Yuri Worlds
[Epilogue]
Carrie patiently waited before the sixth security gate for the guard in white to go through the same unlocking procedure that each of the previous guards had directed her through. This seemed like overkill.
She listened carefully and came to the rudimentary understanding that each of these was like a nested doll universe contained within the previous. That didn't mean any of them were smaller than the ones before. Each contained a dizzying plethora of distorted cosmos, translucent ivory pathways like bleached classical astrolabes, and the same shallow impressions of divine authority the company flaunted in the backstage of Yuka's home universe turned up even higher. Pointless theater, she concluded.
Each guard she met looked like she could've been the twin of the previous, but for slight, subtle distinctions: hair in a ponytail instead of a bun, how far their noses projected, and the prominence of their eyebrows. Like photocopies of the same person, which weren't exact reproductions of the original. They also behaved exactly the same, casually verifying her identity and asking her to sign her name on an empty white sheet clamped to a clipboard, which she did as Carrie Francesca Sasaki. None of the guards responded to her choice of surname, simply nodding before ushering her to the next.
This charade continued until she got to a complicated, steampunk glass-style vault door looming the size of an entire city block. All the circles, spirals, and dizzying loops looked like they could predict the weather for the next thousand years. The different patterns crossed, intersected, and eventually slotted together to reveal a vast walkway across a deep, glow-washed-out chasm. On the other side, the guard pushed open a simple three-meter door, revealing a modestly sized chamber within.
The interior had the same tone of stark white as everything else. Several benches spread across one end of the room, with a modest living space on the other. It looked like the pieces of a house bleached and stripped down to the essentials. Carrie could see a bedroom with a simple but comfortable queen-size bed, a restroom and shower area nearby, a small exercise gym, one of those familiar tablets, and a micro garden with dainty flowers and green tomatoes. If not for the faintly buzzing blue and gold force fields filling every open space, Carrie might've thought it was just a strange style of exploded, minimalist apartment.
Cerberus was situated at the far end, facing away but pausing at the noise of the door opening. He was in boy mode, but with dense, inky black locks flowing past his shoulder, practically obscuring his entire head. Instead of the suit and tie Yuka had been practicing previously, he wore a silvery jumpsuit.
"See you," Carrie announced softly but clearly, with a cheeky smile beaming in his direction.
Her wife snapped his head around cautiously at first. When he caught true sight of her—not an illusion or a trick—all the tension in his features fell away. Cerberus hopped to his feet and scampered across the sleek, white floor like a reborn puppy.
"You made it!" His voice surged to unexpected heights, leaving the realm of any Cerberus efforts and bounding clearly into Yuka tones. Despite the energy wall separating them, Cerberus gleefully crashed into it for the closest thing to a loving embrace they could offer one another.
Fiercely glaring at the guard, Carrie demanded the field be put down for her to be allowed admission inside. The guard's answer was a simple, unequivocal "no." The response carried no emotion. Those were the orders. She contested several ways, but the guard leaned against the nearby wall with her arms folded and her head down, as though practicing to be a statue.
"I'll take what I can get," Cerberus responded with a faint smile. His male form eased away and diminished until he was back in his Yuka state. She wiggled around gleefully, stretching on her bare feet and flapping the now-oversized sleeves of her jumpsuit as though trying to fly over the threshold. Carrie moved as close to the barrier as possible, and they exuberantly mimed their hug.
"How have you been, Care? How are your little sister and Fiona? Did you get to see anyone else? They don't tell me much, but I learned they let you into my home world. How is Naoko holding up? Is she still with Kosame? Is she okay too? How about Bianka? Did my moms start with the reconstruction yet? Did you get to see anyone else? Sorry, I should slow down, but it's been so long, and I'm so happy to see you." Yuka's voice wobbled with emotion, on the verge of tears. Care motioned to stroke her hair and smiled.
They sat together, right next to the field separating them, not bothering with the platforms and chairs further back. Care glossed over some recent stomach upset but couldn't resist slipping in an incongruent, knowing smile while reflecting on the signs. She regaled her wife with small and silly details of work before assuring her that Silvia and Fiona were doing fine. Care admitted that she revealed all the stuff to Naoko that Yuka had kept quiet about her sacrifice. This didn't bother her in the least. She just smiled and nodded.
