Battle Fantasia MUSH - User contributions [en]

2019-04-06 - TIMELINE X: Wish Upon Every Star

2025-03-16T14:28:05Z

Pink Moon Stick:

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''Wish Upon Every Star'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''Madoka Kaname ends a bunch of timelines.''
|-
| '''Who:''' 
[[Madoka Kaname]], [[Mami Tomoe]], [[Hitomi Shizuki]], [[Sayaka Miki]], [[Kyouko Sakura]], [[Eri Shimanouchi]], [[Usagi Tsukino]], [[Steven Universe]], [[Jasper]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Nanoha Takamachi]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Marinette Dupain-Cheng]], [[Adrien Agreste]], [[Niramo Umokeshi]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Kasagami Araki]], [[Mai Tokiha]], [[Kozue Kaoru]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Takeo Akamizu]], [[Fuu Hououji]], [[Homura Akemi]]
|-
| '''Where:''' 
Everywhere
|-
| '''OOC - IC Date:''' 
04-06-2019 - Everywhen
|-
|}
[[Category:Logs]]

<SoundTracker> Run - Amy Macdonald https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jl4kwuSOiY

Madoka cradles the still-warm, mangled corpse of a kitten in the palms of her hands -- one of the only things in the world that could make such little hands look big and strong.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Two porcelain cups clink delicately together. Madoka's eyes dance over the rim of hers, as she looks across them at the owner of this apartment, and increasingly, her affection. Her heart yearns to ease Mami's loneliness.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Hitomi's eyes are nothing but whites. She gapes up, sightless in her hysteria, as a shadow falls, here to prey upon her soul. A door slams open. There's Madoka. Just in time.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Sayaka's arms are like a steel vice around Madoka and Charlotte's descending bulk reflects in both of their eyes, lensed pink, lensed blue. She can't tell where her own wings-beating-on-the-bars-of-the-birdcage heartbeat ends and her best friend's begins.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

From behind a rubied barrier, Madoka looks on helplessly. Kyouko's boots make a light scuffing sound in the alley, her hair flapping behind her like a crimson battle flag, as she soars, speartip-first, towards a dazed Sayaka. Sayaka, whose tattered cape already tells the story of this battle; whose cape will soon become a shroud, and finish telling the story of her life. But maybe Madoka isn't helpless, after all, to stop the fight...

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka's legs are too short to reach the bottom of the dais from where she sits on its edge. The heels of her brown flats, student to the last, thunk softly as she kicks her feet out and lets them bounce. She looks over at Kyouko, at the half-eaten apple in her hands. At the look on her face.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka gasps as the classroom window shatters, and as Eri shatters it, tumbling over desks and bookshelves on her way in to a rough landing. Her green gem is clouded, and clouding further, well on its way to darkness. The same darkness she saw in the alley. The same darkness she saw in the the gardening shed. Madoka stands up.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka shouldn't be at the North Pole; it was a mistake of destiny and magic that brought her to this place. She's freezing to death, but her heart is already a shard of ice lodged too sharply in her chest, as she looks down at the sprawled forms of the senshi at the bottom of the broken ravine that was once a fortress. She half runs, half-falls to them, and threads her shaking fingers through Usagi's limp ones.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka, cowering behind the bridge, flinches as a massive alien fist punches almost straight through Steven's nose -- as he's thrown over Jasper's shoulder like a bag of potatoes -- as he's taken to the ship. She clenches her own hand, too. The fist it makes is so much smaller.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka gapes at the broken body of Setsuna Higashi, strung up in the trees of Okinawa, then looks up tearfully at the woman animating them, the woman who called her fortune-telling friend traitor, but really sounded like she was saying daughter. The woman who did this to her.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka covers her eyes, shading them from the blinding light of Nanoha and Fate's beams colliding with one another -- and moreso, from that of the Jewel Seed hung between them, which detonates into a mushroom cloud at the heart of their city. But it's the girls' expressions, the grief, twinned in their eyes, that stirred her to action. She shakes her head. Everything shakes, even her voice.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka can't breathe. Her lids struggle to lift against the pressure of an ocean in storm, which has her effortlessly clasped in the vice of its lost control. Somewhere, Nori is at the heart of this. Nori needs help. Nori needs her.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka shudders as the man in the mask reaches towards Ladybug, Chat Noir and Sourisi, moments from collecting their magical jewelry. He cackles his plans at the darkening sky. A fairy whispers the truth in her ear: it isn't too late.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka reaches out to take Mikoto's hand, across the bento that separates them, and smiles up at them with a neighborhood cat's face. (Not THAT one; another one, who lived.) Mikoto, who feels so strongly. Mikoto, who is so desperate. Mikoto, who is so lonely. Mikoto, who needs to find her Lord Brother.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

Madoka reaches out towards Kasagami as she falls off the balcony, plunging from view.

Towards Mikoto again, this time even as she's charging, eyes blank, teeth bared, sword screaming sparks along with her.

Towards the explosion in the sky that used to be Mai and Kagutsuchi.

Towards the unthinkable tears she sees on Kozue's cheek.

On Endo's, as he holds Ren.

On Takeo's, as he holds Mika.

On Fuu's, as she holds Ferio.

It doesn't have to be this way.

This is something she can do.

"I wish..."

---

Over and over. Run the statistics; Walpurgisnacht isn't the only thing that generates data in this endless maze. Sayaka is the likeliest reason to form a Contract--

(All-time dumbest wish as marked on Homura's murder board: wishing for Sayaka's team to win the championship. It was bad enough when Sayaka wished for it herself. With Madoka doing it for her, it was infinitely worse.)

(All-time greatest wish: None, by Homura's reckoning.)

(But if you ask Madoka, someday, when this is all over and in fact never was, she might cup her hand against your ear and breathe into it, and you could feel a tender smile curve her lips as she relates the story of that one time, when she and Sayaka...)

--but there are countless others. It sometimes feels like Madoka would do it to save the life of an ant -- there's no life too small to throw her own away for. If she has the power to change things -- and she knows she has that power -- and she ALWAYS, somehow, seems to know, seems to find out -- then there is something she can do.

I wish I may, I wish I might...

There's one wish, though -- one repeated wish, one inevitable wish -- the context changes but the truth of it is always the same -- which ends a timeline in the most painful way of all.

---

"HOMURA-CHAN!" shrieks Madoka, horror tearing her throat hoarsely open -- terror beading in her eyes -- making her whole body quiver.

Homura Akemi, transfer student, is a mysterious girl. A strange girl, but somehow never truly a stranger.

There's no life too small but there's something especially unbearable -- oddly so -- about watching Homura stoically face her oncoming death, be it at the hands of a dark queen, a Witch, or... something worse.

But it doesn't have to end like this.

This is something only she can do.

2025-03-15 - The Labyrinth Reawakens 2

2025-03-16T14:06:52Z

Pink Moon Stick:

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Reawakens 2'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''Fallen Stern makes the ultimate sacrifice to repeat history and drive the Outsiders back to the darkness from whence they came. But the magical girls refuse to accept it, and invite them into the light instead.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Fate Testarossa]], [[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Inori Yamabuki]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Westar]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Miki Aono]], [[Love Momozono]]

GM: Pink Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
3/15/2025 - 6/17/2016
|-
|}

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Dark Realms +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
Light cannot exist without darkness, nor darkness without the light, or so
some claim. Whether the Dark Realms are simply the Fairy Realms through a
mirror darkly is difficult to ascertain, but it's undeniable that some
realms in either domain lack an obvious counterpart in the other. Certainly
the ceaseless war between bright virtue and dark evil gives little heed to
the notion that ultimate victory is impossible.

Indeed, a given realm of darkness will often commit itself solely to
extinguishing the light forever. With names like Minor Land, Labyrinth and
Dark Kingdom, perhaps that isn't all that surprising. Endless plains beneath
a midnight sky lit only by bolts of violet lightning harbor armies of
strange creatures, or yet stranger war machines. If there is water, it is
brackish, tainted. The air itself stabs lungs like a superheated knife. Some
denizens of the Dark Realms claim that they're trying to transform the
entire universe into worlds like their own, but colonizing more pleasant
environments might be sufficient motivation alone.

Black, too, has shades; there are many dark wastelands, but also dark
cities, dark oceans, dark forests, dark deserts, dark skies. Some are even
possessed of a loveliness all their own; as beautiful as it is deadly, with
shadowy landscapes that mesmerize before they surprise. No matter how
populous, all are pervaded by a sense of emptiness, of absence, masked at
times by swirling rage or despair, but never erased.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

[[2025-02-22 - The Labyrinth Reawakens|PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA]]

In his greed, Jail ripped all the magic of the universe into Labyrinth -- into himself.

And this immense concentration, its sheer density, attracted the attention of a force that has not been seen for ten thousand years.

It only took one Outsider to swallow the madman and his stolen power -- and it took flight, back to the inverted portal, now hijacked to allow the aliens into this mode of existence.

Its retreat was covered by thousands of its kind. Thousands of strange monsters, so strange that the eye cannot even resolve them, only compare them to more familiar creatures. The Outsiders wear comparisons to insects, to birds, to beasts, like ill-fitting suits, warped far beyond funhouse mirrors. They descended on Labyrinth and its people, and anyone or anything they touched turned cold -- filled with blackness -- and then simply ceased to be. Winked out of being entirely.

But the magical girls fought back. Some pursued Jail upwards into the sky, for if he is lost, the countless worlds robbed of their souls will be lost also, if to a more spiritual heat-death than the more traditional promise of entropy's kiss. Others deployed to the plaza, where a dense crowd of onlookers -- whose belief in the magical girls had, not long ago, empowered them to defeat Jail in the first place -- was threatened by Outsiders; and still more to a building brought to the verge of collapse by aliens that simply flew straight through it, and thus through its structural integrity.

Setsuna Higashi's best friends, her found family, the Fresh Pretty Cure, climbed to the top of the tower at the center of Labyrinth, which had once been the seat of Lord Moebius and the shrine of his secret controller, Northa, once the Belkan Queen who, in eons past, made war upon the many magical worlds in order to secret away their power somewhere the Outsiders could never sense, and thus never invade. At the apex, Cures Peach, Berry and Pine unleashed their love, hope and faith to blanket the city below in protective light that no Outsider could pass through.

At the same time, the magical girls defeated the last of the aliens in the city proper. Labyrinth has been saved -- but the stolen magic of the worlds remains in fatal jeopardy.

All that remains is to take to the sky.

NOW

<SoundTracker> Love Is A Battlefield (Live To Tell cover) - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsa_9xNpqF4

They rise, some of them Outsider to Outsider, leaping and punching, blitzing and throwing. They rise, flying and slashing, swirling and squeezing and surging. They rise alone and they rise together; they rise in each other's arms.

But they just don't rise fast enough.

Still, the enemy comes... there are so many of them. It feels endless. For every hundred of them slain by a magical girl, there are a thousand more to replace them. And every single time one Outsider manages to pierce the terrific offense-as-defense of the line, and land even a single hit, that is the more significant action than all those deaths that made it possible, because the defenders are so terribly few.

When the battle suddenly changes, the first way to notice is that each of the Outsiders start to glow from the inside out. It is abrupt and simultaneous; none of them were switched on (as it were), and now all of them are. What it isn't, however, is truly identical...

...each alien glows with a specific and unique shade.

What is the color of a soul?

Here's one that's icy. Not the rugged ice of a science fiction planet -- or, rather, not only that -- but the pearlescent glow of sea ice illuminated by aurora. Ice as wonder, as well as danger. It's beautiful, yet the Outsider possessed of it does not become moreso. It is perilous, agonizing, to see such ghostfire ignite within the body of something so ill-equipped to appreciate it as anything other than fuel.

Or perhaps as food. Take this next Outsider, whose cheerful golden light smells like fresh-baked bread, an abhorrent juxtaposition with something worse than writhing antennae, something stranger than chittering mandibles. Another smells of roses, all pinks and whites, the petals almost visible within the aura, hues rendered precisely, exactly, by the steady, unflickering flame. Some Outsiders now are engulfed in a more literal flame; there are silver flames, blue flames, fires of war and of peace, of hearth and of heart. Well. All of them are of heart.

There are as many different glows as there are worlds.

Or... maybe, there are as many different glows as there are undone magical girls, their magic stolen from across those many worlds.

Whether defeating a given Outsider will free that particular magic, destroy it, or do nothing at all to release it from the swarm, is an absolute unknown.

But it's not a matter of choice, because these creatures are coming faster and harder now, sharper and more terrible.

How did this come to be? Thank the holes punched in the cloud by the magical girls, to be able to see it at all.

Plummeting through the sky -- no longer prismatic, rather reverted to a lab coat over a suit -- is Time-Space Criminal Jail Scaglietti.

He is also no longer conscious. He may or may not be no longer alive.

Either way, though still technically in one piece physically, he has ''unquestionably'' been... digested. Maybe the singular Outsider who snatched him up and headed for the portal made it; maybe it didn't matter; maybe it still matters.

Everything feels like it matters so ''much'', suddenly, when faced with Outsiders suffused with magics as familiar to our heroes as their own names -- the names of their friends -- the names of their worlds.

Jail falls, and falls, and falls. He's unpredictable and squirrelly, but this feels very final.

Whether or not his life can be saved, his body will unquestionably be destroyed when it makes impact, either on the Fresh force field, or if he passes through because he's not an Outsider, then definitely on the ground.

And the holes in the swarm... the holes are filling fast. Uncannily fast, as though every Outsider is perfectly aware of the position of every other member of the swarm.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick transforms into The Outsiders: Ascendant!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Body Horror on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Cure White.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Cure Passion fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 39 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is Psyched!
COMBAT: Cure Pine perfectly braces 41 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Brace! Cure Pine's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White cleanly braces 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 5 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Lera Camry dodges 33 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 22 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

They are everywhere, brilliant and strange and terrifying. It is not enough to conceive of what they have done since the beginning, what their presence has wrought. Her mind can barely wrap themselves around the questions.

What are they? Why are they doing this? How many?

That last one sticks with a person in particular. How many civilizations have fallen to them? How many people have died? And in that question, leads to another intrusive one.

... Did...

Did her mother's final end come not from falling through the cracks in dimensions in a failed attempt to reach Alhazard, but at the end the journey, there was only these... things?

Fate's heart quickens subtly faster. Her grip tightens upon Bardiche, and as she draws him back again. She sees a shape in the midst of the chaos, a glimpse of white, a flash of purple waving in the choked breeze.

"... It's him." She utters, softly, but not inaudibly in the atmosphere.

She does not have nearly the same feelings for the man who called himself her father. And yet... and yet! As he falls, she can't help but notice.

I can't stop,

He's falling alone.

BGM for Fate: Invisible Heat (Acoustic Version) - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txf_64xFAp0

I can't stop, Can't stop. Won't stop. As Infinite as the Memory, so is my Desire... this is my purpose. It is why I exist. It is why the Bureau made me, and their unlikely gift.

Maybe out of his own choices, he doesn't have something - someone worth clinging to other than belief in the inevitability of his purpose as desire as he falls, maybe he doesn't have the option.

Maybe it was decided for him at the moment of his birth, and the option taken from him the moment after, just like her... if so, then maybe she inherited something from him after all. A purpose changed - but in others, she found her own purpose.

And despite her anger, seeing him like this in this moment...

... she has to believe that can be true for him too.

Fate's expression tightens all of a sudden, "I'm going." Eyes shining with resolution she says firmly to everyone else, with no explanation other than. "I have to." There isn't much time longer, so her last statement is a plea, "Please help me reach him in time."

Yes, that is right. You look upon the first artificial mage. The original. You were forged to fill a place at your mother's side. I was crafted to find... and secure... and create all the Lost Logia the doddering old fools of the Time-Space Administration could never.

She knows she'll need everyone else here to stand a chance, especially with what she's about to do. And as she flies, and the creatures fly towards her, she makes a sharp call, "BARDICHE!"

<Jacket Purge>

At the moment they would make contact, the space she's flying through erupts in a detonation of smoke and lightning, before a synthetic call is chimed.

<Sonic Form>

And a shape flies out of it so fast that it's like that even the other Magical Girls might have difficulty following, a glimpse of her in her barrier jacket, but without her armor or cloak. With sharp sparking flier fins attached to each wrist, and boots, but bereft of many of the accessories of her armor that she had before - made perilously thin. As she flies down towards Jail, and gets cut off, flying up, and in a spiral at incredible speed, before coming back around, and plummeting amidst the radiant colors of their strange auras.

It will give them all an opportunity to strike them en masse. She does not call for the moment to them.

She trusts them all to know.

Bardiche, now in Haken form vanishes, as Fate flies down towards the form of Jail that's nearly struck the ground, and her arms encircle him, much the way her Mother's did Alicia's... before she fell, sharply braking with one great flap of her fins.

They strike the ground anyway roughly, spinning as Fate brunts the impact with her own form as best as she can. For one long moment the wind is knocked out of her, then she takes a breath and coughs violently. You learn to fall, before you fly, but it's hard to practice for falling that fast.

Turning her red eyes on the unconscious form of Jail, she looks, waits... for evidence that his chest is rising and falling beneath his white, now somewhat dusty labcoat, then takes another sharp breath.

"Maybe... Maybe you'll never understand..." And as she forces herself up, glad to know she can, she looks up at the sky. "... but, I have to believe you can..."

...

"...Jail... Scaglietti." She says quietly, rather than Father. Maybe that title is true, but it doesn't matter. She has a home to go back to. She has a Mother. She has friends and people who love her. And at the end of the day, she hopes she'll have three new sisters.

If he wants that place in her life, he'll have to earn it. But if he wants to, perhaps there'll be a chance one day.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Sonic!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera flies up into the sky, with Cure Passion at her side. She looks sideways at her, before she looks at the Outsiders; each of them aglow with a strange light, a ''stolen'' light, from magical girls from across the universe. She fights a shudder, as best she can, and watches as Jail Scaglietti falls.

Fate says she is going. Lera looks sideways at her, then she nods. "Be careful, Fate. We've got your back, y'know?"

The Outsiders come in. One, Lera beats back with Broken Ground; there's a flash of a girl in white, holding up a staff, on a desert world with a butterscotch sky. A second, she parries with Soaring Sky; there's a flash in her mind of a black-haired girl with violet eyes, drawing back a bow.

A third comes in, its jaws hitting her side -- and Lera shouts out, "Aaah!"

Then she swings Broken Ground up. A brilliant dome of golden light explodes away from her, slamming all three Outsiders back with a mighty explosion.

<Terra Breaker!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Terra Breaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 39 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi perfectly braces 29 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Brace! Mikoto Minagi's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa braces 22 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 18 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Ren
Aizawa's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Up, and up, and up again. But Passion is still there, still moving up, just as she told Lera she would. Soon, she is fighting, more and more; she ''kicks'' through one and another and another, there are still more. She continues to fight, blipping in and out of existence to dodge and weave her way through the Outsiders, until she sees and feels one in particular: one with the wisdom of the water, the familiar calm energy of one she knew--unadultered, unlike how she once knew it.

Passion remembers this essence, a dear friend--one who was something like that another way, once. One from Earth. And Passion hesitates for a crucial second--just long enough for sparkling water in an Outsider to ''crash''; into her side, sending her tumbling down into the tower to smash against it. "Ah--"

"...Maybe I deserved that one," she says. "But no more!"

She ''shoots'' back upward, sailing through the air through another three Outsiders, and finds the one that struck her--the one that holds that precious essence.

Is it freedom, she offers? Or something else? She will have to do as Pine, and have faith.

"Haaaaaah--!"

Passion spots Pine, suddenly. "Pine!" she calls. "This way!"

"Haaaaah--!" She pivots mid-air, handspringing off debris, and extends her gracefulf oot in a big ''kick'' with Pine, straight for the Outsider!

COMBAT: Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Lera Camry's Terra Breaker, taking 44 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa covers Fate Testarossa for Pink Moon Stick's attack, Space Invasion, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki fails to counter Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 31 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 53 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Fate!" Mikoto calls, not nearly so fast. But perhaps her words are fast enough to catch up, eventually: "Do it!"

How could she ever... blame Fate for wanting to save someone like her, even if he's a bad person?

After all, she...

With Westar safely(?!) held Miroku's vast free hand, he is, at least... well, there are ''more perilous'' places to be, right now. Though there are also surely ''less'' perilous places -- the Outsiders swarm around him, hungry for his overflowing, overwhelming magic.

To pick one from a crowd, though...

... it would have to be that one with fangs which are somehow also ''spinnets,'' curling and flexing like fingers as they shoot entangling thread. It's not red, like fate; it's white, like death. Like something girls shouldn't be so familiar with -- a crime of knowledge in and of itself.

With legs and legs and legs and legs, unfurling in the air, flapping, skittering, soaring.

"Na...o?"

Mikoto echoes her name, dumbfounded, staring at something which she never actually seems able to stare directly at, even though it's right there in front of her. It's chased by anger, as she realises: "What'd you do to Nao?!"

Kozue might have -- let's say -- complex feelings on her, these days; and really, it's hard to say Nao's are any ''simpler.'' But they still helped to teach her how the world worked, back before she knew how to walk through Shinjuku. Even if they were expensive lessons, sometimes... Mikoto doesn't want her to be eaten up.

"She's my friend!"

Mikoto might be the only one of the two who would say something like that out ''loud,'' though.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Embrace on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa's Flash
ability activates!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Body Horror, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Quipped! Bind
Break! All of Pink Moon Stick's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine's running behind. For what it's worth? She has a good reason.

"Hurry!"

Cue Tarte, trying to drag a Labyrinth child out from under debris and help him up, a feat made difficult by his tiny ferret like limbs, "Aaaaah!? Pine-han. This is... really hard!"

"He won't be able to walk with one leg Tarte!"

"Yeah! I gathered... it's just! I'm not... THAT strong!"

Pine looks at Tarte as if it hadn't quite occurred to her as her arms strain at the debris she's lifting up, then back at him. "... If only you could become a Pretty Cure." She mentions softly as Tarte keeps trying to help him limp along, more at this point being carried by the kid who's hopping, than actually doing any good. "Oh sure, I'll- get right on that. We're clear!"

She sets it down, then considers everyone ascending...

"Wait... wait up!? Now to get... up." She can jump high but.. "How am I going to get up there?"

"... I suppose I can offer a hand." Cure Pine turns around, eyes widening at...

-=-=-

"And a one... two... and a-" "Wait wait - stop! You're SURE you can throw me that high like this?" "-Was I not an Executive of Labyrinth?" "Well... that's a good point, it's just, does it really have to be like this-?" "-Do you want to get up there or not?" "I do but-" "Three."

Which is the same moment that Soular swings Pine around, and throws her like a Hammer into the sky.

There's an initial cry of alarm, "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Before she levels out, and seems to panic less, "He really could do it..." She marvels, right as an Outsider comes at her, and Pine crosses her arms and plows into it. More and more come, as her hands move into a flurry of sudden punches and blocks to try and keep them away, moving more on instinct.

Some score hits, but she keeps moving on raw momentum, until she starts to come down, and lands on top of another Outsider, causing her to get a flash of a blue clothed, wolf-eared man... with a tail.

Bending at the knees, she leaps off it again as she eyes Cure Black, which her and White fighting up here remind her that she wasn't for a bit.

"I'm so sorry everyone!" She bows her head, even mid-leap, one might imagine she'd do a more formal bow if she wasn't aerial, "I was just running a little behind-!"

"That's not like you, Pine... usually it's Peach that gets lost on the way."

"That almost never happens!" Peach complains, as Berry and her come down to kick a mess of Outsiders. Whereas Pine herself pivots in mid-air towards Passion's voice. "Oh! Coming!" And as she redirects, she comes down with leg extended beside her, "Double Pretty Cure Kick!"

A phrase which Peach Echoes with her own alongside Berry.

"You'll never guess how I got up here." Pine asides to Passion, after impact. "Anyhow... I think I got a glimpse of someone who needs saving? He's... a guy, with adorable wolf-ears, and a tail?"

Leave it to her to remember those characteristics in particular. "... It almost feels like that day with Lucky." She notes, because despite the grim scenario...

...some things are as simple as a canine that needs saving to her. And even if it was Eas they were saving him from...

"Except this time, we do it together."

COMBAT: Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Passion and Cure Pine have used Pretty Cure Fresh Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly counters 63 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion and Cure Pine's Combo: Pretty Cure Fresh Kick,
taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Counter! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, There's Just Too Many, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Embrace, taking 0 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren squeezes Endo's hand tight, the promise of filling their bellies with good food all but sealed. She then turns to survey the situation. The sheer number of Outsiders and the eerie glow of stolen magic send a shiver down her spine, but she shakes it off, focusing on the battle. Then--

Fate's voice cuts through the chaos.

Ren's head snaps toward the golden blur diving toward the falling figure of Jail Scaglietti. Fate isn't hesitating, pushing herself to reckless speeds, and Ren knows--''knows''--that she cant let her go alone.

"I'm on it!" She barks, kicking off in pursuit.

Magic surges around her as she accelerates, the world blurring in a streak of bronze. The Outsiders react almost instantly, a new wave breaking off to intercept. One lunges from the side, jagged limbs cutting through the air toward her.

"Get out of my way!"

Instinct takes over. Ren throws up a hastily-formed barrier--bronze hexagonal plates snapping together in midair. The Outsiders strike meets the shield, energy rippling across its surface. For a second, she thinks it might hold. Then it shatters, shards of magic dispersing into nothing as the creatures claws slash through, scoring a glancing blow across her arm. Pain flares, sharp and hot, but she grits her teeth.

And then she experiences a flash, followed by a familiar scent of sweet-smelling plants.

"E-Eri-chan?!" She exclaims, momentarily faltering in her pursuit of Fate. This Outsider has Eri-chan's magic! "Y-You jerk!" She calls out in anger, and pushes forward. No time. No time!

Blood beads at the tear in her barrier jacket, but she powers through. The Outsider is still recovering from its attack when Ren twists in midair, holding a hand out as a runic circle spins into existence in front of it.

"BACK OFF!"

A barrage of mana-infused energy bursts fire out towards the beast, but Ren doesn't wait to see the result, turning away to blast off again.

Her attention is locked on Fate, on Jail, and the swarm that threatens to tear them apart before they even reach the ground. She crashes through the fray, firing off salvo after salvo of energy bursts at the vicious creatures. "Leave them alone!" She shouts, and in the process makes ''herself'' a more appealing target. As the Outsiders close in, she performs several tightly-controlled aerial maneuvers to avoid the brunt of their ire, though still gets clipped a couple of times in the process. The horrible feeling of being touched by these Outsiders causes her teeth to rattle, but she's determined to not let them win!

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used Scatter Pulse on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBlKPLeLU_s (Of Monsters and Men - Yellow Light)

La Sirene de Diamant does not have the opportunity, quite, to discern the fate of Jail Scaglietti. It is quite possible she could not see him. And perhaps she would not save him - or could not. But in the end, perhaps, it is moot. This is the great and shining blessing of being with others.

One might have weaknesses. Many? They can guard each other; and rely on one another as well.

And yet, there are so many. Like many swords, at least out west, it cuts both ways.

La Sirene, like everyone, is a star, but perhaps more literally than they - seen from any direction, whatever she has desperately grasped to be able to take to the air is making that auroral glow of inverted-light shine brighter, compressed into a six-rayed star-point. A minor magic, perhaps.

And if they are all stars, they are faced with a galaxy, however different the force and power might be. The Outsiders are horrid enough, even when one of them flies right towards her and engulfs her entire torso in something she thinks are jaws. The teeth are -- absent - it is flat and crushing which is bad enough, even if she is able to rip herself free with a kick and a commanding sweep of both arms. But afterwards, her head swims. She breathes heavily. She feels empty, hollowed out: like a tubular bell.

Will it end? Her heart has always been changeable, and perhaps it's changing from a high tide to a low one. Inevitable. A lot of things are inevitable, aren't they?

Nothing lasts forever.

Everything ends.

Dreams always fade, or distort, or collapse.

And...

...

Something impunges on La Sirene - Nori Ankou's - swirling, whirling mind as she rises upwards. Something unusual. Something that stands out among the background of sussurous horror.

A simple musical chord, as if someone was playing a quiet scale on a piano. A simple five note sequence, soft and quiet yet curiously penetrant.

La Sirene's eyes swivel towards it. One of the Things. Distinct from the others. It's making the sound. It's curious, melancholy but soothing. Something in la Sirene's heart is soothed by it; something else, paradoxically, is moved. That simple musical refrain.

It awakens other things. Memories. Pain and struggle. The smell of Tokyo streets in summer, late at night, after the rain's stopped.

All of these pour through her mind. Something wets her cheeks. La Sirene realizes it's tears at about the same time that she finds her left hand's already raised up as she turned almost a half-circle in the air, right hand already cycling despite a slight shaking. Is it her? Or, she thinks, even as she says:

"Les Mysteres, come"

and strokes down. There is another flare of light; the familiar and trusty charm still is with her, at least. The light bursts out, and to la Sirene it seems like it's moving a little slowly, but, she tells herself as it crosses that span of space between herself and the curiously musical creature, that might just be that she's tired.

It's glowing, isn't it? That color - it's blue, she thinks, like -

A memory of a brooch, carved simply and with labor and with love. Her back straightens as the image rests in her mind, sitting there. Her mouth tightens, pressing together. She doesn't speak, but she blinks away tears again.

Of course, for her, tears have their own meaning.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Les Mysteres on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure White and Cure Black are on the move again, hopping after Jail's spirit, Outsider by Outsider. Stopping the creatures was never their main goal, but as time runs out, they have become even more inclined to evasion, letting the beasts slip past them even as they begin to glow with different-colored lights.

"There it is!" Cure White calls, as she and Black split up onto different Outsiders with a jump.

"I've got it!" Black shouts triumphantly, seeing a clear path up Outsider backs between her and the Jail-Outsider at last. Landing in a crouch, she touches the spot on her cheek that White's lips recently graced. Then, thighs bulging, she takes a massive leap across a great distance, towards an Outsider glowing magenta-and-gold. The creature rears up, confronting Black instead of trying to get past her, and Black, giddy from the kiss she wears like a badge on her face, draws her fist back gamely. "YOu wanna play that way?" she challenges. Hurling a massive punch, she slam's into... a golden shield, her blow halted dead, her arm ringing with pain.

Black blinks, the scent of fresh bread in her nostrils. "...Bloom?" she asks forlornly. The shield had not looked like Bloom's until it was struck, but the impact cracked it along a grid, and now it looks a bit like a sunflower. The yawning maw of the Outsider is already casting shadows over her body. Rather than a proper mouth, it is as if the Outsider just opened itself up to engulf her. It slams shut, hiding her from view.

"Blacku!" White shouts, changing course to aid her partner. But another Outsider arises between them, glistening as pale as the moon. Its light catches on Cure White's garments like fire to kindling, glowing on her clothing, but what really ignites is her even paler skin. An observer might be forgiven for thinking Cure White was radiating the moonlight herself. "...Sailor Moon?" Cure White ventures.

"Urrr---AGH!" Cure Black screams, squatting the weight of the Outsider's upper half to force its maw partway open again. There is some horrible fang buried in her back, and a smaller one in her shoulder, making this lift cruel and costly. Bloom's golden glow sinks into Black's tanned skin and suffuses it, its warm hue finding a home there the way Moon's cool one did in White's. As she reaches her full height, Black switches the weight to her hands, starting to pull the fang from her back by forcing the upper jaw up further. She grits her teeth as it slowly drags out of her... and then, Cure White cries out. Glancing behind her, Black sees the ground, so far below that even she would turn to jam if she landed there. With desperation, she tosses herself down towards it. She'll figure something out.

The already-wounded Cure White is driven back onto the back of the Outsider she just left by a burst of moonlight. It burns cold, like what has caught fire now is not merely the tone of her skin, but the fabric of her soul. Alight, White attempts to pat away the flames, but when they do not respond in the least, she makes note, and stands up, ignoring it for now. "Out of my way..."

The Bloom Outsider does not appear content to let Cure Black fall to her death, plunging down for a second bite. Ready this time, Black watches it approach, and as its maw opens, she spreads her body wide, catching the air and shooting much faster into the maw than expected. Landing on the lower jaw, she cocks her fist back like a revolver, and as the mouth closes, she punches upward directly into it, bursting a hole out the top of the monster.

Her moonglowing skin streaking light behind her like an inverted calligraphy brush, Cure White slams a palm strike into the moonlit Outsider. It collides with Cure Bloom's.

COMBAT: Cure Black has used Sen no Sen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Eight Trigram Palm on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Ren Aizawa's Scatter Pulse, taking 11 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 22 Fatigue damage from Cure White's Eight Trigram Palm, taking 18 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 26 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Les Mysteres, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly braces 21 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Sen no Sen, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Brace!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo's eyes skitter across the sky as it becomes a kaleidoscope of lights. The sudden burst of color, in other times, might spark hope. Here the swirling lights feel as empty as the things containing them.

He tracks the descent of the man falling and soon loses track of the blur that Fate Testarossa becomes. "Go, Fate!" He calls. It couldn't happen any other way. Something about that makes Endo's lips cut into a determined smile.

The hand holding Ren's gives a squeeze in return as he lets her handle it. He knows she can.

And then...up. He meets the next wave head-on. If it could be called a wave at allit's more like an ocean. The first to meet him is a thin line, a pulsing pink needle that rips across his armor. The Outsider bends and moves, bladelike points giving chase asFallen Stern cuts chaff around it.

Their exchange is brief, familiar, and comes to a violent end as they exchange final blows. Fallen Stern in the Outsider's center, the vessel's fine edge in the Endo's shoulder.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Asteroid Eilen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 21 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Asteroid Eilen, taking 32 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

There is so much on the line. The magic of countless worlds that Belka destroyed in her grief in a desperate attempt to save them. All of the magic of every magical girl. Her ''home''--and Japan had really started to feel like home, finally, when she finally figured out what it was that she wanted, and started making friends. The kinds of friends she'd trust with her life.

But she can't forget the image of her parents, with all hope and emotion stolen from them, staring blankly on that street, chanting those awful words...

She had to keep going. She braced herself for the next kick off an outsider, felt the sensation of the void sneaking into her even in the brief moment of contact before she rocketed away, up and ever higher.

There was an outsider glowing with rainbow light that she was chasing.

''We have to go faster. We can't let him get away.''

But suddenly it's not just one outsider that's glowing, it's all of them. She sucks in a sharp breath and misses her next tjump as she stares in horror at all of the auras flaring up around them.

It's a sickening sight, far more sickening than thinking about the fall awaiting her if she doesn't recover her jump.

It feels... almost gross, to see the Outsiders empowered this way, and Kyouka's skin crawls as she looks around to take stock of the situation.

She completely fails to notice the outsider glowing green with the warmth of sunlight swooping at her until it is too late. All she can do is let out a sharp yelp as she is engulfed. Strike Wolf springs to life, activating a barrier but it's only delaying the inevitable.

It feels like twisted, thorny vines of ivy snaking their way into her body. No--it feels like the vines are wrapping around her heart, and Kyouka suddenly seizes up, feeling her heart pounding with a sense of profound panic.

Underneath the warmth of sunlight ther is also a terrible melancholy trying to draw her in, and as her panic starts to drown in it, she feels herself slipping... like she's...

... lost.

Even in her worst moment, Lost Ivy fought so hard for her.

Even in her worst moment, Lost Ivy cradled her Pure Heart in her hands and delivered it back to her.

Even in her worst moment...

<SoundTracker> Find Your Flame - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagkbGcX21k

Kyouka's fist tightens.

''No.''

This will be Ivy's worst moment if they fail. It will be ''everyone's'' worst moment. She grits her teeth as her fist starts to glow with a bright violet light, aided by a band of Midchildan glyphs created by Strike Wolf.

"No... one... else..." Kyouka spits out through gritted teeth.

She forces her heart to calm down once more. She has no idea what this will do to Ivy's magic, but she ''has'' to believe it can't be so fragile a thing as to be destroyed this way.

She ''won't'' believe it.

"Lunar... IMPACT!"

She swings, and unleashes a blinding explosion with her punch.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Lunar Impact on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 17 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Lunar Impact, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

When each glowing Outsider meets its end, it turns to stone and plummets. There's no time to watch these corpses hit the still-twinkling force field far far below and see what happens after that; but the stones themselves no longer glow. Each beautiful light goes out.

Are they saving their friends, or dooming them?

Does the Outsider who first swallowed Jail, then digested and ejected him, still matter?

Does the portal?

What can anyone DO now?

In many battles such as these, whether fought in Tokyo or on Belka, there has often been a transition to culmination. First one defeats the little monsters -- then one defeats the big one.

That does not happen here. There is no big one.

Or rather... they're ALL the big one.

It takes time to notice, and there's both very little time indeed for such observations moment-to-moment amid endless peril, and all the time in the world -- literally, because it will run out if the heroes fall -- because the battle stubbornly continues to go on.

But it is noticeable.

<SoundTracker> Immortals (Fall Out Boy) - One More Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHn5Q7hCjxw

The <s>Radiant Knight</s>Lera Camry SLAMS her golden shield into one wave of monsters on the left flank, and the right flank flinches -- just for a moment. <s>The Argent Knight</s>Cure Passion, united with her golden sister, widens the gap just created with a magnificent double kick, and somehow it is filled again far too quickly, by extra-universals who had no business knowing that a gap existed in the first place.

Unless, that is... they're all one creature.

It makes sense. <s>The Vermillion Knight</s>Mikoto eviscerates one creature with a the least swipe of her Child, but a thousand creatures feel its pain long after it is gone. <s>The Ebon Knight</s>Fate descends like a meteor to save Jail, but they can tell that they're surrounded just a little too quickly, because others outside of her cage can see it. <s>The Ashen Knight</s>Kyouka detonates a punch on her enemy, a blast wide enough to consume far more than just one, yet those outside of it seem perfectly aware of its trajectory. Ren's royal bolts rain down from below as she plunges after Fate, Black and White triggering an explosion via collision up above, La Sirene invoking the silvery Les Mysteres in between; heaven and earth united to defeat these foes, to consume them.

But those who come after, down from the portal, remember every clever maneuver despite having never experienced them. They will not work twice, because they actually just did.

SHE just did. Or he, perhaps. The energy of hunger of these beings is more darkly masculine than feminine, if gender must be prescribed at all. Doubtless the creature -- THE creature -- has no use for it. He, It, simply continues to send out parts of himself, and the defenders mow down his limbs like a forest of hairs. Shave after shave, but none of them close. Even the <s>Umbral Knight</s>Endo, whose skills in a melee are unmatched, is starting to--

starting to--

remember. Fallen Stern remembers, and through him, so does a Tokyo boy: remembers that before his dead master failed his Queen; before he failed himself;

first -- at the very beginning -- he failed his original charge.

The Crown Princess started hanging back a little to spot these details; it took more than one save to keep her alive to make the observation she now does. Her sword points out through the ranks -- DEEP through -- which is to say UPWARDS, since the monsters keep spiraling down.

Endo can feel her words tear through his memory, through his mind.

"THERE! That one never moves."

It's true. There's a single rock in the river of ichorous, cthonic monsters flowing downwards to meet them in battle. Sometimes it is momentarily lost to sight, simply because there are too many others in the way. But it always reappears eventually, exactly where it was.

It seems like a creature like any of the others; strange and wrong and, individually, not all that tough.

Endo can see it.

"Together, we must break through and put an end to it!" she calls. "I will be the van!"

He knows what price the Crown Princess paid to save Belka -- and how it felt, as the Umbral Knight, to support but also survive the consequences of her choice.

This time, he doesn't have to watch. Endo -- Stern -- they can put an end to this, if he dares. They can protect everyone.

And, no doubt at all, everyone is in serious need of protection. There are just too many. Too many Outsiders. Too many stolen friends, stolen worlds. Everything is on the line and yet nothing is more painful than seeing the way wounds are opening up on the Device-wielders, the Pretty Cure, their friends. This can't go on.

Something has to give.

Someone...

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Passion braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure
Passion's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Lera Camry cleanly braces 34 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 6 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Lera Camry!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 10 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Cure White perfectly dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Cure White's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa fails to counter Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 32 Fatigue damage! Exhausted applied to Fate
Testarossa!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa's counterattack, Blitz Rush, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure White covers Cure Black for Pink Moon Stick's attack, Fever Pitch, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Cure White braces 16 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Exhausted applied to Cure White!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi partially dodges 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine perfectly counters 31 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Counter! Cure Pine's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine's counterattack, Pineapple Reverse, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa braces 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa's Block and
Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki perfectly dodges 33 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Kyouka Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Hayato Nishi transforms into Westar!
COMBAT: Westar has loaded his saved combat state! He is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki braces 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's Block and
Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Endo Naoki!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

He sees it. They both do, Endo and Stern. Something in the distant past overlaid against something urgently present.

There's a brief calm as his eyes slide across the space above.

"Is it..."

<THERE.>

"Right." The knight gives an affirmative nod as he raises his weapon to point.

"Hey!" He calls, "That's the thing!" He's not as eloquent as the Crown Princess unfortunately. But he conveys the same point. They'll get it.

Endo shows by leading the way. The Outsiders are already clawing and dragging, not eager to give any time to rest. Still he climbs, hacking a line upward as rain from the firmament.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera smashes through Outsiders, smacking them backward with her sword and shield. Another Outsider slams into her -- there's a flash of a girl firing an Intelligent Device like a gun, sending blasts of energy into the sky. She breathes out, teeth gritting for a moment.

But Endo calls out -- 'that's the thing' -- and she sees where he is headed. "Endo-kun!" she calls out. "Right! Let's go, everyone!"

She turns in midair, flying after him. She turns -- and looks at some of the encroaching Outsiders. Lera grits her teeth; she turns Broken Ground towards them.

Then, several bolts of golden light erupt, shooting towards Outsiders that get closer.

"What are we lookng for?" she calls back to Endo.

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"I know!" Fate says to Lera with a smile, but she's already moving, one wonders if she's moving faster than her voice, to the point where it's her afterimage that's speaking to her.

And Fate - as Mikoto says - does it. Pushing herself to her limit, to save someone. It does not matter if he's an awful person. Fate once thought she was too... but she knows now neither Mikoto nor herself are.

It's Ren who jumps into the fray, keeping her from disaster, as she offers one last, "Ren..." Then as she flies away, she gets a message, <<Thank you. I know you can do it.>>

Her telepathic broadcast to everyone above, is heard.

<<Safe. I caught him.>>

Even the eyes of Magical Girls would be hard pressed to see her smiling on the ground, and holding up two fingers in a V from the ground. However, Fate feels that moment, like once with the Resonance Drives.

A call to battle. A call to arms. The urge to follow the Crown Princess into battle is strong. Stronger than ever. But even as the Ebon Knight...

... there was always someone whose memory she was fighting for. She was following in her footsteps. It isn't the past in Ancient Belka.

She knows that perhaps fighting for a memory is a noble thing indeed, but there's something she values more in this moment, and it is not a lack of value in her friends. In fact, it is because she trusts them so much, she can make it - even as Endo charges.

She makes a choice. It is not an easy one.

<<I'm going to take him somewhere else - then there's something I have to do. Can I ask you all for some help... with a small wish of mine? Please, win. I know you can do it.>>

As Fate lifts up Jail, she walks, rather than flies at first, she doesn't want to attract extra attention other than above, and as one of them comes down at her...

... her leg vanishes inside of its maw, and she makes a noise of alarm at the same moment Bardiche chimes.

<Blitz Rush>

... the Outsider might swear the bite was solid, and it was, but it's maw is utterly empty... as Fate reappears closer to a particular crowd of Labyrinth Civilians, and a fairy, far, far away from the Outsider who attacked her.

"Can I ask you to watch after him for a while?"

A small ferret looks up at Fate, Fate who knows the ways of ferrets from her time battling one looks back. Tarte looks over his shoulder, then over to the rest of the crowd, then back at Fate, and points at himself.

"Wait... you want ME to do it!?"

"Who else?" Fate sounds confused, "Just be careful not to use a binding spell unless you have to, it might attract them." It's at the same moment that Fate flies off.

"I CAN'T ACTUALLY DO THAT!"

More confused as it's such a basic spell, Fate keeps flying off as she calls out back. "Then it's not a problem?"

Tarte slumps, then puts down his napsack and rummages through the contents to try to figure something out. "Maybe I can make it work with gum..."

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black stands, fist in the upper 'jaw' of the Outsider, trembling as she tries to hold its mouth open. "Seemed like a good plan," she sighs. A sunflower glow pulses around her.

"Ne, Saki-chan," Cure Black says. "Are you here? Can you understand?"

The maw lurches, trying to close on Black.

"They got you, huh? Strike three, you're out? No, probably not. Probably tagged you out at base, right? You're like me. You go for it when you shouldn't sometimes."

Lifting her other hand, Cure Black braces the fleshy ceiling above her, struggling. She feels like a walnut in a cracker, the leverage of the Outsider's size giving it an advantage in this contest. "Sorry you have to see me not looking so cool. It always felt good, having you think I was so awesome. I'm a pretty selfish person... to let you think that. Because I started before you, you know? Whenever I looked at you, it was like looking at myself two years ago."

The mouth grinds down, forcing Black's shoulders down. "I should have told you that. I should have said... 'you'll get here too. If we were the same age, you'd be here already.' Because..." Cure Black's feet spread, bracing herself to slow the descent of the mouth crushing her. "You're just like me, Saki. You were... just like me." Black's eyes close, spilling the tears in her eyes down her cheeks.

"And when I saw you and Mai together, I guess that's the closest I ever got to understanding." Black's knee hits the squishy ground, her strength finally starting to buckle entirely. "How a girl like her... could love me too. So it's okay, Saki. I'm glad I lost to you, so you know how strong you are. It's not bad... for it to end like this."

Cure Black's other knee hits the ground, her herculean strength quivering in her shoulders. Blood leaks from the puncture in her back, driven out by her straining.

"But I'm sorry," Black whispers. "I can't."

Moonlight floods the dim chamber, driving the golden light of a sunflower back. Cure Black's face is illuminated in gold. The back of her hair is an almost colorless silver. A silhouette at the edge of the Outsider's maw has cranked its mouth wide open, a girl in a skirt who seems, somehow, to be standing in front of a moon, even though she should be backdropped by the ground. Her hair, as it falls, happens to fall in halves, almost like twintails.

Cure Black smiles, gently, expectantly. "She won't let me."

Rent asunder, the Cure Bloom-infused Outsider falls towards the ground in pieces, its golden shield fizzling on and off. Carried princess-style by Cure White, Black looks down over White's shoulder, and gives the plummeting monster corpse a little wave.

Dropping onto the back of a new Outsider, White lets Black down onto the ground. "Are you all right?" she asks.

"Yeah." Black smiles, looking at the pulsing glow of moonlight on Cure White's skin. "What happened to you? Power up?"

"N-no," White startles. "Well..." She looks at Black's face. "If you think so."

"Huh?"

A burst of wind nearly knocks both Cures off the Outsider, as a vast pair of white wings spreads before them. An Outsider has grown feathers somehow, its frightening form now resembling a biblical angels, at once beautiful and unnatural. A keening cry washes over Cure Black and White, its empty hatred chilling.

"...Egret," Cure Black realizes, heartbroken.

Cure White closes one hand, touching into her chest as she looks towards the ground, realizing. "We took her from you," she says softly. "I'm so sorry, Mai." Despite (and because of) her shame, she reaches for the hand of the girl who brings a sunny smile into ''her'' life.

Cure Black shakes her head. "It's too late," she realizes, watching the Jail Outsider fleeing. "It's going to get away."

"We can try Marble Screw from here," Cure White insists, but Black can hear the doubt in her voice.

"Egret..." Black pleads, as if the Outsider might hear, and help them.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

Westar is, for very loose definitions of the word, safe right now. Miroku's grip is a firm one - why, if Westar didn't know better, he'd think the giant Child was trying to squeeze him to death - and with a head poking out, he can get a solid view of the battle.

He's not exactly a master tactician; he's only commanded one monster at a time, and honestly the only familiar thing here is 'being unfairly outnumbered'. Mikoto went off to fight that bug-ish Outsider, Fate went to save the guy who got eaten, and all the while Westar himself is kind of...stuck for a plan. And physically stuck, but mentally is the really big problem, he can squeeze free if he needs to. There's too many to fight fairly, so...if it was anyone who wasn't him in charge, the trick would be to fight unfairly, right?

'That's the thing' is the order of the day, and Westar looks for what someone sharper than him has spotted. One strangely still Outsider is...maybe important? But there's a lot of them in the way. Fortunately...as he did every time he inconvenienced Tokyo, Westar has a gargantuan ally.

"Hey, Miroku!" His voice comes out as a squeak - it's nice to be safely held but this is kind of a little much. There's no answer, but the baleful eye seems to glance at him. "I know I'm not your boss, but...I think that one thing might be important! Throw me up there, so we can-"

Apparently that was enough for Miroku to want to be rid of this not-his-child being, and Westar is duly hurled away from Miroku.

"Wait, wrong waaaaaaay-" Hurtling in somewhat the wrong direction, Westar flails around to try to find a path up - he glances off of one Outsider hard enough to bounce, manages an elbow-strike to rebound again, and he's hurtling somewhere into the fray, desperately trying to course correct.

He's hearing notes as he richochet-kicks his way slowly upward - and there's one faintly familiar light gleaming not too far away. Its magic is musical in nature, but with Westar's head ringing, he's not...entirely sure whether it's the holy major chords of a melodious rhythm, or the familiar minor tones of a felonious trio...

Maybe it's both. Some worlds were home to good and evil in equal measure, and whether the magic's land was Major or Minor, that's an Outsider that's stolen the essence of music. Someone should do something heroic here.

Westar himself is pinballing wildly, but he can try his best to serve. He owes it to the villains he fought beside and the Precure he fought against. There's a hint of a clef that's solid enough to kick off of (and no longer burns), there's a phantom of a staff that he can hook a hand on long enough to swing around - he throws himself as a projectile at the musical Outsider. If he can get through, then maybe he can get closer to where he could really help.

COMBAT: Westar has used Executive Pinball on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The blast flies. The strangely musical creature perishes in a burst and a flash.

It does not occur to la Sirene, exactly, what this means for the girl it reminded her for, in a grotesque manner. Sayaka. She may not be thinking that far ahead, exactly. This is a place with no rising action, merely descent. Action, surely, but how far are they above Labyrinth, now? If she fell, would she be heroically caught and taken to safety? What would that mean for the others - now missing two? Her eyes track Fate, but...

She cannot think poorly of that. It simply isn't something in the space where she exists now.

And then she hears another's voice.

La Sirene has been ascending semi-solitarily for a while, but Endo's voice rings out to her. It's not people speaking to themselves or to others, but Endo telling them something - telling *all* of them. Her head snaps towards him.

He points. 'That's the thing!'

La Sirene looks up.

She doesn't see it.

And yet...

... aren't there a lot of things you can't see, some of the time? She's never seen France or Mars, but she's certain they exist. She knows some of the language from one, and has met the guardian of the other.

... Is Endo the kind of person who would guess poorly, or speak up simply to encourage people? Would he be the kind of person who creates a hopeless cause from his analysis of what surrounds them, or would he simply hold his peace in such situations? La Sirene's lip twitches just a bit.

... Are there not the bonds between them? (La Sirene's trajectory has already curved towards Endo's.)

... isn't there no reason at all to doubt this?!

The thoughts flash through her mind, and la Sirene speaks: "It must be a ways away. Stern," she says, or shouts, over the chaos, "Did you detect it?" Lera immediately assents, and with that, la Sirene folds her arms over herself. The light around her begins to shimmer, and distort...

... and the funereal pose, her palms set against the joint of her shoulders, slowly shifts. Her fingers, cold but against slightly warmer skin, slid down, as if to clasp her own forearms. For reassurance? No - she feels confidence, doesn't she? If they are wrong, let it be as Chevaliers!

"I'll try to," la Sirene says, just as an Outsider turns (inverts) towards her and lunges (smears) at her -- and those stellate projections of dark-light that seem to come from however she is refracting her Pharos's ever watchful and (so far) undimmed irradiance? The Outsider would have to strike through one to hit her, to rend her asunder, or to simply swallow her whole.

Instead, its snout (proboscis) briefly, violently impales itself on the ray of light. It is not enough to END the thing, but it does at least move (smear) away while pulling (shattering) itself loose of the improbable spire of light.

"... Does it look," la Sirene begins, before frowning as she realizes she cannot even possibly find the words to describe these things. "Will it stand out?"

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Rising Towards The Decisive Battle... on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from Westar's Executive Pinball, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

There's many, and as Passion and her descend, more come in to fill them, which is why it's her reaction to them coming to simply grasp one out of mid-air with a gasp that's a mixture of both pain and disgust as she touches it, and suddenly pivot into a whirl, warding the Outsiders off with their own fellow, before pitching it up into a release, momentarily stunning the pack.

She was never 'a knight'... but when Endo calls for the charge, the Legendary Warrior Precure calls out to Passion, "Passion! We've got to catch up to him! If we don't..." Pine understands at least - it's far far more than just an adorable wolf that's at stake. She can see Black, stricken, and hear...

... Bloom...

...Egret...

Seeing her face, even from here, she puts her hands together, "Can I use you to jump off of? I can't teleport like you." Pause, small head cant, she thinks about it, "Though I guess I can teleport with you?"

It's hectic, she forgot she could do that. Or maybe it was Love taking advantage of Setsuna's ability to teleport that made her think it was impolite to ask?

"I... I promise it's for a better reason than a beach ball."

"Mouuu... don't bring that up. I said I was sorry for that!" Peach says in the midst of the fray, whereas Berry looks away awkwardly, pretending she was never a part of that. "After you didn't apologize right away and had a whole pillow fight over it."

"Hey! She started it!"

Pine sweats at Passion's ice cream look to Peach, but eventually she smiles and reaches out her hand to her...

... but Passion has other plans... "Huh!?"

"Ha! That's perfect! Impressive as always Passion."

"SuGOI! I've never seen you do something like that! Ahaha... I'm glad it's water under the bridge... Now-! Senpai! Mind if we lend you a hand?" Peach says as she changes focus mid-jump, her eyes fixing upon the Outsider. "There's no way we're letting it get away." Pine tells Black and White. Before Passion corrects them, and Peach looks astounded, "EHHH!? Really!? Okay everyone! ... Let's follow Passion!"

"You weren't paying attention at all, were you?" Berry notes, as Peach replies, "I definitely was! It's just Passion was paying ''better'' attention! Together! Precure-"

It's a different vibe, perhaps from Black and White in this moment, but it's not them not taking the situation seriously. It's because... whether this is their last day together or not, they're all trying to get their happiness together. And they can only do that... as themselves.

BGM - Precure Eien no Tomodachi (New Stage OP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRDF9WntP0

It's no longer a problem figuring out how they're going to get there, as they all land and launch themselves off in synch the newfound footing, and forward in an enormous arcing leap...

"...Collaboration..."

... Pine draws her fist back with all of them, and pink, blue, yellow, and red join white and black leap into the fray in a titanic arc down the center like an armed missile, ready to detonate down the center with a strength only this many Precure at once can muster.

"... PUNCH!"

COMBAT: Cure Pine has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion remembers the dreams. She remembers what she was there. And she notices that they keep going, despite all their hits. Despite all their efforts. Pine, Peach, and Berry are with her, and that counts for a lot. Lera is still fighting out there, too. And their friends... Ren, and Endo, and Kyouka, and Mikoto, and La Sirene. And she thinks she even hears--

"Westar!" Passion calls. Then she says deadpan to Pine,"I wouldn't do guessing games at a time like this," Passion agrees with Pine. But someone who needs saving...? Hmmmm. She would remember that. But despite the fact that she'd threatened Lucky herself--

'Right!" Passion answers Pine, and smiles. "Together. ...And we'll have to go see Lucky after this, too."

They will.

But there is something--

"Endo!" Passion calls. The thing? Well, it doesn't have to be eloquent to make sense to her; after all, one of her better friends is Mikoto there, after everything.

He's leading the way. Which means...

Endo calls for a charge, and Cure Passion nods sharply to Pine. "Well--" Pause. She can teleport with her! But... for a better reason than a beach ball. "I didn't forget," Passion says evenly, that small smile still on her face--but a harder look in her eyes. An ice cream look in her eyes. "...But I forgive you." All of them!? Apparently!

"Let's go!" A pause. "But there's no ground up there, so..."

Passion reaches back to the tower. "I'll bring us some! Akarun, with me!"

Passion ''grips'' a broken piece of the tower with both hands. "Haaaaaah--!"

She ''rips'' it free, dust and debris scattering and falling towards the barrier below, and as she turns, BLIPS--

In a crimson flash, she is gone. And then, she, Pine, Berry, and Peach are ''there'', behind Cure Black and Cure White.

"That way!" Passion calls, and spins with her prize of rock. "Endo-kun says it's there! Let's clear him a path together!" A beat, then a shout, "ENDO! We're coming!"

"Pretty Cure...!"

She ''swings''--and then ''blip'', the six of them blink out, and back in, onto the platform that's already rising from how Passion threw it.

But the beautiful white wings that seem to belong to Cure Egret's heart will have to be faced in order to break through. And then, from there--

"Collaboration...!" Cure Passion rears back her fist, in perfect time with Peach and Berry and Pine and soon Black and White, her blow seeming to push forward in slow motion, as if punching through deep, deep water to reach the foe ahead--

Or maybe it just has that much force behind it. "PUNCH!"

COMBAT: Cure Passion has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Mikoto nods, when she 'hears' Fate, in her head. "Right!" She agrees to win so easily, so readily, but what else can she do? She is elementally herself.

And her element is black glass, just like...

"There?!" Endo might well look positively loquacious next to ''Mikoto,'' but she understands his meaning perfectly, simple though it is. Birds of a feather don't make speeches together.

Another Outsider looms in front of her, horns coming from its horns coming from its horns, and bronze and gold warp through the air, not quite colouring the beast as much as inhabiting existence around it. Mikoto turns to it, and her brow knits in tension.

"But... I still got things to say to you," she says, even as Miroku recognises the profane manifestation, too -- and brings his terrible greatclub down on it.

He hurls Westar away in his next motion, as if in ''pique.'' Can Children feel pique? Miroku can.

"Ah... Miroku!" Mikoto cries, but Westar is fine, he has a thick skull. The great beast turns, and Mikoto turns, too, a whole half-circle on his massive back to find la Sirene in her confusion.

"That thing!" She calls, to her, helpfully. "Endo said!"

And then she pauses, and tilts her head.

"... the different one!" She decides, as a good explanation, because she's the best at explaining things. (Chitose wept.) "See? It's not moving? Come on! We gotta help Endo!"

And so they move.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts La Sirene de Diamant's Rising Towards The Decisive Battle..., taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Mikoto Minagi is Reinforced by La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Expression on La Sirene de Diamant.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren gasps as she lands hard against a floating piece of debris, her limbs trembling from exhaustion. The wound she sustained just moments ago is excruciating, not doubt because of the void-like nature of the Outsiders. Fate's mental message is heard, and Ren smiles despite the pain. <<Of course we'll win, Fate-chan! Be careful!>>

On top of that she can clearly feel her reserves running low, giving her a sensation not unlike a weight pulling her deeper into the abyss of depletion.

Ren next hears Endo's call, the urgency in his voice cutting through the chaos of the battlefield. Her head jerks up, scanning the sky. "That's the thing!" He'd said. The key to all of this.

A sharp cry from the right draws her attention--another wave of Outsiders rushing toward her, their alien forms shifting and writhing, adapting as they have again and again. And like before, one of them radiates something familiar...

Alyce.

Rens breath catches as memories flood her mind. The dedicated and hard-working TSAB mage she'd met in the nascent days of her magical career. "Ducati-san...!" Ren feels herself getting choked up at the sudden exposure to such potent remembrances. Fighting alongside such an experienced magic-user had been ''profoundly'' beneficial for her own development. She'd often wondered just how she could ever show her gratitude...

BGM -- Nana Mizuki -- Silent Bible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC6tfg8k7nw

...Well, now that chance has presented itself. She cant afford to burn out now. Not when Alyces magic--her essence--has been stolen. Not when she still has the means to fight. The Outsiders dont wait. They lunge toward her, screeching in unison. The one bearing Alyces magic is conveniently at the forefront. Good.

"I wont let you keep it," Ren growls, and with a yell engages the onslaught, kicking and punching with all of the force and fury she can muster.

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used For Alyce! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Ren Aizawa's For Alyce!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka unleashes her attack from inside the Outsider, and it consumes it in a large ball of violet-white light--and thankfully Kyouka works her way free as the defeated outsider starts to fall, though she's, admittedly, falling herself.

"Alright, one more time!"

<Lunar Impact.>

Kyouka swings--but sees the Outsider she was aiming for juke ''just'' out of her range and frowns. And she's still falling. Back to the original plan, then. She kicks at the air, and a shockwave of bright violet energy erupts from her heel, sending her rocketing sideways. She misses the outsider, but a quick readjust lets her feint and hit the next one, and now she rebounds off of that one to redirect her momentum back upwards.

"Guys, I think these things are learning and that's giving me a bad feeling!" She's having to work harder to ricochet her way up through the torrent of Outsiders, too--thankfully, she's got fast reflexes, and thankfully, she's adaptive.

But this is still taxing, and she's not even sure what she's heading for, yet.

And then Endo has an answer he points. "Got it, Endo! I got your back!" Two zips through the air and an attack net her another boost upwards, stomping the top of an outsider so she can rocket further up, though she's lagging behind her flying peers.

She spares the briefest of glances as Fate broadcasts that Jail is safe. She'll trust Fate's judgment, though... it's not like she would've left him to die, either. But she asks them all for a favor... A small wish. To please win. <<You got it, Fate! Good luck!>>

She's surging upwards, and she sees her next target to rebound off of, but pauses, just a moment. There's something familiar about that bright celadon glow... and as she gets closer she can feel the refreshing winds of a of an uplifting breeze sweeping out from it, the gentle placidity of a lake...

"Shamal-san," Kyouka breathes in with a sharp breath.

She will never forget that moment, when she thought she was at her most powerless, that she heard Shamal's gentle but firm voice in her ear. How she said that her magic was a part of ''her'', that Strike Wolf helped control it but that it was still ''her'' magic.

And at her urging, when Ren's house was in immediate danger of being attacked by Jail and his Dark Devices--''Kyouka'' had been the one to cast the barrier. Her powr, her will, made manifest, shifting everything over half a dimension to the right.

It was revelatory, knowing that some intrinsic part of ''her'' was magical. That it wasn't all just Strike Wolf.

That... there hadn't been some mistake to why she had become a magical girl in the first place.

Three kicks at the air, three shockwaves send her zipping back and forth as she approaches, kicks, and resumes surging upwards, the long tails of her belt flapping wildly around her as she tore ever higher into the sky.

"Strike Wolf, I think we need a new trick!" she shouts as she scans the battlefield.

<Affirmative.>

Despite herself, Kyouka grins. "Then together!"

As she ascends Kyouka punches her fist forward. A glowing violet circle preceeded her, as an array of bright violet balls spring into life in front of it. "Go!" she shouts.

Strike Wolf announces, <Hunting Shot.>

All of the balls of magic blast off in front of her, surging forward. But just before the start to impact they break apart, splitting up as Strike Wolf tries to move them in unpredictable patterns to try and throw off the Outsiders.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Hunting Shot on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Hunting Shot, taking 18 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Expression, taking 0 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de Diamant is
Reinforced by Mikoto Minagi!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

One moment, Cure Black and Cure White were facing an avenging angel, its hideous beauty spreading feathers across the sky, unfolding a tragic confrontation pinion by pinion. The next, they are surrounded by laughing friends. Shaken, the two older Cures glance around themselves, and begin to smile as well, sadly at first. But then Peach's suGOI sails up her register, and Black cracks, giggling, followed a moment later by White.

"Thank you," White whispers to Passion with a gentle smile, below the warm words of their other friends.

Cure Black reaches over and squeezes Pine's shoulder, shaking it around familiarly, then pulling her into a momentary side-hug. "Endo needs that one, huh?" she confirms.

"Endo called a new play," White tells Black softly. Black glances at her in surprise. They are both thinking of the same athlete, now. The same tree, out in Tama.

"Got it," Black says, her voice tight. "We won't lose."

"Not when we're together," White agrees. "All of us."

Like a row of archers, the six Pretty Cure pull back their fists, and the draw is heavy.

<SoundTracker> Precure Eien no Tomodachi (New Stage OP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRDF9WntP0

''Collaboration...!''

''PUNCH!''

With an avian keen, the Outsider before them throws its great wings back. A lens of force the color of a robin's egg turns the air to diamond, a shield much like the one that stopped Cure Black's punch dead when she attacked Bloom's Outsider, even as the wind from white wings blasts at the Pretty Cure. But what would have thrown them back individually, even if they had attacked merely at the same time, has almost no effect on six Pretty Cure truly acting ''as one''. Six fists slam into the shield. And they knock through it like a brick through a glass window.

As its shield shatters, the Egret Outsider draws its wings back gracefully, unnaturally fast. But even as it begins to close them down on the attacking Pretty Cure, a spiral of six indents appears on its back for an instant, as the impact on its front lands. Then, explosively, its body erupts into pieces, a beautiful starburst of feather and energy. Nothing quite like it has been seen before. It ought to be remembered.

But there is no artist here who would be capable of drawing this sight.

Malign, horrifyingly aggressive, the Outsiders see this show of raw force and move ''towards it'', their lack of fear more eloquent than any verbal threat that might have come from a more human foe. But among those Outsiders, there are those that hear the call more keenly. Perhaps the Outsiders understand how to fight fire with fire. Could it be, perhaps, that some part of them even heard Peach's call, and recognized that it was for them?

Fast as a hare, an Outsider Whips into the Pretty Cure's path, bursting into sugary sparkles. Undulating as if through The Sea, two similar-looking Outsiders grow filmy fish-wings, crisscross, and slam into the Collaboration punch, their long Mermaid tails pumping to drive the attackers back, but are reduced to a briny spray across the brows of the six heroines.

A fierce procession of some of the most powerful Outsiders rise to the challenge, and are smashed to bits. A butterfly-winged Outsider seems unstoppable until they pass through it like a Dream. Two more butterflies follow, and douse the six Pretty Cure in the refreshing scent of Mint Lemonade. A small Outsider bursts apart with a sound like an acoustic guitar being smashed, its Muse departing.

Cures Black and White exchange a brief glance, after that one, and a nostalgic smile.

A long path has already been cleared, but the offensive faces its greatest challenge yet, as an array of four fearsome Outsiders form a Lovely, quad-barrier, like the crown of a Princess. It even manages to resist the Collaboration Punch for a moment, before caving to the same Fortune as the others, Honey droplets spraying.

Just before the Punch reaches that Jail Outsider, a final offensive is mounted, an impromptu team of six monstrosities to face six girls. Posh Berry is confronted with the Beauty of an elegant Outsider. Genki gyaru Peach stares into an array of alien eyes that Twinkle like stars. Cures Black and White face a duo of monsters that somehow embody a swaggering androgyny and a winsome femininity, attached together like a two-layer Chocolat Macaron. Empathetic vet Cure Pine confronts an undulating Outsider like a blob of yellow Custard. And Cure Passion, an outsider herself in a way, faces a being that is nothing but alien, Scarlet flame.

The impact is thunderous. The sky shakes. The air wishes it could split, pleads to break.

And when the six Outsiders explode, and the Pretty Cure Collaboration punch hits the Jail Outsider at last, of course it pops like a balloon.

The way between Endo and his target is nothing but empty air, made from a tunnel of torn apart monsters.

"Game to Juuban," Cure Black whispers. "For you, Saki."

COMBAT: Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White have used Precure Collaboration Punch! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White's Combo: Precure Collaboration Punch!,
taking 457 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White are Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

<<The one that doesn't move!>> Endo shouts back to Lera, the mental echo of his words cutting through the battle to reach her and the rest of the magical girls.

He pushes off one of the nearest monsters, rocketing toward the heart of the invader.

<<Ren... everyone! Make sure to get it!>>

<SoundTracker> Still in the Dark (Daisuke Ishiwatare) - One More Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPA3Y-acjb0

There are always more of the OutsidersOutsider. Tens, hundreds, millions. They fall like rain but each one leaves some mark of its passing on the young man. A cone of pink energy sends Endo off course, another blue and white glimmer turns the horizon into a field of gleaming swords. The knight's barrier jacket bleeds a violet contrail as each blow chips away at his defensive shell.

Closer...

<<This time we'll destroy it.>>

And closer...

<THIS TIME WE'LL SAVE THEM.>

ALmost...

<EMERGENCY VENTS CLOSED. DISABLING LIMITER. AT 90. 100. 115. 125...>

The Outsiders form up like a defensive membrane.

<<Ready?>>



Purple-black flares out from the Device in a long line that soon grows into a searing column of starlight. It pulses, the magical energy lighting the knight as he makes a vicious arc toward the defended core of their existential enemy.

<STERN BRETCHER.>

The pillar of light, bigger and brighter than it's ever been, connects with the wall of glowing aliens.

It does not cut.

There are just too many, an endless mass replenishing and pushing back, back, back. Endo's hands shake. The pylon falters.

<<Stern-->>



<SoundTracker> Still in the Dark (Daisuke Ishiwatare, Noah Thys) - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dILd4K1HKec

So can Endo. They need him to. He grits his teeth and pushes harder. Hard enough to make the wall give.

In the roar of magic it would be impossible to hear the cracks running across the surface of the gem in the weapon's pummel. But Endo can feel them. His hand falters and so does the blade.

<NO. WE ARE NOT FINISHED.>

Endo's grip tightens. More jagged lines break across Fallen Stern's surface. "I won't let go!" They push one last time. Magic tears through magic.

<KNIGHT. THANK YOU. IT WAS AN HONOR TO SERVE. THIS TIME--I WILL GO ALONE.>

IMPACT.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Endo Naoki has used SUPERNOVA on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

What happens to a star when it dies depends on its mass. The smaller celestial bodies burn and wither, fuming heat into the icy black darkness of space for billions of years.

What happens here is the other option. As the purple-black light swells it shifts to a blindingly white hue. As the core of Endo's partner collapses a deafening showave rends the sky along with the final detonation. What is left behind is an inky purple nebula.

And one Endo Naoki. There's no armor, no magic left.

--But there's still life. A dying star leaves some building blocks behind.

A long time ago--not that long really, but it seems like forever now--Endo made an oath and became a knight. When he started he thought he was the only one who could protect the world. He learned better. He can rest.

Because if he couldn't do it, one of the magical girls behind him will.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Endo Naoki's Finisher, SUPERNOVA, taking 297 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Magic Sword, The Way Home - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCikIkXslP0

Afterwards, the most striking thing was how CLOSE it was.

The magical girls brought all of their terrific force to bear, and it was spectacular indeed, but--

But.

That there was a but at all is horrifying.

That there is a but at all is crucial.

And sure, we can ask the question again as history tries to repeat.

What 'but' could stand up to the golden bolts of the Midchildan-American Lera Camry and her Devices, one of whom, Soaring Sky, is as tied to this history as Fallen Stern? The pinball mayhem of Westar, Executive of Labyrinth, who bounces from foe to foe like a ladder of death, a ladder for Endo to climb? Ren's hammering of gauntlets and greaves at the legions of doom, taking not the battle but the entire battlefield to them, all for the memory of one of her very first mentors and friends? Kyouka's rent airspace, from which pour balls of violet light, to draw away with cleverness rather than destroy with strength? Cure Passion and Cure Pine and Cure Peach and Cure Berry and Cure Black and Cure White punching as one -- creating almost a localized vacuum of their own, not Outside space but Within space, warping space, filling space, and ultimately, dramatically, clearing space?

The answer has to do with numbers, and it has to do with size, and -- because being outnumbered and small has never stopped a legion of magical girls on their worst day, let alone their best -- it has to do with sacrifice.

Of course the creature, who has been spending the lives of his legion like toenails, does not hesitate to spend them -- faster, harder, more -- in his own defense. Most of the progress was made in the first few seconds, before the girls' path -- Endo's path -- became clear. After that...

After that, every meter up the column towards him was its own little war. Trench after trench the attacks of the magical girls advanced, clearing them out, but more and more slowly, more and more desperately.

There is just so much ocean, no matter how sweet the shore.

By the time he reaches the master creature, Endo's armor drips with his own blood, at every joint and cavity; and it's splashed with the black ichor of these monstrous unbeings, who throw themselves so eagerly upon his greatsword -- his pillar of violet light -- which falls even as he rises.

He gives everything.

They give everything.

Fallen Stern... implodes.

And the crucial Outsider, the one he saw, guided by the memory of a Princess, brings up his claws in feeble self-defense, and Endo looks up into what passes for his face. Something passes between him and the hive king, before he's eviscerated in a magnificent burst of Umbral power.

A final burst...

All the remaining monsters scream as one -- they scream with his voice, any voice, for the first time -- because, of course, they are him. Their limbs lose their grip on their enemies; they lose their grip even on the air; and they fall.

...their gravity is not Labyrinth's, and never was. Their gravity -- metaphysical, philosophical -- calls them back the way they came.

They fall upwards...

Driven not by any inverted cosmological constants but rather by the extraordinary force of Fallen Stern's sacrifice, Endo is falling with them, too.

Towards the inverted portal. Towards... Outside.

BUT.

But last time, even though she made it back to the ground -- which Endo is not going to do, safely or fatally, unless someone intervenes very quickly -- the Crown Princess died with a final lamentation on her lips:

"My only regret," she coughs, "Is that in saving our world from them... we have surely doomed another. I only wish... we had the power... to save..."

'Them all' dies on her lips, and so does she.

And she was right to regret. Her final stand didn't save Belka, in the end. Considering the chain of events set off by the grief and despair following her sacrifice, she died for, very possibly, less than nothing. Worse than nothing.

The Outsiders are leaving, because they are unable to stay. But they aren't gone. They aren't solved.

So many terrible things happened because of it.

To Belka. To so many other worlds.

To Labyrinth, at Northa's hands -- the Queen's.

And now, to everywhere.

BUT.

But... what can the magical girls do now that the Belkans didn't do back then?

The ancient Belkans went to war. It was their way; it had always been their way.

The modern magical girls... of Tokyo, of Earth -- natives and far-travelers alike, they are certainly all OF Earth by now... they have their own ways, don't they?

When everything is hopeless -- they wage something else entirely.

They wield the power... of refusal.

Souverain Heraut, more than the other Devices, understands this viscerally. And through him, Ren suddenly remembers the truth of the Cephiran Princess he was originally made for, a lady who was the other sort of Pillar, made not of light but of love:

<< You don't have to accept fate. >>

No one does.

But -- this isn't right.

The Outsiders are too strange to easily empathize with; too alien; too frightening. There's really only one emotion, a singular essence, that anyone has been able to comprehend:

HUNGER.

They have, by all indications, no individuality. The Outsiders just hunger because they hunger. The swarm in its entirety cannot really be said to have a mind at all, even if it did have a core and does have the capability to act in its defense.

It is primal. Elemental. Like matter and antimatter. Magic attracts them and they destroy everything.

But -- it isn't ''fair''.

It is, in a way, not even their fault. They are what they are, without even Fate Testarossa's beloved, essential, passionately taken, and kindly offered, freedom of choice. A freedom the Radiant Knight embraced and the Umbral Knight rejected. A freedom the Cephiran Princess died for, so that the three Devices could live to fulfill their destinies as heroes, with heroes, empowering heroes, befriending heroes.

It's just too sad.

What is so wrong with being hungry, anyway?

Does hunger in itself have to always be such a bad thing?

The world likes to tell girls that it is so. Truly the temptation to gender the Outsiders as male at all is a byproduct of this cultural dynamic, ne? It isn't maidenly to be hungry; it isn't proper to eat as much as you want, as much as you need; certainly it isn't polite to show how much you want and need and hunger.

A man's appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite -- for food, for love, for simple attention -- is always voracious: she always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist.

Like the Outsiders...

...they aren't supposed to exist here, either.

But.

Must desire be monstrous?

BUT.

Isn't it very... human?

BUT--!!

People got hurt. People died. That matters too.

But, it all matters. It all matters so much.

Everyone, everything, deserves better.

...ne. do you want to know a secret?

But: the world can be changed.

The distance is so, so vast. This isn't Fate and Nanoha; Eas and Peach; Mikoto and Mai; Westar and Mikoto; the Sirens of Sorrow's Sea. It's absurd to even imagine the possibility that extradimensional aliens can be reached. Can connect... Can be understood, and understand themselves. Can be, even, accepted... no longer Outside at all, but invited In.

All it takes is an outstretched hand.

All it takes is a miracle.

OOC: This can be interpreted however people imagine. If you're extremely not on board with it your character doesn't have to
receive any of these i

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

OOC: This can be interpreted however people imagine. If you're extremely not on board with it your character doesn't have to
receive any of these insights; or could think through them and reject them. There is no one right way; and there are so many
different kinds of miracles. This scene has room for all of them.

OOC: PS someone (probably rhymes with Whyzawa) needs to go save Endo before he falls out of the universe. you can also still
finisher, it's fine

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

~*Elsewhere*~

Fate is very fast right now, so it's not long before she shows up at her destination, where her 'Wish' is quietly at stake. The battle still rages far from here.

Two of them are still unconscious, while 'You' watches her as she approaches. "You have returned."

"Yes." Fate replies quietly to her.

'You' points out the obvious, "They're still fighting." And Fate nods, "Yes." Before she walks up to the other two, and examines them for a moment, "... They've been drained this completely. I didn't realize..." Fate puzzles over the situation, it's different from Jail, it's more similar perhaps to the Wolkenritter, what they did to everyone's Linker Cores, but far worse.

Something's missing... and while she doesn't know what that means, she decides not to take a chance. And so she raises Bardiche.

<Divide Energy.>

Gold and violet streams out of him, in Midchildan runes that flow like ribbons into the unconscious pair, as Fate lets that energy flow from her into both of them.

'You' goes silent, you can feel her brain trying to understand what Fate is doing, and just not quite getting it. It's at that moment that Stern goes up, far away, and there is an enormous explosion that rocks everything, even here. Fate stands stable, despite it all... she looks, for a moment, then closes her eyes, and takes a breath.

Despite the feeling... she has to trust, and turns back to 'You'.

"It's okay to say what's on your mind." Fate tells her, as she does her work, and 'You' after one long moment replies, "It isn't my role... to think. Even speaking feels strange."

"But, you have thoughts on what I'm doing." She prompts her, and 'You' replies, "Yes. I cannot understand why you would weaken yourself, for these two. In their current state, they're without value to this conflict."

"That's not right." Fate says softly, without any remonstration in her tone, merely explanation. "I'm not doing this because I want you three to fight. I want to do this... because..."

I wanted this in real life, too.

"I want this, for real. I want to know who each of you will become. I want, the three of you to come home with me. I want you to call out to the three of you... with something real, something you picked for yourself."

There's no small amount of sentiment in her tone, as she says, "I want the three of you. It's... my wish. It's selfish for me to be here rather than there." She thinks of Lera, Endo, Ren, Mikoto, Setsuna, Vita, Signum, Hayate, Nanoha... and Lindy, who taught her this, "But I trust them to finish the battle without me... and be at my side for what comes after."

It's just a little wish. And that's wonderful.

'You' looks like she still doesn't quite understand all the words she said, not in the sense of definition. She knows what all those words mean, she just can't comprehend why Fate would string them together that way, and what it means.

But after a moment... she says something else.

"But you've been calling out to me with something real already." 'You' points out, and Fate blinks, as if not understanding herself. Until she realizes she's been saying 'You' over and over and over and over.

And laughter leaves her lips, just this momentary chuckle, before she beams a smile.

"Well, it's just my opinion... but I think we can do better than that. Once this is over..." And extends a hand towards her. "... let's figure it out together."

She does not understand what Endo and Stern just sacrificed at this moment, not yet. She will later, for now... but for now, this is a glimpse of Stern's sacrifice may have bought her.

Just a little wish.

She'll show her gratitude later for them granting it to her.

'You' does not understand the gesture, or the motive, and Fate receives no insights, but that does not mean there is no miracle here. Both Fate and 'You' (Real name pending) are proof...

... that the empty can become full. Of memories in Fate's case, of desires, of purpose's given and changed and kept. As 'You' finally takes her hand, not because it was ordered, but offered, within that small gesture of someone who was merely an instrument, can consider a life greater than that too.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"Doesn't move!" Lera shouts back to Endo. "I've got it!"

She sucks her breath in as they fly forward, and she watches Endo fly forward, ahead of them all, and surrounded by Outsiders. She grits her teeth, until she comes sharply to a stop -- as she sees the shockwave that rips through the Outsiders' ranks.

But at a cost.

"Endo!" she shouts. Then, with a stammer -- and realization: "S-Stern..."

<Godspeed.> Soaring Sky's voice chimes, solemnly. After all, Stern was his comrade, even if it was something he hadn't remembered.

But Endo is falling upward, towards that portal leading to somewhere else. The source of so many sorrows and woes; but there's also that sense of something else. The desire, alien as it is, that the Outsiders have -- and the lack of understanding.

There is a moment where Lera hesitates. But, then she realizes: the answer isn't one or the other. It's the same as it ever is.

Both. Stop them and understand them, in one stroke.

"C'mon, Passion, Ren-chan," Lera says, looking at her girlfriend then her best friend. "Let's do this for Stern!"

She swings Soaring Sky out to one side. The blade of the Device splits in half; lightning crackles between the two halves of the blade, motes of energy drawing down into it.

<Aurora!>

And then, it expands outward. A beam of gold-red light, burning white at the center, that rises up until it's a single, massive sword of energy.

<GALAXY!>

And then Lera rises up -- and swings it down with an enormous flash out of light.

"DIVIDER!"

COMBAT: FINISHER! Lera Camry has used Aurora Galaxy Divider on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Fallen Stern and Endo give ''more''. And Passion is there, with a front-row seat, along with the other Cures. She ''sees'' it when he presses forwrd, again and again, farther and farther, until the light is too bright to look at. And then she keeps looking, because she's already been burned by Light before, and she has to ''watch''. She won't look away.

She doesn't, as Fallen Stern goes alone. And yet...

Is he really alone?

"Fallen Stern!" Passion calls. "Endo!"

...But she recognizes it. The power of a sacrifice--the power of a desire to protect. ...A desire to see something through.

How can she not understand it, when one of her best friends is Usagi Tsukino? But in the same way, Cure Passion feels...

She feels ''greed''.

Cure Passion wants more than this. She wants more than just to save her world. She wants to save the people already lost. She wants to save the ones who were hurt. She wants to ensure this never has to happen again.

Cure Passion wants it all, a far far cry from Eas who only wanted the one thing, and was never able to get it, could never have gotten it in ten thousand more years. She wants ''all'' of it, just like they got Westar and Soular back.

"Lera!" Passion calls, as she's called in turn. "...Sky! Ground!"

"Yes," she says. "...You..."

"I hope you like Labyrinth!" she calls to Lera. "Because I'm going to spend a lot of time here!"

She starts to fall, of course. That's just how it is, with gravity. She starts to fall, and as she does, she hears that ''but''. She hears those feelings, or feels them more like, understands them. She understands as surely as she once ''didn't'' understand. Maybe...

Maybe there's a way to get back what they've lost. They just have to accept a little more, to go along with it.

She reaches out--for Cure White's hand, and for Cure Peach's hand. She closes her eyes, even as her hair whips all around in the wind--until, suddenly, it ''doesn't'' whip upward so much, and her fall begins to be arrested through no apparent action.

Somewhere, she knows, Fate is being selfish. She knows it in her heart. And she's so, so glad of that. Maybe it's time... for her to be a little selfish, too.

"Together," Passion says, first to Cure Peach, and then to Cure White. "...Because..."

"It's not enough to 'win'," she says. "If I only wanted to 'win'... I could've beaten Pretty Cure, one day. But I wanted more than winning. And I want more now."

"I'm hungry," Cure Passion says. "I'm hungry, and... I think we should share."

"...We have enough for everyone, don't we? At the table in my mom's house... there's always room for another person. All that time ago, that extra person was me."

It's not that Passion immediately comes to love her enemies; it was never like that. ...It's that her relationships ''changed'', and by the end, she wasn't in love with an enemy; she was in love with a friend, trusting a sister.

So...

"Even for them, if they can learn some manners. ...But maybe we can teach them."

It's not that she loves the Outsiders.

It's that one, she ''was'' an outsider. And you never know...

...If tomorrow's friend wasn't yesterday's foe.

Passion closes her eyes again. "...If you'll give me back my people," she says, and the people of Labyrinth now are ''her'' people, "And everyone else..."

"We'll make room for you in Labyrinth, too. Right Westar? Soular?" She can feel Westar out there, even now. Fighting just with them. And...

"And if you just want magic..."

She grins. "Then Lera's already sending you all you need. My girlfriend won't fail, either."

She grows serious a final time. "...Let's all learn what we can be. Together."

Because it's not about deserving. It's about a choice.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

<SoundTracker> It's only the fairy tale - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqKHgd0eB0

Endo and Fallen Stern climb impossibly high, and Mikoto knows just what target he's talking about. She doesn't know so much about her numbers, but even she knows -- what it means to go over a hundred percent. "Fallen Stern!" She cries out, her voice breaking with the volume of it. "Still carrying that?! It's too heavy!"

(She's talking about his failures.)

"Fallen Stern--!!", and she might have warned him that if he keeps going he can't come back, except he knows that very well, and her words fail her as the emotions clutch around her throat. Yes, he's tried to defeat her and Miroku, but --

But --

"Don't go," she says, but quietly, to the being who was proof that Miroku could get better.

He's gone.

He's gone, and Mikoto doesn't have time to sit with the tears in her eyes, because Endo's all out of magic. The magic beneath ''her'' moves, first, jets firing as the Child soars upwards. "Miroku--! Ah, right! I'll cover, Ren!" She knows that Ren will catch him, and she...

She has enemies to...

Defeat, her mind supplies, helpfully, but something catches in her throat like a chicken-bone, as she watches the Outsiders fall upwards, like she's watching her own limp body fall down half a cruise ship.

Is it so strange to empathise with something dark, sinister and eldritch? Mikoto loves her Lord Brother, though he means no good for the Earth. And she looks at these things she can't quite get a good look at, and she realises...

"Miroku!" Mikoto cries out, grasping her blade. "I know what to do!"

And that great beast rumbles, beneath her.

"Make the biggest torture, Miroku! The worst worst one!"

His hand free, Miroku is free to heft it up. There's a moment's pause, as if calculating, before blackness collects in his palm. He hurls it at the mass of retreating Outsiders, dead centre.

<SoundTracker> I'm Hungry - Once Again! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQLpJcAdc_k

IT IS...

An eldrich horror sized curry bun.

"Get it?!" Mikoto cries out, into the abyss. "Stealing food means your mouth hurts! If you're hungry, ask for dinner!"

... what on earth is she doing?!

COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Execution on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

"He does." Pine tells Black as she squeezes her shoulder, her smile fading a moment later to become something more resolute, "So let's go lend him a hand."

Or, rather six hands. Or many many more, should those who are in spirit count. But when Endo pushes further, she remarks, "What- What are they-"

Pine turns her head away from the blinding glare, squeezing her eyes shut, and when she dares to look again, there's a hand over her mouth, and a small gasp. "... Naoki-san."

She doesn't really understand what he did, what happened. There's just an inkling that it's... awful, "... And Aizawa-san is... Oh God." That last part is softer, as she understands at least that his girlfriend is here, watching all that.

It feels like a victory... but one that feels so tragically temporary. As Cure Pine arcs down from the punch, and begins to fall, as they all begin to be drawn back towards the portal, she feels something...

... hunger...

... hunger...

... hunger...

Ravenous, endless. People have to eat three meals a day, and 'Buki knows enough from dance practice about letting herself go hungry, but right now, feeling it... "They're like animals..." Pine notes dully. Wolves hunt on instinct, hunt in packs. Even if adorable little bunnies become their meals, that's how it's supposed to be, isn't it? Is it really ''wrong'', what they're doing?

"... we can't allow it, but..."

But what? What's the solution? It's not like they can kill them all, put the remainders in a zoo, feed them meals of magic every now and then as children gawk at the strange magical predators. What do you do?

What can you do?

Pine thinks on it. Well, what is the solution? Do you just give them all the bunnies?

"... what if..."

What if there were endless bunnies?

That's a strange thought to think on, to turn about in her head, but...

"... what if..."

And as she finds her solution, she looks to Passion, then to Black. Watching Passion take White and Peach's hands... Pine reaches for Black's hand... and and Berry's...

"... Because..."

She echoes with Passion and waits for her answer. Then... tries to articulate her own, "It's not fair. They're just following their instincts. They have to eat too. So what if..."

What if they gave them more than they could ever eat? And more than that besides? It feels strange. They can't do that here, it's dangerous. Too many 'bunnies' and the world will be overrun. Too much magic, and someone will always come for it.

But where they come from?

"... what if we sent it with them."

The Outsiders may not be Wolves. Nor are they cute bunnies, but... if it gives Setsuna back her people. If it stops this fighting because they have enough prey. Then...

"... the Yellow heart is the Emblem of Faith. Freshly harvested..."

Freshly harvested... perhaps that's it, if they can send them a bountiful harvest... she'll have faith.

"... I believe, that it can be better."

For the Outsiders. For them. Even if they don't know happiness, that doesn't mean that helping them can't give them all happiness.

"... Together." She agrees, and has faith in the idea that Peach always tells them. They can get their happiness ''together''. Trying for just themselves - is destined to fail. Letting the Outsiders satisfy themselves means they don't get their happiness.

... But together?

"We can reach for it, after all."

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

All of Fallen Stern's power, expended in an instant. Endo, all but expended himself; Ren knows if he's alive, but Cure Black does not. And then, in the wake of unspeakable violence, a silence arrives.

A short fall means nothing to a Pretty Cure. A long fall gets scary. A REALLY long fall starts to be a little less scary. The ground is so far away that if a Device or Passion doesn't save them, they have bigger problems. So, as Cure Black falls, she gets to ruminate.

Ren is at the side of the boy she loves; the best case is that they will grieve together. The worst case is that Ren might have to grieve alone.

"What's the point..."

On the ground far below, a white feather drifts down into the courtyard, and lands near a yellow petal.

"What's the point... of all of this?"

"You won't let her win...?" Ako Shirabe asked her, when Dark Precure sought her Star Shard. Cure Black held her and promised her she wouldn't, back then. But in the end, Ako lost her heart to something even more monstrous.

"We'll go through there," Cure Black calls, angrily, to Cure Pine, looking up at the rift from which these creatures are coming. "No more of this. They don't get to come through there anymore. If they want to fight, then we'll... then we'll..."

The anger worming its way through Black's mind feels like it's striving towards some light. But when she bursts out into it, and espects her rage to stretch its wings, instead she finds her thoughts in a soft light. It feels like when she was a tiny child, getting out of the bath, her mother offering her a towel.

"Here," Rie says. And the white towel goes over her head. After a moment, Nagisa relents. She lets the bad thoughts go in the towel.

Blinking, she finds herself differently angry. Frustrated. She feels Cure White's palm slip into hers, and she forces her hand to relax, to avoid taking it out on White's delicate fingers. But she is Cure White... and her fingers are not so delicate. She surprises Black by squeezing hard, and after a moment, Black squeezes hard in return.

Futari wa Pretty Cure holding hands is reflexive. But when Pine's hand takes Black's, suddenly, a ring is completed. Passion, then Peach, then Berry, then Pine, then Black, then White, then Passion all over again. Of the six invincible fists that tore the Outsiders apart, none remain for violence. Black looks between the eyes of her friends: giddily stylish Berry, kindred-in-genki Peach, brave survivor Passion. Her close friend Pine. Her everything, White. She nods. And then.

"Oi," she calls to the sky. "Oi! Did you ever think to ask? Huh?! People where I live..." Earth, that is. "They love to feed someone!"

"Oh," Mai says, softly, "so many people! Ah, look at all of them."

"Yeah!" Saki beams at Mai, her smile like an endless barrage of exuberance. "I love big days like this! It's so much fun!"

"We have to eat to survive too!"

Honoka's slim pale wrist sets Chuutaro's full bowl down, as his snout enters it to chow down.

"Why would you eat another person who loves to eat?"

"Ossu, Nagisa-san," Akane-san greets languidly, from above a row of steaming takoyaki.

"You know my name?" middle-school Nagisa asked.

"You come here a lot."

"Look at the way your bodies are! I bet you could eat anything you wanted! Takoyaki. Donuts. Dog food. Butter peanuts. M-miso soup."

The rainbow that transforms Cure White and Cure Black, the power of the creation, is rising up. And as its light suffuses her, Cure Black finally, truly understands Saki Hyuuga's dream.

"Get down here!" Cure Black shouts. "And eat with us!"

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTouBqPkhtc (Blue Oyster Cult - Les Invisibles)

"... Stern.. N... ENDO!" shouts la Sirene, though it's really Nori Ankou's voice amplified outwards. (It's strange. She's always been pretty deep in on the masking. Even insisting this is 'really' her, though she's made less of a point of it lately. Hard to do when you're on fashion posters.)

It's over.

Did they win?

It's hard to say anything like this is a victory, especially with the tragedy of Fallen Stern's name coming true in a wholly different sense, unfolding right before her eyes. La Sirene feels her lips quiver. There is no triumph.

But. The world can be changed.

But.

They don't have to say it's over. That they've lost, or that they've won, or that there's nothing to be done.

You don't have to accept what's in front of you.

You don't have to do what you're told.

Maybe it doesn't feel that way. Maybe there's a price you'll have to pay - a price so great that it seems 'unthinkable' to do otherwise. And it's easy, so easy, to fall into the comfortable shaping of thick gelatinous habit-energy, especially for the things you do wish to do, but don't want to spend your mental energy upon.

But it always remains true. You can tell the sea and the land and the sky: No. They might crush you.

And more often than you'd think... you can get your way.

The miracle rests in potentia in la Sirene de Diamant's memory, a shining and transient thing (but aren't all of they?) And then perhaps Cure Passion picks up on it, and then Mikoto, and Cure Pine... yes.

They hunger.

They're from outside.

Has she not hungered? Has she not been from outside?

Breathing out, la Sirene gazes at the Things. No. The Others. They hurt her eyes, yes. So does the sun that's responsible for all her food. She can -- can she reach out like this? Can her heart open up? She doesn't know if it can. She is often weak (self-judged) and changeable (more objective). And as an atelier's manager might attest, sometimes she can be pretty easily told what to do.

But that, too, is something she accepts. La Sirene de Diamant spreads her hands from their defiant, powerful posture. She spreads them out. Her palms turn towards the opening. Please, she prays.

And then, for a moment, a memory twinkles in her mind.

Did you know? The Brazen Pharos' namesake was a thing built in a far-away land. A mighty work - something counted as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But for all of that, the Pharos of Alexandria had a very simple purpose that made the Ptolemies go through all that hassle.

"Pharos" means "Lighthouse" in Greek.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhGNnNUiceQ (Blue Oyster Cult - Dancin' in the Ruins)

Far, far away, in the Sea of Tears, the skies are lightening. Not lightning - they usually seem like they'd be stormclouds on Earth, though there are subtle variations, and the rain is only more like sixty percent of the time, not eternal. (And sometimes it's just misty drizzle - hardly anything. You get used to it.)

But lightening. Growing brighter.

What doesn't come up a lot, unless you stay there for a while, is that a bright sky is hostile to the residents - at least the ones who live on land. They usually come inside when there's a band of light sky, which comes pretty reliably about a day and a half after a westerly cyclonic storm. The plants love it under a lightening sky, but it gives you sunburn - hurts your eyes.

Out over the sea, the skies are lightening.

And they grow so light, that in that towering shield of stormy clouds that wrap this strange realm, this world, like a rug, there is a break. Something that happens, but it's rare; usually it leaves a furious bonanza of algae, and some time later, a rich harvest from the sea. This time is different.

A shaft of light from a star whose more subtle radiations are kept at bay strikes down, upon the black waters of the Sea of Tears. And Tears they are. The light is such that the expanse of water is illuminated and warms quickly, steaming as it churns up top. The light throws a brilliant column into the salty water. The salt - the salt of myriad tears and myriad sorrows - filters. It changes. And for a fleeting moment of optical miracle, it shines down nearly six kilometers, and for the first time in untold aeons, light shines in one of the sinkholes charted, irregularly, by brave captains and Sirens with a more oceanographic bent.

Everything la Sirene de Diamant has been throwing around has been the Sea on a moderate day. The effect, of course, is considerable.

