//------------------------------// // 151 - Through the Cracks // Story: Songs of the Spheres // by GMBlackjack //------------------------------// My name is Twilence. You may have found this little booklet hidden away in some long-forgotten corner of a library. But, more likely, you’re just getting this transmitted directly to your computer screen. If you’re the former, I admire and respect what you are. Living in the New World, completely free… I wish I could see what it’s like. Know that you have an experience that I cannot know from these pages, something that no one I know personally can attest to. You are something different. I hope my jotted thoughts on a world long gone will have some beneficial impact on you besides confusion. I’ll ask that you don’t think me mad, but I’ll understand if you do. If you’re the latter, hello readers, welcome to chapter 151. Except it isn’t really a chapter. This is just me rambling – rambling about some of the things that happen while the ever-so-present power of ka wanes. The cracks in the Tower cause those of us who have had immense clouds of ka surrounding us to lose that ka and gain moments of freedom. While it can never go away entirely, there are moments where the world isn’t a ridiculous over-the-top story where we’re always the chosen ones. By their nature, these events cannot be relayed to you directly, since they have limited ka. But they are important – oh so important to our understanding of what is to come. So at the risk of contaminating the purity of some of these moments, I have chosen to write them down. You won’t find grand adventure here, nor will you find an endless trove of deep personal drama raised to the power of ten for your enjoyment. Instead, you will find a bunch of unrelated snapshots of life that I decided were worth saving. Naturally, I will be unable to remove all semblance of a story from each event, for I am writing this down in a form meant to be read. Consider this a journal, if you must. A book about my experiences – or the experiences of others I head about. I am the eye that looks through the cracks. Title drop. ~~~ We like to over-decorate our cars with every conceivable ornament we can find. The more oversized and ridiculous, the better. If you make a living out of being a race car driver, you can afford to deck out your car to the point it hardly looks like a car anymore, but of course you – an expert racer – can drive it at high speeds anyway because of your raw skill. No matter how ridiculous or impractical your car is. As I was trotting down one of the City’s many streets, I watched one such racer pull his car out of the driveway. I heard the revving of the engine, the whir of the wheels on the pavement, and the brush of air as he whirled past me. The spoiler that looked like a chicken swerved a bit too far to the right, smacking an information terminal. The avian structure shattered into a dozen large pieces and spilled all across the road. The racer’s poor car entered a tailspin and skidded off the road into someone’s lawn, hitting the tree with the back end. He ended up in the hospital for a broken arm and had many major bruises all over his body. He couldn’t believe it had failed on him – he had taken the car out thousands of times exactly like that, and nothing had stopped his radical coolness! It took the doctors a lot longer to piece together than it should have. Or was what I witnessed just people taking a normal amount of time to come to the seemingly obvious answer? ~~~ Sherlock Holmes, a man who depends a bit too much on natural intuition. When the cracks first started rippling through the city, he didn’t have any way to prepare, so he assumed his deductions were just as reliable as they always were, no matter how absurd this ended up being. This was particularly bad the first time it happened: while he was on a case. He leaned down to inspect the body, prodding it with his mind. He did not sense the lack of ka, for his mind did not get any less sharp. He was still able to see all the details – the scratches on the man’s ring, the way his coat was put on inside-out, his open satchel with lots of discs inside. The information was easily available to him. I even watched him putting two and two together, the little gears in his mind creaking at a fast rate. He smirked, stood up, and cleared his throat. “This man was killed by a partner he had recently left, via the ingestion of a toxic poison – given the smile on his face, I’m thinking liquefied laughing gas. In other deductions, he is an aficionado of music.” He picked up one of the discs and allowed it to glint in the sunlight. “We should check all his recent relationships to see who’s most likely. I’m thinking a woman, but that doesn’t have to be the case.” Lightning stared at him with a dumbfounded expression. “…What? It’s not like last week. I’m not saying a pig ate his liver and then sold the ‘remnants’ for pocket money. I was still right about this though.” Lightning pointed at the table. There was a note on it. “Suicide…?” Sherlock said, raising an eyebrow. “That doesn’t make any…” He read the note. Test 19: I think I have the correct formula. It has a lot of volatile compounds, but it should be able to finally let me appreciate music. I will actually be able to understand all these things I am selling. Details are below in case this doesn’t work so someone else may continue the process. Sherlock shook his head, unable to process how he hadn’t picked that up. It all made perfect sense to him NOW. Why hadn’t he seen the note? He never got that fixated on a crime scene… Clearly, the entire thing was set up for him to make a bizarre deduction about self-experimentation, music appreciation, and a tragic accident. But that didn’t happen. ~~~ I am lucky enough to be able to see the result of a crack in ka. In theory all Aware powers should cease to function, and in a technical sense my Eye of Rhyme cannot show me anything new while I am currently in one of the aforementioned cracks. That said; the Eye of Rhyme is able to detect when a crack will happen and tell me what the result will be. This creates some interesting opportunities. Say you’re with Vriska, the troll who feeds off luck and is generally predisposed to win every gambling encounter she’s part of, so long as it’s fair. Anyone who knows