Care filled her in on practically everything regarding the events of her trip so far, although she avoided mentioning Haruka and the biggest news of all. Yuka beamed about the possibilities of this soon-to-be Mecchen House, even though melancholy dimmed her smile. She settled with a sigh of relief that Maharu was properly remembered.
Glaring at the way her wife was confined, Care asked Yuka how the company was treating her. Yuka shrugged and responded, "About how I expected. Samples taken with all sorts of needles and probes. Tests, scrutiny, and focusing. Doing everything they can to bring me to the state they want to examine and harvest. I swear I'm not trying to block results, but I just haven't been able to do anything like I did. I don't know if it's a panic response, fear, or something else. They even put me on a cliff once. How long has it been? I don't know whether to trust their measurements of time."
Carrie confirmed that just a few weeks had passed. Yuka marveled that it felt like months on end. She missed everyone, but she missed Care so much.
They leaned forward, testing what felt like a static electrical zone at the cusp of the field. Moving closer and closer, a sliver of that magnetic pull passed between them. It was that urge, that need to be close, to practically be one. Not just the completion of a broken spirit, but something greater. For a fleeting instant, they each felt like they might be able to cross the barrier, as though it were just an illusion, and truly embrace, truly touch, feel one another, and dive into the other's soul for all eternity.
The guard gave a rough cough, and they retreated a few inches to show that they weren't doing anything bad. Their loving chat continued with the lightest and most ridiculous things in a cheerful array. Then they fell silent for a moment, as did the rest of the room.
Suddenly, a figure in a gray military uniform entered from the door behind them. They took a few steps forward and addressed Yuka specifically. "Subject Cerberus? I have unfortunate news."
Yuka focused her attention and suspicion on the company official, not betraying a single twitch of anxiety. Care did likewise, tensing her jaw.
"We regret to inform you that your....wife, Carrie Francesca Fowler, suffered a pattern cascade en route to this facility and did not survive the trip."
"What... What does that mean? I don't.."
The military woman reached behind her and pulled out a long, glassy tube with a luminous golden light circulating within it, like a strange, detached fluorescent bulb. Mari warned them about... Oh no. It was a weapon. Yuka realized what was happening moments later.
"What's...why...NO NOOOO OH GODDESS NO DON'T PLEASE NO!" Yuka screamed so loudly that the sound seemed to blot out everything around the entire room. Carrie tried to rise to her feet, but something was holding her in place, refusing her legs the strength to even quiver.
"Please noooooooo! Not like this! She didn't do anything! This is not what we agreed to. Don't kill her! Don't kill my wife!"
Yuka rose to her feet as well, pounding on the shimmering forcefield, her expression contorted and wild, begging the gods beyond for some sort of intervention. "Anything! Anything you want! I'll do anything you ask! Please stop STOP STOP!" Yuka's sobs swelled with crazed hysteria.
The woman in uniform approached Carrie like a machine, expertly focused on her task. Primal panic surged through Carrie. Her trembling hand lowered to her abdomen in a futile attempt to protect it. She never got the chance to tell Yuka she was pregnant.
Carrie turned to look at her wife, a torrent of emotions flowing through her and tearing her apart. Then, somehow, peace washed over her. She was here, and yet she wasn't. In danger, yet protected. Lost and yet right where she needed to be. Yuka furiously fought to get free from her containment, but the force field simply burned hotter against her.
The military woman stood right next to her. Carrie released a slow breath. She was okay. A friend was nearby. She was waiting for her, exuberantly waving above her head and rocketing in circles with glee to see her again. Carrie smiled at her wife and told her, "Don't worry. It's gonna be okay. It really is. I love you, my beautiful Cerberus. Forever and always. For a thousand years."
The bar of light came down, unleashing a deluge of light that engulfed Carrie's body and mind, stealing every thought and feeling away. Her flesh dissolved in an instant, transfigured into pure light. Where she was sitting, an eruption of black tendrils, like strands of black sausages with sloppy, obsidian spaghetti noodles, spewed out. All that was left of Carrie, the piece of Yuka's dark entity leg.
Yuka released a scream of unearthly agony that had never been heard in all the multiverse, the volume of which shook the air and made the white walls tremble. Her pain and suffering rippled throughout the entire realm and beyond.