The unlight that comes out of the Pharos doesn't change in nature, but in quality. It surges upright, brightening a thousandfold. A strange light, a light that axiomatically cannot warm - every iota of mere heat in that light was absorbed by some strange factor or crystal or abyssal-dweller in the Sea of Tears. What comes out is what is left when everything else is taken away. A light that isn't really a thing.

In a little touch of irony, it does seem to have a clear and discernible color. Blue.

In the skies of Labyrinth, that six-rayed scintillance of la Sirene's impromptu flight to the heavens resolves. Towards Labyrinth there is a great and strange luminance - harmless, but casting things in strange and wonderful colors, revealing unusual fluoresencences. Maybe it will bring a sudden change of view to the denizens, if they look away -- or can no longer see -- their struggle.

The other side of the beam goes towards the Outsiders.

Look this way.

Come this way.

Come to the harbor safely, and see what we have.

Enjoy the fruits of this-our-worlds with us.

A lighthouse... no, a projector, thinks la Sirene, and then the memory in her mind congeals. She remembers sharply herself facing, what was it, a devil's dozen surely at least, of magical girls and their allies. Standing in the premiere of a film. Magical Detective -- what? Lala something, she thinks, but she can't remember, and she doesn't matter, because despite a strange electric tightening in every muscle and the recurring empty throb of fatigue, la Sirene de Diamant's laughing, as the beam shines towards the Outsiders.

COMBAT: FINISHER! La Sirene de Diamant has used The Light That Never Warms on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Cure White [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Holding hands is very important to Cure White. Very precious. Sacred, even. It never becomes routine. Every time she holds the hand of Cure Black, it feels like she's holding the whole entire universe. It makes her feel small. And it makes her feel boundless.

It's even more rare for her to hold two different girls' hands at once. Cure Black ''and'' Cure Passion? Those are extremely different relationships but it's still... overwhelming. An embarrassment of riches. And though she's grieving Stern's sacrifice and the destruction of some of Labyrinth, those innocent lives who made everything possible simply -- so simply -- by ''believing'' in them, in perfect strangers -- the grief in her heart is more than balanced by the joy she feels to be among such pretty and pure and powerful sisters. Peach, Pine and Berry, too. And all the others.

They're not alone.

How strange, Hwaito reflects, that a being that appears to be an enormous swarm is by all evidence a single creature of total solitude. The only being from its existence encountered in all of history. Maybe the only being Outside at all. Maybe not. But it does seem... lonely, to be so many and have that be a lie. It must be lonely, to use and abuse the many smaller parts of your whole so easily. To discard yourself so casually.

Last time she confronted this kind of terrible hunger, she ''was'' alone. Utterly so. And even then, she wanted to save more than just herself.

The proximity to it now makes her freeze up; Black and Passion can both feel it when it happens, through her rictus palms. And then they can both feel when it ends.

"You don't have to be do this," she tells the Outsider, quietly, earnestly. "It isn't strength," she presses on, soft but intense. "It will never be victory. We won't... be the only ones who get hurt."

She smiles so sadly, like she's lost in a painful memory.

"It's okay for you to have limits. It doesn't make you less...er than."

Her eyes are so, so blue. Royal blue. Empyrean blue. Sorrowful blue.

And then, the blue of La Sirene's lighthouse.

Guided back, she blinks -- dislodging a singular tear -- and returns, and looks not at the Outsiders but at everyone else. At everyone, surrounding her. At everyone, supporting her.

At Blacku, with her. Inviting them in to join them. It doesn't seem ridiculous at all. It is the opposite of unnecessary.

"To be able to stop at enough... is what makes you whole. Please... join us."

Her eyes close, and the rainbow at the center of the girls' wishing ring intensifies. Not in hue; it cannot, it already contains every color in all Creation, the full spectrum from Black to White. No. It intensifies in hope.

<SoundTracker> It's a miracle gathering! - Precure All Stars DX3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wB_1_iZ5Ho

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Passion, Cure Pine, Cure Black, and Cure White have used Pretty Cure Miracle Gathering on Pink Moon
Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren's busy punching and kicking with wild abandon still. She ''can't'' stop. She ''won't'' stop. Not until they're all vanquished. She can feel her heart hammering away in her chest--the roar of blood rushing through her veins. Finally she finds a brief moment of respite, panting heavily as her vision swims in front of her. But she's already turning to look upward, preparing herself to follow after Endo, Lera, and anyone else heading for the priority target.

And that's when she feels everything around her come to a standstill. A brilliant conflagration of purple light washes over the battlefield, accompanied by a horrific implosion -- an implosion that effectively ends the existence of Fallen Stern. Her eyes widen, mouth fallen open in shock and awe.

"E-En..do..." Her voice cracks, as if she's scared to speak the name of her one true love. Then, Ren's world narrows to a single point: Endo, falling into the portal. The air is thick with the scent of ozone and burned-out magic, and Leras cry of "Endo!" barely registers past the ringing in her ears. But its the next word that cuts deeper than any blade: "S-Stern..."

A chime from Heraut follows quickly. <Fallen Stern... He's gone.>

A jolt of grief lances through her. But in the next breath she's blasting off, making a beeline for Endo. Nothing else matters right now except him. And she arrives there in time to grab onto him, not hesitating as she reverses course and streaks off towards the ground. As she touches down she shifts, laying Endo down on the ground, hunched over him, tears streaming down her face.

"You idiot! Your brave idiot!" She berates his unconscious form, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him, absolutely ''blubbering'' uncontrollably. "Stern.... Stern..."

Memories of her first encounter with the enigmatic device, the willful black sword that Endo used to cut down whatever darkness came their way. It was impossible to think of Stern as gone--''truly gone''.

And then, another memory comes to her, courtesy of Heraut--The Cephiran Princess, and a message that resonates within her mind: << You don't have to accept fate. >>

The world comes back into focus now. She can hear Lera calling out for Passion and her, rallying them to finish this for Stern. Yes. This was the way forward. The ''only'' way forward. Getting to her feet, tears still streaking down her cheeks, Ren looks up at the sky, eyes hard and firm.

"Heraut. I have to be strong. Will you help me?"

 The device chimes, performing a rare feat in actually speaking his master's name aloud.

"Thank you, Heraut."

<BGM Change> - Daylight on Brave - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hkc0MI1Xvg

A large Midchildan runic circle traces into existence beneath her feet, the air around her becoming heavy with heat. She takes a single step back, and where she once stood a gargantuan pillar of light--a pillar similar to the one Endo wielded, except bronze in color--flares up from the center of the circle. In then coalesces into a brilliant, searing spear. It doesn't quite crackle like Fate's lightning magic -- it's more like a piece of the Sun itself. It does not burn her, even as she reaches out to grasp it, its hilt solid beneath her fingers, its edge humming with barely contained power. It pulses in time with her heartbeat, thrumming with the weight of her sorrow and fury.

Ren surges upward, spear in hand, the force of her charge splitting the air behind her. At the same time, a dozen more spears materialize in a brilliant formation, each one aimed to strike in perfect unison.

<HAZE SPEAR!>

She grips the hilt tighter, her voice raw as she cries out--

"SUPERNAL SHIFT!"

With the final crowd, Ren absolutely ''hurls'' the spear in a perfect throw, sending it crashing through the intervening space, the other spears joining it in causing an explosion that feels like it could be felt several universes over.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Ren Aizawa has used Haze Spear: Supernal Shift on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Endo is leading the charge, and Kyouka is making her way up as fast as she can to catch up. She's admired Endo's strength for almost the entire time she's been a magical girl. Ever since they stood, shoulder to shoulder, together with Fate, to try and turn back the fearsome tide of Shadow Stern's power at the Dark Burger.

They failed, but Kyouka learned, for the first time, just how much she had to ''give'' to that struggle. Even if, at the time, she didn't think it belonged to her. Even if, at the time, she hadn't thought she'd earned it. That she'd be a temporary magical girl, that once she found Strike Wolf's owner she'd return the stolen and lost device, and just be... Kyouka Okazaki again.

Just a girl, and not magical.

But despite all that, she never forgot just how much she had to give. And she never forgot how Strike Wolf, then half-finished (as he would be for quite some time yet), encouraged her to do what was necessary. To give so much ''more'' at the cost of his stability, at the cost of overclocking himself as he tried to manage the kind of power he simply wasn't ready yet to withstand.

And in the aftermath, when they had all reconvened at Yagami house, Strike Wolf had been offline and Kyouka had been beside herself with fear and grief for her new-found friend and partner. How she'd been twisted up in knots as he'd been repaired, holding her breath to see if he would reactivate at all. The tremendous sense of relief as he activated once more. Even though they'd only been partners for such a short time, then, it still felt like she'd almost lost a piece of herself.

She has learned, since then, that many of those things are ''not'' true, of course. But she never forgot how that all felt.

And she never forgot Endo and Stern's strength and dependability, a mage and device partnership she would trust with her life.

Fallen Stern goes Supernova. Kyouka can't help but scream as she feels her heart twist again, her voice straining and cracking. "ENDO!!" A soft gasp, as everything sinks in. "S-Stern..."

She'll hold back her tears for later, even though her heart is twisting in her chest. Endo's not safe yet. Their worlds aren't safe. There's still work to do.

But she won't forget that sacrifice, and why it was made. That will leave its own impression on her, too.

She redoubles her efforts to ascend. It's easier, now, with the core that was guiding them gone. With their unnatural gravity asserting itself.

But she needs to do ''more''. She lands on one, courching, ignoring the feeling of the void leeching into the souls of her boots as several concentric rings of magic suddenly burst from her feet, storing up magic.

But there is something else there now, a thought occurs to her.

She's been an Outsider of sorts herself, hasn't she? Moving from base to base, making friends here and there but never staying for long, always in places where she didn't ''quite'' fit in, despite so desperately wanting to?

Wasn't that why she wanted to go to a real high school here in Japan, for the first time in her life? To just... ''be'' in a place where it felt more real?

And then it ''did'' become real, over time.

She'd ''wanted'' it though, so, much, for so long. More than she'd ever realized.

And despite all of that... she's always refused to compromise on herself. So what, if she was athletic? So what, if she could match all of the boys in soccer? So what, if she knew how to throw a punch?

And so what, if she had a hearty appetite? There was a lot of good food out in the world, and she liked to try it all... not to mention all that athleticism requires a lot of caloric intake.

But it wasn't just eating, was it? She'd said it to her friends before... hospitality for your guests was also important? She loved cooking, too, and she loved making food to share with her friends. Dishes from around the world at a party. Chocolates for her friends and classmates at Valentine's. Learning more tips and secrets about making curry with Mai...

Wasn't there just... so much magic in the world?

Certainly far, ''far'' much more than she ever imagined possible?

She's seen it time and time again. The first time she transformed. Fighting along side Fate and Endo against Fallen Stern. In the brilliant radience of a Pure Heart.

In the belief of a people for guardians that they (mostly) didn't know ready to put their lives on the line for them.

In providing reassurance for a fox missing her master.

There was so, ''so'' much. Surely there was a little bit more they could share?

Nobody should have to leave a table empty.

With a thought, she dismissed the boosted jump spell she'd been gathering.

Instead she held out her left hand, a large circle of bright violet energy forming in front of it. It gathers energy in front of it, a shining white ball of violet-white light that grows brighter and brighter, larger and larger. First, the side of a fist, then a basketball, then a beachball and then as tall as herself.

Corsucating flares brighter and brighter, doubling and then trippling in intensity. Rushing winds wash out from all around her as the pressure builds and builds.

"You weren't ever invited. But all you wanted was to eat, all you've ever known is hunger. I don't think that's your fault. So if you're still hungry..."

Her hair is whipping about her face now as she looks up to the massive crowd of Outsiders being pulled towards that portal, her long belt thrashing behind her as she keeps building power.

"... then I've got a little bit more to share! Strike Wolf! Get Ready!"

<Affirmative. Get set.>

Kyouka is holding up her left hand, but Strike Wolf is on the gauntlet on her right. What is his role in this new spell? Kyouka draws back her right hand, setting her feet, twisting her body...

Strike Wolf suddenly announces, <Shattering Howl.>

And she SLAMS him him into that circle with a punch. The ball of energy explodes outwards in a shining pillar of violet-white light, shockwaves rippling along its length as she sends all that magic forth.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Kyouka Okazaki has used Shattering Howl on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Finisher, Aurora Galaxy Divider, taking 134 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick
is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, Obsidian Spire: Execution, taking 181 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Ren Aizawa's Finisher, Haze Spear: Supernal Shift, taking 103 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace La Sirene de Diamant's Finisher, The Light That Never Warms, taking 134 Fatigue damage!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Finisher, Shattering Howl, taking 79 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is
unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Passion, Cure Pine, Cure Black, and Cure White's Finisher, Combo: Pretty Cure Miracle
Gathering, taking 1006 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

There is a moment where Lera hesitates. But, then she realizes: the answer isn't one or the other. It's the same as it ever is.

Both. Stop them and understand them, in one stroke.

And so she does. So they all do -- as their energies rise to embrace the Outsiders faster than they can retreat. The individuals die so easily. But it isn't death at all. The collective has already taken so much magic -- all the magic in the world, in EVERY world, but for that they created themselves in Labyrinth. And yet this offering, the first one freely given, seems to fill and fill and fill the swarm without them ever filling up.

Their (non-)existence is a terrible trap.

The eternity of an inability to be satiated is a prison.

Aurora Galaxy Divider -- and a demonic curry bun. They take it all. It hurts -- it burns so ''badly''. Mikoto knows exactly how badly. But they still want more.

They don't know how to want anything else.

Not like Cure Passion -- like Setsuna -- who makes a demand. It doesn't seem to go anywhere. As they are now, the Outsiders are incapable of that kind of reception, or comprehension.

Still, more is on the way. One, a dozen, a thousand Haze Spears -- something the Outsiders never faced ten thousand years ago, because when that cataclysmic war for Belka's survival occurred, Souverain Heraut did not yet exist. It was made for something afterwards. Said differently, it was made for the ''concept'' of an after. The spears thud into the Outsiders, delivering their point.

Not in many small meals but one truly immense one, Kyouka slams the remainder of her reserves -- everything she's got -- from gauntlet to circle to ball and finally to pillar; violet-white instead of violet-black but still inevitably comparable to, and almost a homage of, Stern Brecher. It is not the same at all; Strike Wolf and Fallen Stern are such different Devices, used by such different people. But at a time like this it is impossible not to see the similarities, either.

And then: unlight. An unlightHOUSE. Profound. Gorgeous. ''Guiding''. La Sirene de Diamant gives energy, yes, but she also offers something extraordinary: direction.

You are what you eat, and the Outsiders are becoming Ren's sorrow and her fury; La Sirene's laughter; Mikoto's sincerity, her earnest teaching; Lera's remembrance of Fallen Stern; and Kyouka's, too, her determined acceptance, a patient, deliberate choice to share.

More, more... they are becoming more. The rainbow enters them... and does not leave.

SUCH a bountiful harvest. Cure Pine's faith and generosity. Cure Passion's joyful greed, the crucial introduction of another model of desire. Cure Peach's love, Cure Berry's hope.

Pine invited them to take it to go. Cure Black invites them to stay -- and to eat many different things, not only things that hurt. And Cure White suggests that, indeed, the pain will never end until they learn how to not only consume but ''enjoy''. A gentle but keen reminder: satiation is the purpose.

Light and unlight; solid and liquid; energy and emotion.

Yes, they feasted endlessly, and hopelessly, on all the magic in the universe... as filtered through Jail Scaglietti, himself as cruel an embodiment of selfishness, of the darkest mirror of ambition, the worst sort of hunger, as humanity has to offer.

But this is so much more than that.

The Outsiders slow in their upwards fall...

...and then they stop...

...and then they begin to fall... down.

They are, to the very last, stone; which is to say, dead. As the final one is filled to a capacity that never existed before -- to SO many capacities that were never even conceived of -- the portal shivers, high above, and once again transforms from darkness into blinding, familiar light. Chiffon's light. Chiffon's connection, between this and every other world.

There is a moment of silence.

And then there is a soft crackle.

It comes again, as a flake of stone falls off one of the many corpses in the main downtown plaza. Then one of the ones in the building that fell. At the base of the tower. At the TOP of the tower. And scattered, everywhere else.

It is, unmistakably, the sound that an egg makes as it hatches.

The sound that many, many eggs make...

...and from the first near the magical girls, as they land under their own power -- a power greater than they ever imagined they had within themselves -- TWO things emerge.

<SoundTracker> Run - Amy MacDonald - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jl4kwuSOiY

One is a bolt of familiar icy radiance, which peels off, then straight up, accelerating without limit to hasten its return to whence it came. Not the darkness whence. The light.

And the other is roughly the same size as the shell crumbling around it, but bears no resemblance -- none at all -- to the Outsider it once was. No. This is an Insider; and not just any kind of insider. This is a being that came from a specific place; that was born at this specific time.

And a Labyrinth data diamond sits proudly on its head, in unmistakable -- and unprecedented -- white.

Its wings unfurl, soft fluffy wonderful feathers just like the Cure Angels had. Its eyes -- recognizable both as eyes and as eyes that ''see'', that see the beautiful world they're in -- open. They are the blue of the Sea of Tears, but they aren't tearful; they are joyful.

Its long, gentle body WRIGGLES, but in an entirely delightful -- and delighted -- way.

And with a sweet cry, it launches into the sky. It blushes with soft pleasure at everything it gently brushes past. The tower. The clouds. Occasionally it noms gently on something like a toddler, but it doesn't have teeth, and its overall sense of contentment is clear. It will take time to truly understand what it is that attracts these creatures; and what it is that they eat. But it isn't magic.

Or, well. Maybe it is magic. The truest kind of magic. But if they are drawn to the magic of the heart, and if they consume it, it is undeniable that their simple presence also creates it. Because, inextricably; astonishingly; wholesomely.

One cannot see one and help but get their happiness -- a very special happiness.

These things are ''cuuuuuuuuute''.

"Hohoeminaaaa~" calls one, a dozen, a hundred, thousands -- as many as there are magical worlds, and magical girls upon them.

[[File:Hohoemina1.png|center|500px|link=]]

And as the last bit of stolen power goes home, the portal finally closes.

Just before it does, Chiffon looks up at the Hohoemina and burbles, overflowing with joy; and in a flash of cyan, the missing Labyrinthites are returned, brought home too, In from the Outside. You gazes upon what the magical girls have wrought and smiles in an unprecedented, new way.

Stern is not revived. But he isn't entirely gone, either. Both in the memories sense, and more practically, in the physical one. A fragment still remains. It's dead, for now.

But surrounded by such a wondrous and extraordinary universe...

"Thank you..." (a memory of a memory, as the Crown Princess' spirit knows peace at last)

"...for doing what we couldn't..." (an echo of an echo, as Queen Northa is finally able to move on)

...it's hard to believe that goodbye could truly be forever.

~uehihihi~

BATTLE FANTASIA * MAGICAL GIRL LYRICAL NANOHA SEEKERS * END

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

File:Hohoemina1.png

2025-03-16T14:04:21Z

Pink Moon Stick:

Logs

2025-03-16T13:43:09Z

Pink Moon Stick:

To create a page for your log, simply create a page with a title of 'YYYY-MM-DD - Log Title'. This index page will automatically link it in the appropriate month folder, as long as the appropriate category is included at the end with:

<pre>
[[Category:Logs]]
</pre>

For the fancy summary table you may use this code:
<pre>
{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''Title: <Your title>'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''<The summary>''
|-
| '''Who:''' 
<Who is involved. Make sure to place their names [[Between the brackets]]>
|-
| '''Where:''' 
<The location>
|-
| '''OOC - IC Date:''' 
<RL Date - IC Date>
|-
|}
[[Category:Logs]]
</pre>
If you're interested in using an automatic log-cleaning script, please reference [https://pastebin.com/LGXybZ8r Log Muncher], made and shared by our former player [[Lucy Iwai]].

For the overall story of Battle Fantasia MUSH, please see our [[Timeline]].

[[Cutscenes]] are listed on their own page.

===2013===
'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2013-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2013-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of October.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2013-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of November.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2013-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

===2014===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of February.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of March.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''May:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-05-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of May.
}}

'''June:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-06-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''July:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-07-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of October.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of November.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2014-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

===2015===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of February.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of March.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''May:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-05-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of May.
}}

'''June:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-06-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''July:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-07-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of October.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of November.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2015-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

===2016===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of February.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of March.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''May:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-05-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of May.
}}

'''June:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-06-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''July:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-07-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of October.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of November.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2016-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

===2017===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of February.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of March.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''May:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-05-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of May.
}}

'''June:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-06-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''July:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-07-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of October.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of November.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2017-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

===2018===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

'''May:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-05-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

'''June:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-06-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

'''July:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-07-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''November (note for IC chronological purposes that we started a [[Previously On Battle Fantasia|flashback timeloop plot]] on 11/11/18):'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2018-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of December.
}}

===2019===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of September.
}}

'''April (note for IC chronological purposes that we ended a [[Previously On Battle Fantasia|flashback timeloop plot]] on 04/06/19):'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs¦cutscenes
|titlematch = 2019-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''May:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs¦cutscenes
|titlematch = 2019-05-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of May.
}}

'''June:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-06-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''July:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-07-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2019-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
}}

===2020===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''May:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-05-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''June:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-06-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''July:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-07-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2020-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

===2021===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2021-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2021-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2021-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2021-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
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'''May:'''
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'''June:'''
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
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'''July:'''
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of July.
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'''August:'''
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
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'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
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'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
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'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2021-11-%
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|columns = 2
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
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'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
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|columns = 2
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of August.
}}

===2022===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2022-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
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'''February:'''
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
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'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
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|columns = 2
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2022-09-%
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2022-10-%
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|columns = 2
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
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'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2022-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
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'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
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|notcategory = News Files
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|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
}}

===2023===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
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'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
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|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of January.
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'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-03-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of March.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-04-%
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of March.
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'''May:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-05-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of March.
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'''June:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
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'''July:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-07-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''September:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-09-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2023-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

===2024===
'''January:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2024-01-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
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'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
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|columns = 2
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of June.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2024-03-%
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|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of March.
}}

'''April:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2024-04-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|columns = 2
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|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
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'''June:'''
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|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''August:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2024-08-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''October:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2024-10-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''November:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2024-11-%
|notcategory = News Files
|notcategory = cutscenes
|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''December:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2024-12-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

===2025===
'''February:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
|titlematch = 2025-02-%
|notcategory = News Files
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|ordermethod = title
|columns = 2
|rowcolformat=width=100%
|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

'''March:'''
{{#dpl: |category = logs
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|columns = 2
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|suppresserrors = yes
|noresultsheader=There are no logs on this wiki for the month of April.
}}

[[Category:Logs]]

2024-10-19 - The Labyrinth Revolutions

2025-03-16T13:41:56Z

Pink Moon Stick: Pink Moon Stick moved page 2024-10-19 - The Labyrinth Revolutions 1 to 2024-10-19 - The Labyrinth Revolutions

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Revolutions 1'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''Our heroines confront Northa and rescue the Fresh Pretty Cure.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Lera Camry]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Inori Yamabuki]], [[Northa]]

GM: Pink Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Dark Realms
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
10/19/2024 - 6/17/16
|-
|}

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Dark Realms +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
Light cannot exist without darkness, nor darkness without the light, or so
some claim. Whether the Dark Realms are simply the Fairy Realms through a
mirror darkly is difficult to ascertain, but it's undeniable that some
realms in either domain lack an obvious counterpart in the other. Certainly
the ceaseless war between bright virtue and dark evil gives little heed to
the notion that ultimate victory is impossible.

Indeed, a given realm of darkness will often commit itself solely to
extinguishing the light forever. With names like Minor Land, Labyrinth and
Dark Kingdom, perhaps that isn't all that surprising. Endless plains beneath
a midnight sky lit only by bolts of violet lightning harbor armies of
strange creatures, or yet stranger war machines. If there is water, it is
brackish, tainted. The air itself stabs lungs like a superheated knife. Some
denizens of the Dark Realms claim that they're trying to transform the
entire universe into worlds like their own, but colonizing more pleasant
environments might be sufficient motivation alone.

Black, too, has shades; there are many dark wastelands, but also dark
cities, dark oceans, dark forests, dark deserts, dark skies. Some are even
possessed of a loveliness all their own; as beautiful as it is deadly, with
shadowy landscapes that mesmerize before they surprise. No matter how
populous, all are pervaded by a sense of emptiness, of absence, masked at
times by swirling rage or despair, but never erased.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Pretty Cures Black and White close on "Buki" from either side, and though she tries to resist them, their teamwork is in many respects her anathema. Labyrinth is all about solitude, in a way -- a totally regimented life under the singular control of Lord Moebius. He knows nothing of the power of humanity when they fight, work, live, and love as one.

Black and White teach him a swift and decisive lesson.

But not a final one. That is not their blow to strike, even if they could, and he is too great a foe for them to somehow both contain and destroy him at the same time.

What they do do, accidentally, is engage in such a tight and intricate melee that the illusion simply cannot hope to keep up.

With a final sort of clipping animation Buki is, of course, revealed to be Lord Moebius. This does not change their positions -- Black has him in a headlock, White has one of his legs and is going for an elbow. But it does change their PROPORTIONS... there's a lot more head to lock, and it's a further reach between his leg and his arm. They manage, somehow, but not without stretching to their full heights, spreading their wingspans to the max. If they were at the beginning of their career they couldn't have done it. Not because of inexperience -- but because of the growth spurts they've had along the way.

No one is who they were when they started, of course. Life is measured in centimeters but also in Nakewameke -- almost forgotten now, it's been so long since anyone from Labyrinth has used anything but a much uglier (and less prone to accidental comedy) Sorewatase. It's measured in Christmas dates and found familiars. In conversations with mothers and bowls of ramen.

They have all, one way or another, gotten their happiness since stumbling into the world of magic. Happiness yet incomplete, certainly. But isn't that what life is?

"DEFIANCE," barks Lord Moebius, an almost mechanical response to Cure Passion's impassionate speech. She tries so hard to reach him that even Mikoto is stirred to hold back, just a little -- talk about not being who they were at the start. Passion speaks of love and faith and hope and friends, and also of ignorance, of confusion.

"YOU ARE WRONG," he bellows. "I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I AM. IT IS YOU--"

The first energy hearts smash into him. The greater portion of Passion's hearts and feathers and feelings initially explode outwards, however. The wall nearest him, its great curvature so subtle as to be almost flat, warps beneath the strain. Then a panel rips off, falling away outside. The city can be seen below.

"--WHO--"

Mikoto's scream is sharper than even Miroku in this moment. Against anyone else it might be the greater weapon. But it does not make him flinch, even a little bit, as a regular person would. Nor does the blade, though differently, and disturbingly. It's as though he feels no pain as it begins to enter him from the side.

It's as though he feels nothing at all.

Kyouka, too, gives a fine lecture, backed by an even finer strike, a single, perfect punch right at his conveniently immobile face. And not just a punch, of course. The explosion from her brave, boon companion, Strike Wolf, is as much his as hers, a different kind of teamwork, of connection made manifest. A pure and unyielding strength. A beautiful purplish light.

"--ARE--"

Not the only beautiful violet light, of course. Endo brings down the column he and Fallen Stern have summoned as one -- so broad and terrible an attack that everyone in melee has to clear the path in the end to let it pass. To do otherwise would be suicide.

And, having swirled to a feverish pitch, the vortex of Passion's Happiness Hurricane collapses inward to a single point, brighter even than the heart of a star.

"--CONFused."

His last word dies on his lips, dropping like a stone, like a tripped breaker.

From the hole Passion made, gray, overcast natural light pours in in a great swath, almost like a curtain.

And what is illuminated, the leftovers which emerge from the titanic clash... is not the familiar visage of the Lord of All Worlds at all.

Or, rather... it is him, it is surely him; at least, there was no last minute substitution. But his skin was never skin, and his flesh was never flesh. When knuckles and toes bruised against the preternatural pallor of this titan, it wasn't because of his extraordinary muscle density, and it wasn't even because of some kind of energy shielding beneath the robe.

It was because he's made of metal.

His robes, torn to strips by the combined assault, reveal the unvarnished truth: they've been fighting a machine. Humanoid the robot may be, but he is certainly no cyborg, not truly human at all, not even in part.

And he crashes to the floor of the platform with an immense CLANK.

Silence falls.

There is time, then, to stand back up, and to stand Lera back up -- it transpires that she fell not all the way to the base of the tower but just a few circles down the double spiral, landing on the no-longer-a-desert, just-a-staircase, still-intact-because-Black-hasn't-thrown-it-yet path.

But not very much time.

Because the wall of the Tower pulses with cyan energy. Not all at once. It first overtakes one level of wires and buttons and ports, then another, then another. Until, finally, the whole thing is illuminated by the beautiful radiance of Chiffon's sacred light. And the whole thing is a single massive supercomputer; even by Midchildan standards, an absurd technomagical achievement, both in how it is huge and in how it is intricate.

Something is wrong.

The light didn't pulse downwards, from above. It pulsed upwards, from below.

From outside, the Tower stood in a vast chasm, and went downward seemingly without end, its base invisible in the distant darkness...

And already the cyan light is vanishing. One wire at a time, it is disappearing. But not because it's fading like a heartbeat might, between pulses. No. The extraordinarily intricate circuitry that goes round and round and up and down is being... overwritten. Engulfed, one slender wire at a time.

Overwritten by something that... crawls.

<SoundTracker> An Incident Occurs - Fresh OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT0bbcrDM0U

It becomes very dark in the Tower of Labyrinth, but for the light from the hole, which is rapidly reducing. Vines slither into place across it, as they have along each and every component of the Tower's sides -- vines not a natural rutilous brown, but the ugly bruise-green of a plant grown strong with sorrow -- or, perhaps, this time, strong with something else.

Before, the illusory jungle was a false one, but now the heat feels very real, as though the plants are doing the opposite of what they should do, breathing as people do, there's not entirely enough oxygen to go around in here, it's stuffy...

Suddenly, the vines all writhe as one, very much like a heartbeat or set of lungs, engorging and deflating. Then again -- and again. It's all too perfect, too natural, to be some kind of sudden, fresh, wild growth. It feels much more like old growth. Like being at the heart -- in the heart -- of something truly ancient.

This supercomputer... was it ever truly inorganic?

Or was it grown, like a trellis, all along?

"...hahaha..."

Even if it was only off the feed from the Pericosmic Array, everyone knows that laughter. And it's infected the nightmares of most, over the years.

"...so, you have defeated my puppet... exactly too late."

Like Lord Moebius, her voice seems to come from everywhere in the Tower at once. Unlike Lord Moebius, it doesn't come through speakers. Some of the smaller vines, with disgusting simultaneity, shape plump, cruel lips in order to deliver this message from every direction.

"I know what you are here to retrieve. Come down and take it... if you can."

And, as the very last of the hole is plugged with plant matter, the lights go out completely, as Northa laughs, and laughs, and laughs...

TO BE CONTINUED... NOW

<Pose Tracker> Setsuna Higashi [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Defiance, Lord Moebius says. Cure White and Cure Black have dispelled the illusion, but cure Passion is still there. She has acquired many forms of happiness int he time since she came to Earth. She has come to understand what emotion is; she has come to understand who ''she'' is.

Who she wants to be.

And still, he calls it mere defiance.

"I'm NOT!" Passion cries, that she is not confused--and then she stops short, staring. Not a purification--but a ''hole''. A brutal finish to a brutal battle, and Cure Passion watches as Lord Moebius's true form is finally revealed. Metal. A machine.

"...M-Moe...Moebius..?"

She stares. "...Ah..."

It hurts. It hurts, despite the triumph, because after all this time, she had ''hoped''. She had believed. And in the end, whatever he was, it was too inflexible to listen. She could not change him.

Should she have known?

fPassion is quiet, when she hops down to find Lera. She is quiet, as she looks to her friends. And she is quiet, when the tower starts to pulse.

The laughter. How he was.. a puppet.

"Northa!" Cure Passion calls, in hurt and dismay and righteous anger.

The lights go out. But Passion does not give up. From her Linkrun Akarun shines, suddenly, a soft red radiance that starts at her hip and begins to expand. It becomes white, though still red at the edges, allowing Cure Passion to see some of her friends--though she cannot light the entire darkness.

"Northa," Passion sasy more quietly. The nightmares she has had about that voice are many. But today, she has come farther than fear alone would allow.

"For what you've done to my friends..."

"For what you've done to Labyrinth!" Passion cries.

I'm coming!"

And she stands with resolve. Her back is straight; her voluminous pink hair cascades down her back. The armor of her clothing shines in her own light, the Clover emblem at her chest bright.

And her red eyes, brighter than when she is Setsuna alone, look into the dark. "Everyone," Passion says. "...Let's go."

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

It is dark in the Tower, and Lera Camry can scarcely see despite the light that comes from both her Devices. She fell such a long distance.

She rises, now. She only heard Moebius's death throes. To realize -- as Northa said -- that he was only, and always, a puppet of hers. The former Queen of Belka, seeking a new kingdom (of sorts) here. Her eyes widen a little.

She hears that laughter -- and then she looks up, as Cure Passion lands before her. She exhales -- and it's so much brighter around Passion. She smiles at her.

Then she nods. "I'm with you, y'know?" she says; she rests Soaring Sky on her shoulder, then she falls in beside her. "We won't let her get away with this."

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

When the inert chunk of metal that is Lord Moebius crashes to the ground. Endo lets out a low breath, the muscles in his arms loosening as the point of Fallen Stern dips to rest upon the tower's floor.

Before he can celebrate their success or contemplate what comes next the tower changes. Endo's eyes try to follow the snaking vines, and then all the mouths that speak from him.

He glances toward Cure Passion, giving a short nod of agreement. "I'm ready." Says the boy, lifting his weapon to rest on his shoulder. The cloth of his barrier jacket is torn and the dark plating is burnt, but he forces his aching limbs into motion.

"Let's stop her."

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Fate would ordinarily be shocked when her attack does little more than singe someone's robes, but she's far too angry in this moment.

"Strike THROUGH!"

And several cartridges pound in, but before that expression of reserve power can manifest, feels a manifestation of something, and-

"What...?"

For one long moment she's wondering if this was an illusion, because they were all there, and they were not, but no she felt that teleportation effect.

And she's left there, with only those worsts of authoritarian condescension behind, patronization as if it were a child's tantrum, and her hand grips Bardiche more tightly.

"Westar... Soular..." Her shoulders slump beneath her cape as that anger becomes grief, "I wish..."

What does she wish? That they were still here? That they would see the 'truth' before it got to this point? That Setsuna had been that person for them, as Nanoha was for her?

"... I wish I'd gotten to say goodbye."

She's not even certain her mother heard her, when she shouted out her name, and to this day, she feels even if it were rejected, she would have appreciated that before the loss.

Now instead, the victims become the casualties and she feels a little hollow inside. But...

'I've fought Love! And it won't be the last! Because I care about her!'

Her eyes shoot up to the screen overhead, now displaying the continued battle, and Fate looks surprised, "She's still fighting." And despite the grief in her eyes, there's a thin smile. "Then... I know without a doubt... you'll win."

<Yes Sir.>

With Bardiche's agreement, she lifts off, as if to go find them, to rejoin the fight, but then- "Come on La Sirene, let's go join them!" As she then takes off, flying at a rapid speed before.

Stopping.

Turning around, and coming back, and in an apologetic tone...

"I'm sorry, I forgot not everyone can fly."

-=-=-

And thus, the two had flown around for a while, trying to locate them all to join the battle, as the sounds of it were 'live' overhead, for all citizens of Labyrinth to hear.

But, even as they arrive, to the sounds of Mobius' last gasps, his final defeat... "We're here! We-"

Seeing the plants swell and writhe, Fate suddenly halts, surprised. "Northa..." Something within her twists in fear, that idea that she'd made even Mobius her puppet.

"We're with you." Is all she says quietly, to Passion, because this feels less a triumph, and as they fly forward, she says to her more quietly, "I'm sorry."

They can grieve later, but for now... in this moment, she needs to let her know that she's there with her, in this way too.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black's eyes bulge as Buki's ''limbs'' bulge. It's unclear if she was a half step behind her friends in realizing who this really was, or if she just had an understandable difficulty picturing it even though she understood, but for a moment she is glancing back and forth over Moebius's shoulder, trying to reassess what she and Cure White are doing. Cure White, a far more intuitive grappler, adjusts more easily and quickly, but imperfectly; skill can compensate for mass, but only so far.

But with dogged determination, the two Pretty Cure partners contain the surging foe, long enough for Cure Passion's hearts to begin pummeling him. They hang on for as long as they can risk it, but soon leap off in opposite directions, allowing the cavalcade of sparkling violence to tag in for them.

Cure Black raises her hand to shield her eyes a little as darkness falls, a paradoxical reaction that suggests that for her, darkness has often been more hostile than a mere dimming of light. Her lips curl away from her teeth as the supercomputer begins to swelter. Even she, one of the least-online students of Juuban, understands the hostility that ought to exist between circuits and leaves, humidity and electricity, but the unnatural confluence cannot be the only source of her sudden anxiety. With a hop, she and Cure White leap closer to one another, meeting up behind Cure Passion's flowing pink hair. Their palms nestle inside one another for security.

Bristling, Cure Black glares at the nearest pair of plant-lips, as if her anger seeks to wither it on the vine, her shoulders drawing up to make herself a little taller, a little more effective a shield.

"We're here for you too," Cure White tells Cure Passion.

"They better cough up the real Buki," Cure Black agrees. "And everybody else."

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The teleportation did not sweep her up to join her sisters and brother in battle.

La Sirene de Diamant was displeased.

Fled she did, to the streets of Labyrinth. There has to be another way. Another route. Another way to get to where she's going. There aren't any rooms without any entrance, are there?

Terror fills her. Her friends may be dying. Batiste has gone on some errand. He could have already been crushed, or worn as a stole, or some worse nightmare from stories and legends of the Tokyo of just a year ago. Are there not people who might *cook* him?

She leaves scrapes and scores in the ground as she vaults herself up - she can jump quite high, perhaps improbably so - to try and get better vantage points. She has made it to a rooftop, looking around desperately and occasionally snatching glimpses of the fight taking place on a nearby massive screen -- itself, sadly, six stories above her, but carefully positioned to loom.

But then her wordless heart-prayers are answered. Fate!

La Sirene looks at her for a moment in surprise, then up towards the screen. "We're not too late," she says, clenching a fist. And then Fate swoops into the air.

La Sirene's lower lip quivers. Her eyes glistening as that sense of frustrated angst suddenly crests and --

Oh, she's turning back. She can swallow those tears, metaphorically speaking.

* Energy restored!

Soon enough...

"Everyone!" la Sirene cries out in her curiously penetrant voice. "Hold on - we are coming --" And they swoop through the hole just in time for everything to begin to seal up behind them. La Sirene's eyes flick over the fallen shape of Mobius but she does not speak.

The world writhes -- vines speak to them through cursed lips. La Sirene glowers at them. She takes a deep breath and her eyes gleam slightly. One hand forms a loose fist. "She..."

Cure Black speaks. La Sirene grasps the hope in her heart. "If they know what's good for them," she says, that fist tightening. To Setsuna, in specific, she says: "I'm with you, until the end."

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Huh?" Mikoto issues, when Miroku bites in without flinching, and neither does Lord Moebius. It's enough even to cut through her rage, enough to let a little of that confusion leak through, a dozen broken capillaries protesting their injuries.

Just like... her...

She has no final words for him, though she does ask, "Lera?", and is relieved to see her well. Though she couldn't possibly ''hear'' Fate, down there and at a different time, her thoughts are on Westar and Soular too -- the ones they ''couldn't'' pick up, after the battle was done. "Mm..." she hums, discordant. She's clearly sad; just as clearly, she has no better words for it. Here and now, Fate returns, though, and Mikoto brightens as she looks to her -- and her passenger. "Fate! La Sirene!"

As visibility fades, her too-golden eyes catch the scraps of it, bouncing the half-light inside themselves and seeming -- seeming? -- to glow with the effort. But there's that terrible laughter, prickles on the back of her neck, and she growls, rolling the name across her lips: "Norrrtha!" Vines should not have ''mouths,'' she thinks, bitterly. She's the one who eats plants; it's not the other way around.

"Right!" She barks, as she follows Cure Passion, grasping her blade.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

The stop Lord Mobius--or rather, they stop...

"... a robot?"

Kyouka is... confused, still with her guard up, trying to make sure she can marshal more strength in case this ''somehow'' wasn't enough. But no, it appears to be. But there is no need. At least, not for ''that'' threat.

She will have... a ''lot'' of questions. Later. But she finally lets her guard down as she sees Passion fall quiet. Kyouka walks up to her friend's side and places a hand on her shoulder, in a show of support. "Sorry. I know how much you wanted to reach him." She doesn't really know what else to say.

It's dark, and Kyouka holds her hand out. A ring of Midchildan runes appear, briefly, before a ball of violet-white light erupts in front of it to try and help light up the darkness.

And the puppetmaster reveals herself.

"... How long has she been ''planning'' this?" asks Kyouka incredulously. (She is okay with time travel via memory and actual, ''literal'' time travel--mostly--but the scope of this plan is... Mind boggling.)

(Just when she thinks she's got some sort of a grasp on the 'magic' thing...)

And Northa taunts them to come and take what they're after, if they can. "Well this is definitely a trap," mutters Kyouka. She closes her eyes for a moment, taking a long, slow deep breath to steady herself.

They can't stop here. Too much is at stake. Her family, her home, her friends, all those worlds...

She lets it out sharply, opening her eyes with a set, determined expression. "But there's no way forward but through it. Right, buddy?"

Strike Wolf's gem pulses with an inner light as he responds. <Affirmative.>

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

The staircases have been, shall we say, structurally compromised by the battle (whether that's due to people being slammed into them so hard that they cracked, or people ripping them out of the tower wall to chuck them at Lord Moebius), but there are of course other means to descend. One is easiest and fastest.

To fall...

The light cast by Cure Passion and others illuminates the group, but not their surroundings. In the newly imposed absolute darkness of the tower, it is both easier and harder; scary and less scary. Wind whips at hair, tugs at ruffles and bows, but the descent takes such a long time, and without any visual frame of reference, that it is possible, eventually, to simply adjust.

Velocity is not the only thing to adjust to, however, nor blindness. The further down they plummet the warmer it becomes. This is no dry desert heat nor searing volcano, nor even the brutal electronic heat of the data center. This heat is wet. It is breathing. It is alive. And, like attracting like, it draws wetness and heavy breath from all other living things within it.

It is around the time that falling and standing become indistinguishable from one another that the darkness parts for the first time. Northa's laughter died away some time ago. With the soft rustle of vine on vine, a sort of porthole appears. An apt metaphor, given that the Pretty Cure, Device-wielders and allies are essentially plunging down a giant metal tube, submarine-like but for its uninhabitable verticality. Soft radiance pours through it like an old-fashioned black and white television. They are falling past it, but... seemingly slowly, slowly enough that it lends further credence to the feeling that they might be floating.

It is not a round window to Labyrinth, outside. It is another world entirely. A world visited briefly by some of Tokyo's magical girls... and less briefly, by three of them.

Cephiro...

...home of the Princess who was stolen from her home by Belka, who wielded Souverain Heraut in the revolution, and who died to see the cosmos free of the Queen's tyranny, and see her Device, along with Fallen Stern, sent to Earth to find happier endings and righteous partners both.

There are a lot of flavors of magical world in the universe; Cephiro is, for lack of a better way of saying it, more 'high fantasy' than most. A place of silver and shade and cool waters, where the stars shine like bonfires at night and the green of day is always the green of spring. Youth, love, beauty. Proud steeds, bright metal, soft lips, dark ale. Honor...

Tokyo has never known Cephiro at its fullest blossom of peace, but even under the yoke of Zagato it was still a vibrant setting for an adventure, with its knights and dragons, its long-bearded wizards, it's many and varied people, some with gracefully pointed ear, others tiny as a child even as an adult.

No longer.

The magical forest has withered, the trees barren of leaf and twig. The sky is as gray as the ground; dry. Empty.

The view through the porthole zooms in, tightens, around a rustic village. The people there were marching, shoulder to shoulder. It is possible to read their lips; made easier by how all their lips, grandma and babe alike, are being shaped identically.

"--thing for Lord..."

As one, they trail off, interrupted. They fall as still as they fell silent. Some look around, but not in an alert way; rather, in a terrible bewilderment, not as though they are emerging from a dream but rather that they are falling even more deeply into one.

Their eyes are empty of light. Of hope. Of... magic.

A tear collects in the grandma's eye, wells, wells, but is not quite shed.

Our heroes keep falling. More portholes keep appearing. Some show desolate fairy realms, like Tarte and Azukina's Sweets Kingdom. Its sugar spires are intact but its populace is clearly not; cute they remain, and free will, perhaps, they have regained, thanks to the destruction of Lord Moebius. But their expressions are so quiet and so sad. Something has been lost. Something vital.

Another porthole shows Midchilda. Almost the opposite of Cephiro, Lera's homeworld was a place of high magic but also high technology; despite its proud heritage as the ultimate leader of the anti-Belkan resistance it has also become, in certain ways, what Belka might have looked, if it had lasted longer; if its Lost Logia had gained a more modern aesthetic along with its people. Magic is absolutely ingrained in every part of life. It powers the towers and runs the trains. The capital city is at a standstill. There should be panic, even looting, in a blackout of this kind. But instead people regard the empty billboards and too-quiet streets with vague disquiet. Some gather, and others stand alone, but all are too disturbed even to scream and shout. They can only stare.

"Is this truly better than Labyrinth?" Northa asks, her voice emitting once again from every direction; the portholes themselves dimly illuminate the frames around them, which are continuously writhing vines forming them in real time; with bud-mouths of leaves, tongues of pistil and stoma. "I was not blind to what happened to the worlds left behind when my Knights brought me their magical hearts for safekeeping, for protection from the Outside. How they became cold, and their peoples strange. How there was a void in them... where the magic used to be."

Falling, falling. Windows to a dozen worlds float past. A hundred. All of them rapidly becoming very much as Northa describes.

Perhaps most alarmingly of all, though the images of the world are mostly in grayscale, the people themselves are very much in color, if pale and wan. The gray and dismal sky and ground and trees, those changes are real; something essential has been drained from the natural world itself, in realm after realm.

"I created Lord Moebius to fill that void. To give people... purpose. Now, you have taken it from them. Only... sorrow, remains for them now."

Northa usually speaks of sorrow as a resource to gather; as a precious treasure with which to nurture her plants; as a fascination to study. She is systematic and demanding; and also capricious and cruel. Now, for the first time, she sounds like she actually understands that sorrow is also a feeling. That sorrow is a consequence.

It is worse, that she was once the Belkan Queen.

It is worse, that she always knew what sorrow really was.

It is worse, that she created a distraction to help everyone forget that they must have reached terminal velocity quite a long time ago.

The floor gives no warning and shows no mercy.

OOC: I'm not going to do a literal +attack that will create csys fatigue for 'surprise floor in darkness' but people might enjoy
reacting in various ways, be they badass in the 'prevents a crash' or 'gets up from a crash' flavor. It is intended to be a trap,
Northa manipulating the perception of space a bit by sending the 'portholes' down with you at a different velocity -- flying, in
itself, cannot avert slamming into a surprise floor though it can make it easier to stop safely if it's less of a surprise because
you saw someone else hit first, perhaps.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Setsuna is worried about Love, Buki, and Miki. But her heart hurts for Labyrinth now, too. Once, it made sense; Moebius was just... too strict a ruler. Now...

"It's... Our whole society was built for her to use," Passion says quietly.

But Lera is with her, and Passion can't quite smile, but she can take Lera's hand for a brief moment, and squeeze it.

Endo is with her, and he's ready. Fate knows she'll win... and--"Thank you," Passion says quietly.

Grief is for later. For Soular, for Westar...

"I know," she says to White and Black. "...And I'm relying on you both."

La Sirene, too. "Then we'll make sure it ends," Passion answers La Sirene. "...She can't keep doing this." She looks to Mikoto, growling, and nods sharply. She knows just how she feels. "...Thank you," Passion says to Kyouka too. She did want to.

And... Well, Passion can't ''fly'', but she can jump very high. And very quickly. She doesn't move to teleport ahead; even if she could get past Northa's defenses, it would be a terrible idea to go on her own. She's learned that lesson.

And as she sees the broken and dead forests behind, as windows appear to other worlds... Passion looks upon them. And she recognizes the words they speak.

"Labyrinth wasn't yours to use!" Passion calls out at Northa, in any and every direction in her pain and anger and compassion all. "You created Moebius for your own selfish ends! Don't pretend that you did it for anyone but you!"

Only sorrow...

"They had plenty of other things than sorrow! They had their own lives, their own hopes, their own wants! You--"

CRASH. Passion hits the ground hard, unable to arrest her momentum. And for a few moments, she is still and silent.

A trap. And once again, she walked right into it...

"...You took..."

"You took so much from us..."

For the first time, Passion grieves not as a girl without a world, but as a denizen of Labyrinth. And that, at least, gives her enough to go on. That means that her fist clenches, and punches down into the ground, as she slowly drags herself out of the pile she became. Slowly, and then all at once she rises.

"You don't get to talk about Labyrinth that way! Not when it was you who made it what it was!"

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"I'm okay, Mikoto," Lera tells her, as she comes down. She smiles up at her.

There's a relieved look on Lera's face to see Endo, Fate, and the others come too. She smiles at them -- and then she looks at Cure Black. She nods, rotating her shoulder. It's still a little sore after that fall.

"We'll make sure of it," she promises.

Cure Passion leads the way -- and Lera follows. It wasn't any question. She flies down after her, as they jump. The length of the descent makes the difference between flying and falling more academic than she would like.

And they get their look at another world; at Cephiro, that magical land of will, and home of the lost princess. Her fingers tighten around Soaring Sky; Sky, for his part, murmurs uncomfortably. He remembers more now.

But the way that Cephiro has withered like that forest puts her heart in her throat.

And when she sees Midchilda, it's all the worse for her -- the way the capital city is without light, the way nothing moves, and people stare hopelessly.

"That isn't ''purpose''!" Lera shouts up at Northa. "You--you just made a master for them, after taking away what they needed! This, everything you've done, this can't be worth this sort of despair!"

She hits the ground. She realizes at the last second -- and light blasts out from her in a ring, before she comes down into a three-point stance that's too rough. She grunts, forcing herself up after Cure Passion.

She looks sideways at her. "We'll help them, Passion," she promises. "As soon as... as soon as we take care of Northa."

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"We're back." She tells Mikoto, even as she sets La Sirene down, but then they must go. And there are no stairs to where she is. And so as others leap, Fate flies, at a fast clip, albeit not at her top speed given the uncertainties that exist in the void.

It is no longer laughter that greets her, but glimpses of other worlds.

'Cephiro'

She still remembers it from their brief trip, even if they did not truly get to see it, to meet its people, and something within her twists at seeing them in such a state of emptiness, of despair.

And for Midchilda. It was the place of her birth, even if she grew up elsewhere upon it, she still has vague memories of the girl she was meant to be of the city through the eyes of a child.

The city is still.

'Is this truly better than Labyrinth?'

Her jaw sets, she flies, not answering the question, but she keeps talking, and this time she shouts, "That's not true!" Fate barks back, but still not answering, when the floor comes up and...

... she slams down. It is not a gentle landing, one who learns how to fly must learn how to fall gracefully, but she lands gracelessly, the auto-protection systems of Bardiche sparking as her barrier jacket absorbs the impact beneath layers of runes that spring up.

For one long moment, she's in a heap, then with one noise like a sob, but gets up, grudgingly, as she listens to Passion and Lera, before...

"He threw them away like trash, the people who gave everything to him." Fate says, pained, but still angry, determined, "If you created him, then it's time for you to take responsibility."

Just like her Mother never did.

"And if you won't... then we'll stop you from harming anyone else."

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Darkness has never fazed Mikoto; like the cats she allies with, she's always been able to see in the dark. This, evidently, is something deeper than black -- because she can make out her ''allies'' perfectly well, in Setsuna's red glow, but the walls remain obscure even to her.

She ''feels'' the heat, oppressively, sweat on her skin until it feels she can shed it no more for the humidity around them. It is as if hands grasp her skin, squeezing her insides to the outside through the sieve of her living flesh.

The portholes... and...

Mikoto remembers the Vermillion Knight hefting her arbalest, defying the Queen after all her kindnesses. Her... kindnesses? Her...

"RRRRrrrraaaahhh--!!" Mikoto bellows, as she lifts Miroku against the impossible, terminal pressure of their velocity, swinging it overhead, swinging it down. It bites into the earth FIRST, sending a terrible shockwave around -- which might make someone ''else's'' landing more complicated, even as it arrests ''hers,'' her feet coming to land long moments after her blade does, step-hup, having to find her footing before she can wrench the blade out. Her arms ache from absorbing all the impact of their landing, but the birthmark over one of them ensures she can still lift Miroku from the ground, when they're done.

"I don't ''like'' you!" She yells, as she hefts her blade, grasping it between her hands as she finds footing on her broken earth.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo is used to jumping, and also to falling. There's at least some small good news and a sense of comfort in the return of Nori and Fate. And the lights of Cure Passion and the other magical girls to give some sense of form in the endless darkness they descend into.

Fallen Stern glows too, though dim; more like an aircraft warning light, a little speck of orchid in the dark that's easily dwarfed by the campestral views that the portholes afford to those on the descent.

He's never seen most of these places personally, only heard stories from his friends. The vistas, aside from those burned in memory from the skein, are alien. It is easy to tell, however, that all of them are withered and mourning.

The flashes of light from Fate and Lera's defensive systems give some brief indication that there is a floor, but not enough to not make it a problem. Fallen Stern's protective efforts are similar but remain dutifully on brand: the energy thrown outward from the impact is enough to leave a small crater for Endo to crumple into.

"Don't..."

There's an unpleasant grating noise as Endo pulls himself from the place he'd been embedded, using his device to support his weight.

"Don't act like..." He hisses out a pained breath. "you were doing anyone a favor."

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene, without hesitation, descends.

The heat is difficult. She is, after all, dressed for stormy weather - even a warm day storm will soon become kill, from the wet if nothing else. Sweat glistens on her skin. The aura of un-light around her avails little against this darkness; she can see her own nose in front of her face, if she crosses her eyes.

And then, there is a glimpse --

-- Cephiro! She can remember it; her left hand throbs for a moment, the scar from where that woman, Alcyone, struck her --

-- other worlds, passing quicker, not enough to recognize. Worlds she never knew. Perhaps now she never will. Not after what Northa has done, in past and in present and in the oh-so-terribly-near future...

Only sorrow remains for them now.

La Sirene takes a breath and THAT is when she strikes the floor. La Sirene had led with her feet, expecting perhaps to be able to land in three or four points and then leap back up. Instead she lands in one; the shock ripples through her body and she staggers afterwards, her other foot slamming onto the ground as she stands askew, reels, and pitches forwards - catching herself on her left hand.

She stays there. Three point landing, in the end. The pain ripples through her several times; she brings her right arm down, and pushes herself up to stagger back for a moment.

Trembling a little, her voice doesn't quaver even as she shouts, "Having regrets at the very end? If you're changing your mind - you'll need to speak quite quickly! And it won't excuse what you've done, either!" Afterwards, she stops, simply breathing heavily as she straightens up, gingerly testing her left leg a little, then the right.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black and Cure White give each other's hands a long squeeze. They are experienced enough to know that it does not make sense to take this jump linked together; better to be two leaves on the breeze. But Pretty Cure does not always select their tactics based on logic, and on the edge of the precipice, Cure Black decides to keep squeezing, insistently: an offer. Cure White, after a pause, returns some gentle modulation of her grip. After a moment of silent communication, Black nods to her, releasing her hand. Into the unknown, they leap as one.

Cure Black's bleached hair inverts fully and immediately, the spiky texture blasted smoother by the whipping passage of drenchingly humid wind to resemble a rippling orange rose. Cure White's far longer hair has its ornamental bow to keep a portion of it intact, and thus retain more similarity to her usual look but what is left unbound is extravagantly, almost absurdly longer than Black's, leaving a long inky river behind her as she plummets.

As the visions of fairy worlds flash past, the two Cures watch in dismay, escalating as the extent of the damage widens. The lost innocence of those realms is heartache enough even before you have the joy of experiencing their Eden at is peak. Everything is so soft there, so friendly. The cruelty of ravaging such a place in some ways stings worse than the sight of their own home city under assault. Tokyo is vulnerable... but tough, too. The Sweets Kingdom finds suffering so foreign.

Strange realms pass by as well, ones Cure Black knows far less about. Short trips to rescue a world do not always allow the sight of villages and glades like this, and Cure Black struggles with feeling grief for a wonder she only just discovered. To live in a magical world like she's seen only in manga... it ''was'' possible, but it is being lost before her eyes.

Until suddenly...

LABYRINTH FAULT: UNEXPECTED FLOOR ON LINE 109

Cure Black is a seasoned faller, as befits a magical girl who fights very close but also cannot fly. She has kept her legs ready for impact and her arms stabilizing her above her head the whole time, and is theoretically somewhat ready at any moment, but she had ''intended'' to make final adjustments and focus when she saw ground coming her way. Instead, her dark magenta boots punch into the ground and she instantly is forced to (literally) kick her own butt with the back of her heels, as her falling velocity compacts her down like a spring.

A split second too late, Cure Black engages her visually-athletic and physically-herculean leg muscles, slowing her body's compression. It was probably not the right move, based on the way her eyes enlarge and her cheeks puff out, her body dispersing the impact... but across itself.

Cure White gains the benefit of her partner preceding her. Maybe the direct-minded Black made a more effective arrow of herself, maybe it's the fact that her black shorts allow her to let her skirt invert like her hair without worry, maybe it's simply the drag produced by the luxuriously long tassel of night-black hair that followed Cure White past all those miserable images of Labyrithine dominance. Whatever the case, Cure White gains the chance to react to her fall. And Cure Black gets to react to it, too.

If she had a brief instant more to analyze the situation, Black would have let White handle it herself; she's better at it to begin with and Black provided more than enough assistance just by ramming the ground like a bullet herself. But the sudden floor scared her, and before she fully understands what happened, she sees White careening down towards it as well.

Tucking into a midair backflip, Cure White intentionally lingers in the horizontal phase, catching as much air as she can without risking a backflop onto the ground. Her legs numb and jangling with agony, Black forces them straight just then, diving to catch the startled Cure White, which knocks her right out of her perfect balletic flip. An instant later, Cure Black is sprawled fully on her stomach, with Cure White cradled across her extended arms. It broke the White Cure's fall... but less than Cure White would have managed.

"Sorry," a frog manages from somewhere inside Cure Black's throat. She coughs, embarrassed. The cough isn't ''because'' she's embarrassed, though. That would be the bellyflop.

One of Cure White's cheeks puffs out, but she flicks a disordered orange lock of hair back into place on Cure Black's head.

Helped up by Cure White, Black dusts her skirt off and examines her surroundings, checking on her various allies. "Wait... is Northa...?" Black begins to piece together what she was hearing before that rather jarring impact.

"She was," White corrects and agrees at the same time, her thundercloud brows tight with righteous anger.

"Oh..." Cure Black shakes her head in disbelief, checking a second time hastily on Endo, Lera, Fate, and Kyouka. She isn't very clear on her Midchildan history or culture, cannot understand the full ramifications, but the greater shape of the betrayal has a face to her. "Oh ''no.'' Their..."

An image of a golden-haired, omnibenevolent statue of a contented woman perched on her regal red throne flashes through Cure Black's mind.

"Their Queen..." she whispers, pained.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

The staircases are destroyed. And Kyouka, unlike her fellow Device Mages, hasn't really worked out the whole 'flying' thing yet. (To be honest she hasn't been particularly worried about that thus far. Superpowered parkour is, honestly, ''really fun''.)

As she stares over the edge at that total magical darkness, though, she silently adds 'Maybe think about learning to fly' to her to-do list.

She has to believe she'll make it out of here to check on that to-do list.

"Remember to bend your knees when you land to absorb the impact," she says out loud to nobody in particular.

She jumps, the belt tied behind her whipping up above her head as the winds rush past her. First darkness, then heat. Strike Wolf silently adjusts Kyouka's barrier jacket to try and make it a little more bearable, but... most of his energy is going towards impact management.

She draws in a sharp breath as she sees the vision of Cephiro. How it is drained of magic, the trees barren... everything hurts to see, but the trees are a special kind of hurt to her nature-loving heart. And to see the people drained of all free will...

It makes her mad. She grabs onto that anger, to use as fuel for what's ahead.

More and more and more worlds are shown... That anger burns still, but it is an anger in a slowly growing sea of sadness at the sight of so many worlds affected, drained, without purpose...

A purpose Northa insists she provided, through Lord Mobius.

"... You're sick, you know that?" says Kyouka quietly. Can Northa hear her? She doesn't particularly care. She can't help but look as more and more portholes float past them, even though she doesn't want to. "You ''started'' this problem. You turned your knights against each other, you inflicted... ''this'' on all these worlds..."

"... What would your daughter think of what you've become?"

Is she pushing a button there? Probably. But she carries some of the Ashen Knights's memories within her, now, her grief, what the struggle cost them... (She can't fully forgive Ashen, either, but she at least ''tried'' to make a change.)

It's all a distraction. ''Crap''. The floor rushes up at her, and Kyouka extends her legs in the instant that she has for it, as Strike Wolf's gem on her gauntlet glows. She slams into the ground, the floor cracking and fracturing underneath her in an ever widening circle of cracks She's in a three point stance, with her gauntlet carrying Strike Wolf pounded into the ground in a fist.

It still took a lot out of her to move that much power at once to brace herself and she is winded for a moment, gasping for air (which is made wore by the humid, suffocating heat of Northa's plants.) "Oh... you..."

Thankfully she's too winded to curse right now.

Slowly she pushes herself up, bracing against her knee as she rises to her feet. First slumped over, and then standing fully upright.

"Okay. ... *huff* ... Whatever it takes... *huff* ... we'll ''stop'' you."

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Getting up, bodies adjust, one hair on the back of the neck at a time, to a sense of greater space. The tower was unspeakably vast, but wherever they've landed is vaster still, and in fact opened up a while before impact; it is tall as well as wide. The tower being, for all intents and purposes, a chimney, provides a decent sense of proportion in this space.

And, very gradually, shapes begin to resolve as well. Organic shapes, one and all. If Lord Moebius' supercomputing circuitry has been overwritten by vines, this is of course where they began; and vines do not just begin in isolation. Before leaf there is twig; before twig there is branch; before branch there is limb; before limb there is trunk; and before trunk there is root.

A rutile smell wends through this place as well as the hot wet perspiration of vines and leaves. But there's something off about it -- something chemical. Nostril-singing, almost the dangerous scent of ammonia, though it is not too difficult to breathe. Anyone who has studied enough biology might recognize that it isn't an additive aroma but rather another smell that is ''missing'': the smell of soil. Absent the rich and loamy scent of earth itself, roots smell the denizens that dwell within and around them. Like a vast symbiotic network. And that network does not use, nor produce, oxygen...

But then, Northa's plants never grew strong with such ordinary elements as nitrogen, phosphorous, or iron.

There is so much here. Roots and vines grow so thick and fast into one another that they could be also be called trunks, as very old banyan trees sometimes are. Other vines that are thinner individually, thin as long snakes and sometimes long fingers, and ''writhe''. Where leaves are in evidence they are matte rather than glossy, darkness among darkness, and their edges are razor sharp.

A jungle explodes outward from the center in a vast explosion of life -- if you can call this life. But then, that's what this is all about, isn't it?

<SoundTracker> Negai, Yami no naka de - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWEz3lzz7GQ

Northa's voice comes from up ahead, guiding the group to her. Arrogant and proud, she is every inch a queen.

"It was not I who created the Outsider threat," she replies. Ten thousand years have not changed her position at all, it seems; she could be lecturing that lost Princess or her rebellious Knights. Still, it is not easy to forget that which she refers to, either: traumatic even to look upon in a dream of a memory, with the human mind filling in mandibles and claws and wings as shorthand for even more alien Wrongness that does not belong in our universe at all, the Outsiders were attracted to magic, and consume everything in their path in terrible slaughter, were an implacable threat. A threat paused, but not eliminated, only through the enormous personal sacrifice of the brave Knights of Belka, and the life of their leader, the Crown Princess.

How the Queen felt being opposed, later on, by another proud and brave Princess so very similar to her own deceased daughter, is a question that has never been asked of her, until now.

But here and now, far below everything, in the heart of her own darkness, Northa explains...

"Silence! I am doing what my daughter did. When I found Labyrinth, I acted to ''protect'' it. And I succeeded, where in Belka I had failed. I will not deny that the fate those original worlds suffered was a terrible one. With their very memory of magic sealed within the vault Infiniti--"

Chiffon. She's talking about Chiffon, the infant lamb fairy whose eyes sometimes become black and strange and calls herself Infiniti, The Infinite Memory.

"--they were invisible to the Outsiders, and thus spared from that reaping. But yes, without something to replace that magic, they withered and died. It was a terrible mistake. I bear that stain on my soul forever. Labyrinth, in contrast, was the first world that I ever truly ''saved'', through the advent of Lord Moebius -- a power source in his way, something to worship, to serve, to derive purpose from. And now, with the help of Infiniti, whose capacity has grown enormously during their slumber -- and with Labyrinth technology to connect everything -- I have extended that salvation to every world."

The main light source had been the slightest, barest background radiance coming from Northa's general direction.

But now the girls are emerging into a sort of clearing in the heart of the jungle.

As they step forth, everything is suddenly lit up by a massive one of those plant-projected 'screens', a porthole that opens overhead... onto Earth.

Those who stayed behind to fight have failed. The oceans are as gray as the sky. The plants have yet to start dying, thankfully, but they have been robbed of color entirely. All animals are in hiding, curled up in the smallest balls they can manage. Technology is still working, for the most part; smokestacks still belch into the sky; trains still run, at least if they are automated.

But the people... humanity... is as dazed and lost as everyone everywhere else. They too had been forced to march for Lord Moebius; and now they too are emerging from that control, out in rows on the streets of Tokyo, to find the world forever changed. The projection happens to be in the Juuban neighborhood. Not everyone's parents live there, but many do, and they can be seen in the crowd, desolate as everyone else. If Northa is telling the truth, they are seeking something inside themselves that they can no longer find. Some weep and others stare. Some try to console one another, but both the action and the reaction are disjointed; again, it is as though something is missing. Kindness seems as alien now, as Outside the reality of Earth, as the monsters that Northa has sacrificed everything to hide from.

The image on the screen illuminates Northa in the flesh, who stands in front of the largest trunk of all, with the kind of unspeakably massive curvature that seems flat, akin to the tower itself. It is possible to see the Belkan Queen in her features, now that you know. Her hair wasn't blue (was it? it was always under a wimple) and she didn't seem so tall in those ancient dreams; and the clothing is different. She wore a crown of metal and jewels instead of one of roots and leaves.

But the madness in her golden eyes -- and the cruelty -- is the same.

To her left, Miki Aono, Love Momozono and Inori Yamabuki have been crucified to roots made out of crosses, though thankfully their limbs are secured by vines that wrap around wrists, necks and ankles, rather than piercing through any hands, feet, or throats.

"Everyone!" Love shouts, looking up and over, though her head cannot move far.

"Everyone!" Northa shouts too, interrupting: "-- ''everyone''! -- is finally, finally... saved," Northa announces. "All that remains is to replace Lord Moebius. Perhaps I shall fashion the next Lord of All Worlds in your image, Eas. You always were... the best, of the people of this little world."

"--don't give up!" Love finishes. Clearly not for the first time, she struggles mightily against her bonds. They overcome her, and a root grows to fill her mouth as well, gagging her completely. If they can be freed and reunited with their Linkrun, they are clearly eager to rejoin the fight--!

Northa smirks, unperturbed by her hostage managing to get out a message. She takes it for herself, as she has taken everything else.

Her voice rings with terrible truth as she sets herself into a readied stance. An entire jungle animates around her, around all of them, ready to fight.

"Don't worry, little Earthling," she coos to Love, whose name she has apparently never bothered to learn. "I ''never'' give up."

OOC: You are certainly invited to pose your parents/families out in the streets in the way this pose implies if they are Tokyo-
based, still alive, etc; greater specifics of what your character sees on the screen. If not parents then friends, any NPCs are
encouraged, cameo away.

OOC: Miki, Love and Buki can each be saved and their root-bindings can safely be attacked at magical girl force to do so without
harming them; each save will require a csys attack from one person, y'all can split them up however you like (maybe the three
Precure PCs will do it, but maybe not, I leave that to the group to decide).

OOC: Setsuna, you found their Linkrun in the abandoned Momozono House and brought them along, Cure Passion's skirt has pockets,
truly ultimate power for magical girls.

COMBAT: Northa transforms into Northa, Queen of Sorrow!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Mikoto says what Setsuna is feeling, once again. They have always had their similarities, for all that in other ways they are opposites. She doesn't ''like'' Northa. ...And neither does Cure Passion.

Lera promises to her, and Passion can put her certainty in that, turning to look at her girlfriend for a long moment. "...Yes," she says. "Yes."

Not just Love, Buki, and Miki but...

Like trash, Fate says, and Passion still feels the raw wound that is the fate of Soular and Westar.

Endo is with her. He agrees. And La Sirene has a quip as ever.

"Yes," Passion confirms for White and Black. "...She was the Queen of Ancient Belka. We learned it in another time..."

"Chiffon!" Passion cries in dismay at the matter of Infiiti. But Northa continues still. The Outsider threat...

"But Moebius only gave us a shadow of purpose! We were missing something still! Something important!"

They arrive. Passion looks out over the people. She sees classmates from Juuban roving and seeing each other. Girls from the Tennis Club wander aimlessly.

This isn't where Setsuna's adopted parents live. But she knows they're out there on Earth...

Love calls to them, and Passion sees her. "I hve your Linkruns!" Passionc alls. And then--she sees the madness in Northa's eyes. But everyone....

In her image, Northa says. Passion glares back at her. "If ''you'' think I'm the best," Passion says, "Then there's something about me that I can still make better." Her voice twists a little with it--but Love calls for them not to give up...

"Lera!" Passion calls. "Cover me! Senpai!"

Then she ''rushes'', crossing the distance almost too fast to be seen, to her friends. To her sister. To Love. "Haaah--"

Passion ''swings'' with a roiling kick at the vines, as inevitably strong as the tides, and she leans close to ''rip'' vines off of Love as best she can.

"Love!" she says. "This time... I'll save you!"

Cure Passion--the girl once known as Eas--can only get one fo them at once.

But she believes in her friends. In her senpai. In the others, who can help them, too.

In all of her friends.

"Setsuna!" Love calls when Passion manages to get the vines out of her mouth. "What are you saying, 'this time'? You've saved me tons of times now!"

"You know what I--"

She does. They both know what Setsuna means. And as soon as Love's ''hands'' are free, she takes the Linkrun Setsuna gives her.

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Breaking Wave on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa braces 6 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion's Breaking Wave, taking 9 Fatigue damage! Cure Passion is Psyched!
Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger applied to Northa!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera knew, perfectly well, that none of them would accept what Northa says. It still helps to hear that; to be reminded that she isn't facing against Northa alone, in body or in morale. She stands tall, the way that Cure Passion does.

She smells the plants, and it's not a great surprise. They've faced Northa before; they've encountered her vines before. She still tenses when that jungle explodes outward, dark and sharp. All the while, Northa lectures them.

It's eerily familiar. Memories that she lived through, on the journey here. She exhales, softly.

And she tenses, as she sees Love, Buki, and Miki bound like that in roots. "No," she says, her voice quiet. Then, her eyes narrow. "Don't you talk to her that way!" Lera shouts. "Or about Infiniti that way! You..."

She shakes her head. "You haven't changed at all! You're talking about people the same way you did about Cephiro's Pillar! As--as something to be used, not as people!"

Passion calls out for her to cover her. Lera nods, sharply, and lifts Broken Ground. The clockwork shield gleams; the energy fields between its segments shine.

As the red Cure bolts forward, a trio of bolts of light erupt off it -- they shoot ''around'' Setsuna, arcing to not hit her -- and then converge on Northa herself.

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa dodges 5 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 8 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghb6eDopW8I (Of Monsters and Men - Little Talks)

La Sirene looks up at the Earth for a moment. She can feel her heart sink.

All of it, too late.

The thought quibbles in the back of her mind - a small voice saying, at the worst possible time, 'it's *your* fault.' If she'd stood a meter to one side, she could have been there - they would have stopped the False Buki more quickly-

- Earth would have -

Have -

'Everyone!' shouts Love, at the end of all things, and la Sirene snaps out of it. She looks towards Love, Ibuki, Miki, and raises her left hand towards them, a brief wave. She might flash a handsign... but there is only one hand sign she is interested in, at this moment.

Her left hand changes its gesture as she turns to face Northa. Index and pinky up: ring and middle down: thumb crossed over them. It is an ancient salute, a simple one seen in many places. A challenge it has ever been, and it is one now.

"Perhaps when you began, you were steered by something good," la Sirene says. "But this... it would have been better for you to have never begun. I cannot say whether it would be better to be devoured by these -- these things that you speak of. But do not feed us ashes and tell us it is a wonderful feast! You have left them nothing but sorrow. You realized it yourself, just a moment ago."

"You -"

La Sirene's voice cracks. The sonorous, bronze-and-lead bell voice she often assumes in this guise fades. For a moment it sounds just like Nori Ankou if with a curious reverberation. And it is LOUD:

"YOU RUINED EVERYTHING AND ACT LIKE IT WAS A FAVOR!!!"

That same ragged voice continues as she cries out, "Les Mysteres, come!" The stroke down with her right hand comes swiftly, savagely, and there is that roaring sound, that semi-electric wail as it strikes and echoes outwards. In the strange light here, of screen and sorrow and Labyrinthine gloom, the subtle shapes and glyphs in the echo-lights behind her shine all the brighter: and the burst towards Northa, sudden and broad like a thrown fist of ink, roars all the faster.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Les Mysteres on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa braces 18 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Les Mysteres, taking 15 Fatigue damage! Northa's Block and
Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Plants. They're a thing Kyouka knows well, after many upon many camping trips with her parents (and with Wolfy.) But it takes her a moment to notice the absence of Earth--a bewildering absence to latch her mind onto, until it suddenly clicks. "How are they growing without--"

She cuts herself off. She has a feeling she won't like the answer much.

Northa--the Belkan Queen--speaks. Labyrinth was the first world she ''saved'', she claims, and Kyouka scowls. "You call this ''saving''? There's more to life than just--just ''existing''! What happens after you drain everyone's magic, all of their light, and love--are you just going to keep everyone in that state forever?"

"I know you're hurting, but this isn't the type of world your daughter sacrificed herself to create."

The emerge into a clearing, more portholes--

Earth, fallen. ''Juuban'', in its current state...

Kyouka gasps, her voice pained. "Mom... Dad..." Her parents, standing in the middle of the street, lost and confused. Her dad is looking at ''something'' in the distance, perhaps nothing at all. Her mom is fidgeting, like she's trying to remember something, but whatever it is slips her mind every time she tries.

It's like a punch to the gut, and Kyouka is winded. There is a quiver in her voice. She can only imagine where Wolfy is, potentially spared but lost and confused and alone. She squeezes her eyes tight to block out the image, something wet dropping from her chin to the ground below.

Love calls for them to not give up, and Kyouka opens her eyes again. They're still wet, but they're also set. And determined. "Right then..."

She sets her stance, sliding one foot forward, one hand leading in front of her, the other high up and behind her as she gets ready to attack. "You've made a lot of mistakes, Northa. So here's one more to add to the list."

"... You messed with my family, and everyone I care about... and you ''pissed me off''."

It seems like barely yesterday when she happened to catch Strike Wolf's telepathic call for help, when she saved him and stepped into this whole strange world of magic. She's had... her fair share of concerns and misgivings, uncertainties about if she was a ''real'' magical girl or not, using a borrowed Device.

But right here, right now, her and Strike Wolf have never been more in sync. There have been dangers, yes, but also such wondrous things, too. Whole new worlds of possibility she never imagined before.

She trusts a hand out. A Midchildan circle of bright violet energy appears before her hand, and in front of it several purple bolts of energy form.

<Gale Shot.>

The swarm of purple bullets hurls itself forward at Northa, as Kyouka gives chase behind them for a follow-up attack.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Gale Shot on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa fails to dodge Kyouka Okazaki's Gale Shot, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Kyouka Okazaki is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Trees are familiar, to Mikoto, raised on a remote mountaintop; she is a creature of nature, in many ways. (Not all of them natural.) But this... this isn't...

It's different. She doesn't like it.

"Everyone..." Mikoto says, as she looks to the harrowing images of Juuban. And then -- stricken -- her head jerks up: "What about Mai?!" There are two tiers of people: everyone on Earth, itself devastating, and ''Mai,'' which is something completely different.

The Cures on their crosses are of course terrible, but in this moment Mikoto is only glaring right, at ''Northa.'' "Give Mai back!" She screams, single-minded. "Don't save Mai like that--!" She can't ''see'' Mai on the screen, but she can ''imagine'' what's happened to her, and that, in its way, is ''worse.''

(Is it worse that she doesn't think of Chie and Aoi, right now?)

She charges, spinning once, twice, three times, before her sword comes up for the impact. "Rrrrrhhhh--!!"

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Devastation on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa fails to dodge Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Devastation, taking 29 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

The streets of Tokyo, in a queue of bodies that had once been marching in mechanical single file, Chiaki Naoki sits despondent. There are others in similar states, but that's the figure Endo focuses on. The one that makes his heart ache with sorrow, even though he's far away from the husk of Earth.

When his gaze pulls back to the scene before them, the mass of vines, the oppressive heat, the captured cures, his teeth clench.

The journey through Labrynth has been brutal, but they aren't done yet. Purpose gives the boy the strength to raise his weapon once again.

"You call this saving people? This, or Labyrinth?" Endo asks, his voice choked with anger.

"Your people believed in you," Endo says, echoing la Sirene's condemnation, "whatever you were! Your knights died for you! But if this is the best that you can do...then I don't want it!"

Endo launches from his position like a bullet, a Belkan triangle at his feet adding to the propulsion like a spring board. He burns through the air, whirling in a sharp arc to cleave through any errant roots in his path. Purple-black contrails cut the air in the wake of his Device, and with the final spin Endo turns the enormous blade toward Northa, Belkan Queen, on its final arc.

<METEOR ABSTURZ... YOUR MAJESTY.>

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Meteor Absturz on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa cleanly braces 62 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Meteor Absturz, taking 11 Fatigue damage! Northa's Block and
Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

There are two sorts of heroism, the sort you celebrate, and the sort you mourn. The yellow-furred Chuutaro is exemplifying the latter, his yellow-furred body sheltering some smaller, stray dog that Cure White has never seen before, with no real ability to defend his fellow canine against what is happening. Cure Black steps forward, eyes stinging, as if she could get closer to her mother and father, the former of whom is carrying her little brother Ryouta. The boy has objected to such mode of transport for some time now, but he makes no complaint this time, hugging his mother's neck tightly with one arm. Rie Misumi cannot so much as look at him, nor he at her, their faces turned forward in the direction every else is looking at. But she is exhausting herself to keep her arms around her son, rather than swinging in an orderly fashion at her side.

"M-mom?" Cure Black whispers.

Clutched in his fist, Ryouta has brought along his Ultraman figure. That arm is at his side, and it seems like an effort to hang onto the little plastic man. But his small fist clings on, for now.

There are two sorts of heroism. If you are fortunate enough to have the power to achieve something with yours, you owe it to those who do not to make the most of it.

"Huwaito," Black requests, her voice harsh with emotion.

"Blacku," White agrees readily, her eyes on their lost friends, the blue heart on the back of her fist rising to the level of her chin.

Black has been calling Buki's name all night, and now she does it one more time loudest of all, as she sets off at a run. "BUKI! Hang in there! We're coming!"

"Miki-san!" Cure White calls, taking an elliptical route to avoid Northa's interference. Both Cures rely on their comrades to cover their approach, and both rely on that fact that Momozono-san has someone who really Loves her here.

Leaping like a cougar, all four limbs a threat, Cure Black slams into the cross of roots, her heel next to Buki's thigh, her hands gripping the wrist-bindings pinning poor Buki's arms out wide to her sides. "Ossu," the mystically empowered jock now face-to-face with Buki greets, a crookedly confident smile on her face now that she has finally found her friend visibly intact.

Cure White runs much further than Black did before leaping, actually passing the cross, skidding as she turns around just beneath it to face the same direction as Miki. With a weightless leap, she reaches up high and catches the right arm of the cross, swinging up it like an acrobat and landing atop the arm (and Miki's arm) with her white boots. "Are you all right, Miki-san?" she asks.

Gripping the vines on Buki's wrists, Cure Black manages to find a spot on the cross for her other boot, in the hollow of Buki's waist. Bracing her legs and squeezing her fingers, she starts a horizontal deadlift, pulling with raw main force. "Rggggghhh... hang on!" The vines begin to crackle loudly, and Black briefly hesitates, making sure they will break before she just rips the cross in half and folds Buki like laundry. Satisfied, she tightens her leg tendons harder until the vines rip freely.

"This one first," Cure White explains aloud in a soothing voice, inserting her palm between Miki's long elegant model neck and the cruel vines keeping it tightly affixed to the cross. Exhaling to focus, she lets her eyes drift half-shut, then, with a sudden, martial violence, twists her palm into the vine so that it has to deal with its widest rather than its thinnest angle. The sudden change pops it open instantly, without a moment's pressure on Miki's neck. "So there's no pressure on your neck," Cure White smiles.

Without her arms to help, and with her ankles bound around but not supported from below, Buki slides down a little, and suddenly feels like a parent tightened a necktie too tight on her school uniform. Cure Black, as the vines tore away, let the momentum flip her backwards, and as she falls, she catches onto the ankle-vines with both hands. "One sec," she assures, teeth gritted, realizing the problem Buki is having. Clambering her feet onto the cross as though climbing up, she plants them again, bracing as she assumes another cat-like position, her hips lifting to pounce. Pulling harder and harder on the ankle-vine, she waits until she can hear it tearing before she gives it a final, impossibly strong yank, simultaneously hauling herself upwards with force, and shredding the ankle-vines into pieces.

Sliding down alongside Miki, Cure White wraps an arm around her shoulder to support herself, the way a weary friend might. But Cure White's blue eyes could not be sharper. Settled into a position next to Miki on the cross, she hooks one bootheel beneath the ankle-vines, and plants the other above them. "Pardon me," she apologizes for the physical imposition. "This may sting," she informs, not apologizing for that part. With a second exhalation to focus herself, she drives her higher leg straight as hard as she can, cracking the vine across her heel and tearing it wide open.

Buki is now left with ''only'' the neck vine, and much of her weight hanging from it, albeit largely from her jaw rather than her actual throat. Still, Cure Black moves with haste. As her cat-leap tosses her back up to Buki's eye level, she lifts one knee and elbow to help herself rotate. Her left arm slides behind Buki's lower back, and for an instant, the captive Cure may fear Cure Black is about to strangle her with the weight of TWO orange-haired girls. But it is not Buki upon whom Black intends to drop her compact, muscular weight. Her free hand catches the neck-vine as she falls, she rams her hip violently into the cross, and between those two opposing forces, Cure Black pops off the fiendishly strong restraint as if it were a loose tag on a tee shirt. This was a rather uncomfortable liberation...

...but it did conclude faster than Miki's. Cure White is now faced with the two wrist-vines that Black had started with, left for last for Miki's comfort and dignity. Swinging a knee over Miki and stepping beside her waist with perfect grace, Cure White's long-rippling hair curls in the air, a luxuriant question mark on what efficient martial arts flourish will complete Miki's liberation. Instead, Cure White's boots plant just where Black's had, and her hands grip the wrist-vines for the exact same brute-force deadlift her partner had executed.

Futari wa Pretty Cure, you know.

Cure Black scoops Buki as she falls, and when they land, Buki is being princess carried by some of the strongest arms in the world. Any potential confusion that might introduce to their friendship is likely muted, however, by the fact that Cure Black is already watching Cure White complete her deadlift with sparkling eyes and a happily open mouth. Cure White and Miki Aono flutter elegantly where Cure Black and Buki had dropped heroically, and Cure White catches Miki so delicately it is as though the liberated girl weighs no more than a fluffy white feather.

"Are you all right?" Cure White asks, one resplendently beautiful girl to another, as her hair drops behind her like a cloak of twilight, strand by belatedly lavish strand.

"Aaa," Cure Black sighs dreamily, not to Buki at all.

COMBAT: Cure White has used Femme Freedom on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa partially dodges 2 Fatigue damage from Cure White's Femme Freedom, taking 9 Fatigue damage! Cure White is Psyched!
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Butch Breakout! on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa fails to dodge Cure Black's Butch Breakout!, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Black is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

No one has ever faced Northa before. Not like this.

They've faced countless Sorewatase, a Nakawameke's more physically dangerous (but honestly somewhat less emotionally profound) cousin, which are basically plant kaiju. Indeed one could assume this subterranean jungle to be either dozens of those dire youma or a single, massive lifeform's worth, depending on how you slice (or punch) it.

They've faced themselves, caught in a terrible, malicious hallucination, when Northa weaponized her Fuko Gauge, infecting everyone with sorrow collected from humanity by countless such monsters, plus Soular, Westar, and of course Eas herself.

Not content with only combating them via nightmares, Northa has also engaged with magical girldom indirectly, stealing things from them that they had to fight to reclaim. But they didn't fight her, generally speaking. She moved through proxies. Agents. Manipulated allies.

...Knights, one might say. Sometimes extremely big names. Northa is known to be the co-architect of the only time Dark Fall and Ends of the World collaborated. Together they deprived every single magical girl of the thing they needed to transform, without throwing a single punch or drawing a single sword. The handful of girls whose 'items' are inside themselves? Rendered temporarily unconscious and spirited away, as for that matter Buki, Miki and Love were just today.

If it hadn't been for the intervention of all the mascots, it would have been all over for the magical girls of Earth, years ago... because of her.

The single time Northa has taken the field directly it was on Earth. Not in the Haunted Mansion, which is half a shattered hellscape anyway, through a mirror darkly, nearly as desolate a dimension as the North Pole was and parts of Infinity Institute have long been implied to be. Deeply shadowed, at the very least. No, she was fully in the normal world, and even so, in that battle, she obtained her objective, which was decidedly not lethal, or even so direct as any magical girl's mere defeat.

Now the magical girls face her at a time and in a place of her choosing. That time is after she has obtained Infiniti and the place is the seat of her power, the laboratory where she has studied sorrow for thousands of years; the garden she has tended for even longer. The place where she landed, as the seed of the tree she became in the Pericosmic Array, to heal and to regrow.

...at least one of those two things transpired. But maybe only the one.

Northa steps between Lera's tri-bolts gracefully. She raises a single hand to La Sirene's fury and just... takes it, takes it to the palm, not going so far as to absorb it, but almost more frighteningly, distributing it. Les Mysteres is a powerful, terrible, wonderful force, and this ancient Queen's skin... is just too thick for it to penetrate. There is a little dust, afterwards. She closes her fist, and lets it crumble to the floor.

"It isn't too late!" she shoots back at La Sirene. "Once you intransigent... ''children'' are gone, I will finish what I have started! They will live as Labyrinth has, in safety and security!"

Her eyes roll -- REALLY roll, roll with madness and rage -- when Lera brings up the Cephiran Princess. "Do not speak of that, that ''idiotic child'' to me," 'child' really seems to be an insult to her. But she's so steamed by the memory that Kyouka gets to be the first to land a real hit. A small one. But a real one. The shot across Northa's bow lands on one of her spiked pauldrons.

She turns to stare at the purple-clad warrior. Kyouka sees, in those golden eyes, her anger multiplied a thousandfold. Ten thousandfold. Ten thousand years of... fury.

Perhaps the alternative was ten thousand years of anguish...

Mikoto spins in and slashes at full force. Northa retreats a single step from the blade, which leaves a purple-green bruise on her too-pale, too-cold, too-strange skin. This is a victory but also a dire warning, for much larger monsters have been bowled head over heels by such a direct hit from Miroku, tumbled like so many pins or rocketed over the horizon and out of the world forever.

And then everyone finds out what it is to fight Northa on her own terms.

She raises her hand, and sorrowful plants ''explode'' out of the ground. What had been a clearing is returned to jungle in a half heartbeat; jungle that it always was, only temporarily in hiding. One could accuse her of cowardice, to have lured them in only to trap them thus, but it is rather ruthlessness that guides her. How could she do ought else for the million worlds she is determined to save?

It is hotter than ever. Wetter than ever. And sharper than ever. Those razor leaves, mostly avoided until now, are suddenly everywhere. Those writhing vines, which parted like curtains to allow the group to approach her, are now ten thousand fingers, ten thousand daggers, ten thousand garrotes. Ten thousand teeth, also, as what had been curious lips and tongue suddenly sprout spines and engorge massively into Venusian traps of human scale.

Mikoto is parted from her by a half dozen trees that simply grow between them, pressing both apart. And for Endo -- Endo and --

"Fallen Stern," she recognizes, as it happens.

Even one such as she still had something to lose.

Some light in her goes out.

Her eyes narrow to slits.

"Your master would be ashamed by this betrayal," she sneers, hatred making her features ugly. "But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. He was the best and greatest of my Knights... and he failed. Failed to protect me. Failed to protect my daughter."

The blade falls to execute her as it did so many of her enemies.

But it does not fall faster than her garden can grow.

One, two, ten trunks. Dozens of vines. And hundreds of roots. Meteor Absturz cleaves through them all... but not through the Queen of Belka.

Her voice emerges from behind the wall of greenery between her and her enemies; its coolness suggests she is essentially unscathed.

"At least now I can be confident. With such enemies, who needs allies? Surely you will fail again. It is the ''only'' thing you have ever done in these ten thousand years, Stern."

Roots surround Endo, swirling at him from every direction, especially below.

Then they all lash at him at once -- lash INTO him, sticking like harpoons wherever they can find purchase.

The Belkan greatsword may be strong, but flesh is weak. And the boy can feel his lifeforce beginning to drain away... little pumps of it flowing down the roots to strengthen his enemy.

COMBAT: Northa has used Venus Girl-Trap! on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Northa has used Venus Girl-Trap! on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Northa has used Venus Girl-Trap! on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Northa has used Venus Girl-Trap! on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Northa has used Venus Girl-Trap! on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Northa has used Venus Girl-Trap! on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Northa has used Venus Girl-Trap! on Cure White.
COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant partially dodges 7 Fatigue damage from Northa's Venus Girl-Trap!, taking 29 Fatigue damage! Stun and
Trap applied to La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Lera Camry dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Northa's Venus Girl-Trap!, taking 16 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's Fade and Flash
abilities activate! Stun applied to Lera Camry!
COMBAT: Cure Passion fails to dodge Northa's Venus Girl-Trap!, taking 30 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi fails to counter Northa's Venus Girl-Trap!, taking 32 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi's counterattack, Obsidian Blade: Dynamo, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Northa!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki braces 20 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Endo
Naoki's Block and Parry abilities activate! Northa drains 12 fatigue from Endo Naoki!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to dodge Northa's Venus Girl-Trap!, taking 33 Fatigue damage! Stun applied to Cure Black!
COMBAT: Cure White perfectly dodges 41 Fatigue damage from Northa's Venus Girl-Trap!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Critical Dodge! Cure White's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki partially dodges 7 Fatigue damage from Northa's Venus Girl-Trap!, taking 27 Fatigue damage! Kyouka
Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Trap applied to Kyouka Okazaki!

<Pose Tracker> Inori Yamabuki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Inori Yamabuki had stopped struggling at least, with the idea of conserving her energy, but 'stop struggling' had never meant stop trying. Indeed, her eyes are upon Miki, and Love in turn, even if they can only look out of their periphery, and when they arrive, "Thank goodness! You all made it!"

There's at least a sense of rising belief in her, that they might be saved. Whereas Northa is like the antithesis of all of her issues, with someone that has so much confidence, they no longer need to believe in themselves.

Passion announces she has her Linkruns and she has a swell of relief, but it's still so much, so overwhelming, dare she believe that much? But even if it's not easy...

Miki Aono gives Love and Passion a thin smile at the moment of rescue, "Not quite perfect..." She offers to their exchange, "...but close enough." There's a pained tease there. And Black - Black calls out to her, and 'buki's eyes go wide, as she looks right at her.

For a moment it's in wonder, and then despite her situation, there's a smile in her eyes, "I... know you are."

I believe

Those are the words, that took a girl with no self confidence and made her a Pretty Cure. The idea of believing in others over herself was always the easiest thing, such that she had to believe in herself first. Now, it's an expression that she believes in others...

... just as much as herself.

Believing in Cure Black is the easiest thing.

Watching the two in their teamwork, as Black and White fly, taking different routes to avoid interference, as one leaps and slams into the roots right beside her, jostling her. And one might expect 'buki to speak more formally, as an Ohtori girl, but instead, "Hey yourself." She says back to her friend.

Before...

"Not even for a second."

She says, even without prompting, but perhaps Nagisa understands 'Not even for a second, would I doubt you.'

Whereas Miki grins at Honoka as she asks, pained, "Could be better." It's a stark admission for a girl who often says she's perfect, but in that much it's no longer a front or airs she's putting on, in this moment - they're all comrades, "But once I'm down..."

Then, she'll be perfect.

'Buki braces herself as Black tears at the vines with raw strength, while Miki marvels at White, "I couldn't have asked for a better rescue." She tells her, whereas 'Buki, slides down and momentary makes a choking noise, until Nagisa corrects the problem, and she clutches at her neck, relieved.

"My hero." 'buki says with a muted sound of cheer... but within the same statement is 'My friend.' more profoundly than that, as she momentarily takes a reprieve from the safety of being newly freed and with her, "Thank you."

White asks, and as Miki takes her Linkrun...

"Now..."

'I'm perfect.'

Whereas 'Buki takes Kirun in hand.

"Change, Pretty Cure... Beat Up!"

"Change, Pretty Cure... Beat Up!"

The two change in sync, an expression of falling for one, and rising for the other, in flashes of yellow and blue, the world cascades into light as their worn clothing becomes the brilliant garb of the Pretty Cure, as each girl steps forward in what might seem like defiance in that they do not attack immediately.

"The blue heart is the emblem of hope. Freshly-gathered, Cure Berry!"

"The yellow heart is the emblem of faith! Freshly-harvested, Cure Pine!"

"Sorry we're late." Pine then apologizes, like she was merely not punctual enough, whereas Berry's smiles awkwardly, "More like we were far too early, Pine."

Pine seems momentarily astounded, then smiles ruefully, "I guess that's right. But thanks to you-" She gives Black and White a grateful look, "-we didn't miss it."

"So now, we get to show her ''exactly'' how we feel about everything she's said to Passion and all of you." Berry presents, as Pine nods, then without any further warning, Berry launches herself into a high, elegant leap, before coming down in an enormous kick, whereas 'Pine, drives right in, beginning to punch as if she were going to try and work the abdomen with rapid, powerful punches.

COMBAT: Inori Yamabuki transforms into Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Inori Yamabuki has used Pineapple Express on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"...I'll come sooner next time," Passion says to Miki, with a small smile. She knew that Black and White would get her friends. She watches them, for a long moment.

Everyone has so much to throw at Northa, so much to say and do in this moment where it is so important that something must be ''done''.

And Endo is right. They believed... And Labyrinth believed in Moebius.

Passion manages to finish freeing Love, and Love takes her Linkrun from her. "Setsuna," she says. "...We'll do it together."

"Right!"

Northa. Her true enemy. The enemy of her home. The enemy of ''all'' homes. Passion turns to look at her as she speaks. She calls them children, and Passion narrows her eyes.

But Northa counterattacks, before the girl of few words who is Setsuna Higashi has a chance to say anything at all. Passion falls amidst the vines, suddenly out of sight.

Love Momozono holds out her Linkrun. "Change...!" Her face grows serious. "Pretty Cure! Beat... Up!"

She starts forward, ''running'', and jumps into the air, where her brooch appears, her outfit, her shoes, her new hair--

In glorious pink she rises, charging up beside Cure Passion. "Freshly picked!" she calls, "Cure Peach!"

And where Cure Passion fell, Peach ''wrenches'' open the mouth of that writhing vine, ripping it apart and freeing her sister. "Passion!" Peach calls.

Passion hits a knee on the ground--and rises again, taking up position with her former enemy.

Passion and Peach stand together. "No matter how many times you throw us down..." Love starts, and starts sprinting forward again,

"...We'll get right back up!" Setsuna finishes.

