3:24 p.m, December 23rd, 2028

Celes and Minnie chuckled while eating at a popular coffee shop.

As they chatted over lattes at an outdoor table at their favorite corner cafe, the midday crowd created a light buzz around them. Outside, big city traffic rolled by the towering glass buildings, unaware that a shadow lingered, watching them from afar.

"What a bother," Shadow muttered. "But 20 G’s for nothing is pretty good." He started making another call. Before long, he left, and a big bald muscle man aggrievedly took his place, looking like a wronged child forced to eat vegetables at the dinner table.

"So, enough of the secretive Mary Mystery Act. Spill!" Minnie jokingly poked Celes. "I hardly know anything about cards, but you've praised them so much."

Celes smiled before holding her delicate chin. " Hm. It's kind of hard to explain. Think of it like a new field of study. Like Math was non-existent and had just been discovered, or Gender Studies, or Mechanical Engineering."

"That sounds terrifying. There's no way it's that complicated, is there?" Minnie gasped, realizing the implications.

Celes looked at the billboard to the far left, painted with several big-eyed white marshmallows. Several small children passed by, holding their parents' hands and clutching an oversized stuffed marshmallow doll of the trending kids' cartoon.

With an inward laugh, she thought of something amusing. So many times before, when they would hold meetings on what to do, Minnie would explain their strategy and she would get confused. Minnie would then explain the strategy in children's terms later on so she could understand, which Celes always found mildly insulting.

However, they had agreed to compartmentalize roles, with her leading the different teams on missions and fighting with different friends and foes. This was only due to Celes being the strongest, along with the great role of Sapphire Beauty who was a summoning type card and her natal card.

The usefulness of Summoning cards was almost universal. These cards possessed intelligence and could function as a second individual. With their racial abilities and skills as a bonus, they were the most sought-after cards. They could fight, keep watch, serve as mounts for travel, share burdens, substitute for oneself, and so on.

Being a Flight Type summon also raised Sapphire Beauty's usefulness by many folds. So, Celes was always on the frontlines, trying to reduce casualties with her presence, or taking part in covert missions for the base's survival, while Minnie was the at-home strategist, which suited her sharp mind well. This created a situation where Celes couldn't follow her detailed plans and figure out her end goals at times without her explicitly spelling them out, despite Celes being the actual leader of the base.

"Think of it this way," Celes returned to the present, looking for better words of explanation. "Everything we know now is through practice like many equations proved wrong and beliefs turned into foolish muses, like the earth being flat. It's all a small part of the real picture. Fifteen years was too short to truly study anything from such a complete and foreign system."

Minnie nodded quietly, the gears starting to turn in her head.

"Sparing you from any technical terms, let me break it down for you," Celes continued. "You've watched Rainbow Marshmellow with the kids at the orphanage, right? In the New World, we humans are just like those little marshmallows. We start as Tier Zero Card Apprentices, which was not easy to figure out by the way, then we transform into Tier One Card Experts, Tier Two Card Masters, Tier Three Card Grandmasters, and so on."

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"The leveling system is starting to sound based," commented Minnie.

Celes nodded. "Like the show, you start as a slightly capable little white marshmallow, but as you fulfill kids' dreams, or cultivate in our case, you eventually meet the requirement to get promoted to the next class. This gets you bigger, stronger, and more capable, like little Guoba was when she was going to be promoted to a Yellow Marshmellow."

Minnie momentarily scrunched her petite nose at how Celes was dumbing it down for her, but Celes carried on.

"Just meeting the requirements isn't enough, though. You need a special method to advance, like the errands Guoba has to run. There are a few methods that have been discovered, and possibly a lot more undiscovered, but the best is the breathing method. It has the best all-round improvement and fighting ability in the same rank, with only little flaws to exploit. It is also the most consistent from low rank to high rank."

"So, like a diamond method?" Minnie jumped at the opportunity to have some input. "Imperfectly perfect?"

Celes nodded in agreement. "Something like that. Of course, unlike little Guoba, we have to deal with everyone and everything trying to kill us every five seconds. This isn't the Cotton County. Many called it the Devil's Crusade New World."

Minnie nodded as she listened. The trending cartoon, Rainbow Marshmallow, was well-known by anyone who stayed with kids. It had an upgrade system like Pokemon, but with quite a few more levels, like the colors in a rainbow with the added white marshmallow and black marshmallow. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, from the young to the old. In the cartoon, upgrading to the next form was quite hard, considering the cartoon had several dozen episodes and each rank took around a dozen to complete.

"And then?" Minnie prodded.

Celes seemed to remember something, becoming somber.

The knowledge gained was with corpses of millions in the wake. While they were busy figuring things out, the population plummeted due to massacres and disasters. Had they discovered it earlier, they would have saved countless lives.

As the gamers would put it, dying a few times to figure out the mechanics was a given. But this was real life and there were no extra lives; all the lives used to discover the mechanics were eternally gone. Only those who remained benefitted from their sacrifices.

Since she had returned to the past, Celes felt it was up to her to save them and publicize this knowledge.

Their sacrifices would be unnecessary!

Of course, with that being said, she was no fool.

Celes intended to wait a little while, maybe a few months, to pull ahead. She wanted to deal with the barbarians and heathens who would take advantage of the apocalypse to fulfill their sick fantasies and fetishes. The bad apples had to be taken care of before she could focus on the good. As the saying goes, ‘It only takes one bad apple to ruin the barrel.’

Minnie got up, pulling the brooding girl along. She knew Celes long enough to tell something was on her mind.

She was also self-aware and couldn't possibly imagine the horrors Celes had lived through before returning. The best thing to do as her best friend was just to be there for her and provide a shoulder to lean on. Asking Celes to open up old wounds would be too selfish. She would wait for the right time.

The world was changing.

The recent disasters have destroyed homes and property, reaped lives, destroyed businesses, killed insurance, and much more.

Despite only being days apart it hadn't truly sunk in for most.

But this was just the beginning.

No, it was the prelude to the end.