her knows never to bet against her on anything founded in randomness or chance – and she’s banned from every casino in the City. Now, the luck of Light isn’t a truly ka-based power, it is still able to function without a constant presence of narrative. However, luck without ka should be random. With even a tiny bit of luck, Vriska is basically guaranteed to win a coin flip through ka. Without it, the luck of Light becomes less potent, becoming a pure numbers game that always has a chance of failure. It is just luck, after all. So I cheated. One day I was walking and talking with her and Starbeat, and then I felt the crack coming. I turned to Vriska. “Hey, wanna try something?” “Yeah, what?” I held up a coin. “Coin flip. Heads, I win, tails, you lose. I won’t cheat with my magic – I’ll just let it spin and fall.” “Don’t you know the result?” “Yes, I do,” I said with a smirk. “But the question here is are you confident enough that the result is you winning?” “You’re on.” I flipped the coin. Vriska grabbed some luck from Starbeat and focused on the coin. It landed heads, exactly as I foresaw. “I win.” “What the fuck…” Vriska said, eyes wide. I winked and teleported away before she could question me. ~~~ So, Rosalina showed up. Yes, the woman who was supposedly executed by Starbeat’s Rage-fed version of the Hub. Apparently she’d devised a clever self-recreation spell that took a gamble that ‘revive’ would work on her from a distance. It worked like a charm, and to make it better nobody bothered to check to see if soul-magic had been used in the execution room. Just a regular oversight at the execution block. This woman walked into the City and absolutely nothing happened. There were no dramatic gasps, no bravado, no nothing. A few people recognized her and were surprised, but to her chagrin nothing seemed to happen. She was calm and collected enough not to get angry with this, but disappointment is also a powerful emotion. She soon realized she had no idea what to do now that she was here – she had sort of just expected everything to fall into her lap since she’d been the effective leader of the Mushroom World. But there was no niche prepared for her, her people had been spread out through the City, and she didn’t have all that many close friends around. To cut a long story short, she didn’t feel like becoming a member of Expeditions or politics, and she didn’t feel all that comfortable leading people she wasn’t familiar with. Part of this was due to her mental state – being put on trial and executed does things to your mind if you manage to survive it. In the end she somehow ended up working at a Subway. Yes, the sandwich place. We have them. “Welcome to Subway, what can I get you?” “Meatball sub,” I said. After my order was complete I took my seat at the window and watched what was about to unfold. Starbeat walked into the subway and locked eyes with Rosalina. For a moment, it looked like there might be a bit of a scene. Starbeat lit her horn and nervously glanced from side to side, while Rosalina hefted her wand aggressively. And then Starbeat shut off her magic and put on a dumb smile. She walked up to the counter and coughed. “Uh… seafood. Just the standard.” Rosalina lowered her wand. “…Yes. What kind of bread do you want?” “That… seasoned one that looks like it has cheesy bits on the top.” “…Coming right up.” She split the bread, carefully loaded it with the seafood special, and added a healthy assortment of veggies. “Would you like anything else with that?” “You know what, I think I’m good.” “Sure? We’ve got chips.” “…I’ll pass.” Starbeat paid, took her sandwich, and walked away from the counter. She paused for a moment and looked back at Rosalina as if she wanted to say something. In the end, all she did was shake her head and walk away. Rosalina took the next order with shaking hands. Starbeat would not be going back to this particular Subway. ~~~ A gigantic mouse-fox monster was whaling on the City walls, determined to break through to all the succulent food sources within. It could smell the delicious humans in there. The walls were holding just fine, but the noises the rodent was making had become a mixture of annoying and terrifying for the people living on the exact opposite side of the wall. Since they didn’t want to use explosives or complex artillery near the wall and people, they decided to use an agent. It just so happened that Saitama was free and hadn’t been finding things to challenge himself lately. So he took the chore readily – but took one look at the oversized mouse and decided this wasn’t going to be interesting. He slowly walked up to it and punched. He hit its toe with a tiny bit of force, expecting the entire beast to rupture. Nothing happened. “Shit, dud,” he muttered, preparing for impact. Nothing happened again. The monster hadn’t even felt him – but it had seen something shiny in the distance. It decided to give up on the wall it had been whaling on for so long to go investigate the shiny. This left Saitama decidedly confused. “…Did I win?” Later he would test his punch and discover it worked just fine. …And he would destroy part of the City wall in the process. He would be put on community service for this, and then promptly removed when he started doing every job perfectly. ~~~ Shirley was a woman who hated the ‘don’t call me Surely’ joke, for obvious reasons. It was always ‘Surely this, Shirley that.’ She was far too stubborn to change her name and avoid the trouble altogether, as was the way with a lot of people. Feeling hungry, she got up from her couch to make the long trek over to the fridge. This was a considerable ordeal, considering she lived in a house that was essentially one giant hallway the kids played in. Moving from one area to another in this house was essentially trying to walk through a minefield. The Legos hid in the carpet, just waiting to be stepped on. She would have put on shoes, but she had left them on the other side of the house. Carefully, she tiptoed through the wilds of the carpet, avoiding any bright colors, looking only for white, fluffy carpet. Before she committed to any step, she would feel the area with her big toe, using her arm to balance herself on a nearby wall. A couple times she committed and felt a Lego nudge the side of her foot, telling her she was exceptionally close to driving excruciating pain through her sole. And she knew what happened when she failed. Her body would freak out and she would jump, falling flat on her back – onto even more Legos. The plastic bricks would dig at her flesh until she had square-and-circle marks all along her back. It was a horrible torment she wanted to avoid at all costs. Luckily for her, she eventually crossed the hallway and did a little dance at the other end. She laughed on the linoleum of the kitchen, satisfied she had survived the gauntlet once more! She reached for the fridge, closing her hand around the sharp, cold metal. The anticipation sent chills up her spine. With a set of quick motions she grabbed herself all the ingredients to make a sandwich fit for a king. Ham, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, bacon, fresh onions, jalapenos, bell peppers, seasonings… it was enough to make almost anyone’s mouth water. She ended up only making a simple meat and cheese sandwich and eating it on the spot. She put the rest of the ingredients back in the fridge, deciding they were frivolous in the end. ~~~ Vriska woke up, took one look outside, and said “Nope.” She just wasn’t going to go to work today. Who needed to, really? ~~~ The vibrant roses of Can’-Ka No Rey are everywhere in the City. Numerous areas of land – particularly in the middle of squares – were left untouched in the City’s construction so people could appreciate the natural beauty and redness of the roses. Everyone knew they were sharper than knives, redder than any pigment, and more full of life than any other plant. They were an integral part of City life and aesthetics. The City’s colors were orange, black, and red. Orange was a holdover from Merodi and a few other societies, while the black represented the Tower, and the red the roses themselves. The official emblem of the City was created using compressed rose petals – making it the brightest red that wasn’t on the roses themselves. True rose dye was a controlled substance, if only because there was a limited amount of it. The roses did not seem to be able to reproduce, and they couldn’t be transplanted outside the bounds of the City. It was originally thought to have no use beyond exceedingly vibrant pigment that demanded attention. But then the cracks started happening more often, and people realized something peculiar. Whenever ka lost its strength around the roses, they dimmed. They were still pure, almost perfectly proportioned flowers in this state – but they were just flowers in this state. It was a subtle change, one people rarely noticed, but once a few botanists, biologists, and the like started looking closer they were able to say for certain the dimming of the flowers was a simple, effective detector of the cracks. For the first little while, people would rely on the naturally-growing roses around the City to tell them. But they quickly realized that even if they were looking for it, most of them didn’t have the mental awareness to actually detect the change in rose vibrance on the fly. However, if they had some rose pigment… the change there was visibly noticeable and harsh. And it was a lot simpler than putting together a full ka-sensor array. Roses began to vanish from public parks so they could be fashioned into these devices that could detect ka strength. Eventually they got precise – little color readers placed on red-colored objects could detect low, but also normal and high levels of ka. It got to be such a problem that people were injuring themselves on the sharp thorns of the roses – thinking they were grabbing them when ka was low and being sorely mistaken. Mlinx eventually had to implement major enchantments to protect the roses. And that was that. The rose-dye ka-readers technically aren’t illegal anymore, since they’re already made, but they are one of the most expensive items in the City. A lot of thefts and murders have happened over them. ~~~ There are those like me who can cheat and just know when a crack upsets the balance around. This does not apply to all Aware beings. “So, Pinkie, what are you thinking?” I asked as I took a sip of my drink. It was something fruity, probably a mixture of several dozen organic things. She opened her mouth to respond – and then stopped. “I uh… don’t know what I was thinking about.” She sat back in her chair, blinking. “Huh, that’s a little weird.” “That is,” I said. “Maybe we can retrace your steps? See what happened?” “I, sure, yeah! So, I was watching you drink, and I was thinking about the color purple then. You and your drink. That turned into eggplants, then eggs, and then breakfast – even though this is lunch – and then I was thinking about a breakfast party and then… Then…” She tapped her hoof on the table. “There was something there…” “Sounds like you were planning a party.” “I think I was. Usually I come up with those things in, like, a second! How did I lo-” it was at this point she put two and two together from my curious responses, her Awareness’s minimal input, and the general feel of the atmosphere. “Oooooh, I getcha! Just some little game then?” “The opposite of a game.” “You just lost the game.” “So I did.” ~~~ There was a man. Let’s call him John. There was another man. Let’s call him Matt. John and Matt had been fighting a lot over the course of the last few weeks about, of all things, politics. John really liked Mlinx’s policies; while Matt thought he was too hard-handed with the way he managed his presence. These arguments had been the source of a lot of strife between the two men, and it had begun to drive a rift between them. Like friends were always doing in the City, they decided to meet up and resolve the issue. There was nothing a good long talk couldn’t fix, right? “Hey,” John said as he sat in his chair. “Hey,” Matt responded, awkwardly. They ordered food, but when it arrived neither of them touched it. “Look…” John folded his hands together. “At the end of the day, does it really matter who’s the Mayor?” “No. What matters is what they do.” “Does it really? “I’m not going to become apathetic about it. Mlinx is wrong in what he does and refusing to talk about it is also wrong.” “But neither of us are going to get anywhere in convincing each other,” John added. “Your friendship is more important than my devotion to a man’s ideals.” “Then change