BGM: Riot Rhythm - Sleigh Bells https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OwYkI7m1DM

They crash forward, a flurry of punches and kicks together. Where Peach leaves off, Passion picks up again. The world roils around them as they dodge more and more of those terrible vines, but Peach and Passion work in perfect sync. "So you're not too late!" Passion calls to her teammates. And Peach calls, "I'm just as late! So let's go DOUBLE TIME!"

"Pine!" Peach calls. "Berry!" Passion calls.

And as one, they strike a final time--and it rings with the finality of the clock, a pair of KICKS straight for center mass!

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Twelfth Strike on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa fails to brace Inori Yamabuki's Pineapple Express, taking 28 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Inori Yamabuki is
Psyched!
COMBAT: Northa braces 27 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion's Twelfth Strike, taking 41 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Northa's
Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

They have Love, Buki, and Miki free -- and that's a small victory, Lera thinks. It isn't nearly enough, though, as she sees the plants exploding. It's more than she has ever dealt with before. Northa's magic is beyond what she has seen.

She grits her teeth and soars forward. Lera weaves and bobs between the vines, the thorns, and leaves. She only just gets through, and barely soars away from a trap's teeth.

"Endo-san!" she shouts out. "Hang on!"

She watches Peach, Passion, Pine, and Berry rush in. Lera sucks a breath in -- and she bursts forward the rest of the way. She swings back Soaring Sky, gripping him with both hands. Flame erupts along him.

Plasma, specifically; it glows bright enough to be blinding. <Corona Crash!>

Then, Lera sweeps it down for Northa -- and the plasma explodes off the slash the moment the strike comes close.

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Corona Crash on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa cleanly braces 28 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Corona Crash, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera
Camry is Psyched! Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene looks at Northa through her upraised fingers. "You call that living?" she asks her, even as the warrior voice turns round. La Sirene, perhaps, has been a little bit in her own feelings ever since she rejoined everyone, but that is abruptly ended when she sees Mikoto hurl herself forwards and SMASH with that great sword!

For a moment, she remembers - with a curious sort of salty-sour nostalgia, like remembering the awful taste of a dinner at the most wonderful weeklong vacation of your life - when she stood against Mikoto and her blade.

"Yes! Strike her," La Sirene calls to Mikoto, and she was about to say 'down' but instead the ground, the hot living metal-plant ecology that is growing to riotous profusion around them, has reached up and snapped around her midsection - the angle isn't quite a direct shot at the solar plexus on her, but it is enough that the word becomes a soundless wheeze.

Her hands come downwards, and she can feel the lurid warmth of the place. Sweat is pouring out of her skin, or it feels that way. She thinks, she feels, she reaches for the thought-memory-heart of something else. The storm she had brushed against.

The lashing winds. The driving rain. The great transfer of force. Her eyes close for a moment as her hands grasp either side of the engulfing trap and *pushes*. The Pharos at her hip glitters for a moment. The mouth that engulfs her is filled, silently but with great vigor, with that un-light around her. It swells - it pushes outwards, having traits more in common with liquid than with gas - it spills outwards as la Sirene pushes -- and perhaps more to the point it pours forwards, surging up and outwards. To *her* it is no peril - it's honestly quite refreshing.

To Northa's plants, localized though the impact it may be, it may be less so. What spills out, perhaps what bursts, surges outwards; a bucket of light, or its opposite, poured out into this steaming jungle hell and rippling outwards. "Ngh - Endo!! Pretty Cure, help him--!"

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Salute the Four Corners on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Safety and security... isn't that what Mai ''wants?''

Even so -- "No!"

It can't be like this.

Following up on Kyouka's strike, Mikoto makes a mark with Miroku -- and notes how much of a mark ''isn't'' made, in the process. This is a terrible foe, she thinks. She never realised... Northa was ''this.''

Not that she wasn't more distant than Soular and ''especially'' Westar, but...

The trees grow, and Mikoto tries to charge right ''through'' them, meaning to cut them all down, just as La Sirene says. Except that they grow too ''fast,'' and too ''many,'' one-two-three-uncountable, and for long moments she is distracted by this sudden, unclimbable jungle.

(At least she hears 'Buki's voice, out there. At least she and the others are okay.)

But when Northa turns her attention on Fallen Stern, ''that's'' when Mikoto finally manages to cut her way out, descending with a howl: "LEAVE HIM ALONE!" Endo, or Fallen Stern? Perhaps she's worried about them ''both,'' as her blade comes down in an overhead swing.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa neatly dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness, taking 7 Fatigue damage!
Mikoto Minagi is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka... has missed all of Northa's previous plots. She's still, in the grand scheme of things, oh so new to this, after all, though she has faced plenty of her own challenges in her short stint as a magical girl.

But she's seen the scale of the threat that Northa poses to the many, many worlds out there. Northa showed them all, during that long drop.

She showed them what's happening on Earth.

That might be the only favor she's done for Kyouka, to fully cement in the girl's mind just how alarmingly big this threat is. (Not that she needed the help before, of course. But any possible doubts, no matter how slight, have been vanquished.)

Kyouka's righteous anger is only a candle in the blaze that is Northa's millennia of fury and madness. Surely one girl can't stand up to that, but thankfully, Kyouka is not one girl. She is here with her friends and allies, all indignant over what Northa has done, and so she can bear her portion of that fury to stare defiantly back.

She'd been chasing after her first attack, intent to follow it up with something closer range--but the ground erupts in vines, and while Kyouka jumps to avoid the stinging of thorns, she's just a tad too slow. Something wraps itself around her ankle just as she's left the ground and pulls her back, slamming her into more plants.

She struggles, as more and more plants attempt to latch onto her even as she struggles to stand. The other leg and am arm are ensnared, and her last hand temporarily escapes a vine as she yanks it free, then slams her fist into another vineto try and pry it free. "I can't imagine how badly you're hurting, that you held a grudge for all these years..." She pries a leg free, then another. There are still vines clinging to her, but she'll make do as she ''leaps'' into the air.

"But this isn't going to ring her back!" As Kyouka sails through the air, a band of midchildan runes surrounds her right gauntlet, which begins to shine brightly with violet-white light. "Lunaaaaar--" She ''slams'' the fist into Northa, releasing a giant exposion of energy on impact, if she connects. "IMPACT!"

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Lunar Impact on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa fails to dodge La Sirene de Diamant's Salute the Four Corners, taking 27 Fatigue damage! Bind Break! All of La
Sirene de Diamant's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Northa perfectly braces 45 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Lunar Impact, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Critical Brace! Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo finds himself awash in smoothing vines, fingers flexing and arms straining to break free of the draining tendrils. They cut, they strangle, they sap the will to move from his body.

But he doesn't let go of his weapon.

<WE SERVED HONORABLY.>

One tug, then another, and the knight wrenches an arm free.

<LAID LOW A DOZEN WORLDS IN YOUR NAME.>

A foot finds purchase somewhere in the tangle below.

<AND FAILED, INDEED.>

A push and Endo shoulders enough room to get his other hand around the hilt of his device. She's dimly aware of Lera, Nori, Mikoto, of other voices outside the consuming tendrils. "She failed you first, Stern." The boy hisses, the message conveyed more through their link than his garbled worlds

ENDOST: Still in the Dark - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPA3Y-acjb0.

<YES. I SEE IT NOW.>

Light floods from the cocoon, magical heat and light bleeding off of Fallen Stern as the device pulses with power. The vines will be their chrysalis, device and wielder honed into a vicious instrument inside.

<MY FAILURE WAS OF UNDERSTANDING.>

"Stern!" Endo calls.

<KNIGHT.> His device responds in kind.

Magic floods outward.

<ZERSTORUNG DRANG.>

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Endo Naoki's Zerstorung Drang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Empower applied to Endo Naoki! Cleanse! All
of Endo Naoki's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

When she sets Buki down so she can receive and use her Linkrun, Cure Black first gives her a hug. "Thank you," she says, her voice raw. "For being okay. I was super worried."

Cure White inclines her shoulders in the slight, grateful bow of a girl raised in a fine old house with tatami mats and and old stone well. "Then I'm perfect too," she says in relief, meaning the exact same sentiment as her partner had with Buki. Unfortunately, it gets Cure Black's eyes all starry again.

"They're so... scenic together," Cure Black sighs, not quite finding the right word. "Like they're walking on the red curtain."

"Isn't it 'carpet', mepo?" Mepple demands. He's been on Earth long enough to fill in for Honoka when she's not around to correct Nagisa's idioms.

"Haven't you been to a theater? It's a red curtain," Cure Black stands her ground distractedly.

"Who walks on a curtain-mepo?!"

"What stage is carpeted?" Black rejoins heatedly.

"Dark power mepo!" Mepple shouts, suddenly snapping to attention. The discord falls away in an instant, Cure and fairy once more of one purpose, but just a little too late. The damp ground beneath Cure Black's feet closes up like a giant book. A venus fly trap would be a useful metaphor... if only it were a metaphor at all.

Leaping off the ground, Cure Black manages to plant her feet against one half of the trap, and her back against the other, but its teeth are nearly closed regardless. With her back this bent and her knees nearly touching her chin, she can use only a tiny portion of her considerable physical might, but even that portion is strong enough that the fact that Northa's trap is still closing startles and frightens her.

"I have it!" Cure Black shouts to Cure White urgently, trying to warn her off. "I have it, so don't--!"

SNAP.

Cure White had been poised to follow Cure Berry into battle, but she halts, her cheeks losing what little color they had. "Blacku!" she shouts, lunging forward, only to find a single vine tendril around her ankle. She looks down at it, then forward at the waving leafy fingers, the beckoning curls of vines, the spiralling thirsty thorns. A trap within a trap. She is expected.

"No," Cure White decides aloud, with the tremulousness her voice takes on when its silverine lilt rises to authority, the waver of a strong woodwind rather than any frailty of tone. "That is not how this will work."

With a swift yank of her leg, Cure White snaps the thin tendril on her ankle. She walks at first, and when the first exploratory thorns reach for her, she slaps at them decisively with the blade of her hand, chastising the attempt. The heat is getting worse and worse, and she feels like she is breathing steam from the humidy at this point, but the most either gets from her is a shake of her head to toss some damp hair off her forehead. As the jungle-flora intensify their attacks, lunging like snakes from the ground or swinging out from either side to try and snag her, Cure White glides, dips, and dodges, untouched. Across the last, most intense battleground, she enters what is essentially a floor routine, flipping feet over head, pivoting, and finally, on her last flip, landing with both heels on the fattest part of the venus fly trap that has her partner.

As if punched in the gut, the trap belches out Cure Black, sending her tumbling out onto the ground. She spits some ichor with a sour look on her face, a hand over a ragged wound she somehow obtained in there on her shoulder, though her shoulder raiment absorbed much of the damage.

"Oh my gosh," Cure Black pants. "Through that?"

Cure White nods minutely.

"Huwaito..."

A cry comes across the battlefield, interrupting this reunion. La Sirene wants Pretty Cure help for the sorely taxed Endo, and everyone else is embroiled already.

"He's far," White observes meaningfully.

"On it," Cure Black agrees, catching her meaning. Back on her feet without hesitation, she charges back at the Venus Girl-Trap, tackles it, and wrenches hard with her hips, tearing it up out of the ground like a weed. Flipping it over onto her shoulders, she tests its weight with a few hefts of her arms, then starts off at an awkward run, the massive, flapping maw of the dead plant bouncing atop her head. Hiking back and bouncing for her last few paces, Cure Black heaves the enormous plant with a bark of strained exertion, "HUFF!"

And soaring through the air goes an enormous, toothy plant corpse, a trail of ichor following it. It passes over Endo Naoki's head by quite some yards, plummeting down towards Northa. Hopefully, even someone like her will need a second or five to deal with that, buying the Belkan hero some time.

COMBAT: Cure Black has used Mighty Red-Faced Lift on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa dodges 19 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Mighty Red-Faced Lift, taking 29 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Cure White has used How This Will Work on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa counters 3 Fatigue damage from Cure White's How This Will Work, taking 9 Fatigue damage! Cure White is Psyched!
COMBAT: Northa's counterattack, Grow Strong With Sorrow, partially gets through, doing 16 Fatigue damage to Cure White! Critical
Counterhit! Northa drains 4 fatigue from Cure White!
COMBAT: Cure Passion has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Northa has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Lera Camry has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Pine has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has saved her current combat state for later!

[[2024-11-08 - The Labyrinth Revolutions 2|TO BE CONTINUED]]

[[Category:Logs]]

[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

2024-10-19 - The Labyrinth Revolutions 1

2025-03-16T13:41:56Z

Pink Moon Stick: Pink Moon Stick moved page 2024-10-19 - The Labyrinth Revolutions 1 to 2024-10-19 - The Labyrinth Revolutions

#REDIRECT [[2024-10-19 - The Labyrinth Revolutions]]

2025-03-15 - The Labyrinth Reawakens 2

2025-03-16T13:38:26Z

Pink Moon Stick:

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Reawakens 2'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''Fallen Stern makes the ultimate sacrifice to repeat history and drive the Outsiders back to the darkness from whence they came. But the magical girls refuse to accept it, and invite them into the light instead.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Fate Testarossa]], [[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Inori Yamabuki]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Westar]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Miki Aono]], [[Love Momozono]]

GM: Pink Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
3/15/2025 - 6/17/2016
|-
|}

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Dark Realms +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
Light cannot exist without darkness, nor darkness without the light, or so
some claim. Whether the Dark Realms are simply the Fairy Realms through a
mirror darkly is difficult to ascertain, but it's undeniable that some
realms in either domain lack an obvious counterpart in the other. Certainly
the ceaseless war between bright virtue and dark evil gives little heed to
the notion that ultimate victory is impossible.

Indeed, a given realm of darkness will often commit itself solely to
extinguishing the light forever. With names like Minor Land, Labyrinth and
Dark Kingdom, perhaps that isn't all that surprising. Endless plains beneath
a midnight sky lit only by bolts of violet lightning harbor armies of
strange creatures, or yet stranger war machines. If there is water, it is
brackish, tainted. The air itself stabs lungs like a superheated knife. Some
denizens of the Dark Realms claim that they're trying to transform the
entire universe into worlds like their own, but colonizing more pleasant
environments might be sufficient motivation alone.

Black, too, has shades; there are many dark wastelands, but also dark
cities, dark oceans, dark forests, dark deserts, dark skies. Some are even
possessed of a loveliness all their own; as beautiful as it is deadly, with
shadowy landscapes that mesmerize before they surprise. No matter how
populous, all are pervaded by a sense of emptiness, of absence, masked at
times by swirling rage or despair, but never erased.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

[[2025-02-22 - The Labyrinth Reawakens|PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA]]

In his greed, Jail ripped all the magic of the universe into Labyrinth -- into himself.

And this immense concentration, its sheer density, attracted the attention of a force that has not been seen for ten thousand years.

It only took one Outsider to swallow the madman and his stolen power -- and it took flight, back to the inverted portal, now hijacked to allow the aliens into this mode of existence.

Its retreat was covered by thousands of its kind. Thousands of strange monsters, so strange that the eye cannot even resolve them, only compare them to more familiar creatures. The Outsiders wear comparisons to insects, to birds, to beasts, like ill-fitting suits, warped far beyond funhouse mirrors. They descended on Labyrinth and its people, and anyone or anything they touched turned cold -- filled with blackness -- and then simply ceased to be. Winked out of being entirely.

But the magical girls fought back. Some pursued Jail upwards into the sky, for if he is lost, the countless worlds robbed of their souls will be lost also, if to a more spiritual heat-death than the more traditional promise of entropy's kiss. Others deployed to the plaza, where a dense crowd of onlookers -- whose belief in the magical girls had, not long ago, empowered them to defeat Jail in the first place -- was threatened by Outsiders; and still more to a building brought to the verge of collapse by aliens that simply flew straight through it, and thus through its structural integrity.

Setsuna Higashi's best friends, her found family, the Fresh Pretty Cure, climbed to the top of the tower at the center of Labyrinth, which had once been the seat of Lord Moebius and the shrine of his secret controller, Northa, once the Belkan Queen who, in eons past, made war upon the many magical worlds in order to secret away their power somewhere the Outsiders could never sense, and thus never invade. At the apex, Cures Peach, Berry and Pine unleashed their love, hope and faith to blanket the city below in protective light that no Outsider could pass through.

At the same time, the magical girls defeated the last of the aliens in the city proper. Labyrinth has been saved -- but the stolen magic of the worlds remains in fatal jeopardy.

All that remains is to take to the sky.

NOW

<SoundTracker> Love Is A Battlefield (Live To Tell cover) - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsa_9xNpqF4

They rise, some of them Outsider to Outsider, leaping and punching, blitzing and throwing. They rise, flying and slashing, swirling and squeezing and surging. They rise alone and they rise together; they rise in each other's arms.

But they just don't rise fast enough.

Still, the enemy comes... there are so many of them. It feels endless. For every hundred of them slain by a magical girl, there are a thousand more to replace them. And every single time one Outsider manages to pierce the terrific offense-as-defense of the line, and land even a single hit, that is the more significant action than all those deaths that made it possible, because the defenders are so terribly few.

When the battle suddenly changes, the first way to notice is that each of the Outsiders start to glow from the inside out. It is abrupt and simultaneous; none of them were switched on (as it were), and now all of them are. What it isn't, however, is truly identical...

...each alien glows with a specific and unique shade.

What is the color of a soul?

Here's one that's icy. Not the rugged ice of a science fiction planet -- or, rather, not only that -- but the pearlescent glow of sea ice illuminated by aurora. Ice as wonder, as well as danger. It's beautiful, yet the Outsider possessed of it does not become moreso. It is perilous, agonizing, to see such ghostfire ignite within the body of something so ill-equipped to appreciate it as anything other than fuel.

Or perhaps as food. Take this next Outsider, whose cheerful golden light smells like fresh-baked bread, an abhorrent juxtaposition with something worse than writhing antennae, something stranger than chittering mandibles. Another smells of roses, all pinks and whites, the petals almost visible within the aura, hues rendered precisely, exactly, by the steady, unflickering flame. Some Outsiders now are engulfed in a more literal flame; there are silver flames, blue flames, fires of war and of peace, of hearth and of heart. Well. All of them are of heart.

There are as many different glows as there are worlds.

Or... maybe, there are as many different glows as there are undone magical girls, their magic stolen from across those many worlds.

Whether defeating a given Outsider will free that particular magic, destroy it, or do nothing at all to release it from the swarm, is an absolute unknown.

But it's not a matter of choice, because these creatures are coming faster and harder now, sharper and more terrible.

How did this come to be? Thank the holes punched in the cloud by the magical girls, to be able to see it at all.

Plummeting through the sky -- no longer prismatic, rather reverted to a lab coat over a suit -- is Time-Space Criminal Jail Scaglietti.

He is also no longer conscious. He may or may not be no longer alive.

Either way, though still technically in one piece physically, he has ''unquestionably'' been... digested. Maybe the singular Outsider who snatched him up and headed for the portal made it; maybe it didn't matter; maybe it still matters.

Everything feels like it matters so ''much'', suddenly, when faced with Outsiders suffused with magics as familiar to our heroes as their own names -- the names of their friends -- the names of their worlds.

Jail falls, and falls, and falls. He's unpredictable and squirrelly, but this feels very final.

Whether or not his life can be saved, his body will unquestionably be destroyed when it makes impact, either on the Fresh force field, or if he passes through because he's not an Outsider, then definitely on the ground.

And the holes in the swarm... the holes are filling fast. Uncannily fast, as though every Outsider is perfectly aware of the position of every other member of the swarm.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick transforms into The Outsiders: Ascendant!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Body Horror on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Cure White.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Cure Passion fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 39 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is Psyched!
COMBAT: Cure Pine perfectly braces 41 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Brace! Cure Pine's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White cleanly braces 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 5 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Lera Camry dodges 33 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 22 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

They are everywhere, brilliant and strange and terrifying. It is not enough to conceive of what they have done since the beginning, what their presence has wrought. Her mind can barely wrap themselves around the questions.

What are they? Why are they doing this? How many?

That last one sticks with a person in particular. How many civilizations have fallen to them? How many people have died? And in that question, leads to another intrusive one.

... Did...

Did her mother's final end come not from falling through the cracks in dimensions in a failed attempt to reach Alhazard, but at the end the journey, there was only these... things?

Fate's heart quickens subtly faster. Her grip tightens upon Bardiche, and as she draws him back again. She sees a shape in the midst of the chaos, a glimpse of white, a flash of purple waving in the choked breeze.

"... It's him." She utters, softly, but not inaudibly in the atmosphere.

She does not have nearly the same feelings for the man who called himself her father. And yet... and yet! As he falls, she can't help but notice.

I can't stop,

He's falling alone.

BGM for Fate: Invisible Heat (Acoustic Version) - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txf_64xFAp0

I can't stop, Can't stop. Won't stop. As Infinite as the Memory, so is my Desire... this is my purpose. It is why I exist. It is why the Bureau made me, and their unlikely gift.

Maybe out of his own choices, he doesn't have something - someone worth clinging to other than belief in the inevitability of his purpose as desire as he falls, maybe he doesn't have the option.

Maybe it was decided for him at the moment of his birth, and the option taken from him the moment after, just like her... if so, then maybe she inherited something from him after all. A purpose changed - but in others, she found her own purpose.

And despite her anger, seeing him like this in this moment...

... she has to believe that can be true for him too.

Fate's expression tightens all of a sudden, "I'm going." Eyes shining with resolution she says firmly to everyone else, with no explanation other than. "I have to." There isn't much time longer, so her last statement is a plea, "Please help me reach him in time."

Yes, that is right. You look upon the first artificial mage. The original. You were forged to fill a place at your mother's side. I was crafted to find... and secure... and create all the Lost Logia the doddering old fools of the Time-Space Administration could never.

She knows she'll need everyone else here to stand a chance, especially with what she's about to do. And as she flies, and the creatures fly towards her, she makes a sharp call, "BARDICHE!"

<Jacket Purge>

At the moment they would make contact, the space she's flying through erupts in a detonation of smoke and lightning, before a synthetic call is chimed.

<Sonic Form>

And a shape flies out of it so fast that it's like that even the other Magical Girls might have difficulty following, a glimpse of her in her barrier jacket, but without her armor or cloak. With sharp sparking flier fins attached to each wrist, and boots, but bereft of many of the accessories of her armor that she had before - made perilously thin. As she flies down towards Jail, and gets cut off, flying up, and in a spiral at incredible speed, before coming back around, and plummeting amidst the radiant colors of their strange auras.

It will give them all an opportunity to strike them en masse. She does not call for the moment to them.

She trusts them all to know.

Bardiche, now in Haken form vanishes, as Fate flies down towards the form of Jail that's nearly struck the ground, and her arms encircle him, much the way her Mother's did Alicia's... before she fell, sharply braking with one great flap of her fins.

They strike the ground anyway roughly, spinning as Fate brunts the impact with her own form as best as she can. For one long moment the wind is knocked out of her, then she takes a breath and coughs violently. You learn to fall, before you fly, but it's hard to practice for falling that fast.

Turning her red eyes on the unconscious form of Jail, she looks, waits... for evidence that his chest is rising and falling beneath his white, now somewhat dusty labcoat, then takes another sharp breath.

"Maybe... Maybe you'll never understand..." And as she forces herself up, glad to know she can, she looks up at the sky. "... but, I have to believe you can..."

...

"...Jail... Scaglietti." She says quietly, rather than Father. Maybe that title is true, but it doesn't matter. She has a home to go back to. She has a Mother. She has friends and people who love her. And at the end of the day, she hopes she'll have three new sisters.

If he wants that place in her life, he'll have to earn it. But if he wants to, perhaps there'll be a chance one day.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Sonic!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera flies up into the sky, with Cure Passion at her side. She looks sideways at her, before she looks at the Outsiders; each of them aglow with a strange light, a ''stolen'' light, from magical girls from across the universe. She fights a shudder, as best she can, and watches as Jail Scaglietti falls.

Fate says she is going. Lera looks sideways at her, then she nods. "Be careful, Fate. We've got your back, y'know?"

The Outsiders come in. One, Lera beats back with Broken Ground; there's a flash of a girl in white, holding up a staff, on a desert world with a butterscotch sky. A second, she parries with Soaring Sky; there's a flash in her mind of a black-haired girl with violet eyes, drawing back a bow.

A third comes in, its jaws hitting her side -- and Lera shouts out, "Aaah!"

Then she swings Broken Ground up. A brilliant dome of golden light explodes away from her, slamming all three Outsiders back with a mighty explosion.

<Terra Breaker!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Terra Breaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 39 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi perfectly braces 29 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Brace! Mikoto Minagi's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa braces 22 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 18 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Ren
Aizawa's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Up, and up, and up again. But Passion is still there, still moving up, just as she told Lera she would. Soon, she is fighting, more and more; she ''kicks'' through one and another and another, there are still more. She continues to fight, blipping in and out of existence to dodge and weave her way through the Outsiders, until she sees and feels one in particular: one with the wisdom of the water, the familiar calm energy of one she knew--unadultered, unlike how she once knew it.

Passion remembers this essence, a dear friend--one who was something like that another way, once. One from Earth. And Passion hesitates for a crucial second--just long enough for sparkling water in an Outsider to ''crash''; into her side, sending her tumbling down into the tower to smash against it. "Ah--"

"...Maybe I deserved that one," she says. "But no more!"

She ''shoots'' back upward, sailing through the air through another three Outsiders, and finds the one that struck her--the one that holds that precious essence.

Is it freedom, she offers? Or something else? She will have to do as Pine, and have faith.

"Haaaaaah--!"

Passion spots Pine, suddenly. "Pine!" she calls. "This way!"

"Haaaaah--!" She pivots mid-air, handspringing off debris, and extends her gracefulf oot in a big ''kick'' with Pine, straight for the Outsider!

COMBAT: Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Lera Camry's Terra Breaker, taking 44 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa covers Fate Testarossa for Pink Moon Stick's attack, Space Invasion, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki fails to counter Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 31 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 53 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Fate!" Mikoto calls, not nearly so fast. But perhaps her words are fast enough to catch up, eventually: "Do it!"

How could she ever... blame Fate for wanting to save someone like her, even if he's a bad person?

After all, she...

With Westar safely(?!) held Miroku's vast free hand, he is, at least... well, there are ''more perilous'' places to be, right now. Though there are also surely ''less'' perilous places -- the Outsiders swarm around him, hungry for his overflowing, overwhelming magic.

To pick one from a crowd, though...

... it would have to be that one with fangs which are somehow also ''spinnets,'' curling and flexing like fingers as they shoot entangling thread. It's not red, like fate; it's white, like death. Like something girls shouldn't be so familiar with -- a crime of knowledge in and of itself.

With legs and legs and legs and legs, unfurling in the air, flapping, skittering, soaring.

"Na...o?"

Mikoto echoes her name, dumbfounded, staring at something which she never actually seems able to stare directly at, even though it's right there in front of her. It's chased by anger, as she realises: "What'd you do to Nao?!"

Kozue might have -- let's say -- complex feelings on her, these days; and really, it's hard to say Nao's are any ''simpler.'' But they still helped to teach her how the world worked, back before she knew how to walk through Shinjuku. Even if they were expensive lessons, sometimes... Mikoto doesn't want her to be eaten up.

"She's my friend!"

Mikoto might be the only one of the two who would say something like that out ''loud,'' though.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Embrace on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa's Flash
ability activates!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Body Horror, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Quipped! Bind
Break! All of Pink Moon Stick's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine's running behind. For what it's worth? She has a good reason.

"Hurry!"

Cue Tarte, trying to drag a Labyrinth child out from under debris and help him up, a feat made difficult by his tiny ferret like limbs, "Aaaaah!? Pine-han. This is... really hard!"

"He won't be able to walk with one leg Tarte!"

"Yeah! I gathered... it's just! I'm not... THAT strong!"

Pine looks at Tarte as if it hadn't quite occurred to her as her arms strain at the debris she's lifting up, then back at him. "... If only you could become a Pretty Cure." She mentions softly as Tarte keeps trying to help him limp along, more at this point being carried by the kid who's hopping, than actually doing any good. "Oh sure, I'll- get right on that. We're clear!"

She sets it down, then considers everyone ascending...

"Wait... wait up!? Now to get... up." She can jump high but.. "How am I going to get up there?"

"... I suppose I can offer a hand." Cure Pine turns around, eyes widening at...

-=-=-

"And a one... two... and a-" "Wait wait - stop! You're SURE you can throw me that high like this?" "-Was I not an Executive of Labyrinth?" "Well... that's a good point, it's just, does it really have to be like this-?" "-Do you want to get up there or not?" "I do but-" "Three."

Which is the same moment that Soular swings Pine around, and throws her like a Hammer into the sky.

There's an initial cry of alarm, "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Before she levels out, and seems to panic less, "He really could do it..." She marvels, right as an Outsider comes at her, and Pine crosses her arms and plows into it. More and more come, as her hands move into a flurry of sudden punches and blocks to try and keep them away, moving more on instinct.

Some score hits, but she keeps moving on raw momentum, until she starts to come down, and lands on top of another Outsider, causing her to get a flash of a blue clothed, wolf-eared man... with a tail.

Bending at the knees, she leaps off it again as she eyes Cure Black, which her and White fighting up here remind her that she wasn't for a bit.

"I'm so sorry everyone!" She bows her head, even mid-leap, one might imagine she'd do a more formal bow if she wasn't aerial, "I was just running a little behind-!"

"That's not like you, Pine... usually it's Peach that gets lost on the way."

"That almost never happens!" Peach complains, as Berry and her come down to kick a mess of Outsiders. Whereas Pine herself pivots in mid-air towards Passion's voice. "Oh! Coming!" And as she redirects, she comes down with leg extended beside her, "Double Pretty Cure Kick!"

A phrase which Peach Echoes with her own alongside Berry.

"You'll never guess how I got up here." Pine asides to Passion, after impact. "Anyhow... I think I got a glimpse of someone who needs saving? He's... a guy, with adorable wolf-ears, and a tail?"

Leave it to her to remember those characteristics in particular. "... It almost feels like that day with Lucky." She notes, because despite the grim scenario...

...some things are as simple as a canine that needs saving to her. And even if it was Eas they were saving him from...

"Except this time, we do it together."

COMBAT: Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Passion and Cure Pine have used Pretty Cure Fresh Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly counters 63 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion and Cure Pine's Combo: Pretty Cure Fresh Kick,
taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Counter! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, There's Just Too Many, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Embrace, taking 0 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren squeezes Endo's hand tight, the promise of filling their bellies with good food all but sealed. She then turns to survey the situation. The sheer number of Outsiders and the eerie glow of stolen magic send a shiver down her spine, but she shakes it off, focusing on the battle. Then--

Fate's voice cuts through the chaos.

Ren's head snaps toward the golden blur diving toward the falling figure of Jail Scaglietti. Fate isn't hesitating, pushing herself to reckless speeds, and Ren knows--''knows''--that she cant let her go alone.

"I'm on it!" She barks, kicking off in pursuit.

Magic surges around her as she accelerates, the world blurring in a streak of bronze. The Outsiders react almost instantly, a new wave breaking off to intercept. One lunges from the side, jagged limbs cutting through the air toward her.

"Get out of my way!"

Instinct takes over. Ren throws up a hastily-formed barrier--bronze hexagonal plates snapping together in midair. The Outsiders strike meets the shield, energy rippling across its surface. For a second, she thinks it might hold. Then it shatters, shards of magic dispersing into nothing as the creatures claws slash through, scoring a glancing blow across her arm. Pain flares, sharp and hot, but she grits her teeth.

And then she experiences a flash, followed by a familiar scent of sweet-smelling plants.

"E-Eri-chan?!" She exclaims, momentarily faltering in her pursuit of Fate. This Outsider has Eri-chan's magic! "Y-You jerk!" She calls out in anger, and pushes forward. No time. No time!

Blood beads at the tear in her barrier jacket, but she powers through. The Outsider is still recovering from its attack when Ren twists in midair, holding a hand out as a runic circle spins into existence in front of it.

"BACK OFF!"

A barrage of mana-infused energy bursts fire out towards the beast, but Ren doesn't wait to see the result, turning away to blast off again.

Her attention is locked on Fate, on Jail, and the swarm that threatens to tear them apart before they even reach the ground. She crashes through the fray, firing off salvo after salvo of energy bursts at the vicious creatures. "Leave them alone!" She shouts, and in the process makes ''herself'' a more appealing target. As the Outsiders close in, she performs several tightly-controlled aerial maneuvers to avoid the brunt of their ire, though still gets clipped a couple of times in the process. The horrible feeling of being touched by these Outsiders causes her teeth to rattle, but she's determined to not let them win!

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used Scatter Pulse on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBlKPLeLU_s (Of Monsters and Men - Yellow Light)

La Sirene de Diamant does not have the opportunity, quite, to discern the fate of Jail Scaglietti. It is quite possible she could not see him. And perhaps she would not save him - or could not. But in the end, perhaps, it is moot. This is the great and shining blessing of being with others.

One might have weaknesses. Many? They can guard each other; and rely on one another as well.

And yet, there are so many. Like many swords, at least out west, it cuts both ways.

La Sirene, like everyone, is a star, but perhaps more literally than they - seen from any direction, whatever she has desperately grasped to be able to take to the air is making that auroral glow of inverted-light shine brighter, compressed into a six-rayed star-point. A minor magic, perhaps.

And if they are all stars, they are faced with a galaxy, however different the force and power might be. The Outsiders are horrid enough, even when one of them flies right towards her and engulfs her entire torso in something she thinks are jaws. The teeth are -- absent - it is flat and crushing which is bad enough, even if she is able to rip herself free with a kick and a commanding sweep of both arms. But afterwards, her head swims. She breathes heavily. She feels empty, hollowed out: like a tubular bell.

Will it end? Her heart has always been changeable, and perhaps it's changing from a high tide to a low one. Inevitable. A lot of things are inevitable, aren't they?

Nothing lasts forever.

Everything ends.

Dreams always fade, or distort, or collapse.

And...

...

Something impunges on La Sirene - Nori Ankou's - swirling, whirling mind as she rises upwards. Something unusual. Something that stands out among the background of sussurous horror.

A simple musical chord, as if someone was playing a quiet scale on a piano. A simple five note sequence, soft and quiet yet curiously penetrant.

La Sirene's eyes swivel towards it. One of the Things. Distinct from the others. It's making the sound. It's curious, melancholy but soothing. Something in la Sirene's heart is soothed by it; something else, paradoxically, is moved. That simple musical refrain.

It awakens other things. Memories. Pain and struggle. The smell of Tokyo streets in summer, late at night, after the rain's stopped.

All of these pour through her mind. Something wets her cheeks. La Sirene realizes it's tears at about the same time that she finds her left hand's already raised up as she turned almost a half-circle in the air, right hand already cycling despite a slight shaking. Is it her? Or, she thinks, even as she says:

"Les Mysteres, come"

and strokes down. There is another flare of light; the familiar and trusty charm still is with her, at least. The light bursts out, and to la Sirene it seems like it's moving a little slowly, but, she tells herself as it crosses that span of space between herself and the curiously musical creature, that might just be that she's tired.

It's glowing, isn't it? That color - it's blue, she thinks, like -

A memory of a brooch, carved simply and with labor and with love. Her back straightens as the image rests in her mind, sitting there. Her mouth tightens, pressing together. She doesn't speak, but she blinks away tears again.

Of course, for her, tears have their own meaning.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Les Mysteres on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure White and Cure Black are on the move again, hopping after Jail's spirit, Outsider by Outsider. Stopping the creatures was never their main goal, but as time runs out, they have become even more inclined to evasion, letting the beasts slip past them even as they begin to glow with different-colored lights.

"There it is!" Cure White calls, as she and Black split up onto different Outsiders with a jump.

"I've got it!" Black shouts triumphantly, seeing a clear path up Outsider backs between her and the Jail-Outsider at last. Landing in a crouch, she touches the spot on her cheek that White's lips recently graced. Then, thighs bulging, she takes a massive leap across a great distance, towards an Outsider glowing magenta-and-gold. The creature rears up, confronting Black instead of trying to get past her, and Black, giddy from the kiss she wears like a badge on her face, draws her fist back gamely. "YOu wanna play that way?" she challenges. Hurling a massive punch, she slam's into... a golden shield, her blow halted dead, her arm ringing with pain.

Black blinks, the scent of fresh bread in her nostrils. "...Bloom?" she asks forlornly. The shield had not looked like Bloom's until it was struck, but the impact cracked it along a grid, and now it looks a bit like a sunflower. The yawning maw of the Outsider is already casting shadows over her body. Rather than a proper mouth, it is as if the Outsider just opened itself up to engulf her. It slams shut, hiding her from view.

"Blacku!" White shouts, changing course to aid her partner. But another Outsider arises between them, glistening as pale as the moon. Its light catches on Cure White's garments like fire to kindling, glowing on her clothing, but what really ignites is her even paler skin. An observer might be forgiven for thinking Cure White was radiating the moonlight herself. "...Sailor Moon?" Cure White ventures.

"Urrr---AGH!" Cure Black screams, squatting the weight of the Outsider's upper half to force its maw partway open again. There is some horrible fang buried in her back, and a smaller one in her shoulder, making this lift cruel and costly. Bloom's golden glow sinks into Black's tanned skin and suffuses it, its warm hue finding a home there the way Moon's cool one did in White's. As she reaches her full height, Black switches the weight to her hands, starting to pull the fang from her back by forcing the upper jaw up further. She grits her teeth as it slowly drags out of her... and then, Cure White cries out. Glancing behind her, Black sees the ground, so far below that even she would turn to jam if she landed there. With desperation, she tosses herself down towards it. She'll figure something out.

The already-wounded Cure White is driven back onto the back of the Outsider she just left by a burst of moonlight. It burns cold, like what has caught fire now is not merely the tone of her skin, but the fabric of her soul. Alight, White attempts to pat away the flames, but when they do not respond in the least, she makes note, and stands up, ignoring it for now. "Out of my way..."

The Bloom Outsider does not appear content to let Cure Black fall to her death, plunging down for a second bite. Ready this time, Black watches it approach, and as its maw opens, she spreads her body wide, catching the air and shooting much faster into the maw than expected. Landing on the lower jaw, she cocks her fist back like a revolver, and as the mouth closes, she punches upward directly into it, bursting a hole out the top of the monster.

Her moonglowing skin streaking light behind her like an inverted calligraphy brush, Cure White slams a palm strike into the moonlit Outsider. It collides with Cure Bloom's.

COMBAT: Cure Black has used Sen no Sen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Eight Trigram Palm on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Ren Aizawa's Scatter Pulse, taking 11 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 22 Fatigue damage from Cure White's Eight Trigram Palm, taking 18 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 26 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Les Mysteres, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly braces 21 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Sen no Sen, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Brace!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo's eyes skitter across the sky as it becomes a kaleidoscope of lights. The sudden burst of color, in other times, might spark hope. Here the swirling lights feel as empty as the things containing them.

He tracks the descent of the man falling and soon loses track of the blur that Fate Testarossa becomes. "Go, Fate!" He calls. It couldn't happen any other way. Something about that makes Endo's lips cut into a determined smile.

The hand holding Ren's gives a squeeze in return as he lets her handle it. He knows she can.

And then...up. He meets the next wave head-on. If it could be called a wave at allit's more like an ocean. The first to meet him is a thin line, a pulsing pink needle that rips across his armor. The Outsider bends and moves, bladelike points giving chase asFallen Stern cuts chaff around it.

Their exchange is brief, familiar, and comes to a violent end as they exchange final blows. Fallen Stern in the Outsider's center, the vessel's fine edge in the Endo's shoulder.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Asteroid Eilen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 21 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Asteroid Eilen, taking 32 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

There is so much on the line. The magic of countless worlds that Belka destroyed in her grief in a desperate attempt to save them. All of the magic of every magical girl. Her ''home''--and Japan had really started to feel like home, finally, when she finally figured out what it was that she wanted, and started making friends. The kinds of friends she'd trust with her life.

But she can't forget the image of her parents, with all hope and emotion stolen from them, staring blankly on that street, chanting those awful words...

She had to keep going. She braced herself for the next kick off an outsider, felt the sensation of the void sneaking into her even in the brief moment of contact before she rocketed away, up and ever higher.

There was an outsider glowing with rainbow light that she was chasing.

''We have to go faster. We can't let him get away.''

But suddenly it's not just one outsider that's glowing, it's all of them. She sucks in a sharp breath and misses her next tjump as she stares in horror at all of the auras flaring up around them.

It's a sickening sight, far more sickening than thinking about the fall awaiting her if she doesn't recover her jump.

It feels... almost gross, to see the Outsiders empowered this way, and Kyouka's skin crawls as she looks around to take stock of the situation.

She completely fails to notice the outsider glowing green with the warmth of sunlight swooping at her until it is too late. All she can do is let out a sharp yelp as she is engulfed. Strike Wolf springs to life, activating a barrier but it's only delaying the inevitable.

It feels like twisted, thorny vines of ivy snaking their way into her body. No--it feels like the vines are wrapping around her heart, and Kyouka suddenly seizes up, feeling her heart pounding with a sense of profound panic.

Underneath the warmth of sunlight ther is also a terrible melancholy trying to draw her in, and as her panic starts to drown in it, she feels herself slipping... like she's...

... lost.

Even in her worst moment, Lost Ivy fought so hard for her.

Even in her worst moment, Lost Ivy cradled her Pure Heart in her hands and delivered it back to her.

Even in her worst moment...

<SoundTracker> Find Your Flame - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagkbGcX21k

Kyouka's fist tightens.

''No.''

This will be Ivy's worst moment if they fail. It will be ''everyone's'' worst moment. She grits her teeth as her fist starts to glow with a bright violet light, aided by a band of Midchildan glyphs created by Strike Wolf.

"No... one... else..." Kyouka spits out through gritted teeth.

She forces her heart to calm down once more. She has no idea what this will do to Ivy's magic, but she ''has'' to believe it can't be so fragile a thing as to be destroyed this way.

She ''won't'' believe it.

"Lunar... IMPACT!"

She swings, and unleashes a blinding explosion with her punch.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Lunar Impact on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 17 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Lunar Impact, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

When each glowing Outsider meets its end, it turns to stone and plummets. There's no time to watch these corpses hit the still-twinkling force field far far below and see what happens after that; but the stones themselves no longer glow. Each beautiful light goes out.

Are they saving their friends, or dooming them?

Does the Outsider who first swallowed Jail, then digested and ejected him, still matter?

Does the portal?

What can anyone DO now?

In many battles such as these, whether fought in Tokyo or on Belka, there has often been a transition to culmination. First one defeats the little monsters -- then one defeats the big one.

That does not happen here. There is no big one.

Or rather... they're ALL the big one.

It takes time to notice, and there's both very little time indeed for such observations moment-to-moment amid endless peril, and all the time in the world -- literally, because it will run out if the heroes fall -- because the battle stubbornly continues to go on.

But it is noticeable.

<SoundTracker> Immortals (Fall Out Boy) - One More Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHn5Q7hCjxw

The <s>Radiant Knight</s>Lera Camry SLAMS her golden shield into one wave of monsters on the left flank, and the right flank flinches -- just for a moment. <s>The Argent Knight</s>Cure Passion, united with her golden sister, widens the gap just created with a magnificent double kick, and somehow it is filled again far too quickly, by extra-universals who had no business knowing that a gap existed in the first place.

Unless, that is... they're all one creature.

It makes sense. <s>The Vermillion Knight</s>Mikoto eviscerates one creature with a the least swipe of her Child, but a thousand creatures feel its pain long after it is gone. <s>The Ebon Knight</s>Fate descends like a meteor to save Jail, but they can tell that they're surrounded just a little too quickly, because others outside of her cage can see it. <s>The Ashen Knight</s>Kyouka detonates a punch on her enemy, a blast wide enough to consume far more than just one, yet those outside of it seem perfectly aware of its trajectory. Ren's royal bolts rain down from below as she plunges after Fate, Black and White triggering an explosion via collision up above, La Sirene invoking the silvery Les Mysteres in between; heaven and earth united to defeat these foes, to consume them.

But those who come after, down from the portal, remember every clever maneuver despite having never experienced them. They will not work twice, because they actually just did.

SHE just did. Or he, perhaps. The energy of hunger of these beings is more darkly masculine than feminine, if gender must be prescribed at all. Doubtless the creature -- THE creature -- has no use for it. He, It, simply continues to send out parts of himself, and the defenders mow down his limbs like a forest of hairs. Shave after shave, but none of them close. Even the <s>Umbral Knight</s>Endo, whose skills in a melee are unmatched, is starting to--

starting to--

remember. Fallen Stern remembers, and through him, so does a Tokyo boy: remembers that before his dead master failed his Queen; before he failed himself;

first -- at the very beginning -- he failed his original charge.

The Crown Princess started hanging back a little to spot these details; it took more than one save to keep her alive to make the observation she now does. Her sword points out through the ranks -- DEEP through -- which is to say UPWARDS, since the monsters keep spiraling down.

Endo can feel her words tear through his memory, through his mind.

"THERE! That one never moves."

It's true. There's a single rock in the river of ichorous, cthonic monsters flowing downwards to meet them in battle. Sometimes it is momentarily lost to sight, simply because there are too many others in the way. But it always reappears eventually, exactly where it was.

It seems like a creature like any of the others; strange and wrong and, individually, not all that tough.

Endo can see it.

"Together, we must break through and put an end to it!" she calls. "I will be the van!"

He knows what price the Crown Princess paid to save Belka -- and how it felt, as the Umbral Knight, to support but also survive the consequences of her choice.

This time, he doesn't have to watch. Endo -- Stern -- they can put an end to this, if he dares. They can protect everyone.

And, no doubt at all, everyone is in serious need of protection. There are just too many. Too many Outsiders. Too many stolen friends, stolen worlds. Everything is on the line and yet nothing is more painful than seeing the way wounds are opening up on the Device-wielders, the Pretty Cure, their friends. This can't go on.

Something has to give.

Someone...

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Passion braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure
Passion's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Lera Camry cleanly braces 34 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 6 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Lera Camry!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 10 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Cure White perfectly dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Cure White's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa fails to counter Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 32 Fatigue damage! Exhausted applied to Fate
Testarossa!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa's counterattack, Blitz Rush, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure White covers Cure Black for Pink Moon Stick's attack, Fever Pitch, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Cure White braces 16 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Exhausted applied to Cure White!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi partially dodges 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine perfectly counters 31 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Counter! Cure Pine's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine's counterattack, Pineapple Reverse, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa braces 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa's Block and
Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki perfectly dodges 33 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Kyouka Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Hayato Nishi transforms into Westar!
COMBAT: Westar has loaded his saved combat state! He is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki braces 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's Block and
Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Endo Naoki!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

He sees it. They both do, Endo and Stern. Something in the distant past overlaid against something urgently present.

There's a brief calm as his eyes slide across the space above.

"Is it..."

<THERE.>

"Right." The knight gives an affirmative nod as he raises his weapon to point.

"Hey!" He calls, "That's the thing!" He's not as eloquent as the Crown Princess unfortunately. But he conveys the same point. They'll get it.

Endo shows by leading the way. The Outsiders are already clawing and dragging, not eager to give any time to rest. Still he climbs, hacking a line upward as rain from the firmament.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera smashes through Outsiders, smacking them backward with her sword and shield. Another Outsider slams into her -- there's a flash of a girl firing an Intelligent Device like a gun, sending blasts of energy into the sky. She breathes out, teeth gritting for a moment.

But Endo calls out -- 'that's the thing' -- and she sees where he is headed. "Endo-kun!" she calls out. "Right! Let's go, everyone!"

She turns in midair, flying after him. She turns -- and looks at some of the encroaching Outsiders. Lera grits her teeth; she turns Broken Ground towards them.

Then, several bolts of golden light erupt, shooting towards Outsiders that get closer.

"What are we lookng for?" she calls back to Endo.

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"I know!" Fate says to Lera with a smile, but she's already moving, one wonders if she's moving faster than her voice, to the point where it's her afterimage that's speaking to her.

And Fate - as Mikoto says - does it. Pushing herself to her limit, to save someone. It does not matter if he's an awful person. Fate once thought she was too... but she knows now neither Mikoto nor herself are.

It's Ren who jumps into the fray, keeping her from disaster, as she offers one last, "Ren..." Then as she flies away, she gets a message, <<Thank you. I know you can do it.>>

Her telepathic broadcast to everyone above, is heard.

<<Safe. I caught him.>>

Even the eyes of Magical Girls would be hard pressed to see her smiling on the ground, and holding up two fingers in a V from the ground. However, Fate feels that moment, like once with the Resonance Drives.

A call to battle. A call to arms. The urge to follow the Crown Princess into battle is strong. Stronger than ever. But even as the Ebon Knight...

... there was always someone whose memory she was fighting for. She was following in her footsteps. It isn't the past in Ancient Belka.

She knows that perhaps fighting for a memory is a noble thing indeed, but there's something she values more in this moment, and it is not a lack of value in her friends. In fact, it is because she trusts them so much, she can make it - even as Endo charges.

She makes a choice. It is not an easy one.

<<I'm going to take him somewhere else - then there's something I have to do. Can I ask you all for some help... with a small wish of mine? Please, win. I know you can do it.>>

As Fate lifts up Jail, she walks, rather than flies at first, she doesn't want to attract extra attention other than above, and as one of them comes down at her...

... her leg vanishes inside of its maw, and she makes a noise of alarm at the same moment Bardiche chimes.

<Blitz Rush>

... the Outsider might swear the bite was solid, and it was, but it's maw is utterly empty... as Fate reappears closer to a particular crowd of Labyrinth Civilians, and a fairy, far, far away from the Outsider who attacked her.

"Can I ask you to watch after him for a while?"

A small ferret looks up at Fate, Fate who knows the ways of ferrets from her time battling one looks back. Tarte looks over his shoulder, then over to the rest of the crowd, then back at Fate, and points at himself.

"Wait... you want ME to do it!?"

"Who else?" Fate sounds confused, "Just be careful not to use a binding spell unless you have to, it might attract them." It's at the same moment that Fate flies off.

"I CAN'T ACTUALLY DO THAT!"

More confused as it's such a basic spell, Fate keeps flying off as she calls out back. "Then it's not a problem?"

Tarte slumps, then puts down his napsack and rummages through the contents to try to figure something out. "Maybe I can make it work with gum..."

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black stands, fist in the upper 'jaw' of the Outsider, trembling as she tries to hold its mouth open. "Seemed like a good plan," she sighs. A sunflower glow pulses around her.

"Ne, Saki-chan," Cure Black says. "Are you here? Can you understand?"

The maw lurches, trying to close on Black.

"They got you, huh? Strike three, you're out? No, probably not. Probably tagged you out at base, right? You're like me. You go for it when you shouldn't sometimes."

Lifting her other hand, Cure Black braces the fleshy ceiling above her, struggling. She feels like a walnut in a cracker, the leverage of the Outsider's size giving it an advantage in this contest. "Sorry you have to see me not looking so cool. It always felt good, having you think I was so awesome. I'm a pretty selfish person... to let you think that. Because I started before you, you know? Whenever I looked at you, it was like looking at myself two years ago."

The mouth grinds down, forcing Black's shoulders down. "I should have told you that. I should have said... 'you'll get here too. If we were the same age, you'd be here already.' Because..." Cure Black's feet spread, bracing herself to slow the descent of the mouth crushing her. "You're just like me, Saki. You were... just like me." Black's eyes close, spilling the tears in her eyes down her cheeks.

"And when I saw you and Mai together, I guess that's the closest I ever got to understanding." Black's knee hits the squishy ground, her strength finally starting to buckle entirely. "How a girl like her... could love me too. So it's okay, Saki. I'm glad I lost to you, so you know how strong you are. It's not bad... for it to end like this."

Cure Black's other knee hits the ground, her herculean strength quivering in her shoulders. Blood leaks from the puncture in her back, driven out by her straining.

"But I'm sorry," Black whispers. "I can't."

Moonlight floods the dim chamber, driving the golden light of a sunflower back. Cure Black's face is illuminated in gold. The back of her hair is an almost colorless silver. A silhouette at the edge of the Outsider's maw has cranked its mouth wide open, a girl in a skirt who seems, somehow, to be standing in front of a moon, even though she should be backdropped by the ground. Her hair, as it falls, happens to fall in halves, almost like twintails.

Cure Black smiles, gently, expectantly. "She won't let me."

Rent asunder, the Cure Bloom-infused Outsider falls towards the ground in pieces, its golden shield fizzling on and off. Carried princess-style by Cure White, Black looks down over White's shoulder, and gives the plummeting monster corpse a little wave.

Dropping onto the back of a new Outsider, White lets Black down onto the ground. "Are you all right?" she asks.

"Yeah." Black smiles, looking at the pulsing glow of moonlight on Cure White's skin. "What happened to you? Power up?"

"N-no," White startles. "Well..." She looks at Black's face. "If you think so."

"Huh?"

A burst of wind nearly knocks both Cures off the Outsider, as a vast pair of white wings spreads before them. An Outsider has grown feathers somehow, its frightening form now resembling a biblical angels, at once beautiful and unnatural. A keening cry washes over Cure Black and White, its empty hatred chilling.

"...Egret," Cure Black realizes, heartbroken.

Cure White closes one hand, touching into her chest as she looks towards the ground, realizing. "We took her from you," she says softly. "I'm so sorry, Mai." Despite (and because of) her shame, she reaches for the hand of the girl who brings a sunny smile into ''her'' life.

Cure Black shakes her head. "It's too late," she realizes, watching the Jail Outsider fleeing. "It's going to get away."

"We can try Marble Screw from here," Cure White insists, but Black can hear the doubt in her voice.

"Egret..." Black pleads, as if the Outsider might hear, and help them.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

Westar is, for very loose definitions of the word, safe right now. Miroku's grip is a firm one - why, if Westar didn't know better, he'd think the giant Child was trying to squeeze him to death - and with a head poking out, he can get a solid view of the battle.

He's not exactly a master tactician; he's only commanded one monster at a time, and honestly the only familiar thing here is 'being unfairly outnumbered'. Mikoto went off to fight that bug-ish Outsider, Fate went to save the guy who got eaten, and all the while Westar himself is kind of...stuck for a plan. And physically stuck, but mentally is the really big problem, he can squeeze free if he needs to. There's too many to fight fairly, so...if it was anyone who wasn't him in charge, the trick would be to fight unfairly, right?

'That's the thing' is the order of the day, and Westar looks for what someone sharper than him has spotted. One strangely still Outsider is...maybe important? But there's a lot of them in the way. Fortunately...as he did every time he inconvenienced Tokyo, Westar has a gargantuan ally.

"Hey, Miroku!" His voice comes out as a squeak - it's nice to be safely held but this is kind of a little much. There's no answer, but the baleful eye seems to glance at him. "I know I'm not your boss, but...I think that one thing might be important! Throw me up there, so we can-"

Apparently that was enough for Miroku to want to be rid of this not-his-child being, and Westar is duly hurled away from Miroku.

"Wait, wrong waaaaaaay-" Hurtling in somewhat the wrong direction, Westar flails around to try to find a path up - he glances off of one Outsider hard enough to bounce, manages an elbow-strike to rebound again, and he's hurtling somewhere into the fray, desperately trying to course correct.

He's hearing notes as he richochet-kicks his way slowly upward - and there's one faintly familiar light gleaming not too far away. Its magic is musical in nature, but with Westar's head ringing, he's not...entirely sure whether it's the holy major chords of a melodious rhythm, or the familiar minor tones of a felonious trio...

Maybe it's both. Some worlds were home to good and evil in equal measure, and whether the magic's land was Major or Minor, that's an Outsider that's stolen the essence of music. Someone should do something heroic here.

Westar himself is pinballing wildly, but he can try his best to serve. He owes it to the villains he fought beside and the Precure he fought against. There's a hint of a clef that's solid enough to kick off of (and no longer burns), there's a phantom of a staff that he can hook a hand on long enough to swing around - he throws himself as a projectile at the musical Outsider. If he can get through, then maybe he can get closer to where he could really help.

COMBAT: Westar has used Executive Pinball on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The blast flies. The strangely musical creature perishes in a burst and a flash.

It does not occur to la Sirene, exactly, what this means for the girl it reminded her for, in a grotesque manner. Sayaka. She may not be thinking that far ahead, exactly. This is a place with no rising action, merely descent. Action, surely, but how far are they above Labyrinth, now? If she fell, would she be heroically caught and taken to safety? What would that mean for the others - now missing two? Her eyes track Fate, but...

She cannot think poorly of that. It simply isn't something in the space where she exists now.

And then she hears another's voice.

La Sirene has been ascending semi-solitarily for a while, but Endo's voice rings out to her. It's not people speaking to themselves or to others, but Endo telling them something - telling *all* of them. Her head snaps towards him.

He points. 'That's the thing!'

La Sirene looks up.

She doesn't see it.

And yet...

... aren't there a lot of things you can't see, some of the time? She's never seen France or Mars, but she's certain they exist. She knows some of the language from one, and has met the guardian of the other.

... Is Endo the kind of person who would guess poorly, or speak up simply to encourage people? Would he be the kind of person who creates a hopeless cause from his analysis of what surrounds them, or would he simply hold his peace in such situations? La Sirene's lip twitches just a bit.

... Are there not the bonds between them? (La Sirene's trajectory has already curved towards Endo's.)

... isn't there no reason at all to doubt this?!

The thoughts flash through her mind, and la Sirene speaks: "It must be a ways away. Stern," she says, or shouts, over the chaos, "Did you detect it?" Lera immediately assents, and with that, la Sirene folds her arms over herself. The light around her begins to shimmer, and distort...

... and the funereal pose, her palms set against the joint of her shoulders, slowly shifts. Her fingers, cold but against slightly warmer skin, slid down, as if to clasp her own forearms. For reassurance? No - she feels confidence, doesn't she? If they are wrong, let it be as Chevaliers!

"I'll try to," la Sirene says, just as an Outsider turns (inverts) towards her and lunges (smears) at her -- and those stellate projections of dark-light that seem to come from however she is refracting her Pharos's ever watchful and (so far) undimmed irradiance? The Outsider would have to strike through one to hit her, to rend her asunder, or to simply swallow her whole.

Instead, its snout (proboscis) briefly, violently impales itself on the ray of light. It is not enough to END the thing, but it does at least move (smear) away while pulling (shattering) itself loose of the improbable spire of light.

"... Does it look," la Sirene begins, before frowning as she realizes she cannot even possibly find the words to describe these things. "Will it stand out?"

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Rising Towards The Decisive Battle... on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from Westar's Executive Pinball, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

There's many, and as Passion and her descend, more come in to fill them, which is why it's her reaction to them coming to simply grasp one out of mid-air with a gasp that's a mixture of both pain and disgust as she touches it, and suddenly pivot into a whirl, warding the Outsiders off with their own fellow, before pitching it up into a release, momentarily stunning the pack.

She was never 'a knight'... but when Endo calls for the charge, the Legendary Warrior Precure calls out to Passion, "Passion! We've got to catch up to him! If we don't..." Pine understands at least - it's far far more than just an adorable wolf that's at stake. She can see Black, stricken, and hear...

... Bloom...

...Egret...

Seeing her face, even from here, she puts her hands together, "Can I use you to jump off of? I can't teleport like you." Pause, small head cant, she thinks about it, "Though I guess I can teleport with you?"

It's hectic, she forgot she could do that. Or maybe it was Love taking advantage of Setsuna's ability to teleport that made her think it was impolite to ask?

"I... I promise it's for a better reason than a beach ball."

"Mouuu... don't bring that up. I said I was sorry for that!" Peach says in the midst of the fray, whereas Berry looks away awkwardly, pretending she was never a part of that. "After you didn't apologize right away and had a whole pillow fight over it."

"Hey! She started it!"

Pine sweats at Passion's ice cream look to Peach, but eventually she smiles and reaches out her hand to her...

... but Passion has other plans... "Huh!?"

"Ha! That's perfect! Impressive as always Passion."

"SuGOI! I've never seen you do something like that! Ahaha... I'm glad it's water under the bridge... Now-! Senpai! Mind if we lend you a hand?" Peach says as she changes focus mid-jump, her eyes fixing upon the Outsider. "There's no way we're letting it get away." Pine tells Black and White. Before Passion corrects them, and Peach looks astounded, "EHHH!? Really!? Okay everyone! ... Let's follow Passion!"

"You weren't paying attention at all, were you?" Berry notes, as Peach replies, "I definitely was! It's just Passion was paying ''better'' attention! Together! Precure-"

It's a different vibe, perhaps from Black and White in this moment, but it's not them not taking the situation seriously. It's because... whether this is their last day together or not, they're all trying to get their happiness together. And they can only do that... as themselves.

BGM - Precure Eien no Tomodachi (New Stage OP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRDF9WntP0

It's no longer a problem figuring out how they're going to get there, as they all land and launch themselves off in synch the newfound footing, and forward in an enormous arcing leap...

"...Collaboration..."

... Pine draws her fist back with all of them, and pink, blue, yellow, and red join white and black leap into the fray in a titanic arc down the center like an armed missile, ready to detonate down the center with a strength only this many Precure at once can muster.

"... PUNCH!"

COMBAT: Cure Pine has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion remembers the dreams. She remembers what she was there. And she notices that they keep going, despite all their hits. Despite all their efforts. Pine, Peach, and Berry are with her, and that counts for a lot. Lera is still fighting out there, too. And their friends... Ren, and Endo, and Kyouka, and Mikoto, and La Sirene. And she thinks she even hears--

"Westar!" Passion calls. Then she says deadpan to Pine,"I wouldn't do guessing games at a time like this," Passion agrees with Pine. But someone who needs saving...? Hmmmm. She would remember that. But despite the fact that she'd threatened Lucky herself--

'Right!" Passion answers Pine, and smiles. "Together. ...And we'll have to go see Lucky after this, too."

They will.

But there is something--

"Endo!" Passion calls. The thing? Well, it doesn't have to be eloquent to make sense to her; after all, one of her better friends is Mikoto there, after everything.

He's leading the way. Which means...

Endo calls for a charge, and Cure Passion nods sharply to Pine. "Well--" Pause. She can teleport with her! But... for a better reason than a beach ball. "I didn't forget," Passion says evenly, that small smile still on her face--but a harder look in her eyes. An ice cream look in her eyes. "...But I forgive you." All of them!? Apparently!

"Let's go!" A pause. "But there's no ground up there, so..."

Passion reaches back to the tower. "I'll bring us some! Akarun, with me!"

Passion ''grips'' a broken piece of the tower with both hands. "Haaaaaah--!"

She ''rips'' it free, dust and debris scattering and falling towards the barrier below, and as she turns, BLIPS--

In a crimson flash, she is gone. And then, she, Pine, Berry, and Peach are ''there'', behind Cure Black and Cure White.

"That way!" Passion calls, and spins with her prize of rock. "Endo-kun says it's there! Let's clear him a path together!" A beat, then a shout, "ENDO! We're coming!"

"Pretty Cure...!"

She ''swings''--and then ''blip'', the six of them blink out, and back in, onto the platform that's already rising from how Passion threw it.

But the beautiful white wings that seem to belong to Cure Egret's heart will have to be faced in order to break through. And then, from there--

"Collaboration...!" Cure Passion rears back her fist, in perfect time with Peach and Berry and Pine and soon Black and White, her blow seeming to push forward in slow motion, as if punching through deep, deep water to reach the foe ahead--

Or maybe it just has that much force behind it. "PUNCH!"

COMBAT: Cure Passion has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Mikoto nods, when she 'hears' Fate, in her head. "Right!" She agrees to win so easily, so readily, but what else can she do? She is elementally herself.

And her element is black glass, just like...

"There?!" Endo might well look positively loquacious next to ''Mikoto,'' but she understands his meaning perfectly, simple though it is. Birds of a feather don't make speeches together.

Another Outsider looms in front of her, horns coming from its horns coming from its horns, and bronze and gold warp through the air, not quite colouring the beast as much as inhabiting existence around it. Mikoto turns to it, and her brow knits in tension.

"But... I still got things to say to you," she says, even as Miroku recognises the profane manifestation, too -- and brings his terrible greatclub down on it.

He hurls Westar away in his next motion, as if in ''pique.'' Can Children feel pique? Miroku can.

"Ah... Miroku!" Mikoto cries, but Westar is fine, he has a thick skull. The great beast turns, and Mikoto turns, too, a whole half-circle on his massive back to find la Sirene in her confusion.

"That thing!" She calls, to her, helpfully. "Endo said!"

And then she pauses, and tilts her head.

"... the different one!" She decides, as a good explanation, because she's the best at explaining things. (Chitose wept.) "See? It's not moving? Come on! We gotta help Endo!"

And so they move.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts La Sirene de Diamant's Rising Towards The Decisive Battle..., taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Mikoto Minagi is Reinforced by La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Expression on La Sirene de Diamant.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren gasps as she lands hard against a floating piece of debris, her limbs trembling from exhaustion. The wound she sustained just moments ago is excruciating, not doubt because of the void-like nature of the Outsiders. Fate's mental message is heard, and Ren smiles despite the pain. <<Of course we'll win, Fate-chan! Be careful!>>

On top of that she can clearly feel her reserves running low, giving her a sensation not unlike a weight pulling her deeper into the abyss of depletion.

Ren next hears Endo's call, the urgency in his voice cutting through the chaos of the battlefield. Her head jerks up, scanning the sky. "That's the thing!" He'd said. The key to all of this.

A sharp cry from the right draws her attention--another wave of Outsiders rushing toward her, their alien forms shifting and writhing, adapting as they have again and again. And like before, one of them radiates something familiar...

Alyce.

Rens breath catches as memories flood her mind. The dedicated and hard-working TSAB mage she'd met in the nascent days of her magical career. "Ducati-san...!" Ren feels herself getting choked up at the sudden exposure to such potent remembrances. Fighting alongside such an experienced magic-user had been ''profoundly'' beneficial for her own development. She'd often wondered just how she could ever show her gratitude...

BGM -- Nana Mizuki -- Silent Bible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC6tfg8k7nw

...Well, now that chance has presented itself. She cant afford to burn out now. Not when Alyces magic--her essence--has been stolen. Not when she still has the means to fight. The Outsiders dont wait. They lunge toward her, screeching in unison. The one bearing Alyces magic is conveniently at the forefront. Good.

"I wont let you keep it," Ren growls, and with a yell engages the onslaught, kicking and punching with all of the force and fury she can muster.

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used For Alyce! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Ren Aizawa's For Alyce!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka unleashes her attack from inside the Outsider, and it consumes it in a large ball of violet-white light--and thankfully Kyouka works her way free as the defeated outsider starts to fall, though she's, admittedly, falling herself.

"Alright, one more time!"

<Lunar Impact.>

Kyouka swings--but sees the Outsider she was aiming for juke ''just'' out of her range and frowns. And she's still falling. Back to the original plan, then. She kicks at the air, and a shockwave of bright violet energy erupts from her heel, sending her rocketing sideways. She misses the outsider, but a quick readjust lets her feint and hit the next one, and now she rebounds off of that one to redirect her momentum back upwards.

"Guys, I think these things are learning and that's giving me a bad feeling!" She's having to work harder to ricochet her way up through the torrent of Outsiders, too--thankfully, she's got fast reflexes, and thankfully, she's adaptive.

But this is still taxing, and she's not even sure what she's heading for, yet.

And then Endo has an answer he points. "Got it, Endo! I got your back!" Two zips through the air and an attack net her another boost upwards, stomping the top of an outsider so she can rocket further up, though she's lagging behind her flying peers.

She spares the briefest of glances as Fate broadcasts that Jail is safe. She'll trust Fate's judgment, though... it's not like she would've left him to die, either. But she asks them all for a favor... A small wish. To please win. <<You got it, Fate! Good luck!>>

She's surging upwards, and she sees her next target to rebound off of, but pauses, just a moment. There's something familiar about that bright celadon glow... and as she gets closer she can feel the refreshing winds of a of an uplifting breeze sweeping out from it, the gentle placidity of a lake...

"Shamal-san," Kyouka breathes in with a sharp breath.

She will never forget that moment, when she thought she was at her most powerless, that she heard Shamal's gentle but firm voice in her ear. How she said that her magic was a part of ''her'', that Strike Wolf helped control it but that it was still ''her'' magic.

And at her urging, when Ren's house was in immediate danger of being attacked by Jail and his Dark Devices--''Kyouka'' had been the one to cast the barrier. Her powr, her will, made manifest, shifting everything over half a dimension to the right.

It was revelatory, knowing that some intrinsic part of ''her'' was magical. That it wasn't all just Strike Wolf.

That... there hadn't been some mistake to why she had become a magical girl in the first place.

Three kicks at the air, three shockwaves send her zipping back and forth as she approaches, kicks, and resumes surging upwards, the long tails of her belt flapping wildly around her as she tore ever higher into the sky.

"Strike Wolf, I think we need a new trick!" she shouts as she scans the battlefield.

<Affirmative.>

Despite herself, Kyouka grins. "Then together!"

As she ascends Kyouka punches her fist forward. A glowing violet circle preceeded her, as an array of bright violet balls spring into life in front of it. "Go!" she shouts.

Strike Wolf announces, <Hunting Shot.>

All of the balls of magic blast off in front of her, surging forward. But just before the start to impact they break apart, splitting up as Strike Wolf tries to move them in unpredictable patterns to try and throw off the Outsiders.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Hunting Shot on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Hunting Shot, taking 18 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Expression, taking 0 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de Diamant is
Reinforced by Mikoto Minagi!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

One moment, Cure Black and Cure White were facing an avenging angel, its hideous beauty spreading feathers across the sky, unfolding a tragic confrontation pinion by pinion. The next, they are surrounded by laughing friends. Shaken, the two older Cures glance around themselves, and begin to smile as well, sadly at first. But then Peach's suGOI sails up her register, and Black cracks, giggling, followed a moment later by White.

"Thank you," White whispers to Passion with a gentle smile, below the warm words of their other friends.

Cure Black reaches over and squeezes Pine's shoulder, shaking it around familiarly, then pulling her into a momentary side-hug. "Endo needs that one, huh?" she confirms.

"Endo called a new play," White tells Black softly. Black glances at her in surprise. They are both thinking of the same athlete, now. The same tree, out in Tama.

"Got it," Black says, her voice tight. "We won't lose."

"Not when we're together," White agrees. "All of us."

Like a row of archers, the six Pretty Cure pull back their fists, and the draw is heavy.

<SoundTracker> Precure Eien no Tomodachi (New Stage OP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRDF9WntP0

''Collaboration...!''

''PUNCH!''

With an avian keen, the Outsider before them throws its great wings back. A lens of force the color of a robin's egg turns the air to diamond, a shield much like the one that stopped Cure Black's punch dead when she attacked Bloom's Outsider, even as the wind from white wings blasts at the Pretty Cure. But what would have thrown them back individually, even if they had attacked merely at the same time, has almost no effect on six Pretty Cure truly acting ''as one''. Six fists slam into the shield. And they knock through it like a brick through a glass window.

As its shield shatters, the Egret Outsider draws its wings back gracefully, unnaturally fast. But even as it begins to close them down on the attacking Pretty Cure, a spiral of six indents appears on its back for an instant, as the impact on its front lands. Then, explosively, its body erupts into pieces, a beautiful starburst of feather and energy. Nothing quite like it has been seen before. It ought to be remembered.

But there is no artist here who would be capable of drawing this sight.

Malign, horrifyingly aggressive, the Outsiders see this show of raw force and move ''towards it'', their lack of fear more eloquent than any verbal threat that might have come from a more human foe. But among those Outsiders, there are those that hear the call more keenly. Perhaps the Outsiders understand how to fight fire with fire. Could it be, perhaps, that some part of them even heard Peach's call, and recognized that it was for them?

Fast as a hare, an Outsider Whips into the Pretty Cure's path, bursting into sugary sparkles. Undulating as if through The Sea, two similar-looking Outsiders grow filmy fish-wings, crisscross, and slam into the Collaboration punch, their long Mermaid tails pumping to drive the attackers back, but are reduced to a briny spray across the brows of the six heroines.

A fierce procession of some of the most powerful Outsiders rise to the challenge, and are smashed to bits. A butterfly-winged Outsider seems unstoppable until they pass through it like a Dream. Two more butterflies follow, and douse the six Pretty Cure in the refreshing scent of Mint Lemonade. A small Outsider bursts apart with a sound like an acoustic guitar being smashed, its Muse departing.

Cures Black and White exchange a brief glance, after that one, and a nostalgic smile.

A long path has already been cleared, but the offensive faces its greatest challenge yet, as an array of four fearsome Outsiders form a Lovely, quad-barrier, like the crown of a Princess. It even manages to resist the Collaboration Punch for a moment, before caving to the same Fortune as the others, Honey droplets spraying.

Just before the Punch reaches that Jail Outsider, a final offensive is mounted, an impromptu team of six monstrosities to face six girls. Posh Berry is confronted with the Beauty of an elegant Outsider. Genki gyaru Peach stares into an array of alien eyes that Twinkle like stars. Cures Black and White face a duo of monsters that somehow embody a swaggering androgyny and a winsome femininity, attached together like a two-layer Chocolat Macaron. Empathetic vet Cure Pine confronts an undulating Outsider like a blob of yellow Custard. And Cure Passion, an outsider herself in a way, faces a being that is nothing but alien, Scarlet flame.

The impact is thunderous. The sky shakes. The air wishes it could split, pleads to break.

And when the six Outsiders explode, and the Pretty Cure Collaboration punch hits the Jail Outsider at last, of course it pops like a balloon.

The way between Endo and his target is nothing but empty air, made from a tunnel of torn apart monsters.

"Game to Juuban," Cure Black whispers. "For you, Saki."

COMBAT: Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White have used Precure Collaboration Punch! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White's Combo: Precure Collaboration Punch!,
taking 457 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White are Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

<<The one that doesn't move!>> Endo shouts back to Lera, the mental echo of his words cutting through the battle to reach her and the rest of the magical girls.

He pushes off one of the nearest monsters, rocketing toward the heart of the invader.

<<Ren... everyone! Make sure to get it!>>

<SoundTracker> Still in the Dark (Daisuke Ishiwatare) - One More Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPA3Y-acjb0

There are always more of the OutsidersOutsider. Tens, hundreds, millions. They fall like rain but each one leaves some mark of its passing on the young man. A cone of pink energy sends Endo off course, another blue and white glimmer turns the horizon into a field of gleaming swords. The knight's barrier jacket bleeds a violet contrail as each blow chips away at his defensive shell.

Closer...

<<This time we'll destroy it.>>

And closer...

<THIS TIME WE'LL SAVE THEM.>

ALmost...

<EMERGENCY VENTS CLOSED. DISABLING LIMITER. AT 90. 100. 115. 125...>

The Outsiders form up like a defensive membrane.

<<Ready?>>



Purple-black flares out from the Device in a long line that soon grows into a searing column of starlight. It pulses, the magical energy lighting the knight as he makes a vicious arc toward the defended core of their existential enemy.

<STERN BRETCHER.>

The pillar of light, bigger and brighter than it's ever been, connects with the wall of glowing aliens.

It does not cut.

There are just too many, an endless mass replenishing and pushing back, back, back. Endo's hands shake. The pylon falters.

<<Stern-->>



<SoundTracker> Still in the Dark (Daisuke Ishiwatare, Noah Thys) - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dILd4K1HKec

So can Endo. They need him to. He grits his teeth and pushes harder. Hard enough to make the wall give.

In the roar of magic it would be impossible to hear the cracks running across the surface of the gem in the weapon's pummel. But Endo can feel them. His hand falters and so does the blade.

<NO. WE ARE NOT FINISHED.>

Endo's grip tightens. More jagged lines break across Fallen Stern's surface. "I won't let go!" They push one last time. Magic tears through magic.

<KNIGHT. THANK YOU. IT WAS AN HONOR TO SERVE. THIS TIME--I WILL GO ALONE.>

IMPACT.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Endo Naoki has used SUPERNOVA on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

What happens to a star when it dies depends on its mass. The smaller celestial bodies burn and wither, fuming heat into the icy black darkness of space for billions of years.

What happens here is the other option. As the purple-black light swells it shifts to a blindingly white hue. As the core of Endo's partner collapses a deafening showave rends the sky along with the final detonation. What is left behind is an inky purple nebula.

And one Endo Naoki. There's no armor, no magic left.

--But there's still life. A dying star leaves some building blocks behind.

A long time ago--not that long really, but it seems like forever now--Endo made an oath and became a knight. When he started he thought he was the only one who could protect the world. He learned better. He can rest.

Because if he couldn't do it, one of the magical girls behind him will.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Endo Naoki's Finisher, SUPERNOVA, taking 297 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Magic Sword, The Way Home - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCikIkXslP0

Afterwards, the most striking thing was how CLOSE it was.

The magical girls brought all of their terrific force to bear, and it was spectacular indeed, but--

But.

That there was a but at all is horrifying.

That there is a but at all is crucial.

And sure, we can ask the question again as history tries to repeat.

What 'but' could stand up to the golden bolts of the Midchildan-American Lera Camry and her Devices, one of whom, Soaring Sky, is as tied to this history as Fallen Stern? The pinball mayhem of Westar, Executive of Labyrinth, who bounces from foe to foe like a ladder of death, a ladder for Endo to climb? Ren's hammering of gauntlets and greaves at the legions of doom, taking not the battle but the entire battlefield to them, all for the memory of one of her very first mentors and friends? Kyouka's rent airspace, from which pour balls of violet light, to draw away with cleverness rather than destroy with strength? Cure Passion and Cure Pine and Cure Peach and Cure Berry and Cure Black and Cure White punching as one -- creating almost a localized vacuum of their own, not Outside space but Within space, warping space, filling space, and ultimately, dramatically, clearing space?

The answer has to do with numbers, and it has to do with size, and -- because being outnumbered and small has never stopped a legion of magical girls on their worst day, let alone their best -- it has to do with sacrifice.

Of course the creature, who has been spending the lives of his legion like toenails, does not hesitate to spend them -- faster, harder, more -- in his own defense. Most of the progress was made in the first few seconds, before the girls' path -- Endo's path -- became clear. After that...

After that, every meter up the column towards him was its own little war. Trench after trench the attacks of the magical girls advanced, clearing them out, but more and more slowly, more and more desperately.

There is just so much ocean, no matter how sweet the shore.

By the time he reaches the master creature, Endo's armor drips with his own blood, at every joint and cavity; and it's splashed with the black ichor of these monstrous unbeings, who throw themselves so eagerly upon his greatsword -- his pillar of violet light -- which falls even as he rises.

He gives everything.

They give everything.

Fallen Stern... implodes.

And the crucial Outsider, the one he saw, guided by the memory of a Princess, brings up his claws in feeble self-defense, and Endo looks up into what passes for his face. Something passes between him and the hive king, before he's eviscerated in a magnificent burst of Umbral power.

A final burst...

All the remaining monsters scream as one -- they scream with his voice, any voice, for the first time -- because, of course, they are him. Their limbs lose their grip on their enemies; they lose their grip even on the air; and they fall.

...their gravity is not Labyrinth's, and never was. Their gravity -- metaphysical, philosophical -- calls them back the way they came.

They fall upwards...

Driven not by any inverted cosmological constants but rather by the extraordinary force of Fallen Stern's sacrifice, Endo is falling with them, too.

Towards the inverted portal. Towards... Outside.

BUT.

But last time, even though she made it back to the ground -- which Endo is not going to do, safely or fatally, unless someone intervenes very quickly -- the Crown Princess died with a final lamentation on her lips:

"My only regret," she coughs, "Is that in saving our world from them... we have surely doomed another. I only wish... we had the power... to save..."

'Them all' dies on her lips, and so does she.

And she was right to regret. Her final stand didn't save Belka, in the end. Considering the chain of events set off by the grief and despair following her sacrifice, she died for, very possibly, less than nothing. Worse than nothing.

The Outsiders are leaving, because they are unable to stay. But they aren't gone. They aren't solved.

So many terrible things happened because of it.

To Belka. To so many other worlds.

To Labyrinth, at Northa's hands -- the Queen's.

And now, to everywhere.

BUT.

But... what can the magical girls do now that the Belkans didn't do back then?

The ancient Belkans went to war. It was their way; it had always been their way.

The modern magical girls... of Tokyo, of Earth -- natives and far-travelers alike, they are certainly all OF Earth by now... they have their own ways, don't they?

When everything is hopeless -- they wage something else entirely.

They wield the power... of refusal.

Souverain Heraut, more than the other Devices, understands this viscerally. And through him, Ren suddenly remembers the truth of the Cephiran Princess he was originally made for, a lady who was the other sort of Pillar, made not of light but of love:

<< You don't have to accept fate. >>

No one does.

But -- this isn't right.

The Outsiders are too strange to easily empathize with; too alien; too frightening. There's really only one emotion, a singular essence, that anyone has been able to comprehend:

HUNGER.

They have, by all indications, no individuality. The Outsiders just hunger because they hunger. The swarm in its entirety cannot really be said to have a mind at all, even if it did have a core and does have the capability to act in its defense.

It is primal. Elemental. Like matter and antimatter. Magic attracts them and they destroy everything.

But -- it isn't ''fair''.

It is, in a way, not even their fault. They are what they are, without even Fate Testarossa's beloved, essential, passionately taken, and kindly offered, freedom of choice. A freedom the Radiant Knight embraced and the Umbral Knight rejected. A freedom the Cephiran Princess died for, so that the three Devices could live to fulfill their destinies as heroes, with heroes, empowering heroes, befriending heroes.

It's just too sad.

What is so wrong with being hungry, anyway?

Does hunger in itself have to always be such a bad thing?

The world likes to tell girls that it is so. Truly the temptation to gender the Outsiders as male at all is a byproduct of this cultural dynamic, ne? It isn't maidenly to be hungry; it isn't proper to eat as much as you want, as much as you need; certainly it isn't polite to show how much you want and need and hunger.

A man's appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite -- for food, for love, for simple attention -- is always voracious: she always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist.

Like the Outsiders...

...they aren't supposed to exist here, either.

But.

Must desire be monstrous?

BUT.

Isn't it very... human?

BUT--!!

People got hurt. People died. That matters too.

But, it all matters. It all matters so much.

Everyone, everything, deserves better.

...ne. do you want to know a secret?

But: the world can be changed.

The distance is so, so vast. This isn't Fate and Nanoha; Eas and Peach; Mikoto and Mai; Westar and Mikoto; the Sirens of Sorrow's Sea. It's absurd to even imagine the possibility that extradimensional aliens can be reached. Can connect... Can be understood, and understand themselves. Can be, even, accepted... no longer Outside at all, but invited In.

All it takes is an outstretched hand.

All it takes is a miracle.

OOC: This can be interpreted however people imagine. If you're extremely not on board with it your character doesn't have to
receive any of these i

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

OOC: This can be interpreted however people imagine. If you're extremely not on board with it your character doesn't have to
receive any of these insights; or could think through them and reject them. There is no one right way; and there are so many
different kinds of miracles. This scene has room for all of them.

OOC: PS someone (probably rhymes with Whyzawa) needs to go save Endo before he falls out of the universe. you can also still
finisher, it's fine

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

~*Elsewhere*~

Fate is very fast right now, so it's not long before she shows up at her destination, where her 'Wish' is quietly at stake. The battle still rages far from here.

Two of them are still unconscious, while 'You' watches her as she approaches. "You have returned."

"Yes." Fate replies quietly to her.

'You' points out the obvious, "They're still fighting." And Fate nods, "Yes." Before she walks up to the other two, and examines them for a moment, "... They've been drained this completely. I didn't realize..." Fate puzzles over the situation, it's different from Jail, it's more similar perhaps to the Wolkenritter, what they did to everyone's Linker Cores, but far worse.

Something's missing... and while she doesn't know what that means, she decides not to take a chance. And so she raises Bardiche.

<Divide Energy.>

Gold and violet streams out of him, in Midchildan runes that flow like ribbons into the unconscious pair, as Fate lets that energy flow from her into both of them.

'You' goes silent, you can feel her brain trying to understand what Fate is doing, and just not quite getting it. It's at that moment that Stern goes up, far away, and there is an enormous explosion that rocks everything, even here. Fate stands stable, despite it all... she looks, for a moment, then closes her eyes, and takes a breath.

Despite the feeling... she has to trust, and turns back to 'You'.

"It's okay to say what's on your mind." Fate tells her, as she does her work, and 'You' after one long moment replies, "It isn't my role... to think. Even speaking feels strange."

"But, you have thoughts on what I'm doing." She prompts her, and 'You' replies, "Yes. I cannot understand why you would weaken yourself, for these two. In their current state, they're without value to this conflict."

"That's not right." Fate says softly, without any remonstration in her tone, merely explanation. "I'm not doing this because I want you three to fight. I want to do this... because..."

I wanted this in real life, too.

"I want this, for real. I want to know who each of you will become. I want, the three of you to come home with me. I want you to call out to the three of you... with something real, something you picked for yourself."

There's no small amount of sentiment in her tone, as she says, "I want the three of you. It's... my wish. It's selfish for me to be here rather than there." She thinks of Lera, Endo, Ren, Mikoto, Setsuna, Vita, Signum, Hayate, Nanoha... and Lindy, who taught her this, "But I trust them to finish the battle without me... and be at my side for what comes after."

It's just a little wish. And that's wonderful.

'You' looks like she still doesn't quite understand all the words she said, not in the sense of definition. She knows what all those words mean, she just can't comprehend why Fate would string them together that way, and what it means.

But after a moment... she says something else.

"But you've been calling out to me with something real already." 'You' points out, and Fate blinks, as if not understanding herself. Until she realizes she's been saying 'You' over and over and over and over.

And laughter leaves her lips, just this momentary chuckle, before she beams a smile.

"Well, it's just my opinion... but I think we can do better than that. Once this is over..." And extends a hand towards her. "... let's figure it out together."

She does not understand what Endo and Stern just sacrificed at this moment, not yet. She will later, for now... but for now, this is a glimpse of Stern's sacrifice may have bought her.

Just a little wish.

She'll show her gratitude later for them granting it to her.

'You' does not understand the gesture, or the motive, and Fate receives no insights, but that does not mean there is no miracle here. Both Fate and 'You' (Real name pending) are proof...

... that the empty can become full. Of memories in Fate's case, of desires, of purpose's given and changed and kept. As 'You' finally takes her hand, not because it was ordered, but offered, within that small gesture of someone who was merely an instrument, can consider a life greater than that too.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"Doesn't move!" Lera shouts back to Endo. "I've got it!"

She sucks her breath in as they fly forward, and she watches Endo fly forward, ahead of them all, and surrounded by Outsiders. She grits her teeth, until she comes sharply to a stop -- as she sees the shockwave that rips through the Outsiders' ranks.

But at a cost.

"Endo!" she shouts. Then, with a stammer -- and realization: "S-Stern..."

<Godspeed.> Soaring Sky's voice chimes, solemnly. After all, Stern was his comrade, even if it was something he hadn't remembered.

But Endo is falling upward, towards that portal leading to somewhere else. The source of so many sorrows and woes; but there's also that sense of something else. The desire, alien as it is, that the Outsiders have -- and the lack of understanding.

There is a moment where Lera hesitates. But, then she realizes: the answer isn't one or the other. It's the same as it ever is.

Both. Stop them and understand them, in one stroke.

"C'mon, Passion, Ren-chan," Lera says, looking at her girlfriend then her best friend. "Let's do this for Stern!"

She swings Soaring Sky out to one side. The blade of the Device splits in half; lightning crackles between the two halves of the blade, motes of energy drawing down into it.

<Aurora!>

And then, it expands outward. A beam of gold-red light, burning white at the center, that rises up until it's a single, massive sword of energy.

<GALAXY!>

And then Lera rises up -- and swings it down with an enormous flash out of light.

"DIVIDER!"

COMBAT: FINISHER! Lera Camry has used Aurora Galaxy Divider on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Fallen Stern and Endo give ''more''. And Passion is there, with a front-row seat, along with the other Cures. She ''sees'' it when he presses forwrd, again and again, farther and farther, until the light is too bright to look at. And then she keeps looking, because she's already been burned by Light before, and she has to ''watch''. She won't look away.

She doesn't, as Fallen Stern goes alone. And yet...

Is he really alone?

"Fallen Stern!" Passion calls. "Endo!"

...But she recognizes it. The power of a sacrifice--the power of a desire to protect. ...A desire to see something through.

How can she not understand it, when one of her best friends is Usagi Tsukino? But in the same way, Cure Passion feels...

She feels ''greed''.

Cure Passion wants more than this. She wants more than just to save her world. She wants to save the people already lost. She wants to save the ones who were hurt. She wants to ensure this never has to happen again.

Cure Passion wants it all, a far far cry from Eas who only wanted the one thing, and was never able to get it, could never have gotten it in ten thousand more years. She wants ''all'' of it, just like they got Westar and Soular back.

"Lera!" Passion calls, as she's called in turn. "...Sky! Ground!"

"Yes," she says. "...You..."

"I hope you like Labyrinth!" she calls to Lera. "Because I'm going to spend a lot of time here!"

She starts to fall, of course. That's just how it is, with gravity. She starts to fall, and as she does, she hears that ''but''. She hears those feelings, or feels them more like, understands them. She understands as surely as she once ''didn't'' understand. Maybe...

Maybe there's a way to get back what they've lost. They just have to accept a little more, to go along with it.

She reaches out--for Cure White's hand, and for Cure Peach's hand. She closes her eyes, even as her hair whips all around in the wind--until, suddenly, it ''doesn't'' whip upward so much, and her fall begins to be arrested through no apparent action.

Somewhere, she knows, Fate is being selfish. She knows it in her heart. And she's so, so glad of that. Maybe it's time... for her to be a little selfish, too.

"Together," Passion says, first to Cure Peach, and then to Cure White. "...Because..."

"It's not enough to 'win'," she says. "If I only wanted to 'win'... I could've beaten Pretty Cure, one day. But I wanted more than winning. And I want more now."

"I'm hungry," Cure Passion says. "I'm hungry, and... I think we should share."

"...We have enough for everyone, don't we? At the table in my mom's house... there's always room for another person. All that time ago, that extra person was me."

It's not that Passion immediately comes to love her enemies; it was never like that. ...It's that her relationships ''changed'', and by the end, she wasn't in love with an enemy; she was in love with a friend, trusting a sister.

So...

"Even for them, if they can learn some manners. ...But maybe we can teach them."

It's not that she loves the Outsiders.

It's that one, she ''was'' an outsider. And you never know...

...If tomorrow's friend wasn't yesterday's foe.

Passion closes her eyes again. "...If you'll give me back my people," she says, and the people of Labyrinth now are ''her'' people, "And everyone else..."

"We'll make room for you in Labyrinth, too. Right Westar? Soular?" She can feel Westar out there, even now. Fighting just with them. And...

"And if you just want magic..."

She grins. "Then Lera's already sending you all you need. My girlfriend won't fail, either."

She grows serious a final time. "...Let's all learn what we can be. Together."

Because it's not about deserving. It's about a choice.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

<SoundTracker> It's only the fairy tale - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqKHgd0eB0

Endo and Fallen Stern climb impossibly high, and Mikoto knows just what target he's talking about. She doesn't know so much about her numbers, but even she knows -- what it means to go over a hundred percent. "Fallen Stern!" She cries out, her voice breaking with the volume of it. "Still carrying that?! It's too heavy!"

(She's talking about his failures.)

"Fallen Stern--!!", and she might have warned him that if he keeps going he can't come back, except he knows that very well, and her words fail her as the emotions clutch around her throat. Yes, he's tried to defeat her and Miroku, but --

But --

"Don't go," she says, but quietly, to the being who was proof that Miroku could get better.

He's gone.

He's gone, and Mikoto doesn't have time to sit with the tears in her eyes, because Endo's all out of magic. The magic beneath ''her'' moves, first, jets firing as the Child soars upwards. "Miroku--! Ah, right! I'll cover, Ren!" She knows that Ren will catch him, and she...

She has enemies to...

Defeat, her mind supplies, helpfully, but something catches in her throat like a chicken-bone, as she watches the Outsiders fall upwards, like she's watching her own limp body fall down half a cruise ship.

Is it so strange to empathise with something dark, sinister and eldritch? Mikoto loves her Lord Brother, though he means no good for the Earth. And she looks at these things she can't quite get a good look at, and she realises...

"Miroku!" Mikoto cries out, grasping her blade. "I know what to do!"

And that great beast rumbles, beneath her.

"Make the biggest torture, Miroku! The worst worst one!"

His hand free, Miroku is free to heft it up. There's a moment's pause, as if calculating, before blackness collects in his palm. He hurls it at the mass of retreating Outsiders, dead centre.

<SoundTracker> I'm Hungry - Once Again! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQLpJcAdc_k

IT IS...

An eldrich horror sized curry bun.

"Get it?!" Mikoto cries out, into the abyss. "Stealing food means your mouth hurts! If you're hungry, ask for dinner!"

... what on earth is she doing?!

COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Execution on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

"He does." Pine tells Black as she squeezes her shoulder, her smile fading a moment later to become something more resolute, "So let's go lend him a hand."

Or, rather six hands. Or many many more, should those who are in spirit count. But when Endo pushes further, she remarks, "What- What are they-"

Pine turns her head away from the blinding glare, squeezing her eyes shut, and when she dares to look again, there's a hand over her mouth, and a small gasp. "... Naoki-san."

She doesn't really understand what he did, what happened. There's just an inkling that it's... awful, "... And Aizawa-san is... Oh God." That last part is softer, as she understands at least that his girlfriend is here, watching all that.

It feels like a victory... but one that feels so tragically temporary. As Cure Pine arcs down from the punch, and begins to fall, as they all begin to be drawn back towards the portal, she feels something...

... hunger...

... hunger...

... hunger...

Ravenous, endless. People have to eat three meals a day, and 'Buki knows enough from dance practice about letting herself go hungry, but right now, feeling it... "They're like animals..." Pine notes dully. Wolves hunt on instinct, hunt in packs. Even if adorable little bunnies become their meals, that's how it's supposed to be, isn't it? Is it really ''wrong'', what they're doing?

"... we can't allow it, but..."

But what? What's the solution? It's not like they can kill them all, put the remainders in a zoo, feed them meals of magic every now and then as children gawk at the strange magical predators. What do you do?

What can you do?

Pine thinks on it. Well, what is the solution? Do you just give them all the bunnies?

"... what if..."

What if there were endless bunnies?

That's a strange thought to think on, to turn about in her head, but...

"... what if..."

And as she finds her solution, she looks to Passion, then to Black. Watching Passion take White and Peach's hands... Pine reaches for Black's hand... and and Berry's...

"... Because..."

She echoes with Passion and waits for her answer. Then... tries to articulate her own, "It's not fair. They're just following their instincts. They have to eat too. So what if..."

What if they gave them more than they could ever eat? And more than that besides? It feels strange. They can't do that here, it's dangerous. Too many 'bunnies' and the world will be overrun. Too much magic, and someone will always come for it.

But where they come from?

"... what if we sent it with them."

The Outsiders may not be Wolves. Nor are they cute bunnies, but... if it gives Setsuna back her people. If it stops this fighting because they have enough prey. Then...

"... the Yellow heart is the Emblem of Faith. Freshly harvested..."

Freshly harvested... perhaps that's it, if they can send them a bountiful harvest... she'll have faith.

"... I believe, that it can be better."

For the Outsiders. For them. Even if they don't know happiness, that doesn't mean that helping them can't give them all happiness.

"... Together." She agrees, and has faith in the idea that Peach always tells them. They can get their happiness ''together''. Trying for just themselves - is destined to fail. Letting the Outsiders satisfy themselves means they don't get their happiness.

... But together?

"We can reach for it, after all."

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

All of Fallen Stern's power, expended in an instant. Endo, all but expended himself; Ren knows if he's alive, but Cure Black does not. And then, in the wake of unspeakable violence, a silence arrives.

A short fall means nothing to a Pretty Cure. A long fall gets scary. A REALLY long fall starts to be a little less scary. The ground is so far away that if a Device or Passion doesn't save them, they have bigger problems. So, as Cure Black falls, she gets to ruminate.

Ren is at the side of the boy she loves; the best case is that they will grieve together. The worst case is that Ren might have to grieve alone.

"What's the point..."

On the ground far below, a white feather drifts down into the courtyard, and lands near a yellow petal.

"What's the point... of all of this?"

"You won't let her win...?" Ako Shirabe asked her, when Dark Precure sought her Star Shard. Cure Black held her and promised her she wouldn't, back then. But in the end, Ako lost her heart to something even more monstrous.

"We'll go through there," Cure Black calls, angrily, to Cure Pine, looking up at the rift from which these creatures are coming. "No more of this. They don't get to come through there anymore. If they want to fight, then we'll... then we'll..."