She crumpled to the ground, smashing her knees and hands and collapsing into a blubbering pile. The officer in uniform coldly observed the remains where Carrie once sat, withdrew the luminous tube, and stepped away.
Soon, Yuka rose up, her smoldering pain becoming a burning fury.
"I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL KILL YOU ALL! I WON'T REST UNTIL I SEE EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU SUFFER FOR THIS! I SWEAR I WILL!" Yuka's voice twisted, echoed, and expanded beyond its mortal capacity. It wasn't Yuka's voice anymore, but more like a chorus of ancient, warbling, cosmic monstrosities. All angry beyond reason and desperate to exact revenge.
Yuka...no, Cerberus, stretched in all directions, her black essence within looming like a tree, like a dark brain cell, like a horrifying tumor growing and multiplying. The sizzle and burn of the containment fields didn't matter. They were no match for her wrath. She ripped the walls apart.
The guard finally motioned forward, retrieving a device from her pocket that resembled a smaller version of the tablet. The guard flicked her thumb over a series of tiny, glowing lights. A secondary force field engaged, containing the rapid growth of Yuka's dark presence. She slammed through it like it was water, dashing a tendril through the air. The guard didn't have enough time to scream before her head was gone, and the rest of her flopped to the ground in bloodless pieces.
The military woman slammed a patch on the white wall, and an absolute torrent of human blood poured from the ceiling. Yuka sizzled like she was cooking on a grill from the red river pouring over her. It barely slowed her down.
She slammed another part of the wall, and a violent cascade of arcing electricity blasted Yuka like a lightning strike from the heavens. This time, she froze in place, staggered, and then tumbled off her feet, totally paralyzed. She fell so close to Carrie's remains, settling into a heap.
All Yuka could do was stare helplessly at all that was left of her wife. She mouthed the words that she wished she could've said to her again and for every day of her life: "I love you too. I love you for a thousand years. Always. Together forever."
The magnetic feeling between them—being connected, being part of the other's body—jolted the dark remains, like a pair of living magnets desperately trying to act on metal filings in their hearts. "Please..." Yuka begged with everything she had—to whoever and whatever would listen, to the universe, to goddesses she didn't know if she even believed in anymore. "Please don't leave me. Don't leave me alone. Don't go. Not like this. Come back."
The door swiftly hissed open again. Things left through and things came from the opening, but all Yuka cared about was what was left of her wife. The rest of the world fell away as Yuka lost herself in sorrow. Then came a painfully familiar voice, Maharu's voice, wielded and warped by the company, like a monster hiding in human skin.
"My hands are clean. See? I didn't touch her. Not that I'm only using that semantic distinction. There's plenty of mention in the contract to allow us a clean out. I'm afraid we just couldn't let her live. We are patient, and we could've waited until her natural death. But we can learn so much from examining the piece of you that grew inside of her. And you... Look at you, so powerful when you aren't restraining yourself! Just as we suspected. You just needed the right motivation to take your abilities to the next level. Pain and suffering are always the greatest motivators. There's a lesson to be learned from all this."
Yuka hissed, "You killed my wife... You're getting nothing from me, ever again. And you're gonna wish you could kill me."
"Is that so? That's a shame. Your high school friends were so happy about their future. Your mothers were finally beginning to remember you. Everyone was so happy. It's such a shame what will happen to them if you don't cooperate fully. Do you understand?" Maharu tilted her head and put on a knowing smirk. Yuka glared angrily without saying a word. She repeated her question, like she was dealing with an insolent child who wasn't paying attention.
Yuka clenched her teeth. She dipped her head and nodded.
"Good! Remember. It's like what I've been saying to you since you arrived. Play along. Be quiet. Don’t make waves… and maybe you can have what you really want.."
Yuka clearly wanted to curse out the company entity inhabiting Maharu, but she knew it was pointless.
Someone was examining Carrie's remains on the seat and held up a tablet for Maharu to look at. She read it and glanced over at Yuka, commenting, "You didn't know, did you?"
Yuka remained silent and didn't move. She didn't know what game this was or what they were talking about. "Know what?" She finally responded.
"Your wife was pregnant."