your ideals.” “It isn’t that simple. You know it isn’t. How hard it is for people to change their minds!?” “They do it all the time. Read the stories! Endless discussions leading to changed minds!” “But there are also a lot of stubborn people!” “And you are one,” Matt said, tapping his fingers together. “Look, I’m sorry John. I can’t change myself for you.” “And neither can I.” “…Maybe I can just not talk about it around you,” Matt suggested. “I think I could do that. Just admit you can’t be swayed and focus my efforts elsewhere.” John narrowed his eyes. “But you’ll still be screaming from the rooftops.” “Of course I will. It’s my life. I’m not letting it go. I won’t stop until the world is the way it needs to be.” “You have the makings of a supervillain.” Matt looked John in the eyes. He opened his mouth to respond, couldn’t, and shut it. “I knew it. I kn-” Matt decided he was done. He stood up and walked out. They never talked to each other again. Forever unresolved. ~~~ Why was there a cat on my porch singing to a cactus I had been growing for the last week? No reason. Why did that cat pace around the cactus for an hour? Not much of a reason. Why did the cactus fall over? Bad health, a need for direct sun, hatred of the soil, my own inexperience gardening. Why didn’t it fall on the cat? No reason. ~~~ “We need to decide this now,” Andrew Cobb said, sitting down on the sofa across from his wife, Laurel. She looked up. “Do… do we really, Andrew?” Andrew tossed the divorce papers up onto the table. “Yes. We do. The moment to finalize this is now.” “Fine then!” She tore them off the table and read them over. “Sure, we can sign it! Why haven’t you signed it!?” “Because I wasn’t going to be made a fool!” “A fool? A fool? Like you need my bloody help for that!” “You certainly don’t help, wench.” Laurel laughed. “I bet if I actually helped you’d end up looking better than if you tried anything on your own! Every little bit of your life is failure after failure and you just sucked me in along with you!” “I sucked you along? Ha! Who was it that said ‘we should go move to a collapse society?’ You! ‘It’ll be safer’, you said. ‘They’ll be nicer to us’, you said.” “They would have if you weren’t going to be such a prick!” “Maybe I like being a prick! Maybe it’s part of who I am! Maybe I’m just a grumpy old monkey that needs some goddamn freedom every now and then!” “Well you’re about to have all the freedom you want!” “I will!” He swiped the divorce papers out of her hand and pulled a pen out of his pocket. He set it down to the paper. …and the moment passed. The document lost its luster, its finality. It sat in his hands as a simple piece of paper. It didn’t judge, it didn’t call – it just sat there. There was no freedom in there. He dropped the pen and the papers. They fell down to the coffee table, the pen rolling onto the floor and the papers falling in a bent mess. He flopped into a nearby chair and clenched his jaw as hard as he could manage, unable to prevent two tears from falling down his cheeks. “…What got us here?” he asked. Laurel had no answer. The two of them sat in silence for several minutes. Eventually, Laurel got up and went to bed. Andrew found a blanket and a couch and cried himself to sleep that night. The papers remained untouched on the coffee table for weeks. Neither of them acknowledged the presence of the papers. They still fought and screamed, but the frequency of those events went down over time. Their marriage would return to a happy one and they would have four children. All because the finality of one moment was lost. The papers were forever unresolved. Eventually they were lost under a stack of books and no one would see them ever again. ~~~ His name was Yellow Throat, a member of a bird-like race from a long-forgotten world. Everyone called him Pa. He spent his time sitting in a hospital bed, listening to the beep… beep… beep… of his monitor. He was rarely conscious, and whenever he was it was immensely painful to speak. He was by no means old – not even old enough to have grandchildren – but he looked it. His feathers were falling out and his limbs were shriveled. Tubes of magic energy ran into his body, struggling to keep him alive. It was a sad story – he and his family had been traveling to the City since their old home had been destroyed by meteor-weather. He had been lucky enough to lose none of his seventeen kids in the Dusting. In his travels, he had transformed himself from a meek, soft-spoken family man into a daring hero who would protect his children from every ordeal. But on the last leg of the journey, there had been an attack by pirates. He had thrown himself into the fray, sacrificing everything he could to make sure the pirates were destroyed and his family would go free. He should not have survived. The toxins, the magic weapons, the things they had stabbed him with… All should have destroyed his body. But he’d pulled through. Not a single one of them had survived his onslaught, and he himself still lived. Barely. They were rescued by a patrol right after that and brought to the hospital where Pa now lay, wasting away. His family came to visit him regularly, and there was hardly a moment when two or three weren’t in the room. His wife almost never left him. Despite the pain, he was happy to know every last one of them was alive and healthy. Acceptance was easy. He knew his time had come. It was his heroic sacrifice. He had been allowed to live so he could tell each of them goodbye. A little pain was more than worth that opportunity. His family, of course, wanted to do everything they could to save him. The doctor – a skeleton pony – sighed. “Look, we’ve done everything we can.” He held up a clipboard, going through every section of it. “Every test has been run, every treatment that won’t make it worse has been tried. He rejects Esunas and whatever toxin they had was highly magical in nature.” He looked up at them. “He’s got three days.” The wife burst into tears along with half the children. The eldest woman among them walked up to him and stared him in the face. “Are you sure you’ve done everything?” “Absolutely positive.” He began going through the clipboard again. “We are very thorough and go through every procedure we can, using AI and magical assistance for all diagnoses and treatment options. W-” And