The anger worming its way through Black's mind feels like it's striving towards some light. But when she bursts out into it, and espects her rage to stretch its wings, instead she finds her thoughts in a soft light. It feels like when she was a tiny child, getting out of the bath, her mother offering her a towel.

"Here," Rie says. And the white towel goes over her head. After a moment, Nagisa relents. She lets the bad thoughts go in the towel.

Blinking, she finds herself differently angry. Frustrated. She feels Cure White's palm slip into hers, and she forces her hand to relax, to avoid taking it out on White's delicate fingers. But she is Cure White... and her fingers are not so delicate. She surprises Black by squeezing hard, and after a moment, Black squeezes hard in return.

Futari wa Pretty Cure holding hands is reflexive. But when Pine's hand takes Black's, suddenly, a ring is completed. Passion, then Peach, then Berry, then Pine, then Black, then White, then Passion all over again. Of the six invincible fists that tore the Outsiders apart, none remain for violence. Black looks between the eyes of her friends: giddily stylish Berry, kindred-in-genki Peach, brave survivor Passion. Her close friend Pine. Her everything, White. She nods. And then.

"Oi," she calls to the sky. "Oi! Did you ever think to ask? Huh?! People where I live..." Earth, that is. "They love to feed someone!"

"Oh," Mai says, softly, "so many people! Ah, look at all of them."

"Yeah!" Saki beams at Mai, her smile like an endless barrage of exuberance. "I love big days like this! It's so much fun!"

"We have to eat to survive too!"

Honoka's slim pale wrist sets Chuutaro's full bowl down, as his snout enters it to chow down.

"Why would you eat another person who loves to eat?"

"Ossu, Nagisa-san," Akane-san greets languidly, from above a row of steaming takoyaki.

"You know my name?" middle-school Nagisa asked.

"You come here a lot."

"Look at the way your bodies are! I bet you could eat anything you wanted! Takoyaki. Donuts. Dog food. Butter peanuts. M-miso soup."

The rainbow that transforms Cure White and Cure Black, the power of the creation, is rising up. And as its light suffuses her, Cure Black finally, truly understands Saki Hyuuga's dream.

"Get down here!" Cure Black shouts. "And eat with us!"

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTouBqPkhtc (Blue Oyster Cult - Les Invisibles)

"... Stern.. N... ENDO!" shouts la Sirene, though it's really Nori Ankou's voice amplified outwards. (It's strange. She's always been pretty deep in on the masking. Even insisting this is 'really' her, though she's made less of a point of it lately. Hard to do when you're on fashion posters.)

It's over.

Did they win?

It's hard to say anything like this is a victory, especially with the tragedy of Fallen Stern's name coming true in a wholly different sense, unfolding right before her eyes. La Sirene feels her lips quiver. There is no triumph.

But. The world can be changed.

But.

They don't have to say it's over. That they've lost, or that they've won, or that there's nothing to be done.

You don't have to accept what's in front of you.

You don't have to do what you're told.

Maybe it doesn't feel that way. Maybe there's a price you'll have to pay - a price so great that it seems 'unthinkable' to do otherwise. And it's easy, so easy, to fall into the comfortable shaping of thick gelatinous habit-energy, especially for the things you do wish to do, but don't want to spend your mental energy upon.

But it always remains true. You can tell the sea and the land and the sky: No. They might crush you.

And more often than you'd think... you can get your way.

The miracle rests in potentia in la Sirene de Diamant's memory, a shining and transient thing (but aren't all of they?) And then perhaps Cure Passion picks up on it, and then Mikoto, and Cure Pine... yes.

They hunger.

They're from outside.

Has she not hungered? Has she not been from outside?

Breathing out, la Sirene gazes at the Things. No. The Others. They hurt her eyes, yes. So does the sun that's responsible for all her food. She can -- can she reach out like this? Can her heart open up? She doesn't know if it can. She is often weak (self-judged) and changeable (more objective). And as an atelier's manager might attest, sometimes she can be pretty easily told what to do.

But that, too, is something she accepts. La Sirene de Diamant spreads her hands from their defiant, powerful posture. She spreads them out. Her palms turn towards the opening. Please, she prays.

And then, for a moment, a memory twinkles in her mind.

Did you know? The Brazen Pharos' namesake was a thing built in a far-away land. A mighty work - something counted as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But for all of that, the Pharos of Alexandria had a very simple purpose that made the Ptolemies go through all that hassle.

"Pharos" means "Lighthouse" in Greek.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhGNnNUiceQ (Blue Oyster Cult - Dancin' in the Ruins)

Far, far away, in the Sea of Tears, the skies are lightening. Not lightning - they usually seem like they'd be stormclouds on Earth, though there are subtle variations, and the rain is only more like sixty percent of the time, not eternal. (And sometimes it's just misty drizzle - hardly anything. You get used to it.)

But lightening. Growing brighter.

What doesn't come up a lot, unless you stay there for a while, is that a bright sky is hostile to the residents - at least the ones who live on land. They usually come inside when there's a band of light sky, which comes pretty reliably about a day and a half after a westerly cyclonic storm. The plants love it under a lightening sky, but it gives you sunburn - hurts your eyes.

Out over the sea, the skies are lightening.

And they grow so light, that in that towering shield of stormy clouds that wrap this strange realm, this world, like a rug, there is a break. Something that happens, but it's rare; usually it leaves a furious bonanza of algae, and some time later, a rich harvest from the sea. This time is different.

A shaft of light from a star whose more subtle radiations are kept at bay strikes down, upon the black waters of the Sea of Tears. And Tears they are. The light is such that the expanse of water is illuminated and warms quickly, steaming as it churns up top. The light throws a brilliant column into the salty water. The salt - the salt of myriad tears and myriad sorrows - filters. It changes. And for a fleeting moment of optical miracle, it shines down nearly six kilometers, and for the first time in untold aeons, light shines in one of the sinkholes charted, irregularly, by brave captains and Sirens with a more oceanographic bent.

Everything la Sirene de Diamant has been throwing around has been the Sea on a moderate day. The effect, of course, is considerable.

The unlight that comes out of the Pharos doesn't change in nature, but in quality. It surges upright, brightening a thousandfold. A strange light, a light that axiomatically cannot warm - every iota of mere heat in that light was absorbed by some strange factor or crystal or abyssal-dweller in the Sea of Tears. What comes out is what is left when everything else is taken away. A light that isn't really a thing.

In a little touch of irony, it does seem to have a clear and discernible color. Blue.

In the skies of Labyrinth, that six-rayed scintillance of la Sirene's impromptu flight to the heavens resolves. Towards Labyrinth there is a great and strange luminance - harmless, but casting things in strange and wonderful colors, revealing unusual fluoresencences. Maybe it will bring a sudden change of view to the denizens, if they look away -- or can no longer see -- their struggle.

The other side of the beam goes towards the Outsiders.

Look this way.

Come this way.

Come to the harbor safely, and see what we have.

Enjoy the fruits of this-our-worlds with us.

A lighthouse... no, a projector, thinks la Sirene, and then the memory in her mind congeals. She remembers sharply herself facing, what was it, a devil's dozen surely at least, of magical girls and their allies. Standing in the premiere of a film. Magical Detective -- what? Lala something, she thinks, but she can't remember, and she doesn't matter, because despite a strange electric tightening in every muscle and the recurring empty throb of fatigue, la Sirene de Diamant's laughing, as the beam shines towards the Outsiders.

COMBAT: FINISHER! La Sirene de Diamant has used The Light That Never Warms on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Cure White [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Holding hands is very important to Cure White. Very precious. Sacred, even. It never becomes routine. Every time she holds the hand of Cure Black, it feels like she's holding the whole entire universe. It makes her feel small. And it makes her feel boundless.

It's even more rare for her to hold two different girls' hands at once. Cure Black ''and'' Cure Passion? Those are extremely different relationships but it's still... overwhelming. An embarrassment of riches. And though she's grieving Stern's sacrifice and the destruction of some of Labyrinth, those innocent lives who made everything possible simply -- so simply -- by ''believing'' in them, in perfect strangers -- the grief in her heart is more than balanced by the joy she feels to be among such pretty and pure and powerful sisters. Peach, Pine and Berry, too. And all the others.

They're not alone.

How strange, Hwaito reflects, that a being that appears to be an enormous swarm is by all evidence a single creature of total solitude. The only being from its existence encountered in all of history. Maybe the only being Outside at all. Maybe not. But it does seem... lonely, to be so many and have that be a lie. It must be lonely, to use and abuse the many smaller parts of your whole so easily. To discard yourself so casually.

Last time she confronted this kind of terrible hunger, she ''was'' alone. Utterly so. And even then, she wanted to save more than just herself.

The proximity to it now makes her freeze up; Black and Passion can both feel it when it happens, through her rictus palms. And then they can both feel when it ends.

"You don't have to be do this," she tells the Outsider, quietly, earnestly. "It isn't strength," she presses on, soft but intense. "It will never be victory. We won't... be the only ones who get hurt."

She smiles so sadly, like she's lost in a painful memory.

"It's okay for you to have limits. It doesn't make you less...er than."

Her eyes are so, so blue. Royal blue. Empyrean blue. Sorrowful blue.

And then, the blue of La Sirene's lighthouse.

Guided back, she blinks -- dislodging a singular tear -- and returns, and looks not at the Outsiders but at everyone else. At everyone, surrounding her. At everyone, supporting her.

At Blacku, with her. Inviting them in to join them. It doesn't seem ridiculous at all. It is the opposite of unnecessary.

"To be able to stop at enough... is what makes you whole. Please... join us."

Her eyes close, and the rainbow at the center of the girls' wishing ring intensifies. Not in hue; it cannot, it already contains every color in all Creation, the full spectrum from Black to White. No. It intensifies in hope.

<SoundTracker> It's a miracle gathering! - Precure All Stars DX3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wB_1_iZ5Ho

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Passion, Cure Pine, Cure Black, and Cure White have used Pretty Cure Miracle Gathering on Pink Moon
Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren's busy punching and kicking with wild abandon still. She ''can't'' stop. She ''won't'' stop. Not until they're all vanquished. She can feel her heart hammering away in her chest--the roar of blood rushing through her veins. Finally she finds a brief moment of respite, panting heavily as her vision swims in front of her. But she's already turning to look upward, preparing herself to follow after Endo, Lera, and anyone else heading for the priority target.

And that's when she feels everything around her come to a standstill. A brilliant conflagration of purple light washes over the battlefield, accompanied by a horrific implosion -- an implosion that effectively ends the existence of Fallen Stern. Her eyes widen, mouth fallen open in shock and awe.

"E-En..do..." Her voice cracks, as if she's scared to speak the name of her one true love. Then, Ren's world narrows to a single point: Endo, falling into the portal. The air is thick with the scent of ozone and burned-out magic, and Leras cry of "Endo!" barely registers past the ringing in her ears. But its the next word that cuts deeper than any blade: "S-Stern..."

A chime from Heraut follows quickly. <Fallen Stern... He's gone.>

A jolt of grief lances through her. But in the next breath she's blasting off, making a beeline for Endo. Nothing else matters right now except him. And she arrives there in time to grab onto him, not hesitating as she reverses course and streaks off towards the ground. As she touches down she shifts, laying Endo down on the ground, hunched over him, tears streaming down her face.

"You idiot! Your brave idiot!" She berates his unconscious form, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him, absolutely ''blubbering'' uncontrollably. "Stern.... Stern..."

Memories of her first encounter with the enigmatic device, the willful black sword that Endo used to cut down whatever darkness came their way. It was impossible to think of Stern as gone--''truly gone''.

And then, another memory comes to her, courtesy of Heraut--The Cephiran Princess, and a message that resonates within her mind: << You don't have to accept fate. >>

The world comes back into focus now. She can hear Lera calling out for Passion and her, rallying them to finish this for Stern. Yes. This was the way forward. The ''only'' way forward. Getting to her feet, tears still streaking down her cheeks, Ren looks up at the sky, eyes hard and firm.

"Heraut. I have to be strong. Will you help me?"

 The device chimes, performing a rare feat in actually speaking his master's name aloud.

"Thank you, Heraut."

<BGM Change> - Daylight on Brave - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hkc0MI1Xvg

A large Midchildan runic circle traces into existence beneath her feet, the air around her becoming heavy with heat. She takes a single step back, and where she once stood a gargantuan pillar of light--a pillar similar to the one Endo wielded, except bronze in color--flares up from the center of the circle. In then coalesces into a brilliant, searing spear. It doesn't quite crackle like Fate's lightning magic -- it's more like a piece of the Sun itself. It does not burn her, even as she reaches out to grasp it, its hilt solid beneath her fingers, its edge humming with barely contained power. It pulses in time with her heartbeat, thrumming with the weight of her sorrow and fury.

Ren surges upward, spear in hand, the force of her charge splitting the air behind her. At the same time, a dozen more spears materialize in a brilliant formation, each one aimed to strike in perfect unison.

<HAZE SPEAR!>

She grips the hilt tighter, her voice raw as she cries out--

"SUPERNAL SHIFT!"

With the final crowd, Ren absolutely ''hurls'' the spear in a perfect throw, sending it crashing through the intervening space, the other spears joining it in causing an explosion that feels like it could be felt several universes over.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Ren Aizawa has used Haze Spear: Supernal Shift on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Endo is leading the charge, and Kyouka is making her way up as fast as she can to catch up. She's admired Endo's strength for almost the entire time she's been a magical girl. Ever since they stood, shoulder to shoulder, together with Fate, to try and turn back the fearsome tide of Shadow Stern's power at the Dark Burger.

They failed, but Kyouka learned, for the first time, just how much she had to ''give'' to that struggle. Even if, at the time, she didn't think it belonged to her. Even if, at the time, she hadn't thought she'd earned it. That she'd be a temporary magical girl, that once she found Strike Wolf's owner she'd return the stolen and lost device, and just be... Kyouka Okazaki again.

Just a girl, and not magical.

But despite all that, she never forgot just how much she had to give. And she never forgot how Strike Wolf, then half-finished (as he would be for quite some time yet), encouraged her to do what was necessary. To give so much ''more'' at the cost of his stability, at the cost of overclocking himself as he tried to manage the kind of power he simply wasn't ready yet to withstand.

And in the aftermath, when they had all reconvened at Yagami house, Strike Wolf had been offline and Kyouka had been beside herself with fear and grief for her new-found friend and partner. How she'd been twisted up in knots as he'd been repaired, holding her breath to see if he would reactivate at all. The tremendous sense of relief as he activated once more. Even though they'd only been partners for such a short time, then, it still felt like she'd almost lost a piece of herself.

She has learned, since then, that many of those things are ''not'' true, of course. But she never forgot how that all felt.

And she never forgot Endo and Stern's strength and dependability, a mage and device partnership she would trust with her life.

Fallen Stern goes Supernova. Kyouka can't help but scream as she feels her heart twist again, her voice straining and cracking. "ENDO!!" A soft gasp, as everything sinks in. "S-Stern..."

She'll hold back her tears for later, even though her heart is twisting in her chest. Endo's not safe yet. Their worlds aren't safe. There's still work to do.

But she won't forget that sacrifice, and why it was made. That will leave its own impression on her, too.

She redoubles her efforts to ascend. It's easier, now, with the core that was guiding them gone. With their unnatural gravity asserting itself.

But she needs to do ''more''. She lands on one, courching, ignoring the feeling of the void leeching into the souls of her boots as several concentric rings of magic suddenly burst from her feet, storing up magic.

But there is something else there now, a thought occurs to her.

She's been an Outsider of sorts herself, hasn't she? Moving from base to base, making friends here and there but never staying for long, always in places where she didn't ''quite'' fit in, despite so desperately wanting to?

Wasn't that why she wanted to go to a real high school here in Japan, for the first time in her life? To just... ''be'' in a place where it felt more real?

And then it ''did'' become real, over time.

She'd ''wanted'' it though, so, much, for so long. More than she'd ever realized.

And despite all of that... she's always refused to compromise on herself. So what, if she was athletic? So what, if she could match all of the boys in soccer? So what, if she knew how to throw a punch?

And so what, if she had a hearty appetite? There was a lot of good food out in the world, and she liked to try it all... not to mention all that athleticism requires a lot of caloric intake.

But it wasn't just eating, was it? She'd said it to her friends before... hospitality for your guests was also important? She loved cooking, too, and she loved making food to share with her friends. Dishes from around the world at a party. Chocolates for her friends and classmates at Valentine's. Learning more tips and secrets about making curry with Mai...

Wasn't there just... so much magic in the world?

Certainly far, ''far'' much more than she ever imagined possible?

She's seen it time and time again. The first time she transformed. Fighting along side Fate and Endo against Fallen Stern. In the brilliant radience of a Pure Heart.

In the belief of a people for guardians that they (mostly) didn't know ready to put their lives on the line for them.

In providing reassurance for a fox missing her master.

There was so, ''so'' much. Surely there was a little bit more they could share?

Nobody should have to leave a table empty.

With a thought, she dismissed the boosted jump spell she'd been gathering.

Instead she held out her left hand, a large circle of bright violet energy forming in front of it. It gathers energy in front of it, a shining white ball of violet-white light that grows brighter and brighter, larger and larger. First, the side of a fist, then a basketball, then a beachball and then as tall as herself.

Corsucating flares brighter and brighter, doubling and then trippling in intensity. Rushing winds wash out from all around her as the pressure builds and builds.

"You weren't ever invited. But all you wanted was to eat, all you've ever known is hunger. I don't think that's your fault. So if you're still hungry..."

Her hair is whipping about her face now as she looks up to the massive crowd of Outsiders being pulled towards that portal, her long belt thrashing behind her as she keeps building power.

"... then I've got a little bit more to share! Strike Wolf! Get Ready!"

<Affirmative. Get set.>

Kyouka is holding up her left hand, but Strike Wolf is on the gauntlet on her right. What is his role in this new spell? Kyouka draws back her right hand, setting her feet, twisting her body...

Strike Wolf suddenly announces, <Shattering Howl.>

And she SLAMS him him into that circle with a punch. The ball of energy explodes outwards in a shining pillar of violet-white light, shockwaves rippling along its length as she sends all that magic forth.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Kyouka Okazaki has used Shattering Howl on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Finisher, Aurora Galaxy Divider, taking 134 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick
is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, Obsidian Spire: Execution, taking 181 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Ren Aizawa's Finisher, Haze Spear: Supernal Shift, taking 103 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace La Sirene de Diamant's Finisher, The Light That Never Warms, taking 134 Fatigue damage!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Finisher, Shattering Howl, taking 79 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is
unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Passion, Cure Pine, Cure Black, and Cure White's Finisher, Combo: Pretty Cure Miracle
Gathering, taking 1006 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

There is a moment where Lera hesitates. But, then she realizes: the answer isn't one or the other. It's the same as it ever is.

Both. Stop them and understand them, in one stroke.

And so she does. So they all do -- as their energies rise to embrace the Outsiders faster than they can retreat. The individuals die so easily. But it isn't death at all. The collective has already taken so much magic -- all the magic in the world, in EVERY world, but for that they created themselves in Labyrinth. And yet this offering, the first one freely given, seems to fill and fill and fill the swarm without them ever filling up.

Their (non-)existence is a terrible trap.

The eternity of an inability to be satiated is a prison.

Aurora Galaxy Divider -- and a demonic curry bun. They take it all. It hurts -- it burns so ''badly''. Mikoto knows exactly how badly. But they still want more.

They don't know how to want anything else.

Not like Cure Passion -- like Setsuna -- who makes a demand. It doesn't seem to go anywhere. As they are now, the Outsiders are incapable of that kind of reception, or comprehension.

Still, more is on the way. One, a dozen, a thousand Haze Spears -- something the Outsiders never faced ten thousand years ago, because when that cataclysmic war for Belka's survival occurred, Souverain Heraut did not yet exist. It was made for something afterwards. Said differently, it was made for the ''concept'' of an after. The spears thud into the Outsiders, delivering their point.

Not in many small meals but one truly immense one, Kyouka slams the remainder of her reserves -- everything she's got -- from gauntlet to circle to ball and finally to pillar; violet-white instead of violet-black but still inevitably comparable to, and almost a homage of, Stern Brecher. It is not the same at all; Strike Wolf and Fallen Stern are such different Devices, used by such different people. But at a time like this it is impossible not to see the similarities, either.

And then: unlight. An unlightHOUSE. Profound. Gorgeous. ''Guiding''. La Sirene de Diamant gives energy, yes, but she also offers something extraordinary: direction.

You are what you eat, and the Outsiders are becoming Ren's sorrow and her fury; La Sirene's laughter; Mikoto's sincerity, her earnest teaching; Lera's remembrance of Fallen Stern; and Kyouka's, too, her determined acceptance, a patient, deliberate choice to share.

More, more... they are becoming more. The rainbow enters them... and does not leave.

SUCH a bountiful harvest. Cure Pine's faith and generosity. Cure Passion's joyful greed, the crucial introduction of another model of desire. Cure Peach's love, Cure Berry's hope.

Pine invited them to take it to go. Cure Black invites them to stay -- and to eat many different things, not only things that hurt. And Cure White suggests that, indeed, the pain will never end until they learn how to not only consume but ''enjoy''. A gentle but keen reminder: satiation is the purpose.

Light and unlight; solid and liquid; energy and emotion.

Yes, they feasted endlessly, and hopelessly, on all the magic in the universe... as filtered through Jail Scaglietti, himself as cruel an embodiment of selfishness, of the darkest mirror of ambition, the worst sort of hunger, as humanity has to offer.

But this is so much more than that.

The Outsiders slow in their upwards fall...

...and then they stop...

...and then they begin to fall... down.

They are, to the very last, stone; which is to say, dead. As the final one is filled to a capacity that never existed before -- to SO many capacities that were never even conceived of -- the portal shivers, high above, and once again transforms from darkness into blinding, familiar light. Chiffon's light. Chiffon's connection, between this and every other world.

There is a moment of silence.

And then there is a soft crackle.

It comes again, as a flake of stone falls off one of the many corpses in the main downtown plaza. Then one of the ones in the building that fell. At the base of the tower. At the TOP of the tower. And scattered, everywhere else.

It is, unmistakably, the sound that an egg makes as it hatches.

The sound that many, many eggs make...

...and from the first near the magical girls, as they land under their own power -- a power greater than they ever imagined they had within themselves -- TWO things emerge.

<SoundTracker> Run - Amy MacDonald - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jl4kwuSOiY

One is a bolt of familiar icy radiance, which peels off, then straight up, accelerating without limit to hasten its return to whence it came. Not the darkness whence. The light.

And the other is roughly the same size as the shell crumbling around it, but bears no resemblance -- none at all -- to the Outsider it once was. No. This is an Insider; and not just any kind of insider. This is a being that came from a specific place; that was born at this specific time.

And a Labyrinth data diamond sits proudly on its head, in unmistakable -- and unprecedented -- white.

Its wings unfurl, soft fluffy wonderful feathers just like the Cure Angels had. Its eyes -- recognizable both as eyes and as eyes that ''see'', that see the beautiful world they're in -- open. They are the blue of the Sea of Tears, but they aren't tearful; they are joyful.

Its long, gentle body WRIGGLES, but in an entirely delightful -- and delighted -- way.

And with a sweet cry, it launches into the sky. It blushes with soft pleasure at everything it gently brushes past. The tower. The clouds. Occasionally it noms gently on something like a toddler, but it doesn't have teeth, and its overall sense of contentment is clear. It will take time to truly understand what it is that attracts these creatures; and what it is that they eat. But it isn't magic.

Or, well. Maybe it is magic. The truest kind of magic. But if they are drawn to the magic of the heart, and if they consume it, it is undeniable that their simple presence also creates it. Because, inextricably; astonishingly; wholesomely.

One cannot see one and help but get their happiness -- a very special happiness.

These things are ''cuuuuuuuuute''.

"Hohoeminaaaa~" calls one, a dozen, a hundred, thousands -- as many as there are magical worlds, and magical girls upon them.

And as the last bit of stolen power goes home, the portal finally closes.

Just before it does, Chiffon looks up at the Hohoemina and burbles, overflowing with joy; and in a flash of cyan, the missing Labyrinthites are returned, brought home too, In from the Outside. You gazes upon what the magical girls have wrought and smiles in an unprecedented, new way.

Stern is not revived. But he isn't entirely gone, either. Both in the memories sense, and more practically, in the physical one. A fragment still remains. It's dead, for now.

But surrounded by such a wondrous and extraordinary universe...

"Thank you..." (a memory of a memory, as the Crown Princess' spirit knows peace at last)

"...for doing what we couldn't..." (an echo of an echo, as Queen Northa is finally able to move on)

...it's hard to believe that goodbye could truly be forever.

~uehihihi~

BATTLE FANTASIA * MAGICAL GIRL LYRICAL NANOHA SEEKERS * END

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

2025-03-15 - The Labyrinth Reawakens 2

2025-03-16T13:36:10Z

Pink Moon Stick:

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Reawakens 2'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''Fallen Stern makes the ultimate sacrifice to repeat history and drive the Outsiders back to the darkness from whence they came. But the magical girls refuse to accept it, and invite them into the light instead.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Fate Testarossa]], [[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Inori Yamabuki]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Westar]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Miki Aono]], [[Love Momozono]]

GM: Pink Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
3/15/2025 - 6/17/2016
|-
|}

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Dark Realms +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
Light cannot exist without darkness, nor darkness without the light, or so
some claim. Whether the Dark Realms are simply the Fairy Realms through a
mirror darkly is difficult to ascertain, but it's undeniable that some
realms in either domain lack an obvious counterpart in the other. Certainly
the ceaseless war between bright virtue and dark evil gives little heed to
the notion that ultimate victory is impossible.

Indeed, a given realm of darkness will often commit itself solely to
extinguishing the light forever. With names like Minor Land, Labyrinth and
Dark Kingdom, perhaps that isn't all that surprising. Endless plains beneath
a midnight sky lit only by bolts of violet lightning harbor armies of
strange creatures, or yet stranger war machines. If there is water, it is
brackish, tainted. The air itself stabs lungs like a superheated knife. Some
denizens of the Dark Realms claim that they're trying to transform the
entire universe into worlds like their own, but colonizing more pleasant
environments might be sufficient motivation alone.

Black, too, has shades; there are many dark wastelands, but also dark
cities, dark oceans, dark forests, dark deserts, dark skies. Some are even
possessed of a loveliness all their own; as beautiful as it is deadly, with
shadowy landscapes that mesmerize before they surprise. No matter how
populous, all are pervaded by a sense of emptiness, of absence, masked at
times by swirling rage or despair, but never erased.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

[[2025-02-22 - The Labyrinth Reawakens|PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA]]

In his greed, Jail ripped all the magic of the universe into Labyrinth -- into himself.

And this immense concentration, its sheer density, attracted the attention of a force that has not been seen for ten thousand years.

It only took one Outsider to swallow the madman and his stolen power -- and it took flight, back to the inverted portal, now hijacked to allow the aliens into this mode of existence.

Its retreat was covered by thousands of its kind. Thousands of strange monsters, so strange that the eye cannot even resolve them, only compare them to more familiar creatures. The Outsiders wear comparisons to insects, to birds, to beasts, like ill-fitting suits, warped far beyond funhouse mirrors. They descended on Labyrinth and its people, and anyone or anything they touched turned cold -- filled with blackness -- and then simply ceased to be. Winked out of being entirely.

But the magical girls fought back. Some pursued Jail upwards into the sky, for if he is lost, the countless worlds robbed of their souls will be lost also, if to a more spiritual heat-death than the more traditional promise of entropy's kiss. Others deployed to the plaza, where a dense crowd of onlookers -- whose belief in the magical girls had, not long ago, empowered them to defeat Jail in the first place -- was threatened by Outsiders; and still more to a building brought to the verge of collapse by aliens that simply flew straight through it, and thus through its structural integrity.

Setsuna Higashi's best friends, her found family, the Fresh Pretty Cure, climbed to the top of the tower at the center of Labyrinth, which had once been the seat of Lord Moebius and the shrine of his secret controller, Northa, once the Belkan Queen who, in eons past, made war upon the many magical worlds in order to secret away their power somewhere the Outsiders could never sense, and thus never invade. At the apex, Cures Peach, Berry and Pine unleashed their love, hope and faith to blanket the city below in protective light that no Outsider could pass through.

At the same time, the magical girls defeated the last of the aliens in the city proper. Labyrinth has been saved -- but the stolen magic of the worlds remains in fatal jeopardy.

All that remains is to take to the sky.

NOW

<SoundTracker> Love Is A Battlefield (Live To Tell cover) - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsa_9xNpqF4

They rise, some of them Outsider to Outsider, leaping and punching, blitzing and throwing. They rise, flying and slashing, swirling and squeezing and surging. They rise alone and they rise together; they rise in each other's arms.

But they just don't rise fast enough.

Still, the enemy comes... there are so many of them. It feels endless. For every hundred of them slain by a magical girl, there are a thousand more to replace them. And every single time one Outsider manages to pierce the terrific offense-as-defense of the line, and land even a single hit, that is the more significant action than all those deaths that made it possible, because the defenders are so terribly few.

When the battle suddenly changes, the first way to notice is that each of the Outsiders start to glow from the inside out. It is abrupt and simultaneous; none of them were switched on (as it were), and now all of them are. What it isn't, however, is truly identical...

...each alien glows with a specific and unique shade.

What is the color of a soul?

Here's one that's icy. Not the rugged ice of a science fiction planet -- or, rather, not only that -- but the pearlescent glow of sea ice illuminated by aurora. Ice as wonder, as well as danger. It's beautiful, yet the Outsider possessed of it does not become moreso. It is perilous, agonizing, to see such ghostfire ignite within the body of something so ill-equipped to appreciate it as anything other than fuel.

Or perhaps as food. Take this next Outsider, whose cheerful golden light smells like fresh-baked bread, an abhorrent juxtaposition with something worse than writhing antennae, something stranger than chittering mandibles. Another smells of roses, all pinks and whites, the petals almost visible within the aura, hues rendered precisely, exactly, by the steady, unflickering flame. Some Outsiders now are engulfed in a more literal flame; there are silver flames, blue flames, fires of war and of peace, of hearth and of heart. Well. All of them are of heart.

There are as many different glows as there are worlds.

Or... maybe, there are as many different glows as there are undone magical girls, their magic stolen from across those many worlds.

Whether defeating a given Outsider will free that particular magic, destroy it, or do nothing at all to release it from the swarm, is an absolute unknown.

But it's not a matter of choice, because these creatures are coming faster and harder now, sharper and more terrible.

How did this come to be? Thank the holes punched in the cloud by the magical girls, to be able to see it at all.

Plummeting through the sky -- no longer prismatic, rather reverted to a lab coat over a suit -- is Time-Space Criminal Jail Scaglietti.

He is also no longer conscious. He may or may not be no longer alive.

Either way, though still technically in one piece physically, he has ''unquestionably'' been... digested. Maybe the singular Outsider who snatched him up and headed for the portal made it; maybe it didn't matter; maybe it still matters.

Everything feels like it matters so ''much'', suddenly, when faced with Outsiders suffused with magics as familiar to our heroes as their own names -- the names of their friends -- the names of their worlds.

Jail falls, and falls, and falls. He's unpredictable and squirrelly, but this feels very final.

Whether or not his life can be saved, his body will unquestionably be destroyed when it makes impact, either on the Fresh force field, or if he passes through because he's not an Outsider, then definitely on the ground.

And the holes in the swarm... the holes are filling fast. Uncannily fast, as though every Outsider is perfectly aware of the position of every other member of the swarm.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick transforms into The Outsiders: Ascendant!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Body Horror on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Cure White.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Cure Passion fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 39 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is Psyched!
COMBAT: Cure Pine perfectly braces 41 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Brace! Cure Pine's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White cleanly braces 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 5 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Lera Camry dodges 33 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 22 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

They are everywhere, brilliant and strange and terrifying. It is not enough to conceive of what they have done since the beginning, what their presence has wrought. Her mind can barely wrap themselves around the questions.

What are they? Why are they doing this? How many?

That last one sticks with a person in particular. How many civilizations have fallen to them? How many people have died? And in that question, leads to another intrusive one.

... Did...

Did her mother's final end come not from falling through the cracks in dimensions in a failed attempt to reach Alhazard, but at the end the journey, there was only these... things?

Fate's heart quickens subtly faster. Her grip tightens upon Bardiche, and as she draws him back again. She sees a shape in the midst of the chaos, a glimpse of white, a flash of purple waving in the choked breeze.

"... It's him." She utters, softly, but not inaudibly in the atmosphere.

She does not have nearly the same feelings for the man who called himself her father. And yet... and yet! As he falls, she can't help but notice.

I can't stop,

He's falling alone.

BGM for Fate: Invisible Heat (Acoustic Version) - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txf_64xFAp0

I can't stop, Can't stop. Won't stop. As Infinite as the Memory, so is my Desire... this is my purpose. It is why I exist. It is why the Bureau made me, and their unlikely gift.

Maybe out of his own choices, he doesn't have something - someone worth clinging to other than belief in the inevitability of his purpose as desire as he falls, maybe he doesn't have the option.

Maybe it was decided for him at the moment of his birth, and the option taken from him the moment after, just like her... if so, then maybe she inherited something from him after all. A purpose changed - but in others, she found her own purpose.

And despite her anger, seeing him like this in this moment...

... she has to believe that can be true for him too.

Fate's expression tightens all of a sudden, "I'm going." Eyes shining with resolution she says firmly to everyone else, with no explanation other than. "I have to." There isn't much time longer, so her last statement is a plea, "Please help me reach him in time."

Yes, that is right. You look upon the first artificial mage. The original. You were forged to fill a place at your mother's side. I was crafted to find... and secure... and create all the Lost Logia the doddering old fools of the Time-Space Administration could never.

She knows she'll need everyone else here to stand a chance, especially with what she's about to do. And as she flies, and the creatures fly towards her, she makes a sharp call, "BARDICHE!"

<Jacket Purge>

At the moment they would make contact, the space she's flying through erupts in a detonation of smoke and lightning, before a synthetic call is chimed.

<Sonic Form>

And a shape flies out of it so fast that it's like that even the other Magical Girls might have difficulty following, a glimpse of her in her barrier jacket, but without her armor or cloak. With sharp sparking flier fins attached to each wrist, and boots, but bereft of many of the accessories of her armor that she had before - made perilously thin. As she flies down towards Jail, and gets cut off, flying up, and in a spiral at incredible speed, before coming back around, and plummeting amidst the radiant colors of their strange auras.

It will give them all an opportunity to strike them en masse. She does not call for the moment to them.

She trusts them all to know.

Bardiche, now in Haken form vanishes, as Fate flies down towards the form of Jail that's nearly struck the ground, and her arms encircle him, much the way her Mother's did Alicia's... before she fell, sharply braking with one great flap of her fins.

They strike the ground anyway roughly, spinning as Fate brunts the impact with her own form as best as she can. For one long moment the wind is knocked out of her, then she takes a breath and coughs violently. You learn to fall, before you fly, but it's hard to practice for falling that fast.

Turning her red eyes on the unconscious form of Jail, she looks, waits... for evidence that his chest is rising and falling beneath his white, now somewhat dusty labcoat, then takes another sharp breath.

"Maybe... Maybe you'll never understand..." And as she forces herself up, glad to know she can, she looks up at the sky. "... but, I have to believe you can..."

...

"...Jail... Scaglietti." She says quietly, rather than Father. Maybe that title is true, but it doesn't matter. She has a home to go back to. She has a Mother. She has friends and people who love her. And at the end of the day, she hopes she'll have three new sisters.

If he wants that place in her life, he'll have to earn it. But if he wants to, perhaps there'll be a chance one day.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Sonic!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera flies up into the sky, with Cure Passion at her side. She looks sideways at her, before she looks at the Outsiders; each of them aglow with a strange light, a ''stolen'' light, from magical girls from across the universe. She fights a shudder, as best she can, and watches as Jail Scaglietti falls.

Fate says she is going. Lera looks sideways at her, then she nods. "Be careful, Fate. We've got your back, y'know?"

The Outsiders come in. One, Lera beats back with Broken Ground; there's a flash of a girl in white, holding up a staff, on a desert world with a butterscotch sky. A second, she parries with Soaring Sky; there's a flash in her mind of a black-haired girl with violet eyes, drawing back a bow.

A third comes in, its jaws hitting her side -- and Lera shouts out, "Aaah!"

Then she swings Broken Ground up. A brilliant dome of golden light explodes away from her, slamming all three Outsiders back with a mighty explosion.

<Terra Breaker!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Terra Breaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 39 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi perfectly braces 29 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Brace! Mikoto Minagi's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa braces 22 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 18 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Ren
Aizawa's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Up, and up, and up again. But Passion is still there, still moving up, just as she told Lera she would. Soon, she is fighting, more and more; she ''kicks'' through one and another and another, there are still more. She continues to fight, blipping in and out of existence to dodge and weave her way through the Outsiders, until she sees and feels one in particular: one with the wisdom of the water, the familiar calm energy of one she knew--unadultered, unlike how she once knew it.

Passion remembers this essence, a dear friend--one who was something like that another way, once. One from Earth. And Passion hesitates for a crucial second--just long enough for sparkling water in an Outsider to ''crash''; into her side, sending her tumbling down into the tower to smash against it. "Ah--"

"...Maybe I deserved that one," she says. "But no more!"

She ''shoots'' back upward, sailing through the air through another three Outsiders, and finds the one that struck her--the one that holds that precious essence.

Is it freedom, she offers? Or something else? She will have to do as Pine, and have faith.

"Haaaaaah--!"

Passion spots Pine, suddenly. "Pine!" she calls. "This way!"

"Haaaaah--!" She pivots mid-air, handspringing off debris, and extends her gracefulf oot in a big ''kick'' with Pine, straight for the Outsider!

COMBAT: Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Lera Camry's Terra Breaker, taking 44 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa covers Fate Testarossa for Pink Moon Stick's attack, Space Invasion, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki fails to counter Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 31 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 53 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Fate!" Mikoto calls, not nearly so fast. But perhaps her words are fast enough to catch up, eventually: "Do it!"

How could she ever... blame Fate for wanting to save someone like her, even if he's a bad person?

After all, she...

With Westar safely(?!) held Miroku's vast free hand, he is, at least... well, there are ''more perilous'' places to be, right now. Though there are also surely ''less'' perilous places -- the Outsiders swarm around him, hungry for his overflowing, overwhelming magic.

To pick one from a crowd, though...

... it would have to be that one with fangs which are somehow also ''spinnets,'' curling and flexing like fingers as they shoot entangling thread. It's not red, like fate; it's white, like death. Like something girls shouldn't be so familiar with -- a crime of knowledge in and of itself.

With legs and legs and legs and legs, unfurling in the air, flapping, skittering, soaring.

"Na...o?"

Mikoto echoes her name, dumbfounded, staring at something which she never actually seems able to stare directly at, even though it's right there in front of her. It's chased by anger, as she realises: "What'd you do to Nao?!"

Kozue might have -- let's say -- complex feelings on her, these days; and really, it's hard to say Nao's are any ''simpler.'' But they still helped to teach her how the world worked, back before she knew how to walk through Shinjuku. Even if they were expensive lessons, sometimes... Mikoto doesn't want her to be eaten up.

"She's my friend!"

Mikoto might be the only one of the two who would say something like that out ''loud,'' though.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Embrace on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa's Flash
ability activates!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Body Horror, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Quipped! Bind
Break! All of Pink Moon Stick's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine's running behind. For what it's worth? She has a good reason.

"Hurry!"

Cue Tarte, trying to drag a Labyrinth child out from under debris and help him up, a feat made difficult by his tiny ferret like limbs, "Aaaaah!? Pine-han. This is... really hard!"

"He won't be able to walk with one leg Tarte!"

"Yeah! I gathered... it's just! I'm not... THAT strong!"

Pine looks at Tarte as if it hadn't quite occurred to her as her arms strain at the debris she's lifting up, then back at him. "... If only you could become a Pretty Cure." She mentions softly as Tarte keeps trying to help him limp along, more at this point being carried by the kid who's hopping, than actually doing any good. "Oh sure, I'll- get right on that. We're clear!"

She sets it down, then considers everyone ascending...

"Wait... wait up!? Now to get... up." She can jump high but.. "How am I going to get up there?"

"... I suppose I can offer a hand." Cure Pine turns around, eyes widening at...

-=-=-

"And a one... two... and a-" "Wait wait - stop! You're SURE you can throw me that high like this?" "-Was I not an Executive of Labyrinth?" "Well... that's a good point, it's just, does it really have to be like this-?" "-Do you want to get up there or not?" "I do but-" "Three."

Which is the same moment that Soular swings Pine around, and throws her like a Hammer into the sky.

There's an initial cry of alarm, "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Before she levels out, and seems to panic less, "He really could do it..." She marvels, right as an Outsider comes at her, and Pine crosses her arms and plows into it. More and more come, as her hands move into a flurry of sudden punches and blocks to try and keep them away, moving more on instinct.

Some score hits, but she keeps moving on raw momentum, until she starts to come down, and lands on top of another Outsider, causing her to get a flash of a blue clothed, wolf-eared man... with a tail.

Bending at the knees, she leaps off it again as she eyes Cure Black, which her and White fighting up here remind her that she wasn't for a bit.

"I'm so sorry everyone!" She bows her head, even mid-leap, one might imagine she'd do a more formal bow if she wasn't aerial, "I was just running a little behind-!"

"That's not like you, Pine... usually it's Peach that gets lost on the way."

"That almost never happens!" Peach complains, as Berry and her come down to kick a mess of Outsiders. Whereas Pine herself pivots in mid-air towards Passion's voice. "Oh! Coming!" And as she redirects, she comes down with leg extended beside her, "Double Pretty Cure Kick!"

A phrase which Peach Echoes with her own alongside Berry.

"You'll never guess how I got up here." Pine asides to Passion, after impact. "Anyhow... I think I got a glimpse of someone who needs saving? He's... a guy, with adorable wolf-ears, and a tail?"

Leave it to her to remember those characteristics in particular. "... It almost feels like that day with Lucky." She notes, because despite the grim scenario...

...some things are as simple as a canine that needs saving to her. And even if it was Eas they were saving him from...

"Except this time, we do it together."

COMBAT: Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Passion and Cure Pine have used Pretty Cure Fresh Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly counters 63 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion and Cure Pine's Combo: Pretty Cure Fresh Kick,
taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Counter! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, There's Just Too Many, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Embrace, taking 0 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren squeezes Endo's hand tight, the promise of filling their bellies with good food all but sealed. She then turns to survey the situation. The sheer number of Outsiders and the eerie glow of stolen magic send a shiver down her spine, but she shakes it off, focusing on the battle. Then--

Fate's voice cuts through the chaos.

Ren's head snaps toward the golden blur diving toward the falling figure of Jail Scaglietti. Fate isn't hesitating, pushing herself to reckless speeds, and Ren knows--''knows''--that she cant let her go alone.

"I'm on it!" She barks, kicking off in pursuit.

Magic surges around her as she accelerates, the world blurring in a streak of bronze. The Outsiders react almost instantly, a new wave breaking off to intercept. One lunges from the side, jagged limbs cutting through the air toward her.

"Get out of my way!"

Instinct takes over. Ren throws up a hastily-formed barrier--bronze hexagonal plates snapping together in midair. The Outsiders strike meets the shield, energy rippling across its surface. For a second, she thinks it might hold. Then it shatters, shards of magic dispersing into nothing as the creatures claws slash through, scoring a glancing blow across her arm. Pain flares, sharp and hot, but she grits her teeth.

And then she experiences a flash, followed by a familiar scent of sweet-smelling plants.

"E-Eri-chan?!" She exclaims, momentarily faltering in her pursuit of Fate. This Outsider has Eri-chan's magic! "Y-You jerk!" She calls out in anger, and pushes forward. No time. No time!

Blood beads at the tear in her barrier jacket, but she powers through. The Outsider is still recovering from its attack when Ren twists in midair, holding a hand out as a runic circle spins into existence in front of it.

"BACK OFF!"

A barrage of mana-infused energy bursts fire out towards the beast, but Ren doesn't wait to see the result, turning away to blast off again.

Her attention is locked on Fate, on Jail, and the swarm that threatens to tear them apart before they even reach the ground. She crashes through the fray, firing off salvo after salvo of energy bursts at the vicious creatures. "Leave them alone!" She shouts, and in the process makes ''herself'' a more appealing target. As the Outsiders close in, she performs several tightly-controlled aerial maneuvers to avoid the brunt of their ire, though still gets clipped a couple of times in the process. The horrible feeling of being touched by these Outsiders causes her teeth to rattle, but she's determined to not let them win!

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used Scatter Pulse on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBlKPLeLU_s (Of Monsters and Men - Yellow Light)

La Sirene de Diamant does not have the opportunity, quite, to discern the fate of Jail Scaglietti. It is quite possible she could not see him. And perhaps she would not save him - or could not. But in the end, perhaps, it is moot. This is the great and shining blessing of being with others.

One might have weaknesses. Many? They can guard each other; and rely on one another as well.

And yet, there are so many. Like many swords, at least out west, it cuts both ways.

La Sirene, like everyone, is a star, but perhaps more literally than they - seen from any direction, whatever she has desperately grasped to be able to take to the air is making that auroral glow of inverted-light shine brighter, compressed into a six-rayed star-point. A minor magic, perhaps.

And if they are all stars, they are faced with a galaxy, however different the force and power might be. The Outsiders are horrid enough, even when one of them flies right towards her and engulfs her entire torso in something she thinks are jaws. The teeth are -- absent - it is flat and crushing which is bad enough, even if she is able to rip herself free with a kick and a commanding sweep of both arms. But afterwards, her head swims. She breathes heavily. She feels empty, hollowed out: like a tubular bell.

Will it end? Her heart has always been changeable, and perhaps it's changing from a high tide to a low one. Inevitable. A lot of things are inevitable, aren't they?

Nothing lasts forever.

Everything ends.

Dreams always fade, or distort, or collapse.

And...

...

Something impunges on La Sirene - Nori Ankou's - swirling, whirling mind as she rises upwards. Something unusual. Something that stands out among the background of sussurous horror.

A simple musical chord, as if someone was playing a quiet scale on a piano. A simple five note sequence, soft and quiet yet curiously penetrant.

La Sirene's eyes swivel towards it. One of the Things. Distinct from the others. It's making the sound. It's curious, melancholy but soothing. Something in la Sirene's heart is soothed by it; something else, paradoxically, is moved. That simple musical refrain.

It awakens other things. Memories. Pain and struggle. The smell of Tokyo streets in summer, late at night, after the rain's stopped.

All of these pour through her mind. Something wets her cheeks. La Sirene realizes it's tears at about the same time that she finds her left hand's already raised up as she turned almost a half-circle in the air, right hand already cycling despite a slight shaking. Is it her? Or, she thinks, even as she says:

"Les Mysteres, come"

and strokes down. There is another flare of light; the familiar and trusty charm still is with her, at least. The light bursts out, and to la Sirene it seems like it's moving a little slowly, but, she tells herself as it crosses that span of space between herself and the curiously musical creature, that might just be that she's tired.

It's glowing, isn't it? That color - it's blue, she thinks, like -

A memory of a brooch, carved simply and with labor and with love. Her back straightens as the image rests in her mind, sitting there. Her mouth tightens, pressing together. She doesn't speak, but she blinks away tears again.

Of course, for her, tears have their own meaning.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Les Mysteres on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure White and Cure Black are on the move again, hopping after Jail's spirit, Outsider by Outsider. Stopping the creatures was never their main goal, but as time runs out, they have become even more inclined to evasion, letting the beasts slip past them even as they begin to glow with different-colored lights.

"There it is!" Cure White calls, as she and Black split up onto different Outsiders with a jump.

"I've got it!" Black shouts triumphantly, seeing a clear path up Outsider backs between her and the Jail-Outsider at last. Landing in a crouch, she touches the spot on her cheek that White's lips recently graced. Then, thighs bulging, she takes a massive leap across a great distance, towards an Outsider glowing magenta-and-gold. The creature rears up, confronting Black instead of trying to get past her, and Black, giddy from the kiss she wears like a badge on her face, draws her fist back gamely. "YOu wanna play that way?" she challenges. Hurling a massive punch, she slam's into... a golden shield, her blow halted dead, her arm ringing with pain.

Black blinks, the scent of fresh bread in her nostrils. "...Bloom?" she asks forlornly. The shield had not looked like Bloom's until it was struck, but the impact cracked it along a grid, and now it looks a bit like a sunflower. The yawning maw of the Outsider is already casting shadows over her body. Rather than a proper mouth, it is as if the Outsider just opened itself up to engulf her. It slams shut, hiding her from view.

"Blacku!" White shouts, changing course to aid her partner. But another Outsider arises between them, glistening as pale as the moon. Its light catches on Cure White's garments like fire to kindling, glowing on her clothing, but what really ignites is her even paler skin. An observer might be forgiven for thinking Cure White was radiating the moonlight herself. "...Sailor Moon?" Cure White ventures.

"Urrr---AGH!" Cure Black screams, squatting the weight of the Outsider's upper half to force its maw partway open again. There is some horrible fang buried in her back, and a smaller one in her shoulder, making this lift cruel and costly. Bloom's golden glow sinks into Black's tanned skin and suffuses it, its warm hue finding a home there the way Moon's cool one did in White's. As she reaches her full height, Black switches the weight to her hands, starting to pull the fang from her back by forcing the upper jaw up further. She grits her teeth as it slowly drags out of her... and then, Cure White cries out. Glancing behind her, Black sees the ground, so far below that even she would turn to jam if she landed there. With desperation, she tosses herself down towards it. She'll figure something out.

The already-wounded Cure White is driven back onto the back of the Outsider she just left by a burst of moonlight. It burns cold, like what has caught fire now is not merely the tone of her skin, but the fabric of her soul. Alight, White attempts to pat away the flames, but when they do not respond in the least, she makes note, and stands up, ignoring it for now. "Out of my way..."

The Bloom Outsider does not appear content to let Cure Black fall to her death, plunging down for a second bite. Ready this time, Black watches it approach, and as its maw opens, she spreads her body wide, catching the air and shooting much faster into the maw than expected. Landing on the lower jaw, she cocks her fist back like a revolver, and as the mouth closes, she punches upward directly into it, bursting a hole out the top of the monster.

Her moonglowing skin streaking light behind her like an inverted calligraphy brush, Cure White slams a palm strike into the moonlit Outsider. It collides with Cure Bloom's.

COMBAT: Cure Black has used Sen no Sen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Eight Trigram Palm on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Ren Aizawa's Scatter Pulse, taking 11 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 22 Fatigue damage from Cure White's Eight Trigram Palm, taking 18 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 26 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Les Mysteres, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly braces 21 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Sen no Sen, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Brace!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo's eyes skitter across the sky as it becomes a kaleidoscope of lights. The sudden burst of color, in other times, might spark hope. Here the swirling lights feel as empty as the things containing them.

He tracks the descent of the man falling and soon loses track of the blur that Fate Testarossa becomes. "Go, Fate!" He calls. It couldn't happen any other way. Something about that makes Endo's lips cut into a determined smile.

The hand holding Ren's gives a squeeze in return as he lets her handle it. He knows she can.

And then...up. He meets the next wave head-on. If it could be called a wave at allit's more like an ocean. The first to meet him is a thin line, a pulsing pink needle that rips across his armor. The Outsider bends and moves, bladelike points giving chase asFallen Stern cuts chaff around it.

Their exchange is brief, familiar, and comes to a violent end as they exchange final blows. Fallen Stern in the Outsider's center, the vessel's fine edge in the Endo's shoulder.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Asteroid Eilen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 21 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Asteroid Eilen, taking 32 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

There is so much on the line. The magic of countless worlds that Belka destroyed in her grief in a desperate attempt to save them. All of the magic of every magical girl. Her ''home''--and Japan had really started to feel like home, finally, when she finally figured out what it was that she wanted, and started making friends. The kinds of friends she'd trust with her life.

But she can't forget the image of her parents, with all hope and emotion stolen from them, staring blankly on that street, chanting those awful words...

She had to keep going. She braced herself for the next kick off an outsider, felt the sensation of the void sneaking into her even in the brief moment of contact before she rocketed away, up and ever higher.

There was an outsider glowing with rainbow light that she was chasing.

''We have to go faster. We can't let him get away.''

But suddenly it's not just one outsider that's glowing, it's all of them. She sucks in a sharp breath and misses her next tjump as she stares in horror at all of the auras flaring up around them.

It's a sickening sight, far more sickening than thinking about the fall awaiting her if she doesn't recover her jump.

It feels... almost gross, to see the Outsiders empowered this way, and Kyouka's skin crawls as she looks around to take stock of the situation.

She completely fails to notice the outsider glowing green with the warmth of sunlight swooping at her until it is too late. All she can do is let out a sharp yelp as she is engulfed. Strike Wolf springs to life, activating a barrier but it's only delaying the inevitable.

It feels like twisted, thorny vines of ivy snaking their way into her body. No--it feels like the vines are wrapping around her heart, and Kyouka suddenly seizes up, feeling her heart pounding with a sense of profound panic.

Underneath the warmth of sunlight ther is also a terrible melancholy trying to draw her in, and as her panic starts to drown in it, she feels herself slipping... like she's...

... lost.

Even in her worst moment, Lost Ivy fought so hard for her.

Even in her worst moment, Lost Ivy cradled her Pure Heart in her hands and delivered it back to her.

Even in her worst moment...

<SoundTracker> Find Your Flame - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagkbGcX21k

Kyouka's fist tightens.

''No.''

This will be Ivy's worst moment if they fail. It will be ''everyone's'' worst moment. She grits her teeth as her fist starts to glow with a bright violet light, aided by a band of Midchildan glyphs created by Strike Wolf.

"No... one... else..." Kyouka spits out through gritted teeth.

She forces her heart to calm down once more. She has no idea what this will do to Ivy's magic, but she ''has'' to believe it can't be so fragile a thing as to be destroyed this way.

She ''won't'' believe it.

"Lunar... IMPACT!"

She swings, and unleashes a blinding explosion with her punch.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Lunar Impact on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 17 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Lunar Impact, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

When each glowing Outsider meets its end, it turns to stone and plummets. There's no time to watch these corpses hit the still-twinkling force field far far below and see what happens after that; but the stones themselves no longer glow. Each beautiful light goes out.

Are they saving their friends, or dooming them?

Does the Outsider who first swallowed Jail, then digested and ejected him, still matter?

Does the portal?

What can anyone DO now?

In many battles such as these, whether fought in Tokyo or on Belka, there has often been a transition to culmination. First one defeats the little monsters -- then one defeats the big one.

That does not happen here. There is no big one.

Or rather... they're ALL the big one.

It takes time to notice, and there's both very little time indeed for such observations moment-to-moment amid endless peril, and all the time in the world -- literally, because it will run out if the heroes fall -- because the battle stubbornly continues to go on.

But it is noticeable.

<SoundTracker> Immortals (Fall Out Boy) - One More Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHn5Q7hCjxw

The <s>Radiant Knight</s>Lera Camry SLAMS her golden shield into one wave of monsters on the left flank, and the right flank flinches -- just for a moment. <s>The Argent Knight</s>Cure Passion, united with her golden sister, widens the gap just created with a magnificent double kick, and somehow it is filled again far too quickly, by extra-universals who had no business knowing that a gap existed in the first place.

Unless, that is... they're all one creature.

It makes sense. <s>The Vermillion Knight</s>Mikoto eviscerates one creature with a the least swipe of her Child, but a thousand creatures feel its pain long after it is gone. <s>The Ebon Knight</s>Fate descends like a meteor to save Jail, but they can tell that they're surrounded just a little too quickly, because others outside of her cage can see it. <s>The Ashen Knight</s>Kyouka detonates a punch on her enemy, a blast wide enough to consume far more than just one, yet those outside of it seem perfectly aware of its trajectory. Ren's royal bolts rain down from below as she plunges after Fate, Black and White triggering an explosion via collision up above, La Sirene invoking the silvery Les Mysteres in between; heaven and earth united to defeat these foes, to consume them.

But those who come after, down from the portal, remember every clever maneuver despite having never experienced them. They will not work twice, because they actually just did.

SHE just did. Or he, perhaps. The energy of hunger of these beings is more darkly masculine than feminine, if gender must be prescribed at all. Doubtless the creature -- THE creature -- has no use for it. He, It, simply continues to send out parts of himself, and the defenders mow down his limbs like a forest of hairs. Shave after shave, but none of them close. Even the <s>Umbral Knight</s>Endo, whose skills in a melee are unmatched, is starting to--

starting to--

remember. Fallen Stern remembers, and through him, so does a Tokyo boy: remembers that before his dead master failed his Queen; before he failed himself;

first -- at the very beginning -- he failed his original charge.

The Crown Princess started hanging back a little to spot these details; it took more than one save to keep her alive to make the observation she now does. Her sword points out through the ranks -- DEEP through -- which is to say UPWARDS, since the monsters keep spiraling down.

Endo can feel her words tear through his memory, through his mind.

"THERE! That one never moves."

It's true. There's a single rock in the river of ichorous, cthonic monsters flowing downwards to meet them in battle. Sometimes it is momentarily lost to sight, simply because there are too many others in the way. But it always reappears eventually, exactly where it was.

It seems like a creature like any of the others; strange and wrong and, individually, not all that tough.

Endo can see it.

"Together, we must break through and put an end to it!" she calls. "I will be the van!"

He knows what price the Crown Princess paid to save Belka -- and how it felt, as the Umbral Knight, to support but also survive the consequences of her choice.

This time, he doesn't have to watch. Endo -- Stern -- they can put an end to this, if he dares. They can protect everyone.

And, no doubt at all, everyone is in serious need of protection. There are just too many. Too many Outsiders. Too many stolen friends, stolen worlds. Everything is on the line and yet nothing is more painful than seeing the way wounds are opening up on the Device-wielders, the Pretty Cure, their friends. This can't go on.

Something has to give.

Someone...

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Passion braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure
Passion's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Lera Camry cleanly braces 34 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 6 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Lera Camry!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 10 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Cure White perfectly dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Cure White's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa fails to counter Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 32 Fatigue damage! Exhausted applied to Fate
Testarossa!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa's counterattack, Blitz Rush, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure White covers Cure Black for Pink Moon Stick's attack, Fever Pitch, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Cure White braces 16 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Exhausted applied to Cure White!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi partially dodges 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine perfectly counters 31 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Counter! Cure Pine's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine's counterattack, Pineapple Reverse, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa braces 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa's Block and
Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki perfectly dodges 33 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Kyouka Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Hayato Nishi transforms into Westar!
COMBAT: Westar has loaded his saved combat state! He is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki braces 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's Block and
Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Endo Naoki!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

He sees it. They both do, Endo and Stern. Something in the distant past overlaid against something urgently present.

There's a brief calm as his eyes slide across the space above.

"Is it..."

<THERE.>

"Right." The knight gives an affirmative nod as he raises his weapon to point.

"Hey!" He calls, "That's the thing!" He's not as eloquent as the Crown Princess unfortunately. But he conveys the same point. They'll get it.

Endo shows by leading the way. The Outsiders are already clawing and dragging, not eager to give any time to rest. Still he climbs, hacking a line upward as rain from the firmament.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera smashes through Outsiders, smacking them backward with her sword and shield. Another Outsider slams into her -- there's a flash of a girl firing an Intelligent Device like a gun, sending blasts of energy into the sky. She breathes out, teeth gritting for a moment.

But Endo calls out -- 'that's the thing' -- and she sees where he is headed. "Endo-kun!" she calls out. "Right! Let's go, everyone!"

She turns in midair, flying after him. She turns -- and looks at some of the encroaching Outsiders. Lera grits her teeth; she turns Broken Ground towards them.

Then, several bolts of golden light erupt, shooting towards Outsiders that get closer.

"What are we lookng for?" she calls back to Endo.

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"I know!" Fate says to Lera with a smile, but she's already moving, one wonders if she's moving faster than her voice, to the point where it's her afterimage that's speaking to her.

And Fate - as Mikoto says - does it. Pushing herself to her limit, to save someone. It does not matter if he's an awful person. Fate once thought she was too... but she knows now neither Mikoto nor herself are.

It's Ren who jumps into the fray, keeping her from disaster, as she offers one last, "Ren..." Then as she flies away, she gets a message, <<Thank you. I know you can do it.>>

Her telepathic broadcast to everyone above, is heard.

<<Safe. I caught him.>>

Even the eyes of Magical Girls would be hard pressed to see her smiling on the ground, and holding up two fingers in a V from the ground. However, Fate feels that moment, like once with the Resonance Drives.

A call to battle. A call to arms. The urge to follow the Crown Princess into battle is strong. Stronger than ever. But even as the Ebon Knight...

... there was always someone whose memory she was fighting for. She was following in her footsteps. It isn't the past in Ancient Belka.

She knows that perhaps fighting for a memory is a noble thing indeed, but there's something she values more in this moment, and it is not a lack of value in her friends. In fact, it is because she trusts them so much, she can make it - even as Endo charges.

She makes a choice. It is not an easy one.

<<I'm going to take him somewhere else - then there's something I have to do. Can I ask you all for some help... with a small wish of mine? Please, win. I know you can do it.>>

As Fate lifts up Jail, she walks, rather than flies at first, she doesn't want to attract extra attention other than above, and as one of them comes down at her...

... her leg vanishes inside of its maw, and she makes a noise of alarm at the same moment Bardiche chimes.

<Blitz Rush>

... the Outsider might swear the bite was solid, and it was, but it's maw is utterly empty... as Fate reappears closer to a particular crowd of Labyrinth Civilians, and a fairy, far, far away from the Outsider who attacked her.

"Can I ask you to watch after him for a while?"

A small ferret looks up at Fate, Fate who knows the ways of ferrets from her time battling one looks back. Tarte looks over his shoulder, then over to the rest of the crowd, then back at Fate, and points at himself.

"Wait... you want ME to do it!?"

"Who else?" Fate sounds confused, "Just be careful not to use a binding spell unless you have to, it might attract them." It's at the same moment that Fate flies off.

"I CAN'T ACTUALLY DO THAT!"

More confused as it's such a basic spell, Fate keeps flying off as she calls out back. "Then it's not a problem?"

Tarte slumps, then puts down his napsack and rummages through the contents to try to figure something out. "Maybe I can make it work with gum..."

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black stands, fist in the upper 'jaw' of the Outsider, trembling as she tries to hold its mouth open. "Seemed like a good plan," she sighs. A sunflower glow pulses around her.

"Ne, Saki-chan," Cure Black says. "Are you here? Can you understand?"

The maw lurches, trying to close on Black.

"They got you, huh? Strike three, you're out? No, probably not. Probably tagged you out at base, right? You're like me. You go for it when you shouldn't sometimes."

Lifting her other hand, Cure Black braces the fleshy ceiling above her, struggling. She feels like a walnut in a cracker, the leverage of the Outsider's size giving it an advantage in this contest. "Sorry you have to see me not looking so cool. It always felt good, having you think I was so awesome. I'm a pretty selfish person... to let you think that. Because I started before you, you know? Whenever I looked at you, it was like looking at myself two years ago."

The mouth grinds down, forcing Black's shoulders down. "I should have told you that. I should have said... 'you'll get here too. If we were the same age, you'd be here already.' Because..." Cure Black's feet spread, bracing herself to slow the descent of the mouth crushing her. "You're just like me, Saki. You were... just like me." Black's eyes close, spilling the tears in her eyes down her cheeks.

"And when I saw you and Mai together, I guess that's the closest I ever got to understanding." Black's knee hits the squishy ground, her strength finally starting to buckle entirely. "How a girl like her... could love me too. So it's okay, Saki. I'm glad I lost to you, so you know how strong you are. It's not bad... for it to end like this."

Cure Black's other knee hits the ground, her herculean strength quivering in her shoulders. Blood leaks from the puncture in her back, driven out by her straining.

"But I'm sorry," Black whispers. "I can't."

Moonlight floods the dim chamber, driving the golden light of a sunflower back. Cure Black's face is illuminated in gold. The back of her hair is an almost colorless silver. A silhouette at the edge of the Outsider's maw has cranked its mouth wide open, a girl in a skirt who seems, somehow, to be standing in front of a moon, even though she should be backdropped by the ground. Her hair, as it falls, happens to fall in halves, almost like twintails.

Cure Black smiles, gently, expectantly. "She won't let me."

Rent asunder, the Cure Bloom-infused Outsider falls towards the ground in pieces, its golden shield fizzling on and off. Carried princess-style by Cure White, Black looks down over White's shoulder, and gives the plummeting monster corpse a little wave.

Dropping onto the back of a new Outsider, White lets Black down onto the ground. "Are you all right?" she asks.

"Yeah." Black smiles, looking at the pulsing glow of moonlight on Cure White's skin. "What happened to you? Power up?"

"N-no," White startles. "Well..." She looks at Black's face. "If you think so."

"Huh?"

A burst of wind nearly knocks both Cures off the Outsider, as a vast pair of white wings spreads before them. An Outsider has grown feathers somehow, its frightening form now resembling a biblical angels, at once beautiful and unnatural. A keening cry washes over Cure Black and White, its empty hatred chilling.

"...Egret," Cure Black realizes, heartbroken.

Cure White closes one hand, touching into her chest as she looks towards the ground, realizing. "We took her from you," she says softly. "I'm so sorry, Mai." Despite (and because of) her shame, she reaches for the hand of the girl who brings a sunny smile into ''her'' life.

Cure Black shakes her head. "It's too late," she realizes, watching the Jail Outsider fleeing. "It's going to get away."

"We can try Marble Screw from here," Cure White insists, but Black can hear the doubt in her voice.

"Egret..." Black pleads, as if the Outsider might hear, and help them.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

Westar is, for very loose definitions of the word, safe right now. Miroku's grip is a firm one - why, if Westar didn't know better, he'd think the giant Child was trying to squeeze him to death - and with a head poking out, he can get a solid view of the battle.

He's not exactly a master tactician; he's only commanded one monster at a time, and honestly the only familiar thing here is 'being unfairly outnumbered'. Mikoto went off to fight that bug-ish Outsider, Fate went to save the guy who got eaten, and all the while Westar himself is kind of...stuck for a plan. And physically stuck, but mentally is the really big problem, he can squeeze free if he needs to. There's too many to fight fairly, so...if it was anyone who wasn't him in charge, the trick would be to fight unfairly, right?

'That's the thing' is the order of the day, and Westar looks for what someone sharper than him has spotted. One strangely still Outsider is...maybe important? But there's a lot of them in the way. Fortunately...as he did every time he inconvenienced Tokyo, Westar has a gargantuan ally.

"Hey, Miroku!" His voice comes out as a squeak - it's nice to be safely held but this is kind of a little much. There's no answer, but the baleful eye seems to glance at him. "I know I'm not your boss, but...I think that one thing might be important! Throw me up there, so we can-"

Apparently that was enough for Miroku to want to be rid of this not-his-child being, and Westar is duly hurled away from Miroku.

"Wait, wrong waaaaaaay-" Hurtling in somewhat the wrong direction, Westar flails around to try to find a path up - he glances off of one Outsider hard enough to bounce, manages an elbow-strike to rebound again, and he's hurtling somewhere into the fray, desperately trying to course correct.

He's hearing notes as he richochet-kicks his way slowly upward - and there's one faintly familiar light gleaming not too far away. Its magic is musical in nature, but with Westar's head ringing, he's not...entirely sure whether it's the holy major chords of a melodious rhythm, or the familiar minor tones of a felonious trio...

Maybe it's both. Some worlds were home to good and evil in equal measure, and whether the magic's land was Major or Minor, that's an Outsider that's stolen the essence of music. Someone should do something heroic here.

Westar himself is pinballing wildly, but he can try his best to serve. He owes it to the villains he fought beside and the Precure he fought against. There's a hint of a clef that's solid enough to kick off of (and no longer burns), there's a phantom of a staff that he can hook a hand on long enough to swing around - he throws himself as a projectile at the musical Outsider. If he can get through, then maybe he can get closer to where he could really help.

COMBAT: Westar has used Executive Pinball on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The blast flies. The strangely musical creature perishes in a burst and a flash.

It does not occur to la Sirene, exactly, what this means for the girl it reminded her for, in a grotesque manner. Sayaka. She may not be thinking that far ahead, exactly. This is a place with no rising action, merely descent. Action, surely, but how far are they above Labyrinth, now? If she fell, would she be heroically caught and taken to safety? What would that mean for the others - now missing two? Her eyes track Fate, but...

She cannot think poorly of that. It simply isn't something in the space where she exists now.

And then she hears another's voice.

La Sirene has been ascending semi-solitarily for a while, but Endo's voice rings out to her. It's not people speaking to themselves or to others, but Endo telling them something - telling *all* of them. Her head snaps towards him.

He points. 'That's the thing!'

La Sirene looks up.

She doesn't see it.

And yet...

... aren't there a lot of things you can't see, some of the time? She's never seen France or Mars, but she's certain they exist. She knows some of the language from one, and has met the guardian of the other.

... Is Endo the kind of person who would guess poorly, or speak up simply to encourage people? Would he be the kind of person who creates a hopeless cause from his analysis of what surrounds them, or would he simply hold his peace in such situations? La Sirene's lip twitches just a bit.

... Are there not the bonds between them? (La Sirene's trajectory has already curved towards Endo's.)

... isn't there no reason at all to doubt this?!

The thoughts flash through her mind, and la Sirene speaks: "It must be a ways away. Stern," she says, or shouts, over the chaos, "Did you detect it?" Lera immediately assents, and with that, la Sirene folds her arms over herself. The light around her begins to shimmer, and distort...

... and the funereal pose, her palms set against the joint of her shoulders, slowly shifts. Her fingers, cold but against slightly warmer skin, slid down, as if to clasp her own forearms. For reassurance? No - she feels confidence, doesn't she? If they are wrong, let it be as Chevaliers!

"I'll try to," la Sirene says, just as an Outsider turns (inverts) towards her and lunges (smears) at her -- and those stellate projections of dark-light that seem to come from however she is refracting her Pharos's ever watchful and (so far) undimmed irradiance? The Outsider would have to strike through one to hit her, to rend her asunder, or to simply swallow her whole.

Instead, its snout (proboscis) briefly, violently impales itself on the ray of light. It is not enough to END the thing, but it does at least move (smear) away while pulling (shattering) itself loose of the improbable spire of light.

"... Does it look," la Sirene begins, before frowning as she realizes she cannot even possibly find the words to describe these things. "Will it stand out?"

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Rising Towards The Decisive Battle... on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from Westar's Executive Pinball, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

There's many, and as Passion and her descend, more come in to fill them, which is why it's her reaction to them coming to simply grasp one out of mid-air with a gasp that's a mixture of both pain and disgust as she touches it, and suddenly pivot into a whirl, warding the Outsiders off with their own fellow, before pitching it up into a release, momentarily stunning the pack.

She was never 'a knight'... but when Endo calls for the charge, the Legendary Warrior Precure calls out to Passion, "Passion! We've got to catch up to him! If we don't..." Pine understands at least - it's far far more than just an adorable wolf that's at stake. She can see Black, stricken, and hear...

... Bloom...

...Egret...

Seeing her face, even from here, she puts her hands together, "Can I use you to jump off of? I can't teleport like you." Pause, small head cant, she thinks about it, "Though I guess I can teleport with you?"

It's hectic, she forgot she could do that. Or maybe it was Love taking advantage of Setsuna's ability to teleport that made her think it was impolite to ask?

"I... I promise it's for a better reason than a beach ball."

"Mouuu... don't bring that up. I said I was sorry for that!" Peach says in the midst of the fray, whereas Berry looks away awkwardly, pretending she was never a part of that. "After you didn't apologize right away and had a whole pillow fight over it."

"Hey! She started it!"

Pine sweats at Passion's ice cream look to Peach, but eventually she smiles and reaches out her hand to her...

... but Passion has other plans... "Huh!?"

"Ha! That's perfect! Impressive as always Passion."

"SuGOI! I've never seen you do something like that! Ahaha... I'm glad it's water under the bridge... Now-! Senpai! Mind if we lend you a hand?" Peach says as she changes focus mid-jump, her eyes fixing upon the Outsider. "There's no way we're letting it get away." Pine tells Black and White. Before Passion corrects them, and Peach looks astounded, "EHHH!? Really!? Okay everyone! ... Let's follow Passion!"

"You weren't paying attention at all, were you?" Berry notes, as Peach replies, "I definitely was! It's just Passion was paying ''better'' attention! Together! Precure-"

It's a different vibe, perhaps from Black and White in this moment, but it's not them not taking the situation seriously. It's because... whether this is their last day together or not, they're all trying to get their happiness together. And they can only do that... as themselves.

BGM - Precure Eien no Tomodachi (New Stage OP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRDF9WntP0

It's no longer a problem figuring out how they're going to get there, as they all land and launch themselves off in synch the newfound footing, and forward in an enormous arcing leap...

"...Collaboration..."

... Pine draws her fist back with all of them, and pink, blue, yellow, and red join white and black leap into the fray in a titanic arc down the center like an armed missile, ready to detonate down the center with a strength only this many Precure at once can muster.

"... PUNCH!"

COMBAT: Cure Pine has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion remembers the dreams. She remembers what she was there. And she notices that they keep going, despite all their hits. Despite all their efforts. Pine, Peach, and Berry are with her, and that counts for a lot. Lera is still fighting out there, too. And their friends... Ren, and Endo, and Kyouka, and Mikoto, and La Sirene. And she thinks she even hears--

"Westar!" Passion calls. Then she says deadpan to Pine,"I wouldn't do guessing games at a time like this," Passion agrees with Pine. But someone who needs saving...? Hmmmm. She would remember that. But despite the fact that she'd threatened Lucky herself--

'Right!" Passion answers Pine, and smiles. "Together. ...And we'll have to go see Lucky after this, too."

They will.

But there is something--

"Endo!" Passion calls. The thing? Well, it doesn't have to be eloquent to make sense to her; after all, one of her better friends is Mikoto there, after everything.

He's leading the way. Which means...

Endo calls for a charge, and Cure Passion nods sharply to Pine. "Well--" Pause. She can teleport with her! But... for a better reason than a beach ball. "I didn't forget," Passion says evenly, that small smile still on her face--but a harder look in her eyes. An ice cream look in her eyes. "...But I forgive you." All of them!? Apparently!

"Let's go!" A pause. "But there's no ground up there, so..."

Passion reaches back to the tower. "I'll bring us some! Akarun, with me!"

Passion ''grips'' a broken piece of the tower with both hands. "Haaaaaah--!"

She ''rips'' it free, dust and debris scattering and falling towards the barrier below, and as she turns, BLIPS--

In a crimson flash, she is gone. And then, she, Pine, Berry, and Peach are ''there'', behind Cure Black and Cure White.

"That way!" Passion calls, and spins with her prize of rock. "Endo-kun says it's there! Let's clear him a path together!" A beat, then a shout, "ENDO! We're coming!"

"Pretty Cure...!"

She ''swings''--and then ''blip'', the six of them blink out, and back in, onto the platform that's already rising from how Passion threw it.

But the beautiful white wings that seem to belong to Cure Egret's heart will have to be faced in order to break through. And then, from there--

"Collaboration...!" Cure Passion rears back her fist, in perfect time with Peach and Berry and Pine and soon Black and White, her blow seeming to push forward in slow motion, as if punching through deep, deep water to reach the foe ahead--

Or maybe it just has that much force behind it. "PUNCH!"

COMBAT: Cure Passion has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Mikoto nods, when she 'hears' Fate, in her head. "Right!" She agrees to win so easily, so readily, but what else can she do? She is elementally herself.

And her element is black glass, just like...

"There?!" Endo might well look positively loquacious next to ''Mikoto,'' but she understands his meaning perfectly, simple though it is. Birds of a feather don't make speeches together.

Another Outsider looms in front of her, horns coming from its horns coming from its horns, and bronze and gold warp through the air, not quite colouring the beast as much as inhabiting existence around it. Mikoto turns to it, and her brow knits in tension.

"But... I still got things to say to you," she says, even as Miroku recognises the profane manifestation, too -- and brings his terrible greatclub down on it.

He hurls Westar away in his next motion, as if in ''pique.'' Can Children feel pique? Miroku can.

"Ah... Miroku!" Mikoto cries, but Westar is fine, he has a thick skull. The great beast turns, and Mikoto turns, too, a whole half-circle on his massive back to find la Sirene in her confusion.

"That thing!" She calls, to her, helpfully. "Endo said!"

And then she pauses, and tilts her head.

"... the different one!" She decides, as a good explanation, because she's the best at explaining things. (Chitose wept.) "See? It's not moving? Come on! We gotta help Endo!"

And so they move.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts La Sirene de Diamant's Rising Towards The Decisive Battle..., taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Mikoto Minagi is Reinforced by La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Expression on La Sirene de Diamant.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren gasps as she lands hard against a floating piece of debris, her limbs trembling from exhaustion. The wound she sustained just moments ago is excruciating, not doubt because of the void-like nature of the Outsiders. Fate's mental message is heard, and Ren smiles despite the pain. <<Of course we'll win, Fate-chan! Be careful!>>

On top of that she can clearly feel her reserves running low, giving her a sensation not unlike a weight pulling her deeper into the abyss of depletion.

Ren next hears Endo's call, the urgency in his voice cutting through the chaos of the battlefield. Her head jerks up, scanning the sky. "That's the thing!" He'd said. The key to all of this.

A sharp cry from the right draws her attention--another wave of Outsiders rushing toward her, their alien forms shifting and writhing, adapting as they have again and again. And like before, one of them radiates something familiar...

Alyce.

Rens breath catches as memories flood her mind. The dedicated and hard-working TSAB mage she'd met in the nascent days of her magical career. "Ducati-san...!" Ren feels herself getting choked up at the sudden exposure to such potent remembrances. Fighting alongside such an experienced magic-user had been ''profoundly'' beneficial for her own development. She'd often wondered just how she could ever show her gratitude...

BGM -- Nana Mizuki -- Silent Bible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC6tfg8k7nw

...Well, now that chance has presented itself. She cant afford to burn out now. Not when Alyces magic--her essence--has been stolen. Not when she still has the means to fight. The Outsiders dont wait. They lunge toward her, screeching in unison. The one bearing Alyces magic is conveniently at the forefront. Good.

"I wont let you keep it," Ren growls, and with a yell engages the onslaught, kicking and punching with all of the force and fury she can muster.

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used For Alyce! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Ren Aizawa's For Alyce!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka unleashes her attack from inside the Outsider, and it consumes it in a large ball of violet-white light--and thankfully Kyouka works her way free as the defeated outsider starts to fall, though she's, admittedly, falling herself.

"Alright, one more time!"

<Lunar Impact.>

Kyouka swings--but sees the Outsider she was aiming for juke ''just'' out of her range and frowns. And she's still falling. Back to the original plan, then. She kicks at the air, and a shockwave of bright violet energy erupts from her heel, sending her rocketing sideways. She misses the outsider, but a quick readjust lets her feint and hit the next one, and now she rebounds off of that one to redirect her momentum back upwards.

"Guys, I think these things are learning and that's giving me a bad feeling!" She's having to work harder to ricochet her way up through the torrent of Outsiders, too--thankfully, she's got fast reflexes, and thankfully, she's adaptive.

But this is still taxing, and she's not even sure what she's heading for, yet.

And then Endo has an answer he points. "Got it, Endo! I got your back!" Two zips through the air and an attack net her another boost upwards, stomping the top of an outsider so she can rocket further up, though she's lagging behind her flying peers.

She spares the briefest of glances as Fate broadcasts that Jail is safe. She'll trust Fate's judgment, though... it's not like she would've left him to die, either. But she asks them all for a favor... A small wish. To please win. <<You got it, Fate! Good luck!>>

She's surging upwards, and she sees her next target to rebound off of, but pauses, just a moment. There's something familiar about that bright celadon glow... and as she gets closer she can feel the refreshing winds of a of an uplifting breeze sweeping out from it, the gentle placidity of a lake...

"Shamal-san," Kyouka breathes in with a sharp breath.

She will never forget that moment, when she thought she was at her most powerless, that she heard Shamal's gentle but firm voice in her ear. How she said that her magic was a part of ''her'', that Strike Wolf helped control it but that it was still ''her'' magic.

And at her urging, when Ren's house was in immediate danger of being attacked by Jail and his Dark Devices--''Kyouka'' had been the one to cast the barrier. Her powr, her will, made manifest, shifting everything over half a dimension to the right.

It was revelatory, knowing that some intrinsic part of ''her'' was magical. That it wasn't all just Strike Wolf.

That... there hadn't been some mistake to why she had become a magical girl in the first place.

Three kicks at the air, three shockwaves send her zipping back and forth as she approaches, kicks, and resumes surging upwards, the long tails of her belt flapping wildly around her as she tore ever higher into the sky.

"Strike Wolf, I think we need a new trick!" she shouts as she scans the battlefield.

<Affirmative.>

Despite herself, Kyouka grins. "Then together!"

As she ascends Kyouka punches her fist forward. A glowing violet circle preceeded her, as an array of bright violet balls spring into life in front of it. "Go!" she shouts.

Strike Wolf announces, <Hunting Shot.>

All of the balls of magic blast off in front of her, surging forward. But just before the start to impact they break apart, splitting up as Strike Wolf tries to move them in unpredictable patterns to try and throw off the Outsiders.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Hunting Shot on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Hunting Shot, taking 18 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Expression, taking 0 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de Diamant is
Reinforced by Mikoto Minagi!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

One moment, Cure Black and Cure White were facing an avenging angel, its hideous beauty spreading feathers across the sky, unfolding a tragic confrontation pinion by pinion. The next, they are surrounded by laughing friends. Shaken, the two older Cures glance around themselves, and begin to smile as well, sadly at first. But then Peach's suGOI sails up her register, and Black cracks, giggling, followed a moment later by White.

"Thank you," White whispers to Passion with a gentle smile, below the warm words of their other friends.

Cure Black reaches over and squeezes Pine's shoulder, shaking it around familiarly, then pulling her into a momentary side-hug. "Endo needs that one, huh?" she confirms.

"Endo called a new play," White tells Black softly. Black glances at her in surprise. They are both thinking of the same athlete, now. The same tree, out in Tama.

"Got it," Black says, her voice tight. "We won't lose."

"Not when we're together," White agrees. "All of us."

Like a row of archers, the six Pretty Cure pull back their fists, and the draw is heavy.

<SoundTracker> Precure Eien no Tomodachi (New Stage OP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRDF9WntP0

''Collaboration...!''

''PUNCH!''

With an avian keen, the Outsider before them throws its great wings back. A lens of force the color of a robin's egg turns the air to diamond, a shield much like the one that stopped Cure Black's punch dead when she attacked Bloom's Outsider, even as the wind from white wings blasts at the Pretty Cure. But what would have thrown them back individually, even if they had attacked merely at the same time, has almost no effect on six Pretty Cure truly acting ''as one''. Six fists slam into the shield. And they knock through it like a brick through a glass window.

As its shield shatters, the Egret Outsider draws its wings back gracefully, unnaturally fast. But even as it begins to close them down on the attacking Pretty Cure, a spiral of six indents appears on its back for an instant, as the impact on its front lands. Then, explosively, its body erupts into pieces, a beautiful starburst of feather and energy. Nothing quite like it has been seen before. It ought to be remembered.

But there is no artist here who would be capable of drawing this sight.

Malign, horrifyingly aggressive, the Outsiders see this show of raw force and move ''towards it'', their lack of fear more eloquent than any verbal threat that might have come from a more human foe. But among those Outsiders, there are those that hear the call more keenly. Perhaps the Outsiders understand how to fight fire with fire. Could it be, perhaps, that some part of them even heard Peach's call, and recognized that it was for them?

Fast as a hare, an Outsider Whips into the Pretty Cure's path, bursting into sugary sparkles. Undulating as if through The Sea, two similar-looking Outsiders grow filmy fish-wings, crisscross, and slam into the Collaboration punch, their long Mermaid tails pumping to drive the attackers back, but are reduced to a briny spray across the brows of the six heroines.

A fierce procession of some of the most powerful Outsiders rise to the challenge, and are smashed to bits. A butterfly-winged Outsider seems unstoppable until they pass through it like a Dream. Two more butterflies follow, and douse the six Pretty Cure in the refreshing scent of Mint Lemonade. A small Outsider bursts apart with a sound like an acoustic guitar being smashed, its Muse departing.

Cures Black and White exchange a brief glance, after that one, and a nostalgic smile.

A long path has already been cleared, but the offensive faces its greatest challenge yet, as an array of four fearsome Outsiders form a Lovely, quad-barrier, like the crown of a Princess. It even manages to resist the Collaboration Punch for a moment, before caving to the same Fortune as the others, Honey droplets spraying.

Just before the Punch reaches that Jail Outsider, a final offensive is mounted, an impromptu team of six monstrosities to face six girls. Posh Berry is confronted with the Beauty of an elegant Outsider. Genki gyaru Peach stares into an array of alien eyes that Twinkle like stars. Cures Black and White face a duo of monsters that somehow embody a swaggering androgyny and a winsome femininity, attached together like a two-layer Chocolat Macaron. Empathetic vet Cure Pine confronts an undulating Outsider like a blob of yellow Custard. And Cure Passion, an outsider herself in a way, faces a being that is nothing but alien, Scarlet flame.

The impact is thunderous. The sky shakes. The air wishes it could split, pleads to break.

And when the six Outsiders explode, and the Pretty Cure Collaboration punch hits the Jail Outsider at last, of course it pops like a balloon.

The way between Endo and his target is nothing but empty air, made from a tunnel of torn apart monsters.

"Game to Juuban," Cure Black whispers. "For you, Saki."

COMBAT: Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White have used Precure Collaboration Punch! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White's Combo: Precure Collaboration Punch!,
taking 457 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White are Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

<<The one that doesn't move!>> Endo shouts back to Lera, the mental echo of his words cutting through the battle to reach her and the rest of the magical girls.

He pushes off one of the nearest monsters, rocketing toward the heart of the invader.

<<Ren... everyone! Make sure to get it!>>

<SoundTracker> Still in the Dark (Daisuke Ishiwatare) - One More Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPA3Y-acjb0

There are always more of the OutsidersOutsider. Tens, hundreds, millions. They fall like rain but each one leaves some mark of its passing on the young man. A cone of pink energy sends Endo off course, another blue and white glimmer turns the horizon into a field of gleaming swords. The knight's barrier jacket bleeds a violet contrail as each blow chips away at his defensive shell.

Closer...

<<This time we'll destroy it.>>

And closer...

<THIS TIME WE'LL SAVE THEM.>

ALmost...

<EMERGENCY VENTS CLOSED. DISABLING LIMITER. AT 90. 100. 115. 125...>

The Outsiders form up like a defensive membrane.

<<Ready?>>



Purple-black flares out from the Device in a long line that soon grows into a searing column of starlight. It pulses, the magical energy lighting the knight as he makes a vicious arc toward the defended core of their existential enemy.

<STERN BRETCHER.>

The pillar of light, bigger and brighter than it's ever been, connects with the wall of glowing aliens.

It does not cut.

There are just too many, an endless mass replenishing and pushing back, back, back. Endo's hands shake. The pylon falters.

<<Stern-->>



<SoundTracker> Still in the Dark (Daisuke Ishiwatare, Noah Thys) - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dILd4K1HKec

So can Endo. They need him to. He grits his teeth and pushes harder. Hard enough to make the wall give.

In the roar of magic it would be impossible to hear the cracks running across the surface of the gem in the weapon's pummel. But Endo can feel them. His hand falters and so does the blade.

<NO. WE ARE NOT FINISHED.>

Endo's grip tightens. More jagged lines break across Fallen Stern's surface. "I won't let go!" They push one last time. Magic tears through magic.

<KNIGHT. THANK YOU. IT WAS AN HONOR TO SERVE. THIS TIME--I WILL GO ALONE.>

IMPACT.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Endo Naoki has used SUPERNOVA on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

What happens to a star when it dies depends on its mass. The smaller celestial bodies burn and wither, fuming heat into the icy black darkness of space for billions of years.

What happens here is the other option. As the purple-black light swells it shifts to a blindingly white hue. As the core of Endo's partner collapses a deafening showave rends the sky along with the final detonation. What is left behind is an inky purple nebula.

And one Endo Naoki. There's no armor, no magic left.

--But there's still life. A dying star leaves some building blocks behind.

A long time ago--not that long really, but it seems like forever now--Endo made an oath and became a knight. When he started he thought he was the only one who could protect the world. He learned better. He can rest.

Because if he couldn't do it, one of the magical girls behind him will.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Endo Naoki's Finisher, SUPERNOVA, taking 297 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Magic Sword, The Way Home - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCikIkXslP0

Afterwards, the most striking thing was how CLOSE it was.

The magical girls brought all of their terrific force to bear, and it was spectacular indeed, but--

But.

That there was a but at all is horrifying.

That there is a but at all is crucial.

And sure, we can ask the question again as history tries to repeat.

What 'but' could stand up to the golden bolts of the Midchildan-American Lera Camry and her Devices, one of whom, Soaring Sky, is as tied to this history as Fallen Stern? The pinball mayhem of Westar, Executive of Labyrinth, who bounces from foe to foe like a ladder of death, a ladder for Endo to climb? Ren's hammering of gauntlets and greaves at the legions of doom, taking not the battle but the entire battlefield to them, all for the memory of one of her very first mentors and friends? Kyouka's rent airspace, from which pour balls of violet light, to draw away with cleverness rather than destroy with strength? Cure Passion and Cure Pine and Cure Peach and Cure Berry and Cure Black and Cure White punching as one -- creating almost a localized vacuum of their own, not Outside space but Within space, warping space, filling space, and ultimately, dramatically, clearing space?

The answer has to do with numbers, and it has to do with size, and -- because being outnumbered and small has never stopped a legion of magical girls on their worst day, let alone their best -- it has to do with sacrifice.

Of course the creature, who has been spending the lives of his legion like toenails, does not hesitate to spend them -- faster, harder, more -- in his own defense. Most of the progress was made in the first few seconds, before the girls' path -- Endo's path -- became clear. After that...

After that, every meter up the column towards him was its own little war. Trench after trench the attacks of the magical girls advanced, clearing them out, but more and more slowly, more and more desperately.

There is just so much ocean, no matter how sweet the shore.

By the time he reaches the master creature, Endo's armor drips with his own blood, at every joint and cavity; and it's splashed with the black ichor of these monstrous unbeings, who throw themselves so eagerly upon his greatsword -- his pillar of violet light -- which falls even as he rises.

He gives everything.

They give everything.

Fallen Stern... implodes.

And the crucial Outsider, the one he saw, guided by the memory of a Princess, brings up his claws in feeble self-defense, and Endo looks up into what passes for his face. Something passes between him and the hive king, before he's eviscerated in a magnificent burst of Umbral power.

A final burst...

All the remaining monsters scream as one -- they scream with his voice, any voice, for the first time -- because, of course, they are him. Their limbs lose their grip on their enemies; they lose their grip even on the air; and they fall.

...their gravity is not Labyrinth's, and never was. Their gravity -- metaphysical, philosophical -- calls them back the way they came.

They fall upwards...

Driven not by any inverted cosmological constants but rather by the extraordinary force of Fallen Stern's sacrifice, Endo is falling with them, too.

Towards the inverted portal. Towards... Outside.

BUT.

But last time, even though she made it back to the ground -- which Endo is not going to do, safely or fatally, unless someone intervenes very quickly -- the Crown Princess died with a final lamentation on her lips:

"My only regret," she coughs, "Is that in saving our world from them... we have surely doomed another. I only wish... we had the power... to save..."

'Them all' dies on her lips, and so does she.

And she was right to regret. Her final stand didn't save Belka, in the end. Considering the chain of events set off by the grief and despair following her sacrifice, she died for, very possibly, less than nothing. Worse than nothing.

The Outsiders are leaving, because they are unable to stay. But they aren't gone. They aren't solved.

So many terrible things happened because of it.

To Belka. To so many other worlds.

To Labyrinth, at Northa's hands -- the Queen's.

And now, to everywhere.

BUT.

But... what can the magical girls do now that the Belkans didn't do back then?

The ancient Belkans went to war. It was their way; it had always been their way.

The modern magical girls... of Tokyo, of Earth -- natives and far-travelers alike, they are certainly all OF Earth by now... they have their own ways, don't they?

When everything is hopeless -- they wage something else entirely.

They wield the power... of refusal.

Souverain Heraut, more than the other Devices, understands this viscerally. And through him, Ren suddenly remembers the truth of the Cephiran Princess he was originally made for, a lady who was the other sort of Pillar, made not of light but of love:

<< You don't have to accept fate. >>

No one does.

But -- this isn't right.

The Outsiders are too strange to easily empathize with; too alien; too frightening. There's really only one emotion, a singular essence, that anyone has been able to comprehend:

HUNGER.

They have, by all indications, no individuality. The Outsiders just hunger because they hunger. The swarm in its entirety cannot really be said to have a mind at all, even if it did have a core and does have the capability to act in its defense.

It is primal. Elemental. Like matter and antimatter. Magic attracts them and they destroy everything.

But -- it isn't ''fair''.

It is, in a way, not even their fault. They are what they are, without even Fate Testarossa's beloved, essential, passionately taken, and kindly offered, freedom of choice. A freedom the Radiant Knight embraced and the Umbral Knight rejected. A freedom the Cephiran Princess died for, so that the three Devices could live to fulfill their destinies as heroes, with heroes, empowering heroes, befriending heroes.

It's just too sad.

What is so wrong with being hungry, anyway?

Does hunger in itself have to always be such a bad thing?

The world likes to tell girls that it is so. Truly the temptation to gender the Outsiders as male at all is a byproduct of this cultural dynamic, ne? It isn't maidenly to be hungry; it isn't proper to eat as much as you want, as much as you need; certainly it isn't polite to show how much you want and need and hunger.

A man's appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite -- for food, for love, for simple attention -- is always voracious: she always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist.

Like the Outsiders...

...they aren't supposed to exist here, either.

But.

Must desire be monstrous?

BUT.

Isn't it very... human?

BUT--!!

People got hurt. People died. That matters too.

But, it all matters. It all matters so much.

Everyone, everything, deserves better.

...ne. do you want to know a secret?

But: the world can be changed.

The distance is so, so vast. This isn't Fate and Nanoha; Eas and Peach; Mikoto and Mai; Westar and Mikoto; the Sirens of Sorrow's Sea. It's absurd to even imagine the possibility that extradimensional aliens can be reached. Can connect... Can be understood, and understand themselves. Can be, even, accepted... no longer Outside at all, but invited In.

All it takes is an outstretched hand.

All it takes is a miracle.

OOC: This can be interpreted however people imagine. If you're extremely not on board with it your character doesn't have to
receive any of these i

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

OOC: This can be interpreted however people imagine. If you're extremely not on board with it your character doesn't have to
receive any of these insights; or could think through them and reject them. There is no one right way; and there are so many
different kinds of miracles. This scene has room for all of them.

OOC: PS someone (probably rhymes with Whyzawa) needs to go save Endo before he falls out of the universe. you can also still
finisher, it's fine

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

~*Elsewhere*~

Fate is very fast right now, so it's not long before she shows up at her destination, where her 'Wish' is quietly at stake. The battle still rages far from here.

Two of them are still unconscious, while 'You' watches her as she approaches. "You have returned."

"Yes." Fate replies quietly to her.

'You' points out the obvious, "They're still fighting." And Fate nods, "Yes." Before she walks up to the other two, and examines them for a moment, "... They've been drained this completely. I didn't realize..." Fate puzzles over the situation, it's different from Jail, it's more similar perhaps to the Wolkenritter, what they did to everyone's Linker Cores, but far worse.

Something's missing... and while she doesn't know what that means, she decides not to take a chance. And so she raises Bardiche.

<Divide Energy.>

Gold and violet streams out of him, in Midchildan runes that flow like ribbons into the unconscious pair, as Fate lets that energy flow from her into both of them.

'You' goes silent, you can feel her brain trying to understand what Fate is doing, and just not quite getting it. It's at that moment that Stern goes up, far away, and there is an enormous explosion that rocks everything, even here. Fate stands stable, despite it all... she looks, for a moment, then closes her eyes, and takes a breath.

Despite the feeling... she has to trust, and turns back to 'You'.

"It's okay to say what's on your mind." Fate tells her, as she does her work, and 'You' after one long moment replies, "It isn't my role... to think. Even speaking feels strange."

"But, you have thoughts on what I'm doing." She prompts her, and 'You' replies, "Yes. I cannot understand why you would weaken yourself, for these two. In their current state, they're without value to this conflict."

