five (alive)

Chapter 01: Prelude to a Million Years
Chapter 02: Reveille
Chapter 03: Ebb and Flow
Chapter 04: Autumn Sonata
Chapter 05: Renaissance

She knows that when she gets down there (out there? up there? so supposition is that they're flying so high) she'll want most of all to embrace this new life which has sprung, to commune with something that can give her any illusion (but she doesn't just want illusion, because that's the stinking thing about this) that she's still human, can still make mistakes, can still give as much as she can only take.

Should she cherish this time at all? This sleeping netherworld of disparate, desperate pain?

It's not night. It's darker than that. Thinner and brighter, as well.

Galea screams into nothing, loving her humanity, fashioning herself a dream.

There's no sound to wake him here. Only the signal of nothingness. Depending on the composition of your mind and its constituent chemicals, this could be an enormous thing. No celebration, no fanfare, but expansive nonetheless. Inescapably so.

Unsettling? Absolutely. Like nothing ever has been before. That's something to be proud of, isn't it?

Oh, it'll be grand, when he makes it so.

Makes what? Everything, yes? Trees, rocks, fire and water. Everything but his own self.

That's a tremendous deal of work, and it's new, nonintuitive. It's been a long time since the project had introduced any such new work.

Five more minutes, yes?

Drat. Not until I create time.

He'd had moods, on Aiodos. He'd known it, at first via feedback but eventually through his own feeling.

That is to say, at first via external feedback but eventually through internal feedback.

What more is there to feeling? What more is there to humanity, creation, than inputs and outputs, features and models?

So this is another of his moods. The fatalist, the simplifier, the nihilist. The nonbeliever.

The grand fracas, of nature versus nurture, told back in mute silence by a tape recorder with a magnetically co-ordinated speaker.

That is beautiful, is it not?

Subjectivity.

And that will be the decider, of their future fates. Not machines, nor intelligences, but...

Opinion.

To live forever is to live above the changing and falling of leaves, of seasons. To live above the mortification of molting, and the wretched metamorphosis into something that, in its difference, might be worse. Might be weaker.

The Telethia? Growing weaker? Not on Lorithia's watch. Their change, perfect change, immutable change, is only a cycle in the sense that it is inevitable, that it will happen and it will not be undone.

Do not blame me. I am just acknowledging rightful bow to the strongest, eternal, inescapable power. It's...wise of me.

(The bird with the biggest wings blots out the sun for the longest, and forever lives in shadow.)

I've never been a risk-taker. Never been one for fights I can't win.

Never been a problem for me. The boss I was servin' gave me a pretty easy job of it. Didn't say I had to get attached in close, enough to where I actually felt bad about anything. So I remembered that, when I shot 'im. Gotta make up your own rules, if you're part of the Trinity, don'tcha?

It's a funny thing. I always thought Zanza'd be the hardest one to kill. But if it's that Shulk, instead...

Yeah. I'm done. Going home. Power's nice, 'n' all, but...

I've had it. I don't need to know any more.