then he did what very few doctors had ever done. He noticed the convenient oversight on one of the documents. One square had been marked as ‘complete’ when, really, the mark was part of the box below it. A tiny mistake conveniently made on the one patient it would likely help. “Order a JE-4-SCAN!” he ordered, dropping the clipboard and running into the hall. “I NEED A JE-4-SCAN!” Modern magic medicine could cure curses. There was no reason it wouldn’t be able to cure a bizarre mixture of chemicals and poisons in the hands of pirates. But Pa’s time had come. Except now his death was going to be skipped over. Fate was changed - cracked. ~~~ If the Tower chooses not to let ka dictate a decision, isn’t that still in a way ka? Think about it. The Tower has to manage everything and know everything that’s going to happen between now and the moment of its destruction. After it falls, it has no control, but even when it allows the ‘cracks’ to flow out and disrupt ka, it’s no more than a narrative glitch, isn’t it? Perhaps. After all, as I write these, a lot of them seem overly convenient in timing. Sure, I am picking and choosing the events that are worthy of being recorded, thereby making more of them seem important when they aren’t. Perhaps that is a bit arrogant of me. …It is definitely arrogant. Regardless, they seem to have the elements of story in them. And that element is a subversion, or the loss of coherence, of completion. Many of them aren’t really satisfying, or just seem out of place. Yet, they together approach a point, a goal, a purpose of some kind. They come together to show the world and prepare it for what is to come. It is exactly like the glitches, I think. The Tower always knows, so while it may use a randomizer to decide where to cause the ka ‘blackouts’, it still knows the results, and knows the instances I will place in my little journal here. It always knew, right from the start. Really, this is all fake. Ka never vanishes completely, even when we can’t detect it. The Tower is controlling all for now. But it is living up to The Emissary’s promise. It’s preparing us for the world that will come after. ~~~ He had been bullied all his life. He had been told to forgive and forget. He had been told to turn the other cheek. “Fuck that,” he declared, planning to leave his family the moment he could. When all of them were dusted, it was a dream come true. He was not only rid of those idiots, he was rid of all the other people around as well. He owned what remained – he was king of his own little cityscape. Empty, devoid of human life, but it was still his. As its king, he needed servants. Since his IQ was off the charts, he built his own robotic servants to do all the work for him – bringing him food, transforming city hall into a personal palace, telling him everything they discovered about the New World. He lived a life almost without want, without need. Many people would say it was without purpose, but he did not mind. It wasn’t the hell he was in before with those people who thought they could control him, so he was content. Unfortunately for everyone in existence, a few travelers started to pass through his city. They were welcomed as esteemed guests so they could gasp in awe at his kingdom and his glory. Sometimes they would tell him things – that there were communities who survived, that there were dangerous pirate bands, and that there were entire worlds beneath the surface and in the sky. He sent minor exploration drones to investigate these things to satisfy his curiosity. The efforts didn’t begin in earnest until he heard about the City. No matter how he examined the rumors, the City was better than him. Larger. More important. More hopeful. The few who had been there and left said it was the most organized place they had seen in the New World, and that the king of robots would be well suited to open relations with them. “Fuck that.” Nobody could be better than him. And he knew exactly how to make them bow to his will. He began building a bomb that could do one thing and one thing only – wipe cities off the face of the planet. It wasn’t just a regular nuclear bomb, not even close; it was a strange matter cascade, one of the most feared weapons in the entire multiverse because of how hard it was to control. All he had to do was introduce some wild ‘strangelet’ particles into the City and watch as every form of atomic matter was transformed into more strangelets, effectively disintegrating them. The spread would be unstoppable, crossing through the air, the water, and the earth itself. Nucleon was large enough to take several thousand years to completely fall to the strangelets, but the City wouldn’t take anywhere near as long. They would know their place. He set up a forcefield around his city of robots and armed the strangelet device, aiming it at the distant City. He fired, ready for mass genocide and conquest. They wouldn’t know what hit them. In a way, he was right. But not in the way he was expecting. He also didn’t hit himself with the strangelets – the robot flew through space just fine, landing in the City without a problem. The problem was the strangelets just failed to work. When the City scientists popped the robot open they had no idea that they were even looking at a failed weapon. As far as they were concerned they had opened up an overly-complicated lunchbox that fell from the sky. They saw no reason to do anything special with it. The king of robots, though, was sure they had managed to stop the weapon somehow and were now plotting to retaliate against him. So he built a wall around his city and refused to let anyone in ever again, retreating to his world of robots where he would eternally build up more defenses, waiting for an attack that would never come. ~~~ A hundred and forty-four Aradias vanished into thin air one day. They were all sitting and chatting about how time was fluid and how beautiful the world around them was – a few of them were organizing funerals for particularly eccentric people and were in black attire. Suddenly all of them looked at nothing and vanished into thin air. There was no sign of time distortion or teleportation spells. They were just there, and then they were gone without a trace. Not even a single hair was left behind. The investigation put into the case became legendary. People from all over the city were called in – Sherlock, yes, but also psychics, future-tellers, other Aradias, and even myself. Sherlock was sure it was some kind of sabotage from a meta-manipulating creature. The psychics were convinced the Aradias had experienced soul-synergy and had melded into one being we could not comprehend. The fortune-tellers predicted the Aradias would be lost forever, but that they were in a state of peace. The other Aradias wondered if there was some kind of hidden time dimension that grabbed hold of their ‘sisters.’ I was almost embarrassed to reveal the actual answer. “It was random.” Everyone stared at me in disbelief. “I’m serious. It was random. That was just a result of one ka being ‘removed’ in a slightly unconventional way. Instead of making things more mundane, it just made quantum events significantly more likely. I’d call it a glitch, but you know the Tower doesn’t do glitches. This one didn’t even have the point of ‘preparing us for the next world’, it was just there to be there. Sorry to disappoint you.” “…Are they dead?” an Aradia asked. “Maybe? I don’t see it exactly. If they aren’t, they’ll re-appear after the Tower falls.” I shrugged. “I can see and understand everything, but the final result is still beyond me in some cases. I am sorry.” ~~~ The Happy Mask Salesman came out of the woodwork and started selling masks. Nobody really noticed aside from Seskii. He’d sell stuff in the market with her and Mister Raven from time to time. ~~~ I have a flowerpot on my windowsill. It used to have one of the great roses in it, but that was stolen back during the ‘rose gold rush’. Now it is just a flowerpot with nothing but soil in it. I haven’t bothered to remove it or put another flower in it. Something about the clay vessel just makes me appreciate existence when I look at it. In a way, it is just like every other average small flowerpot. The clay used to form it has taken on a brown-orange color, making it look somehow both earthy and heavily artificial at the same time. There is a singular hole in the bottom for drainage, not that it can be seen. Not to mention the fact that I have a magic spell in place to take care of draining so the sill doesn’t get wet – not that I’ve watered the empty pot since the rose was stolen. The rose wouldn’t need water anyway. I did water it while it was still in there, though. Because that’s what you do with flowers. Along the bottom of the flowerpot there are several markings. A serial number is scrawled on the bottom – 194213GMTSMU – an almost comically convenient set of numbers and letters etched into the pot. The 9 and the S are pretty worn out, almost too worn to even see. Though, of course, this is all the part of the pot that is hidden from view. In plain sight is the outside surface – upon first glance, a perfectly round base with a slightly larger, but equally rounded rim. But anyone who studies the surface closely will find numerous marks along the edge. Most of these are simply manufacturing artifacts – a little lump here, some extra grit there, and a strange dark spot I keep turned toward the window. These marks aren’t interesting; the ones that it has accumulated over time are. Every nick and dent tells something of a story. Most the ones along the bottom edge are indications that it’s been moved, slid around, or handled roughly in some way or other. The top rim is similar, though not as heavily demolished as the other. Between the upper part of the pot and the lower there is a shadow effect that shrouds some of the worst damage – a scrape caused by a stick run through the overlap in an attempt to clean the clay surface. The large crack down the middle of the pot has no apparent origin, having shown up one day with no warning or act taken to cause the damage. The interior of the pot is nothing more than a memory of what once was. The dirt is what could be best described as ‘standard, but dry.’ Parts of it stick to the edge of the flowerpot, but most of it keeps a dull, slow, motionless existence on top of several layers of other dirt. It was once dark brown and littered with little white flecks, but now it is dull and dusty from lack of watering. There is a small lump in the middle where the rose’s roots are. They’ve been dead for a long time. But on the days where the twilight of the stars in the distance shine through the window just right… well it still looks dead, but it’s interesting. I like my flowerpot. ~~~ It occurs that this will be my last chance to address you. That is, the readers who didn’t discover this book, but are reading it as part of a larger work. Sure, I’ll still be around the Discord chat – for a good while longer – but there’s not much space left for me to talk to you here. Only six chapters left. Or five or four, depending on how you count exactly. We’ve come a long way. Some of you have been here with me longer than Songs of the Spheres itself has been running. For you, that’s over two years. For me? Centuries. And yet you – all of you – have felt like a constant presence for my entire journey. I don’t always talk to you, I don’t always address you, and I don’t always like what you represent. However, there is something to be said for your constant presence. The Eye of Rhyme, despite all the curses of knowing and understanding, can provide comfort in certain times with its constant presence. When I lost it in the middle of fighting English, I was terrified. Lost. Afraid. Confused. I was not prepared. The world was in too much danger for me to appreciate my freedom. I needed to see then. I guess I’ll put this Eye back on in a heartbeat if I feel like it’d help somebody, huh? I really should take care of myself better… If I keep subjecting myself to all this when the natural protection of a hero is gone… I won’t last long. Hopefully I’ll find something after the Tower falls that’ll keep me around long enough to appreciate my new life. If not… …Well, I’m kind of hoping there’s something more, you know? That with the Tower gone there’ll still be something left. Something with some real tangibility to it. I don’t pretend to know if there really is anything. I just understand ka itself. I don’t actually have the big answers to life’s greatest mysteries. I’m probably a lot less certain about life than you are! A curious thing happens when you