"That's not right." Fate says softly, without any remonstration in her tone, merely explanation. "I'm not doing this because I want you three to fight. I want to do this... because..."

I wanted this in real life, too.

"I want this, for real. I want to know who each of you will become. I want, the three of you to come home with me. I want you to call out to the three of you... with something real, something you picked for yourself."

There's no small amount of sentiment in her tone, as she says, "I want the three of you. It's... my wish. It's selfish for me to be here rather than there." She thinks of Lera, Endo, Ren, Mikoto, Setsuna, Vita, Signum, Hayate, Nanoha... and Lindy, who taught her this, "But I trust them to finish the battle without me... and be at my side for what comes after."

It's just a little wish. And that's wonderful.

'You' looks like she still doesn't quite understand all the words she said, not in the sense of definition. She knows what all those words mean, she just can't comprehend why Fate would string them together that way, and what it means.

But after a moment... she says something else.

"But you've been calling out to me with something real already." 'You' points out, and Fate blinks, as if not understanding herself. Until she realizes she's been saying 'You' over and over and over and over.

And laughter leaves her lips, just this momentary chuckle, before she beams a smile.

"Well, it's just my opinion... but I think we can do better than that. Once this is over..." And extends a hand towards her. "... let's figure it out together."

She does not understand what Endo and Stern just sacrificed at this moment, not yet. She will later, for now... but for now, this is a glimpse of Stern's sacrifice may have bought her.

Just a little wish.

She'll show her gratitude later for them granting it to her.

'You' does not understand the gesture, or the motive, and Fate receives no insights, but that does not mean there is no miracle here. Both Fate and 'You' (Real name pending) are proof...

... that the empty can become full. Of memories in Fate's case, of desires, of purpose's given and changed and kept. As 'You' finally takes her hand, not because it was ordered, but offered, within that small gesture of someone who was merely an instrument, can consider a life greater than that too.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"Doesn't move!" Lera shouts back to Endo. "I've got it!"

She sucks her breath in as they fly forward, and she watches Endo fly forward, ahead of them all, and surrounded by Outsiders. She grits her teeth, until she comes sharply to a stop -- as she sees the shockwave that rips through the Outsiders' ranks.

But at a cost.

"Endo!" she shouts. Then, with a stammer -- and realization: "S-Stern..."

<Godspeed.> Soaring Sky's voice chimes, solemnly. After all, Stern was his comrade, even if it was something he hadn't remembered.

But Endo is falling upward, towards that portal leading to somewhere else. The source of so many sorrows and woes; but there's also that sense of something else. The desire, alien as it is, that the Outsiders have -- and the lack of understanding.

There is a moment where Lera hesitates. But, then she realizes: the answer isn't one or the other. It's the same as it ever is.

Both. Stop them and understand them, in one stroke.

"C'mon, Passion, Ren-chan," Lera says, looking at her girlfriend then her best friend. "Let's do this for Stern!"

She swings Soaring Sky out to one side. The blade of the Device splits in half; lightning crackles between the two halves of the blade, motes of energy drawing down into it.

<Aurora!>

And then, it expands outward. A beam of gold-red light, burning white at the center, that rises up until it's a single, massive sword of energy.

<GALAXY!>

And then Lera rises up -- and swings it down with an enormous flash out of light.

"DIVIDER!"

COMBAT: FINISHER! Lera Camry has used Aurora Galaxy Divider on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Fallen Stern and Endo give ''more''. And Passion is there, with a front-row seat, along with the other Cures. She ''sees'' it when he presses forwrd, again and again, farther and farther, until the light is too bright to look at. And then she keeps looking, because she's already been burned by Light before, and she has to ''watch''. She won't look away.

She doesn't, as Fallen Stern goes alone. And yet...

Is he really alone?

"Fallen Stern!" Passion calls. "Endo!"

...But she recognizes it. The power of a sacrifice--the power of a desire to protect. ...A desire to see something through.

How can she not understand it, when one of her best friends is Usagi Tsukino? But in the same way, Cure Passion feels...

She feels ''greed''.

Cure Passion wants more than this. She wants more than just to save her world. She wants to save the people already lost. She wants to save the ones who were hurt. She wants to ensure this never has to happen again.

Cure Passion wants it all, a far far cry from Eas who only wanted the one thing, and was never able to get it, could never have gotten it in ten thousand more years. She wants ''all'' of it, just like they got Westar and Soular back.

"Lera!" Passion calls, as she's called in turn. "...Sky! Ground!"

"Yes," she says. "...You..."

"I hope you like Labyrinth!" she calls to Lera. "Because I'm going to spend a lot of time here!"

She starts to fall, of course. That's just how it is, with gravity. She starts to fall, and as she does, she hears that ''but''. She hears those feelings, or feels them more like, understands them. She understands as surely as she once ''didn't'' understand. Maybe...

Maybe there's a way to get back what they've lost. They just have to accept a little more, to go along with it.

She reaches out--for Cure White's hand, and for Cure Peach's hand. She closes her eyes, even as her hair whips all around in the wind--until, suddenly, it ''doesn't'' whip upward so much, and her fall begins to be arrested through no apparent action.

Somewhere, she knows, Fate is being selfish. She knows it in her heart. And she's so, so glad of that. Maybe it's time... for her to be a little selfish, too.

"Together," Passion says, first to Cure Peach, and then to Cure White. "...Because..."

"It's not enough to 'win'," she says. "If I only wanted to 'win'... I could've beaten Pretty Cure, one day. But I wanted more than winning. And I want more now."

"I'm hungry," Cure Passion says. "I'm hungry, and... I think we should share."

"...We have enough for everyone, don't we? At the table in my mom's house... there's always room for another person. All that time ago, that extra person was me."

It's not that Passion immediately comes to love her enemies; it was never like that. ...It's that her relationships ''changed'', and by the end, she wasn't in love with an enemy; she was in love with a friend, trusting a sister.

So...

"Even for them, if they can learn some manners. ...But maybe we can teach them."

It's not that she loves the Outsiders.

It's that one, she ''was'' an outsider. And you never know...

...If tomorrow's friend wasn't yesterday's foe.

Passion closes her eyes again. "...If you'll give me back my people," she says, and the people of Labyrinth now are ''her'' people, "And everyone else..."

"We'll make room for you in Labyrinth, too. Right Westar? Soular?" She can feel Westar out there, even now. Fighting just with them. And...

"And if you just want magic..."

She grins. "Then Lera's already sending you all you need. My girlfriend won't fail, either."

She grows serious a final time. "...Let's all learn what we can be. Together."

Because it's not about deserving. It's about a choice.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

<SoundTracker> It's only the fairy tale - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqKHgd0eB0

Endo and Fallen Stern climb impossibly high, and Mikoto knows just what target he's talking about. She doesn't know so much about her numbers, but even she knows -- what it means to go over a hundred percent. "Fallen Stern!" She cries out, her voice breaking with the volume of it. "Still carrying that?! It's too heavy!"

(She's talking about his failures.)

"Fallen Stern--!!", and she might have warned him that if he keeps going he can't come back, except he knows that very well, and her words fail her as the emotions clutch around her throat. Yes, he's tried to defeat her and Miroku, but --

But --

"Don't go," she says, but quietly, to the being who was proof that Miroku could get better.

He's gone.

He's gone, and Mikoto doesn't have time to sit with the tears in her eyes, because Endo's all out of magic. The magic beneath ''her'' moves, first, jets firing as the Child soars upwards. "Miroku--! Ah, right! I'll cover, Ren!" She knows that Ren will catch him, and she...

She has enemies to...

Defeat, her mind supplies, helpfully, but something catches in her throat like a chicken-bone, as she watches the Outsiders fall upwards, like she's watching her own limp body fall down half a cruise ship.

Is it so strange to empathise with something dark, sinister and eldritch? Mikoto loves her Lord Brother, though he means no good for the Earth. And she looks at these things she can't quite get a good look at, and she realises...

"Miroku!" Mikoto cries out, grasping her blade. "I know what to do!"

And that great beast rumbles, beneath her.

"Make the biggest torture, Miroku! The worst worst one!"

His hand free, Miroku is free to heft it up. There's a moment's pause, as if calculating, before blackness collects in his palm. He hurls it at the mass of retreating Outsiders, dead centre.

<SoundTracker> I'm Hungry - Once Again! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQLpJcAdc_k

IT IS...

An eldrich horror sized curry bun.

"Get it?!" Mikoto cries out, into the abyss. "Stealing food means your mouth hurts! If you're hungry, ask for dinner!"

... what on earth is she doing?!

COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Execution on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

"He does." Pine tells Black as she squeezes her shoulder, her smile fading a moment later to become something more resolute, "So let's go lend him a hand."

Or, rather six hands. Or many many more, should those who are in spirit count. But when Endo pushes further, she remarks, "What- What are they-"

Pine turns her head away from the blinding glare, squeezing her eyes shut, and when she dares to look again, there's a hand over her mouth, and a small gasp. "... Naoki-san."

She doesn't really understand what he did, what happened. There's just an inkling that it's... awful, "... And Aizawa-san is... Oh God." That last part is softer, as she understands at least that his girlfriend is here, watching all that.

It feels like a victory... but one that feels so tragically temporary. As Cure Pine arcs down from the punch, and begins to fall, as they all begin to be drawn back towards the portal, she feels something...

... hunger...

... hunger...

... hunger...

Ravenous, endless. People have to eat three meals a day, and 'Buki knows enough from dance practice about letting herself go hungry, but right now, feeling it... "They're like animals..." Pine notes dully. Wolves hunt on instinct, hunt in packs. Even if adorable little bunnies become their meals, that's how it's supposed to be, isn't it? Is it really ''wrong'', what they're doing?

"... we can't allow it, but..."

But what? What's the solution? It's not like they can kill them all, put the remainders in a zoo, feed them meals of magic every now and then as children gawk at the strange magical predators. What do you do?

What can you do?

Pine thinks on it. Well, what is the solution? Do you just give them all the bunnies?

"... what if..."

What if there were endless bunnies?

That's a strange thought to think on, to turn about in her head, but...

"... what if..."

And as she finds her solution, she looks to Passion, then to Black. Watching Passion take White and Peach's hands... Pine reaches for Black's hand... and and Berry's...

"... Because..."

She echoes with Passion and waits for her answer. Then... tries to articulate her own, "It's not fair. They're just following their instincts. They have to eat too. So what if..."

What if they gave them more than they could ever eat? And more than that besides? It feels strange. They can't do that here, it's dangerous. Too many 'bunnies' and the world will be overrun. Too much magic, and someone will always come for it.

But where they come from?

"... what if we sent it with them."

The Outsiders may not be Wolves. Nor are they cute bunnies, but... if it gives Setsuna back her people. If it stops this fighting because they have enough prey. Then...

"... the Yellow heart is the Emblem of Faith. Freshly harvested..."

Freshly harvested... perhaps that's it, if they can send them a bountiful harvest... she'll have faith.

"... I believe, that it can be better."

For the Outsiders. For them. Even if they don't know happiness, that doesn't mean that helping them can't give them all happiness.

"... Together." She agrees, and has faith in the idea that Peach always tells them. They can get their happiness ''together''. Trying for just themselves - is destined to fail. Letting the Outsiders satisfy themselves means they don't get their happiness.

... But together?

"We can reach for it, after all."

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

All of Fallen Stern's power, expended in an instant. Endo, all but expended himself; Ren knows if he's alive, but Cure Black does not. And then, in the wake of unspeakable violence, a silence arrives.

A short fall means nothing to a Pretty Cure. A long fall gets scary. A REALLY long fall starts to be a little less scary. The ground is so far away that if a Device or Passion doesn't save them, they have bigger problems. So, as Cure Black falls, she gets to ruminate.

Ren is at the side of the boy she loves; the best case is that they will grieve together. The worst case is that Ren might have to grieve alone.

"What's the point..."

On the ground far below, a white feather drifts down into the courtyard, and lands near a yellow petal.

"What's the point... of all of this?"

"You won't let her win...?" Ako Shirabe asked her, when Dark Precure sought her Star Shard. Cure Black held her and promised her she wouldn't, back then. But in the end, Ako lost her heart to something even more monstrous.

"We'll go through there," Cure Black calls, angrily, to Cure Pine, looking up at the rift from which these creatures are coming. "No more of this. They don't get to come through there anymore. If they want to fight, then we'll... then we'll..."

The anger worming its way through Black's mind feels like it's striving towards some light. But when she bursts out into it, and espects her rage to stretch its wings, instead she finds her thoughts in a soft light. It feels like when she was a tiny child, getting out of the bath, her mother offering her a towel.

"Here," Rie says. And the white towel goes over her head. After a moment, Nagisa relents. She lets the bad thoughts go in the towel.

Blinking, she finds herself differently angry. Frustrated. She feels Cure White's palm slip into hers, and she forces her hand to relax, to avoid taking it out on White's delicate fingers. But she is Cure White... and her fingers are not so delicate. She surprises Black by squeezing hard, and after a moment, Black squeezes hard in return.

Futari wa Pretty Cure holding hands is reflexive. But when Pine's hand takes Black's, suddenly, a ring is completed. Passion, then Peach, then Berry, then Pine, then Black, then White, then Passion all over again. Of the six invincible fists that tore the Outsiders apart, none remain for violence. Black looks between the eyes of her friends: giddily stylish Berry, kindred-in-genki Peach, brave survivor Passion. Her close friend Pine. Her everything, White. She nods. And then.

"Oi," she calls to the sky. "Oi! Did you ever think to ask? Huh?! People where I live..." Earth, that is. "They love to feed someone!"

"Oh," Mai says, softly, "so many people! Ah, look at all of them."

"Yeah!" Saki beams at Mai, her smile like an endless barrage of exuberance. "I love big days like this! It's so much fun!"

"We have to eat to survive too!"

Honoka's slim pale wrist sets Chuutaro's full bowl down, as his snout enters it to chow down.

"Why would you eat another person who loves to eat?"

"Ossu, Nagisa-san," Akane-san greets languidly, from above a row of steaming takoyaki.

"You know my name?" middle-school Nagisa asked.

"You come here a lot."

"Look at the way your bodies are! I bet you could eat anything you wanted! Takoyaki. Donuts. Dog food. Butter peanuts. M-miso soup."

The rainbow that transforms Cure White and Cure Black, the power of the creation, is rising up. And as its light suffuses her, Cure Black finally, truly understands Saki Hyuuga's dream.

"Get down here!" Cure Black shouts. "And eat with us!"

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTouBqPkhtc (Blue Oyster Cult - Les Invisibles)

"... Stern.. N... ENDO!" shouts la Sirene, though it's really Nori Ankou's voice amplified outwards. (It's strange. She's always been pretty deep in on the masking. Even insisting this is 'really' her, though she's made less of a point of it lately. Hard to do when you're on fashion posters.)

It's over.

Did they win?

It's hard to say anything like this is a victory, especially with the tragedy of Fallen Stern's name coming true in a wholly different sense, unfolding right before her eyes. La Sirene feels her lips quiver. There is no triumph.

But. The world can be changed.

But.

They don't have to say it's over. That they've lost, or that they've won, or that there's nothing to be done.

You don't have to accept what's in front of you.

You don't have to do what you're told.

Maybe it doesn't feel that way. Maybe there's a price you'll have to pay - a price so great that it seems 'unthinkable' to do otherwise. And it's easy, so easy, to fall into the comfortable shaping of thick gelatinous habit-energy, especially for the things you do wish to do, but don't want to spend your mental energy upon.

But it always remains true. You can tell the sea and the land and the sky: No. They might crush you.

And more often than you'd think... you can get your way.

The miracle rests in potentia in la Sirene de Diamant's memory, a shining and transient thing (but aren't all of they?) And then perhaps Cure Passion picks up on it, and then Mikoto, and Cure Pine... yes.

They hunger.

They're from outside.

Has she not hungered? Has she not been from outside?

Breathing out, la Sirene gazes at the Things. No. The Others. They hurt her eyes, yes. So does the sun that's responsible for all her food. She can -- can she reach out like this? Can her heart open up? She doesn't know if it can. She is often weak (self-judged) and changeable (more objective). And as an atelier's manager might attest, sometimes she can be pretty easily told what to do.

But that, too, is something she accepts. La Sirene de Diamant spreads her hands from their defiant, powerful posture. She spreads them out. Her palms turn towards the opening. Please, she prays.

And then, for a moment, a memory twinkles in her mind.

Did you know? The Brazen Pharos' namesake was a thing built in a far-away land. A mighty work - something counted as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But for all of that, the Pharos of Alexandria had a very simple purpose that made the Ptolemies go through all that hassle.

"Pharos" means "Lighthouse" in Greek.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhGNnNUiceQ (Blue Oyster Cult - Dancin' in the Ruins)

Far, far away, in the Sea of Tears, the skies are lightening. Not lightning - they usually seem like they'd be stormclouds on Earth, though there are subtle variations, and the rain is only more like sixty percent of the time, not eternal. (And sometimes it's just misty drizzle - hardly anything. You get used to it.)

But lightening. Growing brighter.

What doesn't come up a lot, unless you stay there for a while, is that a bright sky is hostile to the residents - at least the ones who live on land. They usually come inside when there's a band of light sky, which comes pretty reliably about a day and a half after a westerly cyclonic storm. The plants love it under a lightening sky, but it gives you sunburn - hurts your eyes.

Out over the sea, the skies are lightening.

And they grow so light, that in that towering shield of stormy clouds that wrap this strange realm, this world, like a rug, there is a break. Something that happens, but it's rare; usually it leaves a furious bonanza of algae, and some time later, a rich harvest from the sea. This time is different.

A shaft of light from a star whose more subtle radiations are kept at bay strikes down, upon the black waters of the Sea of Tears. And Tears they are. The light is such that the expanse of water is illuminated and warms quickly, steaming as it churns up top. The light throws a brilliant column into the salty water. The salt - the salt of myriad tears and myriad sorrows - filters. It changes. And for a fleeting moment of optical miracle, it shines down nearly six kilometers, and for the first time in untold aeons, light shines in one of the sinkholes charted, irregularly, by brave captains and Sirens with a more oceanographic bent.

Everything la Sirene de Diamant has been throwing around has been the Sea on a moderate day. The effect, of course, is considerable.

The unlight that comes out of the Pharos doesn't change in nature, but in quality. It surges upright, brightening a thousandfold. A strange light, a light that axiomatically cannot warm - every iota of mere heat in that light was absorbed by some strange factor or crystal or abyssal-dweller in the Sea of Tears. What comes out is what is left when everything else is taken away. A light that isn't really a thing.

In a little touch of irony, it does seem to have a clear and discernible color. Blue.

In the skies of Labyrinth, that six-rayed scintillance of la Sirene's impromptu flight to the heavens resolves. Towards Labyrinth there is a great and strange luminance - harmless, but casting things in strange and wonderful colors, revealing unusual fluoresencences. Maybe it will bring a sudden change of view to the denizens, if they look away -- or can no longer see -- their struggle.

The other side of the beam goes towards the Outsiders.

Look this way.

Come this way.

Come to the harbor safely, and see what we have.

Enjoy the fruits of this-our-worlds with us.

A lighthouse... no, a projector, thinks la Sirene, and then the memory in her mind congeals. She remembers sharply herself facing, what was it, a devil's dozen surely at least, of magical girls and their allies. Standing in the premiere of a film. Magical Detective -- what? Lala something, she thinks, but she can't remember, and she doesn't matter, because despite a strange electric tightening in every muscle and the recurring empty throb of fatigue, la Sirene de Diamant's laughing, as the beam shines towards the Outsiders.

COMBAT: FINISHER! La Sirene de Diamant has used The Light That Never Warms on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Cure White [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Holding hands is very important to Cure White. Very precious. Sacred, even. It never becomes routine. Every time she holds the hand of Cure Black, it feels like she's holding the whole entire universe. It makes her feel small. And it makes her feel boundless.

It's even more rare for her to hold two different girls' hands at once. Cure Black ''and'' Cure Passion? Those are extremely different relationships but it's still... overwhelming. An embarrassment of riches. And though she's grieving Stern's sacrifice and the destruction of some of Labyrinth, those innocent lives who made everything possible simply -- so simply -- by ''believing'' in them, in perfect strangers -- the grief in her heart is more than balanced by the joy she feels to be among such pretty and pure and powerful sisters. Peach, Pine and Berry, too. And all the others.

They're not alone.

How strange, Hwaito reflects, that a being that appears to be an enormous swarm is by all evidence a single creature of total solitude. The only being from its existence encountered in all of history. Maybe the only being Outside at all. Maybe not. But it does seem... lonely, to be so many and have that be a lie. It must be lonely, to use and abuse the many smaller parts of your whole so easily. To discard yourself so casually.

Last time she confronted this kind of terrible hunger, she ''was'' alone. Utterly so. And even then, she wanted to save more than just herself.

The proximity to it now makes her freeze up; Black and Passion can both feel it when it happens, through her rictus palms. And then they can both feel when it ends.

"You don't have to be do this," she tells the Outsider, quietly, earnestly. "It isn't strength," she presses on, soft but intense. "It will never be victory. We won't... be the only ones who get hurt."

She smiles so sadly, like she's lost in a painful memory.

"It's okay for you to have limits. It doesn't make you less...er than."

Her eyes are so, so blue. Royal blue. Empyrean blue. Sorrowful blue.

And then, the blue of La Sirene's lighthouse.

Guided back, she blinks -- dislodging a singular tear -- and returns, and looks not at the Outsiders but at everyone else. At everyone, surrounding her. At everyone, supporting her.

At Blacku, with her. Inviting them in to join them. It doesn't seem ridiculous at all. It is the opposite of unnecessary.

"To be able to stop at enough... is what makes you whole. Please... join us."

Her eyes close, and the rainbow at the center of the girls' wishing ring intensifies. Not in hue; it cannot, it already contains every color in all Creation, the full spectrum from Black to White. No. It intensifies in hope.

<SoundTracker> It's a miracle gathering! - Precure All Stars DX3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wB_1_iZ5Ho

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Passion, Cure Pine, Cure Black, and Cure White have used Pretty Cure Miracle Gathering on Pink Moon
Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren's busy punching and kicking with wild abandon still. She ''can't'' stop. She ''won't'' stop. Not until they're all vanquished. She can feel her heart hammering away in her chest--the roar of blood rushing through her veins. Finally she finds a brief moment of respite, panting heavily as her vision swims in front of her. But she's already turning to look upward, preparing herself to follow after Endo, Lera, and anyone else heading for the priority target.

And that's when she feels everything around her come to a standstill. A brilliant conflagration of purple light washes over the battlefield, accompanied by a horrific implosion -- an implosion that effectively ends the existence of Fallen Stern. Her eyes widen, mouth fallen open in shock and awe.

"E-En..do..." Her voice cracks, as if she's scared to speak the name of her one true love. Then, Ren's world narrows to a single point: Endo, falling into the portal. The air is thick with the scent of ozone and burned-out magic, and Leras cry of "Endo!" barely registers past the ringing in her ears. But its the next word that cuts deeper than any blade: "S-Stern..."

A chime from Heraut follows quickly. <Fallen Stern... He's gone.>

A jolt of grief lances through her. But in the next breath she's blasting off, making a beeline for Endo. Nothing else matters right now except him. And she arrives there in time to grab onto him, not hesitating as she reverses course and streaks off towards the ground. As she touches down she shifts, laying Endo down on the ground, hunched over him, tears streaming down her face.

"You idiot! Your brave idiot!" She berates his unconscious form, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him, absolutely ''blubbering'' uncontrollably. "Stern.... Stern..."

Memories of her first encounter with the enigmatic device, the willful black sword that Endo used to cut down whatever darkness came their way. It was impossible to think of Stern as gone--''truly gone''.

And then, another memory comes to her, courtesy of Heraut--The Cephiran Princess, and a message that resonates within her mind: << You don't have to accept fate. >>

The world comes back into focus now. She can hear Lera calling out for Passion and her, rallying them to finish this for Stern. Yes. This was the way forward. The ''only'' way forward. Getting to her feet, tears still streaking down her cheeks, Ren looks up at the sky, eyes hard and firm.

"Heraut. I have to be strong. Will you help me?"

 The device chimes, performing a rare feat in actually speaking his master's name aloud.

"Thank you, Heraut."

<BGM Change> - Daylight on Brave - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hkc0MI1Xvg

A large Midchildan runic circle traces into existence beneath her feet, the air around her becoming heavy with heat. She takes a single step back, and where she once stood a gargantuan pillar of light--a pillar similar to the one Endo wielded, except bronze in color--flares up from the center of the circle. In then coalesces into a brilliant, searing spear. It doesn't quite crackle like Fate's lightning magic -- it's more like a piece of the Sun itself. It does not burn her, even as she reaches out to grasp it, its hilt solid beneath her fingers, its edge humming with barely contained power. It pulses in time with her heartbeat, thrumming with the weight of her sorrow and fury.

Ren surges upward, spear in hand, the force of her charge splitting the air behind her. At the same time, a dozen more spears materialize in a brilliant formation, each one aimed to strike in perfect unison.

<HAZE SPEAR!>

She grips the hilt tighter, her voice raw as she cries out--

"SUPERNAL SHIFT!"

With the final crowd, Ren absolutely ''hurls'' the spear in a perfect throw, sending it crashing through the intervening space, the other spears joining it in causing an explosion that feels like it could be felt several universes over.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Ren Aizawa has used Haze Spear: Supernal Shift on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Endo is leading the charge, and Kyouka is making her way up as fast as she can to catch up. She's admired Endo's strength for almost the entire time she's been a magical girl. Ever since they stood, shoulder to shoulder, together with Fate, to try and turn back the fearsome tide of Shadow Stern's power at the Dark Burger.

They failed, but Kyouka learned, for the first time, just how much she had to ''give'' to that struggle. Even if, at the time, she didn't think it belonged to her. Even if, at the time, she hadn't thought she'd earned it. That she'd be a temporary magical girl, that once she found Strike Wolf's owner she'd return the stolen and lost device, and just be... Kyouka Okazaki again.

Just a girl, and not magical.

But despite all that, she never forgot just how much she had to give. And she never forgot how Strike Wolf, then half-finished (as he would be for quite some time yet), encouraged her to do what was necessary. To give so much ''more'' at the cost of his stability, at the cost of overclocking himself as he tried to manage the kind of power he simply wasn't ready yet to withstand.

And in the aftermath, when they had all reconvened at Yagami house, Strike Wolf had been offline and Kyouka had been beside herself with fear and grief for her new-found friend and partner. How she'd been twisted up in knots as he'd been repaired, holding her breath to see if he would reactivate at all. The tremendous sense of relief as he activated once more. Even though they'd only been partners for such a short time, then, it still felt like she'd almost lost a piece of herself.

She has learned, since then, that many of those things are ''not'' true, of course. But she never forgot how that all felt.

And she never forgot Endo and Stern's strength and dependability, a mage and device partnership she would trust with her life.

Fallen Stern goes Supernova. Kyouka can't help but scream as she feels her heart twist again, her voice straining and cracking. "ENDO!!" A soft gasp, as everything sinks in. "S-Stern..."

She'll hold back her tears for later, even though her heart is twisting in her chest. Endo's not safe yet. Their worlds aren't safe. There's still work to do.

But she won't forget that sacrifice, and why it was made. That will leave its own impression on her, too.

She redoubles her efforts to ascend. It's easier, now, with the core that was guiding them gone. With their unnatural gravity asserting itself.

But she needs to do ''more''. She lands on one, courching, ignoring the feeling of the void leeching into the souls of her boots as several concentric rings of magic suddenly burst from her feet, storing up magic.

But there is something else there now, a thought occurs to her.

She's been an Outsider of sorts herself, hasn't she? Moving from base to base, making friends here and there but never staying for long, always in places where she didn't ''quite'' fit in, despite so desperately wanting to?

Wasn't that why she wanted to go to a real high school here in Japan, for the first time in her life? To just... ''be'' in a place where it felt more real?

And then it ''did'' become real, over time.

She'd ''wanted'' it though, so, much, for so long. More than she'd ever realized.

And despite all of that... she's always refused to compromise on herself. So what, if she was athletic? So what, if she could match all of the boys in soccer? So what, if she knew how to throw a punch?

And so what, if she had a hearty appetite? There was a lot of good food out in the world, and she liked to try it all... not to mention all that athleticism requires a lot of caloric intake.

But it wasn't just eating, was it? She'd said it to her friends before... hospitality for your guests was also important? She loved cooking, too, and she loved making food to share with her friends. Dishes from around the world at a party. Chocolates for her friends and classmates at Valentine's. Learning more tips and secrets about making curry with Mai...

Wasn't there just... so much magic in the world?

Certainly far, ''far'' much more than she ever imagined possible?

She's seen it time and time again. The first time she transformed. Fighting along side Fate and Endo against Fallen Stern. In the brilliant radience of a Pure Heart.

In the belief of a people for guardians that they (mostly) didn't know ready to put their lives on the line for them.

In providing reassurance for a fox missing her master.

There was so, ''so'' much. Surely there was a little bit more they could share?

Nobody should have to leave a table empty.

With a thought, she dismissed the boosted jump spell she'd been gathering.

Instead she held out her left hand, a large circle of bright violet energy forming in front of it. It gathers energy in front of it, a shining white ball of violet-white light that grows brighter and brighter, larger and larger. First, the side of a fist, then a basketball, then a beachball and then as tall as herself.

Corsucating flares brighter and brighter, doubling and then trippling in intensity. Rushing winds wash out from all around her as the pressure builds and builds.

"You weren't ever invited. But all you wanted was to eat, all you've ever known is hunger. I don't think that's your fault. So if you're still hungry..."

Her hair is whipping about her face now as she looks up to the massive crowd of Outsiders being pulled towards that portal, her long belt thrashing behind her as she keeps building power.

"... then I've got a little bit more to share! Strike Wolf! Get Ready!"

<Affirmative. Get set.>

Kyouka is holding up her left hand, but Strike Wolf is on the gauntlet on her right. What is his role in this new spell? Kyouka draws back her right hand, setting her feet, twisting her body...

Strike Wolf suddenly announces, <Shattering Howl.>

And she SLAMS him him into that circle with a punch. The ball of energy explodes outwards in a shining pillar of violet-white light, shockwaves rippling along its length as she sends all that magic forth.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Kyouka Okazaki has used Shattering Howl on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Finisher, Aurora Galaxy Divider, taking 134 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick
is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, Obsidian Spire: Execution, taking 181 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Ren Aizawa's Finisher, Haze Spear: Supernal Shift, taking 103 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace La Sirene de Diamant's Finisher, The Light That Never Warms, taking 134 Fatigue damage!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Finisher, Shattering Howl, taking 79 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is
unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Passion, Cure Pine, Cure Black, and Cure White's Finisher, Combo: Pretty Cure Miracle
Gathering, taking 1006 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

There is a moment where Lera hesitates. But, then she realizes: the answer isn't one or the other. It's the same as it ever is.

Both. Stop them and understand them, in one stroke.

And so she does. So they all do -- as their energies rise to embrace the Outsiders faster than they can retreat. The individuals die so easily. But it isn't death at all. The collective has already taken so much magic -- all the magic in the world, in EVERY world, but for that they created themselves in Labyrinth. And yet this offering, the first one freely given, seems to fill and fill and fill the swarm without them ever filling up.

Their (non-)existence is a terrible trap.

The eternity of an inability to be satiated is a prison.

Aurora Galaxy Divider -- and a demonic curry bun. They take it all. It hurts -- it burns so ''badly''. Mikoto knows exactly how badly. But they still want more.

They don't know how to want anything else.

Not like Cure Passion -- like Setsuna -- who makes a demand. It doesn't seem to go anywhere. As they are now, the Outsiders are incapable of that kind of reception, or comprehension.

Still, more is on the way. One, a dozen, a thousand Haze Spears -- something the Outsiders never faced ten thousand years ago, because when that cataclysmic war for Belka's survival occurred, Souverain Heraut did not yet exist. It was made for something afterwards. Said differently, it was made for the ''concept'' of an after. The spears thud into the Outsiders, delivering their point.

Not in many small meals but one truly immense one, Kyouka slams the remainder of her reserves -- everything she's got -- from gauntlet to circle to ball and finally to pillar; violet-white instead of violet-black but still inevitably comparable to, and almost a homage of, Stern Brecher. It is not the same at all; Strike Wolf and Fallen Stern are such different Devices, used by such different people. But at a time like this it is impossible not to see the similarities, either.

And then: unlight. An unlightHOUSE. Profound. Gorgeous. ''Guiding''. La Sirene de Diamant gives energy, yes, but she also offers something extraordinary: direction.

You are what you eat, and the Outsiders are becoming Ren's sorrow and her fury; La Sirene's laughter; Mikoto's sincerity, her earnest teaching; Lera's remembrance of Fallen Stern; and Kyouka's, too, her determined acceptance, a patient, deliberate choice to share.

More, more... they are becoming more. The rainbow enters them... and does not leave.

SUCH a bountiful harvest. Cure Pine's faith and generosity. Cure Passion's joyful greed, the crucial introduction of another model of desire. Cure Peach's love, Cure Berry's hope.

Pine invited them to take it to go. Cure Black invites them to stay -- and to eat many different things, not only things that hurt. And Cure White suggests that, indeed, the pain will never end until they learn how to not only consume but ''enjoy''. A gentle but keen reminder: satiation is the purpose.

Light and unlight; solid and liquid; energy and emotion.

Yes, they feasted endlessly, and hopelessly, on all the magic in the universe... as filtered through Jail Scaglietti, himself as cruel an embodiment of selfishness, of the darkest mirror of ambition, the worst sort of hunger, as humanity has to offer.

But this is so much more than that.

The Outsiders slow in their upwards fall...

...and then they stop...

...and then they begin to fall... down.

They are, to the very last, stone; which is to say, dead. As the final one is filled to a capacity that never existed before -- to SO many capacities that were never even conceived of -- the portal shivers, high above, and once again transforms from darkness into blinding, familiar light. Chiffon's light. Chiffon's connection, between this and every other world.

There is a moment of silence.

And then there is a soft crackle.

It comes again, as a flake of stone falls off one of the many corpses in the main downtown plaza. Then one of the ones in the building that fell. At the base of the tower. At the TOP of the tower. And scattered, everywhere else.

It is, unmistakably, the sound that an egg makes as it hatches.

The sound that many, many eggs make...

...and from the first near the magical girls, as they land under their own power -- a power greater than they ever imagined they had within themselves -- TWO things emerge.

<SoundTracker> Run - Amy MacDonald - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jl4kwuSOiY

One is a bolt of familiar icy radiance, which peels off, then straight up, accelerating without limit to hasten its return to whence it came. Not the darkness whence. The light.

And the other is roughly the same size as the shell crumbling around it, but bears no resemblance -- none at all -- to the Outsider it once was. No. This is an Insider; and not just any kind of insider. This is a being that came from a specific place; that was born at this specific time.

And a Labyrinth data diamond sits proudly on its head, in unmistakable -- and unprecedented -- white.

Its wings unfurl, soft fluffy wonderful feathers just like the Cure Angels had. Its eyes -- recognizable both as eyes and as eyes that ''see'', that see the beautiful world they're in -- open. They are the blue of the Sea of Tears, but they aren't tearful; they are joyful.

Its long, gentle body WRIGGLES, but in an entirely delightful -- and delighted -- way.

And with a sweet cry, it launches into the sky. It blushes with soft pleasure at everything it gently brushes past. The tower. The clouds. Occasionally it noms gently on something like a toddler, but it doesn't have teeth, and its overall sense of contentment is clear. It will take time to truly understand what it is that attracts these creatures; and what it is that they eat. But it isn't magic.

Or, well. Maybe it is magic. The truest kind of magic. But if they are drawn to the magic of the heart, and if they consume it, it is undeniable that their simple presence also creates it. Because, inextricably; astonishingly; wholesomely.

One cannot see one and help but get their happiness -- a very special happiness.

These things are ''cuuuuuuuuute''.

"Hohoeminaaaa~" calls one, a dozen, a hundred, thousands -- as many as there are magical worlds, and magical girls upon them.

And as the last bit of stolen power goes home, the portal finally closes.

Just before it does, Chiffon looks up at the Hohoemina and burbles, overflowing with joy; and in a flash of cyan, the missing Labyrinthites are returned, brought home too, In from the Outside. You gazes upon what the magical girls have wrought and smiles in an unprecedented, new way.

Stern is not revived. But he isn't entirely gone, either. Both in the memories sense, and more practically, in the physical one. A fragment still remains. It's dead, for now.

But surrounded by such a wondrous and extraordinary universe...

"Thank you..." (a memory of a memory, as the Crown Princess' spirit knows peace at last)

"...for doing what we couldn't..." (an echo of an echo, as Queen Northa is finally able to move on)

...it's hard to believe that goodbye could truly be forever.

~uehihihi~

BATTLE FANTASIA * MAGICAL GIRL LYRICAL NANOHA SEEKERS * END

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

2025-03-15 - The Labyrinth Reawakens 2

2025-03-16T13:32:32Z

Pink Moon Stick: Created page with "{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2" |- ! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Reawakens 2'''..."

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Reawakens 2'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''Fallen Stern makes the ultimate sacrifice to repeat history and drive the Outsiders back to the darkness from whence they came. But the magical girls refuse to accept it, and invite them into the light instead.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Fate Testarossa]], [[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Inori Yamabuki]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Westar]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Miki Aono]], [[Love Momozono]]

GM: Pink Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
3/15/2025 - 6/17/2016
|-
|}

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Dark Realms +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
Light cannot exist without darkness, nor darkness without the light, or so
some claim. Whether the Dark Realms are simply the Fairy Realms through a
mirror darkly is difficult to ascertain, but it's undeniable that some
realms in either domain lack an obvious counterpart in the other. Certainly
the ceaseless war between bright virtue and dark evil gives little heed to
the notion that ultimate victory is impossible.

Indeed, a given realm of darkness will often commit itself solely to
extinguishing the light forever. With names like Minor Land, Labyrinth and
Dark Kingdom, perhaps that isn't all that surprising. Endless plains beneath
a midnight sky lit only by bolts of violet lightning harbor armies of
strange creatures, or yet stranger war machines. If there is water, it is
brackish, tainted. The air itself stabs lungs like a superheated knife. Some
denizens of the Dark Realms claim that they're trying to transform the
entire universe into worlds like their own, but colonizing more pleasant
environments might be sufficient motivation alone.

Black, too, has shades; there are many dark wastelands, but also dark
cities, dark oceans, dark forests, dark deserts, dark skies. Some are even
possessed of a loveliness all their own; as beautiful as it is deadly, with
shadowy landscapes that mesmerize before they surprise. No matter how
populous, all are pervaded by a sense of emptiness, of absence, masked at
times by swirling rage or despair, but never erased.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

[[2025-02-22 - The Labyrinth Reawakens|PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA]]

In his greed, Jail ripped all the magic of the universe into Labyrinth -- into himself.

And this immense concentration, its sheer density, attracted the attention of a force that has not been seen for ten thousand years.

It only took one Outsider to swallow the madman and his stolen power -- and it took flight, back to the inverted portal, now hijacked to allow the aliens into this mode of existence.

Its retreat was covered by thousands of its kind. Thousands of strange monsters, so strange that the eye cannot even resolve them, only compare them to more familiar creatures. The Outsiders wear comparisons to insects, to birds, to beasts, like ill-fitting suits, warped far beyond funhouse mirrors. They descended on Labyrinth and its people, and anyone or anything they touched turned cold -- filled with blackness -- and then simply ceased to be. Winked out of being entirely.

But the magical girls fought back. Some pursued Jail upwards into the sky, for if he is lost, the countless worlds robbed of their souls will be lost also, if to a more spiritual heat-death than the more traditional promise of entropy's kiss. Others deployed to the plaza, where a dense crowd of onlookers -- whose belief in the magical girls had, not long ago, empowered them to defeat Jail in the first place -- was threatened by Outsiders; and still more to a building brought to the verge of collapse by aliens that simply flew straight through it, and thus through its structural integrity.

Setsuna Higashi's best friends, her found family, the Fresh Pretty Cure, climbed to the top of the tower at the center of Labyrinth, which had once been the seat of Lord Moebius and the shrine of his secret controller, Northa, once the Belkan Queen who, in eons past, made war upon the many magical worlds in order to secret away their power somewhere the Outsiders could never sense, and thus never invade. At the apex, Cures Peach, Berry and Pine unleashed their love, hope and faith to blanket the city below in protective light that no Outsider could pass through.

At the same time, the magical girls defeated the last of the aliens in the city proper. Labyrinth has been saved -- but the stolen magic of the worlds remains in fatal jeopardy.

All that remains is to take to the sky.

NOW

<SoundTracker> Love Is A Battlefield (Live To Tell cover) - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsa_9xNpqF4

They rise, some of them Outsider to Outsider, leaping and punching, blitzing and throwing. They rise, flying and slashing, swirling and squeezing and surging. They rise alone and they rise together; they rise in each other's arms.

But they just don't rise fast enough.

Still, the enemy comes... there are so many of them. It feels endless. For every hundred of them slain by a magical girl, there are a thousand more to replace them. And every single time one Outsider manages to pierce the terrific offense-as-defense of the line, and land even a single hit, that is the more significant action than all those deaths that made it possible, because the defenders are so terribly few.

When the battle suddenly changes, the first way to notice is that each of the Outsiders start to glow from the inside out. It is abrupt and simultaneous; none of them were switched on (as it were), and now all of them are. What it isn't, however, is truly identical...

...each alien glows with a specific and unique shade.

What is the color of a soul?

Here's one that's icy. Not the rugged ice of a science fiction planet -- or, rather, not only that -- but the pearlescent glow of sea ice illuminated by aurora. Ice as wonder, as well as danger. It's beautiful, yet the Outsider possessed of it does not become moreso. It is perilous, agonizing, to see such ghostfire ignite within the body of something so ill-equipped to appreciate it as anything other than fuel.

Or perhaps as food. Take this next Outsider, whose cheerful golden light smells like fresh-baked bread, an abhorrent juxtaposition with something worse than writhing antennae, something stranger than chittering mandibles. Another smells of roses, all pinks and whites, the petals almost visible within the aura, hues rendered precisely, exactly, by the steady, unflickering flame. Some Outsiders now are engulfed in a more literal flame; there are silver flames, blue flames, fires of war and of peace, of hearth and of heart. Well. All of them are of heart.

There are as many different glows as there are worlds.

Or... maybe, there are as many different glows as there are undone magical girls, their magic stolen from across those many worlds.

Whether defeating a given Outsider will free that particular magic, destroy it, or do nothing at all to release it from the swarm, is an absolute unknown.

But it's not a matter of choice, because these creatures are coming faster and harder now, sharper and more terrible.

How did this come to be? Thank the holes punched in the cloud by the magical girls, to be able to see it at all.

Plummeting through the sky -- no longer prismatic, rather reverted to a lab coat over a suit -- is Time-Space Criminal Jail Scaglietti.

He is also no longer conscious. He may or may not be no longer alive.

Either way, though still technically in one piece physically, he has ''unquestionably'' been... digested. Maybe the singular Outsider who snatched him up and headed for the portal made it; maybe it didn't matter; maybe it still matters.

Everything feels like it matters so ''much'', suddenly, when faced with Outsiders suffused with magics as familiar to our heroes as their own names -- the names of their friends -- the names of their worlds.

Jail falls, and falls, and falls. He's unpredictable and squirrelly, but this feels very final.

Whether or not his life can be saved, his body will unquestionably be destroyed when it makes impact, either on the Fresh force field, or if he passes through because he's not an Outsider, then definitely on the ground.

And the holes in the swarm... the holes are filling fast. Uncannily fast, as though every Outsider is perfectly aware of the position of every other member of the swarm.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick transforms into The Outsiders: Ascendant!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Body Horror on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Cure White.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Space Invasion on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Cure Passion fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 39 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is Psyched!
COMBAT: Cure Pine perfectly braces 41 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Brace! Cure Pine's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White cleanly braces 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 5 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Lera Camry dodges 33 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 22 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

They are everywhere, brilliant and strange and terrifying. It is not enough to conceive of what they have done since the beginning, what their presence has wrought. Her mind can barely wrap themselves around the questions.

What are they? Why are they doing this? How many?

That last one sticks with a person in particular. How many civilizations have fallen to them? How many people have died? And in that question, leads to another intrusive one.

... Did...

Did her mother's final end come not from falling through the cracks in dimensions in a failed attempt to reach Alhazard, but at the end the journey, there was only these... things?

Fate's heart quickens subtly faster. Her grip tightens upon Bardiche, and as she draws him back again. She sees a shape in the midst of the chaos, a glimpse of white, a flash of purple waving in the choked breeze.

"... It's him." She utters, softly, but not inaudibly in the atmosphere.

She does not have nearly the same feelings for the man who called himself her father. And yet... and yet! As he falls, she can't help but notice.

I can't stop,

He's falling alone.

BGM for Fate: Invisible Heat (Acoustic Version) - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txf_64xFAp0

I can't stop, Can't stop. Won't stop. As Infinite as the Memory, so is my Desire... this is my purpose. It is why I exist. It is why the Bureau made me, and their unlikely gift.

Maybe out of his own choices, he doesn't have something - someone worth clinging to other than belief in the inevitability of his purpose as desire as he falls, maybe he doesn't have the option.

Maybe it was decided for him at the moment of his birth, and the option taken from him the moment after, just like her... if so, then maybe she inherited something from him after all. A purpose changed - but in others, she found her own purpose.

And despite her anger, seeing him like this in this moment...

... she has to believe that can be true for him too.

Fate's expression tightens all of a sudden, "I'm going." Eyes shining with resolution she says firmly to everyone else, with no explanation other than. "I have to." There isn't much time longer, so her last statement is a plea, "Please help me reach him in time."

Yes, that is right. You look upon the first artificial mage. The original. You were forged to fill a place at your mother's side. I was crafted to find... and secure... and create all the Lost Logia the doddering old fools of the Time-Space Administration could never.

She knows she'll need everyone else here to stand a chance, especially with what she's about to do. And as she flies, and the creatures fly towards her, she makes a sharp call, "BARDICHE!"

<Jacket Purge>

At the moment they would make contact, the space she's flying through erupts in a detonation of smoke and lightning, before a synthetic call is chimed.

<Sonic Form>

And a shape flies out of it so fast that it's like that even the other Magical Girls might have difficulty following, a glimpse of her in her barrier jacket, but without her armor or cloak. With sharp sparking flier fins attached to each wrist, and boots, but bereft of many of the accessories of her armor that she had before - made perilously thin. As she flies down towards Jail, and gets cut off, flying up, and in a spiral at incredible speed, before coming back around, and plummeting amidst the radiant colors of their strange auras.

It will give them all an opportunity to strike them en masse. She does not call for the moment to them.

She trusts them all to know.

Bardiche, now in Haken form vanishes, as Fate flies down towards the form of Jail that's nearly struck the ground, and her arms encircle him, much the way her Mother's did Alicia's... before she fell, sharply braking with one great flap of her fins.

They strike the ground anyway roughly, spinning as Fate brunts the impact with her own form as best as she can. For one long moment the wind is knocked out of her, then she takes a breath and coughs violently. You learn to fall, before you fly, but it's hard to practice for falling that fast.

Turning her red eyes on the unconscious form of Jail, she looks, waits... for evidence that his chest is rising and falling beneath his white, now somewhat dusty labcoat, then takes another sharp breath.

"Maybe... Maybe you'll never understand..." And as she forces herself up, glad to know she can, she looks up at the sky. "... but, I have to believe you can..."

...

"...Jail... Scaglietti." She says quietly, rather than Father. Maybe that title is true, but it doesn't matter. She has a home to go back to. She has a Mother. She has friends and people who love her. And at the end of the day, she hopes she'll have three new sisters.

If he wants that place in her life, he'll have to earn it. But if he wants to, perhaps there'll be a chance one day.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Sonic!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera flies up into the sky, with Cure Passion at her side. She looks sideways at her, before she looks at the Outsiders; each of them aglow with a strange light, a ''stolen'' light, from magical girls from across the universe. She fights a shudder, as best she can, and watches as Jail Scaglietti falls.

Fate says she is going. Lera looks sideways at her, then she nods. "Be careful, Fate. We've got your back, y'know?"

The Outsiders come in. One, Lera beats back with Broken Ground; there's a flash of a girl in white, holding up a staff, on a desert world with a butterscotch sky. A second, she parries with Soaring Sky; there's a flash in her mind of a black-haired girl with violet eyes, drawing back a bow.

A third comes in, its jaws hitting her side -- and Lera shouts out, "Aaah!"

Then she swings Broken Ground up. A brilliant dome of golden light explodes away from her, slamming all three Outsiders back with a mighty explosion.

<Terra Breaker!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Terra Breaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 39 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi perfectly braces 29 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Brace! Mikoto Minagi's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa braces 22 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 18 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Ren
Aizawa's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Up, and up, and up again. But Passion is still there, still moving up, just as she told Lera she would. Soon, she is fighting, more and more; she ''kicks'' through one and another and another, there are still more. She continues to fight, blipping in and out of existence to dodge and weave her way through the Outsiders, until she sees and feels one in particular: one with the wisdom of the water, the familiar calm energy of one she knew--unadultered, unlike how she once knew it.

Passion remembers this essence, a dear friend--one who was something like that another way, once. One from Earth. And Passion hesitates for a crucial second--just long enough for sparkling water in an Outsider to ''crash''; into her side, sending her tumbling down into the tower to smash against it. "Ah--"

"...Maybe I deserved that one," she says. "But no more!"

She ''shoots'' back upward, sailing through the air through another three Outsiders, and finds the one that struck her--the one that holds that precious essence.

Is it freedom, she offers? Or something else? She will have to do as Pine, and have faith.

"Haaaaaah--!"

Passion spots Pine, suddenly. "Pine!" she calls. "This way!"

"Haaaaah--!" She pivots mid-air, handspringing off debris, and extends her gracefulf oot in a big ''kick'' with Pine, straight for the Outsider!

COMBAT: Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Lera Camry's Terra Breaker, taking 44 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa covers Fate Testarossa for Pink Moon Stick's attack, Space Invasion, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki fails to counter Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 31 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 53 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Fate!" Mikoto calls, not nearly so fast. But perhaps her words are fast enough to catch up, eventually: "Do it!"

How could she ever... blame Fate for wanting to save someone like her, even if he's a bad person?

After all, she...

With Westar safely(?!) held Miroku's vast free hand, he is, at least... well, there are ''more perilous'' places to be, right now. Though there are also surely ''less'' perilous places -- the Outsiders swarm around him, hungry for his overflowing, overwhelming magic.

To pick one from a crowd, though...

... it would have to be that one with fangs which are somehow also ''spinnets,'' curling and flexing like fingers as they shoot entangling thread. It's not red, like fate; it's white, like death. Like something girls shouldn't be so familiar with -- a crime of knowledge in and of itself.

With legs and legs and legs and legs, unfurling in the air, flapping, skittering, soaring.

"Na...o?"

Mikoto echoes her name, dumbfounded, staring at something which she never actually seems able to stare directly at, even though it's right there in front of her. It's chased by anger, as she realises: "What'd you do to Nao?!"

Kozue might have -- let's say -- complex feelings on her, these days; and really, it's hard to say Nao's are any ''simpler.'' But they still helped to teach her how the world worked, back before she knew how to walk through Shinjuku. Even if they were expensive lessons, sometimes... Mikoto doesn't want her to be eaten up.

"She's my friend!"

Mikoto might be the only one of the two who would say something like that out ''loud,'' though.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Embrace on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Space Invasion, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa's Flash
ability activates!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Body Horror, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Quipped! Bind
Break! All of Pink Moon Stick's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine's running behind. For what it's worth? She has a good reason.

"Hurry!"

Cue Tarte, trying to drag a Labyrinth child out from under debris and help him up, a feat made difficult by his tiny ferret like limbs, "Aaaaah!? Pine-han. This is... really hard!"

"He won't be able to walk with one leg Tarte!"

"Yeah! I gathered... it's just! I'm not... THAT strong!"

Pine looks at Tarte as if it hadn't quite occurred to her as her arms strain at the debris she's lifting up, then back at him. "... If only you could become a Pretty Cure." She mentions softly as Tarte keeps trying to help him limp along, more at this point being carried by the kid who's hopping, than actually doing any good. "Oh sure, I'll- get right on that. We're clear!"

She sets it down, then considers everyone ascending...

"Wait... wait up!? Now to get... up." She can jump high but.. "How am I going to get up there?"

"... I suppose I can offer a hand." Cure Pine turns around, eyes widening at...

-=-=-

"And a one... two... and a-" "Wait wait - stop! You're SURE you can throw me that high like this?" "-Was I not an Executive of Labyrinth?" "Well... that's a good point, it's just, does it really have to be like this-?" "-Do you want to get up there or not?" "I do but-" "Three."

Which is the same moment that Soular swings Pine around, and throws her like a Hammer into the sky.

There's an initial cry of alarm, "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Before she levels out, and seems to panic less, "He really could do it..." She marvels, right as an Outsider comes at her, and Pine crosses her arms and plows into it. More and more come, as her hands move into a flurry of sudden punches and blocks to try and keep them away, moving more on instinct.

Some score hits, but she keeps moving on raw momentum, until she starts to come down, and lands on top of another Outsider, causing her to get a flash of a blue clothed, wolf-eared man... with a tail.

Bending at the knees, she leaps off it again as she eyes Cure Black, which her and White fighting up here remind her that she wasn't for a bit.

"I'm so sorry everyone!" She bows her head, even mid-leap, one might imagine she'd do a more formal bow if she wasn't aerial, "I was just running a little behind-!"

"That's not like you, Pine... usually it's Peach that gets lost on the way."

"That almost never happens!" Peach complains, as Berry and her come down to kick a mess of Outsiders. Whereas Pine herself pivots in mid-air towards Passion's voice. "Oh! Coming!" And as she redirects, she comes down with leg extended beside her, "Double Pretty Cure Kick!"

A phrase which Peach Echoes with her own alongside Berry.

"You'll never guess how I got up here." Pine asides to Passion, after impact. "Anyhow... I think I got a glimpse of someone who needs saving? He's... a guy, with adorable wolf-ears, and a tail?"

Leave it to her to remember those characteristics in particular. "... It almost feels like that day with Lucky." She notes, because despite the grim scenario...

...some things are as simple as a canine that needs saving to her. And even if it was Eas they were saving him from...

"Except this time, we do it together."

COMBAT: Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Passion and Cure Pine have used Pretty Cure Fresh Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly counters 63 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion and Cure Pine's Combo: Pretty Cure Fresh Kick,
taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Counter! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, There's Just Too Many, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Embrace, taking 0 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren squeezes Endo's hand tight, the promise of filling their bellies with good food all but sealed. She then turns to survey the situation. The sheer number of Outsiders and the eerie glow of stolen magic send a shiver down her spine, but she shakes it off, focusing on the battle. Then--

Fate's voice cuts through the chaos.

Ren's head snaps toward the golden blur diving toward the falling figure of Jail Scaglietti. Fate isn't hesitating, pushing herself to reckless speeds, and Ren knows--''knows''--that she cant let her go alone.

"I'm on it!" She barks, kicking off in pursuit.

Magic surges around her as she accelerates, the world blurring in a streak of bronze. The Outsiders react almost instantly, a new wave breaking off to intercept. One lunges from the side, jagged limbs cutting through the air toward her.

"Get out of my way!"

Instinct takes over. Ren throws up a hastily-formed barrier--bronze hexagonal plates snapping together in midair. The Outsiders strike meets the shield, energy rippling across its surface. For a second, she thinks it might hold. Then it shatters, shards of magic dispersing into nothing as the creatures claws slash through, scoring a glancing blow across her arm. Pain flares, sharp and hot, but she grits her teeth.

And then she experiences a flash, followed by a familiar scent of sweet-smelling plants.

"E-Eri-chan?!" She exclaims, momentarily faltering in her pursuit of Fate. This Outsider has Eri-chan's magic! "Y-You jerk!" She calls out in anger, and pushes forward. No time. No time!

Blood beads at the tear in her barrier jacket, but she powers through. The Outsider is still recovering from its attack when Ren twists in midair, holding a hand out as a runic circle spins into existence in front of it.

"BACK OFF!"

A barrage of mana-infused energy bursts fire out towards the beast, but Ren doesn't wait to see the result, turning away to blast off again.

Her attention is locked on Fate, on Jail, and the swarm that threatens to tear them apart before they even reach the ground. She crashes through the fray, firing off salvo after salvo of energy bursts at the vicious creatures. "Leave them alone!" She shouts, and in the process makes ''herself'' a more appealing target. As the Outsiders close in, she performs several tightly-controlled aerial maneuvers to avoid the brunt of their ire, though still gets clipped a couple of times in the process. The horrible feeling of being touched by these Outsiders causes her teeth to rattle, but she's determined to not let them win!

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used Scatter Pulse on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBlKPLeLU_s (Of Monsters and Men - Yellow Light)

La Sirene de Diamant does not have the opportunity, quite, to discern the fate of Jail Scaglietti. It is quite possible she could not see him. And perhaps she would not save him - or could not. But in the end, perhaps, it is moot. This is the great and shining blessing of being with others.

One might have weaknesses. Many? They can guard each other; and rely on one another as well.

And yet, there are so many. Like many swords, at least out west, it cuts both ways.

La Sirene, like everyone, is a star, but perhaps more literally than they - seen from any direction, whatever she has desperately grasped to be able to take to the air is making that auroral glow of inverted-light shine brighter, compressed into a six-rayed star-point. A minor magic, perhaps.

And if they are all stars, they are faced with a galaxy, however different the force and power might be. The Outsiders are horrid enough, even when one of them flies right towards her and engulfs her entire torso in something she thinks are jaws. The teeth are -- absent - it is flat and crushing which is bad enough, even if she is able to rip herself free with a kick and a commanding sweep of both arms. But afterwards, her head swims. She breathes heavily. She feels empty, hollowed out: like a tubular bell.

Will it end? Her heart has always been changeable, and perhaps it's changing from a high tide to a low one. Inevitable. A lot of things are inevitable, aren't they?

Nothing lasts forever.

Everything ends.

Dreams always fade, or distort, or collapse.

And...

...

Something impunges on La Sirene - Nori Ankou's - swirling, whirling mind as she rises upwards. Something unusual. Something that stands out among the background of sussurous horror.

A simple musical chord, as if someone was playing a quiet scale on a piano. A simple five note sequence, soft and quiet yet curiously penetrant.

La Sirene's eyes swivel towards it. One of the Things. Distinct from the others. It's making the sound. It's curious, melancholy but soothing. Something in la Sirene's heart is soothed by it; something else, paradoxically, is moved. That simple musical refrain.

It awakens other things. Memories. Pain and struggle. The smell of Tokyo streets in summer, late at night, after the rain's stopped.

All of these pour through her mind. Something wets her cheeks. La Sirene realizes it's tears at about the same time that she finds her left hand's already raised up as she turned almost a half-circle in the air, right hand already cycling despite a slight shaking. Is it her? Or, she thinks, even as she says:

"Les Mysteres, come"

and strokes down. There is another flare of light; the familiar and trusty charm still is with her, at least. The light bursts out, and to la Sirene it seems like it's moving a little slowly, but, she tells herself as it crosses that span of space between herself and the curiously musical creature, that might just be that she's tired.

It's glowing, isn't it? That color - it's blue, she thinks, like -

A memory of a brooch, carved simply and with labor and with love. Her back straightens as the image rests in her mind, sitting there. Her mouth tightens, pressing together. She doesn't speak, but she blinks away tears again.

Of course, for her, tears have their own meaning.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Les Mysteres on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure White and Cure Black are on the move again, hopping after Jail's spirit, Outsider by Outsider. Stopping the creatures was never their main goal, but as time runs out, they have become even more inclined to evasion, letting the beasts slip past them even as they begin to glow with different-colored lights.

"There it is!" Cure White calls, as she and Black split up onto different Outsiders with a jump.

"I've got it!" Black shouts triumphantly, seeing a clear path up Outsider backs between her and the Jail-Outsider at last. Landing in a crouch, she touches the spot on her cheek that White's lips recently graced. Then, thighs bulging, she takes a massive leap across a great distance, towards an Outsider glowing magenta-and-gold. The creature rears up, confronting Black instead of trying to get past her, and Black, giddy from the kiss she wears like a badge on her face, draws her fist back gamely. "YOu wanna play that way?" she challenges. Hurling a massive punch, she slam's into... a golden shield, her blow halted dead, her arm ringing with pain.

Black blinks, the scent of fresh bread in her nostrils. "...Bloom?" she asks forlornly. The shield had not looked like Bloom's until it was struck, but the impact cracked it along a grid, and now it looks a bit like a sunflower. The yawning maw of the Outsider is already casting shadows over her body. Rather than a proper mouth, it is as if the Outsider just opened itself up to engulf her. It slams shut, hiding her from view.

"Blacku!" White shouts, changing course to aid her partner. But another Outsider arises between them, glistening as pale as the moon. Its light catches on Cure White's garments like fire to kindling, glowing on her clothing, but what really ignites is her even paler skin. An observer might be forgiven for thinking Cure White was radiating the moonlight herself. "...Sailor Moon?" Cure White ventures.

"Urrr---AGH!" Cure Black screams, squatting the weight of the Outsider's upper half to force its maw partway open again. There is some horrible fang buried in her back, and a smaller one in her shoulder, making this lift cruel and costly. Bloom's golden glow sinks into Black's tanned skin and suffuses it, its warm hue finding a home there the way Moon's cool one did in White's. As she reaches her full height, Black switches the weight to her hands, starting to pull the fang from her back by forcing the upper jaw up further. She grits her teeth as it slowly drags out of her... and then, Cure White cries out. Glancing behind her, Black sees the ground, so far below that even she would turn to jam if she landed there. With desperation, she tosses herself down towards it. She'll figure something out.

The already-wounded Cure White is driven back onto the back of the Outsider she just left by a burst of moonlight. It burns cold, like what has caught fire now is not merely the tone of her skin, but the fabric of her soul. Alight, White attempts to pat away the flames, but when they do not respond in the least, she makes note, and stands up, ignoring it for now. "Out of my way..."

The Bloom Outsider does not appear content to let Cure Black fall to her death, plunging down for a second bite. Ready this time, Black watches it approach, and as its maw opens, she spreads her body wide, catching the air and shooting much faster into the maw than expected. Landing on the lower jaw, she cocks her fist back like a revolver, and as the mouth closes, she punches upward directly into it, bursting a hole out the top of the monster.

Her moonglowing skin streaking light behind her like an inverted calligraphy brush, Cure White slams a palm strike into the moonlit Outsider. It collides with Cure Bloom's.

COMBAT: Cure Black has used Sen no Sen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Eight Trigram Palm on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Ren Aizawa's Scatter Pulse, taking 11 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 22 Fatigue damage from Cure White's Eight Trigram Palm, taking 18 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 26 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Les Mysteres, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly braces 21 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Sen no Sen, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Brace!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo's eyes skitter across the sky as it becomes a kaleidoscope of lights. The sudden burst of color, in other times, might spark hope. Here the swirling lights feel as empty as the things containing them.

He tracks the descent of the man falling and soon loses track of the blur that Fate Testarossa becomes. "Go, Fate!" He calls. It couldn't happen any other way. Something about that makes Endo's lips cut into a determined smile.

The hand holding Ren's gives a squeeze in return as he lets her handle it. He knows she can.

And then...up. He meets the next wave head-on. If it could be called a wave at allit's more like an ocean. The first to meet him is a thin line, a pulsing pink needle that rips across his armor. The Outsider bends and moves, bladelike points giving chase asFallen Stern cuts chaff around it.

Their exchange is brief, familiar, and comes to a violent end as they exchange final blows. Fallen Stern in the Outsider's center, the vessel's fine edge in the Endo's shoulder.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Asteroid Eilen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 21 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Asteroid Eilen, taking 32 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

There is so much on the line. The magic of countless worlds that Belka destroyed in her grief in a desperate attempt to save them. All of the magic of every magical girl. Her ''home''--and Japan had really started to feel like home, finally, when she finally figured out what it was that she wanted, and started making friends. The kinds of friends she'd trust with her life.

But she can't forget the image of her parents, with all hope and emotion stolen from them, staring blankly on that street, chanting those awful words...

She had to keep going. She braced herself for the next kick off an outsider, felt the sensation of the void sneaking into her even in the brief moment of contact before she rocketed away, up and ever higher.

There was an outsider glowing with rainbow light that she was chasing.

''We have to go faster. We can't let him get away.''

But suddenly it's not just one outsider that's glowing, it's all of them. She sucks in a sharp breath and misses her next tjump as she stares in horror at all of the auras flaring up around them.

It's a sickening sight, far more sickening than thinking about the fall awaiting her if she doesn't recover her jump.

It feels... almost gross, to see the Outsiders empowered this way, and Kyouka's skin crawls as she looks around to take stock of the situation.

She completely fails to notice the outsider glowing green with the warmth of sunlight swooping at her until it is too late. All she can do is let out a sharp yelp as she is engulfed. Strike Wolf springs to life, activating a barrier but it's only delaying the inevitable.

It feels like twisted, thorny vines of ivy snaking their way into her body. No--it feels like the vines are wrapping around her heart, and Kyouka suddenly seizes up, feeling her heart pounding with a sense of profound panic.

Underneath the warmth of sunlight ther is also a terrible melancholy trying to draw her in, and as her panic starts to drown in it, she feels herself slipping... like she's...

... lost.

Even in her worst moment, Lost Ivy fought so hard for her.

Even in her worst moment, Lost Ivy cradled her Pure Heart in her hands and delivered it back to her.

Even in her worst moment...

<SoundTracker> Find Your Flame - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagkbGcX21k

Kyouka's fist tightens.

''No.''

This will be Ivy's worst moment if they fail. It will be ''everyone's'' worst moment. She grits her teeth as her fist starts to glow with a bright violet light, aided by a band of Midchildan glyphs created by Strike Wolf.

"No... one... else..." Kyouka spits out through gritted teeth.

She forces her heart to calm down once more. She has no idea what this will do to Ivy's magic, but she ''has'' to believe it can't be so fragile a thing as to be destroyed this way.

She ''won't'' believe it.

"Lunar... IMPACT!"

She swings, and unleashes a blinding explosion with her punch.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Lunar Impact on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 17 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Lunar Impact, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

When each glowing Outsider meets its end, it turns to stone and plummets. There's no time to watch these corpses hit the still-twinkling force field far far below and see what happens after that; but the stones themselves no longer glow. Each beautiful light goes out.

Are they saving their friends, or dooming them?

Does the Outsider who first swallowed Jail, then digested and ejected him, still matter?

Does the portal?

What can anyone DO now?

In many battles such as these, whether fought in Tokyo or on Belka, there has often been a transition to culmination. First one defeats the little monsters -- then one defeats the big one.

That does not happen here. There is no big one.

Or rather... they're ALL the big one.

It takes time to notice, and there's both very little time indeed for such observations moment-to-moment amid endless peril, and all the time in the world -- literally, because it will run out if the heroes fall -- because the battle stubbornly continues to go on.

But it is noticeable.

<SoundTracker> Immortals (Fall Out Boy) - One More Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHn5Q7hCjxw

The Radiant Knight^H^H^H^H^HLera Camry SLAMS her golden shield into one wave of monsters on the left flank, and the right flank flinches -- just for a moment. The Argent Knight^H^H^H^HCure Passion, united with her golden sister, widens the gap just created with a magnificent double kick, and somehow it is filled again far too quickly, by extra-universals who had no business knowing that a gap existed in the first place.

Unless, that is... they're all one creature.

It makes sense. The Vermillion Knight^H^H^H^H^HMikoto eviscerates one creature with a the least swipe of her Child, but a thousand creatures feel its pain long after it is gone. The Ebon Knight^H^H^H^H^HFate descends like a meteor to save Jail, but they can tell that they're surrounded just a little too quickly, because others outside of her cage can see it. The Ashen Knight^H^H^H^H^H^HKyouka detonates a punch on her enemy, a blast wide enough to consume far more than just one, yet those outside of it seem perfectly aware of its trajectory. Ren's royal bolts rain down from below as she plunges after Fate, Black and White triggering an explosion via collision up above, La Sirene invoking the silvery Les Mysteres in between; heaven and earth united to defeat these foes, to consume them.

But those who come after, down from the portal, remember every clever maneuver despite having never experienced them. They will not work twice, because they actually just did.

SHE just did. Or he, perhaps. The energy of hunger of these beings is more darkly masculine than feminine, if gender must be prescribed at all. Doubtless the creature -- THE creature -- has no use for it. He, It, simply continues to send out parts of himself, and the defenders mow down his limbs like a forest of hairs. Shave after shave, but none of them close. Even the Umbral Knight^H^H^H^H^HEndo, whose skills in a melee are unmatched, is starting to--

starting to--

remember. Fallen Stern remembers, and through him, so does a Tokyo boy: remembers that before his dead master failed his Queen; before he failed himself;

first -- at the very beginning -- he failed his original charge.

The Crown Princess started hanging back a little to spot these details; it took more than one save to keep her alive to make the observation she now does. Her sword points out through the ranks -- DEEP through -- which is to say UPWARDS, since the monsters keep spiraling down.

Endo can feel her words tear through his memory, through his mind.

"THERE! That one never moves."

It's true. There's a single rock in the river of ichorous, cthonic monsters flowing downwards to meet them in battle. Sometimes it is momentarily lost to sight, simply because there are too many others in the way. But it always reappears eventually, exactly where it was.

It seems like a creature like any of the others; strange and wrong and, individually, not all that tough.

Endo can see it.

"Together, we must break through and put an end to it!" she calls. "I will be the van!"

He knows what price the Crown Princess paid to save Belka -- and how it felt, as the Umbral Knight, to support but also survive the consequences of her choice.

This time, he doesn't have to watch. Endo -- Stern -- they can put an end to this, if he dares. They can protect everyone.

And, no doubt at all, everyone is in serious need of protection. There are just too many. Too many Outsiders. Too many stolen friends, stolen worlds. Everything is on the line and yet nothing is more painful than seeing the way wounds are opening up on the Device-wielders, the Pretty Cure, their friends. This can't go on.

Something has to give.

Someone...

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fever Pitch on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Passion braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure
Passion's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Lera Camry cleanly braces 34 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 6 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Lera Camry!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 10 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Cure White perfectly dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Cure White's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa fails to counter Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 32 Fatigue damage! Exhausted applied to Fate
Testarossa!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa's counterattack, Blitz Rush, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure White covers Cure Black for Pink Moon Stick's attack, Fever Pitch, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Cure White braces 16 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Exhausted applied to Cure White!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi partially dodges 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine perfectly counters 31 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Counter! Cure Pine's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine's counterattack, Pineapple Reverse, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa braces 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa's Block and
Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki perfectly dodges 33 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Kyouka Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Hayato Nishi transforms into Westar!
COMBAT: Westar has loaded his saved combat state! He is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki braces 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Fever Pitch, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's Block and
Parry abilities activate! Exhausted applied to Endo Naoki!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

He sees it. They both do, Endo and Stern. Something in the distant past overlaid against something urgently present.

There's a brief calm as his eyes slide across the space above.

"Is it..."

<THERE.>

"Right." The knight gives an affirmative nod as he raises his weapon to point.

"Hey!" He calls, "That's the thing!" He's not as eloquent as the Crown Princess unfortunately. But he conveys the same point. They'll get it.

Endo shows by leading the way. The Outsiders are already clawing and dragging, not eager to give any time to rest. Still he climbs, hacking a line upward as rain from the firmament.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera smashes through Outsiders, smacking them backward with her sword and shield. Another Outsider slams into her -- there's a flash of a girl firing an Intelligent Device like a gun, sending blasts of energy into the sky. She breathes out, teeth gritting for a moment.

But Endo calls out -- 'that's the thing' -- and she sees where he is headed. "Endo-kun!" she calls out. "Right! Let's go, everyone!"

She turns in midair, flying after him. She turns -- and looks at some of the encroaching Outsiders. Lera grits her teeth; she turns Broken Ground towards them.

Then, several bolts of golden light erupt, shooting towards Outsiders that get closer.

"What are we lookng for?" she calls back to Endo.

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"I know!" Fate says to Lera with a smile, but she's already moving, one wonders if she's moving faster than her voice, to the point where it's her afterimage that's speaking to her.

And Fate - as Mikoto says - does it. Pushing herself to her limit, to save someone. It does not matter if he's an awful person. Fate once thought she was too... but she knows now neither Mikoto nor herself are.

It's Ren who jumps into the fray, keeping her from disaster, as she offers one last, "Ren..." Then as she flies away, she gets a message, <<Thank you. I know you can do it.>>

Her telepathic broadcast to everyone above, is heard.

<<Safe. I caught him.>>

Even the eyes of Magical Girls would be hard pressed to see her smiling on the ground, and holding up two fingers in a V from the ground. However, Fate feels that moment, like once with the Resonance Drives.

A call to battle. A call to arms. The urge to follow the Crown Princess into battle is strong. Stronger than ever. But even as the Ebon Knight...

... there was always someone whose memory she was fighting for. She was following in her footsteps. It isn't the past in Ancient Belka.

She knows that perhaps fighting for a memory is a noble thing indeed, but there's something she values more in this moment, and it is not a lack of value in her friends. In fact, it is because she trusts them so much, she can make it - even as Endo charges.

She makes a choice. It is not an easy one.

<<I'm going to take him somewhere else - then there's something I have to do. Can I ask you all for some help... with a small wish of mine? Please, win. I know you can do it.>>

As Fate lifts up Jail, she walks, rather than flies at first, she doesn't want to attract extra attention other than above, and as one of them comes down at her...

... her leg vanishes inside of its maw, and she makes a noise of alarm at the same moment Bardiche chimes.

<Blitz Rush>

... the Outsider might swear the bite was solid, and it was, but it's maw is utterly empty... as Fate reappears closer to a particular crowd of Labyrinth Civilians, and a fairy, far, far away from the Outsider who attacked her.

"Can I ask you to watch after him for a while?"

A small ferret looks up at Fate, Fate who knows the ways of ferrets from her time battling one looks back. Tarte looks over his shoulder, then over to the rest of the crowd, then back at Fate, and points at himself.

"Wait... you want ME to do it!?"

"Who else?" Fate sounds confused, "Just be careful not to use a binding spell unless you have to, it might attract them." It's at the same moment that Fate flies off.

"I CAN'T ACTUALLY DO THAT!"

More confused as it's such a basic spell, Fate keeps flying off as she calls out back. "Then it's not a problem?"

Tarte slumps, then puts down his napsack and rummages through the contents to try to figure something out. "Maybe I can make it work with gum..."

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black stands, fist in the upper 'jaw' of the Outsider, trembling as she tries to hold its mouth open. "Seemed like a good plan," she sighs. A sunflower glow pulses around her.

"Ne, Saki-chan," Cure Black says. "Are you here? Can you understand?"

The maw lurches, trying to close on Black.

"They got you, huh? Strike three, you're out? No, probably not. Probably tagged you out at base, right? You're like me. You go for it when you shouldn't sometimes."

Lifting her other hand, Cure Black braces the fleshy ceiling above her, struggling. She feels like a walnut in a cracker, the leverage of the Outsider's size giving it an advantage in this contest. "Sorry you have to see me not looking so cool. It always felt good, having you think I was so awesome. I'm a pretty selfish person... to let you think that. Because I started before you, you know? Whenever I looked at you, it was like looking at myself two years ago."

The mouth grinds down, forcing Black's shoulders down. "I should have told you that. I should have said... 'you'll get here too. If we were the same age, you'd be here already.' Because..." Cure Black's feet spread, bracing herself to slow the descent of the mouth crushing her. "You're just like me, Saki. You were... just like me." Black's eyes close, spilling the tears in her eyes down her cheeks.

"And when I saw you and Mai together, I guess that's the closest I ever got to understanding." Black's knee hits the squishy ground, her strength finally starting to buckle entirely. "How a girl like her... could love me too. So it's okay, Saki. I'm glad I lost to you, so you know how strong you are. It's not bad... for it to end like this."

Cure Black's other knee hits the ground, her herculean strength quivering in her shoulders. Blood leaks from the puncture in her back, driven out by her straining.

"But I'm sorry," Black whispers. "I can't."

Moonlight floods the dim chamber, driving the golden light of a sunflower back. Cure Black's face is illuminated in gold. The back of her hair is an almost colorless silver. A silhouette at the edge of the Outsider's maw has cranked its mouth wide open, a girl in a skirt who seems, somehow, to be standing in front of a moon, even though she should be backdropped by the ground. Her hair, as it falls, happens to fall in halves, almost like twintails.

Cure Black smiles, gently, expectantly. "She won't let me."

Rent asunder, the Cure Bloom-infused Outsider falls towards the ground in pieces, its golden shield fizzling on and off. Carried princess-style by Cure White, Black looks down over White's shoulder, and gives the plummeting monster corpse a little wave.

Dropping onto the back of a new Outsider, White lets Black down onto the ground. "Are you all right?" she asks.

"Yeah." Black smiles, looking at the pulsing glow of moonlight on Cure White's skin. "What happened to you? Power up?"

"N-no," White startles. "Well..." She looks at Black's face. "If you think so."

"Huh?"

A burst of wind nearly knocks both Cures off the Outsider, as a vast pair of white wings spreads before them. An Outsider has grown feathers somehow, its frightening form now resembling a biblical angels, at once beautiful and unnatural. A keening cry washes over Cure Black and White, its empty hatred chilling.

"...Egret," Cure Black realizes, heartbroken.

Cure White closes one hand, touching into her chest as she looks towards the ground, realizing. "We took her from you," she says softly. "I'm so sorry, Mai." Despite (and because of) her shame, she reaches for the hand of the girl who brings a sunny smile into ''her'' life.

Cure Black shakes her head. "It's too late," she realizes, watching the Jail Outsider fleeing. "It's going to get away."

"We can try Marble Screw from here," Cure White insists, but Black can hear the doubt in her voice.

"Egret..." Black pleads, as if the Outsider might hear, and help them.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

Westar is, for very loose definitions of the word, safe right now. Miroku's grip is a firm one - why, if Westar didn't know better, he'd think the giant Child was trying to squeeze him to death - and with a head poking out, he can get a solid view of the battle.

He's not exactly a master tactician; he's only commanded one monster at a time, and honestly the only familiar thing here is 'being unfairly outnumbered'. Mikoto went off to fight that bug-ish Outsider, Fate went to save the guy who got eaten, and all the while Westar himself is kind of...stuck for a plan. And physically stuck, but mentally is the really big problem, he can squeeze free if he needs to. There's too many to fight fairly, so...if it was anyone who wasn't him in charge, the trick would be to fight unfairly, right?

'That's the thing' is the order of the day, and Westar looks for what someone sharper than him has spotted. One strangely still Outsider is...maybe important? But there's a lot of them in the way. Fortunately...as he did every time he inconvenienced Tokyo, Westar has a gargantuan ally.

"Hey, Miroku!" His voice comes out as a squeak - it's nice to be safely held but this is kind of a little much. There's no answer, but the baleful eye seems to glance at him. "I know I'm not your boss, but...I think that one thing might be important! Throw me up there, so we can-"

Apparently that was enough for Miroku to want to be rid of this not-his-child being, and Westar is duly hurled away from Miroku.

"Wait, wrong waaaaaaay-" Hurtling in somewhat the wrong direction, Westar flails around to try to find a path up - he glances off of one Outsider hard enough to bounce, manages an elbow-strike to rebound again, and he's hurtling somewhere into the fray, desperately trying to course correct.

He's hearing notes as he richochet-kicks his way slowly upward - and there's one faintly familiar light gleaming not too far away. Its magic is musical in nature, but with Westar's head ringing, he's not...entirely sure whether it's the holy major chords of a melodious rhythm, or the familiar minor tones of a felonious trio...

Maybe it's both. Some worlds were home to good and evil in equal measure, and whether the magic's land was Major or Minor, that's an Outsider that's stolen the essence of music. Someone should do something heroic here.

Westar himself is pinballing wildly, but he can try his best to serve. He owes it to the villains he fought beside and the Precure he fought against. There's a hint of a clef that's solid enough to kick off of (and no longer burns), there's a phantom of a staff that he can hook a hand on long enough to swing around - he throws himself as a projectile at the musical Outsider. If he can get through, then maybe he can get closer to where he could really help.

COMBAT: Westar has used Executive Pinball on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The blast flies. The strangely musical creature perishes in a burst and a flash.

It does not occur to la Sirene, exactly, what this means for the girl it reminded her for, in a grotesque manner. Sayaka. She may not be thinking that far ahead, exactly. This is a place with no rising action, merely descent. Action, surely, but how far are they above Labyrinth, now? If she fell, would she be heroically caught and taken to safety? What would that mean for the others - now missing two? Her eyes track Fate, but...

She cannot think poorly of that. It simply isn't something in the space where she exists now.

And then she hears another's voice.

La Sirene has been ascending semi-solitarily for a while, but Endo's voice rings out to her. It's not people speaking to themselves or to others, but Endo telling them something - telling *all* of them. Her head snaps towards him.

He points. 'That's the thing!'

La Sirene looks up.

She doesn't see it.

And yet...

... aren't there a lot of things you can't see, some of the time? She's never seen France or Mars, but she's certain they exist. She knows some of the language from one, and has met the guardian of the other.

... Is Endo the kind of person who would guess poorly, or speak up simply to encourage people? Would he be the kind of person who creates a hopeless cause from his analysis of what surrounds them, or would he simply hold his peace in such situations? La Sirene's lip twitches just a bit.

... Are there not the bonds between them? (La Sirene's trajectory has already curved towards Endo's.)

... isn't there no reason at all to doubt this?!

The thoughts flash through her mind, and la Sirene speaks: "It must be a ways away. Stern," she says, or shouts, over the chaos, "Did you detect it?" Lera immediately assents, and with that, la Sirene folds her arms over herself. The light around her begins to shimmer, and distort...

... and the funereal pose, her palms set against the joint of her shoulders, slowly shifts. Her fingers, cold but against slightly warmer skin, slid down, as if to clasp her own forearms. For reassurance? No - she feels confidence, doesn't she? If they are wrong, let it be as Chevaliers!

"I'll try to," la Sirene says, just as an Outsider turns (inverts) towards her and lunges (smears) at her -- and those stellate projections of dark-light that seem to come from however she is refracting her Pharos's ever watchful and (so far) undimmed irradiance? The Outsider would have to strike through one to hit her, to rend her asunder, or to simply swallow her whole.

Instead, its snout (proboscis) briefly, violently impales itself on the ray of light. It is not enough to END the thing, but it does at least move (smear) away while pulling (shattering) itself loose of the improbable spire of light.

"... Does it look," la Sirene begins, before frowning as she realizes she cannot even possibly find the words to describe these things. "Will it stand out?"

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Rising Towards The Decisive Battle... on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from Westar's Executive Pinball, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

There's many, and as Passion and her descend, more come in to fill them, which is why it's her reaction to them coming to simply grasp one out of mid-air with a gasp that's a mixture of both pain and disgust as she touches it, and suddenly pivot into a whirl, warding the Outsiders off with their own fellow, before pitching it up into a release, momentarily stunning the pack.

She was never 'a knight'... but when Endo calls for the charge, the Legendary Warrior Precure calls out to Passion, "Passion! We've got to catch up to him! If we don't..." Pine understands at least - it's far far more than just an adorable wolf that's at stake. She can see Black, stricken, and hear...

... Bloom...

...Egret...

Seeing her face, even from here, she puts her hands together, "Can I use you to jump off of? I can't teleport like you." Pause, small head cant, she thinks about it, "Though I guess I can teleport with you?"

It's hectic, she forgot she could do that. Or maybe it was Love taking advantage of Setsuna's ability to teleport that made her think it was impolite to ask?

"I... I promise it's for a better reason than a beach ball."

"Mouuu... don't bring that up. I said I was sorry for that!" Peach says in the midst of the fray, whereas Berry looks away awkwardly, pretending she was never a part of that. "After you didn't apologize right away and had a whole pillow fight over it."

"Hey! She started it!"

Pine sweats at Passion's ice cream look to Peach, but eventually she smiles and reaches out her hand to her...

... but Passion has other plans... "Huh!?"

"Ha! That's perfect! Impressive as always Passion."

"SuGOI! I've never seen you do something like that! Ahaha... I'm glad it's water under the bridge... Now-! Senpai! Mind if we lend you a hand?" Peach says as she changes focus mid-jump, her eyes fixing upon the Outsider. "There's no way we're letting it get away." Pine tells Black and White. Before Passion corrects them, and Peach looks astounded, "EHHH!? Really!? Okay everyone! ... Let's follow Passion!"

"You weren't paying attention at all, were you?" Berry notes, as Peach replies, "I definitely was! It's just Passion was paying ''better'' attention! Together! Precure-"

It's a different vibe, perhaps from Black and White in this moment, but it's not them not taking the situation seriously. It's because... whether this is their last day together or not, they're all trying to get their happiness together. And they can only do that... as themselves.

BGM - Precure Eien no Tomodachi (New Stage OP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRDF9WntP0

It's no longer a problem figuring out how they're going to get there, as they all land and launch themselves off in synch the newfound footing, and forward in an enormous arcing leap...

"...Collaboration..."

... Pine draws her fist back with all of them, and pink, blue, yellow, and red join white and black leap into the fray in a titanic arc down the center like an armed missile, ready to detonate down the center with a strength only this many Precure at once can muster.

"... PUNCH!"

COMBAT: Cure Pine has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion remembers the dreams. She remembers what she was there. And she notices that they keep going, despite all their hits. Despite all their efforts. Pine, Peach, and Berry are with her, and that counts for a lot. Lera is still fighting out there, too. And their friends... Ren, and Endo, and Kyouka, and Mikoto, and La Sirene. And she thinks she even hears--

"Westar!" Passion calls. Then she says deadpan to Pine,"I wouldn't do guessing games at a time like this," Passion agrees with Pine. But someone who needs saving...? Hmmmm. She would remember that. But despite the fact that she'd threatened Lucky herself--

'Right!" Passion answers Pine, and smiles. "Together. ...And we'll have to go see Lucky after this, too."

They will.

But there is something--

"Endo!" Passion calls. The thing? Well, it doesn't have to be eloquent to make sense to her; after all, one of her better friends is Mikoto there, after everything.

He's leading the way. Which means...

Endo calls for a charge, and Cure Passion nods sharply to Pine. "Well--" Pause. She can teleport with her! But... for a better reason than a beach ball. "I didn't forget," Passion says evenly, that small smile still on her face--but a harder look in her eyes. An ice cream look in her eyes. "...But I forgive you." All of them!? Apparently!

"Let's go!" A pause. "But there's no ground up there, so..."

Passion reaches back to the tower. "I'll bring us some! Akarun, with me!"

Passion ''grips'' a broken piece of the tower with both hands. "Haaaaaah--!"

She ''rips'' it free, dust and debris scattering and falling towards the barrier below, and as she turns, BLIPS--

In a crimson flash, she is gone. And then, she, Pine, Berry, and Peach are ''there'', behind Cure Black and Cure White.

"That way!" Passion calls, and spins with her prize of rock. "Endo-kun says it's there! Let's clear him a path together!" A beat, then a shout, "ENDO! We're coming!"

"Pretty Cure...!"

She ''swings''--and then ''blip'', the six of them blink out, and back in, onto the platform that's already rising from how Passion threw it.

But the beautiful white wings that seem to belong to Cure Egret's heart will have to be faced in order to break through. And then, from there--

"Collaboration...!" Cure Passion rears back her fist, in perfect time with Peach and Berry and Pine and soon Black and White, her blow seeming to push forward in slow motion, as if punching through deep, deep water to reach the foe ahead--

Or maybe it just has that much force behind it. "PUNCH!"

COMBAT: Cure Passion has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Mikoto nods, when she 'hears' Fate, in her head. "Right!" She agrees to win so easily, so readily, but what else can she do? She is elementally herself.

And her element is black glass, just like...

"There?!" Endo might well look positively loquacious next to ''Mikoto,'' but she understands his meaning perfectly, simple though it is. Birds of a feather don't make speeches together.

Another Outsider looms in front of her, horns coming from its horns coming from its horns, and bronze and gold warp through the air, not quite colouring the beast as much as inhabiting existence around it. Mikoto turns to it, and her brow knits in tension.

"But... I still got things to say to you," she says, even as Miroku recognises the profane manifestation, too -- and brings his terrible greatclub down on it.

He hurls Westar away in his next motion, as if in ''pique.'' Can Children feel pique? Miroku can.

"Ah... Miroku!" Mikoto cries, but Westar is fine, he has a thick skull. The great beast turns, and Mikoto turns, too, a whole half-circle on his massive back to find la Sirene in her confusion.

"That thing!" She calls, to her, helpfully. "Endo said!"

And then she pauses, and tilts her head.

"... the different one!" She decides, as a good explanation, because she's the best at explaining things. (Chitose wept.) "See? It's not moving? Come on! We gotta help Endo!"

And so they move.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts La Sirene de Diamant's Rising Towards The Decisive Battle..., taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Mikoto Minagi is Reinforced by La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Expression on La Sirene de Diamant.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren gasps as she lands hard against a floating piece of debris, her limbs trembling from exhaustion. The wound she sustained just moments ago is excruciating, not doubt because of the void-like nature of the Outsiders. Fate's mental message is heard, and Ren smiles despite the pain. <<Of course we'll win, Fate-chan! Be careful!>>

On top of that she can clearly feel her reserves running low, giving her a sensation not unlike a weight pulling her deeper into the abyss of depletion.

Ren next hears Endo's call, the urgency in his voice cutting through the chaos of the battlefield. Her head jerks up, scanning the sky. "That's the thing!" He'd said. The key to all of this.

A sharp cry from the right draws her attention--another wave of Outsiders rushing toward her, their alien forms shifting and writhing, adapting as they have again and again. And like before, one of them radiates something familiar...

Alyce.

Rens breath catches as memories flood her mind. The dedicated and hard-working TSAB mage she'd met in the nascent days of her magical career. "Ducati-san...!" Ren feels herself getting choked up at the sudden exposure to such potent remembrances. Fighting alongside such an experienced magic-user had been ''profoundly'' beneficial for her own development. She'd often wondered just how she could ever show her gratitude...

BGM -- Nana Mizuki -- Silent Bible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC6tfg8k7nw

...Well, now that chance has presented itself. She cant afford to burn out now. Not when Alyces magic--her essence--has been stolen. Not when she still has the means to fight. The Outsiders dont wait. They lunge toward her, screeching in unison. The one bearing Alyces magic is conveniently at the forefront. Good.

"I wont let you keep it," Ren growls, and with a yell engages the onslaught, kicking and punching with all of the force and fury she can muster.

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used For Alyce! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Ren Aizawa's For Alyce!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka unleashes her attack from inside the Outsider, and it consumes it in a large ball of violet-white light--and thankfully Kyouka works her way free as the defeated outsider starts to fall, though she's, admittedly, falling herself.

"Alright, one more time!"

<Lunar Impact.>

Kyouka swings--but sees the Outsider she was aiming for juke ''just'' out of her range and frowns. And she's still falling. Back to the original plan, then. She kicks at the air, and a shockwave of bright violet energy erupts from her heel, sending her rocketing sideways. She misses the outsider, but a quick readjust lets her feint and hit the next one, and now she rebounds off of that one to redirect her momentum back upwards.

"Guys, I think these things are learning and that's giving me a bad feeling!" She's having to work harder to ricochet her way up through the torrent of Outsiders, too--thankfully, she's got fast reflexes, and thankfully, she's adaptive.

But this is still taxing, and she's not even sure what she's heading for, yet.

And then Endo has an answer he points. "Got it, Endo! I got your back!" Two zips through the air and an attack net her another boost upwards, stomping the top of an outsider so she can rocket further up, though she's lagging behind her flying peers.

She spares the briefest of glances as Fate broadcasts that Jail is safe. She'll trust Fate's judgment, though... it's not like she would've left him to die, either. But she asks them all for a favor... A small wish. To please win. <<You got it, Fate! Good luck!>>

She's surging upwards, and she sees her next target to rebound off of, but pauses, just a moment. There's something familiar about that bright celadon glow... and as she gets closer she can feel the refreshing winds of a of an uplifting breeze sweeping out from it, the gentle placidity of a lake...

"Shamal-san," Kyouka breathes in with a sharp breath.

She will never forget that moment, when she thought she was at her most powerless, that she heard Shamal's gentle but firm voice in her ear. How she said that her magic was a part of ''her'', that Strike Wolf helped control it but that it was still ''her'' magic.

And at her urging, when Ren's house was in immediate danger of being attacked by Jail and his Dark Devices--''Kyouka'' had been the one to cast the barrier. Her powr, her will, made manifest, shifting everything over half a dimension to the right.

It was revelatory, knowing that some intrinsic part of ''her'' was magical. That it wasn't all just Strike Wolf.

That... there hadn't been some mistake to why she had become a magical girl in the first place.

Three kicks at the air, three shockwaves send her zipping back and forth as she approaches, kicks, and resumes surging upwards, the long tails of her belt flapping wildly around her as she tore ever higher into the sky.

"Strike Wolf, I think we need a new trick!" she shouts as she scans the battlefield.

<Affirmative.>

Despite herself, Kyouka grins. "Then together!"

As she ascends Kyouka punches her fist forward. A glowing violet circle preceeded her, as an array of bright violet balls spring into life in front of it. "Go!" she shouts.

Strike Wolf announces, <Hunting Shot.>

All of the balls of magic blast off in front of her, surging forward. But just before the start to impact they break apart, splitting up as Strike Wolf tries to move them in unpredictable patterns to try and throw off the Outsiders.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Hunting Shot on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Hunting Shot, taking 18 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Expression, taking 0 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de Diamant is
Reinforced by Mikoto Minagi!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

One moment, Cure Black and Cure White were facing an avenging angel, its hideous beauty spreading feathers across the sky, unfolding a tragic confrontation pinion by pinion. The next, they are surrounded by laughing friends. Shaken, the two older Cures glance around themselves, and begin to smile as well, sadly at first. But then Peach's suGOI sails up her register, and Black cracks, giggling, followed a moment later by White.

"Thank you," White whispers to Passion with a gentle smile, below the warm words of their other friends.

Cure Black reaches over and squeezes Pine's shoulder, shaking it around familiarly, then pulling her into a momentary side-hug. "Endo needs that one, huh?" she confirms.

"Endo called a new play," White tells Black softly. Black glances at her in surprise. They are both thinking of the same athlete, now. The same tree, out in Tama.

"Got it," Black says, her voice tight. "We won't lose."

"Not when we're together," White agrees. "All of us."

Like a row of archers, the six Pretty Cure pull back their fists, and the draw is heavy.

<SoundTracker> Precure Eien no Tomodachi (New Stage OP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRDF9WntP0

''Collaboration...!''

''PUNCH!''

With an avian keen, the Outsider before them throws its great wings back. A lens of force the color of a robin's egg turns the air to diamond, a shield much like the one that stopped Cure Black's punch dead when she attacked Bloom's Outsider, even as the wind from white wings blasts at the Pretty Cure. But what would have thrown them back individually, even if they had attacked merely at the same time, has almost no effect on six Pretty Cure truly acting ''as one''. Six fists slam into the shield. And they knock through it like a brick through a glass window.

As its shield shatters, the Egret Outsider draws its wings back gracefully, unnaturally fast. But even as it begins to close them down on the attacking Pretty Cure, a spiral of six indents appears on its back for an instant, as the impact on its front lands. Then, explosively, its body erupts into pieces, a beautiful starburst of feather and energy. Nothing quite like it has been seen before. It ought to be remembered.

But there is no artist here who would be capable of drawing this sight.

Malign, horrifyingly aggressive, the Outsiders see this show of raw force and move ''towards it'', their lack of fear more eloquent than any verbal threat that might have come from a more human foe. But among those Outsiders, there are those that hear the call more keenly. Perhaps the Outsiders understand how to fight fire with fire. Could it be, perhaps, that some part of them even heard Peach's call, and recognized that it was for them?

Fast as a hare, an Outsider Whips into the Pretty Cure's path, bursting into sugary sparkles. Undulating as if through The Sea, two similar-looking Outsiders grow filmy fish-wings, crisscross, and slam into the Collaboration punch, their long Mermaid tails pumping to drive the attackers back, but are reduced to a briny spray across the brows of the six heroines.

A fierce procession of some of the most powerful Outsiders rise to the challenge, and are smashed to bits. A butterfly-winged Outsider seems unstoppable until they pass through it like a Dream. Two more butterflies follow, and douse the six Pretty Cure in the refreshing scent of Mint Lemonade. A small Outsider bursts apart with a sound like an acoustic guitar being smashed, its Muse departing.

