from some combination of hypothermia, shock, and psychological anguish. She's interrupted by a blood-speckled cough from the back of her throat. She hopes she just bit her tongue earlier. "You don't know what that means. Giving up isn't the same thing as being broken. Neither is feeling sad or not knowing what to do. You've never worked right, but you've never been broken, Blueberry."     "Not like me, and not like Strawberry. You died too early for that. Living is what breaks you."     The moment Arthur fully seizes Blueberry's Heart Ability is the moment Lilian's sheer force of will stops keeping her knelt with her sword raised. She falls forward on hands and knees, still dreading looking down or looking back. Another bloody, coughing round of careless laughter rises up from her.     "I know you never imagined her finding out, you fucking imbecile! If you ever did, we wouldn't all be here, would we?! That's just how it is! Even in your own private world, where you can do anything you want and nobody will ever know, there are still some things you can't bring yourself to do, right? Because it'd be bad enough that you know! For that ridiculously unfair power, you're still so immature and obvious. You have to get older if you really want to be underhanded."     A chilling smirk wrestles control of her pale lips away from her. The mask slipped a little too much for her to not show exactly what she's thinking of Blueberry with perfect information. "See? What did I say? You're just as intolerably clever as you are hopelessly naive. You know how people will act, but nothing about how people are." The bitterly satisfied grin slips from her face as the second vision plays out. Lilian wipes her bloodied lip. Her skin feels cold.     §Ah. I can hear Tamamo. Good. I was . . . Yeah, I was right to keep going. She sounds fine. Ah--! That burns. She must be trying to heal me, right? I should thank her, but I'm a little scared of knowing what the damage is, haha . . . I feel really pathetic.§     Lilian turns just enough to be able to see Tamamo out of the corner of her eye, and then holds out her arm to be taken, such that she can wrap it around Tamamo and haul herself up to stand with her. She screams quietly through gritted teeth as the feeling starts coming back into her lower leg. "Please. Tamamo, please. I'm sorry it had to be this way. I really am. But I'd do it whether you promised or not, you know. There's really no way you could stop me from being so self-centered and delusional. So don't get all bent out of shape. The thing I regret is doing it poorly, not doing it at all." Her best attempt at a laugh is dry and weak. Lilian looks back to Blueberry. Her brow furrows at the unpleasant familiarity of the ugly sight.     §Seriously, what the hell is ticking so loud? Is that me? Did I bring my phone with me? Is it the Terminarch? But it sounds so close.§     "Oh shut up." Lilian sighs, hobbling her way to somewhere she can sit and raise her leg out of the water with Tamamo's assistance. "That kind of bawling looked bad enough on me, I don't want to see you wearing it." Her thoughts race back to an exchange between Strawberry and Muramasa, a few months before everything had gone down with Hibiki. Withering chagrin tugs at her present expression. "You can't fathom how stupid that girl is about getting hurt. It's honestly inspiring. You haven't heard a word she's said for the past eight years, so that must be the only way you could believe something so stupid."     "Strawberry Princess is ruined the day she chooses to stop being Strawberry Princess and that's that. Even I'm not so insufferably arrogant to believe otherwise."
Lilian Rook	A dark little cackle follows Blueberry's disbelief at Cantio. "Weren't you listening? Everything you've done, I've done worse. Did you think I was just scrounging up words of sympathy like the others? Or were you really on autopilot the whole time and didn't consider what I meant?"     Attempting to find a seat on the Endling corpse to ameliorate Tamamo's worry, Lilian resumes talking with a hint of irritation. "Here's what I think. On one hand, Strawberry desperately wants you to be okay more than anything else in the world, and I could make her unbelievably happy. On the other hand, you're actually sort of an awful bitch and I don't care what you want, so I guess there's only really one option." She delivers it with such fantastic British deadpan too. At least for a little while, before her voice crumbles into quiet hoarseness.     "Unfortunately, for personal reasons, I can't accept that you're not worth the effort and give up like a sensible person. We're all going to talk. I'm older than you, so you're going to sit and listen to me tell you what you have to do to fight the grip 'that world' has on you. You're going to talk to Strawberry about what happened. And I'll--" Lilian sucks in a sharp breath, and flinches, again, as if someone were just about to hit her. Her shoulders jump with a half-motion of beginning to heave. Her voice gets several shades rougher. Her eyes are wet from stress. "I'll talk to Strawberry too. I'll tell her . . . I'll talk to her about . . . so that we're even."     Lilian lets a shuddering breath out, and finally elevates her leg from the rancid water fully. The combat skin has been flayed right off, melted edges having fused to her skin across the sharp threshold made by frozen contact, not even leaving a residual smear below it. The sheer amount of gradually congealing blood is staggering. It looks as if she shouldn't still have a lower limb at all, though Tamamo's talismans have certainly plastered up over most of it. The skin that still shows is . . . burnt(?) . . . black. And slightly shiny. But . . . somehow it almost looks sort of see-through. What kind of exotic physics injury is that? The black is even shot through with thin ripples of dusty gold lines.     "Jesus Christ can nobody else hear that? It's driving me mad."