learn more and more about the world. You get less and less certain. What was once black and white becomes muddied shades of gray. Good is still good, evil is still evil, but there are mixtures of good and evil that get put into a nice soup and served to you in an incomprehensible mess. It’s a little ridiculous how many ‘exceptions’ and ‘case-by-case’ things there are. I really do admire Renee – the real Renee – for being able to keep the Merodi Universalis ‘case-by-case’ law together so well. It was one of those things that totally should have failed miserably, but somehow didn’t. I don’t care that most of its success was ka-based – most success is. But everything has two reasons. And that second reason was Renee. I can only hope it will continue to be successful. …That’s the problem with stories like this, isn’t it? We have a lot of morals here, morals that work for us in our world that seem to be absolutely true. Don’t lie, be honest, respect other cultures, war is horrendous, sometimes you should push against impossible odds, occasionally the correct answer is to give up, you shouldn’t want stories to be real. And while some of these certainly do apply universally… some of them are difficult to reconcile with your experiences. You live in what can best be summarized as the ‘real world’ – be it the deep past, a secluded world, or the only ‘real’ place at all. You most likely either have very little ka running your lives, or none at all. All the might of heroes works here, but you can’t really count on the ‘right’ answer giving you the best outcome. You can’t count on a happy ending just because you did the right thing. You can’t even count on an ‘ending’ at all, aside from death, and even that isn’t really an ending to your story. This story was definitely designed by GM to get you to think. He let his own bias through, certainly, but he also tried to give characters voices that heavily disagreed with his own. I am one of them, and so is Corona, and so is O’Neill… None of us are really him. The only one who is, well, is that kid sitting in a distant church trying not to be found by the people who want him to answer questions. Questions about why. He’ll be the first to admit it didn’t have to be this way. There was a list of people who made it to the end. He changed it more times than he can remember. He made a lot of last-minute decisions. As he’s writing these words into my pen, he doesn’t know who survives the coming journey, and yet I do. It’s an interesting paradox. Writing about beings who know more than you do. I don’t know what it says about me, about the Tower, or about Prophets in general. What I do know is that this story has run its course. It was always intended to be an End to All Stories one way or another – either through the destruction of the Tower or the expansion to Infinity – for that’s what the preservation movement would have led to in arcs 11 and 12, instead of all this New World business. Lord English would have stormed across existence regardless, forcing the two sides of the war to reconcile in either scenario. There were two ways the story could have taken. This is the one it ended up in. I prefer this one. One where we can escape the story and create a society without Prophets and the Tower dictating every action, without the horrors of time travel, without the desires of people made into reality. No more wishes, no more flights of fancy – reality. The other one was not without merit. The idea of Infinity has a certain appeal… for certain people. It ends the debate over meaning by declaring all meanings valid and invalid at the same time. I find that unsatisfying. But, to some, it is freeing. You could, in Infinity, pick the world you wanted if you had the means… We would have gotten to see the true consequences of immortality… But those are all what-ifs. We are in a world where ka was rejected and the future is condensed. But the world itself is amazing, beautiful, and full of life. It’s like a second chance. I like it when a story ends by tying up loose ends rather than leaving an Infinite number of possibilities open, don’t you? ~~~ Most everyone in the City is immortal. Deaths by natural causes are rare – usually it’s an accident, a murder, or something a little stranger. Bodies are usually kept in conditions of reasonable health, so the normal causes of death were minimal. Still, they happened occasionally. Usually those with importance got a pass. They would never have to worry. It surprised everyone when Doctor Strange dropped dead from a stroke in the line of duty. Revive spells did nothing. He may not have been the most important person in existence, but he was the chief of police for the entire City. Every person on its streets owed him some portion of their safety. He deserved a more heroic death – one where he went out fighting criminals, or trying to stop an ancient evil from wrecking a city block. Instead, he seized up and dropped like a stone without warning. They had just arrested a suspect in an armed robbery of a government materials depot – the danger from the man had passed. That did little to help him. He was still on the ground, dead, unresponsive. His funeral was paradoxically big and small. Big, because so many people wanted to pay respects to the chief. Small, because very few people actually knew him. He had been a private man, and very few superheroes from Earth MC had bothered to stay in touch with him and his life. Corona had a few words to say – but she’d only known him in the past. She knew what he represented, not what he had become. Very few did. Lightning did. She didn’t feel like talking. Sherlock did. He knew better than to let himself talk at a funeral. “I was an endless source of annoyance,” Sherlock told Lightning in private. “He enjoyed it, somewhere in there,” Lightning responded. “I could have been a bit more than an annoyance.” He pulled up the collar on his coat. “You think I’d actually learn that at some point.” “Maybe when the Tower falls.” “I’m not placing any money on that.” He shook his head. “…Looks like you’re in charge now.” Lightning nodded slowly. “Again… I come back from everything. One of these days that’s going to stop.” “…I can’t tell you if you’re right,” Sherlock said, walking away. I took the opportunity to walk up to her. “I can tell you that you’re