Cures Black and White exchange a brief glance, after that one, and a nostalgic smile.

A long path has already been cleared, but the offensive faces its greatest challenge yet, as an array of four fearsome Outsiders form a Lovely, quad-barrier, like the crown of a Princess. It even manages to resist the Collaboration Punch for a moment, before caving to the same Fortune as the others, Honey droplets spraying.

Just before the Punch reaches that Jail Outsider, a final offensive is mounted, an impromptu team of six monstrosities to face six girls. Posh Berry is confronted with the Beauty of an elegant Outsider. Genki gyaru Peach stares into an array of alien eyes that Twinkle like stars. Cures Black and White face a duo of monsters that somehow embody a swaggering androgyny and a winsome femininity, attached together like a two-layer Chocolat Macaron. Empathetic vet Cure Pine confronts an undulating Outsider like a blob of yellow Custard. And Cure Passion, an outsider herself in a way, faces a being that is nothing but alien, Scarlet flame.

The impact is thunderous. The sky shakes. The air wishes it could split, pleads to break.

And when the six Outsiders explode, and the Pretty Cure Collaboration punch hits the Jail Outsider at last, of course it pops like a balloon.

The way between Endo and his target is nothing but empty air, made from a tunnel of torn apart monsters.

"Game to Juuban," Cure Black whispers. "For you, Saki."

COMBAT: Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Pine!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White have used Precure Collaboration Punch! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White's Combo: Precure Collaboration Punch!,
taking 457 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Pine, Cure Passion, Cure Black, and Cure White are Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

<<The one that doesn't move!>> Endo shouts back to Lera, the mental echo of his words cutting through the battle to reach her and the rest of the magical girls.

He pushes off one of the nearest monsters, rocketing toward the heart of the invader.

<<Ren... everyone! Make sure to get it!>>

<SoundTracker> Still in the Dark (Daisuke Ishiwatare) - One More Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPA3Y-acjb0

There are always more of the OutsidersOutsider. Tens, hundreds, millions. They fall like rain but each one leaves some mark of its passing on the young man. A cone of pink energy sends Endo off course, another blue and white glimmer turns the horizon into a field of gleaming swords. The knight's barrier jacket bleeds a violet contrail as each blow chips away at his defensive shell.

Closer...

<<This time we'll destroy it.>>

And closer...

<THIS TIME WE'LL SAVE THEM.>

ALmost...

<EMERGENCY VENTS CLOSED. DISABLING LIMITER. AT 90. 100. 115. 125...>

The Outsiders form up like a defensive membrane.

<<Ready?>>



Purple-black flares out from the Device in a long line that soon grows into a searing column of starlight. It pulses, the magical energy lighting the knight as he makes a vicious arc toward the defended core of their existential enemy.

<STERN BRETCHER.>

The pillar of light, bigger and brighter than it's ever been, connects with the wall of glowing aliens.

It does not cut.

There are just too many, an endless mass replenishing and pushing back, back, back. Endo's hands shake. The pylon falters.

<<Stern-->>



<SoundTracker> Still in the Dark (Daisuke Ishiwatare, Noah Thys) - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dILd4K1HKec

So can Endo. They need him to. He grits his teeth and pushes harder. Hard enough to make the wall give.

In the roar of magic it would be impossible to hear the cracks running across the surface of the gem in the weapon's pummel. But Endo can feel them. His hand falters and so does the blade.

<NO. WE ARE NOT FINISHED.>

Endo's grip tightens. More jagged lines break across Fallen Stern's surface. "I won't let go!" They push one last time. Magic tears through magic.

<KNIGHT. THANK YOU. IT WAS AN HONOR TO SERVE. THIS TIME--I WILL GO ALONE.>

IMPACT.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Endo Naoki has used SUPERNOVA on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

What happens to a star when it dies depends on its mass. The smaller celestial bodies burn and wither, fuming heat into the icy black darkness of space for billions of years.

What happens here is the other option. As the purple-black light swells it shifts to a blindingly white hue. As the core of Endo's partner collapses a deafening showave rends the sky along with the final detonation. What is left behind is an inky purple nebula.

And one Endo Naoki. There's no armor, no magic left.

--But there's still life. A dying star leaves some building blocks behind.

A long time ago--not that long really, but it seems like forever now--Endo made an oath and became a knight. When he started he thought he was the only one who could protect the world. He learned better. He can rest.

Because if he couldn't do it, one of the magical girls behind him will.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Endo Naoki's Finisher, SUPERNOVA, taking 297 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Magic Sword, The Way Home - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCikIkXslP0

Afterwards, the most striking thing was how CLOSE it was.

The magical girls brought all of their terrific force to bear, and it was spectacular indeed, but--

But.

That there was a but at all is horrifying.

That there is a but at all is crucial.

And sure, we can ask the question again as history tries to repeat.

What 'but' could stand up to the golden bolts of the Midchildan-American Lera Camry and her Devices, one of whom, Soaring Sky, is as tied to this history as Fallen Stern? The pinball mayhem of Westar, Executive of Labyrinth, who bounces from foe to foe like a ladder of death, a ladder for Endo to climb? Ren's hammering of gauntlets and greaves at the legions of doom, taking not the battle but the entire battlefield to them, all for the memory of one of her very first mentors and friends? Kyouka's rent airspace, from which pour balls of violet light, to draw away with cleverness rather than destroy with strength? Cure Passion and Cure Pine and Cure Peach and Cure Berry and Cure Black and Cure White punching as one -- creating almost a localized vacuum of their own, not Outside space but Within space, warping space, filling space, and ultimately, dramatically, clearing space?

The answer has to do with numbers, and it has to do with size, and -- because being outnumbered and small has never stopped a legion of magical girls on their worst day, let alone their best -- it has to do with sacrifice.

Of course the creature, who has been spending the lives of his legion like toenails, does not hesitate to spend them -- faster, harder, more -- in his own defense. Most of the progress was made in the first few seconds, before the girls' path -- Endo's path -- became clear. After that...

After that, every meter up the column towards him was its own little war. Trench after trench the attacks of the magical girls advanced, clearing them out, but more and more slowly, more and more desperately.

There is just so much ocean, no matter how sweet the shore.

By the time he reaches the master creature, Endo's armor drips with his own blood, at every joint and cavity; and it's splashed with the black ichor of these monstrous unbeings, who throw themselves so eagerly upon his greatsword -- his pillar of violet light -- which falls even as he rises.

He gives everything.

They give everything.

Fallen Stern... implodes.

And the crucial Outsider, the one he saw, guided by the memory of a Princess, brings up his claws in feeble self-defense, and Endo looks up into what passes for his face. Something passes between him and the hive king, before he's eviscerated in a magnificent burst of Umbral power.

A final burst...

All the remaining monsters scream as one -- they scream with his voice, any voice, for the first time -- because, of course, they are him. Their limbs lose their grip on their enemies; they lose their grip even on the air; and they fall.

...their gravity is not Labyrinth's, and never was. Their gravity -- metaphysical, philosophical -- calls them back the way they came.

They fall upwards...

Driven not by any inverted cosmological constants but rather by the extraordinary force of Fallen Stern's sacrifice, Endo is falling with them, too.

Towards the inverted portal. Towards... Outside.

BUT.

But last time, even though she made it back to the ground -- which Endo is not going to do, safely or fatally, unless someone intervenes very quickly -- the Crown Princess died with a final lamentation on her lips:

"My only regret," she coughs, "Is that in saving our world from them... we have surely doomed another. I only wish... we had the power... to save..."

'Them all' dies on her lips, and so does she.

And she was right to regret. Her final stand didn't save Belka, in the end. Considering the chain of events set off by the grief and despair following her sacrifice, she died for, very possibly, less than nothing. Worse than nothing.

The Outsiders are leaving, because they are unable to stay. But they aren't gone. They aren't solved.

So many terrible things happened because of it.

To Belka. To so many other worlds.

To Labyrinth, at Northa's hands -- the Queen's.

And now, to everywhere.

BUT.

But... what can the magical girls do now that the Belkans didn't do back then?

The ancient Belkans went to war. It was their way; it had always been their way.

The modern magical girls... of Tokyo, of Earth -- natives and far-travelers alike, they are certainly all OF Earth by now... they have their own ways, don't they?

When everything is hopeless -- they wage something else entirely.

They wield the power... of refusal.

Souverain Heraut, more than the other Devices, understands this viscerally. And through him, Ren suddenly remembers the truth of the Cephiran Princess he was originally made for, a lady who was the other sort of Pillar, made not of light but of love:

<< You don't have to accept fate. >>

No one does.

But -- this isn't right.

The Outsiders are too strange to easily empathize with; too alien; too frightening. There's really only one emotion, a singular essence, that anyone has been able to comprehend:

HUNGER.

They have, by all indications, no individuality. The Outsiders just hunger because they hunger. The swarm in its entirety cannot really be said to have a mind at all, even if it did have a core and does have the capability to act in its defense.

It is primal. Elemental. Like matter and antimatter. Magic attracts them and they destroy everything.

But -- it isn't ''fair''.

It is, in a way, not even their fault. They are what they are, without even Fate Testarossa's beloved, essential, passionately taken, and kindly offered, freedom of choice. A freedom the Radiant Knight embraced and the Umbral Knight rejected. A freedom the Cephiran Princess died for, so that the three Devices could live to fulfill their destinies as heroes, with heroes, empowering heroes, befriending heroes.

It's just too sad.

What is so wrong with being hungry, anyway?

Does hunger in itself have to always be such a bad thing?

The world likes to tell girls that it is so. Truly the temptation to gender the Outsiders as male at all is a byproduct of this cultural dynamic, ne? It isn't maidenly to be hungry; it isn't proper to eat as much as you want, as much as you need; certainly it isn't polite to show how much you want and need and hunger.

A man's appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite -- for food, for love, for simple attention -- is always voracious: she always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist.

Like the Outsiders...

...they aren't supposed to exist here, either.

But.

Must desire be monstrous?

BUT.

Isn't it very... human?

BUT--!!

People got hurt. People died. That matters too.

But, it all matters. It all matters so much.

Everyone, everything, deserves better.

...ne. do you want to know a secret?

But: the world can be changed.

The distance is so, so vast. This isn't Fate and Nanoha; Eas and Peach; Mikoto and Mai; Westar and Mikoto; the Sirens of Sorrow's Sea. It's absurd to even imagine the possibility that extradimensional aliens can be reached. Can connect... Can be understood, and understand themselves. Can be, even, accepted... no longer Outside at all, but invited In.

All it takes is an outstretched hand.

All it takes is a miracle.

OOC: This can be interpreted however people imagine. If you're extremely not on board with it your character doesn't have to
receive any of these i

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

OOC: This can be interpreted however people imagine. If you're extremely not on board with it your character doesn't have to
receive any of these insights; or could think through them and reject them. There is no one right way; and there are so many
different kinds of miracles. This scene has room for all of them.

OOC: PS someone (probably rhymes with Whyzawa) needs to go save Endo before he falls out of the universe. you can also still
finisher, it's fine

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

~*Elsewhere*~

Fate is very fast right now, so it's not long before she shows up at her destination, where her 'Wish' is quietly at stake. The battle still rages far from here.

Two of them are still unconscious, while 'You' watches her as she approaches. "You have returned."

"Yes." Fate replies quietly to her.

'You' points out the obvious, "They're still fighting." And Fate nods, "Yes." Before she walks up to the other two, and examines them for a moment, "... They've been drained this completely. I didn't realize..." Fate puzzles over the situation, it's different from Jail, it's more similar perhaps to the Wolkenritter, what they did to everyone's Linker Cores, but far worse.

Something's missing... and while she doesn't know what that means, she decides not to take a chance. And so she raises Bardiche.

<Divide Energy.>

Gold and violet streams out of him, in Midchildan runes that flow like ribbons into the unconscious pair, as Fate lets that energy flow from her into both of them.

'You' goes silent, you can feel her brain trying to understand what Fate is doing, and just not quite getting it. It's at that moment that Stern goes up, far away, and there is an enormous explosion that rocks everything, even here. Fate stands stable, despite it all... she looks, for a moment, then closes her eyes, and takes a breath.

Despite the feeling... she has to trust, and turns back to 'You'.

"It's okay to say what's on your mind." Fate tells her, as she does her work, and 'You' after one long moment replies, "It isn't my role... to think. Even speaking feels strange."

"But, you have thoughts on what I'm doing." She prompts her, and 'You' replies, "Yes. I cannot understand why you would weaken yourself, for these two. In their current state, they're without value to this conflict."

"That's not right." Fate says softly, without any remonstration in her tone, merely explanation. "I'm not doing this because I want you three to fight. I want to do this... because..."

I wanted this in real life, too.

"I want this, for real. I want to know who each of you will become. I want, the three of you to come home with me. I want you to call out to the three of you... with something real, something you picked for yourself."

There's no small amount of sentiment in her tone, as she says, "I want the three of you. It's... my wish. It's selfish for me to be here rather than there." She thinks of Lera, Endo, Ren, Mikoto, Setsuna, Vita, Signum, Hayate, Nanoha... and Lindy, who taught her this, "But I trust them to finish the battle without me... and be at my side for what comes after."

It's just a little wish. And that's wonderful.

'You' looks like she still doesn't quite understand all the words she said, not in the sense of definition. She knows what all those words mean, she just can't comprehend why Fate would string them together that way, and what it means.

But after a moment... she says something else.

"But you've been calling out to me with something real already." 'You' points out, and Fate blinks, as if not understanding herself. Until she realizes she's been saying 'You' over and over and over and over.

And laughter leaves her lips, just this momentary chuckle, before she beams a smile.

"Well, it's just my opinion... but I think we can do better than that. Once this is over..." And extends a hand towards her. "... let's figure it out together."

She does not understand what Endo and Stern just sacrificed at this moment, not yet. She will later, for now... but for now, this is a glimpse of Stern's sacrifice may have bought her.

Just a little wish.

She'll show her gratitude later for them granting it to her.

'You' does not understand the gesture, or the motive, and Fate receives no insights, but that does not mean there is no miracle here. Both Fate and 'You' (Real name pending) are proof...

... that the empty can become full. Of memories in Fate's case, of desires, of purpose's given and changed and kept. As 'You' finally takes her hand, not because it was ordered, but offered, within that small gesture of someone who was merely an instrument, can consider a life greater than that too.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"Doesn't move!" Lera shouts back to Endo. "I've got it!"

She sucks her breath in as they fly forward, and she watches Endo fly forward, ahead of them all, and surrounded by Outsiders. She grits her teeth, until she comes sharply to a stop -- as she sees the shockwave that rips through the Outsiders' ranks.

But at a cost.

"Endo!" she shouts. Then, with a stammer -- and realization: "S-Stern..."

<Godspeed.> Soaring Sky's voice chimes, solemnly. After all, Stern was his comrade, even if it was something he hadn't remembered.

But Endo is falling upward, towards that portal leading to somewhere else. The source of so many sorrows and woes; but there's also that sense of something else. The desire, alien as it is, that the Outsiders have -- and the lack of understanding.

There is a moment where Lera hesitates. But, then she realizes: the answer isn't one or the other. It's the same as it ever is.

Both. Stop them and understand them, in one stroke.

"C'mon, Passion, Ren-chan," Lera says, looking at her girlfriend then her best friend. "Let's do this for Stern!"

She swings Soaring Sky out to one side. The blade of the Device splits in half; lightning crackles between the two halves of the blade, motes of energy drawing down into it.

<Aurora!>

And then, it expands outward. A beam of gold-red light, burning white at the center, that rises up until it's a single, massive sword of energy.

<GALAXY!>

And then Lera rises up -- and swings it down with an enormous flash out of light.

"DIVIDER!"

COMBAT: FINISHER! Lera Camry has used Aurora Galaxy Divider on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Fallen Stern and Endo give ''more''. And Passion is there, with a front-row seat, along with the other Cures. She ''sees'' it when he presses forwrd, again and again, farther and farther, until the light is too bright to look at. And then she keeps looking, because she's already been burned by Light before, and she has to ''watch''. She won't look away.

She doesn't, as Fallen Stern goes alone. And yet...

Is he really alone?

"Fallen Stern!" Passion calls. "Endo!"

...But she recognizes it. The power of a sacrifice--the power of a desire to protect. ...A desire to see something through.

How can she not understand it, when one of her best friends is Usagi Tsukino? But in the same way, Cure Passion feels...

She feels ''greed''.

Cure Passion wants more than this. She wants more than just to save her world. She wants to save the people already lost. She wants to save the ones who were hurt. She wants to ensure this never has to happen again.

Cure Passion wants it all, a far far cry from Eas who only wanted the one thing, and was never able to get it, could never have gotten it in ten thousand more years. She wants ''all'' of it, just like they got Westar and Soular back.

"Lera!" Passion calls, as she's called in turn. "...Sky! Ground!"

"Yes," she says. "...You..."

"I hope you like Labyrinth!" she calls to Lera. "Because I'm going to spend a lot of time here!"

She starts to fall, of course. That's just how it is, with gravity. She starts to fall, and as she does, she hears that ''but''. She hears those feelings, or feels them more like, understands them. She understands as surely as she once ''didn't'' understand. Maybe...

Maybe there's a way to get back what they've lost. They just have to accept a little more, to go along with it.

She reaches out--for Cure White's hand, and for Cure Peach's hand. She closes her eyes, even as her hair whips all around in the wind--until, suddenly, it ''doesn't'' whip upward so much, and her fall begins to be arrested through no apparent action.

Somewhere, she knows, Fate is being selfish. She knows it in her heart. And she's so, so glad of that. Maybe it's time... for her to be a little selfish, too.

"Together," Passion says, first to Cure Peach, and then to Cure White. "...Because..."

"It's not enough to 'win'," she says. "If I only wanted to 'win'... I could've beaten Pretty Cure, one day. But I wanted more than winning. And I want more now."

"I'm hungry," Cure Passion says. "I'm hungry, and... I think we should share."

"...We have enough for everyone, don't we? At the table in my mom's house... there's always room for another person. All that time ago, that extra person was me."

It's not that Passion immediately comes to love her enemies; it was never like that. ...It's that her relationships ''changed'', and by the end, she wasn't in love with an enemy; she was in love with a friend, trusting a sister.

So...

"Even for them, if they can learn some manners. ...But maybe we can teach them."

It's not that she loves the Outsiders.

It's that one, she ''was'' an outsider. And you never know...

...If tomorrow's friend wasn't yesterday's foe.

Passion closes her eyes again. "...If you'll give me back my people," she says, and the people of Labyrinth now are ''her'' people, "And everyone else..."

"We'll make room for you in Labyrinth, too. Right Westar? Soular?" She can feel Westar out there, even now. Fighting just with them. And...

"And if you just want magic..."

She grins. "Then Lera's already sending you all you need. My girlfriend won't fail, either."

She grows serious a final time. "...Let's all learn what we can be. Together."

Because it's not about deserving. It's about a choice.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

<SoundTracker> It's only the fairy tale - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqKHgd0eB0

Endo and Fallen Stern climb impossibly high, and Mikoto knows just what target he's talking about. She doesn't know so much about her numbers, but even she knows -- what it means to go over a hundred percent. "Fallen Stern!" She cries out, her voice breaking with the volume of it. "Still carrying that?! It's too heavy!"

(She's talking about his failures.)

"Fallen Stern--!!", and she might have warned him that if he keeps going he can't come back, except he knows that very well, and her words fail her as the emotions clutch around her throat. Yes, he's tried to defeat her and Miroku, but --

But --

"Don't go," she says, but quietly, to the being who was proof that Miroku could get better.

He's gone.

He's gone, and Mikoto doesn't have time to sit with the tears in her eyes, because Endo's all out of magic. The magic beneath ''her'' moves, first, jets firing as the Child soars upwards. "Miroku--! Ah, right! I'll cover, Ren!" She knows that Ren will catch him, and she...

She has enemies to...

Defeat, her mind supplies, helpfully, but something catches in her throat like a chicken-bone, as she watches the Outsiders fall upwards, like she's watching her own limp body fall down half a cruise ship.

Is it so strange to empathise with something dark, sinister and eldritch? Mikoto loves her Lord Brother, though he means no good for the Earth. And she looks at these things she can't quite get a good look at, and she realises...

"Miroku!" Mikoto cries out, grasping her blade. "I know what to do!"

And that great beast rumbles, beneath her.

"Make the biggest torture, Miroku! The worst worst one!"

His hand free, Miroku is free to heft it up. There's a moment's pause, as if calculating, before blackness collects in his palm. He hurls it at the mass of retreating Outsiders, dead centre.

<SoundTracker> I'm Hungry - Once Again! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQLpJcAdc_k

IT IS...

An eldrich horror sized curry bun.

"Get it?!" Mikoto cries out, into the abyss. "Stealing food means your mouth hurts! If you're hungry, ask for dinner!"

... what on earth is she doing?!

COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Execution on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

"He does." Pine tells Black as she squeezes her shoulder, her smile fading a moment later to become something more resolute, "So let's go lend him a hand."

Or, rather six hands. Or many many more, should those who are in spirit count. But when Endo pushes further, she remarks, "What- What are they-"

Pine turns her head away from the blinding glare, squeezing her eyes shut, and when she dares to look again, there's a hand over her mouth, and a small gasp. "... Naoki-san."

She doesn't really understand what he did, what happened. There's just an inkling that it's... awful, "... And Aizawa-san is... Oh God." That last part is softer, as she understands at least that his girlfriend is here, watching all that.

It feels like a victory... but one that feels so tragically temporary. As Cure Pine arcs down from the punch, and begins to fall, as they all begin to be drawn back towards the portal, she feels something...

... hunger...

... hunger...

... hunger...

Ravenous, endless. People have to eat three meals a day, and 'Buki knows enough from dance practice about letting herself go hungry, but right now, feeling it... "They're like animals..." Pine notes dully. Wolves hunt on instinct, hunt in packs. Even if adorable little bunnies become their meals, that's how it's supposed to be, isn't it? Is it really ''wrong'', what they're doing?

"... we can't allow it, but..."

But what? What's the solution? It's not like they can kill them all, put the remainders in a zoo, feed them meals of magic every now and then as children gawk at the strange magical predators. What do you do?

What can you do?

Pine thinks on it. Well, what is the solution? Do you just give them all the bunnies?

"... what if..."

What if there were endless bunnies?

That's a strange thought to think on, to turn about in her head, but...

"... what if..."

And as she finds her solution, she looks to Passion, then to Black. Watching Passion take White and Peach's hands... Pine reaches for Black's hand... and and Berry's...

"... Because..."

She echoes with Passion and waits for her answer. Then... tries to articulate her own, "It's not fair. They're just following their instincts. They have to eat too. So what if..."

What if they gave them more than they could ever eat? And more than that besides? It feels strange. They can't do that here, it's dangerous. Too many 'bunnies' and the world will be overrun. Too much magic, and someone will always come for it.

But where they come from?

"... what if we sent it with them."

The Outsiders may not be Wolves. Nor are they cute bunnies, but... if it gives Setsuna back her people. If it stops this fighting because they have enough prey. Then...

"... the Yellow heart is the Emblem of Faith. Freshly harvested..."

Freshly harvested... perhaps that's it, if they can send them a bountiful harvest... she'll have faith.

"... I believe, that it can be better."

For the Outsiders. For them. Even if they don't know happiness, that doesn't mean that helping them can't give them all happiness.

"... Together." She agrees, and has faith in the idea that Peach always tells them. They can get their happiness ''together''. Trying for just themselves - is destined to fail. Letting the Outsiders satisfy themselves means they don't get their happiness.

... But together?

"We can reach for it, after all."

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

All of Fallen Stern's power, expended in an instant. Endo, all but expended himself; Ren knows if he's alive, but Cure Black does not. And then, in the wake of unspeakable violence, a silence arrives.

A short fall means nothing to a Pretty Cure. A long fall gets scary. A REALLY long fall starts to be a little less scary. The ground is so far away that if a Device or Passion doesn't save them, they have bigger problems. So, as Cure Black falls, she gets to ruminate.

Ren is at the side of the boy she loves; the best case is that they will grieve together. The worst case is that Ren might have to grieve alone.

"What's the point..."

On the ground far below, a white feather drifts down into the courtyard, and lands near a yellow petal.

"What's the point... of all of this?"

"You won't let her win...?" Ako Shirabe asked her, when Dark Precure sought her Star Shard. Cure Black held her and promised her she wouldn't, back then. But in the end, Ako lost her heart to something even more monstrous.

"We'll go through there," Cure Black calls, angrily, to Cure Pine, looking up at the rift from which these creatures are coming. "No more of this. They don't get to come through there anymore. If they want to fight, then we'll... then we'll..."

The anger worming its way through Black's mind feels like it's striving towards some light. But when she bursts out into it, and espects her rage to stretch its wings, instead she finds her thoughts in a soft light. It feels like when she was a tiny child, getting out of the bath, her mother offering her a towel.

"Here," Rie says. And the white towel goes over her head. After a moment, Nagisa relents. She lets the bad thoughts go in the towel.

Blinking, she finds herself differently angry. Frustrated. She feels Cure White's palm slip into hers, and she forces her hand to relax, to avoid taking it out on White's delicate fingers. But she is Cure White... and her fingers are not so delicate. She surprises Black by squeezing hard, and after a moment, Black squeezes hard in return.

Futari wa Pretty Cure holding hands is reflexive. But when Pine's hand takes Black's, suddenly, a ring is completed. Passion, then Peach, then Berry, then Pine, then Black, then White, then Passion all over again. Of the six invincible fists that tore the Outsiders apart, none remain for violence. Black looks between the eyes of her friends: giddily stylish Berry, kindred-in-genki Peach, brave survivor Passion. Her close friend Pine. Her everything, White. She nods. And then.

"Oi," she calls to the sky. "Oi! Did you ever think to ask? Huh?! People where I live..." Earth, that is. "They love to feed someone!"

"Oh," Mai says, softly, "so many people! Ah, look at all of them."

"Yeah!" Saki beams at Mai, her smile like an endless barrage of exuberance. "I love big days like this! It's so much fun!"

"We have to eat to survive too!"

Honoka's slim pale wrist sets Chuutaro's full bowl down, as his snout enters it to chow down.

"Why would you eat another person who loves to eat?"

"Ossu, Nagisa-san," Akane-san greets languidly, from above a row of steaming takoyaki.

"You know my name?" middle-school Nagisa asked.

"You come here a lot."

"Look at the way your bodies are! I bet you could eat anything you wanted! Takoyaki. Donuts. Dog food. Butter peanuts. M-miso soup."

The rainbow that transforms Cure White and Cure Black, the power of the creation, is rising up. And as its light suffuses her, Cure Black finally, truly understands Saki Hyuuga's dream.

"Get down here!" Cure Black shouts. "And eat with us!"

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTouBqPkhtc (Blue Oyster Cult - Les Invisibles)

"... Stern.. N... ENDO!" shouts la Sirene, though it's really Nori Ankou's voice amplified outwards. (It's strange. She's always been pretty deep in on the masking. Even insisting this is 'really' her, though she's made less of a point of it lately. Hard to do when you're on fashion posters.)

It's over.

Did they win?

It's hard to say anything like this is a victory, especially with the tragedy of Fallen Stern's name coming true in a wholly different sense, unfolding right before her eyes. La Sirene feels her lips quiver. There is no triumph.

But. The world can be changed.

But.

They don't have to say it's over. That they've lost, or that they've won, or that there's nothing to be done.

You don't have to accept what's in front of you.

You don't have to do what you're told.

Maybe it doesn't feel that way. Maybe there's a price you'll have to pay - a price so great that it seems 'unthinkable' to do otherwise. And it's easy, so easy, to fall into the comfortable shaping of thick gelatinous habit-energy, especially for the things you do wish to do, but don't want to spend your mental energy upon.

But it always remains true. You can tell the sea and the land and the sky: No. They might crush you.

And more often than you'd think... you can get your way.

The miracle rests in potentia in la Sirene de Diamant's memory, a shining and transient thing (but aren't all of they?) And then perhaps Cure Passion picks up on it, and then Mikoto, and Cure Pine... yes.

They hunger.

They're from outside.

Has she not hungered? Has she not been from outside?

Breathing out, la Sirene gazes at the Things. No. The Others. They hurt her eyes, yes. So does the sun that's responsible for all her food. She can -- can she reach out like this? Can her heart open up? She doesn't know if it can. She is often weak (self-judged) and changeable (more objective). And as an atelier's manager might attest, sometimes she can be pretty easily told what to do.

But that, too, is something she accepts. La Sirene de Diamant spreads her hands from their defiant, powerful posture. She spreads them out. Her palms turn towards the opening. Please, she prays.

And then, for a moment, a memory twinkles in her mind.

Did you know? The Brazen Pharos' namesake was a thing built in a far-away land. A mighty work - something counted as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But for all of that, the Pharos of Alexandria had a very simple purpose that made the Ptolemies go through all that hassle.

"Pharos" means "Lighthouse" in Greek.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhGNnNUiceQ (Blue Oyster Cult - Dancin' in the Ruins)

Far, far away, in the Sea of Tears, the skies are lightening. Not lightning - they usually seem like they'd be stormclouds on Earth, though there are subtle variations, and the rain is only more like sixty percent of the time, not eternal. (And sometimes it's just misty drizzle - hardly anything. You get used to it.)

But lightening. Growing brighter.

What doesn't come up a lot, unless you stay there for a while, is that a bright sky is hostile to the residents - at least the ones who live on land. They usually come inside when there's a band of light sky, which comes pretty reliably about a day and a half after a westerly cyclonic storm. The plants love it under a lightening sky, but it gives you sunburn - hurts your eyes.

Out over the sea, the skies are lightening.

And they grow so light, that in that towering shield of stormy clouds that wrap this strange realm, this world, like a rug, there is a break. Something that happens, but it's rare; usually it leaves a furious bonanza of algae, and some time later, a rich harvest from the sea. This time is different.

A shaft of light from a star whose more subtle radiations are kept at bay strikes down, upon the black waters of the Sea of Tears. And Tears they are. The light is such that the expanse of water is illuminated and warms quickly, steaming as it churns up top. The light throws a brilliant column into the salty water. The salt - the salt of myriad tears and myriad sorrows - filters. It changes. And for a fleeting moment of optical miracle, it shines down nearly six kilometers, and for the first time in untold aeons, light shines in one of the sinkholes charted, irregularly, by brave captains and Sirens with a more oceanographic bent.

Everything la Sirene de Diamant has been throwing around has been the Sea on a moderate day. The effect, of course, is considerable.

The unlight that comes out of the Pharos doesn't change in nature, but in quality. It surges upright, brightening a thousandfold. A strange light, a light that axiomatically cannot warm - every iota of mere heat in that light was absorbed by some strange factor or crystal or abyssal-dweller in the Sea of Tears. What comes out is what is left when everything else is taken away. A light that isn't really a thing.

In a little touch of irony, it does seem to have a clear and discernible color. Blue.

In the skies of Labyrinth, that six-rayed scintillance of la Sirene's impromptu flight to the heavens resolves. Towards Labyrinth there is a great and strange luminance - harmless, but casting things in strange and wonderful colors, revealing unusual fluoresencences. Maybe it will bring a sudden change of view to the denizens, if they look away -- or can no longer see -- their struggle.

The other side of the beam goes towards the Outsiders.

Look this way.

Come this way.

Come to the harbor safely, and see what we have.

Enjoy the fruits of this-our-worlds with us.

A lighthouse... no, a projector, thinks la Sirene, and then the memory in her mind congeals. She remembers sharply herself facing, what was it, a devil's dozen surely at least, of magical girls and their allies. Standing in the premiere of a film. Magical Detective -- what? Lala something, she thinks, but she can't remember, and she doesn't matter, because despite a strange electric tightening in every muscle and the recurring empty throb of fatigue, la Sirene de Diamant's laughing, as the beam shines towards the Outsiders.

COMBAT: FINISHER! La Sirene de Diamant has used The Light That Never Warms on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Cure White [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Holding hands is very important to Cure White. Very precious. Sacred, even. It never becomes routine. Every time she holds the hand of Cure Black, it feels like she's holding the whole entire universe. It makes her feel small. And it makes her feel boundless.

It's even more rare for her to hold two different girls' hands at once. Cure Black ''and'' Cure Passion? Those are extremely different relationships but it's still... overwhelming. An embarrassment of riches. And though she's grieving Stern's sacrifice and the destruction of some of Labyrinth, those innocent lives who made everything possible simply -- so simply -- by ''believing'' in them, in perfect strangers -- the grief in her heart is more than balanced by the joy she feels to be among such pretty and pure and powerful sisters. Peach, Pine and Berry, too. And all the others.

They're not alone.

How strange, Hwaito reflects, that a being that appears to be an enormous swarm is by all evidence a single creature of total solitude. The only being from its existence encountered in all of history. Maybe the only being Outside at all. Maybe not. But it does seem... lonely, to be so many and have that be a lie. It must be lonely, to use and abuse the many smaller parts of your whole so easily. To discard yourself so casually.

Last time she confronted this kind of terrible hunger, she ''was'' alone. Utterly so. And even then, she wanted to save more than just herself.

The proximity to it now makes her freeze up; Black and Passion can both feel it when it happens, through her rictus palms. And then they can both feel when it ends.

"You don't have to be do this," she tells the Outsider, quietly, earnestly. "It isn't strength," she presses on, soft but intense. "It will never be victory. We won't... be the only ones who get hurt."

She smiles so sadly, like she's lost in a painful memory.

"It's okay for you to have limits. It doesn't make you less...er than."

Her eyes are so, so blue. Royal blue. Empyrean blue. Sorrowful blue.

And then, the blue of La Sirene's lighthouse.

Guided back, she blinks -- dislodging a singular tear -- and returns, and looks not at the Outsiders but at everyone else. At everyone, surrounding her. At everyone, supporting her.

At Blacku, with her. Inviting them in to join them. It doesn't seem ridiculous at all. It is the opposite of unnecessary.

"To be able to stop at enough... is what makes you whole. Please... join us."

Her eyes close, and the rainbow at the center of the girls' wishing ring intensifies. Not in hue; it cannot, it already contains every color in all Creation, the full spectrum from Black to White. No. It intensifies in hope.

<SoundTracker> It's a miracle gathering! - Precure All Stars DX3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wB_1_iZ5Ho

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Passion, Cure Pine, Cure Black, and Cure White have used Pretty Cure Miracle Gathering on Pink Moon
Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren's busy punching and kicking with wild abandon still. She ''can't'' stop. She ''won't'' stop. Not until they're all vanquished. She can feel her heart hammering away in her chest--the roar of blood rushing through her veins. Finally she finds a brief moment of respite, panting heavily as her vision swims in front of her. But she's already turning to look upward, preparing herself to follow after Endo, Lera, and anyone else heading for the priority target.

And that's when she feels everything around her come to a standstill. A brilliant conflagration of purple light washes over the battlefield, accompanied by a horrific implosion -- an implosion that effectively ends the existence of Fallen Stern. Her eyes widen, mouth fallen open in shock and awe.

"E-En..do..." Her voice cracks, as if she's scared to speak the name of her one true love. Then, Ren's world narrows to a single point: Endo, falling into the portal. The air is thick with the scent of ozone and burned-out magic, and Leras cry of "Endo!" barely registers past the ringing in her ears. But its the next word that cuts deeper than any blade: "S-Stern..."

A chime from Heraut follows quickly. <Fallen Stern... He's gone.>

A jolt of grief lances through her. But in the next breath she's blasting off, making a beeline for Endo. Nothing else matters right now except him. And she arrives there in time to grab onto him, not hesitating as she reverses course and streaks off towards the ground. As she touches down she shifts, laying Endo down on the ground, hunched over him, tears streaming down her face.

"You idiot! Your brave idiot!" She berates his unconscious form, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him, absolutely ''blubbering'' uncontrollably. "Stern.... Stern..."

Memories of her first encounter with the enigmatic device, the willful black sword that Endo used to cut down whatever darkness came their way. It was impossible to think of Stern as gone--''truly gone''.

And then, another memory comes to her, courtesy of Heraut--The Cephiran Princess, and a message that resonates within her mind: << You don't have to accept fate. >>

The world comes back into focus now. She can hear Lera calling out for Passion and her, rallying them to finish this for Stern. Yes. This was the way forward. The ''only'' way forward. Getting to her feet, tears still streaking down her cheeks, Ren looks up at the sky, eyes hard and firm.

"Heraut. I have to be strong. Will you help me?"

 The device chimes, performing a rare feat in actually speaking his master's name aloud.

"Thank you, Heraut."

<BGM Change> - Daylight on Brave - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hkc0MI1Xvg

A large Midchildan runic circle traces into existence beneath her feet, the air around her becoming heavy with heat. She takes a single step back, and where she once stood a gargantuan pillar of light--a pillar similar to the one Endo wielded, except bronze in color--flares up from the center of the circle. In then coalesces into a brilliant, searing spear. It doesn't quite crackle like Fate's lightning magic -- it's more like a piece of the Sun itself. It does not burn her, even as she reaches out to grasp it, its hilt solid beneath her fingers, its edge humming with barely contained power. It pulses in time with her heartbeat, thrumming with the weight of her sorrow and fury.

Ren surges upward, spear in hand, the force of her charge splitting the air behind her. At the same time, a dozen more spears materialize in a brilliant formation, each one aimed to strike in perfect unison.

<HAZE SPEAR!>

She grips the hilt tighter, her voice raw as she cries out--

"SUPERNAL SHIFT!"

With the final crowd, Ren absolutely ''hurls'' the spear in a perfect throw, sending it crashing through the intervening space, the other spears joining it in causing an explosion that feels like it could be felt several universes over.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Ren Aizawa has used Haze Spear: Supernal Shift on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Endo is leading the charge, and Kyouka is making her way up as fast as she can to catch up. She's admired Endo's strength for almost the entire time she's been a magical girl. Ever since they stood, shoulder to shoulder, together with Fate, to try and turn back the fearsome tide of Shadow Stern's power at the Dark Burger.

They failed, but Kyouka learned, for the first time, just how much she had to ''give'' to that struggle. Even if, at the time, she didn't think it belonged to her. Even if, at the time, she hadn't thought she'd earned it. That she'd be a temporary magical girl, that once she found Strike Wolf's owner she'd return the stolen and lost device, and just be... Kyouka Okazaki again.

Just a girl, and not magical.

But despite all that, she never forgot just how much she had to give. And she never forgot how Strike Wolf, then half-finished (as he would be for quite some time yet), encouraged her to do what was necessary. To give so much ''more'' at the cost of his stability, at the cost of overclocking himself as he tried to manage the kind of power he simply wasn't ready yet to withstand.

And in the aftermath, when they had all reconvened at Yagami house, Strike Wolf had been offline and Kyouka had been beside herself with fear and grief for her new-found friend and partner. How she'd been twisted up in knots as he'd been repaired, holding her breath to see if he would reactivate at all. The tremendous sense of relief as he activated once more. Even though they'd only been partners for such a short time, then, it still felt like she'd almost lost a piece of herself.

She has learned, since then, that many of those things are ''not'' true, of course. But she never forgot how that all felt.

And she never forgot Endo and Stern's strength and dependability, a mage and device partnership she would trust with her life.

Fallen Stern goes Supernova. Kyouka can't help but scream as she feels her heart twist again, her voice straining and cracking. "ENDO!!" A soft gasp, as everything sinks in. "S-Stern..."

She'll hold back her tears for later, even though her heart is twisting in her chest. Endo's not safe yet. Their worlds aren't safe. There's still work to do.

But she won't forget that sacrifice, and why it was made. That will leave its own impression on her, too.

She redoubles her efforts to ascend. It's easier, now, with the core that was guiding them gone. With their unnatural gravity asserting itself.

But she needs to do ''more''. She lands on one, courching, ignoring the feeling of the void leeching into the souls of her boots as several concentric rings of magic suddenly burst from her feet, storing up magic.

But there is something else there now, a thought occurs to her.

She's been an Outsider of sorts herself, hasn't she? Moving from base to base, making friends here and there but never staying for long, always in places where she didn't ''quite'' fit in, despite so desperately wanting to?

Wasn't that why she wanted to go to a real high school here in Japan, for the first time in her life? To just... ''be'' in a place where it felt more real?

And then it ''did'' become real, over time.

She'd ''wanted'' it though, so, much, for so long. More than she'd ever realized.

And despite all of that... she's always refused to compromise on herself. So what, if she was athletic? So what, if she could match all of the boys in soccer? So what, if she knew how to throw a punch?

And so what, if she had a hearty appetite? There was a lot of good food out in the world, and she liked to try it all... not to mention all that athleticism requires a lot of caloric intake.

But it wasn't just eating, was it? She'd said it to her friends before... hospitality for your guests was also important? She loved cooking, too, and she loved making food to share with her friends. Dishes from around the world at a party. Chocolates for her friends and classmates at Valentine's. Learning more tips and secrets about making curry with Mai...

Wasn't there just... so much magic in the world?

Certainly far, ''far'' much more than she ever imagined possible?

She's seen it time and time again. The first time she transformed. Fighting along side Fate and Endo against Fallen Stern. In the brilliant radience of a Pure Heart.

In the belief of a people for guardians that they (mostly) didn't know ready to put their lives on the line for them.

In providing reassurance for a fox missing her master.

There was so, ''so'' much. Surely there was a little bit more they could share?

Nobody should have to leave a table empty.

With a thought, she dismissed the boosted jump spell she'd been gathering.

Instead she held out her left hand, a large circle of bright violet energy forming in front of it. It gathers energy in front of it, a shining white ball of violet-white light that grows brighter and brighter, larger and larger. First, the side of a fist, then a basketball, then a beachball and then as tall as herself.

Corsucating flares brighter and brighter, doubling and then trippling in intensity. Rushing winds wash out from all around her as the pressure builds and builds.

"You weren't ever invited. But all you wanted was to eat, all you've ever known is hunger. I don't think that's your fault. So if you're still hungry..."

Her hair is whipping about her face now as she looks up to the massive crowd of Outsiders being pulled towards that portal, her long belt thrashing behind her as she keeps building power.

"... then I've got a little bit more to share! Strike Wolf! Get Ready!"

<Affirmative. Get set.>

Kyouka is holding up her left hand, but Strike Wolf is on the gauntlet on her right. What is his role in this new spell? Kyouka draws back her right hand, setting her feet, twisting her body...

Strike Wolf suddenly announces, <Shattering Howl.>

And she SLAMS him him into that circle with a punch. The ball of energy explodes outwards in a shining pillar of violet-white light, shockwaves rippling along its length as she sends all that magic forth.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Kyouka Okazaki has used Shattering Howl on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Finisher, Aurora Galaxy Divider, taking 134 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick
is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, Obsidian Spire: Execution, taking 181 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Ren Aizawa's Finisher, Haze Spear: Supernal Shift, taking 103 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace La Sirene de Diamant's Finisher, The Light That Never Warms, taking 134 Fatigue damage!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Finisher, Shattering Howl, taking 79 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is
unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Passion, Cure Pine, Cure Black, and Cure White's Finisher, Combo: Pretty Cure Miracle
Gathering, taking 1006 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

There is a moment where Lera hesitates. But, then she realizes: the answer isn't one or the other. It's the same as it ever is.

Both. Stop them and understand them, in one stroke.

And so she does. So they all do -- as their energies rise to embrace the Outsiders faster than they can retreat. The individuals die so easily. But it isn't death at all. The collective has already taken so much magic -- all the magic in the world, in EVERY world, but for that they created themselves in Labyrinth. And yet this offering, the first one freely given, seems to fill and fill and fill the swarm without them ever filling up.

Their (non-)existence is a terrible trap.

The eternity of an inability to be satiated is a prison.

Aurora Galaxy Divider -- and a demonic curry bun. They take it all. It hurts -- it burns so ''badly''. Mikoto knows exactly how badly. But they still want more.

They don't know how to want anything else.

Not like Cure Passion -- like Setsuna -- who makes a demand. It doesn't seem to go anywhere. As they are now, the Outsiders are incapable of that kind of reception, or comprehension.

Still, more is on the way. One, a dozen, a thousand Haze Spears -- something the Outsiders never faced ten thousand years ago, because when that cataclysmic war for Belka's survival occurred, Souverain Heraut did not yet exist. It was made for something afterwards. Said differently, it was made for the ''concept'' of an after. The spears thud into the Outsiders, delivering their point.

Not in many small meals but one truly immense one, Kyouka slams the remainder of her reserves -- everything she's got -- from gauntlet to circle to ball and finally to pillar; violet-white instead of violet-black but still inevitably comparable to, and almost a homage of, Stern Brecher. It is not the same at all; Strike Wolf and Fallen Stern are such different Devices, used by such different people. But at a time like this it is impossible not to see the similarities, either.

And then: unlight. An unlightHOUSE. Profound. Gorgeous. ''Guiding''. La Sirene de Diamant gives energy, yes, but she also offers something extraordinary: direction.

You are what you eat, and the Outsiders are becoming Ren's sorrow and her fury; La Sirene's laughter; Mikoto's sincerity, her earnest teaching; Lera's remembrance of Fallen Stern; and Kyouka's, too, her determined acceptance, a patient, deliberate choice to share.

More, more... they are becoming more. The rainbow enters them... and does not leave.

SUCH a bountiful harvest. Cure Pine's faith and generosity. Cure Passion's joyful greed, the crucial introduction of another model of desire. Cure Peach's love, Cure Berry's hope.

Pine invited them to take it to go. Cure Black invites them to stay -- and to eat many different things, not only things that hurt. And Cure White suggests that, indeed, the pain will never end until they learn how to not only consume but ''enjoy''. A gentle but keen reminder: satiation is the purpose.

Light and unlight; solid and liquid; energy and emotion.

Yes, they feasted endlessly, and hopelessly, on all the magic in the universe... as filtered through Jail Scaglietti, himself as cruel an embodiment of selfishness, of the darkest mirror of ambition, the worst sort of hunger, as humanity has to offer.

But this is so much more than that.

The Outsiders slow in their upwards fall...

...and then they stop...

...and then they begin to fall... down.

They are, to the very last, stone; which is to say, dead. As the final one is filled to a capacity that never existed before -- to SO many capacities that were never even conceived of -- the portal shivers, high above, and once again transforms from darkness into blinding, familiar light. Chiffon's light. Chiffon's connection, between this and every other world.

There is a moment of silence.

And then there is a soft crackle.

It comes again, as a flake of stone falls off one of the many corpses in the main downtown plaza. Then one of the ones in the building that fell. At the base of the tower. At the TOP of the tower. And scattered, everywhere else.

It is, unmistakably, the sound that an egg makes as it hatches.

The sound that many, many eggs make...

...and from the first near the magical girls, as they land under their own power -- a power greater than they ever imagined they had within themselves -- TWO things emerge.

<SoundTracker> Run - Amy MacDonald - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jl4kwuSOiY

One is a bolt of familiar icy radiance, which peels off, then straight up, accelerating without limit to hasten its return to whence it came. Not the darkness whence. The light.

And the other is roughly the same size as the shell crumbling around it, but bears no resemblance -- none at all -- to the Outsider it once was. No. This is an Insider; and not just any kind of insider. This is a being that came from a specific place; that was born at this specific time.

And a Labyrinth data diamond sits proudly on its head, in unmistakable -- and unprecedented -- white.

Its wings unfurl, soft fluffy wonderful feathers just like the Cure Angels had. Its eyes -- recognizable both as eyes and as eyes that ''see'', that see the beautiful world they're in -- open. They are the blue of the Sea of Tears, but they aren't tearful; they are joyful.

Its long, gentle body WRIGGLES, but in an entirely delightful -- and delighted -- way.

And with a sweet cry, it launches into the sky. It blushes with soft pleasure at everything it gently brushes past. The tower. The clouds. Occasionally it noms gently on something like a toddler, but it doesn't have teeth, and its overall sense of contentment is clear. It will take time to truly understand what it is that attracts these creatures; and what it is that they eat. But it isn't magic.

Or, well. Maybe it is magic. The truest kind of magic. But if they are drawn to the magic of the heart, and if they consume it, it is undeniable that their simple presence also creates it. Because, inextricably; astonishingly; wholesomely.

One cannot see one and help but get their happiness -- a very special happiness.

These things are ''cuuuuuuuuute''.

"Hohoeminaaaa~" calls one, a dozen, a hundred, thousands -- as many as there are magical worlds, and magical girls upon them.

And as the last bit of stolen power goes home, the portal finally closes.

Just before it does, Chiffon looks up at the Hohoemina and burbles, overflowing with joy; and in a flash of cyan, the missing Labyrinthites are returned, brought home too, In from the Outside. You gazes upon what the magical girls have wrought and smiles in an unprecedented, new way.

Stern is not revived. But he isn't entirely gone, either. Both in the memories sense, and more practically, in the physical one. A fragment still remains. It's dead, for now.

But surrounded by such a wondrous and extraordinary universe...

"Thank you..." (a memory of a memory, as the Crown Princess' spirit knows peace at last)

"...for doing what we couldn't..." (an echo of an echo, as Queen Northa is finally able to move on)

...it's hard to believe that goodbye could truly be forever.

~uehihihi~

BATTLE FANTASIA * MAGICAL GIRL LYRICAL NANOHA SEEKERS * END

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

2025-02-22 - The Labyrinth Reawakens

2025-03-16T13:22:18Z

Pink Moon Stick:

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Reawakens'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''The magical girls protect Labyrinth from the Outsiders, the mysterious, magic-hungry plague not just from an alien world but an alien existence outside the known universe.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Westar]]
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
2/22/2025 - 6/17/16
|-
|}

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.
<SoundTracker> The Colour out of Space - NINGEN ISU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JY89ZxVqEg

[[2024-12-21 - The Labyrinth Resurrections 2|PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA]]

Jail Scaglietti moans from the floor. He's still alive, but only just. He still looks like a rainbow more than a person -- they haven't beaten the magic out of him, just beaten him. But it is, surely, an excellent first step in that direction.

Fate's clones were blown clear of the Devices that used them, but they're still breathing, too.

It is very quiet.

It is too quiet.

At some point, the cheering... stopped.

It was safe to assume that everyone outside, horrified by the power displayed by the enemy, by the suffering of the girls, might have been shocked into silence.

Might have been collectively holding their breath, forgetting that their belief in the magical girls has already been outcome-determinate.

And in any case, the magical girls have been fighting for their lives and the lives of Fate's sisters and the lives of everyone on every world. They shouldn't blame themselves for focusing on their task.

And especially they shouldn't blame themselves for never having the chance to figure out what was wrong with those lightning flashes.

---

A FEW MINUTES AGO

Outside, Tarte and Azukina exchange looks as yet another bolt of lightning crashes... upwards. Like running a video in reverse, it sprouts from the ground -- is attracted to the tower -- and then explodes into the sky.

The last one was teal. This one is peach.

They are striking more and more frequently; never the same color, but always the same sound -- enormous, rending crashes. Thunder that isn't backwards per se, as the lightning's direction is; but, nevertheless, is also not-so-subtly incorrect. It's as though the space that it warps through carries enough sonic hell that merely three dimensions cannot account for all of it.

Tarte is much more seasoned in the art of standing on (...near) magical girl battlefields; Azukina tenderly grasps his paw.

"...is it...a good sign? Does it mean we're... winning?"

Tarte's uncharacteristic silence is its own answer.

---

THEN

Why did an asteroid fall out of the sky over Juuban Public School the night of the astronomy event? Why did Jail send Black Sky to intercept it?

Why did the Maiden of Dreams risk everything -- and lose everything, all evidence that she accepted, if not her total destruction, certainly the loss of a greater part of herself -- to deliver the golden skein to Earth?

Why did Jail seek Chiffon?

What drove Northa to drive her Knights first to depravity and then to revolution?

What destroyed Belka, the most powerful magical civilization of all time, at the very height of its powers?

What did the girls witness, the very first time they held a slumber party to unlock these mysteries in dreams?

...they defy description. If they have eyes, they weren't evolved in this universe to see, and look nothing like what eyes would be. If they have grasping claws, or tentacles, or spikes, it is only because of a certain higher order universality of violence. But any resemblance to recognition ends there. They are hard where they should be soft, and vice versa. They are dark where they should be bright, and dark where they should be dark also, but with strange, shifting colors that, like the rest of them, have not yet existed in this dimension until now, and therefore have never been named.

One swoops down through a Miroku-made skylight, and swallows Jail Scaglietti whole.

But there's never only one.

TO

BE

CONCLUDED

NOW

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera isn't ''quite'' sure how to feel when Jail, finally, is brought low. She looks at him with a note of concern. He... might need medical attention. They'll need to get him that attention.

But there's a sense of something being wrong. She looks up, her amber eyes narrowing. Somehow, it feels quiet.

And instead of relief, she feels tension.

She can't place it -- and then she looks at Jail. Something sweeps down, into Jail.

He's swallowed. Lera shouts, screaming, and brings Sky up -- and Ground, across herself.

"What is--"

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

There are a lot of 'whys', but none of them matter to Cure Passion as much as the 'what'. Her henshin shimmers, and she is her ordinary sublime self again, and she stares for a moment at the space where the creature of some kind was. She stares, as Jail is ''gone'' of all things.

She catches Chiffon, and holds her close. "Lera..." she starts, and looks to her in that same tension.

She looks around at everyone else, next. There is so much that's happened in the last few moments. So much that's happened in the moments before that.

"...We have to go," she says.

She hands Chiffon to Cure Peach, looking into her sister's eyes for a moment--before she reaches out a hand for Lera.

"We can't..."

"We can't ignore what's happening."

She wants to leap out there right now. She wants to rush ahead.

But she's learned, painstakingly over the years, that she doesn't have to do this alone.

So she breathes, just for a moment. "...Everyone..."

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

They'd done it.

Jail laid there, battered and bruised, likely wallowing in the indignity of his own defeat. Ren paused, looking around at everyone.

They'd done it! They'd beaten him!

...Though something was ''wrong''. She could feel it in her gut, and from the way Lera was looking so did she. Ren looks to everyone else again, opening her mouth to say something when-

''Something'' swoops down, and in a flash swallows Jail before fleeing back from whence it came.

''Oh!''

Ren gasps, taking a surprised step back. Did that... really just happen?! Oh yes, it did!

"Passion's right!" She finds her voice, clenching her fists. "We have to go after it!"

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Jail falls. Mikoto does not look to him and wonder about the medical treatment he needs; she looks to him and wonders if he's really not a threat, any more. ... but Lera and Setsuna aren't moving to take care of him, so maybe that isn't the way.

She doesn't like it, still. The danger hasn't passed. It prickles at the back of her neck-hairs, vibrates through her muscles like the taut strings at a piano's back.

Lera asks what it is, and Mikoto cannot find the words, in her mind, before it happens. Don't blame her; she does not exist in a verbal world, first of all. It's always been a second language.

No wonder she snarls, when that thing dives down, as if acting on those thoughts she'd restrained. Her lips pull, tightly, up and over her teeth, exposing them as her tongue presses in behind. "Rrrrhhh..."

Setsuna finds the words she doesn't have, though -- and when Ren declares it's time to go, Mikoto nods, sharply, to her. "Right," she finds her reply, grasping Miroku tightly as she sets out.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo, sagging under both the weight of relief and the accumulated tonnage already accumulated over the course of the battle, isn't exactly prepared to stop anything that comes next.

His eyes follow the arc of the intruder as it tears by to munch up Jail, drawn from his allies and fallen enemies by the blur of color.

He agrees with the others. So he goes after it, forcing his tired body to produce the energy to do so.

"Aah, why is it always like this..." He complains, a reflex that bubbles up even through growing terror.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

OUTSIDE, WITH THE OTHERS

Batiste watches. He has nothing to say. He dry-washes his paws together.

HERE, WHERE IT ALL COMES TOGETHER

La Sirene de Diamant sways. That was a lot. A lot of a lot; and she feels weak, washed out. Like a tea-bag that's being soaked for the third time. But they've overcome him --

-- something sweeps down. Something that isn't out of a nightmare. It's not out of a nightmare because nightmares in all of their infinite horror and cryptic potentialities hold, at least, the *potential* to be understood. Perhaps they are things that could never truly be, but you could, at least in principle, understand the parts.

La Sirene de Diamant feels her back muscles spasm. She doesn't feel what was behind that right away.

"It..." Her head tilts upwards. She can't do it, she feels.

But that can't gains an asterisk after Cure Passion speaks. La Sirene breathes swiftly, five times, and her left hand comes up to rest over her face. She hunches forwards and takes two more deep breaths. She then mutters something, cryptic but clear: "If she could ride a cachalot in her undershirts, then I --"

La Sirene straightens up. Breathing quickly. But more steadily. "We must," she agrees with Ren.

To Endo, though, she says: "I suppose it's our turn to be the rescuers."

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Jail Scaglietti moans from the floor... still glowing prismatically, but he's not Fate's first concern. That would be the girls that were blown clear out of the devices, whom she swoops down to try to catch them.

"Got you!" The thought that 'you' is now capitalized for one of her little sisters crosses her mind at that moment, but she puts it out of her thoughts for long enough. It's awkward to carry two other girls who are much larger than her, but...

As she arrives at the Defenser Plus barrier she put up over 'You' the thought finally catches up and she gives her an apologetic look, before checking their breathing, and there's this sudden look of relief that passes on her face.

As she puts them down, she notes.

"We'll have to figure out a system later."

<Release.>

And the barrier suddenly fades out of existence, in strange patterns of runic fractals, and Fate asks, "You. Can I entrust them to your care? I know I'm asking a lot." Especially after how her hand burned, but... she has to trust she's capable of at least watching them.

There's something wrong with the lightning, and Fate can't place why. Ordinarily that's an impossible question, lightning is in her blood, it's in her magic. It's so much of who she is. She can summon the weather - change it - charge the atmosphere with magic and bring it down.

But she can't figure this out.

Fate turns around, and steps forward, like she's going to address him. "... Fa-" Her senses suddenly roil at something that defies her ability to perceive them. Even a glimpse is-

... and Jail is gone.

Fate stands stock still, words stolen from her, Bardiche still in her hands, and she's not certain how to feel. One deep breath, and...

"No we can't."

... she's still not certain how she really feels about the matter. Only that she has something she desires to protect, there are people here who would call her name...

... and as Passion noted, they can't ignore ''that''. Fate doesn't doubt her ability to fight any foe that she can exchange words with, or understand. This time? This time she's not so certain.

But that doesn't mean she won't try. "I... don't know." She tells Endo. And not for the first time, not for the last, she wonders the meaning of her birth.

COMBAT: Hayato Nishi transforms into Westar!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

There is a moment at the end of many of Pretty Cure's hardest battles, when stress and fear begin to fade, and compassion gains a little room to breathe. There is little room for hesitation when fighting against all odds, against opponents with more raw power and dangerous, unknown abilities, especially when one has accumulated numerous wounds oneself. But then, eventually, the foe always falls; if they did not, Cure Black and Cure White would not be standing here today. And if they still live, Cure Black often finds herself reviewing her last few actions, wondering if she could have spared them a little.

"Whew." Cure Black hops on the balls of her feet, shaking off the adrenaline, loosening her tanned muscles. She claps her palms behind her back and then in front of her belt, lightly, then closes one eye as she stretches her neck to the side. "We sure hit him hard."

White shakes her wrist delicately to disperse the sting from their double palm strike. "Your hand?" she wonders. Black's knuckles and the backs of her fists were all torn up by the imitation Sky attack.

Black grins, tired but reassuring, displaying her palm to her partner. "Not so b--"

White's palm is already against Black's. "Oh. You were showing me," she realizes.

Shyly, Cure Black smiles at her. Apologetically, White starts to move her hand away, just as Black's fingers start to close to accept the unexpected hand-touch. The perfect synchronization of their final Heart to Heart attack gives way to a brief dance of uncertainty, and the two girls pause, look at each other, and giggle a little.

"Is everybody all right?" Cure Black calls, clearing her throat. This may not be entirely over yet, not until Jail is secured. "Cure Angel Peach, do you want to--whoa! Back to normal, huh?" Maybe everything will be.

And then the least normal life(?) form Cure Black has seen in a long time, maybe ever, plunges through the collateral damage Mikoto made, and makes a meal out of the mad scientist Jail Scaglietti. Precure do not willingly watch their foes devoured, but the matter is resolved, disgustingly, before Black even fully understands what is going on. "Stop it!" Black cries, but the abomination is already fleeing. "Cure White?"

"Un," White nods sharply. Both of them could use a longer recovery break, at a minimum. Neither of them are willing to wait for it right now.

"Lera-chan," Cure Black requests, jogging over to the Device-user. "You can carry me, right?" 'Sky' seems like the Device that probably has the most extra flying power, right?

"Passion," Cure White calls, touching her shoulder gently, an intent to hang on when her friend invokes the Keyrun. "Pardon my intrusion."

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka and Strike Wolf deliver their final attack, releasing a satisfyingly large explosion of energy before they fall back to the ground. It's a heavy 3-point landing, clearing a wave of debris from around them with their impact.

"Come on..." The final attack is hits, and Kyouka heaves a sigh of relief as Jail is slammed into the ground. "''That''," she says between pants, "was too close."

Slowly she stands up, starting to dust herself off. "Okay, so we just gotta get that magic out of him and this is over, right?" she asks aloud to nobody in particular.

But she freezes as a ''thing'' that should not exist swoops in and grabs Jail, jumping back with a yelp and raising her hands up in a defensive posture. "Wh-what the heck!?" She looks around at her friends. "Guys? ''Please'' tell me that's not what I think it is. I was kind of hoping we were done going through the wringer after fighting all of the magic in the universe."

She's panting still, still a bit winded, but as Cure Passion speaks of having to go, as does Ren, and others. Kyouka closes her eyes, takes a deep long breath to calm herself, and then releases it. "Right."

A small fox with two tails and exceptionally bright red fur suddenly appears next to Kyouka, a green circle of magic under her feet. Clara rushes over to Kyouka. <Kyouka, something's happening--!>

"I know," says Kyouka with a nod. "We're going after it. Can you watch Fate's sisters and the devices?"

<I--> The fox familiar looks from Kyouka to the various other entities about the room, and then slowly nods. <... Right. And
Kyouka?>

"Yeah?"

<If you don't bring Strike Wolf back in one piece I'll never forgive you.> Clara glances away a little, mumbling. <... and I hope
you come back safe, too.>

Kyouka grins. "That's the plan." She looks to her friends. "I might need someone to give me a hand up."

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

"Right!" Replies Endo to Diamant matter-of-factly. Then after a long beat his brows wrinkle up. "Wait, did you get rescued?"

"...Did I?" He stutters in the air as he briefly pauses to ponder this.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

Golden light fades, and Jail falls.

To be honest, Westar - Denizen of Labyrinth, representative of WT district, decidedly not faithfully serving Lord Moebius any longer - didn't have a good idea what this guy's plan was. His tasks as an Executive were to make plans and throw giant monsters at people, and he wasn't really good at the planning thing.

He's on one knee, breathing slowly out, still in the same pose he was when he unleashed his might, and...actually, his hand is stuck in the ground. Uh. This might take a few pulls to get free-

Oh, there he goes-

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Leaving behind You, who accepts the care of the other two Fate clones quietly, all three of them left safely beneath the golden hum of Bardiche's force field, the magical girls fly, teleport, or otherwise ascend -- in each other's arms if necessary -- out of the tower and back to the surface.

<NEEDLE DROP!> One Last Time - Rising Tension - FWPC OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bshO3GZqROY

Labyrinth was never heaven, but it was also never hell. Well -- let's not understate the purgatory of the soul that the total domination of its population's free will represented. Until a couple of hours ago life here was very bad indeed. Nevertheless...

Things are now are much worse.

The singular Outsider that gobbled down Jail, and all the stolen magic of the universe within him, is soaring almost straight upwards, up towards the same hole in the sky that Jail and Northa and Moebius had collectively channeled Chiffon's power through like a siphon.

Only the hole isn't the same. Not anymore.

What had been a pipeline to draw down all the worlds' color, all the light, all the beauty, through the lamb fairy and then into the man, has been... fractured. Hijacked. It doesn't connect everything, everywhere, in the universe anymore.

Now, the portal's edges crackle everywhere it touches sky, as though the sky itself was an egg that is already starting to shatter beneath the strain. It is an inversion... a portal to somewhere... that isn't. One could say beyond, and one could say outside, but neither of these words can properly capture the relationship of a place that isn't a place, to everywhere that is.

The naked eye struggles to render anything so alien. The portal has all shapes and none. And the Outsider itself... what can sight do but try to approximate with things more familiar? Right now that would be a rainbow, not because of what the creature is but because of what is in it. Jail's body is making it glow from the inside out, which is distressing insofar as, unlike Jail's clearly visible silhouette, it has no recognizable internal structure. If it could be said to have a skeleton it might have been designed by M.C. Escher, but there's nothing in it that really resembles a bone. Too hard and too soft, too sharp and too blunt, too many and too few. It is wrong.

It is not alone.

Cheers of support have turned into screams of terror. A hive's worth of Outsiders are pouring through the portal into Labyrinth and plummeting towards the city, much as they plummeted into Belka, once upon a golden skein. The one with Jail is already vanishing behind the dense screen of an army of allies, which without-being-truly-black-nevertheless-blackens, shadows, the overcast gray sky. Those, they cast, and very darkly indeed. Maybe all the stolen light of the universe can pour out of that one, but the ambient light of one world does not easily pass through whatever substitutes for their flesh.

Some others must have come in that initial drop; some others are already here. Here, as in in front of the screen Azukina and Tarte and Clara set up with the locals. Here, as in a plume of... not smoke, for it doesn't smell like fire... a cloud of debris is rising from a squat complex of RAM chip-like residential buildings nearby. Here, as in dangerous. Deadly. Like the portal warping the sky, whatever the creatures touch struggles to maintain its integrity, its simple existence. The sky is big and elemental and holding on -- for now. That debris cloud, on the other hand, is from the crumbling fourth floor of an eight-story building that has mostly simply ceased to be.

And the screaming must be from people in mortal danger...

...everyone.

Everyone in Labyrinth is under immediate threat.

And everyone else is surely doomed to the long, slow frozen death of the worlds the Queen of Belka's Knights stole magic from, if they don't go get it back.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick transforms into The Outsiders: Swarm!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera looks at Setsuna -- then everyone else, lingering on Fate -- and then she nods. "Right," she says. "Let's do it."

Then, she looks at Cure Black. She grins --and extends a hand. "You bet!" she says. "Special American delivery, coming right up!"

With a grip on Cure Black -- and a glance, to be sure she has her -- Lera flies up with the others, looking at the Outsider -- and the hole in the world. Her eyes widen to see the way the world seems to distort around that portal.

She puts Black down, and nods to her. "I owe you a flight when it's /not/ like this."

There is an army of Outsiders descending. She looks back at Setsuna, then she nods. "I'm going airborne," she tells Passion. "I'll catch up to you, y'know?"

It's an effort to keep her tone calm. She tries, still.

Then, she looks at the swarm in the air -- and she flies towards it. She looks sideways, at the other fliers. "Ready?"

Broken Ground is swung towards them -- then, several bolts of golden light loose from it, hurtling into the sea of Outsiders in the skies.

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 10 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera
Camry is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

COIN FLIP: Kyouka Okazaki flips a coin. It lands on tails!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"...Okay," Passion tells Lera, though it's clear in her face that she's worried. "I'm going to--"

She'll catch up. "I'm going to save my people," she says, her voice tight with unexpressed emotion. She is, as always, an understated kind of girl. "Westar!" she calls. "Let's do it!"

She looks to White then, and gives her a very tight smile.

But they're going different places. So they will. Passion reaches out her hand as she calls on Akarun's power. A brilliant sphere of light ''erupts'' from her, and she and the friends going with her will disappear.

In an instant that same light shines on the plaza, and Cure Passion appears next to Tarte and Azukina. "Stay behind me!" Passion calls to her friends and fellow citizens. "I'll protect you!"

Passion starts towards the enemy--and it isn't just the enemy that concerns her. She ''slams'' forward, delivering a series of kicks to try to deflect the monsters away from the people of Labyrinth, moving along like a wave wherever they are.

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Breaking Wave on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick counters 5 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion's Breaking Wave, taking 15 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Cure Passion is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates! Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Devouring Shadow, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"... Yes." She says to Lera, softly after a time.

Fate floats up to Mikoto, and considers the situation for a moment. The two girls are both small enough for this to be feasible, but there is one issue.

"Mikoto. Can you hold Bardiche for me? Just while we fly."

And Fate just holds out the hilt of a crackling energy sword over twice as long as she is tall to Mikoto. "Bardiche, Miroku and you need to behave. This isn't the time for jealousy or pride."

<Yes Sir.>

Fate then hoists her up, under her arms and begins to carry her up, but she gives one last look at You, and her other two siblings. "Be safe." She whispers, a wish from a big sister to her three younger. As the older - it's her responsibility.

As Mikoto dangles though, Fate does glance at her then considers, makes some calculations and...

"A few more years..."

Wait... is she wondering how long until she's taller!?

But as they ascend, they see how much worse labyrinth can be under assault. Fate sees the one that gobbled up Jail... the hole, the portal. Her eyes can't make sense of what these things are, just a sense of how strange and wrong they are. She can see the glow of her father.

Part of her wants to give chase, just to have the chance to figure out her feelings, but the screams of terror remind her of her priorities.

Just like Belka.

She thinks, but doesn't allow that thought to reach it's conclusion. It won't become... like Belka.

"We won't allow it!"

And suddenly she diverts sideways, cutting a sharp arc across the sky, flying towards the labyrinthine architecture at high speed. "I'm throwing you!"

And Fate Testarossa suddenly makes an arc around to gain momentum, letting go with one arm, before...

<Thunder Arm>

...pitching her towards the missing fourth floor, with everything dangling above it as Fate then races back up and towards the top and conducting a search and rescue from there on down as the rest falls, beginning to move to grab people as she can, before racing to put them down elsewhere in the speedy search and rescue.

She needs both arms for this, which is why she remains 'unarmed', but she isn't... precisely, not with how one of her forearms and biceps are glowing yellow with crackling energy, leaving the hand free.

She just has to hope it works if they come in while she's saving people.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Arm on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Yeah," Mikoto nods, transferring her own greatsword to a single-handed grip as she reaches out to carefully grasp Bardiche, too. "I'll be careful," she promises, though whether she's speaking to blade or girl is an open question. And she pauses, as she looks to the sisters -- "You, careful too, okay?" -- with well-wishing to the clones which is ''slightly'' less choppy in context. As she grasps Bardiche in one hand, and Miroku in the other, she dangles as an almost comical duality of protection and violence, trusting Fate to get them where they need to be. Both blades are massive, in her hands, but she manages to stop them from touching throughout the journey up. "Be nice!" She insists, to Miroku, though Miroku -- as ever -- says nothing in return.

"Tall shoes," Mikoto suggests, gravely, as they fly; from one short girl to another, she apparently knows ''exactly'' what Fate is thinking, musing something like that.

"Right!" Mikoto barks, though, when Fate says she's going to ''throw'' her -- and her legs bend as she moves with the momentum of Fate's toss to land safely at the base of the building. "Hold on," she asks Bardiche, as she plunges him into the ground -- because she needs two hands, too. She turns away, getting her two-handed grip on Miroku mid-whirl. Once, twice, three times, and she plunges her sword into a dark portal, white lightning crackling from it as her shadow splits to two. "MIROKU!"

Her Child rumbles, as Miroku tears from the ground, and Mikoto turns one final time to grab Bardiche before he can be lost to the earthquake. The first through fourth floors of the apartment building are decimated -- and so the first-through-fourth floors of a massive, spiked beast take their place, the oni's great, gauntlet-clad hands reaching up to physically ''grasp'' the sides of the building. Obsidian spires tear from the earth to press against the sides where his hands can't reach, providing structural support to stop the whole thing from leaning and toppling. Miroku might have a heart of violence, but he is still Mikoto's Child -- and ''Mikoto'' wants to save these people.

"I'll hold it!" She cries, holding Bardiche in one hand and Miroku in the other as she stands beside Miroku again. "Get them out!"

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi transforms into Mikoto and Miroku!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Entomology on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> of Monsters and Men DOUBLE FEATURE - Dirty Paws & Little Talks

La Sirene smiles faintly at Endo. "No," she says. "La reine de l'espoir. She... Once, long ago, strange things came to the Sea of Tears. Like wasps, if wasps were the size of horses and spat fire. They came from the sky... and they began to hunt humans." She looks upwards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCHUw7ACS8o

"There was a girl," she says. "We don't know her child name, at least in the stories. She... she had a disease, her body grew uncomfortably. It was a bit like the Elephant Man, you know that one? But despite this... the wasps, she did not look like a human to them."

"But she lived twelve hundred miles from the Desolation Row, and so she - one of the great cachalots, like whales, she held to its fin. The other Sirens of the time had been slain already. She rode across the sea, to the bay. The Mother came to her in the form of a heron, and she became La Sirene de L'Espoir. All - heh - all she could do was talk to people. And the winged and four-legged people, too, even the ones that hadn't learned human languages."

"We don't have much time, so I'll jump to the end," she says. "In the very end it was simple... she... she pushed the mother-bee, the queen, into the sea. Then it reared up. And that was when the grandfather of the cachalots rammed it and tore it in half fifty fathoms deep."

"I saw her statue," la Sirene concludes, her hands curling into fists. "She was beautiful, even with such a challenge. She only lived three years, ''but she won''. And if a girl can do that before she even became a Siren..."

The light around Nori -- around la Sirene -- shifts slightly - becoming almost prismatic, huddling around her, with six stellate rays, at least from the direction of any individual viewer. "Then I have no excuse at all," she says, and then she rises into the air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghb6eDopW8I

From outside, it doesn't look like much. A difference in halation, certainly. Perhaps there is a distant sound like the surf in an endless swirling loop instead of in-out-in-out. And yet the feeling to la Sirene fills her heart, raising things upwards. She breathes for a moment - and seems to lean forwards as she essays a short loop about two feet off the ground, which widens at the last moment to intercept Kyouka from behind with a clear and raggedly enthusiastic, "Get ready --"

Catch, then. Catch and rise, arms curled up underneath Kyouka's, so it doesn't strain her too much. It does likely feel a bit like the surf, or perhaps the feeling after laying in the surf for an hour and then standing up. The feeling doesn't quite go away, does it?

Rise up. So quickly. Perhaps this is the miracle, la Sirene thinks, and the surge in her heart is swift to reach its crest as she sees the visions of the Horror. She looks at the sky, says nothing and resolves to hope it will get better if she doesn't look at it, and descends. She aims towards an open space --

One which is full of people... but at least it is people who are mostly going in one direction. La Sirene dips down, coming to touch her toetips on the ground and set Kyouka down. That sense-memory-of-the-surf vanishes as she moves away, calling out, "ALL OF YOU!" She sweeps her left arm forwards, perhaps to indicate grandly towards a direction to go.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

In the everyday life of a Denizen of Labyrinth, there is no joy - but also there is no fear. There never was freedom of emotion, made possible by the near uniformity of Labyrinth's days. Every day is the same as before, so there is nothing to fear, and nothing to hope for. Only a grey existence.

Today, in Labyrinth, there is something different.

There were new joys, made possible by the intrusion of a gleaming hope. There was new investiture in goings-on, as evil was beheld and champions worth cheering opposed it. And now, there is new terror, as the grey skies turn black, and beings never beheld invade a realm that never changes.

But are some familiar faces in Labyrinth, too.

- - -

"What kinds of monsters did that guy bring in here?!"

The commander of a hundred Nakewameke is disturbed by how ''weird'' these outsiders are, contrasted with his familiar normal-item-turned-giant-robot minions. Having been helped out with a quick teleport, he pauses in his angry rant to give Cure Passion a nod and a thumbs up. "-yeah. Everything for Labyrinth, right?"

And without waiting for a lift, he starts running to where the smoke is rising from an increasingly non-existent building, following in the wake of Fate and Mikoto as quickly as he can. Albeit with a slight detour, according to the standard city plan there should be a materials depot just a block out of the way.

Westar's arrival at the eroded building is heralded by a metal I-beam crashing lengthwise into the nearest outsiders. He's commandeered a forklift, and is hurling materials off of it with deliberate intent - trying to give the Outsiders something to chew on that doesn't contain people, trying to make a path for evacuation. As obsidian replaces the building's lower floors, he leaps up to the place where the fourth floor ''should'' be, bellowing as loud as he ever demanded obedience before.

"I am Westar, Executive of Labyrinth! All denizens of this building are to evacuate immediately in an orderly fashion!" A pause, as he finds his way to the stairwell, throwing a door from its hinges to make an easier path. "We're here to help."

That last bit of comfort is...non-standard, admittedly. But the orders are familiar, and hopefully intention can fill the rest. If invoking Moebius's orders and drills is what he has to do to keep people safe, at least they'll be alive to apologize to later.

COMBAT: Westar has used I-Beam Buffer on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren smiles at everyone else who seems just as determined to stop the Outsider from slipping away. "Alright!" She then turns to look up into the sky, heart hammering wildly in her chest as she watches that awful portal unleash ''more'' of those freaky creatures. The one that's fleeing with Jail is a priority, yes, but there's no way they'd be able to catch it with all of its brethren swarming around like that!

"Looks like we have to thin them out." Ren observes, then turns to look over at Lera. "Ready?" Of course, she gets her answer when her best friend picks up Cure Black and blasts off. "Oh!" She blinks, then turns to look over at Cure White, lips forming into a sheepish smile. "Wanna come with?"

Moments later Ren is streaking up through the air after Lera and Black with White securely riding along. She comes to a stop once they're properly out of the pit, hovering momentarily while still carrying Cure White. The swarm is close to blotting out the sky, if such a thing were possible. Everyone meanwhile splits off into different directions to handle other just-as-pressing threats.

<We'll handle the swarms!> Ren sends a mental communication out to her allies. <Be safe!>

There's a pause before she sends out another telepathic message, this one for Endo's ears only.



With that, she grips White tightly and says aloud, "Let's go get 'em!" before zooming upwards again. The swarm is still... well, swarming as swarms tend to do. But that doesn't seem to stop Ren who (with White) is seemingly on a collision course with them.

"We're with you Lera-chan and Black-san!" She shouts, and in the next beat dozens upon dozens of magical energy lances trace themselves into existence around the rapidly ascending forms of Ren and White, before then launching upward to impact with the swarming Outside in a cacophony of sound and light!

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used Haze Spear: Cascade Shift on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

"Ah! 'Sank you Miss Lera'," Cure Black levies her weak English, grasping Lera's forearm in her hand. When they arrive outside, she lets go, catches up to the momentum she's still carying with a short jog, and halts, her amber eyes flicking about the horrifying scene.

"All this... because of..."

"Be safe," Cure White tells Cure Passion, slipping her hand off Passion's shoulder. As she and Passion turn, their long hair trails behind them, announcing the respective directions each girl has chosen so decisively. "We can't let that one escape," Cure White tells Cure Black.

"That's the goal up there," Cure Black agrees, squinting up at the portal to which the abomination is fleeing. "Miss Lera!" Running alongside the Device-wielder, Black leaps, catching her fellow athlete's forearm again.

"Very much," Cure White answers Ren breathlessly, as the Device-user slows down long enough to make the offer. Her fingers grip on tightly, ready for the acceleration Ren is surely capable of. Then Ren and Lera are off, both trailing a Pretty Cure, black and white pennants behind them.

"No you DON'T!" Cure Black shouts, bringing a knee all the way up to her chest, then kicking out like a mule to stomp an abomination away from Lera.

Bringing both her heels back far behind her, Cure White swings her body backwards, then comes forward with both feet, making her body rigid at the moment of contact. An Outsider careens away, largely unharmed but the unwilling recipient of a lot of momentum, and bounces into one of its fellow hive members, setting both into disarray.

"I got it I got it I got it," Cure Black tells Lera, a focused yammer of communication typical of the sports field. Hauling her leg back, she spears an Outsider, her foot stomping a bone-like shield that was protecting its stern, looking to crack it in half with her sheer physical strength. But though the 'bone' looks rock-solid, perhaps even too dense to break, Black's foot goes right through it, plunging into the Outsider's body. With the monster stuck on her leg like an olive on a cocktail sword, Black kicks wildly. "Ew! Why is that part soft? Nasty!"

"I've got it!" Cure White calls, and as Ren passes close to Lera, White slams a kick into the undulating, horrible mass trying to crawl up Cure Black's leg. Her shin, too, sinks right through, and is caught, binding Lera and Ren together by extension as the two Precure are now linked by an Outsider.

"Gross! Miss Lera, zap it!"

"No! I've got it!" Cure White swings her free leg over her caught out, twisting her body to get that ankle as far around the front of the monster as she can. "Hold it still!"

Shouting in frustration, Cure Black reaches down with her hand, letting the monster capture that limb too.

With the Outsider caught and stable, Cure White hooks her ankle in, and unrolls her twisted limbs, hauling the monster's body around with her ankle. Unable to follow the motion with Black grabbing it, that shapeless monster simply bursts, torn in half by Cure White's rotation.

"Whoa!" Black scrubs her now-free leg off with her other boot restlessly. "Nice!"

"Black, look--" White starts to warn. But despite her shouted admiration, Black was paying perfectly good attention. Planting a foot against Soaring Sky herself for maximal stability, Black cocks her mighty fist back and hook-punches the next Outsider to reach them, with enough force to burst open its side and send it plummeting, unnamable matter dribbling from its body, towards the courtyard that is increasingly far below.

"Miss Lera!" Cure Black calls. "I'm slowing you down, right? It's 'cool'!" she assures with an English word. "Drop me on a big one!"

"Likewise," White tells Ren, her powerful roundhouse kick punting a smaller Outsider like a soccer ball. "Thank you for taking me this far!"

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

"Yeah," Endo agrees with Diamant, "If she can save one world you can get them all no problem."

While Endo would like to pursue the Jail-eating Outsider upon emerging from the tower, the citizens of Labyrinth have a more immediate need. The yawning gates above will have to wait.

The knight skims low across the air, weaving down toward the residences and plazas below. One the way he scoops a fleeing Labyrinthian out of the way of scattering debris.

"Go!" He shouts, depositing them on a street down the line. During the brief pause he turns his eyes skyward, shooting back a message to Ren along with a smile she can't see: <Love you too.>

He curves back toward the Plaza after, heading toward the light Cure Passion creates. A flood of small purples spheres proceed him, the meteorites detonating to clear the path.

"Be there soon!"

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Meteor Strum on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 21 Fatigue damage from Ren Aizawa's Haze Spear: Cascade Shift, taking 9 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka has come an awfully long way, in the less-than-a-year she's been a magical girl. She has formed a partnership and found friends the likes of which she could never have dreamed of before. She has learned of the tremendous potential within herself--and not jut that of Strike Wolf, but genuinely and truly ''hers''. (There had bee... a lot of doubt, for a while.)

But she hasn't learned to ''fly''.

If she's being honest, she's not really interested in learning? Theoretically she could, but... she likes running too much.

... It's a bit ''too'' far to run this time, though. She's listening to Nori's story, trying to take it in but quietly wondering if there'd be a better time--and then Nori lifts into the air, and then catches ''her'' under the arms. "Whoa-- Diamant!?"

The sensation of the surf fills her, for just that moment, and she decides to just go along for the ride.

There's far, ''far'' too much to do. The thing that ate Jail is escaping into the sky, but--there's ''people'' down below to protect, too. "We gotta help them out," Kyuouka shouts to Diamant, and the moment Nori sets her down--

Kyouka charges forward, kicking off with such speed as to kick back a gust of air towards her ride. "Alright everybody, keep moving! We've got your backs!" she shouts to the crowd, while she reaches an open hand forward.

A circle filled with midchildan runes appears in front of her hand, and in front of ''that'' appears an array of small rapidly spinning crescents, shining the brilliant violet color of her magic. Strike Wolf announces <Gale Shot> before all of the shots streak out and strike at as many of the Outsiders as she can hit.

"Hey!" shouts Kyouka. "If you think you can just come in here and attack these people after they poured their hearts out for us? You got another think coming!" She's trying to draw the attention of the invaders away from the people onto herself, to give them more time to escape.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Gale Shot on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Sword Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Westar's I-Beam Buffer, taking 28 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 5 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Gale Shot, taking 4 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is
Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Dramatic Flourish!! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick partially dodges 9 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Thunder Arm, taking 36 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 6 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Entomology, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Pink
Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Tangle applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure Black's Sword Kick, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Psyched!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 6 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Meteor Strum, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki is Psyched!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly counters 25 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Dramatic Flourish!!, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Critical Counter! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Space Invasion, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Cure White has used Cat's Ankle on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure White's Cat's Ankle, taking 15 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure White is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

The mind continues to try to render these creatures through substitution; and keeps failing. Their necks are sinuous, but not like a snake. Their weapons are terrible, but neither truly the talons of eagles nor the claws of tigers, but something stranger and sharper entirely. Their chief resemblance to insects, really, is the way they are a swarm; so many many many of them, all seemingly identical; but their carapaces are not true exoskeletons; and the hardness of them not hard at all, but, an impenetrable, undulating shadow.

Truthfully, their nearest neighbor, especially for those who never experienced them as a dream, is another terrible foe of Tokyo: the protodaimon incubated to emerge from victims, mostly Infinity Institute students, by the Death Buster cultists. They share a Wrongness that prickles the back of the neck, that fizzes like scum along the teeth, that coldly knots even the sternest of stomachs. And they share lethality. One protodaimon was more than enough to ruin the day of a force of magical girls. A half dozen couldn't be stopped without slaughtering a group of girls at Tokyo Tower, which haunts the memories of some to this day.

And here there are hundreds... maybe thousands.

All of them... hungry.

---

THE PLAZA

The screen that beamed in the magical girls' impossible battle against Labyrinth's dictator -- and the power behind Moebius' throne, the Queen of Belka herself, Northa -- is dark, and cracked. Something hit it hard; there is a faintly half-an-Outsider-shaped (whatever that even means) hole through one of its ends.

The Outsider in question is one of a half dozen descending on the crowd, which is swirling, leaderless and afraid. A moment ago they were surrounded. Now they are... still surrounded, but not alone, and not directionless.

Thus bidden by La Sirene, the people flee, mascots leading the way.

La Sirene often calls upon 'unlight' but this... is a much more literal version of what phenomenon. These shadows are as real as the monsters casting them, which is to say, not at all, in an extraordinarily dangerous way. Just touching their SHADOW, as one flies overhead, causes the familiar little child with the pink hair, the one that they first met and charmed with the power of sugar, to freeze, rigid and colorless.

The more motherly adult near them leaps in the path of the next alien before it can hurt the frozen child. Claws are out but rather than see her cruelly eviscerated, lines of shadow pour through her, almost fractal in their complexity, something between roots and circuitry.

Then she vanishes, entirely unmade.

When, a moment later, Cure Passion leaps in foot-first to halt the monster in its path, she too feels the tug of the void on contact. A terrible cold, beyond chill, beyond even vacuum... a true and complete nothingness. But unlike a civilian, she is equipped to resist it, at least for the duration of foot-upon-face. She feels herself start to sink... into it, almost, into the shadow, but then, in a flare of red light, rebound off of it instead with a force that sends it crashing to the ground.

Endo's meteorites clear another path for the crowd, which is vital; there are too many of them to take a single street away without trampling each other. And while under the control of Moebius they might have been too indifferent to care, right now they seem to care a great deal. Right in front of everyone, they are picking each other up when they stumble; others, who had been strangers because everyone was a stranger, flee hand in hand.

And Kyouka has their backs. Her crescents tear into Outsiders and she very much gets her wish: she has their attention. A huge Outsider bears down on her, maw-first, seeking to swallow her up as happened to Jail; and three more -- the last three in this immediate neighborhood, possibly -- go straight for La Sirene, Endo, and Cure Passion, claws out. Though Kyouka's is the most direct about it, all of them are here to consume magic... and the four of them are now the featured course on the menu. They may not freeze instantly, or vanish, but given half a chance, they will certainly be spirited away.

Thankfully the ground does not start buckling towards the world's core when an Outsider falls upon it insensate; the aliens die easily, and when they do, their corrosive effect on reality seems to die with them. They don't vanish as their victims do; rather, as though succumbing to the universe they've invaded, their corpses become stone. In Labyrinth, that stone is ribbed with silicon and tiny, but unlit, LEDs.

THE BUILDING

Speaking of silicon, the collapsing building... isn't.

<NEEDLE DROP!> One Last Time - Mezame - Mai-HiME OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rudziat8H_k

The utterly massive Child of the greatest of HiME, Mikoto Minagi, reaches out and, for the time being, catches it wholesale. More obsidian reinforces, and what could have been a giant slaughter is suddenly... a chance.

A chance that Westar seizes in both hands, once he lets go of the I-bar. A chance that Fate, faster even than the lightning coursing in her arm, will not possibly miss. Between the two of them, they find and assist a dozen people in seconds. All ages lived here, old and young.

But the Outsiders that thoughtlessly took out the fourth floor just by flying through it are still here, too. Not the one that Westar destroyed, no; it's stone now. But there are several more.

Each is individually horrible. Together, as they close on Westar from either side, they are overwhelming... darkness threatening to engulf him from every direction. Fate, too, finds herself sorely beset.

As for Mikoto... the building is starting to groan. Miroku can keep stabbing obsidian into it, but this cannot last forever.

But if she doesn't do something about the creatures circling the Child like sharks, 'not forever' may shorten much more dramatically still.

THE SKY

Even from high in the air, everyone sees Miroku emerge from the ground. He absolutely towers. And his presence seems to change the trajectory of the plummeting invaders -- they would prefer to land near him, presumably because of the enormity of magic that he represents.

Said differently, Mikoto's summoning is turning the invasion from a falling blanket into a tighter stream.

Cure Black and Cure White punch and kick any that would bar Lera and Ren's path upwards; and the two Device-wielders fill the invaders with golden bolts and bronze energy spears.

The invaders come and they come and they come -- and they die and they die and they die.

There's no sign of the rainbow one -- there are just too many -- and some are arresting their falls to slam at Lera from above, Ren somehow from below as one falls ''backwards'', and Pretty Cure from either side. They don't seem to mind hitting one another, as long as they can get a chance to devour their prey. When they get close enough, they explode into a more liquid form that feels like it SHOULD smell like blood, but the only recognizable viscera is the girls' own, should it be shed. The monsters are ichorous, slimy, and move like -- like ten thousand worms in a bag.

Ten thousand worms in a bag that want to consume you.

But if the girls in the sky can keep any more from reaching the ground, long enough for the ground to be cleared by the teams below...

...maybe they can save the good people of Labyrinth.

"Look!" says Tarte, pointing up, up, up:

Cure Peach, Cure Berry, and Cure Pine are climbing the Tower, one pretty, pure leap at a time. Hand in hand they swing one another higher.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Claws That Catch on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Claws That Catch on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Claws That Catch on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Outer Darkness on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Outer Darkness on Westar.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Outer Darkness on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Visceral Eruption on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Visceral Eruption on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Visceral Eruption on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Visceral Eruption on Cure White.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi braces 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Outer Darkness, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa dodges 14 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Outer Darkness, taking 21 Fatigue damage! Fate
Testarossa's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Blind applied to Fate Testarossa!
COMBAT: Cure Passion perfectly dodges 19 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Claws That Catch, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge! Cure Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar braces 40 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Outer Darkness, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Westar's Block and Parry abilities activate! Blind applied to Westar!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 9 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Claws That Catch, taking 14 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! La Sirene de Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger, Stun, and Tangle applied to La Sirene de
Diamant!
COMBAT: Lera Camry perfectly dodges 18 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Visceral Eruption, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Lera Camry's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki braces 8 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Claws That Catch, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's
Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger, Stun, Tangle, and Trap applied to Endo Naoki!
COMBAT: Cure Black neatly dodges 20 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Visceral Eruption, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Cure Black is Taunted!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"Yeah... yeah, there is," Lera says, with a glance at Fate. She smiles. "So let's make sure there is an after."

Then, there's a last smile at Setsuna. And a nod; she'll be back.

It's about all she can promise.

She takes off -- again with a careful grip on Black -- and glances sideways at Ren. She flashes her best friend a grin, then nods. "Let's go, Ren-chan!"

She makes a 'whumph' sound of surprise, when Black ''kicks'' one ofthose things away from her -- and she looks sideways at her. "Nice shot!" she says in English. Then, back to Japanese: "It's handy having someone watch my six up here!"

But... she needs to drop her onto, to quote, a 'big one.' She looks to the side -- sees one flying at her side -- and she shouts: "HANG ON!"

She shoots upward, over a suitably large one, and then swings in to put Black down on it. Lera flips around -- gives her a peace sign -- and then turns around. There's a glance at Miroku, and then at Peach, Pine, and Berry.

Lera exhales before she dives down amdist them, and swings Soaring Sky into a group of them. Her blade lights up, an arc of white-gold light exploding off it and into the ranks of the Outsiders.

<Radiant Saber!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Radiant Saber on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"Everything for Labyrinth!" Passion agrees with Westar, finding it far more suitable than the old saying. And she means it. But then, they have gone their spearate ways. The terrible creatures remind Setsuna of one of the times she nearly left all the worlds she knows. ...But she will fight them. Because--

At the plaza she calls out. She sees the little one go frozen. She sees another disappear. "NO!" Passion cries. Then, she kicks. She feels the tug of the void... But she will not allow it.

"I am Cure Passion!" Setsuna calls to the people of Labyrinth. "Protector of Earth... and Denizen of Labyrinth!"

A huge outsider bears down on her in the midst of her friends, but Cure Passion doesn't hesitate. She is not spirited away by the Outsider, because she is not ''there'' when it strikes, abrubtly ''gone'' in a flash of crimson light.

"Haaaah--!"

She ''crashes'' down, not for the one that went for her, but for the one that is drawing on Endo.

"GIVE THEM BACK!" she cries, and blurs. Her fist slams down towards the Outsider. She recognized the effect--so instead of one large punch, she trails off with a ''flurry'' of smaller, never maintaining contact for more than an instant, but each one glowing crimson as surely as she is.

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Crimson Flash on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki partially dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 44 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! Pink Moon Stick is Psyched! Kyouka Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo is in the plaza and amidst the other three magical girls within just a few seconds more. Just in time to meet one of the Outsiders swooping down to snatch him up. They come together with a vicious crash, sword embedding in the alien force and claws sinking into the knight's barrier jacket.

It looks for a moment like he will face the consequences of his actions until Cure Passion's strikes shake him loose from the monstrosity.

"Passion!" Endo calls, "Thanks!" He's not going to let her efforts go to waste, Fallen Stern soon raised to take a chunk out of the intruder once the Precure has set him free.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Blauverschiebung on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"Of course. ... There are people I have to come back to." She tells her, before glancing to Miroku to see if he'll be good. Fortunately, he seems to tolerate this for now, before trying her best to smile for Lera...

But the moment they're in flight... the smile vanishes again, as if in worry.

Fate looks back at her metallic boots as Mikoto suggests... unfortunately, the heels don't add enough, yet. One day.

Fate's coming out of a building, when she sees Miroku holding it up, while Westar directs the evacuation. "Westar-! Here!" And Fate comes down to deposit an elderly woman in his arms before flying back up.

"That was very clever!" She calls to him of the forklift and it's I-Beams, but as she makes her next pass, and the spell fades from her arm, Fate finds so many outsiders flying around, and towards-

There's only a moment's hesitation, before she dives right in, grasping another young man, flying through as they swarm after her like streams of darkness...

... and for one moment that lingers farm too long, both of them vanish... then abruptly she bursts through - them, the building - and rather than glass, computer like material flies, melting, disintegrating in mid-air... she dives down, as the darkness follows. "Hang on!"

One arming the young man who's wordlessly gasping she swings down, and grasps the blade Mikoto plunged into the building, turning, and swinging it around at the Outsiders following behind her.

<Blade Impulse>

A line of energy erupts, arcing out towards the Outsiders, splitting the air as it streaks towards them.

...

...

...

As Fate takes a breath from her near... she doesn't know, just that it was awful - experience, she puts the young man down... and...

"You should ask Westar for his autograph after. It'll make him happy."

The young man - who looked similarly haunted from the near-I don't even know-experience previously gives her a look like 'autograph???' as she flies back into the fray, chasing after more Outsiders, as she makes the interminable slog back towards the building's inside.

They're not nearly done here.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Blade Impulse on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure White dodges 9 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Visceral Eruption, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Cure White's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Visceral Eruption, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

One after another, civilians are evacuated from the building. Maybe the sight of a familiar Executive is helping - a little normalcy amid the chaos. Westar bellows commands, directs people to the safest way down Miroku's spikes, and for a moment he's almost able to forget about the utter horror that is trying to devour his city.

Unfortunately, the utter horror has not forgotten him.