Ishirou	"I think her eating habits are more dangerous than anyone around her.." Ishirou says with a thoughtful (if not slightly teasing) tone.  "Though I actually liked the cheesy grapes." Ishirou lands the armor, and he steps out of it.  It's a vulnerable position for him, but at this point... Well if he wasn't going to take a chance now, his words would be hollow! When she responds to Cantio's words, he sighs, "She's not wrong." But he doesn't say which one of them.  Likely both. "I don't think you will, because you spent all this effort trying NOT to.  It was kind of mixed up..." though, at the idea of trying to be better, he nods.  "I'm trying to learn what I am too, human wasn't something I got to be...and I guess it's not something not everyone gets to?  Maybe that's not what you are, but...wanting to be better is the first step!" He smiles brightly at her, though looks towards Lilian when she sits down, cocks his head at her, and opens up his senses.  "What sound?"
James Bond	"Damned if I know," says Bond flatly. Old habits. "...Maybe Lowell is onto something," suggests Bond. "What he said earlier. Maybe there isn't any such thing as 'good.' Ask what makes a person good, and you'll get a different answer from everybody you bother asking. It's some vague inkblot of an idea we fall back on when we can't say what it is we really like about someone."      "And if that's so, then there's not some... inherent thing that's missing from you or me. Keeping us from being 'good.' Maybe it's 'better,' not 'good,' that we ought to be trying for."      He breathes a deep sigh, hissing as his attempt to lean back results in pressing against a wound. "Not trying to wipe the slate clean by dying heroically. Or trying to preserve some perfect, flawless image in someone else's mind." He slumps, slowly, until he's seated, whereupon his hands work their way into a Lucky Strike. The lighter is spent. Bond tosses it aside sullenly, but manages to continue his thought all the same.      "I can't say I believe things will change overnight. But I know that 'more of the same' isn't going to change anything, and that's enough for me to try something else. Maybe you should, too."      There's a glance towards Lilian. "No," he answers simply. "But we should talk, soon. I seem to recall someone told me to reach out if I ever wanted a change in career paths."
Trudy Grimm	Blueberry Princess shies away from her. Trudy pauses to ruminate on the crystal-girl's reaction and her words. Not just the words directed at herself; but the way this girl is reacting to everyone who clearly don't mean her harm. The witch sighs, closing her eyes for a moment. Her hand lifts up to pinch the bridge of her nose in thought while Lilian goes off-- and it seems that Trudy has little more to add to things said by someone much closer and more in-tune with what's going on. Drawing her hand back, she rubs blood between her thumb and forefinger, "Honestly I'm somewhat tempted to just pick her up and get out of here. This really is the worst place for a heart-to-heart."     Her shadow extends to one side. From it, a knight in full plate armor lurches forth, the cloth livery of his tabard tattered. He's far taller than an ordinary man, much like her Soldiers were, but at least keeps his sword in its scabbard. That nasty water pours from the cracks in his armor for a few seconds, though the figure seems undeterred.     "Especially if some of us are starting to hear strange sounds; lingering is only going to make this more dangerous. Need I remind all of you that there are still precognitive murder-limb-abominations shambling about scant kilometers from us?"
Tamamo	Tamamo fusses over Lilian and doesn't stop for a long, long while. <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell says, "Yeah, I'm dumb as hell. I can't teach her shit. But I'm gonna be *friends*." <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell, firm, determined. <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo is about to say something, then sighs. "Very well."     After having been about to wish him well in his endeavours with veiled, indifferent insincerity, Tamamo realizes that she can clearly, obviously do better. And now, she has to.     In addition to giving Arthur healing talismans to restore both the structure and appearance of his recently rearranged face (the pain is mildly helpful to the healing process, and she leaves it be), she gives him a pair of beaded leather cords. They have a rough appearance, though are surprisingly not so rough to the touch. The beads are in a variety of colors of glass, a few stone.     "I believe you know what friendship bracelets are, yes? I made these to modern standards."     They are somewhat obviously magical.