A shard of ice sliced through the remains of Yuka's heart. Even though the company had every reason to fuck with her again, Yuka immediately knew this was true. She knew it in her soul. A heavy, painful breath slipped out of her. Their daughter, their child, gone with her wife. She didn't cry. Yuka had nothing left.
Maharu turned her attention back to the remains on the chair. "Now that that's sorted, we have the right to study the enigma and see if she manifested any repeatable phenomena. That blocking ability of hers definitely needs to be dealt with. She might've been close to quantum immortality as well. Still worthy of study, but a pale shadow to you, Cerberus, the demon dog of Hell."
Cerberus stared at the blue-haired girl with the uncharacteristic cruelty stretched across her face and said, "Hell? I swear, with every last drop of my being, that my vengeance upon all of you will be eternal. Every moment of my immortal life will be devoted to your destruction. You cannot imagine the horrors I will visit upon you. I will bring Hell to you and everything you care about until I know you are finished."
Maharu laughed. "See? Motivation. Excellent. I can't wait."
From the side, one of the workers slid a containment vessel around Carrie's remains and sealed it in a chamber like the one that contained the leg before. Darkness swallowed all sight.
----
"WHAT?! NO! That can't be how it ends! Yuka… Cerberus was supposed to escape from the bad guys, take them down, get reunited with her wife, learn she's going to be a mom, and then live happily ever after! There's gotta be a happily ever after!" Krystal Muller hopped up and down in front of the television.
Blessin Cross urged Krystal to relax and said, "As I explained earlier, we were watching a record of the past from another universe. It happened a long time ago, and considering what Cerberus is like now, how could you possibly expect a happy ending?"
Ruth bowed her head contemplatively and held her tongue.
The three women shared a long couch pushed in front of the big television at the back of Blessin's New Age store. The video on the screen was dark, as though the signal had been lost. Ruth was dressed in a light brown outfit that looked more like western garb with twill and tweed. Her voluminous pockets made the other girls jealous. Krystal had on baggy, purple cotton pants and a baggy shirt with her youngest niece's favorite colorful Australian television doggies. Blessin wore what she swore weren't pajamas decorated with several posing Iron Mans, including one amusingly distorted by her boobs.
Krystal shook her head. "It's not fair! No one should have to go through something like that. Cerberus and Carrie were in love, and they had so many plans for their future. And the others. I have to know what happened to the others. Naoko, Kosame, Bianka, the Sasaki moms, sweet Ayame, even Haruka, and the old woman. And then Carrie's little sister and her friend Fiona. I will tear universes new rear ends, if I have to, to find out what happened!" Krystal barely resisted using sharper words than that. She was doing her best not to swear, even when she was out of earshot of her nieces.
"Calm yourself, Miss Muller," Ruth tiredly remarked. "We all watched the same record of the past. And that was the extent of the information it transmitted. I received the file from an unnamed benefactor. Nothing was removed or edited; it was merely translated by my people into a form we could view on a standard entertainment device."
The setup in the living area of the store was quite cozy, with plenty of snacks and refreshments arranged on the coffee table in front of the couch, including a decadent triple chocolate cake that Ruth had partaken of more than once, a bottle of sparkling pink lemonade, several varieties of cheese, organic hummus, and a big bucket of freshly popped popcorn.
Krystal spread out her arms. "But there are so many questions left unanswered. I have to know what happens next."
Ruth leaned forward. "As far as my people can ascertain, Cerberus remained in the custody of the company for quite some time, occasionally escaping from them and returning to the underworld of reality from which he was first taken and reshaped. He would attack the company at several opportunities, making good on his word."
"Well, I can't blame her," Krystal expressed with her hands folded in front of her. "I would've done the same. My mother nearly forced me to that point."
Blessin noted, "Cerberus isn't innocent, not anymore. She wounded several blameless parties without cause and chased us around an underground warehouse. She also threatened to unleash a multitude of her kind upon us. Whatever she is now, so cold and dark, is vastly different than what she was in the days recorded here. She was a good woman with a kind and caring heart. Now, she truly is the monster, ravenously obsessed with revenge, that she feared was within her or that she might become."
Krystal drooped, her hands tightening around the long locks of her golden blonde hair. "And that nuclear terror she instigated, which destroyed several of your worlds. Your friends and acquaintances mentioned that."