An Executive of Labyrinth has more magic than the average citizen, meaning that he might be seen as a tasty snack - if such a concept makes sense. Westar does see one lunging, and breaks away from the path of evacuation to block its path; other sinuous creatures emerge through walls and ceilings, surrounding him in a writhing swarm of darkness.

As unknowable as the feeling might be, it's almost nostalgic; light was never permitted in the larger Dark Fall meetings, after all. This feels different in many ways; the things unseen writhe horribly, flooding his vision, pulling at his sense of self.

First, he has to endure. Recall the feeling of having even his sorrows drained for Moebius, and try to stand firm.

Second, warn the civilians. He shouts out, muffled by the ''things'' swarming him. "Get out of here - the building isn't going to hold!"

Third, he can't see what's attacking him. But he knows it's surrounding him, that the Outsiders are everywhere - so Westar applies all his tactical expertise, and decide the thing to do is punch in every direction at once.

COMBAT: Westar has used Familiar Old Punching Routine on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 26 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion's Crimson Flash, taking 11 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 19 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Radiant Saber, taking 28 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 23 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Blauverschiebung, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick counters 12 Fatigue damage from Westar's Familiar Old Punching Routine, taking 35 Fatigue damage! Westar
is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Space Invasion, partially gets through, doing 8 Fatigue damage to Westar!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 9 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Blade Impulse, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa
is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

As the lances fade away after finding their targets, Ren curves around in the air. At the same time, Cure White delivers some serious blows of her own, even managing to rip one of the Outsiders in half with some assistance from Cure Black!

"Nice one!" Ren cheers, then pauses for a bit when her passenger requests to be dropped onto one of the flying creatures. There's a moment when Ren almost asks, "Are you sure?", but then she pushes that thought aside and only nods affirmatively. "You got it!"

If there's anything Ren knows about Cures, it's that they are more than capable of taking care of themselves. She still marvels at the sheer amount of poise and strength they possess. After giving White another friendly squeeze, she veers off to the left and does as requested, dropping the other magical girl onto a passing Outsider.

"Show 'em whose boss!" She shouts encouragement after White as she's carried away.

<Incoming!> The familiar mental ping and voice of Heraut warns, cluing Ren in to the fact that she's in danger of being smashed! She tries an aerial evasion maneuver, managing to get out of the way of a few of the divebombing Outsiders. But it's the one that decides to fall ''backwards'' that she's unable to avoid, smashing into her with enough force to illicit a surprised yelp and a few moments of topping head over heels through the air. She rights herself soon enough, thankfully, and shakes her head to clear her blurred vision.

Once it does clear, she's rewarded with the scene taking place below on the surface. Miroku, huge and unable to be missed, has been summoned and is doing his part despite being circled by a flock of hungry-for-magic predators. She can see signs of further battling going on in the plaza as well, and hopes their efforts there bear success.

"I won't let you down!" Ren shouts down to her allies, then turns to continue her own portion of the ongoing fight. "Heraut!"

On command, the gauntlet on her right fist ''ignites'', the gems on it sparkling magnificently. She then streaks off towards the nearest swarm, rearing her shining fist back.

"Take this! <EFFULGENT...>" Upon reaching the swarm, she thrusts her fist forward. <...KNUUUUCKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLE!>

And that's when there's an ''explosion'' that lights up the sky!

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used Effulgent Knuckle: Strike on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

These are dire times, but Kyouka will take some heart in how the people of Labyrinth have grown and changed in such a short period of time. How they're helping each other, trying defend each other, pull each other up when they fall.

It fuels her determination to save them all the more. They don't deserve this--and as long as Kyouka has strength within her she is determined to see them save.

"No!" she cries out as she sees first one is frozen and then another is unmade entirely.

And that feeling drives her forward too. There's too much at risk to succumb to despair.

But meanwhile she has her own problems to deal with. She tried to get the attention ot the Otusiders and she has it. One comes for her, she stares--it's so hard to see ''what'' it is, a shape and form that both is and isn't something that can be readily perceived. That moment of trying to figure out just what's going on almost costs her as those jaws come for her--

Strike Wolf speaks up. <Kyouka.>

Right. Kyouka moves, both just in time and not fast enough. She avoids the fate of Jail, of being swallowed whole. But she's not fast enough to avoid those jaws clamping down over ''most'' of her, leaving an a head an arm and a leg free to resist. She shudders, as she feels the pull of that oblivion, that chill spreading through her body from the contact. "Let... go...!" she gets out through gritted teeth. And when the beast opens those jaws, perhaps to attempt a second bite, Kyouka rockets out of there.

And just like the denizens of Labyrinth are helping each other out in this moment, Kyouka isn't going to leave a fellow magical defender hanging. "Diamant!" she shouts, as she rockets forward along the ground. "Strike Wolf! Let's do it!"

<Affirmative.>

If touching these things is dangerous, then she'll just have to cushion her blow. A band of energy appears around her gauntlet s she runs, and her gauntlet starts to shine brightly. "Lunaaaaar--" She jumps, swings, and punches at the outsider trapping Diamant, releasing a small explosion of violet-white energy to hopefully keep her fist from making too much contact. "IMPACT!"

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Lunar Impact on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Westar-senpai!" Mikoto calls, with relief, seeing him take charge to direct the citizens of Labyrinth to safety. If he's on their side, maybe things will be okay--!!

But even with Fate's speed, and Westar's leadership, it's an entire ''building'' of people. An entire building which is -- again -- an entire building, even more massive than Miroku's massive frame. Worse --

"Rrrrgh--!" Mikoto yells, as she leaps forward to slice Miroku-the-sword through an Outsider coming for Miroku-the-Child. One out of a stream of them, all coming in to settle by her. No -- by ''him.'' They want...

"Miroku, put it down!" Mikoto yells, as Miroku, impossibly, shifts his grip on the building to set it down, its fourth floor now its base. More of those spires rise up to trap (to support?) it in place, as the Child moves to the side, wresting himself completely from the earth which is his elemental home. He lifts a palm to capture her, and brings her up to the back of his carapace; he knows what she's going to say, long before she says it. "They're looking at us. We'll move away from Labyrinth people!"

She knows they're leaving the building on borrowed time -- and surely very ''little'' borrowed time -- but if she can just distract them, draw them away from the evacuation, then at least Fate and Westar won't have to fight two battles at once.

It's better this way, anyway. If they get to a place free of people... Miroku can't fight freely with so many targets he's not allowed to ''hit.'' He swoops away from the building, and turns, lifting his great-club high -- before he SLAMS it down on the Outsiders pursuing his magical energies, cratering the ground for metres around it.

It's dangerous, she knows, to be noticed. To be ''seen.''

But if they're looking at her, they're not looking at the citizens of Labyrinth.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Efface on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The Things sweep towards la Sirene as she rests one foot upon Labyrinth. The stellate pattern around her body relaxes but she has little time save to brace herself as the things begin to smash into each other.

What comes is something noisome and wet. Like grasping a sea slug, la Sirene thinks for a moment, the closest approximation she can make -- which is at least in the right ballpark on one axis, but ignores the three other axes on which such a thing might be assessed.

For one thing, she had that feeling when they were still about three meters away.

They don't stay that far away. But before the plague falls directly upon her, something happens. A miracle rescue - borne by Kyouka. La Sirene looks up towards Kyouka, relief in her pale eyes, and she has the chance to vault back a step afterwards. There is a burst -- enough for la Sirene to dive and tumble through. "Mercibeaucoup," she pants in the direction of Kyouka during the maneuver, rising up and immediately swirling with a scrape from her diamond-soled shoes to face the tide again. "How is it? How are they?" she asks, before pivoting round and swinging up her left hand for an old and trusted ally. Left arm swings up despite a passing hiss; right rises: "Les Mysteres," la Sirene breathes, before taking another deep breath as she concludes with a cry of invitation: "COME!"

The shimmering light echoes vast and cryptic shadows against that darkened signs. But the signs in the silver light's backwash, even as the 'fist' of lush darkness smashes inwards, are things of comfort and comprehension to human eyes.

Her eyes flick upwards momentarily. "... I hope we can..." She does not complete the sentence. The enormity of the situation is too vast.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Les Mysteres on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Ren Aizawa's Effulgent Knuckle: Strike, taking 29 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa is Psyched!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 29 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Efface, taking 43 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Mikoto Minagi is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick neatly dodges 36 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Les Mysteres, taking 9 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 24 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Lunar Impact, taking 20 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Squeezing Lera's wrist hard enough to hurt a little, Black weathers the sudden shifts in momentum needed to manuever over to the Outsider. "Got it," she confirms, when they are over it, and she lets go. Her pink boots slam down into the squirming, amorphous mass of the Outsider, and Cure Black founders for a moment, high-stepping like she was in a ball pit at a birthday party.

Dropping down from Ren, Cure White too lands atop an Outsider, listing to one side. With a limpid cry, she is forced to put a hand down on the creature, and some wobbling limb of it reaches blindly around to try and pin her down there.

"White!" Cure Black launches herself off the Outsider she's standing on, jumping off it before it can attack her. She lands next to Cure White, who rolls out of the way of the plummeting Outsider-limb and onto her feet. She looks down at her boots, her thick eyebrows lifting in surprise at how stable her footing is. Gradually her heels are starting to sink.

"I think this part of them is non-Newtonian!" she shares excitedly.

Black's eyes swing down to the indicated patch on the monster, and she instantly hauls her fist back. She has no idea what that means, but it sounds bad. "On it!"

"Wait--!"

The rippling green patch of monster-mass that Cure Black slams her fist down into shifts from a thick gelatin to something like steel as Black's knuckles slam into it. The impact is thunderous, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, and Cure White stumbles, almost falling off. For an instant, it seems like the suddenly metal-hard 'flesh' is unharmed. But then, with groan like a great rock splitting, it bursts, and a massive spray of squirming ichor blasts up into and around Black. Cure White covers her face from the eruption, her white raiment spattered. Suddenly slack, the Outsider begins to list to the side, its flight becoming a fall.

The two Pretty Cure leap as one, landing on an approaching Outsider. "Mou!" Cure White huffs. "I meant it's a good place to land, see? Its viscosity is determined by stress instead of temperature and pressure!" She hops, so that when she lands, the green patch hardens again, supporting her weight.

Cure Black punches a reaching blob of the Outsider away from herself, while White does the same to another with a palm strike. "I thought you were saying it was some kind of weapon!"

"We learned non-Newtonian fluids in the fall semester!" White stomps the green section to harden it again. "And please don't automatically attack something if you think I said it's dangerous!"

"Even if you say that," Black winks, just before stomping a reaching tendril back down into the Outsider's body. "I'm still going to do it. If somebody's really tough, I want to see if I can win."

"Ah," Cure White replies, unable to answer properly as Black has already lept away. Following, she is a half-second behind her partner for a few leaps. But as she speeds up to catch up, Black slips during a jump, and White ends up leaving her behind. Gritting her teeth, she manages to land on the bottom of the Outsider she's approaching instead of the top, shove off, and return, to where Black is shakily rising to her feet. "Go! I'm right behind you."

Cure Black shakes her head. "I don't... feel good."

Kicking away attacks with a few sharp motions of her foot, White drags Black fully upright with one hand, then turns to her. Disoriented by the sudden change from confidence to terror, she clutches onto Black's upper arms, searching her body for wounds, her eyes for answers. "What happened? Black!"

Cure Black looks at her, dazed. "We're high up... we're so high up. If we fall... even we would... right?"

"We need to jump," White insists, as the Outsider deforms to try and engulf them. "Green spot. Now!"

The two jump together, landing on the next Outsider up, and then, with an effort, again, onto the next. "Getting... there..." Black tries to assure herself. "Probably... I can jump again."

This world is ending -- the universe, absolutely on the brink -- and Cure White has eyes only for Cure Black. She lets the final battle swirl around her, and her inaction is almost a defiance in itself, of all the violence that threatens. There is something more urgent now to do then punch a monster. "Tell me!" White insists, taking a moment as the current Outsider seems too bent on approaching the courtyard to bother with its passengers yet.

"There's no time for--"

"Tell me," White says, gently this time. And this time, somehow, Cure Black obeys instantly.

"I think it... it got in my mouth," Black says faintly. "They... don't even hate us, they're just... empty. From this height, it won't matter, right?" She's babbling, looking at White, pleading. "It doesn't matter how much... I don't want you to fall."

There is always something more precious to do than fight. Lacrosse games, library sessions, picnic outings... there have been so many interruptions to their ordinary life. But here, now, today, one girl interrupts their extraordinary one for the other.

"Ne, Blacku," White says, very seriously, as she cradles the hearts on the back of her partner's fists and turns them over to reveal her bronze-and-black palms. She traces Black's life lines with her thumbs, so lightly that it's almost imagination, yet the slightest trace of her touch leaves a blaze behind exactly the opposite of the icy nothingness the Outsiders bring. "It's too late to stop me from falling."

Her eyes are so blue, and her skin is so pale, and her lips are so, so soft, as they brush against the cheek of Cure Black. It is a brief contact, by any normal measure. But when all they can afford is an instant, everything they cannot afford becomes extravagance.

The cold teeth gnawing at the edge of Cure Black's mind suddenly find their sharp tips melting as her thoughts flood with warm, golden light. That awareness remains there, gnawing, gnawing. But against the awestruck, reeling joy those teeth now seek to tear apart, they begin to melt down to nothing but raindrops.

"...it's not fair, is it?" Black says, her eyes fully back in focus, and only for Cure White. Her fingers dance with White's for a moment, then meet them tip-to-tip. "For these things to have to fight a girl who managed to go out with you."

COMBAT: Cure White has used Falling For You on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Cure Black accepts Cure White's Falling For You, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Black is Cheered!
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Sen no Sen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 24 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Sen no Sen, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Dodge!
Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

THE PLAZA

Though just for a moment, Endo and La Sirene get snatched up by an Outsider apiece. The pain would be terrible, should be beyond description, but the... nothingness... that spreads through their bodies from the prolonged contact, is somehow even more frightening.

Thankfully it does not last for long. Cure Passion crashes down to free Endo with many swift and crimson punches; Kyouka sets La Sirene loose with a single, silver-violet slam.

Thus freed, Endo uses the business end of Fallen Stern (though, let's face it, like a cat which is pointy in six out of seven directions, every end of Stern means business) to bisect the one after Cure Passion; and Les Mysteres engulf and consume the huge Outsider that almost ate Kyouka. When the silver fades, only stone remains... all gaping maw.

It still looks hungry.

But for the moment, the plaza is clear of both people and monsters.

Someone even picked up the frozen child and brought them along to hide.

THE BUILDING

Mikoto splits an unsolvable problem into two -- leaving the bottom half of the building for Fate and Westar to finish evacuating, while the top half, already emptied at their hands, is placed safely clear.

At her direction, Miroku strides well away, into another city center -- a wide but thankfully empty thoroughfare. There are pros and cons to using him as bait. He is VERY LARGE and difficult to kill.

But, if he does manage to be defeated...

...well, she's already in peril, isn't she? If they lose the battle on Labyrinth there will be no Tokyo left to save.

Still... it makes every chunk of him taken out by Outsiders extra frightening, in its way.

And it makes the way that his club absolutely OBLITERATES them into a crater intensely satisfying -- frighteningly so.

This violence, isn't it what Mikoto was born to do?

Or was it what she was made to do?

Back in the bottom half of the building, Fate and Westar have a quarter-problem apiece, now: half the Outsiders and half the people. The former they can solve extremely efficiently with blade and fist respectively -- and a good half dozen of the aliens fall to the floor. Half their corpses bear Westar punch-shaped pockmarks. The other half make twice as many statues as their original numbers would have suggested.

Having dispatched them swiftly, it is a simple matter to evacuate the last of the people. They are enormously grateful, though one of them, a young woman, tells Westar admiringly:

"You don't have to be an executive anymore... you can be something else! Something better!"

IN THE SKY

By the time Ren has righted herself in midair the Outsiders are swarming her -- their shadows frigid and dense, their bodies only moreso. Fortunately she has an answer to this problem and it starts with 'eff' and ends in 'k(le)' and ''wow'' that was a really big explosion! Look out below, because two dozen ex-Outsiders are going to be making deep impressions when their stone bodies impact the ground.

And Lera notices the Fresh Precure determined to help their fourth, newest, and most beloved member save her people. Soaring in, she covers their ascent with arc after arc of white-gold light exploding off of Soaring Sky. And when they reach the top...

"Nasty things, nasty things, fly away!"

Cure Peach puts her hand in.

"Soar, melody of love! Cure Stick, Peach Rod!"

Cure Berry is next, like a football huddle.

"Echo, rhythm of hope! Cure Stick, Berry Sword!"

Cure Pine is last, making a Y of their three arms.

"Flutter, harmony of prayers, Cure Stick, Pine Flute!"

Artifacts in hand, they thrust them towards the sky, and shout as one:

"PRETTY CURE..."

Pink, blue and golden light erupts from the tip of the tower and begins to flow downward.

"...TRIPLE..."

Faster and faster it falls like a curtain over the city... until it hits the ground.

"...FRESH!!"

The Outsider Black and White are riding -- which, inexplicably, evaded a big punch from the former by hollowing itself out like a donut, which is not just non-Newtonian but non-reality, hits the sparkling curtain of Pretty Cure power and... bounces. It's like a giant circus tent of love, hope, and faith.

And, as the others will learn almost immediately, it is decidedly one-way.

They have cleared the ground; and the city can no longer be attacked by air.

They have saved Labyrinth for the second time in two hours.

Now it's time to save every other world.

High, high above, a prismatic Outsider is glimpsed behind countless others, getting closer and closer to the portal from whence they've all come.

<NEEDLE DROP!> One Last Time - Rise - Origa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJjscA9Zvcw

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Endo, La Sirene, Kyouka, and herself. Cure Passion keeps fighting, but she will fight to keep these precious friends safe too, as well as the people of Labyirnth.

"NOT ONE MORE!" she calls, and when the one becomes stone, it is an ''effort'' not to try to shatter it. She keeps hold of that feeling, though.

After all, anger is a feeling too.

The child has been picked up. And up, up, above--

"Everyone!" Passion calls, seeing her friends, her sisters, perform the move that stymied her so many times. She smiles, deespite the terror and horror all around them.

But only a moment. Because there is more they have to do. She looks up to find her friends, her girlfriend. She looks to Lera for just a moment, and is so happy to see that glow that says she's all right. ...But that's a feeling she will share with her later. For now--

"Let's go!"

Cure Passion will call upon Akarun's power once again--and ''blip'' out of existence at the plaza.

...Only to blip right back, next to Cure Peach and Cure Berry and Cure Pine.

"Everyone!" she says. "I knew you'd..."

She stops herself. "I'll--say later. Thank you."

Then she calls, "LERA!"

"...We'll finish this together," she says, and holds a hand over her heart, just for a moment.

With the Cures, with her friends--with Lera--

Cure Passion turns towards their enemy, and readies herself again to fight.

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Together Again on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Cure Passion's Together Again, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Cheered!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"Good job, Ren-chan!" Lera cries out to her, as she sweeps around in midair. She looks down at Peach, Pine, and Berry -- and she gives them a peace sign, too. She looks back at Cure Black and Cure White.

She looks then at Cure Passion -- blinking once when she appears, with a flash -- and then she grins. She reaches out, taking the hand that was over Passion's heart.

She squeezes once. "Yeah," she agrees, as she starts to lift upward. She beams down at her, her hand lifting up as she hovers up above this girl from another world that she fell in love with, all hose years ago. Her amber eyes sparkle as she looks down at her.

"Together, Passion. Nothing's gonna stop us now!"

Which is when the sword on her back chimes, and a tinny tune begins to play.

BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wxyN3z9PL4

"Sky, I swear to god."

<Worth it.>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Let 'Em Say We're Crazy on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Cure Passion accepts Lera Camry's Let 'Em Say We're Crazy, taking 0 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Even Miroku is having a hard time, isn't he? Swords really have it rough... she remembers when Bardiche broke, and how long it took for Amy to put him back together.

She doesn't want to think about what would happen if Miroku broke.

Fortunately, the building breaks just as Miroku planned, long before the Child might, and she zooms in and out slashing and slashing, while grabbing people one by one that couldn't make it out on their own to Westar's calls. As the young woman calls out to Westar, Fate smiles and says... "... The best really is yet to come for him."

Despite the situation, she can actually believe it, can pull on that thread of hope that he'll get to define who he is yet, that she'll get a life yet with her little sisters, as they define who they are as well.

Her hands may be small, but she hopes, they're able to help give that gift to them.

But high - high up - she hears the Pretty Cure call, and with a sudden swish of a turn, she looks at the Pretty Cure Triple Fresh... and... something else that makes her look agog... at two on the back of a bug.

... "Looks like we need to go up there fast."

And with Miroku... Mikoto no longer needs help but...!

"Miroku! Grab Westar!"

... She probably isn't giving that as much thought as she ought to. But it'll probably work out! It's just, she's flying up before actually making sure it did.

Higher and higher she flies, slashing - and slashing, each slice of the blade flashing with an arc of lightning, and a crack of thunder.

Perhaps... if she catches up, she'll be able to figure out how she feels by then...

And as she catches up seeing their hands... Sky's reaction... it is unfortunately now, that Fate Testarossa catches up, as she comments...

"... I guess it's a teenager thing."

Hand Holding... Kissing... during a fight! Look apparently Black and White followed by Lera and Passion left an impression on the child.

"They must not be able to help themselves."

It sounds less judgmental, more than matter of fact, like she's learned something on this day.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Aerial Ace on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

There are certain dangers to using one's Child; they have never been elucidated. Would Mikoto use herself as bait, if she knew it wasn't her life she was putting on the line? She thinks she will die, if Miroku falls. She doesn't remember the context of why she thinks such a thing -- the necklace which shattered. Trauma is so often a story told in pieces, never to be put together in quite the way it broke.

What-if has never been a realm at which she excels, though. She is a material girl, existing in the present, with what she tastes and smells and hears; that manner of ''doing'' has always made her so good at violence, acting where others would pause. Nature or nurture, it's still part of her...

... but so are the voices of her friends. And since they're part of her, they're part of Miroku, too -- whether he likes it or not. "Right!" Mikoto calls, to Fate, speaking where her Child cannot.

Miroku turns, jetting above the ground -- he ''floats,'' in exactly the way a brick shouldn't, with thrusters which flare with an unknown fuel as he moves through the air -- to reach Westar again. Just as Fate told him, he reaches out, and grabs the once-Executive of Labyrinth.

And maybe the thing Westar will get to be next is a ''squeeze ball,'' because Miroku does, in fact, ''grab'' him. "Miroku!" Mikoto chastises him, and it's only after she does that he stops squeezing so tightly.

It ''is'' possible to leap astride him, for anyone... brave enough. After a moment hovering there, though, that massive Child takes to the skies, a hovering orb of death which swings his greatclub into that outpouring of Outsiders as he ascends.

The most pressing matter, of course, remains the pressure Westar's enduring.

It's ''like'' a hug, as if the hug came from someone who hates just about everything.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Embrace on Westar.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

At last, Westar staggers out of the darkness. The worse for wear, the eldritch has gnawed at him, but he got the better of the exchange probably. His eyes are still adjusting to the light and un-light of the strange situation, but he can make out where people are still emerging from the wreckage of the upper building. Rubble is easy enough to move out of the way, and once people are clear - well, it's easy enough to mark for demolition later, the foundations will need to be checked but that's standard procedure when replacing infrastructure...

The comment from one fellow denizen catches Westar off-guard. He's surprised, bashful, contemplative all in the span of a few seconds. "...huh. I don't, do I. Kinda turned into habit after introducing myself as one for so long...but you're right! I've memorized lots of recipes, maybe I could be a cook!"

There's a shout from on high, a storm of brilliant triple light raining down on Labyrinth - and despite everything, despite the change in circumstances, Westar ''flinches'' because this one's going to hurt.

And then it doesn't hurt, and he remembers that he's on Precure's side now. Huh. Still feels weird to think that.

The light is bright, and Westar's spirits are lifted by the realization that Labyrinth is safe...and then dampened by seeing an all too familiar sight. A giant monster has been battered by the trials of this battle, and might need assistance. After making sure the civilians are sorted, Westar starts running towards Miroku and Mikoto.

They aren't ''too'' far away, and he waves both arms in the air. "Minagi! Didn't know you had a giant monster to summon too - Miroku, right? Nice to meet you, and th-"

Fate calls out something tactical, and Mikoto seconds the command - and suddenly there is a very large hand reaching out to dwarf Westar.

"Eh?"

Westar vanishes into Miroku's inexorable grip as the Child takes to the skies, muffled words unable to escape its ominous might. It takes all of Westar's muscular strength to even get his head free of the fist, and he lets out a gasp when he does. A moment while he tries to meet that baleful gaze - that hatred that burns like a forsaken star.

Westar looks away first, and notices just how high they've gotten. "...uh. Thanks for helping out, you two! (Please don't drop me.)"

COMBAT: Westar accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Embrace, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Westar is Cheered!
COMBAT: Westar has used Everything For Labyrinth on Mikoto Minagi.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka comes for Diamant's assailant, and Diamant, in turn, calls forth Les Mysteres to attack hers. "Thanks!" says Kyouka as she touches down momentarily from launching her attack. She catches that glance of Diamant's and looks up.

There ''is'' a lot. Kyouka can't deny that. But she reaches out to clasp a hand on Diamante's shoulder. "I know. But as long as we stick together, we'll pull through. Right?"

But the streets are clear, for the moment as she looks around. "Okay. That's one problem down, then." She looks over to the building that was collapsing, and... She's ''gotta'' remember to ask about Childs at some point. "Two problems, then..."

But then she looks up to the sky again, considering. She rolls her neck a little bit as she considers. "Then it looks like it's time to take the fight to them." She pounds a fist into a palm.

She doesn't even have to explain her crazy idea for Strike Wolf to know it what it is, or to know the answer to she'll get. "You ready?"

<Affirmative.>

<SoundTracker> Break Through It All - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S3D0HSywGg

"Alright then." Kyouka kneels, legs tensed as a circle of bright violet enrgy erupts around her, filled with Midchildan runes. And after a moment another one grows from that, and then a third, and a fourth. She's charging up an enormous amount of power...

Suddenly her legs untense, and a shockwave of pressure ''bursts'' from her as she rockets upwards towards the rest of the fight with sheer velocity. The long belt behind her whips around wildly in the wind, her hair whips about, but her barrier jacket keeps her vision clear as the air rushes past her, filling her ears with noise.

Higher and higher she goes, and when she gets within range of an outsider her trajectory ''just'' about starts to slow... but then another circle erupts from her feet, and after a moment it channels magic up into her body, giving her a faint violet aura. <Sonic Blitz,> announces Strike Wolf.

Kyouka turns, and then kicks off the air as she releases a pulse of mana from the heel of her boot. In an instant she zips right at the outsider, twisting to kick it for the barest of moments--which lets her redirect her trajectory up, and with a flicker of movement she's suddenly upon a second, higher Outsider. This time a punch, the next a knee, and on and on.

She flits with magically-enhanced speed from Outsider to Outsider as she keeps ascending.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Sonic Blitz on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Sonic Blitz, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Diversion and Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Aerial Ace, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is
Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts Westar's Everything For Labyrinth, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi is Cheered! Withstand
applied to Mikoto Minagi!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Less pointy or sharp than Endo - but that's most things. Or should we say 'Les' so?

There is time, enough, to breathe - and just about to breathe - before la Sirene looks past them. They're Winning. They HAVE won. But the other one became... stone? La Sirene's eyes turn towards it, mistrusting the creature thus fossilized. But then she turns her head to see Mikoto - to see that enormous horrible form of Miroku...

And yet, Miroku strives for righteous cause today.

La Sirene smiles, a small thing. First to Endo, then towards Kyouka, towards Passion. And then she looks upwards.

The stream of horror is coming... but so is Pretty Cure.

For some reason she feels like smiling again. Her left hand raises up to veil her eyes, or her face. She lets the smile happen. Then her head tilts down as she reaches for that ineffable feeling she held before. For her determination. For her hope. For...

The light around her does that same twinkling as it becomes a six-pointed stellate form. La Sirene smiles as she pushes herself up to the balls of her feet. Then straightens her feet out... by lifting up the toes. She has, in fatigued delirium and perhaps a deeper and more cthonic feeling, an instinct - she throws both arms above her head, like Superbia, and rises.

She moves her way to the left, too, near to Kyouka. She proffers one gloved hand -- and if Kyouka should reach the apex of that mighty jump without reaching suitable targets, she gives her a boost!

After that she sweeps her arms out, and that glittering stellate form of the un-light ripples outwards, forming swirls of ink and luminosity. When they intersect with the outsiders, the Others, the things-in-themselves, they grip and they squeeze and they surge - tidal forces, pressing.

Water tends to win out against stone, in the final analysis.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Polyploia on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 23 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Polyploia, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Steam pours from the gauntlet, discharging heat from the powerful punch. Watching the defeated Outsiders turn to stone and crash to the ground is ''highly'' satisfying for Ren. "That oughta show 'em!" She quips, pounding her fist into her other hand.

"Thanks Lera-chan!" Ren calls back, "Same to you!" It's important to encourage your allies. It helps them kick butt better. Ren's seen it -- and experienced it herself, for that matter!

Speaking of which, she turns to look down at the plaza, searching for the familiar mind of a certain sword-wielding boy she's madly in love with.

~Endo! When we get back home, let's go out for Bulgogi! All you can eat!~

Some say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

This is very much true for Endo Naoki.

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used An Ardent Promise! on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Ren Aizawa's An Ardent Promise!, taking 0 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo shudders at the lingering not-feeling of the Outsider's claws despite their temporary victory. A very small one in the face of Labryinth's ruptured sky and the limitless invaders that lurk in what remains.

But you have to start somewhere.

<BGM> DETERMINATION - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssS-UIKZh8

Endo goes up. Fine aerial control lines in the realm of other mages... but straight lines are his speciality.

"Stern!" The boy barks, "This time!"

<THIS TIME.> The device affirms. <ENGAGE: ZERSTORUNG DRANG.>

Purple-black energy lights his path, bleeding off the dark metal of his device as magic races across its edges and sharpens them into lines somehow even more vicious. It fills the lingering nothingness from the Outsider's touch with heat and power.

"Lera! Black and White! Ren!" He calls out to those already lingering in the firmament. It's the latter he meets there, hand extending to snatch his girlfriend's."It's a deal." He informs her, pushing down the fear.

"Everyone! Let's work up an appetite."

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> San nin no Kizuna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFONk94CY-E

Two Pretty Cure, black and white, bound along up the neverending stream of Outsiders. Making little effort at damaging them now, they focus on catching up to their target, using the non-Newtonian patches on the monsters to make quick, stable jumps, mostly together, sometimes separating for a jump or three.

"Fresh Precure!" Cure White alerts Cure Black happily, as she notices familiar attacks flit past in fragments, their primary brunt already exhausted on the rows of Outsiders beneath them.

"Hm?" Cure Black smiles the smile of a girl so happy to hear Cure White's voice at the moment that it's difficult for her to understand what she's saying. Her cheeks are flushed with shy pride. Yet her focus, unlike her language retention at the moment, cannot be criticized, her leaps precise, her athleticism on full display in evading attacks. "Oh," Black figures it out belatedly after an embarrassed White jerks her head towards the ground. "CURE PINE! EVERYONE!"

Earlier in this dangerous journey, the Outsiders had not seemed to understand to protect the payload of energies headed towards the portal. But whether by intention or by dint of their increased density, they begin to whizz directly at Black and White more often. "Fullbacks, huh?" Black asks.

"We need to clear some of them out," White notes, evading one with a twist of her body. "Keep them off me?"

"Can do."

As the two land on the next Outsider, Cure Black steps forward, while Cure White inhales, gathers her chi with a scooping motion of her hands, and drops a devastating stomp on the Outsider's body. With a grinding shove of her foot, she spreads the weird matter of the dead creature out, and it catches like a sail, its descent slowing. Suddenly, the periodic whizzing-by of Outsiders mutiplies immensely, and Cure Black is immediately beset. Hurling punch after punch, the short-haired Pretty Cure pounds the Outsiders out of the way, gaining momentum and force as she goes, working her shoulders through the blows. She can see they are losing ground, but trusting her partner, she hastens her punches further, keeping up with the increasing drumroll of enemies.

Slowly rotating her arms, White watches the passing Outsiders, letting Black defend her. The moment one passes by close enough to reach, she lashes out, like a trained monk catching a fish by hand. Wrapping the monster in an agile grapple, she twists, drops her torso and points her boot to heaven, and hurls the Outsider directly into the oncoming stream of enemies. THUMP THUMP THUMP, impact by impact the being is torn to pieces, but not before it does the same damage in return to the first several it runs into.

Four more times Cure White repeats this trick, catching fish from the river, dumping them over her body in a martial throw, and clearing the path more and more. Black's enemies hit her faster and faster, each demanding a hard and precise punch, until the exhalations of effort begin to hit a familiar cadence. "HAAAAATCHACHACHACHA!"

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP goes the last Outsider White throws. "Now!" She says. And bounding forward, the two take advantage of the empty tunnel of air they have created, rapidly progressing where they had been reduced to a slow crawl before. Their target... and the portal, is ahead.

COMBAT: Cure Black has used Hundred Fierce Fists on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Heaven and Earth Throw on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 24 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Hundred Fierce Fists, taking 20 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to counter Cure White's Heaven and Earth Throw, taking 44 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Space Invasion, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Cure White!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Endo Naoki's Zerstorung Drang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Empower applied to Endo Naoki! Cleanse! All
of Endo Naoki's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Cure White has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Black has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Passion has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Lera Camry has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Westar has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has saved her current combat state for later!

[[2025-03-15 - The Labyrinth Reawakens 2|TO BE CONCLUDED]]

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

Logs

2025-02-26T01:42:47Z

Pink Moon Stick:

2025-02-22 - The Labyrinth Reawakens

2025-02-26T01:42:03Z

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Reawakens'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''The magical girls protect Labyrinth from the Outsiders, the mysterious, magic-hungry plague not just from an alien world but an alien existence outside the known universe.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Westar]]
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
2/22/2025 - 6/17/16
|-
|}

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.
<SoundTracker> The Colour out of Space - NINGEN ISU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JY89ZxVqEg

[[2024-12-21 - The Labyrinth Resurrections 2|PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA]]

Jail Scaglietti moans from the floor. He's still alive, but only just. He still looks like a rainbow more than a person -- they haven't beaten the magic out of him, just beaten him. But it is, surely, an excellent first step in that direction.

Fate's clones were blown clear of the Devices that used them, but they're still breathing, too.

It is very quiet.

It is too quiet.

At some point, the cheering... stopped.

It was safe to assume that everyone outside, horrified by the power displayed by the enemy, by the suffering of the girls, might have been shocked into silence.

Might have been collectively holding their breath, forgetting that their belief in the magical girls has already been outcome-determinate.

And in any case, the magical girls have been fighting for their lives and the lives of Fate's sisters and the lives of everyone on every world. They shouldn't blame themselves for focusing on their task.

And especially they shouldn't blame themselves for never having the chance to figure out what was wrong with those lightning flashes.

---

A FEW MINUTES AGO

Outside, Tarte and Azukina exchange looks as yet another bolt of lightning crashes... upwards. Like running a video in reverse, it sprouts from the ground -- is attracted to the tower -- and then explodes into the sky.

The last one was teal. This one is peach.

They are striking more and more frequently; never the same color, but always the same sound -- enormous, rending crashes. Thunder that isn't backwards per se, as the lightning's direction is; but, nevertheless, is also not-so-subtly incorrect. It's as though the space that it warps through carries enough sonic hell that merely three dimensions cannot account for all of it.

Tarte is much more seasoned in the art of standing on (...near) magical girl battlefields; Azukina tenderly grasps his paw.

"...is it...a good sign? Does it mean we're... winning?"

Tarte's uncharacteristic silence is its own answer.

---

THEN

Why did an asteroid fall out of the sky over Juuban Public School the night of the astronomy event? Why did Jail send Black Sky to intercept it?

Why did the Maiden of Dreams risk everything -- and lose everything, all evidence that she accepted, if not her total destruction, certainly the loss of a greater part of herself -- to deliver the golden skein to Earth?

Why did Jail seek Chiffon?

What drove Northa to drive her Knights first to depravity and then to revolution?

What destroyed Belka, the most powerful magical civilization of all time, at the very height of its powers?

What did the girls witness, the very first time they held a slumber party to unlock these mysteries in dreams?

...they defy description. If they have eyes, they weren't evolved in this universe to see, and look nothing like what eyes would be. If they have grasping claws, or tentacles, or spikes, it is only because of a certain higher order universality of violence. But any resemblance to recognition ends there. They are hard where they should be soft, and vice versa. They are dark where they should be bright, and dark where they should be dark also, but with strange, shifting colors that, like the rest of them, have not yet existed in this dimension until now, and therefore have never been named.

One swoops down through a Miroku-made skylight, and swallows Jail Scaglietti whole.

But there's never only one.

TO

BE

CONCLUDED

NOW

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera isn't ''quite'' sure how to feel when Jail, finally, is brought low. She looks at him with a note of concern. He... might need medical attention. They'll need to get him that attention.

But there's a sense of something being wrong. She looks up, her amber eyes narrowing. Somehow, it feels quiet.

And instead of relief, she feels tension.

She can't place it -- and then she looks at Jail. Something sweeps down, into Jail.

He's swallowed. Lera shouts, screaming, and brings Sky up -- and Ground, across herself.

"What is--"

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

There are a lot of 'whys', but none of them matter to Cure Passion as much as the 'what'. Her henshin shimmers, and she is her ordinary sublime self again, and she stares for a moment at the space where the creature of some kind was. She stares, as Jail is ''gone'' of all things.

She catches Chiffon, and holds her close. "Lera..." she starts, and looks to her in that same tension.

She looks around at everyone else, next. There is so much that's happened in the last few moments. So much that's happened in the moments before that.

"...We have to go," she says.

She hands Chiffon to Cure Peach, looking into her sister's eyes for a moment--before she reaches out a hand for Lera.

"We can't..."

"We can't ignore what's happening."

She wants to leap out there right now. She wants to rush ahead.

But she's learned, painstakingly over the years, that she doesn't have to do this alone.

So she breathes, just for a moment. "...Everyone..."

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

They'd done it.

Jail laid there, battered and bruised, likely wallowing in the indignity of his own defeat. Ren paused, looking around at everyone.

They'd done it! They'd beaten him!

...Though something was ''wrong''. She could feel it in her gut, and from the way Lera was looking so did she. Ren looks to everyone else again, opening her mouth to say something when-

''Something'' swoops down, and in a flash swallows Jail before fleeing back from whence it came.

''Oh!''

Ren gasps, taking a surprised step back. Did that... really just happen?! Oh yes, it did!

"Passion's right!" She finds her voice, clenching her fists. "We have to go after it!"

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Jail falls. Mikoto does not look to him and wonder about the medical treatment he needs; she looks to him and wonders if he's really not a threat, any more. ... but Lera and Setsuna aren't moving to take care of him, so maybe that isn't the way.

She doesn't like it, still. The danger hasn't passed. It prickles at the back of her neck-hairs, vibrates through her muscles like the taut strings at a piano's back.

Lera asks what it is, and Mikoto cannot find the words, in her mind, before it happens. Don't blame her; she does not exist in a verbal world, first of all. It's always been a second language.

No wonder she snarls, when that thing dives down, as if acting on those thoughts she'd restrained. Her lips pull, tightly, up and over her teeth, exposing them as her tongue presses in behind. "Rrrrhhh..."

Setsuna finds the words she doesn't have, though -- and when Ren declares it's time to go, Mikoto nods, sharply, to her. "Right," she finds her reply, grasping Miroku tightly as she sets out.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo, sagging under both the weight of relief and the accumulated tonnage already accumulated over the course of the battle, isn't exactly prepared to stop anything that comes next.

His eyes follow the arc of the intruder as it tears by to munch up Jail, drawn from his allies and fallen enemies by the blur of color.

He agrees with the others. So he goes after it, forcing his tired body to produce the energy to do so.

"Aah, why is it always like this..." He complains, a reflex that bubbles up even through growing terror.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

OUTSIDE, WITH THE OTHERS

Batiste watches. He has nothing to say. He dry-washes his paws together.

HERE, WHERE IT ALL COMES TOGETHER

La Sirene de Diamant sways. That was a lot. A lot of a lot; and she feels weak, washed out. Like a tea-bag that's being soaked for the third time. But they've overcome him --

-- something sweeps down. Something that isn't out of a nightmare. It's not out of a nightmare because nightmares in all of their infinite horror and cryptic potentialities hold, at least, the *potential* to be understood. Perhaps they are things that could never truly be, but you could, at least in principle, understand the parts.

La Sirene de Diamant feels her back muscles spasm. She doesn't feel what was behind that right away.

"It..." Her head tilts upwards. She can't do it, she feels.

But that can't gains an asterisk after Cure Passion speaks. La Sirene breathes swiftly, five times, and her left hand comes up to rest over her face. She hunches forwards and takes two more deep breaths. She then mutters something, cryptic but clear: "If she could ride a cachalot in her undershirts, then I --"

La Sirene straightens up. Breathing quickly. But more steadily. "We must," she agrees with Ren.

To Endo, though, she says: "I suppose it's our turn to be the rescuers."

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Jail Scaglietti moans from the floor... still glowing prismatically, but he's not Fate's first concern. That would be the girls that were blown clear out of the devices, whom she swoops down to try to catch them.

"Got you!" The thought that 'you' is now capitalized for one of her little sisters crosses her mind at that moment, but she puts it out of her thoughts for long enough. It's awkward to carry two other girls who are much larger than her, but...

As she arrives at the Defenser Plus barrier she put up over 'You' the thought finally catches up and she gives her an apologetic look, before checking their breathing, and there's this sudden look of relief that passes on her face.

As she puts them down, she notes.

"We'll have to figure out a system later."

<Release.>

And the barrier suddenly fades out of existence, in strange patterns of runic fractals, and Fate asks, "You. Can I entrust them to your care? I know I'm asking a lot." Especially after how her hand burned, but... she has to trust she's capable of at least watching them.

There's something wrong with the lightning, and Fate can't place why. Ordinarily that's an impossible question, lightning is in her blood, it's in her magic. It's so much of who she is. She can summon the weather - change it - charge the atmosphere with magic and bring it down.

But she can't figure this out.

Fate turns around, and steps forward, like she's going to address him. "... Fa-" Her senses suddenly roil at something that defies her ability to perceive them. Even a glimpse is-

... and Jail is gone.

Fate stands stock still, words stolen from her, Bardiche still in her hands, and she's not certain how to feel. One deep breath, and...

"No we can't."

... she's still not certain how she really feels about the matter. Only that she has something she desires to protect, there are people here who would call her name...

... and as Passion noted, they can't ignore ''that''. Fate doesn't doubt her ability to fight any foe that she can exchange words with, or understand. This time? This time she's not so certain.

But that doesn't mean she won't try. "I... don't know." She tells Endo. And not for the first time, not for the last, she wonders the meaning of her birth.

COMBAT: Hayato Nishi transforms into Westar!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

There is a moment at the end of many of Pretty Cure's hardest battles, when stress and fear begin to fade, and compassion gains a little room to breathe. There is little room for hesitation when fighting against all odds, against opponents with more raw power and dangerous, unknown abilities, especially when one has accumulated numerous wounds oneself. But then, eventually, the foe always falls; if they did not, Cure Black and Cure White would not be standing here today. And if they still live, Cure Black often finds herself reviewing her last few actions, wondering if she could have spared them a little.

"Whew." Cure Black hops on the balls of her feet, shaking off the adrenaline, loosening her tanned muscles. She claps her palms behind her back and then in front of her belt, lightly, then closes one eye as she stretches her neck to the side. "We sure hit him hard."

White shakes her wrist delicately to disperse the sting from their double palm strike. "Your hand?" she wonders. Black's knuckles and the backs of her fists were all torn up by the imitation Sky attack.

Black grins, tired but reassuring, displaying her palm to her partner. "Not so b--"

White's palm is already against Black's. "Oh. You were showing me," she realizes.

Shyly, Cure Black smiles at her. Apologetically, White starts to move her hand away, just as Black's fingers start to close to accept the unexpected hand-touch. The perfect synchronization of their final Heart to Heart attack gives way to a brief dance of uncertainty, and the two girls pause, look at each other, and giggle a little.

"Is everybody all right?" Cure Black calls, clearing her throat. This may not be entirely over yet, not until Jail is secured. "Cure Angel Peach, do you want to--whoa! Back to normal, huh?" Maybe everything will be.

And then the least normal life(?) form Cure Black has seen in a long time, maybe ever, plunges through the collateral damage Mikoto made, and makes a meal out of the mad scientist Jail Scaglietti. Precure do not willingly watch their foes devoured, but the matter is resolved, disgustingly, before Black even fully understands what is going on. "Stop it!" Black cries, but the abomination is already fleeing. "Cure White?"

"Un," White nods sharply. Both of them could use a longer recovery break, at a minimum. Neither of them are willing to wait for it right now.

"Lera-chan," Cure Black requests, jogging over to the Device-user. "You can carry me, right?" 'Sky' seems like the Device that probably has the most extra flying power, right?

"Passion," Cure White calls, touching her shoulder gently, an intent to hang on when her friend invokes the Keyrun. "Pardon my intrusion."

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka and Strike Wolf deliver their final attack, releasing a satisfyingly large explosion of energy before they fall back to the ground. It's a heavy 3-point landing, clearing a wave of debris from around them with their impact.

"Come on..." The final attack is hits, and Kyouka heaves a sigh of relief as Jail is slammed into the ground. "''That''," she says between pants, "was too close."

Slowly she stands up, starting to dust herself off. "Okay, so we just gotta get that magic out of him and this is over, right?" she asks aloud to nobody in particular.

But she freezes as a ''thing'' that should not exist swoops in and grabs Jail, jumping back with a yelp and raising her hands up in a defensive posture. "Wh-what the heck!?" She looks around at her friends. "Guys? ''Please'' tell me that's not what I think it is. I was kind of hoping we were done going through the wringer after fighting all of the magic in the universe."

She's panting still, still a bit winded, but as Cure Passion speaks of having to go, as does Ren, and others. Kyouka closes her eyes, takes a deep long breath to calm herself, and then releases it. "Right."

A small fox with two tails and exceptionally bright red fur suddenly appears next to Kyouka, a green circle of magic under her feet. Clara rushes over to Kyouka. <Kyouka, something's happening--!>

"I know," says Kyouka with a nod. "We're going after it. Can you watch Fate's sisters and the devices?"

<I--> The fox familiar looks from Kyouka to the various other entities about the room, and then slowly nods. <... Right. And
Kyouka?>

"Yeah?"

<If you don't bring Strike Wolf back in one piece I'll never forgive you.> Clara glances away a little, mumbling. <... and I hope
you come back safe, too.>

Kyouka grins. "That's the plan." She looks to her friends. "I might need someone to give me a hand up."

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

"Right!" Replies Endo to Diamant matter-of-factly. Then after a long beat his brows wrinkle up. "Wait, did you get rescued?"

"...Did I?" He stutters in the air as he briefly pauses to ponder this.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

Golden light fades, and Jail falls.

To be honest, Westar - Denizen of Labyrinth, representative of WT district, decidedly not faithfully serving Lord Moebius any longer - didn't have a good idea what this guy's plan was. His tasks as an Executive were to make plans and throw giant monsters at people, and he wasn't really good at the planning thing.

He's on one knee, breathing slowly out, still in the same pose he was when he unleashed his might, and...actually, his hand is stuck in the ground. Uh. This might take a few pulls to get free-

Oh, there he goes-

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Leaving behind You, who accepts the care of the other two Fate clones quietly, all three of them left safely beneath the golden hum of Bardiche's force field, the magical girls fly, teleport, or otherwise ascend -- in each other's arms if necessary -- out of the tower and back to the surface.

<NEEDLE DROP!> One Last Time - Rising Tension - FWPC OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bshO3GZqROY

Labyrinth was never heaven, but it was also never hell. Well -- let's not understate the purgatory of the soul that the total domination of its population's free will represented. Until a couple of hours ago life here was very bad indeed. Nevertheless...

Things are now are much worse.

The singular Outsider that gobbled down Jail, and all the stolen magic of the universe within him, is soaring almost straight upwards, up towards the same hole in the sky that Jail and Northa and Moebius had collectively channeled Chiffon's power through like a siphon.

Only the hole isn't the same. Not anymore.

What had been a pipeline to draw down all the worlds' color, all the light, all the beauty, through the lamb fairy and then into the man, has been... fractured. Hijacked. It doesn't connect everything, everywhere, in the universe anymore.

Now, the portal's edges crackle everywhere it touches sky, as though the sky itself was an egg that is already starting to shatter beneath the strain. It is an inversion... a portal to somewhere... that isn't. One could say beyond, and one could say outside, but neither of these words can properly capture the relationship of a place that isn't a place, to everywhere that is.

The naked eye struggles to render anything so alien. The portal has all shapes and none. And the Outsider itself... what can sight do but try to approximate with things more familiar? Right now that would be a rainbow, not because of what the creature is but because of what is in it. Jail's body is making it glow from the inside out, which is distressing insofar as, unlike Jail's clearly visible silhouette, it has no recognizable internal structure. If it could be said to have a skeleton it might have been designed by M.C. Escher, but there's nothing in it that really resembles a bone. Too hard and too soft, too sharp and too blunt, too many and too few. It is wrong.

It is not alone.

Cheers of support have turned into screams of terror. A hive's worth of Outsiders are pouring through the portal into Labyrinth and plummeting towards the city, much as they plummeted into Belka, once upon a golden skein. The one with Jail is already vanishing behind the dense screen of an army of allies, which without-being-truly-black-nevertheless-blackens, shadows, the overcast gray sky. Those, they cast, and very darkly indeed. Maybe all the stolen light of the universe can pour out of that one, but the ambient light of one world does not easily pass through whatever substitutes for their flesh.

Some others must have come in that initial drop; some others are already here. Here, as in in front of the screen Azukina and Tarte and Clara set up with the locals. Here, as in a plume of... not smoke, for it doesn't smell like fire... a cloud of debris is rising from a squat complex of RAM chip-like residential buildings nearby. Here, as in dangerous. Deadly. Like the portal warping the sky, whatever the creatures touch struggles to maintain its integrity, its simple existence. The sky is big and elemental and holding on -- for now. That debris cloud, on the other hand, is from the crumbling fourth floor of an eight-story building that has mostly simply ceased to be.

And the screaming must be from people in mortal danger...

...everyone.

Everyone in Labyrinth is under immediate threat.

And everyone else is surely doomed to the long, slow frozen death of the worlds the Queen of Belka's Knights stole magic from, if they don't go get it back.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick transforms into The Outsiders: Swarm!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera looks at Setsuna -- then everyone else, lingering on Fate -- and then she nods. "Right," she says. "Let's do it."

Then, she looks at Cure Black. She grins --and extends a hand. "You bet!" she says. "Special American delivery, coming right up!"

With a grip on Cure Black -- and a glance, to be sure she has her -- Lera flies up with the others, looking at the Outsider -- and the hole in the world. Her eyes widen to see the way the world seems to distort around that portal.

She puts Black down, and nods to her. "I owe you a flight when it's /not/ like this."

There is an army of Outsiders descending. She looks back at Setsuna, then she nods. "I'm going airborne," she tells Passion. "I'll catch up to you, y'know?"

It's an effort to keep her tone calm. She tries, still.

Then, she looks at the swarm in the air -- and she flies towards it. She looks sideways, at the other fliers. "Ready?"

Broken Ground is swung towards them -- then, several bolts of golden light loose from it, hurtling into the sea of Outsiders in the skies.

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 10 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera
Camry is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

COIN FLIP: Kyouka Okazaki flips a coin. It lands on tails!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"...Okay," Passion tells Lera, though it's clear in her face that she's worried. "I'm going to--"

She'll catch up. "I'm going to save my people," she says, her voice tight with unexpressed emotion. She is, as always, an understated kind of girl. "Westar!" she calls. "Let's do it!"

She looks to White then, and gives her a very tight smile.

But they're going different places. So they will. Passion reaches out her hand as she calls on Akarun's power. A brilliant sphere of light ''erupts'' from her, and she and the friends going with her will disappear.

In an instant that same light shines on the plaza, and Cure Passion appears next to Tarte and Azukina. "Stay behind me!" Passion calls to her friends and fellow citizens. "I'll protect you!"

Passion starts towards the enemy--and it isn't just the enemy that concerns her. She ''slams'' forward, delivering a series of kicks to try to deflect the monsters away from the people of Labyrinth, moving along like a wave wherever they are.

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Breaking Wave on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick counters 5 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion's Breaking Wave, taking 15 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Cure Passion is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates! Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Devouring Shadow, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"... Yes." She says to Lera, softly after a time.

Fate floats up to Mikoto, and considers the situation for a moment. The two girls are both small enough for this to be feasible, but there is one issue.

"Mikoto. Can you hold Bardiche for me? Just while we fly."

And Fate just holds out the hilt of a crackling energy sword over twice as long as she is tall to Mikoto. "Bardiche, Miroku and you need to behave. This isn't the time for jealousy or pride."

<Yes Sir.>

Fate then hoists her up, under her arms and begins to carry her up, but she gives one last look at You, and her other two siblings. "Be safe." She whispers, a wish from a big sister to her three younger. As the older - it's her responsibility.

As Mikoto dangles though, Fate does glance at her then considers, makes some calculations and...

"A few more years..."

Wait... is she wondering how long until she's taller!?

But as they ascend, they see how much worse labyrinth can be under assault. Fate sees the one that gobbled up Jail... the hole, the portal. Her eyes can't make sense of what these things are, just a sense of how strange and wrong they are. She can see the glow of her father.

Part of her wants to give chase, just to have the chance to figure out her feelings, but the screams of terror remind her of her priorities.

Just like Belka.

She thinks, but doesn't allow that thought to reach it's conclusion. It won't become... like Belka.

"We won't allow it!"

And suddenly she diverts sideways, cutting a sharp arc across the sky, flying towards the labyrinthine architecture at high speed. "I'm throwing you!"

And Fate Testarossa suddenly makes an arc around to gain momentum, letting go with one arm, before...

<Thunder Arm>

...pitching her towards the missing fourth floor, with everything dangling above it as Fate then races back up and towards the top and conducting a search and rescue from there on down as the rest falls, beginning to move to grab people as she can, before racing to put them down elsewhere in the speedy search and rescue.

She needs both arms for this, which is why she remains 'unarmed', but she isn't... precisely, not with how one of her forearms and biceps are glowing yellow with crackling energy, leaving the hand free.

She just has to hope it works if they come in while she's saving people.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Arm on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Yeah," Mikoto nods, transferring her own greatsword to a single-handed grip as she reaches out to carefully grasp Bardiche, too. "I'll be careful," she promises, though whether she's speaking to blade or girl is an open question. And she pauses, as she looks to the sisters -- "You, careful too, okay?" -- with well-wishing to the clones which is ''slightly'' less choppy in context. As she grasps Bardiche in one hand, and Miroku in the other, she dangles as an almost comical duality of protection and violence, trusting Fate to get them where they need to be. Both blades are massive, in her hands, but she manages to stop them from touching throughout the journey up. "Be nice!" She insists, to Miroku, though Miroku -- as ever -- says nothing in return.

"Tall shoes," Mikoto suggests, gravely, as they fly; from one short girl to another, she apparently knows ''exactly'' what Fate is thinking, musing something like that.

"Right!" Mikoto barks, though, when Fate says she's going to ''throw'' her -- and her legs bend as she moves with the momentum of Fate's toss to land safely at the base of the building. "Hold on," she asks Bardiche, as she plunges him into the ground -- because she needs two hands, too. She turns away, getting her two-handed grip on Miroku mid-whirl. Once, twice, three times, and she plunges her sword into a dark portal, white lightning crackling from it as her shadow splits to two. "MIROKU!"

Her Child rumbles, as Miroku tears from the ground, and Mikoto turns one final time to grab Bardiche before he can be lost to the earthquake. The first through fourth floors of the apartment building are decimated -- and so the first-through-fourth floors of a massive, spiked beast take their place, the oni's great, gauntlet-clad hands reaching up to physically ''grasp'' the sides of the building. Obsidian spires tear from the earth to press against the sides where his hands can't reach, providing structural support to stop the whole thing from leaning and toppling. Miroku might have a heart of violence, but he is still Mikoto's Child -- and ''Mikoto'' wants to save these people.

"I'll hold it!" She cries, holding Bardiche in one hand and Miroku in the other as she stands beside Miroku again. "Get them out!"

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi transforms into Mikoto and Miroku!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Entomology on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> of Monsters and Men DOUBLE FEATURE - Dirty Paws & Little Talks

La Sirene smiles faintly at Endo. "No," she says. "La reine de l'espoir. She... Once, long ago, strange things came to the Sea of Tears. Like wasps, if wasps were the size of horses and spat fire. They came from the sky... and they began to hunt humans." She looks upwards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCHUw7ACS8o

"There was a girl," she says. "We don't know her child name, at least in the stories. She... she had a disease, her body grew uncomfortably. It was a bit like the Elephant Man, you know that one? But despite this... the wasps, she did not look like a human to them."

"But she lived twelve hundred miles from the Desolation Row, and so she - one of the great cachalots, like whales, she held to its fin. The other Sirens of the time had been slain already. She rode across the sea, to the bay. The Mother came to her in the form of a heron, and she became La Sirene de L'Espoir. All - heh - all she could do was talk to people. And the winged and four-legged people, too, even the ones that hadn't learned human languages."

"We don't have much time, so I'll jump to the end," she says. "In the very end it was simple... she... she pushed the mother-bee, the queen, into the sea. Then it reared up. And that was when the grandfather of the cachalots rammed it and tore it in half fifty fathoms deep."

"I saw her statue," la Sirene concludes, her hands curling into fists. "She was beautiful, even with such a challenge. She only lived three years, ''but she won''. And if a girl can do that before she even became a Siren..."

The light around Nori -- around la Sirene -- shifts slightly - becoming almost prismatic, huddling around her, with six stellate rays, at least from the direction of any individual viewer. "Then I have no excuse at all," she says, and then she rises into the air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghb6eDopW8I

From outside, it doesn't look like much. A difference in halation, certainly. Perhaps there is a distant sound like the surf in an endless swirling loop instead of in-out-in-out. And yet the feeling to la Sirene fills her heart, raising things upwards. She breathes for a moment - and seems to lean forwards as she essays a short loop about two feet off the ground, which widens at the last moment to intercept Kyouka from behind with a clear and raggedly enthusiastic, "Get ready --"

Catch, then. Catch and rise, arms curled up underneath Kyouka's, so it doesn't strain her too much. It does likely feel a bit like the surf, or perhaps the feeling after laying in the surf for an hour and then standing up. The feeling doesn't quite go away, does it?

Rise up. So quickly. Perhaps this is the miracle, la Sirene thinks, and the surge in her heart is swift to reach its crest as she sees the visions of the Horror. She looks at the sky, says nothing and resolves to hope it will get better if she doesn't look at it, and descends. She aims towards an open space --

One which is full of people... but at least it is people who are mostly going in one direction. La Sirene dips down, coming to touch her toetips on the ground and set Kyouka down. That sense-memory-of-the-surf vanishes as she moves away, calling out, "ALL OF YOU!" She sweeps her left arm forwards, perhaps to indicate grandly towards a direction to go.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

In the everyday life of a Denizen of Labyrinth, there is no joy - but also there is no fear. There never was freedom of emotion, made possible by the near uniformity of Labyrinth's days. Every day is the same as before, so there is nothing to fear, and nothing to hope for. Only a grey existence.

Today, in Labyrinth, there is something different.

There were new joys, made possible by the intrusion of a gleaming hope. There was new investiture in goings-on, as evil was beheld and champions worth cheering opposed it. And now, there is new terror, as the grey skies turn black, and beings never beheld invade a realm that never changes.

But are some familiar faces in Labyrinth, too.

- - -

"What kinds of monsters did that guy bring in here?!"

The commander of a hundred Nakewameke is disturbed by how ''weird'' these outsiders are, contrasted with his familiar normal-item-turned-giant-robot minions. Having been helped out with a quick teleport, he pauses in his angry rant to give Cure Passion a nod and a thumbs up. "-yeah. Everything for Labyrinth, right?"

And without waiting for a lift, he starts running to where the smoke is rising from an increasingly non-existent building, following in the wake of Fate and Mikoto as quickly as he can. Albeit with a slight detour, according to the standard city plan there should be a materials depot just a block out of the way.

Westar's arrival at the eroded building is heralded by a metal I-beam crashing lengthwise into the nearest outsiders. He's commandeered a forklift, and is hurling materials off of it with deliberate intent - trying to give the Outsiders something to chew on that doesn't contain people, trying to make a path for evacuation. As obsidian replaces the building's lower floors, he leaps up to the place where the fourth floor ''should'' be, bellowing as loud as he ever demanded obedience before.

"I am Westar, Executive of Labyrinth! All denizens of this building are to evacuate immediately in an orderly fashion!" A pause, as he finds his way to the stairwell, throwing a door from its hinges to make an easier path. "We're here to help."

That last bit of comfort is...non-standard, admittedly. But the orders are familiar, and hopefully intention can fill the rest. If invoking Moebius's orders and drills is what he has to do to keep people safe, at least they'll be alive to apologize to later.

COMBAT: Westar has used I-Beam Buffer on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Ren smiles at everyone else who seems just as determined to stop the Outsider from slipping away. "Alright!" She then turns to look up into the sky, heart hammering wildly in her chest as she watches that awful portal unleash ''more'' of those freaky creatures. The one that's fleeing with Jail is a priority, yes, but there's no way they'd be able to catch it with all of its brethren swarming around like that!

"Looks like we have to thin them out." Ren observes, then turns to look over at Lera. "Ready?" Of course, she gets her answer when her best friend picks up Cure Black and blasts off. "Oh!" She blinks, then turns to look over at Cure White, lips forming into a sheepish smile. "Wanna come with?"

Moments later Ren is streaking up through the air after Lera and Black with White securely riding along. She comes to a stop once they're properly out of the pit, hovering momentarily while still carrying Cure White. The swarm is close to blotting out the sky, if such a thing were possible. Everyone meanwhile splits off into different directions to handle other just-as-pressing threats.

<We'll handle the swarms!> Ren sends a mental communication out to her allies. <Be safe!>

There's a pause before she sends out another telepathic message, this one for Endo's ears only.



With that, she grips White tightly and says aloud, "Let's go get 'em!" before zooming upwards again. The swarm is still... well, swarming as swarms tend to do. But that doesn't seem to stop Ren who (with White) is seemingly on a collision course with them.

"We're with you Lera-chan and Black-san!" She shouts, and in the next beat dozens upon dozens of magical energy lances trace themselves into existence around the rapidly ascending forms of Ren and White, before then launching upward to impact with the swarming Outside in a cacophony of sound and light!

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used Haze Spear: Cascade Shift on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

"Ah! 'Sank you Miss Lera'," Cure Black levies her weak English, grasping Lera's forearm in her hand. When they arrive outside, she lets go, catches up to the momentum she's still carying with a short jog, and halts, her amber eyes flicking about the horrifying scene.

"All this... because of..."

"Be safe," Cure White tells Cure Passion, slipping her hand off Passion's shoulder. As she and Passion turn, their long hair trails behind them, announcing the respective directions each girl has chosen so decisively. "We can't let that one escape," Cure White tells Cure Black.

"That's the goal up there," Cure Black agrees, squinting up at the portal to which the abomination is fleeing. "Miss Lera!" Running alongside the Device-wielder, Black leaps, catching her fellow athlete's forearm again.

"Very much," Cure White answers Ren breathlessly, as the Device-user slows down long enough to make the offer. Her fingers grip on tightly, ready for the acceleration Ren is surely capable of. Then Ren and Lera are off, both trailing a Pretty Cure, black and white pennants behind them.

"No you DON'T!" Cure Black shouts, bringing a knee all the way up to her chest, then kicking out like a mule to stomp an abomination away from Lera.

Bringing both her heels back far behind her, Cure White swings her body backwards, then comes forward with both feet, making her body rigid at the moment of contact. An Outsider careens away, largely unharmed but the unwilling recipient of a lot of momentum, and bounces into one of its fellow hive members, setting both into disarray.

"I got it I got it I got it," Cure Black tells Lera, a focused yammer of communication typical of the sports field. Hauling her leg back, she spears an Outsider, her foot stomping a bone-like shield that was protecting its stern, looking to crack it in half with her sheer physical strength. But though the 'bone' looks rock-solid, perhaps even too dense to break, Black's foot goes right through it, plunging into the Outsider's body. With the monster stuck on her leg like an olive on a cocktail sword, Black kicks wildly. "Ew! Why is that part soft? Nasty!"

"I've got it!" Cure White calls, and as Ren passes close to Lera, White slams a kick into the undulating, horrible mass trying to crawl up Cure Black's leg. Her shin, too, sinks right through, and is caught, binding Lera and Ren together by extension as the two Precure are now linked by an Outsider.

"Gross! Miss Lera, zap it!"

"No! I've got it!" Cure White swings her free leg over her caught out, twisting her body to get that ankle as far around the front of the monster as she can. "Hold it still!"

Shouting in frustration, Cure Black reaches down with her hand, letting the monster capture that limb too.

With the Outsider caught and stable, Cure White hooks her ankle in, and unrolls her twisted limbs, hauling the monster's body around with her ankle. Unable to follow the motion with Black grabbing it, that shapeless monster simply bursts, torn in half by Cure White's rotation.

"Whoa!" Black scrubs her now-free leg off with her other boot restlessly. "Nice!"

"Black, look--" White starts to warn. But despite her shouted admiration, Black was paying perfectly good attention. Planting a foot against Soaring Sky herself for maximal stability, Black cocks her mighty fist back and hook-punches the next Outsider to reach them, with enough force to burst open its side and send it plummeting, unnamable matter dribbling from its body, towards the courtyard that is increasingly far below.

"Miss Lera!" Cure Black calls. "I'm slowing you down, right? It's 'cool'!" she assures with an English word. "Drop me on a big one!"

"Likewise," White tells Ren, her powerful roundhouse kick punting a smaller Outsider like a soccer ball. "Thank you for taking me this far!"

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

"Yeah," Endo agrees with Diamant, "If she can save one world you can get them all no problem."

While Endo would like to pursue the Jail-eating Outsider upon emerging from the tower, the citizens of Labyrinth have a more immediate need. The yawning gates above will have to wait.

The knight skims low across the air, weaving down toward the residences and plazas below. One the way he scoops a fleeing Labyrinthian out of the way of scattering debris.

"Go!" He shouts, depositing them on a street down the line. During the brief pause he turns his eyes skyward, shooting back a message to Ren along with a smile she can't see: <Love you too.>

He curves back toward the Plaza after, heading toward the light Cure Passion creates. A flood of small purples spheres proceed him, the meteorites detonating to clear the path.

"Be there soon!"

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Meteor Strum on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 21 Fatigue damage from Ren Aizawa's Haze Spear: Cascade Shift, taking 9 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka has come an awfully long way, in the less-than-a-year she's been a magical girl. She has formed a partnership and found friends the likes of which she could never have dreamed of before. She has learned of the tremendous potential within herself--and not jut that of Strike Wolf, but genuinely and truly ''hers''. (There had bee... a lot of doubt, for a while.)

But she hasn't learned to ''fly''.

If she's being honest, she's not really interested in learning? Theoretically she could, but... she likes running too much.

... It's a bit ''too'' far to run this time, though. She's listening to Nori's story, trying to take it in but quietly wondering if there'd be a better time--and then Nori lifts into the air, and then catches ''her'' under the arms. "Whoa-- Diamant!?"

The sensation of the surf fills her, for just that moment, and she decides to just go along for the ride.

There's far, ''far'' too much to do. The thing that ate Jail is escaping into the sky, but--there's ''people'' down below to protect, too. "We gotta help them out," Kyuouka shouts to Diamant, and the moment Nori sets her down--

Kyouka charges forward, kicking off with such speed as to kick back a gust of air towards her ride. "Alright everybody, keep moving! We've got your backs!" she shouts to the crowd, while she reaches an open hand forward.

A circle filled with midchildan runes appears in front of her hand, and in front of ''that'' appears an array of small rapidly spinning crescents, shining the brilliant violet color of her magic. Strike Wolf announces <Gale Shot> before all of the shots streak out and strike at as many of the Outsiders as she can hit.

"Hey!" shouts Kyouka. "If you think you can just come in here and attack these people after they poured their hearts out for us? You got another think coming!" She's trying to draw the attention of the invaders away from the people onto herself, to give them more time to escape.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Gale Shot on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Sword Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Westar's I-Beam Buffer, taking 28 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 5 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Gale Shot, taking 4 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is
Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Dramatic Flourish!! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick partially dodges 9 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Thunder Arm, taking 36 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 6 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Entomology, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Pink
Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Tangle applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure Black's Sword Kick, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Psyched!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 6 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Meteor Strum, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki is Psyched!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly counters 25 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Dramatic Flourish!!, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Critical Counter! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Space Invasion, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Cure White has used Cat's Ankle on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure White's Cat's Ankle, taking 15 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure White is Psyched!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

The mind continues to try to render these creatures through substitution; and keeps failing. Their necks are sinuous, but not like a snake. Their weapons are terrible, but neither truly the talons of eagles nor the claws of tigers, but something stranger and sharper entirely. Their chief resemblance to insects, really, is the way they are a swarm; so many many many of them, all seemingly identical; but their carapaces are not true exoskeletons; and the hardness of them not hard at all, but, an impenetrable, undulating shadow.

Truthfully, their nearest neighbor, especially for those who never experienced them as a dream, is another terrible foe of Tokyo: the protodaimon incubated to emerge from victims, mostly Infinity Institute students, by the Death Buster cultists. They share a Wrongness that prickles the back of the neck, that fizzes like scum along the teeth, that coldly knots even the sternest of stomachs. And they share lethality. One protodaimon was more than enough to ruin the day of a force of magical girls. A half dozen couldn't be stopped without slaughtering a group of girls at Tokyo Tower, which haunts the memories of some to this day.

And here there are hundreds... maybe thousands.

All of them... hungry.

---

THE PLAZA

The screen that beamed in the magical girls' impossible battle against Labyrinth's dictator -- and the power behind Moebius' throne, the Queen of Belka herself, Northa -- is dark, and cracked. Something hit it hard; there is a faintly half-an-Outsider-shaped (whatever that even means) hole through one of its ends.

The Outsider in question is one of a half dozen descending on the crowd, which is swirling, leaderless and afraid. A moment ago they were surrounded. Now they are... still surrounded, but not alone, and not directionless.

Thus bidden by La Sirene, the people flee, mascots leading the way.

La Sirene often calls upon 'unlight' but this... is a much more literal version of what phenomenon. These shadows are as real as the monsters casting them, which is to say, not at all, in an extraordinarily dangerous way. Just touching their SHADOW, as one flies overhead, causes the familiar little child with the pink hair, the one that they first met and charmed with the power of sugar, to freeze, rigid and colorless.

The more motherly adult near them leaps in the path of the next alien before it can hurt the frozen child. Claws are out but rather than see her cruelly eviscerated, lines of shadow pour through her, almost fractal in their complexity, something between roots and circuitry.

Then she vanishes, entirely unmade.

When, a moment later, Cure Passion leaps in foot-first to halt the monster in its path, she too feels the tug of the void on contact. A terrible cold, beyond chill, beyond even vacuum... a true and complete nothingness. But unlike a civilian, she is equipped to resist it, at least for the duration of foot-upon-face. She feels herself start to sink... into it, almost, into the shadow, but then, in a flare of red light, rebound off of it instead with a force that sends it crashing to the ground.

Endo's meteorites clear another path for the crowd, which is vital; there are too many of them to take a single street away without trampling each other. And while under the control of Moebius they might have been too indifferent to care, right now they seem to care a great deal. Right in front of everyone, they are picking each other up when they stumble; others, who had been strangers because everyone was a stranger, flee hand in hand.

And Kyouka has their backs. Her crescents tear into Outsiders and she very much gets her wish: she has their attention. A huge Outsider bears down on her, maw-first, seeking to swallow her up as happened to Jail; and three more -- the last three in this immediate neighborhood, possibly -- go straight for La Sirene, Endo, and Cure Passion, claws out. Though Kyouka's is the most direct about it, all of them are here to consume magic... and the four of them are now the featured course on the menu. They may not freeze instantly, or vanish, but given half a chance, they will certainly be spirited away.

Thankfully the ground does not start buckling towards the world's core when an Outsider falls upon it insensate; the aliens die easily, and when they do, their corrosive effect on reality seems to die with them. They don't vanish as their victims do; rather, as though succumbing to the universe they've invaded, their corpses become stone. In Labyrinth, that stone is ribbed with silicon and tiny, but unlit, LEDs.

THE BUILDING

Speaking of silicon, the collapsing building... isn't.

<NEEDLE DROP!> One Last Time - Mezame - Mai-HiME OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rudziat8H_k

The utterly massive Child of the greatest of HiME, Mikoto Minagi, reaches out and, for the time being, catches it wholesale. More obsidian reinforces, and what could have been a giant slaughter is suddenly... a chance.

A chance that Westar seizes in both hands, once he lets go of the I-bar. A chance that Fate, faster even than the lightning coursing in her arm, will not possibly miss. Between the two of them, they find and assist a dozen people in seconds. All ages lived here, old and young.

But the Outsiders that thoughtlessly took out the fourth floor just by flying through it are still here, too. Not the one that Westar destroyed, no; it's stone now. But there are several more.

Each is individually horrible. Together, as they close on Westar from either side, they are overwhelming... darkness threatening to engulf him from every direction. Fate, too, finds herself sorely beset.

As for Mikoto... the building is starting to groan. Miroku can keep stabbing obsidian into it, but this cannot last forever.

But if she doesn't do something about the creatures circling the Child like sharks, 'not forever' may shorten much more dramatically still.

THE SKY

Even from high in the air, everyone sees Miroku emerge from the ground. He absolutely towers. And his presence seems to change the trajectory of the plummeting invaders -- they would prefer to land near him, presumably because of the enormity of magic that he represents.

Said differently, Mikoto's summoning is turning the invasion from a falling blanket into a tighter stream.

Cure Black and Cure White punch and kick any that would bar Lera and Ren's path upwards; and the two Device-wielders fill the invaders with golden bolts and bronze energy spears.

The invaders come and they come and they come -- and they die and they die and they die.

There's no sign of the rainbow one -- there are just too many -- and some are arresting their falls to slam at Lera from above, Ren somehow from below as one falls ''backwards'', and Pretty Cure from either side. They don't seem to mind hitting one another, as long as they can get a chance to devour their prey. When they get close enough, they explode into a more liquid form that feels like it SHOULD smell like blood, but the only recognizable viscera is the girls' own, should it be shed. The monsters are ichorous, slimy, and move like -- like ten thousand worms in a bag.

Ten thousand worms in a bag that want to consume you.

But if the girls in the sky can keep any more from reaching the ground, long enough for the ground to be cleared by the teams below...

...maybe they can save the good people of Labyrinth.

"Look!" says Tarte, pointing up, up, up:

Cure Peach, Cure Berry, and Cure Pine are climbing the Tower, one pretty, pure leap at a time. Hand in hand they swing one another higher.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Jaws That Bite on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Claws That Catch on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Claws That Catch on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Claws That Catch on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Outer Darkness on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Outer Darkness on Westar.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used The Outer Darkness on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Visceral Eruption on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Visceral Eruption on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Visceral Eruption on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Visceral Eruption on Cure White.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi braces 28 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Outer Darkness, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa dodges 14 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Outer Darkness, taking 21 Fatigue damage! Fate
Testarossa's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Blind applied to Fate Testarossa!
COMBAT: Cure Passion perfectly dodges 19 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Claws That Catch, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge! Cure Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar braces 40 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Outer Darkness, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Westar's Block and Parry abilities activate! Blind applied to Westar!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 9 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Claws That Catch, taking 14 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! La Sirene de Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger, Stun, and Tangle applied to La Sirene de
Diamant!
COMBAT: Lera Camry perfectly dodges 18 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Visceral Eruption, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Lera Camry's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki braces 8 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Claws That Catch, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's
Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger, Stun, Tangle, and Trap applied to Endo Naoki!
COMBAT: Cure Black neatly dodges 20 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Visceral Eruption, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Cure Black is Taunted!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"Yeah... yeah, there is," Lera says, with a glance at Fate. She smiles. "So let's make sure there is an after."

Then, there's a last smile at Setsuna. And a nod; she'll be back.

It's about all she can promise.

She takes off -- again with a careful grip on Black -- and glances sideways at Ren. She flashes her best friend a grin, then nods. "Let's go, Ren-chan!"

She makes a 'whumph' sound of surprise, when Black ''kicks'' one ofthose things away from her -- and she looks sideways at her. "Nice shot!" she says in English. Then, back to Japanese: "It's handy having someone watch my six up here!"

But... she needs to drop her onto, to quote, a 'big one.' She looks to the side -- sees one flying at her side -- and she shouts: "HANG ON!"

She shoots upward, over a suitably large one, and then swings in to put Black down on it. Lera flips around -- gives her a peace sign -- and then turns around. There's a glance at Miroku, and then at Peach, Pine, and Berry.

Lera exhales before she dives down amdist them, and swings Soaring Sky into a group of them. Her blade lights up, an arc of white-gold light exploding off it and into the ranks of the Outsiders.

<Radiant Saber!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Radiant Saber on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"Everything for Labyrinth!" Passion agrees with Westar, finding it far more suitable than the old saying. And she means it. But then, they have gone their spearate ways. The terrible creatures remind Setsuna of one of the times she nearly left all the worlds she knows. ...But she will fight them. Because--

At the plaza she calls out. She sees the little one go frozen. She sees another disappear. "NO!" Passion cries. Then, she kicks. She feels the tug of the void... But she will not allow it.

"I am Cure Passion!" Setsuna calls to the people of Labyrinth. "Protector of Earth... and Denizen of Labyrinth!"

A huge outsider bears down on her in the midst of her friends, but Cure Passion doesn't hesitate. She is not spirited away by the Outsider, because she is not ''there'' when it strikes, abrubtly ''gone'' in a flash of crimson light.

"Haaaah--!"

She ''crashes'' down, not for the one that went for her, but for the one that is drawing on Endo.

"GIVE THEM BACK!" she cries, and blurs. Her fist slams down towards the Outsider. She recognized the effect--so instead of one large punch, she trails off with a ''flurry'' of smaller, never maintaining contact for more than an instant, but each one glowing crimson as surely as she is.

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Crimson Flash on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki partially dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's The Jaws That Bite, taking 44 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! Pink Moon Stick is Psyched! Kyouka Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo is in the plaza and amidst the other three magical girls within just a few seconds more. Just in time to meet one of the Outsiders swooping down to snatch him up. They come together with a vicious crash, sword embedding in the alien force and claws sinking into the knight's barrier jacket.

It looks for a moment like he will face the consequences of his actions until Cure Passion's strikes shake him loose from the monstrosity.

"Passion!" Endo calls, "Thanks!" He's not going to let her efforts go to waste, Fallen Stern soon raised to take a chunk out of the intruder once the Precure has set him free.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Blauverschiebung on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"Of course. ... There are people I have to come back to." She tells her, before glancing to Miroku to see if he'll be good. Fortunately, he seems to tolerate this for now, before trying her best to smile for Lera...

But the moment they're in flight... the smile vanishes again, as if in worry.

Fate looks back at her metallic boots as Mikoto suggests... unfortunately, the heels don't add enough, yet. One day.

Fate's coming out of a building, when she sees Miroku holding it up, while Westar directs the evacuation. "Westar-! Here!" And Fate comes down to deposit an elderly woman in his arms before flying back up.

"That was very clever!" She calls to him of the forklift and it's I-Beams, but as she makes her next pass, and the spell fades from her arm, Fate finds so many outsiders flying around, and towards-

There's only a moment's hesitation, before she dives right in, grasping another young man, flying through as they swarm after her like streams of darkness...

... and for one moment that lingers farm too long, both of them vanish... then abruptly she bursts through - them, the building - and rather than glass, computer like material flies, melting, disintegrating in mid-air... she dives down, as the darkness follows. "Hang on!"

One arming the young man who's wordlessly gasping she swings down, and grasps the blade Mikoto plunged into the building, turning, and swinging it around at the Outsiders following behind her.

<Blade Impulse>

A line of energy erupts, arcing out towards the Outsiders, splitting the air as it streaks towards them.

...

...

...

As Fate takes a breath from her near... she doesn't know, just that it was awful - experience, she puts the young man down... and...

"You should ask Westar for his autograph after. It'll make him happy."

The young man - who looked similarly haunted from the near-I don't even know-experience previously gives her a look like 'autograph???' as she flies back into the fray, chasing after more Outsiders, as she makes the interminable slog back towards the building's inside.

They're not nearly done here.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Blade Impulse on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure White dodges 9 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Visceral Eruption, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Cure White's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Visceral Eruption, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

One after another, civilians are evacuated from the building. Maybe the sight of a familiar Executive is helping - a little normalcy amid the chaos. Westar bellows commands, directs people to the safest way down Miroku's spikes, and for a moment he's almost able to forget about the utter horror that is trying to devour his city.

Unfortunately, the utter horror has not forgotten him.

An Executive of Labyrinth has more magic than the average citizen, meaning that he might be seen as a tasty snack - if such a concept makes sense. Westar does see one lunging, and breaks away from the path of evacuation to block its path; other sinuous creatures emerge through walls and ceilings, surrounding him in a writhing swarm of darkness.

As unknowable as the feeling might be, it's almost nostalgic; light was never permitted in the larger Dark Fall meetings, after all. This feels different in many ways; the things unseen writhe horribly, flooding his vision, pulling at his sense of self.

First, he has to endure. Recall the feeling of having even his sorrows drained for Moebius, and try to stand firm.

Second, warn the civilians. He shouts out, muffled by the ''things'' swarming him. "Get out of here - the building isn't going to hold!"

Third, he can't see what's attacking him. But he knows it's surrounding him, that the Outsiders are everywhere - so Westar applies all his tactical expertise, and decide the thing to do is punch in every direction at once.

COMBAT: Westar has used Familiar Old Punching Routine on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 26 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion's Crimson Flash, taking 11 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 19 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Radiant Saber, taking 28 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 23 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Blauverschiebung, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's
Block and Parry abilities activate! Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick counters 12 Fatigue damage from Westar's Familiar Old Punching Routine, taking 35 Fatigue damage! Westar
is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Space Invasion, partially gets through, doing 8 Fatigue damage to Westar!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 9 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Blade Impulse, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa
is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

As the lances fade away after finding their targets, Ren curves around in the air. At the same time, Cure White delivers some serious blows of her own, even managing to rip one of the Outsiders in half with some assistance from Cure Black!

"Nice one!" Ren cheers, then pauses for a bit when her passenger requests to be dropped onto one of the flying creatures. There's a moment when Ren almost asks, "Are you sure?", but then she pushes that thought aside and only nods affirmatively. "You got it!"

If there's anything Ren knows about Cures, it's that they are more than capable of taking care of themselves. She still marvels at the sheer amount of poise and strength they possess. After giving White another friendly squeeze, she veers off to the left and does as requested, dropping the other magical girl onto a passing Outsider.

"Show 'em whose boss!" She shouts encouragement after White as she's carried away.

<Incoming!> The familiar mental ping and voice of Heraut warns, cluing Ren in to the fact that she's in danger of being smashed! She tries an aerial evasion maneuver, managing to get out of the way of a few of the divebombing Outsiders. But it's the one that decides to fall ''backwards'' that she's unable to avoid, smashing into her with enough force to illicit a surprised yelp and a few moments of topping head over heels through the air. She rights herself soon enough, thankfully, and shakes her head to clear her blurred vision.

Once it does clear, she's rewarded with the scene taking place below on the surface. Miroku, huge and unable to be missed, has been summoned and is doing his part despite being circled by a flock of hungry-for-magic predators. She can see signs of further battling going on in the plaza as well, and hopes their efforts there bear success.

"I won't let you down!" Ren shouts down to her allies, then turns to continue her own portion of the ongoing fight. "Heraut!"

On command, the gauntlet on her right fist ''ignites'', the gems on it sparkling magnificently. She then streaks off towards the nearest swarm, rearing her shining fist back.

"Take this! <EFFULGENT...>" Upon reaching the swarm, she thrusts her fist forward. <...KNUUUUCKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLE!>

And that's when there's an ''explosion'' that lights up the sky!

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used Effulgent Knuckle: Strike on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

These are dire times, but Kyouka will take some heart in how the people of Labyrinth have grown and changed in such a short period of time. How they're helping each other, trying defend each other, pull each other up when they fall.

It fuels her determination to save them all the more. They don't deserve this--and as long as Kyouka has strength within her she is determined to see them save.

"No!" she cries out as she sees first one is frozen and then another is unmade entirely.

And that feeling drives her forward too. There's too much at risk to succumb to despair.

But meanwhile she has her own problems to deal with. She tried to get the attention ot the Otusiders and she has it. One comes for her, she stares--it's so hard to see ''what'' it is, a shape and form that both is and isn't something that can be readily perceived. That moment of trying to figure out just what's going on almost costs her as those jaws come for her--

Strike Wolf speaks up. <Kyouka.>

Right. Kyouka moves, both just in time and not fast enough. She avoids the fate of Jail, of being swallowed whole. But she's not fast enough to avoid those jaws clamping down over ''most'' of her, leaving an a head an arm and a leg free to resist. She shudders, as she feels the pull of that oblivion, that chill spreading through her body from the contact. "Let... go...!" she gets out through gritted teeth. And when the beast opens those jaws, perhaps to attempt a second bite, Kyouka rockets out of there.

And just like the denizens of Labyrinth are helping each other out in this moment, Kyouka isn't going to leave a fellow magical defender hanging. "Diamant!" she shouts, as she rockets forward along the ground. "Strike Wolf! Let's do it!"

<Affirmative.>

If touching these things is dangerous, then she'll just have to cushion her blow. A band of energy appears around her gauntlet s she runs, and her gauntlet starts to shine brightly. "Lunaaaaar--" She jumps, swings, and punches at the outsider trapping Diamant, releasing a small explosion of violet-white energy to hopefully keep her fist from making too much contact. "IMPACT!"

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Lunar Impact on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Westar-senpai!" Mikoto calls, with relief, seeing him take charge to direct the citizens of Labyrinth to safety. If he's on their side, maybe things will be okay--!!

But even with Fate's speed, and Westar's leadership, it's an entire ''building'' of people. An entire building which is -- again -- an entire building, even more massive than Miroku's massive frame. Worse --

"Rrrrgh--!" Mikoto yells, as she leaps forward to slice Miroku-the-sword through an Outsider coming for Miroku-the-Child. One out of a stream of them, all coming in to settle by her. No -- by ''him.'' They want...

"Miroku, put it down!" Mikoto yells, as Miroku, impossibly, shifts his grip on the building to set it down, its fourth floor now its base. More of those spires rise up to trap (to support?) it in place, as the Child moves to the side, wresting himself completely from the earth which is his elemental home. He lifts a palm to capture her, and brings her up to the back of his carapace; he knows what she's going to say, long before she says it. "They're looking at us. We'll move away from Labyrinth people!"

She knows they're leaving the building on borrowed time -- and surely very ''little'' borrowed time -- but if she can just distract them, draw them away from the evacuation, then at least Fate and Westar won't have to fight two battles at once.

It's better this way, anyway. If they get to a place free of people... Miroku can't fight freely with so many targets he's not allowed to ''hit.'' He swoops away from the building, and turns, lifting his great-club high -- before he SLAMS it down on the Outsiders pursuing his magical energies, cratering the ground for metres around it.

It's dangerous, she knows, to be noticed. To be ''seen.''

But if they're looking at her, they're not looking at the citizens of Labyrinth.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Efface on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The Things sweep towards la Sirene as she rests one foot upon Labyrinth. The stellate pattern around her body relaxes but she has little time save to brace herself as the things begin to smash into each other.

What comes is something noisome and wet. Like grasping a sea slug, la Sirene thinks for a moment, the closest approximation she can make -- which is at least in the right ballpark on one axis, but ignores the three other axes on which such a thing might be assessed.

For one thing, she had that feeling when they were still about three meters away.

They don't stay that far away. But before the plague falls directly upon her, something happens. A miracle rescue - borne by Kyouka. La Sirene looks up towards Kyouka, relief in her pale eyes, and she has the chance to vault back a step afterwards. There is a burst -- enough for la Sirene to dive and tumble through. "Mercibeaucoup," she pants in the direction of Kyouka during the maneuver, rising up and immediately swirling with a scrape from her diamond-soled shoes to face the tide again. "How is it? How are they?" she asks, before pivoting round and swinging up her left hand for an old and trusted ally. Left arm swings up despite a passing hiss; right rises: "Les Mysteres," la Sirene breathes, before taking another deep breath as she concludes with a cry of invitation: "COME!"

The shimmering light echoes vast and cryptic shadows against that darkened signs. But the signs in the silver light's backwash, even as the 'fist' of lush darkness smashes inwards, are things of comfort and comprehension to human eyes.

Her eyes flick upwards momentarily. "... I hope we can..." She does not complete the sentence. The enormity of the situation is too vast.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Les Mysteres on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Ren Aizawa's Effulgent Knuckle: Strike, taking 29 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa is Psyched!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 29 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Efface, taking 43 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Mikoto Minagi is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick neatly dodges 36 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Les Mysteres, taking 9 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 24 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Lunar Impact, taking 20 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Squeezing Lera's wrist hard enough to hurt a little, Black weathers the sudden shifts in momentum needed to manuever over to the Outsider. "Got it," she confirms, when they are over it, and she lets go. Her pink boots slam down into the squirming, amorphous mass of the Outsider, and Cure Black founders for a moment, high-stepping like she was in a ball pit at a birthday party.

Dropping down from Ren, Cure White too lands atop an Outsider, listing to one side. With a limpid cry, she is forced to put a hand down on the creature, and some wobbling limb of it reaches blindly around to try and pin her down there.

"White!" Cure Black launches herself off the Outsider she's standing on, jumping off it before it can attack her. She lands next to Cure White, who rolls out of the way of the plummeting Outsider-limb and onto her feet. She looks down at her boots, her thick eyebrows lifting in surprise at how stable her footing is. Gradually her heels are starting to sink.

"I think this part of them is non-Newtonian!" she shares excitedly.

Black's eyes swing down to the indicated patch on the monster, and she instantly hauls her fist back. She has no idea what that means, but it sounds bad. "On it!"

"Wait--!"

The rippling green patch of monster-mass that Cure Black slams her fist down into shifts from a thick gelatin to something like steel as Black's knuckles slam into it. The impact is thunderous, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, and Cure White stumbles, almost falling off. For an instant, it seems like the suddenly metal-hard 'flesh' is unharmed. But then, with groan like a great rock splitting, it bursts, and a massive spray of squirming ichor blasts up into and around Black. Cure White covers her face from the eruption, her white raiment spattered. Suddenly slack, the Outsider begins to list to the side, its flight becoming a fall.

The two Pretty Cure leap as one, landing on an approaching Outsider. "Mou!" Cure White huffs. "I meant it's a good place to land, see? Its viscosity is determined by stress instead of temperature and pressure!" She hops, so that when she lands, the green patch hardens again, supporting her weight.

Cure Black punches a reaching blob of the Outsider away from herself, while White does the same to another with a palm strike. "I thought you were saying it was some kind of weapon!"

"We learned non-Newtonian fluids in the fall semester!" White stomps the green section to harden it again. "And please don't automatically attack something if you think I said it's dangerous!"

"Even if you say that," Black winks, just before stomping a reaching tendril back down into the Outsider's body. "I'm still going to do it. If somebody's really tough, I want to see if I can win."

"Ah," Cure White replies, unable to answer properly as Black has already lept away. Following, she is a half-second behind her partner for a few leaps. But as she speeds up to catch up, Black slips during a jump, and White ends up leaving her behind. Gritting her teeth, she manages to land on the bottom of the Outsider she's approaching instead of the top, shove off, and return, to where Black is shakily rising to her feet. "Go! I'm right behind you."

Cure Black shakes her head. "I don't... feel good."

Kicking away attacks with a few sharp motions of her foot, White drags Black fully upright with one hand, then turns to her. Disoriented by the sudden change from confidence to terror, she clutches onto Black's upper arms, searching her body for wounds, her eyes for answers. "What happened? Black!"

Cure Black looks at her, dazed. "We're high up... we're so high up. If we fall... even we would... right?"

"We need to jump," White insists, as the Outsider deforms to try and engulf them. "Green spot. Now!"

The two jump together, landing on the next Outsider up, and then, with an effort, again, onto the next. "Getting... there..." Black tries to assure herself. "Probably... I can jump again."

This world is ending -- the universe, absolutely on the brink -- and Cure White has eyes only for Cure Black. She lets the final battle swirl around her, and her inaction is almost a defiance in itself, of all the violence that threatens. There is something more urgent now to do then punch a monster. "Tell me!" White insists, taking a moment as the current Outsider seems too bent on approaching the courtyard to bother with its passengers yet.

"There's no time for--"

"Tell me," White says, gently this time. And this time, somehow, Cure Black obeys instantly.

"I think it... it got in my mouth," Black says faintly. "They... don't even hate us, they're just... empty. From this height, it won't matter, right?" She's babbling, looking at White, pleading. "It doesn't matter how much... I don't want you to fall."

There is always something more precious to do than fight. Lacrosse games, library sessions, picnic outings... there have been so many interruptions to their ordinary life. But here, now, today, one girl interrupts their extraordinary one for the other.

"Ne, Blacku," White says, very seriously, as she cradles the hearts on the back of her partner's fists and turns them over to reveal her bronze-and-black palms. She traces Black's life lines with her thumbs, so lightly that it's almost imagination, yet the slightest trace of her touch leaves a blaze behind exactly the opposite of the icy nothingness the Outsiders bring. "It's too late to stop me from falling."

Her eyes are so blue, and her skin is so pale, and her lips are so, so soft, as they brush against the cheek of Cure Black. It is a brief contact, by any normal measure. But when all they can afford is an instant, everything they cannot afford becomes extravagance.

The cold teeth gnawing at the edge of Cure Black's mind suddenly find their sharp tips melting as her thoughts flood with warm, golden light. That awareness remains there, gnawing, gnawing. But against the awestruck, reeling joy those teeth now seek to tear apart, they begin to melt down to nothing but raindrops.

"...it's not fair, is it?" Black says, her eyes fully back in focus, and only for Cure White. Her fingers dance with White's for a moment, then meet them tip-to-tip. "For these things to have to fight a girl who managed to go out with you."

COMBAT: Cure White has used Falling For You on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Cure Black accepts Cure White's Falling For You, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Black is Cheered!
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Sen no Sen on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 24 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Sen no Sen, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Dodge!
Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

THE PLAZA

Though just for a moment, Endo and La Sirene get snatched up by an Outsider apiece. The pain would be terrible, should be beyond description, but the... nothingness... that spreads through their bodies from the prolonged contact, is somehow even more frightening.

Thankfully it does not last for long. Cure Passion crashes down to free Endo with many swift and crimson punches; Kyouka sets La Sirene loose with a single, silver-violet slam.

Thus freed, Endo uses the business end of Fallen Stern (though, let's face it, like a cat which is pointy in six out of seven directions, every end of Stern means business) to bisect the one after Cure Passion; and Les Mysteres engulf and consume the huge Outsider that almost ate Kyouka. When the silver fades, only stone remains... all gaping maw.

It still looks hungry.

But for the moment, the plaza is clear of both people and monsters.

Someone even picked up the frozen child and brought them along to hide.

THE BUILDING

Mikoto splits an unsolvable problem into two -- leaving the bottom half of the building for Fate and Westar to finish evacuating, while the top half, already emptied at their hands, is placed safely clear.

At her direction, Miroku strides well away, into another city center -- a wide but thankfully empty thoroughfare. There are pros and cons to using him as bait. He is VERY LARGE and difficult to kill.

But, if he does manage to be defeated...

...well, she's already in peril, isn't she? If they lose the battle on Labyrinth there will be no Tokyo left to save.

Still... it makes every chunk of him taken out by Outsiders extra frightening, in its way.

And it makes the way that his club absolutely OBLITERATES them into a crater intensely satisfying -- frighteningly so.

This violence, isn't it what Mikoto was born to do?

Or was it what she was made to do?

