Nimbus Child I: Games of War

[REWRITE] Present 3

Tirpitz called her sister; sometimes in German, sometimes English, Japanese or – if extreme – whatever brand of Norwegian she fancied at the moment.

They had met the first time in the Concept Communication System, when the wounds of losing sisters were still fresh and Kongō had attacked her because she just wouldn't shut up about Bismarck.

The Lone Queen of the North and the mind she had lost there before even tasting the first drop of human blood bowed to her afterwards.

With one mind lost in the fjords and the other in Ironbottom Sound, maybe it was destiny to grow close.

It was, probably, also destiny for Tirpitz to fail at the task given to her by Kongō – not that the latter had been too optimistic about it to begin with.

"Kongooooooooou~", Tirpitz 'said', the clip the mute ship played a long, whiney thing.

"Yes?"

Instead of answering, the battleship rolled around on the CCS' ground, lying face down, throwing a tantrum.

"I take it you were not successful?"

Tirpitz heaved herself up on her hands, her almost-brown hair she insisted was dark-blonde falling into her face, ice-blue eyes staring at Kongō as if she had gone completely crazy. Obviously not, they seemed to scream.

Kongō rested her chin on a hand and the elbow on the table, legs crossed: "Unfortunate."

Jumping to her feet, Tirpitz cleaned imaginary dust of her dirndl before actually speaking, her digital avatar not influenced by the ailments of her physical self: "What do we do now? Switch to flagship equipment to use our supergraviton cannons and cause a spatial distortion which allows us to-"

Before she could finish, Kongō felt a new presence and shot up, the room's design having changed to something dark and Tirpitz having vanished.

There was the sound of wind chimes from a direction she couldn't pinpoint, then a figure emerged from the pitch black, joining her in the white pavilion.

"So you were here after all."

Oki's God sighs: "Whenever time runs I'm here, I'm just not necessarily watching you", another sigh, "what is it with all of you causing space-time issues? First Hiei, now you're planning on it too? Honestly..."

It wasn't Kongō's Hiei, it obviously wasn't, yet she couldn't deny the spark of interest her sister's name brought.

The god picked up on it: "Your... niece, I suppose, is a handful. Honestly...", she grumbled to herself, before finally coming to a halt next to the filigrane white table, speaking with a serious voice "don't tear holes into space-time. There is already dead Fog going to join you shortly, leave the rest where it is."

Kongō lifted her arms slightly for a moment as if wanting to cross them in the lady-like manner she had honed to perfection – a mere folding of her hands upon each other – then crossed them normally, like anyone else would; there was no need to present herself in a special way while here, after all.

"Dead Fog?", she asked, "Has that boy reached his goal?"

Even though belated, information from the world of the living would eventually trickle through into the Afterlife, then materialize in the editorial of Tirpitz' little newspaper side project, Schiffsglocke, from where it would then be published.

As such, they certainly knew of Gunzō Chihaya's self-imposed mission.

"Well, in a way", God answered, "you'll see. Now, I believe you were trying to contact me?"

For a moment, Kongō thought about how viable it was to provoke that person's appearing with intermingling super graviton cannons every time: "Indeed. Where is Tirpitz?"

"In the room you were in previously. I thought it was most viable to stop time for her", she moved to partially sit on the table.

"Very well. Then on the matter of Oki, what exactly did she refer to?"

God looked at her, eyes somewhere in between red and dark pink, not betraying any thoughts or emotions: "Define", she said, finally.

Kongō lifted a finger with each thing she listed: "The apparent end of the world, a demon and a matter of balance."

"Sounds like you're well-informed already", Kongō levelled a deadly glare, causing God to lean back, "alright, alright, don't tear my head off. Well, what do we start with... the world? The world is not dying yet, but it got out of balance and will try to correct itself."

"What kind of balance are we speaking of?", Kongō settled back in her chair, "Additionally, how will it correct itself?"

The higher being shifted, sitting fully on the table: "Simply put", because she had attempted to overthink it once and it had brought her nowhere, "worlds need a balance of 'good' and 'bad'. A relatively simple way to correct an imbalance is by war and the following peace."

A war which Oki didn't want under any circumstance and one which she never had wanted either; it was easy to see how this was an option she wouldn't be able to accept.

However, for Kongō, the explanation brought on another question: "Is the assumption correct, that a world begins at a neutral point? If yes, why does this problem appear only now?"

Of course, how much roughly 100 years were in a world's lifespan was difficult to gauge for her, but going by the relatively short breaks in between wars in the "living" world, she assumed a symptom should have appeared sooner.

"Correct. As for your second question: when all of you came here, through trauma and other negative experiences – as well as Oki's implemented error system – there were enough 'bad' things to provoke an imbalance to the 'bad' side", the higher being played with the partially braided section of her hair, looking uninterested, "but with time you heal, get accustomed to your errors and the effect subsides."

And with the subsiding effect, Kongō concluded, the balance would eventually even out and tip into the other direction.

Kongō stayed silent for a moment, deep in thought, mulling everything over: "...How much time remains?"

A yawn: "I alerted you early. I can buy you... a year, maybe? Though the more you wait, the stronger you have to act, of course. If you guys can't come up with anything by then, I will have to use the north."

"The north?"

God smiled at her, the expression secretive yet knowing, not unlike that of a predator teaching its cub the means of survival.

Before another word could be uttered, the gloomy CCS room vanished, leaving Kongō where she had been before shooting up, Tirpitz in the middle of her sentence.