At this, Blessin raised a finger for a moment before drawing it back and grimacing to herself. "Oh, yeah. Right. It's often never really a good time to admit the things you know you should. The nuclear thing never happened; that was just an effort by a me from another universe to implement a lockdown protocol in the secret warehouse where we were holed up. I figured she knew what she was doing, and it would be better if I just played along. So...yeah, that one was on me rather than Cerberus."
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
That admission left Krystal a bit flummoxed and wondering if Cerberus wasn't the bad guy that everyone claimed she was. The matter of pronouns concerning Cerberus had come up earlier during a break. Ruth firmly leaned on the side of male ones, while Blessin vacillated between a variety of them, and Krystal preferred female ones. On the matter of Cerberus as an entity of good or evil, Ruth sat up straight and noted that he had enslaved and time-dilated an entire small fragment of a universe for unknown experimental purposes, perverting methods taken from the deep archives of Beyond. Krystal dipped her head and acknowledged this. But she had a wide swath of doubts and concerns.
"Perhaps...I can assist with the points of contention and uncertainty?" A figure cloaked in black leaned in through the hallway from the front section of the store, their face completely obscured but their figure slight and feminine.
Blessin popped up, not raising her hands but stretching her body to provide a crude wall between the cloaked stranger and the others. "I thought I locked the front door. Who are you?"
"You did," the cloaked woman answered casually. "Sorry." She held up the door lock and put it in Blessin's hand before stepping further into the room. "As for who I am?..."
The woman lowered her hood to reveal crinkly, off-white hair much longer than they had last seen it. Her face didn't look much older, but her eyebrows were extremely fluffy and feathered. She looked far more realistic than the expected anime style. She wore wide, all-black shades over her eyes.
Blessin gave a sigh as she looked over the dismantled lock from her front door for signs of damage. "You could've just knocked..."
Krystal gaped and breathlessly asked, "Sasaki Haruka? Are you Sasaki Haruka?!"
Haruka bowed her head solemnly. "Yes. I apologize for the intrusion. I waited until you all finished watching the archive. As you may have deduced, the data was collected by Cerberus's leg fragment inside Miss Fowler's body. I recently managed to acquire it from a company facility. This is the most complete existing independent account from the early days of the company. And it corroborates other information I have been collecting of critical importance."
Krystal asked, "Do you know what happened to everyone else? Naoko, Kosame, Bianka, the Sasaki moms, Ayame, your grandmother, are they alive?"
Haruka glanced around, looking for a place to sit on the couch. Blessin cleared a spot and urged her, "You should take those silly shades off, especially indoors. Or do you need them for light sensitivity?"
The white-haired girl took a seat on the other side of Krystal, nearest Blessin, and remarked, "I don't wear them for me. I wear them for everyone else. Time has not been kind to all of us." Haruka raised the shades and glanced around at the three of them.
Blessin did her best not to flinch, but Krystal quietly gasped, and Ruth leaned forward curiously. Instead of normal human eyes, Haruka had orbs of charged, bright blue plasma, like someone had replaced her eyes with a set of the star Sirius.
Haruka replaced her shades and added, "But it could be worse. About the girls and women that I knew growing up. That happened a very long time ago. Literally thousands of years for everyone else to catch up with the company's artificial version of now. But I remember. Soma Naoko... Nishikawa Naoko eventually..." Krystal gave a much higher, happier squeak than she expected to make.
She continued after a pause, "Naoko became an accomplished scientist, a happy mom, and a talented baker on the side. She got old young, mainly due to stress and worry about all the terrible things she couldn't do anything about. But she never resigned herself to the sidelines. She lived a good life with Kosame and loved her dearly until their last day. Soma Kosame. They switched surnames in marriage as their forever names. She practiced law at a small firm and found joy in a theater troop where she could pretend to have several lovers without ever breaking Naoko's heart. Their daughters were so beautiful. That's all I know. It's wretched with the living forever that I had to outlive them and so many others. I couldn't bear it with their children."
Krystal pressed her lips together and quietly nodded.