Strawberry Princess	Blueberry makes a nameless, ragged noise of cathartic exhaustion. It's akin to "sighing, with one's breath hitching due to residual sobs", without the actual sighing or breath. It transitions smoothly into a depleted laugh, and to rubbing her face with her hands as she absorbs everyone's advice.      "So, I'm bad for her, but I make her happy. There's no such thing as good, but I can make myself better. And wanting to be better is good, even if there's no such thing." She pauses, her faceless face unreadable. It seems almost as though she's going to shrug it all off with a bitter witticism.      "... Okay. Okay. I can live with that, I think."      Lilian does receive the scoff Blueberry had just bitten back. "Don't try tell me you've done worse than me," she says darkly. "I know more about you than you know about me. That's not your presumption to make." But she immediately drops to a softer tone when Lilian's voice roughens.      "Are you sure? You don't... have to tell her about that. I mean, it'd be nice if I weren't the only one fessing up to something. But I was just... I was saying that to hurt you. If you never tell her, she'd understand."      Finally, she pushes herself up to her feet. "Don't worry about the clones. We don't have to fight them or anything, so I can just make sure they don't see us." Come to think of it, she has been surviving here on her own for a while. Her wand is re-summoned into her hand, now intact. Magical pulses resume 'pinging' her surroundings, though less continuously than they had during the fight.      Her body language and voice convey a strange mixture of gallows-like resignation and faint, flickering hope as she trudges towards the edge of the Crater. "Let's go back. If I'm not going to die, I guess I can't put off talking to her forever."
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Equip Friendship Bracelet     Arthur grunts in pain through the whole process, insisting on moving and working as he does, setting up a Gate to get out of here. While they move, of course. Tamamo's bracelet, though... that surprises him. Eyebrows jump up, and the slow inscription of the Gate halts for a moment. Only after he fully recognizes it does he near-instantly accept and equip it. And in every future, Arthur whirls around, clasps Blueberry's hand, and slips it on, an expert in unwilling, high-complexity handshakes beyond anyone's dexterity. "FRIENDS. PALS." He declares. "BUDS, EVEN."     He jabs a finger at her face, rudely too close. "So long as that stays on you and safe," He declares. "You're doing somethin' good, somethin' real kind and great. All the time. Forever. Got it?" He starts the trudge again. "Good."
Ishirou	Ishirou turns towards his armor and makes it retreat into his storage space.  He is now equipped with a comfy sweater instead because he needs something warm to wear.  The sweater is bright purple.  He turns back to Arthur to enforce his friendship with Blueberry.   He yawns, "Yeah let's go back...I'd like to sleep in a bed, even if it's on a ship," a small pause as he looks from face to face.  "Also pray I don't have to fight someone with time powers for a very long time...twice in one year is twice too many.."
Lilian Rook	"Better is the enemy of good except when it comes to people." Lilian exhales in petty fatigue. It hardens up a little bit at Blueberry. "Oh? Then you'll have to tell me about it. You've succeeded in being so emotionally putrid I don't even want to read your mind." It takes a minute for her to back down again from Heather Peak.     Lilian sighs. "Don't be so self-important. 'It'd be nice if I weren't the only one fessing up to something.' Doesn't that apply the other way around too?" A wry, enervated smirk reemerges. "Frankly, yours is still far worse, so I come out on top. This is a talent you can only get from experience."     Blueberry gets up. Lilian's thoughts jump in the dumbest possible direction. "Ah-- Trudy could you-- No, I need to call back Arina and Satsuki anyways. I'll have them disassemble the tent and transport the contents." She unthinkingly does Blueberry the polite dignity of not saying 'stuffed animal'.     She laughs off Bond's reminder, but the guilty little hopeful light in her eyes gives it away. "Of course. I'll leave you their number once we're back on the boat." However, his obliviousness, along with Trudy's veiled accusation, move her to a loudly irritated noise not long after. Ishirou and Tamamo remind her of something very important: the wand fragments. Of course. She'd put those in her storage case. They have to be making that noise.     Lilian rifles around the interior for a second. She begins pulling out the wand pieces, and then recoils as if burnt. Actually, her fingertips smoke just a little, only the disgusting water on them keeping her from putting her mouth on them. All she succeeds at removing is a fist-sized sphere of hard black material shot through with smoky gold like rippled cracks, a piece of its outside having been scoured away as a soft white scar.     She stuffs it right back in the case and closes it without saying another word. "Exfiltrating in five." she confirms with Arthur. "I flashed those two the clear while we were talking. Blueberry, lead the way." Lilian gets up and starts walking.     Every other footstep makes no sound.