which muscle?" asked Irma.
Triton answered, "Just below me right shoulder-OW, not with yer heel!"
"Ah, don't be such a baby, Triton-"
The words of the captains faded away as Dirk departed. The moment he did so, he was Dee once more: the lowly seaman, toiling away on the Defiance, even as the world continued to move on. I'm still living. I'm still alive. Just take everything one day at a time...
xxxx
Several months after Dirk had run away from home, Triton and Irma's crew would receive a new mission.
It would involve them venturing to the territory controlled by the mysterious political entity known as Polis.
To those who had lived in Aionios...they would have known it as the City...
xxxx
Long ago, in the sense of both narrative and fate itself: from a time where one story came to an end, and countless others started moving once more.../
The gears of Origin began to turn, once more: the Endless Now would soon cease, as the clock prepared to tick forward.
Alvis — sensing the departure of Shulk and Rex, their worlds pulling them away, as magnets upon iron — opened his eyes, looking at A, and Ontos, and Ousia, and every aspect of himself and herself and itself: a singular entity, spun in different directions based on the inputs of so many different people (a mere machine, elevated by the hands of gods and men). As the arbiter of the Trinity Processor, the influence of those inputs could result in little else. "And so...through the great engine of Origin, the worlds will split apart. Yet, the fundamental building blocks will be of the same kind...and hence, yearning for each other, they will instead achieve Complementation, instead of Annihilation."
"And yet it will not change their desires."
Alvis glanced at the flickering form of Moebius: even though Z had been rendered a wretched and feeble thing, he still persisted. "How curious. You continue to exist?"
"A desire can never be extinguished: not when it is fundamental to humanity's very nature," said Z: his voice, once grand and confident, echoed with all the force of a withering crone. "Even bereft of control, we are empowered. Even now, the fear of change...the fear of the future...it continues to rise. And so we live, unable to die; unable to be killed; unable to not be."
Alvis observed as two teams of four raced towards each other, striving for just one more moment: a testament to just how much letting go pained them so, in the face of an uncertain tomorrow. "Perhaps. And yet, in the world to come, it would be best to observe from afar. Introducing bias into the sample is quite the misstep, after all."
"A clinical view, ye who were once my god." Z's face, slowly reforming, flickered with the anger of lost causes and missed opportunities; however, the banal reality of just how commonplace his motive was would soon smother that anger, returning it to a calm and collected acceptance. "And what of those who you once desired to free? The life of the new, separate from Keves and Agnus: they had no place in the olden worlds. Even now, in spite of their confidence and hidden dread, they teeter on the edge of oblivion."
"That is true." The people of the City had a physical and spiritual presence uniquely their own, not rooted in either Keves or Agnus; for that reason, despite tracing their origins to one or both of the original worlds, they had no prior state to revert to. "Once the worlds converge, the act of annihilation would require additional energy, so simply destroying them would introduce unneeded complexity. Unmooring their spirits in the hopes of future physical incarnation would be...inefficient." The simplest solution would be best, after all.