Haruka continued, "Bianka, or Miyu, as she chose for her forever name after marriage, actually became a member of parliament, pushing for systemic change. She was the best aunt to her sister's girls. She designed modestly popular games, launched well-regarded privacy programs, and traveled the multiverse through alternatives to TA, always searching for answers. Ayame knew about Carrie and nearly passed out that terrible day. She remained at the Akechi Clinic, even after it gained many other medical professionals and specialists. She helped out often with fostering and housing hybrid girl orphans. My grandmother survived longer than any of us suspected, finding a second wind in caring for those scared little girls. And my mothers—my ado—my mothers eventually finished the hotel refurbishment. They remembered my sister, but in fragmentary bits and pieces. They always waited for her and hoped that she would one day return home. She never did. They never saw her again."
Krystal gently rubbed her eyes and flailed around for the nearest tissue or closest approximation in a brown, recycled, abrasive napkin. Ruth offered her a handkerchief and told her to keep it after she'd blown practically the entire contents of her nose into it.
Blessin leaned forward with her hands nestled on her chin as she asked, "What about the younger Fowler sister and Fiona? What happened to them? I presume Silvia was just as angry as Cerberus." Ruth leaned back on the cushion and took a sip from the strawberry lemonade in her cup.
"I would also presume so. I never saw either of them again after that. And I presume they didn't ever want to see me again either."
Ruth gave a faint snort. "Maybe you presume too much. But that's not for me to say. Forgiveness is never impossible. Or something like that." The old woman took a long sip of her drink and said nothing else.
Blessin squinted at the old lady on the other end of the couch. Ruth was the one who brought the three of them together. She had learned of the scattering of Cerberus to the winds of the multiverse in reduced, confused pieces by the actions of Blessin's other self and wanted to coordinate and share knowledge.
And they had a good time unwinding after hours and after work. Krystal was added most recently to their little group at the behest of Ruth, since her mother/father recently came into the employ of an emergent concentration of Cerberus they wanted to keep an eye on. He was the same one performing those concerning experiments.
Blessin carefully narrowed her eyes and squeezed her chin as she asked just one question: "Ruth... What's your last name? You never gave it. I always just assumed it was Beyond, for obvious reasons. But that's my assumption." Krystal turned to look at Ruth as well, eyes wide.
The old woman puffed lightly. Blessin wondered what color Ruth's hair had been when she was younger.
"My name doesn't matter. I chose my name a long time ago, and it only matters to me. Please leave it alone. It's not important."
A small device chimed in her light brown tweed pocket, and she swiftly fished out an alabaster device that vaguely resembled the company tablets they had seen on the screen, only thinner and more advanced.
"Excuse me... family issue," was all Ruth responded with before sliding up from the couch and walking around to the kitchen off to the side.
Blessen watched her as she stood and exited. Did her hair, despite being such a faded gray, have the same texture as Silvia's? She was nowhere close when it came to the chest region, but Blessin knew there were plenty of ways around that sort of thing that didn't involve medical intervention. Maybe her face had some similarities to persons in the multi-hour, streaming-like series presentation they just witnessed, but Blessin couldn't be sure that she wasn't just trying to convince herself of that idea.
After a few minutes, Ruth returned, put her device away, and wore a stony expression, which commanded none of them to ask questions about any of that. Haruka set her hands on her lap and cleared her throat before announcing, "As I mentioned, there is a critical matter related to the materials I have given you. It is the key reason that I brought all this to your attention. While it is important that you understand where Cerberus came from and all these details about the company, communicating this information is my most critical goal."
Haruka pulled out several folded sheets of white paper that looked just like the ones she gave Misaki. She read off the first.
"I can have any body, any form. And when we harvest the true immortality within you, I can have whoever I want as a spare. Nothing can stop us... They succeeded. The company has quantum immortality, and they have spread into countless innocent, unknowing lives and latched onto those people as hosts. Spares..."
As Haruka elaborated, a lightbulb went on for Blessin; she raised a finger and proclaimed, "Horcruxes. I used to be a big Potter fan. But it sounds like, by way of Manchurian Candidates, sleepers that have part of them inside? That's so fucked up!"
The white-haired girl looked faintly puzzled at her analogies, but an extended explanation made her nod that the comparison wasn't too far off.
Krystal chirped up, "So, how do we stop it?"