wrong.” “How?” “You aren’t going to be in charge forever.” I looked straight ahead with a soft smile. “There’ll be a change, soon enough. And then… you can do what you want. And no, I’m not talking about the final destruction of the Tower.” The two of us stood in silence, looking at Strange’s grave. ~~~ Rina walked up to me in my library one day. “I don’t feel like my life is going anywhere,” she said matter-of-factly, like there was no room for debate on the subject. I raised an eyebrow. “How so?” “Cut the shit with your ‘mysterious’ persona and just tell me. You know how this conversation is going to go.” “And you won’t learn anything if I just say everything for you,” I said. Rina glared. “So I repeat my question – how so?” “Let me put it this way. I was a murderous insane psycho-bitch and I was essentially Eve’s nemesis for almost this entire story. Then, in what was supposed to be my last words, I expressed some ability to, you know, think for myself. And then instead of being carted off to Xeelee experimentation grounds I got locked in a Gallifreyan test where I could do nothing but think. I thought, and I decided I was done with the life I had once had, and I betrayed my friends until I was found at Rev’s doorstep and given access to actual helpful medication. I converted, became pretty fucking devout, and then had to deal with the collapse war shit. And then I went on a journey with the primary team, fought Fluttershout until she killed herself, and…” She drew a blank in the air with her wing. “Nothing. Blankity-blank. I did all that, looked like I was building up to something, and then the train just dropped off.” “A lot of people were overshadowed by English,” I pointed out. “Yeah. And then they got mentioned again after the fact. Am I wrong in saying I haven’t been in a single chapter since the start of this arc?” I pursed my lips. “You’re in one now.” “What for?” “An example.” I smiled warmly. “In a way, your story is being resolved… By not being resolved.” “…What?” “You’ve gone through everything you need to. Experienced both sides of the coin. Hero, villain… you’ve done it all. Now your proverbial pendulum swings back to the middle, and you can do what you wish. …For a while.” “Ka isn’t quite done with me yet! I knew it!” “Not quite. But I don’t think it’s what you’re going to expect.” I looked at a piece of paper on my desk – a partially completed list. “Don’t expect a grand resolution to your character arc. You get to be a person.” “Welp, that’s better advice than I was expecting. See ya!” She trotted out of the library. “…Didn’t even say thanks…” I muttered. ~~~ And this last one… This last little story… It is for Starbeat. And it’s not one that happens now. It’s one that happens in the future. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks as I scribble this down in my little book. “Oh, something you’ll know eventually,” I say with a coy smile. “Come on! Don’t be so… evasive!” “It’ll be years until it happens. Don’t want to spoil it.” I see her on the prow of an airship, looking at the twilight sky of Nucleon. “But you do want to spoil it! I see it in your eyes!” she complains. “I’ll satisfy myself by telling it to the readers.” “…You’re no fun.” “I’m the most fun.” I change the subject. “So, how’s your research on the cracks been going?” “It would be going better if you provided me with some more insight…” I see someone walk up to her. She turns around, surprised. “That would ruin the point of you researching it.” “Okay, fine,” Starbeat rolls her eyes. “This week was all about studying romance and the cracks. It’s… confusing, because it’s inconsistent. When the ka is gone, I see breakups and arguments in otherwise ‘happily ever after’ relationships. But I also see relationships form and blossom where before there was nothing.” She holds up a data pad and smiled. “I am happy to report that more people are experiencing love without the push of ka at their backs.” “That’s good!” Starbeat nods. “With less adventures cropping up, less incredible circumstances are around to cause unrealistic and rushed relationships. It’s… heartwarming.” “…And?” “And I wish my ka wasn’t so important,” she mutters, looking to the ground. “I can’t bring myself to do it if there’s any chance…” I see her embrace the other person – a kiss is shared. Something deep, passionate, and meaningful. “You’ll get your chance eventually,” I tell her. “Yeah, when the Tower falls. …I guess I can wait that long.” “I’m sure you will.” Right before it falls. In a time where visions are shrouded and ka is vanishing… the Tower will give you a final gift. In a way, it is ka, but in a way, it is not. Whatever it is, you will deserve it, and you will be allowed to make it into whatever you want. After I write this sentence I close my book and ask her if she wants to go grab some lunch. ~~~ There was no point to this. There were several points to this. That’s the point. Confused yet? No? Good, glad you’re keeping up. It’s time for me to go. The chapter’s over, nothing else to see here. There wasn’t much to really see here anyway. This chapter didn’t have a plan, a plot, or much in the way of shared themes beyond ‘ka’s gone, what happens?’ Even then, some things were just out of place. Were just things I found… nice. I could have told many other little tales. Tales about Flutterfree rejecting advances from someone in the church… Nanoha and O’Neill deciding not to adopt… Mlinx discovering that paperwork actually served a deeper purpose… Nastasia sitting in her office, filling out budget declarations… A church service… People in the streets screaming that the end is nigh… Lots of things happen that you don’t see. That you can’t see. I guess this little book is a gift so you can see. And, in other ways, it is a gift to the future to know the struggles we went through. It is not easy to adjust our minds to accept the way without ka. Many – like myself – fully believe it is a good change. Others do not, but they have mostly given up trying to reverse the inevitable. Can’t really say no when the Emissary tells you to your face what is going on. I feel like I’m being too final here… But I also feel like that’s how I have to end it. With an ending. It’s nagging at me, telling me to write those words, the end. To close this book and lock it away, call it done. I don’t want to.