"We don't. We can't. Once someone has been infected, the only recourse is the removal of the affected region, typically in their brain. Radiant beings have benignly implanted themselves in humans in the same way. But the company is cancerous. Right now, they exist in approximately fourteen percent of the multiverse population. They have no intention of stopping until they have spread to every corner of existence, every life, and truly seized the mantle of gods."
Scrunching her forehead, Krystal reflected for a moment and mentioned the encounters that the Blessin and the people she knew had when Cerberus attacked them. "Cerberus swore to destroy every last trace of the company. When he attacked or she attacked or whatever, could that just have been an effort to remove the company from someone who doesn't know they have them inside?"
Ruth shut her eyes, with her hands holding her head, as Haruka gave only a slight nod. "That's possible. Although I don't know all my sister's motivations. It was not my intention to acquit Cerberus of sin; I only wanted to show you how it began and warn you of where we are now. The company will not stop, but Cerberus has one plan to destroy them. He calls it the City—the compression of everything in existence into a single realm. Bringing it all together. Only by collapsing every possibility and wave function into a single space can he truly and finally destroy every piece of the company and be sure they won't spread again."
Krystal turned up her hands with curiosity and said, "It sounds like it could work. Put everyone in one place and weed out the bad actors once and for all."
"It would be devastating. It would be unimaginable. It would be absolute chaos, havoc, destruction, and death on an unparalleled scale. It would obliterate almost everything in existence, leaving only the tiniest trace. It's madness," Ruth responded with wide-eyed fear.
Blessin quipped, "And a very complicated toy commercial and a disappointing redo. I get the picture. Reality is screwed, and whoever wins, we all lose. So, what do we do? We can't just let everyone's worst-case scenario happen."
Ruth briefly mentioned her reality powers but hammered home their limitations. Her new charges were promising, but she didn't want the biggest responsibility of all things and all worlds shouldered by them. They would break. Blessin noted that her acquaintances had capabilities, even though some of them were dormant, as did she. But this definitely sounded bigger than what they could manage. Krystal remarked that she had some talents and was curious about her nieces, but it was again on an entirely different scale.
But what Haruka had brought up returned to their thoughts. Fourteen percent. That was a large number affected. Blessin asked first, "Do you happen to know if anyone we know personally might be in that percentage? Or any of us?" She gulped hard.
Immediately, Haruka reassured them, "The three of you are not affected. Not yet. I confirmed it. The growth rate is gradual now but has the potential to accelerate like a von Neumann probe exploring a universe." Despite the implication, that geeky reference brought delight to Blessin, intrigued Krystal, and earned another nod from Ruth.
Warily, Blessin soon followed up by pressing, "And what about friends, family, and people we know?"
Haruka unfolded three papers and passed one each to the others. They read what was written silently.
"...Shit," Blessin said with a long, pained sigh. "That's a lot."
Krystal covered her tears with her hands, but they soon overflowed. Ruth stared at her list with her jaw clenched and her nails digging into the couch cushion.
"You are completely confident in these names?" Ruth pressed.
"Yes," Haruka assured her with what felt like a steady gaze from her covered eyes and the stars beneath them.
"Well, I want to get very drunk, even though I shouldn't. And I don't… know what to do. I don't know. Some things are just too powerful. Maybe if we could time travel back to when the company started and just strangle them in the cradle. But what else can we do?"
Haruka pressed her hands together, as though in a prayer she didn't speak aloud, before announcing, "I have some ideas. But I think we should ally ourselves with Cerberus. Our ultimate goals are the same. While his plan is madness, he has capabilities we do not. If we work together, we may not need to destroy countless worlds just to stop the company."
Ruth bristled at this proposal, summarily shooting it down. The others were unsure and asked Haruka if she had even spoken to Yuka/Cerberus lately.
With melancholy in her pose, Haruka responded, "Sadly, not for a long time. Despite what Miss Ruth said, some things can never be forgiven. I hated my sister when she was first placed in my life, like finding a wretched, black insect crawling around in your bed. But I played the dutiful role. Now, our rules are reversed, and she hates me beyond reason, and I just wish I could talk to her one more time like we used to."
That dismal aura saturated the others, like an overwhelming fragrance that no wafting hands or circulating breeze could dispel. The only one who avoided its presence was Krystal, who braced herself, sat up, and declared, "We'll figure it out, for our loved ones, for friends, and for everyone out there. The will of evil can get close to victory, but it can never truly win. It sounds silly, like the hopeful wish of a little girl, but hope is a powerful thing. The greatest of things. Hope endures even when everything else seems lost. I have faith in hope. I have spent so long in darkness and despair. I am home now, and I'll fight for it with everything I have."
Haruka actually let herself have the faintest trace of a smile. Ruth shielded her mouth, and Blessin reached out for Krystal's hand in comfort and support, running through all her best prayers.
The tension in the room remained in the air, but questions soon popped off about why Haruka didn't look like anime anymore, along with Cerberus, for that matter. It wasn't related to old multiverse travel methods of integration. Haruka had a long-winded explanation on that topic, which none of them could parse into anything more reasonable than "magic".
Blessin vented about recent Disney+ originals on streaming and started searching the available programs for something to lighten the mood. More snacks came out, along with the most bewildering pop cultural topics, which fostered the deepest furrows of confusion in Krystal and Haruka.
As they settled back into the couch, just looking like four friends about to enjoy a mediocre but cathartic show up next, Blessin did her best to let herself relax.
Tomorrow, they would start saving the world tomorrow.
[END]
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And thus ends Yuri Worlds. That was a massive singular story idea, and I am not sure if the actual epilogue did it justice. But it was necessary because it sets up what comes next.
My first thought when I originally came up with the idea for Yuri Worlds was the same territory as the film and television series adaptations of Westworld. And one of the very first ideas I had was the story arc of Maharu.
There is going to be much more carnage at the festival in the original draft, somewhere around a dozen slaughtered by Yasha, with potentially multiple named characters dead. That's why, on the train, the little vision has more of a body count. I was still considering the possibility pretty late, even though the personality that developed with the killer was more of a savorer of blood than a chugger. That's what I made a large cast for though.
The other notion that emerged very early on was that this was going to be a prequel in the timeline of the stories. My anxiety throughout was how to present it as feeling like it took place in an alternate 2023 in the relative present or future and then segue that into letting people know it was the past.
I didn't want to just smash people with a hammer, telling them it was a prequel, but I feel like I had to go in that direction eventually. The other major component and the big twist was that this was Cerberus' origin story—maybe their backstory, but not the full backstory. It was something I very much wanted to convey.
I actually had a long-standing plan for Cerberus to be a cute girl at some point; that's why some of that pops up in little hints related to the character from time to time. But the idea I had for where, what, and when to do it just didn't feel right, so it turned into this.
So the murder was one twist, being a prequel was another, and then Cerberus, and finally the relatively minor twist about multiple Yuri Worlds. It's also the title. And then, of course, the ending emerged as one last twist.
That last note was very much something my muse pitched to me as to what the ending should be. I already had a discussion between the crossover characters about their challenges and the future. There needed to be events that clearly separated Cerberus/Yuka from her youthful innocence and who she became. Not quite Anakin to Darth Vader, but somewhere in that ballpark. But I also requested that there be a tiny sliver of hope and ambiguity at the end.
Is Carrie dead? I think there's always hope.
This was an incredibly exhausting chapter to write, and I needed to bring in a certain amount of assistance to get through it, which I'll talk about in separate postings. I was hopeful that this wouldn't take a blasted eternity and that I would actually have a low-stress week, but all sorts of things are happening, and stresses find me anyway. It's sad to say goodbye to the story because I lived, loved, and delved into these characters for half a year. I still feel like there is an immense quantity of life and discovery to mine from them. I don't want to say goodbye, but stories have to end.
The rest of the chapters for this week will be relatively short leftovers from this first arc of stories. It's narratives that I couldn't find a use for with the whole Flush With Pride section. It's primarily cute stuff but there are a few NSFW, salacious notes.
Then, in October, we begin Mystery Lake. Inevitably, as this week proved with needing to take care of stuff around and outside the house again, I may eventually need to put the series on a sabbatical or hiatus because of life issues. But I feel good about having a complete set of five stories that will soon be six. The second round of narratives is going to be quite daunting because I have to go back and build upon existing stories as sequels in the overarching narrative while making them friendly for newcomers. No pressure, but I do have some ideas.
I hope you enjoyed Yuri Worlds. No poll this time. Have a great day!