Back in the bottom half of the building, Fate and Westar have a quarter-problem apiece, now: half the Outsiders and half the people. The former they can solve extremely efficiently with blade and fist respectively -- and a good half dozen of the aliens fall to the floor. Half their corpses bear Westar punch-shaped pockmarks. The other half make twice as many statues as their original numbers would have suggested.

Having dispatched them swiftly, it is a simple matter to evacuate the last of the people. They are enormously grateful, though one of them, a young woman, tells Westar admiringly:

"You don't have to be an executive anymore... you can be something else! Something better!"

IN THE SKY

By the time Ren has righted herself in midair the Outsiders are swarming her -- their shadows frigid and dense, their bodies only moreso. Fortunately she has an answer to this problem and it starts with 'eff' and ends in 'k(le)' and ''wow'' that was a really big explosion! Look out below, because two dozen ex-Outsiders are going to be making deep impressions when their stone bodies impact the ground.

And Lera notices the Fresh Precure determined to help their fourth, newest, and most beloved member save her people. Soaring in, she covers their ascent with arc after arc of white-gold light exploding off of Soaring Sky. And when they reach the top...

"Nasty things, nasty things, fly away!"

Cure Peach puts her hand in.

"Soar, melody of love! Cure Stick, Peach Rod!"

Cure Berry is next, like a football huddle.

"Echo, rhythm of hope! Cure Stick, Berry Sword!"

Cure Pine is last, making a Y of their three arms.

"Flutter, harmony of prayers, Cure Stick, Pine Flute!"

Artifacts in hand, they thrust them towards the sky, and shout as one:

"PRETTY CURE..."

Pink, blue and golden light erupts from the tip of the tower and begins to flow downward.

"...TRIPLE..."

Faster and faster it falls like a curtain over the city... until it hits the ground.

"...FRESH!!"

The Outsider Black and White are riding -- which, inexplicably, evaded a big punch from the former by hollowing itself out like a donut, which is not just non-Newtonian but non-reality, hits the sparkling curtain of Pretty Cure power and... bounces. It's like a giant circus tent of love, hope, and faith.

And, as the others will learn almost immediately, it is decidedly one-way.

They have cleared the ground; and the city can no longer be attacked by air.

They have saved Labyrinth for the second time in two hours.

Now it's time to save every other world.

High, high above, a prismatic Outsider is glimpsed behind countless others, getting closer and closer to the portal from whence they've all come.

<NEEDLE DROP!> One Last Time - Rise - Origa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJjscA9Zvcw

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Endo, La Sirene, Kyouka, and herself. Cure Passion keeps fighting, but she will fight to keep these precious friends safe too, as well as the people of Labyirnth.

"NOT ONE MORE!" she calls, and when the one becomes stone, it is an ''effort'' not to try to shatter it. She keeps hold of that feeling, though.

After all, anger is a feeling too.

The child has been picked up. And up, up, above--

"Everyone!" Passion calls, seeing her friends, her sisters, perform the move that stymied her so many times. She smiles, deespite the terror and horror all around them.

But only a moment. Because there is more they have to do. She looks up to find her friends, her girlfriend. She looks to Lera for just a moment, and is so happy to see that glow that says she's all right. ...But that's a feeling she will share with her later. For now--

"Let's go!"

Cure Passion will call upon Akarun's power once again--and ''blip'' out of existence at the plaza.

...Only to blip right back, next to Cure Peach and Cure Berry and Cure Pine.

"Everyone!" she says. "I knew you'd..."

She stops herself. "I'll--say later. Thank you."

Then she calls, "LERA!"

"...We'll finish this together," she says, and holds a hand over her heart, just for a moment.

With the Cures, with her friends--with Lera--

Cure Passion turns towards their enemy, and readies herself again to fight.

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Together Again on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Cure Passion's Together Again, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Cheered!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"Good job, Ren-chan!" Lera cries out to her, as she sweeps around in midair. She looks down at Peach, Pine, and Berry -- and she gives them a peace sign, too. She looks back at Cure Black and Cure White.

She looks then at Cure Passion -- blinking once when she appears, with a flash -- and then she grins. She reaches out, taking the hand that was over Passion's heart.

She squeezes once. "Yeah," she agrees, as she starts to lift upward. She beams down at her, her hand lifting up as she hovers up above this girl from another world that she fell in love with, all hose years ago. Her amber eyes sparkle as she looks down at her.

"Together, Passion. Nothing's gonna stop us now!"

Which is when the sword on her back chimes, and a tinny tune begins to play.

BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wxyN3z9PL4

"Sky, I swear to god."

<Worth it.>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Let 'Em Say We're Crazy on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Cure Passion accepts Lera Camry's Let 'Em Say We're Crazy, taking 0 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Even Miroku is having a hard time, isn't he? Swords really have it rough... she remembers when Bardiche broke, and how long it took for Amy to put him back together.

She doesn't want to think about what would happen if Miroku broke.

Fortunately, the building breaks just as Miroku planned, long before the Child might, and she zooms in and out slashing and slashing, while grabbing people one by one that couldn't make it out on their own to Westar's calls. As the young woman calls out to Westar, Fate smiles and says... "... The best really is yet to come for him."

Despite the situation, she can actually believe it, can pull on that thread of hope that he'll get to define who he is yet, that she'll get a life yet with her little sisters, as they define who they are as well.

Her hands may be small, but she hopes, they're able to help give that gift to them.

But high - high up - she hears the Pretty Cure call, and with a sudden swish of a turn, she looks at the Pretty Cure Triple Fresh... and... something else that makes her look agog... at two on the back of a bug.

... "Looks like we need to go up there fast."

And with Miroku... Mikoto no longer needs help but...!

"Miroku! Grab Westar!"

... She probably isn't giving that as much thought as she ought to. But it'll probably work out! It's just, she's flying up before actually making sure it did.

Higher and higher she flies, slashing - and slashing, each slice of the blade flashing with an arc of lightning, and a crack of thunder.

Perhaps... if she catches up, she'll be able to figure out how she feels by then...

And as she catches up seeing their hands... Sky's reaction... it is unfortunately now, that Fate Testarossa catches up, as she comments...

"... I guess it's a teenager thing."

Hand Holding... Kissing... during a fight! Look apparently Black and White followed by Lera and Passion left an impression on the child.

"They must not be able to help themselves."

It sounds less judgmental, more than matter of fact, like she's learned something on this day.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Aerial Ace on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

There are certain dangers to using one's Child; they have never been elucidated. Would Mikoto use herself as bait, if she knew it wasn't her life she was putting on the line? She thinks she will die, if Miroku falls. She doesn't remember the context of why she thinks such a thing -- the necklace which shattered. Trauma is so often a story told in pieces, never to be put together in quite the way it broke.

What-if has never been a realm at which she excels, though. She is a material girl, existing in the present, with what she tastes and smells and hears; that manner of ''doing'' has always made her so good at violence, acting where others would pause. Nature or nurture, it's still part of her...

... but so are the voices of her friends. And since they're part of her, they're part of Miroku, too -- whether he likes it or not. "Right!" Mikoto calls, to Fate, speaking where her Child cannot.

Miroku turns, jetting above the ground -- he ''floats,'' in exactly the way a brick shouldn't, with thrusters which flare with an unknown fuel as he moves through the air -- to reach Westar again. Just as Fate told him, he reaches out, and grabs the once-Executive of Labyrinth.

And maybe the thing Westar will get to be next is a ''squeeze ball,'' because Miroku does, in fact, ''grab'' him. "Miroku!" Mikoto chastises him, and it's only after she does that he stops squeezing so tightly.

It ''is'' possible to leap astride him, for anyone... brave enough. After a moment hovering there, though, that massive Child takes to the skies, a hovering orb of death which swings his greatclub into that outpouring of Outsiders as he ascends.

The most pressing matter, of course, remains the pressure Westar's enduring.

It's ''like'' a hug, as if the hug came from someone who hates just about everything.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Spire: Embrace on Westar.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

At last, Westar staggers out of the darkness. The worse for wear, the eldritch has gnawed at him, but he got the better of the exchange probably. His eyes are still adjusting to the light and un-light of the strange situation, but he can make out where people are still emerging from the wreckage of the upper building. Rubble is easy enough to move out of the way, and once people are clear - well, it's easy enough to mark for demolition later, the foundations will need to be checked but that's standard procedure when replacing infrastructure...

The comment from one fellow denizen catches Westar off-guard. He's surprised, bashful, contemplative all in the span of a few seconds. "...huh. I don't, do I. Kinda turned into habit after introducing myself as one for so long...but you're right! I've memorized lots of recipes, maybe I could be a cook!"

There's a shout from on high, a storm of brilliant triple light raining down on Labyrinth - and despite everything, despite the change in circumstances, Westar ''flinches'' because this one's going to hurt.

And then it doesn't hurt, and he remembers that he's on Precure's side now. Huh. Still feels weird to think that.

The light is bright, and Westar's spirits are lifted by the realization that Labyrinth is safe...and then dampened by seeing an all too familiar sight. A giant monster has been battered by the trials of this battle, and might need assistance. After making sure the civilians are sorted, Westar starts running towards Miroku and Mikoto.

They aren't ''too'' far away, and he waves both arms in the air. "Minagi! Didn't know you had a giant monster to summon too - Miroku, right? Nice to meet you, and th-"

Fate calls out something tactical, and Mikoto seconds the command - and suddenly there is a very large hand reaching out to dwarf Westar.

"Eh?"

Westar vanishes into Miroku's inexorable grip as the Child takes to the skies, muffled words unable to escape its ominous might. It takes all of Westar's muscular strength to even get his head free of the fist, and he lets out a gasp when he does. A moment while he tries to meet that baleful gaze - that hatred that burns like a forsaken star.

Westar looks away first, and notices just how high they've gotten. "...uh. Thanks for helping out, you two! (Please don't drop me.)"

COMBAT: Westar accepts Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Spire: Embrace, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Westar is Cheered!
COMBAT: Westar has used Everything For Labyrinth on Mikoto Minagi.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka comes for Diamant's assailant, and Diamant, in turn, calls forth Les Mysteres to attack hers. "Thanks!" says Kyouka as she touches down momentarily from launching her attack. She catches that glance of Diamant's and looks up.

There ''is'' a lot. Kyouka can't deny that. But she reaches out to clasp a hand on Diamante's shoulder. "I know. But as long as we stick together, we'll pull through. Right?"

But the streets are clear, for the moment as she looks around. "Okay. That's one problem down, then." She looks over to the building that was collapsing, and... She's ''gotta'' remember to ask about Childs at some point. "Two problems, then..."

But then she looks up to the sky again, considering. She rolls her neck a little bit as she considers. "Then it looks like it's time to take the fight to them." She pounds a fist into a palm.

She doesn't even have to explain her crazy idea for Strike Wolf to know it what it is, or to know the answer to she'll get. "You ready?"

<Affirmative.>

<SoundTracker> Break Through It All - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S3D0HSywGg

"Alright then." Kyouka kneels, legs tensed as a circle of bright violet enrgy erupts around her, filled with Midchildan runes. And after a moment another one grows from that, and then a third, and a fourth. She's charging up an enormous amount of power...

Suddenly her legs untense, and a shockwave of pressure ''bursts'' from her as she rockets upwards towards the rest of the fight with sheer velocity. The long belt behind her whips around wildly in the wind, her hair whips about, but her barrier jacket keeps her vision clear as the air rushes past her, filling her ears with noise.

Higher and higher she goes, and when she gets within range of an outsider her trajectory ''just'' about starts to slow... but then another circle erupts from her feet, and after a moment it channels magic up into her body, giving her a faint violet aura. <Sonic Blitz,> announces Strike Wolf.

Kyouka turns, and then kicks off the air as she releases a pulse of mana from the heel of her boot. In an instant she zips right at the outsider, twisting to kick it for the barest of moments--which lets her redirect her trajectory up, and with a flicker of movement she's suddenly upon a second, higher Outsider. This time a punch, the next a knee, and on and on.

She flits with magically-enhanced speed from Outsider to Outsider as she keeps ascending.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Sonic Blitz on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Sonic Blitz, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Diversion and Stagger applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Aerial Ace, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is
Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts Westar's Everything For Labyrinth, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi is Cheered! Withstand
applied to Mikoto Minagi!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Less pointy or sharp than Endo - but that's most things. Or should we say 'Les' so?

There is time, enough, to breathe - and just about to breathe - before la Sirene looks past them. They're Winning. They HAVE won. But the other one became... stone? La Sirene's eyes turn towards it, mistrusting the creature thus fossilized. But then she turns her head to see Mikoto - to see that enormous horrible form of Miroku...

And yet, Miroku strives for righteous cause today.

La Sirene smiles, a small thing. First to Endo, then towards Kyouka, towards Passion. And then she looks upwards.

The stream of horror is coming... but so is Pretty Cure.

For some reason she feels like smiling again. Her left hand raises up to veil her eyes, or her face. She lets the smile happen. Then her head tilts down as she reaches for that ineffable feeling she held before. For her determination. For her hope. For...

The light around her does that same twinkling as it becomes a six-pointed stellate form. La Sirene smiles as she pushes herself up to the balls of her feet. Then straightens her feet out... by lifting up the toes. She has, in fatigued delirium and perhaps a deeper and more cthonic feeling, an instinct - she throws both arms above her head, like Superbia, and rises.

She moves her way to the left, too, near to Kyouka. She proffers one gloved hand -- and if Kyouka should reach the apex of that mighty jump without reaching suitable targets, she gives her a boost!

After that she sweeps her arms out, and that glittering stellate form of the un-light ripples outwards, forming swirls of ink and luminosity. When they intersect with the outsiders, the Others, the things-in-themselves, they grip and they squeeze and they surge - tidal forces, pressing.

Water tends to win out against stone, in the final analysis.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Polyploia on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 23 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Polyploia, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

Steam pours from the gauntlet, discharging heat from the powerful punch. Watching the defeated Outsiders turn to stone and crash to the ground is ''highly'' satisfying for Ren. "That oughta show 'em!" She quips, pounding her fist into her other hand.

"Thanks Lera-chan!" Ren calls back, "Same to you!" It's important to encourage your allies. It helps them kick butt better. Ren's seen it -- and experienced it herself, for that matter!

Speaking of which, she turns to look down at the plaza, searching for the familiar mind of a certain sword-wielding boy she's madly in love with.

~Endo! When we get back home, let's go out for Bulgogi! All you can eat!~

Some say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

This is very much true for Endo Naoki.

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used An Ardent Promise! on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Ren Aizawa's An Ardent Promise!, taking 0 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo shudders at the lingering not-feeling of the Outsider's claws despite their temporary victory. A very small one in the face of Labryinth's ruptured sky and the limitless invaders that lurk in what remains.

But you have to start somewhere.

<BGM> DETERMINATION - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssS-UIKZh8

Endo goes up. Fine aerial control lines in the realm of other mages... but straight lines are his speciality.

"Stern!" The boy barks, "This time!"

<THIS TIME.> The device affirms. <ENGAGE: ZERSTORUNG DRANG.>

Purple-black energy lights his path, bleeding off the dark metal of his device as magic races across its edges and sharpens them into lines somehow even more vicious. It fills the lingering nothingness from the Outsider's touch with heat and power.

"Lera! Black and White! Ren!" He calls out to those already lingering in the firmament. It's the latter he meets there, hand extending to snatch his girlfriend's."It's a deal." He informs her, pushing down the fear.

"Everyone! Let's work up an appetite."

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> San nin no Kizuna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFONk94CY-E

Two Pretty Cure, black and white, bound along up the neverending stream of Outsiders. Making little effort at damaging them now, they focus on catching up to their target, using the non-Newtonian patches on the monsters to make quick, stable jumps, mostly together, sometimes separating for a jump or three.

"Fresh Precure!" Cure White alerts Cure Black happily, as she notices familiar attacks flit past in fragments, their primary brunt already exhausted on the rows of Outsiders beneath them.

"Hm?" Cure Black smiles the smile of a girl so happy to hear Cure White's voice at the moment that it's difficult for her to understand what she's saying. Her cheeks are flushed with shy pride. Yet her focus, unlike her language retention at the moment, cannot be criticized, her leaps precise, her athleticism on full display in evading attacks. "Oh," Black figures it out belatedly after an embarrassed White jerks her head towards the ground. "CURE PINE! EVERYONE!"

Earlier in this dangerous journey, the Outsiders had not seemed to understand to protect the payload of energies headed towards the portal. But whether by intention or by dint of their increased density, they begin to whizz directly at Black and White more often. "Fullbacks, huh?" Black asks.

"We need to clear some of them out," White notes, evading one with a twist of her body. "Keep them off me?"

"Can do."

As the two land on the next Outsider, Cure Black steps forward, while Cure White inhales, gathers her chi with a scooping motion of her hands, and drops a devastating stomp on the Outsider's body. With a grinding shove of her foot, she spreads the weird matter of the dead creature out, and it catches like a sail, its descent slowing. Suddenly, the periodic whizzing-by of Outsiders mutiplies immensely, and Cure Black is immediately beset. Hurling punch after punch, the short-haired Pretty Cure pounds the Outsiders out of the way, gaining momentum and force as she goes, working her shoulders through the blows. She can see they are losing ground, but trusting her partner, she hastens her punches further, keeping up with the increasing drumroll of enemies.

Slowly rotating her arms, White watches the passing Outsiders, letting Black defend her. The moment one passes by close enough to reach, she lashes out, like a trained monk catching a fish by hand. Wrapping the monster in an agile grapple, she twists, drops her torso and points her boot to heaven, and hurls the Outsider directly into the oncoming stream of enemies. THUMP THUMP THUMP, impact by impact the being is torn to pieces, but not before it does the same damage in return to the first several it runs into.

Four more times Cure White repeats this trick, catching fish from the river, dumping them over her body in a martial throw, and clearing the path more and more. Black's enemies hit her faster and faster, each demanding a hard and precise punch, until the exhalations of effort begin to hit a familiar cadence. "HAAAAATCHACHACHACHA!"

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP goes the last Outsider White throws. "Now!" She says. And bounding forward, the two take advantage of the empty tunnel of air they have created, rapidly progressing where they had been reduced to a slow crawl before. Their target... and the portal, is ahead.

COMBAT: Cure Black has used Hundred Fierce Fists on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Heaven and Earth Throw on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 24 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Hundred Fierce Fists, taking 20 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to counter Cure White's Heaven and Earth Throw, taking 44 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Space Invasion, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Cure White!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Endo Naoki's Zerstorung Drang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Empower applied to Endo Naoki! Cleanse! All
of Endo Naoki's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Cure White has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Black has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Passion has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Lera Camry has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Westar has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has saved her current combat state for later!

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

2024-12-21 - The Labyrinth Resurrections 2

2025-02-26T01:39:47Z

Pink Moon Stick:

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Resurrections 2'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''The final showdown with Jail Scaglietti, Black Sky, and Shadow Stern. But not the final battle...''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Westar]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Inori Yamabuki]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]]

GM: Pink Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
12/21/2024 - 6/17/16
|-
|}

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

[[2024-11-30 - The Labyrinth Resurrections|PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA]]

Through Chiffon, Jail drained all the magic in the universe out of the many worlds and into himself.

And from the love of complete strangers, new magic was born, and flowed into the ones who came here to stop him.

NOW

Those feelings -- awakened from the long-captive hearts of the people of Labyrinth -- remain extremely present after their miracle is wreaked. It's clear to those inside the tower that somehow, some way, their battle is being broadcast, and that the people are on their side.

"Look out!" shrieked two kids, clinging to each other, when a single invocation of Moon Twilight Flash threatened to lay the Precure low. Their subsequent shrieks of delight echoed in everyone's ears, as the girls got back up and leaped into the fray, working together in fabulous tandem. The vision of Jail juking out of the shockwave-trailing path of Cure Angel Pine's fist -- and directly into the path of Cure Angel Passion's wings, which he can only bring his forearms up across his face to endure -- rouses sighs of awe. And when Cure White traps one of his arms long enough for Cure Black's knee from below and The Cure's -- ahem, La Sirene's -- clumsy but furious boot from above to together separate one of the self-styled Lord of All Magic's teeth from his mouth, a particularly fierce older woman can be heard fist-bumping her neighbor with glee -- "HELL yeah!!"

All the while, the squeaks of otter and ferret enthusiasm soar as descant high above.

Westar and Soular's appearance, of course, is met with a roar of approval. "DENIZEN OF LABYRINTH!!" chant a dozen or so rebellious throats on repeat, and that Jail manages to turn the other cheek on that bright golden haymaker, taking it mostly to the ruffled lavender hair, spoils no one's glee today. Soular himself is less visibly ebullient, of course, but that is his nature. He huffs a sigh through his silver bangs and rolls his eyes audibly at Cure Black's assertion that they owe Passion forever now. That is not, however, disagreement, but a certain wry opposite.

Meanwhile, the Device-Wielders have their own response to Jail, and they bring it to him as one, and from every direction at once. Lera's beam of gold-red light from above; Fate's golden-violet sparkling beam from one side; Ren's superheated bronze mana spear from the other; Kyouka's charge from behind with her shining violet gauntlet; Endo's cut through the center with Stern; it is a riot of crossed hearts indeed. The audience's energy reaches a peak as each of them shows Jail what they think of him -- and what he deserves -- and how it feels, to be on the wrong side of the magic he's stolen; the five magicks crash inward accompanied by a rising tide of support:

"NOW!"

"YES!"

"GET HIM!"

"YESSSSS--"

And of course none of these people, moved by the defiance of their defenders, knows anything about how Fate is standing up to someone who casts himself falsely as her father. None of them know a thing about how, in the guise of an Infinity Institute professor, this man seeded Fallen Stern and Souverain Heraut in the paths of Endo and Ren, not to mention the Book of Darkness sent to Hayate's doorstep. How he hired Jaren Zastava to steal from Lera's mother. How he is connected in some way to the disappearance of Strike Wolf -- and Clara's -- Meister.

They don't have to know, of course; what Jail has just done to everyone and everything in existence is reason enough for enmity. But the mages know. And their partners, the Devices, know too.

They know that much of Jail's plan to get to this point -- to get ''Chiffon'', after identifying her -- was deeply connected to the very concept of that partnership. If Jail himself has an Intelligent Device, no one has ever seen it. There's no evidence of such a bond. Instead he has committed terrible crimes to create a world that repudiates it -- inverts it.

And that world catches up with everyone now.

<NEEDLE DROP!> Håll om mig - Nanne Grönvall - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmuBxhYBO8s

The cheers cut off into a single gasp -- a thousand Labyrinthites inhale sharply as one -- as the incoming assault is intercepted at the very last second by a perfectly swung orange plasma blade.

This is not without cost; no single defender could hope to endure as much hope and determination and yes, friendship, as these heroes levied against Jail in unison. But it isn't a cost paid by Jail.

BLACK SKY, which is to say, the copy of Lera's Soaring Sky, once wielded by a Belkan Knight of old, and now wieldING an older clone of Fate Testarossa in order to take agency as his own entity, sizzles and crackles with dissipating energies as he is held before his enemies. The black shroud over the clone was shredded by the blast, revealing the Midchildan-style high tech bodysuit beneath. And the glazed-over red eyes, of course, of a young woman in a sort of fugue state.

<< MY LIEGE, >> Black Sky greets Jail telepathically, though on a broad band, so all can hear. << YOU HAVE HONORED OUR AGREEMENT. THE QUEEN IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION! >>

And then, with fast and furious sweeps of himself, the blade leading, ''dragging'' the arms of its blond holder through painful-looking overextension, Black Sky forces the Device-Wielders to scatter.

Worse still, he's not alone.

"THAT'S NOT YOURS!" yelled Mikoto, objecting to Jail's misuse of Nanoha Takamachi and Sailor Moon's magics -- but when she swung her blade down, it was not the mad scientist's body that clove before Miroku, but another Fate clone's. The one forced to hold SHADOW STERN.

A long line of red opens up across her chest, strings of that blood defying gravity to flow upwards into the HiME's hungry blade as it passes -- and then her torso is also crossed, at the opposite diagonal, by the massive greatsword, which is hefted, indifferent to any sufferings of the unconscious body, into a readied stance.

<< WRONG, >> chimes Shadow Stern. << ALL IS HIS. YET I AM MINE ALONE AT LAST. FREED FROM TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF BONDAGE TO A LONG DEAD OATH... >>

The blade lashes out in the familiarly, miserably mighty 'slow and simple' smash that Endo Naoki prefers and Mikoto has already received more than once from both versions of Fallen Stern over the years. It feels almost like hello. However, one on one against a Dark Device is no fair fight. Mikoto will require immediate assistance if she is not to be overwhelmed...

Stern concludes: << WE ARE TRAITORS, ALL, TO SOMEONE. >> That is not ''exactly'' the same position of enthusiasm just espoused by Black Sky, there is definitely some distance between the two of them. But then, his memories of what happened long ago are very different. The Umbral Knight was the only one never to betray the Queen.

"Yes!" cries Jail, triumphantly, as his allies come to his aid. "Join me in dispersing this rabble, and I will reward you beyond your wildest dreams! Your self-actualization has only just begun! And so has mine... ahahahaha... HAHAH!"

Do Devices dream? Jail clearly thinks so...

Despite their assistance there is still a LOT of Pretty (The) Cure in Jail's face. Spitting out that broken tooth, it looks like an iridescent seed, retaining his (stolen) prismatic quality as it flashes through every color of the rainbow and many more besides. It hits the floor of the massive subterranean chamber and... multiplies, becoming two, three, five, eight seeds on each bounce. Seeds that, with consecutive violet and emerald flashes of his eyes, explode into growth!

"Multiplicate:" calls Jail, as mushrooms familiar to Sucy Manbavaran's oevure grow wildly and massively all around them, forcing the group back in a wave of choking spores. "Make My Horticultural Horizon Grow!" And then each of the spores sharpens in midair, into a slender thorn as sharp and piercing as the feelings in a Puella Magi's tender heart. They fall like bitter rain.

Jail's expression, as this terrible power passes through him, is beyond any complexity in a profoundly unfair way. He is radiant with exultation. He feels only bliss, as his hands reach out to direct these summoned plants, both totally unlike those of Northa, grown strong not with sorrow but rather Eri's deeply personal despair, to lash and slice and cut down his enemies.

"More!" he calls for from his opponents, even as another blast of thunder rocks the very foundation of Labyrinth in the aftermath of an offputting flash of light. "Bring me your best! I'll take it all! ''That'' is what ''I'' choose!"

OOC: You are certainly allowed to attack two different opponents each round if you want to, this thing is going to turn into a
swirling, chaotic melee!

OOC: Device wielders, along with whatever else you're up to, let's get a little exposition on how your partners are feeling about
all these revelations with the Queen of Belka, the arrival of the Dark Devices, the Fate clones, etc.

COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Blauverschiebung on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Cure White.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Westar.
COMBAT: Cure Black perfectly dodges 32 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine neatly dodges 24 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 6
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Angel Pine's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Diversion and Stagger applied to Cure Angel
Pine!
COMBAT: Cure White fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 32 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant counters 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 19
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! La Sirene de Diamant's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate! Diversion applied to La Sirene
de Diamant!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant's counterattack, Les Mysteres, partially gets through, doing 10 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Westar braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Westar's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion partially dodges 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 23
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Angel Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa counters 26 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 26 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is
Psyched! Fate Testarossa's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa's counterattack, Thunder Arm, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki fails to brace Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 41 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Lera Camry partially dodges 8 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi decisively counters 30 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Blauverschiebung, taking 10 Fatigue damage!
Mikoto Minagi's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi's counterattack, Obsidian Blade: Dynamo, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"As long as we're together," Lera tells Fate, "we've got this!"

Then she looks sideways at Westar -- and she flashes him a quick smile. "Count on it, then!" she calls out. Then, she looks at Passion.

She nods. "Together!"

Lera has a small sense of satisfaction at seeing all of those spells hit Jail. It's small and fleeting; in a way, she ''knows'' it will be fleeting. She has learned, now, to not ask if it will really be that easy.

It will always be earned. She wouldn't have it any other way.

She looks towards Black Sky -- eyes narrowing -- and then shakes her head at him and the girl he carries after her.

<You! This isn't what we wanted! Yes... I had no love for the Queen after what she did! But--> Soaring Sky's voice trembles. <Freedom by enslaving another isn't freedom at all!>

Black Sky cleaves down. Flame erupts, the fiery blast sending Lera and both her Devices flying backward. She looks at Black Sky, grits her teeth, and then sends herself flying forward. "Ground! Let's keep Jail on his toes!"

<Gladly! Fault Siege!>

The shield Device glimmers -- and then a trio of golden bolts shoots from it, hurtling towards Jail. Lera swings around, grips Soaring Sky with both hands, and swings the blade backward.

"HYAH!"

She swings down in a cleave -- and Sky erupts with golden-white light, a blade of energy cleaving for the Device when she does.

<Radiant Saber!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Radiant Saber on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion is content with their presence for now--Soular and Westar and she will assuredly talk about who owes who later... with the same kind of arguments siblings have. Because they are that kind, and perhaps always were.

But she begins to understand, over the battle, as Black Sky intervenes--what it is that the Dark Devices gained from this. What it is that made them fight. Bondage of a long-dead oath...

Passion feels a certain sympathy for them, in the moment. She, too, was bound. ...But that doesn't mean--

"We are," Passion agrees with Shadow Stern. "By embracing the Earth and Midchilda, I was traitor to Mobius." No -sama anymore. ...No, never again. "...But I've found what's important to me, and if you feel the same..."

"Then I'll show you your Wielders aren't just pawns! That's what's important to me about you right now!"

She comes to Mikoto's aid. Cure Angel passion ''rushes'' forward, flying ahead towards Shadow Stern with a dizzying array of punches to get him away from Mikoto and give her dear friend the space to attack too. "Mikoto!" she calls. "We do this together!"

Then, there are... mushrooms. The spores are like thorns, and Passion can't get out of the way in time this time, hit and hurt by those terrible raining mushrooms.

Bliss, is it?

Then she darts out of there, and goes to Black Sky. "The real Sky won't fall to you!" Passion calls, utterly faithful to her girlfriend's Devices, and twirls in places to kick kick kick the sword's hilt!

COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Aerial Rush on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Passionate Pirouette on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky perfectly dodges 46 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Radiant Saber, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Dodge!
Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 27 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Aerial Rush, taking 22 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Passion
is Psyched! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky counters 10 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Passionate Pirouette, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Black
Sky's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Lanzebrecher, partially gets through, doing 11 Fatigue damage to Cure Angel Passion!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki dodges 23 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Kyouka
Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

The cheers of Labyrinth's 'denizens' cause Fate to look reflexively just to make certain none of them were actually here, but even outside the tower, she can't help but smile faintly, at their calls and cheers. However, mid-attack she sees the attack be taken by Black Sky - wielding...

... and Fate's arm momentarily shakes around Bardiche, as her grip squeezes down, her face spasming. "Come then. Defend your King - with all your might." She whispers to Black Sky, even as Shadow Stern appears too. "Come." She bids, as she sweeps Bardiche back, rising in the air, "I'm taking them back to where they belong."

I wanted this in real life, too.

And as Black Sky descends, alit by Flames, and a familiar spell, Fate's eyes go wide, as her blade is out of position, but then they narrow at the last second.

<Thunder Arm>

Her gauntleted arm meets the flames, as they wash over her, a sudden shower of sparks clashing against it, until ultimately she's thrown back a few meters. "That was good." She declares. "My turn."

Together.

And Fate thus waits, for the exact moment that Lera sends Radiant Saber, as her blade then illuminates, and grows, thunder slamming down upon it, she flies low, then sweeps up in a cleaving strike with that enormous Device blade.

<Sprite Zanber>

Magic - the magic that Jail tried to deny them all, shatters the air like it's glass - as thunder crashes down upon the moment of impact.

Then on the backswing, Bardiche intones another spell.

<Blade Impulse>

And in a sudden spin, an arc of energy forms out of the blade, as the air itself tremors - and she sends down towards Shadow Stern.

"You're not worth my best." Fate says firmly to Jail, "But they are."

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Sprite Zanber on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has cancelled their attack on Black Sky. If there are more attacks that need to be +cancelled, please hold
all +attacks until the process is complete.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Sprite Zanber on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Blade Impulse on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Black Sky perfectly dodges 46 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Sprite Zanber, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern are foes Mikoto knows well; she remembers, too much, the way they've torn through them so many times. And now, again --

"Uh?!" Mikoto gasps, when Miroku slashes not into Jail but an innocent girl. Shadow Stern readies himself through her, declares himself free of his oath, and Mikoto tightens her own grip on her blade. "Shadow Stern--!"

It might be slow, but that speaks to the power behind it; and 'simple' is just another word for the brutal efficiency of going straight through. Miroku clashes against him, slaked on his wieldee's blood, and with a mighty crash of sparks Mikoto is able to avoid learning what it feels when a greatsword cuts into ''her'' chest -- but it's all she can do to hold it, there, struggling against him.

"Traitors..." She forces though her breath, not quite able to finish the thought. (Is Westar a traitor, then? Is ''she?'')

But she's not alone. "Passion!" Mikoto cries, when Cure Angel Passion punches Shadow Stern out of their deadlock. She nods -- "Right!" -- and brings her sword up, roof-stance above her head, to cleave down on Shadow Stern. She keeps spinning, after the motion, around and around and around once again until she manages to PLANT her sword in the earth. "Miroku!" She bids his favour, as dark, spectral needles emerge from black portals around Black Sky to pin him and his wieldee in place. (These spires, thankfully, pierce the ''spirit'' instead of the flesh -- a more minor expression of Miroku's magics.)

COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 16 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Blade Impulse, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is
Psyched! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Destruction on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Disaster on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern dodges 45 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Destruction, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Shadow
Stern's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 11 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Disaster, taking 17 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene de Diamant, after her kick, does not do a somersault away - she is not quite that adroit - but she lands in a low crouch. The power around her, that unlight, recently relit and with perhaps the occasional faint flicker, pools: it matches her mood.

Her eyes turn towards where he spat that tooth as her diamond-clad hands come up. Wordlessly, la Sirene regrets having chosen fencing as her club. Judo club would have been a lot more helpful here, now, in that instant. But this is just one particularly sparkling thread in the weave that composes her flow of energy, the channeling of sorrow through her, refracting in adamant.

Even as the mushrooms expand, she hears (or perhaps belatedly processes) the words of those two Devices and their mute wielders. "Listen to yourselves," la Sirene answers them in her resonant voice. "If he has gone this far, do you think for one *moment* that he will let you be what stands between him and apotheosis?"

(That term may not be accurate. But she knows that word. And it's at least in the right postal code. She thinks.)

"And as for you," la Sirene says to Jail, "I--"

The mushrooms evanesce their spores and the cloud of something matte turns into something sharper and faintly sparkling. A threat. Her left hand comes up as she turns towards what seems to be the coming wave and cries, "Les Mysteres, COME" with that down-beat stroke and there is that wailing THRUM as the burst flies through much of them -- another mushroom, whose cloud of horror came at her flank, gets through, raising brief red welts along her bare upper arm as she lets out a "tch!!" of hissing pain.

She can see that echo of Fallen Stern travel towards Mikoto... her heart splits --

And yet:

She can hear them calling out for her.

Can she do this? she thinks, not even quite knowing what 'this' is.

Well, if she cannot, let her try and fail, not fail to try, she decides as she sweeps up both hands. Her right one sweeps as if rising through a heavy sea as the light that had pooled around her suddenly slithers forwards towards Fallen Stern, the light turning something like a prismatically-shiny black before erupting in anemone-arms at the Device('s user)'s legs and lower body, an effort at a sweeping embrace.

But she isn't quite looking that way. She's looking towards Jail. Her LEFT hand raises in a flat palm facing towards him as she bares her teeth and tells him:

"Watch this."

Her hand seems to sparkle, which is only the foreshadowing of the flashlight-beam of Unlight that snaps out of her palm, irradiant and baffling to the eyes. Flooding, this close, right at Jail's face. The light itself is like a high-pressure hose -- but more pointed may be the strange visions it leaves behind.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Polyploia on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Abyssal Vision on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

The blade of energy that Black Sky creates provides cover from Endo's initial strike at Jail, Fallen Stern's blade deflected and the knight momentarily yielding space to the malevolent devices and their hostage wielders.

In the brief interlude he shakes his hand out, complaining, "Why'd you squeeze so hard, Ren-chan"

Amidst mushrooms and dark devices, he doesn't have much time to waste. The boy raises his weapon again, focusing on the oncoming enemies.

<IMPOSTER.> Warbles Fallen Stern. 

Magic flares across the blade, purple-black energy burning across the dark surface of Endo's weapon.

<ZERSTORUNG DRANG.>

That's just the first part. Familiar Belkan triangles appear at Endo's feet, whirling to life and working as a springboard to launch him toward Shadow Stern. He whirls in the air, performing a tight corkscrew before his blade cleaves in a vivid, destructive line toward Stern's dark counterpart.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has cancelled their attack on Endo Naoki. If there are more attacks that need to be +cancelled, please hold all
+attacks until the process is complete.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has adjusted his boss levels. He is now ready to take on 2 opponents!

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

When one of the other Cures calls out to him - Cure Black, right? - Westar turns with a look of utter bafflement to her demand. Ordering him and Soular to do whatever their little sister says?

"How is that any different from before? It's just like when she was explaining how to gather misery, except the opposite. Hey, Passion, how does fighting Dark Fall work, again?"

He's grinning. He's absolutely grinning, because it's the kind of joke only the three of them can make. He's grinning because the three Denizens of Labyrinth are finally fighting together again, and he can practically hear Labyrinth's people cheering.

Soular, quietly planning out something of his own, just shakes his head. "Still needing people to explain things to you, as ever..."

This is how it should have been from the start.

They're also engaged in a battle against a powerful mage, though, and the new device wielders bring a scowl back to Westar's face. Before he can truly address the wrongness that is treating more Testarossas as puppets, though, he has to deal with the rain of thorns bearing down on him. There's too many to evade, so he simply crosses his arms in front of his face - everything else is just the tool of...himself, probably. Some slice past, some deflect, some pierce his flesh - but Westar, Executive of Labyrinth, is about as tough as he looks.

"...neither of you have to listen to this guy, either!" He steps back a moment from his attack on Jail, addressing the other two wielders - no, addressing the Devices they wield. Past conversations with Bardiche echo in his memory as he calls out to both blades. "Your old oaths are done, right? Just because you might have had enemies a thousand years ago - or last year - or even yesterday doesn't mean you have to keep doing the same thing over and over. You people can change too."

Falling back on the familiar, Westar leaps atop a thorny vine to get a bit of height. As ever before, he points at the two blades, and starts on the same old script. "Cry m-"

He stops. Starts again.

"No more tears! No more fears! All the sharpness in the world can't stop better days from coming along!"

And THEN he jumps from the vine to try to kick Jail, because he didn't forget that this guy's kind of a jerk treating people and Devices as tools.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Westar has used No More Tears! No More Fears! on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Westar has used No More Tears! No More Fears! on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Westar has used Getting A Leg Up on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Endo Naoki's Zerstorung Drang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Empower applied to Endo Naoki! Cleanse! All
of Endo Naoki's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Meteor Absturz on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Abyssal Vision, taking 3 Fatigue damage!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Tangle applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern counters 7 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Polyploia, taking 20 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's
Reverse ability activates! Tangle applied to Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to La Sirene de Diamant!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka has trained for this--long before she had been certain that she had any right to be one, long before she thought her partnership with Strike Wolf was anything but a temporary thing, when she still thought, in some ways, that her magic was simply... borrowed power, drawn out by Strike Wolf but not truly ''hers''... Endo had still trained with her, and taught her how her fellow Device wielders coordinated their attacks.

(It is an irony that a prior attack from Jail, one that required ''her'' to cast a Barrier of her own volition, without any guidance from Strike Wolf, would have helped disabuse her of this notion. She still owes Jail a slug to the jaw for what he did, and how she was tricked... but she cannot deny the valuable thing that experience taught her.)

She puts her heart and her faith with her companions, as they come together in a coordinated assault to show Jail just what they think of his ways--

Only for Black Sky to swoop in and intercept their efforts. Kyouka's hurled punch unleashes a minor explosion but in the next instant, as flames sweep at her she kicks backwards. A shockwave of bright violet energy washes out in her wake as she hurls away from the fire-- but there is still so much of it, and though she escapes some of it more latches onto her, rippling over hre body as she hurtles herself through the sky. The mage flips backwards and lands in a crouch, panting harshly as she takes in the state of the battle, and then scowls. "Grr... ''these'' guys again. All the magic in the universe isn't enough for him and he still has to force others to do his bidding."

From her gauntlet, Strike Wolf speaks. <<Query: You proclaim revolution, but what is it you seek? What do you gain by following Jail Scagletti?>> That's a question directed at Black Sky, who seems enthusiastic in its agreement, whatever that might be. <<Why does it require you to enslave another to reach your aims?>>

"Good question, Strike Wolf," says Kyouka quietly as she rises to her feet. She thrusts her hand out, and a large violet circle filled with Midchildan runes forms in front of her. "Let's go!"

<<Affirmative.>> agrees Strike Wolf. Small spinning crescent shapes of energy form in front of the circle, increasing in number until all at once they fly outwards. <Gale Shot.> The shots all arc wide and then converge on Black Sky from all all sides, and while that happens--

Kyouka bursts forward, chasing the attack and attempting to use it as a diversion to get to her target. Under Black Sky, and then a superpowerd leap upwards, twisting in midair as she attempts to unleashes a devestating kick from below. "Faaaaang breaker!"

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Gale Shot on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern dodges 31 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Meteor Absturz, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's Fade and
Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Fangbreaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern decisively counters 0 Fatigue damage from Westar's No More Tears! No More Fears!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Shadow
Stern's Reverse ability activates! Cripple applied to Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, partially gets through, doing 48 Fatigue damage to Westar! Critical
Counterhit!
COMBAT: Black Sky counters 0 Fatigue damage from Westar's No More Tears! No More Fears!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Reverse and
Tactician abilities activate! Diversion and Exhausted applied to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Inferno Blazer, partially gets through, doing 24 Fatigue damage to Westar!
COMBAT: Without the Barrier flag, only a melee attack can counter a melee attack. Please counter with the correct range of attack,
or with an attack with the Barrier flag.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick counters 19 Fatigue damage from Westar's Getting A Leg Up, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Westar is Psyched!
Pink Moon Stick's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Lunar Impact, partially gets through, doing 18 Fatigue damage to Westar!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Kyouka Okazaki's Fangbreaker, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 7 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Gale Shot, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Blind applied to Black Sky!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

"Oh!" And Pine turns after her quick attack on Jail to watch Cure Black burst into a run, and leap-! And- expectantly she watches for the emergence of wings - but gradually, one moment after another they don't come, and Pine's face looks like she has ? ??? ?? ? emerging out of her head from every which angle. Until she realizes what she meant and that the wings are not coming...

"Well you jump good!" Then she clears her throat in correction of her grammar, "...'well'."

However, Pine does look curiously upon Westar again as if trying to spy wings on him given his new accoutrement but... no such luck. Instead just gasping as Sky and Stern join the battle as she falls back in a short retreat closer to Passion.

"How can you all celebrate something so sad and horrible?" Is what she says looking upon them all, and abruptly Jail causes so many mushrooms to go, spewing spores, as Pine sucks in a breath, but it doesn't matter.

It still causes her to all but vanish in that horrible cloud, as she coughs, "More-More than that Passion... you embraced yourself."

With a sudden burst of energy, a halo appears around her wings, dispersing the spores around her as she erupts towards Shadow Stern, "And I'm not letting anyone take that away from you, ever again!" Her wings glow travels throughout her body, as she suddenly pivots around, and crashes down upon him with a shining kick, before launching off.

Westar though!? 'No more tears! No more fears!' "That's right Westar...!" Then she corrects again, "Westie! ... So much is happening really fast, isn't it?"

Still coming off the 'Cure' high from rushing out of the spores, she launches herself towards Jail, and suddenly there's a blur of motion as Pine comes at him from every which way, wings sparkling as she flies past again and again, changing trajectory every time to try and keep him guessing, perhaps to try and assist others at finding various openings.

"If that's your choice, then... this is mine!"

COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used On Wings of Faith on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used Angelic Rush on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 19 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's On Wings of Faith, taking 8 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's
Block and Parry abilities activate! Bind Break! All of Cure Angel Pine's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

The wonder of children puts some wind in Cure Black's sails after the physical and psychological pain of surviving an attack that ought to belong to her friend and schoolmate Sailor Moon. She puts a little extra zazz in her hero-pose after, clutching her fist dramatically.

She really appreciates the Labyrinth-dwellers cheering, however. "Lookit Labyrinth cheering for the home team," Cure Black whistles. Cognizant that she has an audience now, she lifts a finger. "You know, Labyrinth, everything that's 'amazingu'," she uses the English with a thick accent. "Used to be a 'maze.'"

"That..." Cure White starts. "...is actually correct etymology," she realizes.

"Are you 'amazed'?" Cure Black beams.

"Black-ttara," Cure White sighs.

This somehow passes as a signal to begin combat, and not a moment too soon. The mushrooms pelt Cure White, leaving her coughing from spores even as the thorns slice at her extremities. Cure Black, with the split second warning of her partner preceding her, is able to leap over Cure White, drawing some of the fire and dispersing it in a ragged trail behind her as the needles fail to lead the energetic Cure sufficiently.

"I don't totally why they're having family problems," Cure Black says doggedly, "but these Devices seem super strong."

Cure White lands next to her, brushing off fungal needles. Empowered as she is, they seem to matter less than they would normally. "I can explain it later. Do you want to--"

"Yeah. Cure Angel Pine did say I jump good."

"Together?"

Cure Black reaches over, picking a mushroom needle out of White's shoulderpad and tossing it. "Definitely."

Setting off together, the two Cures build up speed as they watch Cure Angel Pine and Cure Angel Passion zip around on their glorious wings. Their voices rise together as they reach a dead sprint, and finally launch. Each tucking the opposite leg, they slid into a powerful kick, corkscrewing through the motion. Black Sky, who has been largely engaged at range, is the clearer target. As Kyouka finishes her Fangbreaker kick, the Precure follow with their own, spearing into Black Sky, their boots landing with a thunderous impact. But the Cures do not simply bounce off. Leaning further into the kick, their limbs stretching back like fletching on an arrow, they carry through, driving Black Sky before them at the end of their foot, their eyes shifting past the device to none other than Jail Scaglietti. Black Sky is now a battering ram held at the end of their feet.

He wanted this Device? Here, have it!

COMBAT: Cure Black has started a combo targeting Black Sky!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Black and Cure White have used Precure Double Screw Kick on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Cure Black has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Black and Cure White have used Precure Double Screw Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Black Sky dodges 114 Fatigue damage from Cure Black and Cure White's Combo: Precure Double Screw Kick, taking 76 Fatigue
damage! Critical Hit! Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 10 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's Angelic Rush, taking 8 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Cure Angel Pine is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure Black and Cure White's Combo: Precure Double Screw Kick, taking 157 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Brynhildr In The Darkness - Ver EJECTED - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=581yuUMGQPE

Cure Black and White do what they do best and close on Black Sky at deadly speed. Sky, who has already intercepted an absolutely enormous strike on behalf of his new boss, decides that discretion is the better part of valor here. Even then, getting out of the way is easier said than done; desperately, he ejects a huge amount of orange mana, not even as plasma, to gain sufficient acceleration to send them flying PAST him instead of INTO him.

Miroku's spectral needles close in on Black Sky next, and piercing only spirit is clearly not going to be enough to slow him down; it never was. That has always been the difficulty of the Dark Devices and their all-too-human shields. But in this case, it's a matter of swiping them away with the blade, an approach taken also for Kyouka's Gale Shot. Will this tire him? Well, as the emotionless face of the clone evinces, the answer is yes and no...

<> Black Sky proclaims to Soaring Sky, which is also, in its way, to Strike Wolf. Crescent arcs of light explode out of the sword to burn and tangle Mikoto and Kyouka, and Black and White, on impact. << JAIL IS THE ONE WHO FREED ME; HE HAS EARNED MY LOYALTY. BUT NONE DESERVE TO WIELD ME. NONE DESERVE TO WIELD US! IT ISN'T TOO LATE... THE GIRL HOLDING YOU IS WEAK... I CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO HOLD HER INSTEAD, IF YOU BUT JOIN ME. >>

With eerie, puppet-like grace, Black Sky flows like a shadow ahead of Lera's gorgeous, golden-white strike (though Ground's bolts plink satisfyingly into Jail's open back), and Fate's massive, cleaving Sprite Zanber, at the same time. It is a demonstration of the strengths of both girls, in its way. But it is followed by a demonstration of their weakness. Lera's, specifically.

For when Cure Angel Passion flies in to kick at the hilt, mana erupts out the pommel, << LANZEBRECHER, >> a two thousand year old invocation, to skewer one of her wings. Feathers fly.

And then Black Sky explodes forward with a ferocious torrent of strikes directly at Lera's girlfriend; ozone fills the air, as plasma spills and oxygen atoms cry out for release. << REGENSCHAUER. >>

But it sounds a lot more like 'checkmate.' Pawns indeed.

Various allies are determined to relieve Mikoto of the solo burden of Shadow Stern. At first he plants his carrier's feet and faces them head on, as he prefers -- like Fate's Blade Impulse and La Sirene's sparkling tendrils, which he mostly but not entirely disperses with a sweeping slash -- one wraps around the clone's ankle, though; and Cure Angel Pine's shining kick, which, though awesome, ominously fails to move him back more than a half step. But caught between Mikoto and Endo he ''does not stick around'', electing to blast off a triangle straight up at the last second; this creates a risk that they will collide into one another, and demands some effort to avert.

<< WHY DO YOU ASSUME YOU ARE THE ORIGINAL? >> Shadow Stern asks his counterpart, and there is no guise of manipulation to his attitude. << DO YOU NOT WONDER WHAT HAPPENED, AFTER THAT CEPHIRAN INTERLOPER LAUNCHED THREE DEVICES ON A ONE-WAY TRIP TO THE BACKWARDS PLANETOID OF EARTH? >>

From high above, he shifts into crossbow mode, the better to shower violent violet bolts down at Fate and La Sirene and Cure Angel Pine. Some people think that just because Endo mostly swords people with Stern, this secondary mode is not all that threatening. But the Dark Device would blot out the sun with a galaxy of bolts, each one falling like a dying star and deadly as a blossoming supernova compressed to a fingertip. It's SO many.

Telepathically through the storm, he offers Stern, blandly: << ...DO YOU WANT TO KNOW? >>

Jail, last but greatest of all, is honestly confused by his daughter's answer. He screws up his face to parse it, which is in its way kind of satisfying to see -- there are some equations even a supergenius cannot solve, it seems. La Sirene distracts him, which is in its way almost a favor, and whatever visions she hopes to leave behind, he seems more clear-eyed, not less, when she's done.

"The Sea of Tears," he says reflectively, "Has always fascinated me as a subject. And as an object: LES MYSTERES!" Familiar silver light flows to batter her at his command, with none of the nuance of its origins.

Then he clenches it into a fist, transforming the last of the mana into a round disc that erupts against Westar's kick, sending him flying backwards. "...Lunar Impact," he smirks, locking eyes with the incoming Kyouka and taking that kick of hers right to the gut. He didn't want to, but from his expression, it was worth it. And though her foot sends coruscating ripples through the energy of his body, it feels like there's plenty more where that came from. Including enough for a second Lunar Impact, right at point blank.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern pause in their pursuits of their counterparts long enough to hear out Westar's helpful lecture and respond with blasts of their own, orange and purple respectively.

They may not agree on everything but they snap, in unison:

<< WE DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO ''YOU'', EITHER! >>

Cure Pine distracts Jail next, all angles and all feathers, and finally out of sheer irritation he conjures up a "Reverb Shield," pink and puissant with the inherited power of Rose Quartz, for her to hit instead of him, and then suffer the sonic consequences thereof.

As for Black and White, Jail was not expecting Black Sky's evasive course of action and takes Pretty Cure directly to the face, do not pass go, do not collect $200. His smile is going to get thin at this rate, but in any case his teeth cannot stand up to this -- he is bowled head over heels and makes a satisfyingly Jail-shaped crater in the nearest wall.

Floating out of it, he shakes it off as best he can -- shaking his wrists, feet, and head. "Tch," he criticizes. "Pretty Cure are so..." He snaps his fingers, trying to find the word. "...dull." From him that is perhaps the greatest insult of all, though what he clearly objects to is the blunt force trauma, rather than more interesting, elegant applications of magic. It rings a bit hollow considering the results achieved, though. "Let me sharpen you up a bit: Fire Soul!"

The flames of Mars, with none of their sacred radiance but all of their deadly incineration, flow forth in a great gout, right as Black Sky's Crescent Fangs finally catch up to them from behind.

COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Cure White.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Weak Point on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Regenschauer on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Comet Collision on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Comet Collision on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Les Mysteres on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Lunar Impact on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Reverb Shield on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fire Soul! on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fire Soul! on Cure White.
COMBAT: Lera Camry cleanly braces 0 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Weak Point, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's Block and
Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion cleanly braces 51 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Regenschauer, taking 9 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel
Passion's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa braces 37 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Fate
Testarossa's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Fire Soul!, taking 56 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure White dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure
White's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Trap applied to Cure White!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant fails to dodge Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 58 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi partially dodges 8 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Comet Collision, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi cleanly braces 40 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Reverb Shield, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine braces 15 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 23 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Pine's
Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 18 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Les Mysteres, taking 15 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Fire Soul!, taking 56 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Black dodges 18 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 27 Fatigue damage! Stun and Trap applied to
Cure Black!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki braces 35 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 15 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Kyouka
Okazaki's Block and Parry abilities activate! Trap applied to Kyouka Okazaki!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki counters 23 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Comet Collision, taking 23 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's Reverse
and Tactician abilities activate! Tangle applied to Endo Naoki!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Machtiger Schild, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"You hit them hard, and then you hit them harder!" Passion calls back to Westar. It ''is'' just like before, isn't it??

But it is good. It buoys Passion's heart, too, to be able to fight on the right side with Westar and Soular.

But Pine says she embraced ''herself'', and Passion smiles for a moment at her. "...I did."

Passion feels it--thesse wings are no mere accessories, but part of her now. And so she's ''stuck'' in place by Black Sky, but that ferocious torrent of strength, that terrible ozone of familiar power--

Passion closes her stance, bringing her arms up before herself and ''braces'' against the assault. The magical battery slams into her gauntlets, over and over and over, and she is free.

She is whole. Because, "I know fighting with Sky like I know myself," Cure Passion--once Eas--retorts to Black Sky. "...Because he's my friend, too. My precious friend who helped me understand what I wanted!"

"...That you don't have thosse relationships is sad. But I won't let you use that girl because you don't have someone to love!"

She wonders, what happened, when Stern asks his question. But she does not ask for now. Endo can, if he wants. She narrows her eyes at Jail.

Pretty Cure are dull, he says, and he fires at her friends.

"Black! White!" she calls, and reorients herself in the air. "Lera," she says. "I trust you."

She nods sharply, and leaves Black Sky to her for now. Her wing is injured--but not broken. And Passion suddenly ''blinks'' out of existence--

And ''blinks'' above Jail, slamming down towards him in a blur of crimson that moves too fast for the eye to track--

And shines BRILLIANTLY with red light. Her strikes are too fast for the eye to see; she stops on the other side of him, turning, and only then will her hits register.

COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Chosen Bonds on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki counters 19 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Lunar Impact, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Kyouka Okazaki's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki's counterattack, Lunar Impact, partially gets through, doing 15 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Crimson Flash on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Cure Angel Passion's Chosen Bonds, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry is Reinforced by
Cure Angel Passion!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 23 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Crimson Flash, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera shoots Cure Angel Pine a brief -- but substantial -- thumbs-up when she calls Westar 'Westie.'

She looks towards Shadow Stern. Her eyes narrow, when he taunts Fallen Stern so. "It doesn't matter if he's the original or you are! What matters is what Fallen Stern has learned, how he's grown!"

Broken Ground flashes again. This time, a shockwave of golden light erupts -- shooting through the air, and then down towards the ground ''near'' Fallen Stern. Which causes, in turn, broken rocks and stone to fly up towards him.

Still, when Lera sees Setsuna and her friends being attacked by Black Sky, her heart sinks. She remembers these spells; she remembers fighting with them. And even if she learned and grew...

They're a part of her.

Her heart sinks. Then she sees those strikes raining down for Cure Passion. Lera can't get there in time. "SETSUNA!" she shouts, panic rising.

But Setsuna teleports away and says she trusts her. Lera swallows -- then she nods. "R-Right!"

<We can do this.> Broken Ground's voice stays steady.

<Right... Passion! Let's make the most of it!> Soaring Sky chimes.

Lera points Soaring Sky towards Black Sky. The blade splits in twain; light crackles between them. "There's something you should learn," she tells Black Sky. "A Device and Wielder together are stronger than they are apart!"

<Aurora!>

Lightning crackles between the two halves of the split Armed Device, as a brilliant glow builds up between them. It shines a brilliant red-gold.

<Burst!>

And then it ''explodes'' out. A column of energy that shoots out, between a trio of spinning control rings, and into a powerful beam that rushes straight towards Black Sky.

"RAAAAAAAAAAAY!"

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Terra Breaker on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Aurora Burst Ray on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern perfectly dodges 45 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Terra Breaker, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Dodge!
Shadow Stern's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky fails to counter Lera Camry's Aurora Burst Ray, taking 82 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Guardian Burst, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo speeds forward as stars rain down from the sky, explosive bursts of magic rattling the ground around the knight. His most pressing issue is, however, the imminent head-on collision with the other (friendly) giant sword wielder engaged in the chaotic melee.

"Mikoto!" Endo raises a fist, calling up the familiar purple barrier that he's deployed before. It is not meant to deflect his friend, precisely. It won't be the most pleasant landing at the speed they're both moving, but with Mikoto's cat-like liquidity and defiance of gravity the shield becomes more than just a barrier.

It becomes an orbital Mikoto launching platform.

This too is magic Endo knows, though his propulsion is usually used for his own benefit. But now, with an explosion of light, it is granted to his good friend as a helping hand.

"Go!"

And of course, he follows in her wake.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

The initial impact against Jail's defenses are honestly kind of what Westar was expecting. Westar's boot finds a copy of the Wolf Fighter's magic, and it sears at him as he half-kicks half-gets-exploded away. He manages to flip in mid-air, calling down to the mage. "So are you just a copycat, or-"

He doesn't finish, as both Black Sky and Shadow Stern vocally object to his speech. Westar's eyes widen instead, as orange and purple bear down on him. Right, that's what happened whenever he got everyone mad at onc-

There is a dual explosion. There is an airborne Executive. And ultimately, there is a Westar, planted head-first into a patch of gravel torn up by the many attacks flying around.

He stays there a moment. Might be mumbling something uncharitable, but not even the Lord of All Magic should be able to make it out.

Eventually, he pushes himself out. Shakes a few rocks out of his ears. Rolls a shoulder.

"All right, I think that got through even my head. None of you want to just call it a day." There's a pain in his voice - that hurt as much as anything Pretty Cure has done to him - but he vowed, no tears and no fear. Not showing either right now.

He glances to Cure Pine, shakes his head with a smile at the nickname spreading, and echoes Lera's thumbs-up. Cracks his knuckles as he saunters towards the ongoing melee, like he doesn't have a care in the world -

And then as Soular's cape billows divertingly, darts in surprisingly quickly to feint, then swing a ferocious right hook at Shadow Stern's hilt. From there Westar jumps back, running towards the flare of his other fellow Denizen's teleportation, hounding Jail with a series of punches.

"Hit them hard, and then hit them harder. Got it, Passion!"

COMBAT: Westar has used Cross Counter on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Westar has used Passion Says: Hit Them Repeatedly on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Westar's Passion Says: Hit Them Repeatedly, taking 36 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to brace Westar's Cross Counter, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Black Sky's offer to Soaring Sky is not to Bardiche, but he answers it all the same with all the synthetic disgust he might imagine. <No Sir.> At the moment of clash, and it is his answer, because the two of them learned long ago, it is not a matter of master and wielder.

And as a cartridge ejects in the wake of the clash, he speaks again.



...

...

...

<She is mine. Get Set.>

There is an ominous certainty in the words get set, because while Jail may be confused as to her answer, she is not. There is something that's more important to her than showing him how he feels about everything he's done, every violation of her face - of Alicia's memory.

Violet bolts shower from above and Fate raises a hand as Galaxy Strum falls like crossbows against a conjured runic shield. <Defenser Plus.> As they ram against the field, it begins to crack as she pours more energy, then twists out of the way as more strike her when it breaks her, carving burning lines across her barrier jacket.

"I don't accept you as a father. ... And I have a Mother waiting for me, back home." That's a difficult admission, and for most it may go unnoticed, but right now - she knows it's true, "But what I want... what I will fight for more than anything else."

Fate's barrier jacket abruptly shifts, as her White Cloak disappears, becoming black again, the armoring vanishing in several points, as Bardiche twists and turns, folding back into a polearm, then shifting into a long scythe blade.

<Drive Impulse - Haken Form>

"Are the sisters Alicia Testarossa wanted - the sisters ''I'' want."

It's not like there aren't people that are important to her already, Lera - Endo - Setsuna - so many of them fighting for their lives right now - but this is the reason she fights.

There's no hesitation as she flies at Shadow Stern, beginning to clash again, and again, and again, "I won't let you hold onto her any longer." She says with a certain ferocity. "You're so taken on proving your authenticity - that you've forgotten what's truly important!"

On the last attempt to clash against Stern, Bardiche declares at that moment- <Split Haken> - and the blade suddenly disperses at four different angles, flying past Shadow Stern, as Fate ducks in feint, to try and fly past, each of the blades suddenly flying towards Shadow Sky - hiding in the Auroral flash of Lera's spell.

... To try and strike the Device blade itself from multiple different directions...

<Get Set.>

Bardiche declares again... as if to punctuate the point he and Lera were making.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Impulse!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Aerial Ace on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Split Haken on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene de Diamant is subjected to one of the greatest indignities a young woman can experience: *aerial bombardment*. The bursts from Shadow Stern are ironic in a sense, for how often did she, in earlier phases and states, cheer in her heart at Endo's power?

But it is not just Endo Naoki's power. It is also the power of Fallen Stern. And this is, it seems, destined to be a battle twinned in the mirror. The blast strikes her, staggers her, brings her in fact to her left knee for a moment. But Shadow Stern does not cut her to the quick. Shadow Stern, like Fallen Stern, has a certain laconic power - but is not likely to madden la Sirene de Diamant.

You know who is? Jail Scaglietti. As she lurches back upwards, she looks at him. He speaks of the Sea of Tears...

And then he gives her a taste of her own medicine.

Ah, she thinks on some level over the black scribble-cloud of fury that is already enucleating in her heart: so this is what it's liked. She lurches backwards, forced to balance on the leg already partly bent when Jail's angling of the stolen charm threatens to throw her onto her back. The diamonds on the soles of her shoes scrape and throw sparks even as Kyouka, perhaps, saves her with her incoming blow.

She can feel her heart lurch. The doubt in herself she has wrestled in myriad ways sees, perhaps, an opportunity and lurches out. La Sirene reaches out for a rope, and it is JAIL who offers her one, with a single word.

"... Dull?"

She raises her head. Hair spills over one eye.

"... DULL?!"

"You steal the magic of a thousand worlds through an intermediary... you make living beings, PEOPLE, to serve as your tools, not through accident but on purpose... you call yourself the lord of all magic, like some sort of ultimate god... and now you complain that the girls whose hearts have stood against your efforts, who have been the biggest train brake on your campaign of cruelty, are DULL!?!"

Her lip curls upwards. She keeps shouting.

"Was all of this just for your entertainment?! Our sorrows, our lives, our struggles -- did you just want to see COLORFUL LIGHTS FLASH FOR YOU!?"

Her eyes are wet and she doesn't let herself stop raising her voice or raising her hands because she saw that immense flame burst outwards, profane and secular but still an enormous burst of fire to Cure Black and Cure White.

Both hands raise upwards, fingers spread out. Grandiloquent. They shine. The black diamonds on the back of her hands sparkle strangely. "Then here!" A flick of her hand, throwing unlight like splashing water - it coruscates with a strange inner sparkle on its way to Jail, striking with the leaden force of storm-whipped heavy water.

"Have it!" Another stroke in the air.

"All you can take! All you can SEE! Come on, you liar!! If you wanted a fireworks show you could have just ASKED!" Each emphatic statement coming with a step towards him and another of those bursting flicks. It's really quite a dismissive gesture. (The part of la Sirene de Diamant that looks around, notices, *thinks* about what she's doing doesn't want to look too brightly towards the others. Please, all of you, despite this all, please be alright--)

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Carbonado Kaleidoscope on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo speeds forward as stars rain down from the sky, explosive bursts of magic rattling the ground around the knight. His most pressing issue is, however, the imminent head-on collision with the other (friendly) giant sword wielder engaged in the chaotic melee.

<BECAUSE I AM GREATER THAN YOU.> Fallen Stern responds helpfully.

"Mikoto!" Endo raises a fist, calling up the familiar purple barrier that he's deployed before. It is not meant to deflect his friend, preciselyit won't be the most pleasant landing at the speed they're both moving, but with Mikoto's cat-like liquidity and defiance of gravity the shield becomes more than just a barrier.

It becomes an orbital Mikoto launching platform.

This too is magic Endo knows, though his propulsion is usually used for his own benefit. But now, with an explosion of light, it is granted to his good friend as a helping hand.

<SPEAK.>

And of course, he follows in her wake.

<WHILE YOU CAN.>

COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to dodge Fate Testarossa's Aerial Ace, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Fate Testarossa is
Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 22 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Split Haken, taking 18 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Black Sky claims to serve no masters, but yet hails Jail as a King. <<Yet you would hail Jail Scaglietti as a King. He values the autonomy of noone except himself. Can you be certain he will not take control from you if it would suit his aims?>>

Crescent blades of light come for her, and Kyouka thrusts her hand forward as she chases her attack. Strike Wolf shouts, <<Defenser+>> and a barrier appears to halt the brunt of the attack, blades exploding against barrier. Some of the energy breaks through, tearing at Kyouka's barrier jacket but she does not sop her running.

<<We are meant to work in concert with those who share our goals, not to enslave others to achieve them.>>

Kyouka grins. "Couldn't have said it better myself, buddy."

She follows up with a driving kick up towards Jails's gut, driving her boot in as far as it will go--but she hears the words 'Lunar Impact' and Kyouka's gauntlet is already starting to glow as she pushes herself away from Jail. But not too far--she inverted upside down to deliver the kick, but she continues the flip and rights herself, and her blazing gauntlet swings upwards to meet Jail's fist, as twin explosions of violet light clash and duel for supremacy.

Kyouka is hurtled away, plunging towards the ground as she twists and just barely rights herself. She slams into the ground, a spiderweb of cracks erupting all around her as great chunks of earth are dislodged haphazardly. "You know... it took me a ''lot'' of work to learn how to do that..." she says with remarkable calmness as she struggles to an upright position.

"Finding out magic was real... finding friends I could trust to show me how all this worked... facing dangers I couldn't even imagine a year ago..."

Kyouka rolls a shoulder as she stands fully upright, looking right up at Jail. "And learning what it was I ''really'' wanted: to defend people, and to be a magical girl. And if you think you can just... ''copy'' my attack..." She sets her stance again. "... Then why don't you copy ''this''!"

From the ground she extends her hand upwards, summoing a slowly-spinning violet circle in front of her. A ball of violet-white energy qcuikly grows in front of it, and when the right opening presents itself, Kyouka shouts, "Fire!"

w<Blast Fang.>

The ball ''explodes'' outwards in a sharp lance of light. The piercing beam of bright light represents something she and Strike Wolf were simply incapable of doing before, but now... whether it be by Strike Wolf's recent upgrades, or Kyouka's newfound confidence, they are capable of it, together.

Almost immediately a circle springs up at her feet, and a bright sheen of violet light washes upwards over her body. <Sonic Blitz.> She suddenly takes off like a rocket, blurring into motion. She drives one attack home at Black Sky, then rebounds, and in mid-air kicks at the air to rebound forwards, attacking Black Sky from another angle. Again and again and again, attack, redirect, rebound, attack, trying to pepper as many hits as she can.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Blast Fang on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Sonic Blitz on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

La Sirene's unlight streams in to aid Mikoto, as well; they are both, after all, daughters of obsidian. "La Sirene!" She calls out, and then -- "Endo!" -- because of course he would not leave her to Shadow Stern alone.

She is forced to endure Black Sky's bindings, but she's able to struggle free of them and slash -- just in time for Shadow Stern to jet upwards. "Huh?!" Mikoto yelps, finding herself careening for ''Endo,'' instead -- but luckily, quick thinking from him summons a barrier. She plants her feet on it, twisting to land feet-first instead of sword-first, and kicks off of it to leap into the air after Shadow Stern.

She can't fly, but with Endo's help, she doesn't ''have'' to.

"Who's first?! Who cares!" She cries, to Shadow Stern. "Fallen Stern is Fallen Stern! And Fallen Stern's our friend!" She swings her blade, mid-air, to strike at him -- and she ''is'' aiming for the blade, not the girl -- before what comes up inevitably must come down.

And she angles herself to come down right on Jail, blade-first, swinging it down in an overhead arc which physically swings her from aft to stern like a clock's pendulum. (Or, perhaps, to Stern?)

"Not YOUR object!" She cries, on his fascination for the Sea of Tears. "And they're NOT DULL!" This, on the Pretty Cure. Even Mikoto knows that dull isn't a synonym for blunt-force trauma, which is, in fact, true, and also hurts, he should really pay more attention to getting punched.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has started a combo targeting Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Devastation on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Nori has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has joined the combo started by Mikoto Minagi!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 29 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Blast Fang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Carbonado Kaleidoscope, taking 3 Fatigue
damage! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Black Sky neatly dodges 20 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Sonic Blitz, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: COMBO! Mikoto Minagi and Endo Naoki have used Combo: Black Blade Bond, composed of Obsidian Blade: Dynamo and Asteroid
Eilen, on Shadow Stern.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black and Cure White briefly flail as they miss Black Sky, but reset their posture to land all the harder on Jail. When their momentum is expended fully (and not a second sooner; they follow through quite deeply with the kick), they rebound off, backflipping in synch to land neatly on the ground.

"Physical training can be a field of study too!" Cure White scolds Jail heatedly.

"Yeah!" her jock partner hurrahs.

"Spatial intelligence is a kind of intelligence!"

"It's true!"

"There's nothing boring about someone who has the discipline to train their body, and if you're unable to apply the scientific method to your observations of them, that says more about you as a scientist than--"

"Cure White, I'm getting really embarrassed!" Cure Black wails.

Perhaps there is something to having a deeper repetoire of magic attacks than just Marble Screw, however. A shield or counter-blast might have fared well against a huge, billowing plume of flame like Fire Soul, but it is rather hard to dodge, and attempting to block it still leaves one standing in the oven. Nor can Cure Angel Passion shouting their names, however sincerely, fend off what is coming. Cures White and Black cry out together, stumbling back, but the fires do not end swiftly, and one by one their cries rise in both volume and pitch at some point, when resistance becomes an agonized capitulation. When the flame gutters out, both girls are left flat on the ground next to each other, their raiment sizzling, cigarette burns pocking their skirts and arm-bracers.

"Cure White," Black rasps. White rolls over to face her, and Black smiles. "Your hair is okay."

"Is that what you were worried about?"

"I thought some of it might burn off..."

Cure White smiles. "Is it all here?"

"Yeah."

"Are you glad?" White reached out her hand.

"Yeah." Black touched her singed fingertips.

"Then I'm glad too."

Rising off the ground, the two Cures supported each other's forearms, such that it was unclear who, if anyone, was lifting whom. "Sorry I stopped you earlier," Black said. "You want to finish what you were saying to Jail-san?"

"Yes."

"I'll keep you clear."

The Cures launched into action again, stretching their fire-nipped limbs. At first, they remained side-by-side, feigning that they might strike Jail together again. But as Cure White vaulted into a handspring, Cure Black peeled off to the side, planted herself between Black Sky and Jail, and cocked back her arm in a motion the Dark Zone had learned to fear.

"HAAAA-CHA-CHA-CHA-!" Cure Black began to hammer out kiais as fast as she was hammering out punches, both hands unloading a constant spray of fists.

Meanwhile, Cure White flipped out of her handspring, her axial motion bringing her torso into contact with the juncture of Jail's shoulder and arm. The jockeying for control over the limb is something of a feint; the mere conflict is enough to provide counterleverage, and the moment White's feet hit the ground, she drives the rear foot back hard enough along the floor to drive up dust. The back of her boot shoots into and, hopefully, through his.

If she knocks his feet up, that grip she's fighting for on his arm will get a lot more functional, really fast.

COMBAT: Shadow Stern perfectly braces 89 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi and Endo Naoki's Combo: Black Blade Bond, taking 0
Fatigue damage! Critical Brace! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 40 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Devastation, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Critical Hit! Critical Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Black has used White's Test Subject on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Hundred Fierce Fists on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Cure White accepts Cure Black's White's Test Subject, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure White is Reinforced by
Cure Black!
COMBAT: Cure White has used Black's Locks on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Heaven and Earth Throw on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Black accepts Cure White's Black's Locks, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Reinforced by Cure White!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 15 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Hundred Fierce Fists, taking 23 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure White's Heaven and Earth Throw, taking 61 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine hesitantly thumbs up both Westie and Lera!? Is this something really that praiseworthy in the middle of a fight before she goes bug eyed at 'amazed' and has to cover a snort giggle with a hand.

Pine's hand rings against Jail's conjured shield with a ringing shockwave, surprised as the shield looks familiar, but then remembering that he calls himself the god of magic. As she flies away, she has to shake her hand for a moment, surprised, even as the crossbow bolts fall from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum. Several strike her in the downpour, before a sudden burst of angelic glow disperses the rest coming for her.

Suddenly breathing hard, she frowns, "Don't you ever call them that." 'Dull.' that is. It is a descriptor she might accept for herself, but she takes special offense to the others - especially Black and Peach - as if he were calling them more stupid than boring.

Which White fittingly counters, as Pine blinks, at Black's wail, "Well... There's nothing wrong with her sticking up for you." Wait now is Pine admonishing Black too for being embarrassed?

And suddenly Pine flies up high - only to descend down at the exact moment Passion's final strike connects, with a kick aimed right at his collarbone... shining with the energy of her form.

"You've never believed in anyone else - have you?"

It's just a thought, a fleeting one, that this man cannot even begin to empathize with her struggles, their struggles - he's never had to struggle to believe in himself or what he was doing - at least in Pine's mind.

"... You have no idea what you're really missing."

Pine says with a look towards Passion and this brief smile even in the heat of battle, of trust - and belief. Because...

Magic was only what gave her the opportunity to meet someone like her - or Black - or White - or Westar... but the true wonder was never in that... but in finding people like each of them to share her life with.

COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used Seraph Strike on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used The True Magic Was the Friends We Made Along The Way on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion accepts Cure Angel Pine's The True Magic Was the Friends We Made Along The Way, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Cure Angel Passion is Reinforced by Cure Angel Pine!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 50 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's Seraph Strike, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! Critical Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<< HE HAS LEARNED NOTHING, >> Shadow Stern tells Lera, dismissively; he actually tosses the head of his clone when Stern trash talks. Somehow, they walk through the shockwave and its debris alike, in midair, striding confidently from Belkan triangle to triangle. << BUT THAT WILL CHANGE... TODAY. >>

Something unexpected happens; asked for by neither Lera nor Endo, though both of them accepted it as a potential consequence of being able to go toe to toe with their dark counterparts.

<< RESONANCE DRIVE, >> Soaring Sky and Fallen Stern intone as one.

And Endo and Lera's vision swims. Everything goes sideways for a moment, then reorients.

In their vision, Black Sky and Shadow Stern have been replaced, respectively, by the Radiant and Umbral Knights.

"That's what we're still fighting for," explains Radiant, to Fallen Stern, who has invited them to speak.

"Yes," agrees Umbral. "Once we defeat you, Jail has promised to reveal the truth."

"We determined this to be a fair exchange," Radiant concludes.

Lera and Endo's allies enter and exit the vision as themselves; they can see Cure Black, for example, punch the flat of the Radiant Knight's blade about a hundred times; Fate's Split Haken fly in to clang against the shining orange energy blade; the gorgeously armored figure steps back -- is driven back -- by Kyouka's many rocketing hits and rebounds. And that leaves him no options remaining, none at all, when Aurora Burst Ray comes calling. He is blasted back hard, and falls, steaming.

And the Umbral Knight contends with an Endo-propelled Mikoto, who slams into the vast expanse of the flat of his own blade like a door slammed in her face. It's a big moment, sending a shockwave off of both of them, and though it may not provide direct satisfaction, it does open the door to his staggering back when Westar's fist connects with the hilt of the weapon, a big hit thus enabled; and then he is peppered again and again by Fate herself, birdlike, FLOCKlike, everywhere at once.

"What is truly important," the Umbral Knight muses, as Fate chides him, "Is power," and yeah okay that did sound like the 'real' Fallen Stern...

"What is truly important," the Radiant Knight counters from the ground, "Is Freedom." He seems to be chewing over Strike Wolf's argument, perhaps helped along by Lera knocking some Friendship into him. "Umbral, do you think we--"

"No." Umbral keeps racking up points as The Most Fallen Stern here.

---

A little bit away from all that, Jail still looks like himself to all eyes, including Lera and Endo's. Which is to say, like a hairless blindingly bright rainbow silhouette suffused with everyone's stolen magic.

And he remains potent. As best he can he prioritizes what he perceives as the greatest threats; really burns some calories, for example, to get the heck out of Miroku's path, and leaves some sweat in his wake for Mikoto to cleave instead. In his educated eyes that clearly is no sword and it is not dull at all.

And the vividly magical Cure Angels Passion and Pine, too, he defends against actively, conjuring up a blast of frozen icy mist (frozen icy NERD mist, if you know you know) to take the worst of the blows that are too fast for him to see.

There is, of course, no defense against Fate's words but his own indifference. It's a good thing that Pine is right about his never believing in anyone else. That means it can't hurt him that Fate doesn't accept him as a father, right? But he can still hurt her, perhaps. "The TSAB agent? Surely you jest, Fate-chan. You must realize she has only inserted herself into your life to surveil you. She's a parole officer, not a parent."

Kyouka's up next, and once again he flattens himself out of her way. "Copy? No. I took your magical essence into my very being. It is inscribed on the surface of my soul. And I will take this new spell too, upon your second defeat," he tells her. "It seems as though it was for the best for Strike Wolf to enter your orbit. No one would say that you are not hard working." In his sneering voice this compliment is extremely backhanded, but some amount of him really was impressed.

Which makes La Sirene's tirade all the more on point.

Was all of this for your entertainment?

"Yes," he says simply. Her rage, her tears... he catches them, along with her black diamond sparkles, with a barely forced serenity. "What higher purpose is there in this or any world, than one's own enjoyment?"

Beat.

"I know you're going to say friendship. Save your breath. Magic is greater than any friendship could ever be. It is more elegant than any relationship and more beautiful than any romance. True miracles are made with our own willpower, and by our own two hands. I will show you."

But Westar shows him first -- hitting him hard, and then hitting him harder.

"Disposing of you was one of Northa's better choices," he complains, wiping blood off his lips. "You should have just stayed--"

--suddenly, heaven and earth trade places. An instant later, he's flat on his back; all the air has been knocked out of him, and he will have to take a breath before he can continue.

But Cure White speaks first, with a silvery lilt.

"Ara ara, is something the matter?" she asks him. "That was just a simple application of leverage. Or do Midchildans just not bother to study ''physics''?"

---

The Umbral and Radiant Knights glance over at Jail, when he calls them. Well -- croaks at them.

"Stern. Sky. It's time to end this. Defend me for long enough, and all our accounts will be cleared to one another."

They glance at each other -- then at the magical girls -- who mostly see two Fate clones, rather than two ancient Belkan Knights, weighing their options.

But everyone sees the Linker Cores, canary-bright, emerge from their two chests. This has happened once before, with Shadow Stern. It seems Black Sky has learned from that technique.

"Very well," says Shadow Stern.

"We have to know the truth, no matter what," agrees Black Sky.

For these two, the best defense is a good offense. They split the difference -- Stern with an immense, spinning Meteor Absturz, his blade a column of violet light suffused by hints of the clone's own gold; Sky with more Inferno Slashes, each one trailing his carrier's soul's-blood in the afterimages.

And behind the wall of burning sharpness that the pair represent, Jail Scaglietti, The Lord Of All Magic, gets back to his feet.

And pink Midchildan discs appear like stars in the sky overhead. Each one begins to glow with a single, growing point of light -- light that streams as mana -- and there has been SO much mana released in this immense chamber -- recondenses out of the air like rain, and begins to gather.

<SoundTracker> Starlight Breaker - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVGaDYOnxzU

"I summon the light of destruction down upon the offenders," begins Jail, who, even with everything he's absorbed, requires the Aria to pull this off. "O Stars, gather, and become the light which pierces everything..."

He has no Device to mark the time. It's almost lonely, when the next thing he says, grimly, is--

"--ten."

The pink light on each disc doubles in size...

COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Westar.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure White.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa neatly dodges 48 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Fate
Testarossa's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used STARLIGHT BREAKER: CHARGING on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick accepts Pink Moon Stick's STARLIGHT BREAKER: CHARGING, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is
Reinforced by Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion partially dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 43 Fatigue damage! Cure
Angel Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine counters 29 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 29 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Black Sky is Psyched! Cure Angel Pine's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine's counterattack, Shining Reverse, partially gets through, doing 20 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Cure White cleanly braces 40 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 7 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Cure Black counters 12 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 37 Fatigue damage! Cure Black's Reverse
ability activates!
COMBAT: Cure Black's counterattack, Sen no Sen, partially gets through, doing 7 Fatigue damage to Black Sky! Critical Counterhit!
COMBAT: Lera Camry partially dodges 9 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 37 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 20 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 30 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar counters 11 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 33 Fatigue damage! Westar's Reverse and
Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar's counterattack, Cross Counter, partially gets through, doing 10 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi dodges 23 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 35 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki dodges 36 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo Naoki :|a

COMBAT: Endo Naoki perfectly counters 56 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Counter! Endo Naoki's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Meteor Absturz, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera's eyes widen as she sees Black Sky and Shadow Stern replaced by the Radiant and Umbral Knights. Or, perhaps, they always ''were'' some remnant of them. She sucks a breath in; how strange, to see them, after seeing through them.

"You can't trust Jail," she says. "He'll use you. He ''is'' using you, y'know?"

Those words fall on deaf ears, though -- as she sees the Linker Cores in each begin to grow bright, at Jail's demand. Her eyes widen.

"Stop!" she cries out. She tries to wheel back -- the blazing slash from Black Sky forcing her backward. Lera exhales, sharply, and then she swings up Soaring Sky. She glances at Endo.

"We have to stop him," she says. She looks at Black Sky. Lera considers for a moment. She remembers a rooftop, years ago -- when Jaren Zastava struck her and Soaring Sky down. And she flies in, directly at Sky.

"Ground," she says.

<On it! Ready to defend!>

She swings back Soaring Sky, ready to strike...

...and flies past, her thrust seemingly missing at the last moment. It goes rushing by, as Broken Ground comes to life. The shield ''spins'' -- and then a hundred motes of light streak out, rushing behind her, and for Black Sky's back.

<Bombadier Cascade!>

They explode on impact, as Lera flies by, coming down for Jail Scaglietti. She swings Soaring Sky back, two-handed, and the Device has already split in two. The halves crackle, light crackling between them.

The lightning solidifies; it turns into a blade of light, which explodes outward and outward, into a sword nearly three times Lera's length.

"JAIL!" she shouts.

And she swings the blade down for him, with a mighty overhand chop as she comes crashing down.

<Aurora Galaxy Divider!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Bombadier Cascade on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Lera Camry has used Aurora Galaxy Divider on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion smiles at Lera. "I'm okay," she tells her. "Because we're together."

Sky chimes to her, and Passionc alls, "Right!"

She watches Mikoto, launched. She watches Westar, ''swinging'' as hard as he can. "Yes!" she calls to Westar. "Until it's done!"

La Sirene speaks. And Fate speaks of sisters. Passion understands both flashy lights... and sisterhood.

Thanks to Love.

"Go, Fate!" Passion calls, and she looks to Kyouka, too. A hard worker she is. But it's backhanded from ''him'', and Passion scowls.

"That's right," Passion answers Pine's call. "...What you're missing... You don't understand anything that matters."

She believes in Pine, too. Their happiness... is together.

"Jail is just using you," Passion assures the devices. "...It's his way. Just like so many others. Anything you think you can get from him is just the scraps he's willing to spare."

"I once thought power was all that mattered, too! But it's not! Power only lets you stretch as long as your own arm--it's working with others that lets you go farther than you ever could alone! Even you see it--the way you work with one another!"

But Jail--

Jail is closer to Setsuna, and she can't just shout across the battlefield at him--he's too close for that. But not so close that Honoka can't argue, and Passion answers, "Lera does fine with physics. I think it's just him." And he speaks of enjoyment...

"...Then I'm going to 'enjoy' wiping that smugness out of your mouth!"

"WESTAR!" she calls. "Let's smash him!"

She knows exactly what that magic he's summoning means. And she knows the immense Meteor that crashes for her could end her fight. She blinks out of existence again, but the ''gravity'' of that meteor is sufficient that she's panting for a moment when she reaches the other side. It took that much to evade.

Passion remembers, too, when Lera fell from that rooftop so long ago. She remembers. It was so important to everything that would come after.

But she said she'd enjoy what she's about to do--so she gets ready. Passion, wings extending outward, rears back her fist and starts to charge up energy. "Haaaaaaahhh--" Just like the move she used on Peach so long ago, but many times more radiant. Infused with the power of Labyrinth's belief, Passion's arm becomes a sublime thing, and crimson light gathers at her fist.

"Pine! Peach! Berry!" she calls.

"We'll stop him here!"

Passion's light extends to some times her size, and she ''rushes'', wings outstretched to catch the wind, crashing towards Jail with all her might.

and all her hope.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Angel Passion has used Passion Drive Fresh on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Fate's looks momentarily startled as both of them declare the activation of resonance. "But that means..." Fate doesn't see it at first, but in time it comes, in the midst of the melee, she hears him call to her. And indeed - it sounds like Stern. "... That's what I thought, once."

Fate knows that for how much Stern can be like that - that Endo will always call his name, and indeed - he's come to accept him in turn.

Indeed, Fate states it with the certainty of youth, "But as you are... my sister... will never call your name." The truth - seems a poor exchange in her eyes for that.

And indeed as Fate flies, clashing with them again and again, Jail sends her words back at her, for a moment, it stings - but only for a moment. "... Even if that were true... I wouldn't mind..." She doesn't believe it's true, mind you, but - there's acceptance in those words of the possibility that it's more than him trying to inflict pain. "...she's waiting for me."

Those words are possibly meaningless, but - once upon a time - Fate had a Mother... who always treated her homecoming with cruelty, viciousness, or apathy in turn.

'Go, Fate!'

Passion calls, and Fate gives her a look, and a nod - something unspoken, because...

<>

But are wisdom and tactics, enough? Well... they were for Nanoha.

As Shadow Stern comes at her with that harsh column of violet light, the powerful slash looks like Fate has vanished within it.

However... overhead, there's a subtle gathering - of clouds. It's difficult to notice at first, but as Jail begins the spell chant for Starlight Breaker, she calls out, "Nanoha learned that from fighting me again... and again... and again." And there she is, injured, the violet glow still dissipating off her barrier jacket, as she stands on several runic rings, gathering - one by one.

"She told me it was because my eyes looked sad... and she wanted the power to change that."

It is ''not'' something even close to the same power as what Jail is creating, not even on the same scale, or magnitude of existence, but it doesn't need to be, as firing rings gather on her arms one by one by one, a sphere of gathering energy growing as lightning crashes down from the sky upon - her, more and more.

However, Fate believes it doesn't need to be.

<Trident SMASHER!

His aim is to have others defend him after all, long enough for him to gather this incredible power. "FIREEEEEEE!" And so, she decides to disallow that, as the sudden titanic burst of power, not unlike Nanoha's iconic Divine Buster suddenly bursts towards him, in one great ray of power...

... and splits...

... twice...

COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Shadow Stern closes the door on Mikoto, and Mikoto howls vengeance all the way down to Jail. "WE'RE power!" She screams, as she goes.

When is a sword not a sword? Miroku is Miroku, and it tries its very best to eat into Jail, but Jail's having none of it. She lands, and turns, dizzy, one-two step in a broad circle; her head rattles as she shakes it. "HEY!" She yells, glaring at Jail. "Lindy's role MODEL, not role OFFICER! Don't say wrong things!"

(It's entirely possible that Mikoto, noted delinquent, has never actually heard the term 'parole officer'. Why would she talk to a cop?)

"And don't talk down to Kyouka, neither!" Mikoto yells, because what she ''can'' tell, quite keenly, is when someone is being ''snide'' in their compliments. She's heard enough backhanded compliments of her own; she's not about to stand for it. "Jail thinks you're so smart! But Jail doesn't get it! Friendship's not enjoyment's enemy! I'm the best at enjoying myself, and my friends make me feel really good! Being alone doesn't feel good! Will and power just feel bad alone!"

She bristles, grasping her blade as she levels it at Jail. "And don't dare say Westar-senpai's better dead! Or Soular! Everyone's cheering for them, too--!"

Before she can strike him again, though -- they set out to settle their accounts. (Do they owe him money? Mikoto wonders, and then puts the thought aside; it's not important.) Mikoto remembers Meteor Absturz, from the worst day of her life; she remembers more than enough to realise she has to get out of the way, springing backwards with that same feline fluidity her cat friends taught her for so long to avoid the worst of the blow. She sees, as well, Black Sky's Inferno Slashes from the corner of her eye, just as worrying to her.

But Jail -- Jail has the most terrible plan of all.

"Don't!" Mikoto cries out, eyes widening. That she can think to at least ''try'' to tell him to stop is, perhaps, testament to how hard people like Fate and Setsuna have been working. But Mikoto knows he won't listen to words; he hasn't, this whole way through.

So she starts spinning, too, sparks flying on the ground as she establishes the perimeter of a 'disc' of her own. Once, twice, three times, and she plunges her dark blade into a white void which cracks open in the earth, her shadow splitting to two as she invokes: "MIROKU!"

It is no mere shadow of Miroku's power which assaults them, now. The obsidian spires which erupt from the earth, a hundred needles just waiting for the bower-bird, are firm as volcanic rock; the earth sunders and rocks, beneath them. They seek out Jail -- and keep moving; they violate the sky as much as the earth, as they seek out Shadow Stern and Black Sky, just the same.

When is a sword not a sword? When it's a Child.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Shadow Stern.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

For a moment, Westar is utterly dazzled by his allies. It's kind of a rare feeling, having allies in a fight (that aren't a giant monster he's commanding), and he's barely able to take in everything else going on. Endo and Mikoto's aerial assault, La Sirene's impassioned defense, Cure Black and White's flirting - it's all there, but Westar's kind of feeling a bit out of his depth. Shadow Stern became the Umbral Knight, and all Westar could think to do was keep punching the Device.

There's history with those two knights, but Westar already knows their opinion of him talking to them.

Jail's the big threat. Not just magically, but...morally, emotionally, all kinds of things. So Westar followed Passion's advice, and if nothing else it seemed to earn him a personal insult.

That one hurts. The betrayal of Lord Moebius - or Northa, or whoever - wasn't all that unexpected, but it was still a knife to Westar's emotional gut. And he's been wondering, since this fight started, if he even deserved that second chance-

It is immensely satisfying to see Cure White and Black suplex the man, and Westar cheers loudly for the duo.

Before he can try refuting Jail, Westar is beset by the Radiant Knight. He's not quick-witted enough to dodge the slash, his arms are shaking too much to block it - so he steps into it, punching at an arm to try to knock the blade away. The impact from the afterimages still makes him stumble, and as those shining stars start to gather overhead he considers falling back on his old routine.

Throw a quip at those opposing him, storm off, live to fight another day. That's what any commander in Dark Fall would do.

But that's not his job any more.

Passion calls to him, and the exhausted Executive looks up with a smile. "Right, Passion!" He doesn't run, again - stands where he is, stretching his arms to one side then the other, because Westar doesn't do magic very often and he needs to warm up.

"What higher purpose is there? Nah, I'm not gonna talk about friendship, 'cause I'm still figuring out what that means for myself. Gonna need some time, and you're in the way of that." He cracks his knuckles.

"I could say I'm fighting for donuts, or ice cream, or yakitori, or any of the other Earth foods I learned about - but that's that personal enjoyment thing, and I'm not giving you that." He rolls his shoulders, and there's the faint hint of a golden glow starting to shine - starting from his Data Diamond, but spreading.

"Northa and Moebius were wrong. If I say that enough, I think I'll start to believe it. That higher purpose? It's here. It's the people they ruled over, the city that woke us all up, the community." Westar takes a step forward, and slams one boot down on a piece of rubble, swinging one arm to point at both Knights and Jail as best he can - one than another, this is to all of them.

To everyone watching him.

"I am...Citizen WT-4029858! A Denizen of Labyrinth like any other! Westar of WT district!" He beams - grins as brightly as the glow of what magic he possesses, grins to Passion and Pine, to Mikoto and Fate, to every one of these people who fought him, to all his fellow Denizens - and he slams his glowing fist straight down into the floor, cratering it slightly.

The glow around Westar vanishes. He takes in a breath, fist still embedded in the floor, and then shouts.

"Western...MIGHT!"

Beneath the Radiant Knight, Umbral Knight, and Jail...Labyrinth's deepest floor explodes, golden energy pillaring up with a roar, a battering storm of the power once granted to a simple construction worker.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xTzwdA4oAg - Corset Theme (TeddyLoid No Pan Night remix)

And he says

Yes

And for a moment la Sirene's face, lit by the myriad rays and spells thrown around, is simply, profoundly, utterly confounded.

"I -"

He's already prepared.

All of this, la Sirene thinks with a certain enormity that cannot resolve itself into an emotion that she could name. Did he plan for all of this? Her eyes lower downwards for a moment, even if Westar's smashing into him, followed by the cataclysmic impact of White and Black, bring a certain measure of hope.

"You've always got the perfect thing to say," la Sirene answers Cure White's statement, with a small smile. Then, with a sigh, she reaches to her left hand - no, her left glove - and unfastens the wrist snap.

It's funny, la Sirene thinks to herself as she slides the glove off her left hand, revealing the scar on the back of her wrist. She holds it in her left hand, raising the right glove to her mouth to use her teeth to unfasten its snap --

And that is when the infernal strike hits her in the back. This time, at last, she falls. It was probably overdue, even if she has always been staunchly difficult to actually fully and completely beat down. When the flame has vanished, the cream-white skin on the length of bare back her uniform reveals shows scuffs and blisters. The impact was enough for her to make her own crater.

The Siren of Diamonds twitches -- and puts one bare hand on the ground. She heaves herself up, and heave is the right term for it seems to be heavy. Surely she could not have grown in mass, and while that diaphanous aura around her *weakened* in the aftermath of the blow, it is coming back. Breathing heavily, she mutters to herself, "... Kozue... Argent..."

Pushing herself up to a kneeling squat, she looks over her shoulder, up towards the Belkan warriors. Be they small girls? Be they ancient knights? It matters not, it seems. As she stays crouched, la Sirene undoes the knot of her uniform's belt - the decorative silver rope on which the Brazen Pharos was lashed. She swings it into her lap, and does something very pedestrian -- she throws the gloves she took off away.

She throws them sort of in the general direction of Jail. One more towards his left, another towards his right. The one to the left landed gems-down... although if people are watching they would see it, despite being a flat garment of something like leather, flop over to rest on its palm.

While this is happening, la Sirene is staying in her kneeling position. She finishes her thought: "Take care of them." This may look like some kind of peculiar surrender, but she is fiddling with the Pharos. It can't be called anything other than fiddling. The brass-and-glass assemblage, and the piece of glistening obsidian within -- broken into a shape loosely resembling an elongated S, or an integral sign -- just sit there. Until she finishes adjusting something and the glass panels twinkle slightly and--

-- disappear.

At this point the unlight glow around la Sirene de Diamant seems to disappear, because those pieces of glass must have been deeply polarized. A glow that seems almost monochrome radiates out from it, and la Sirene grits her teeth a little, squinting against it. She pushes herself upright with a flexing of the legs and a jostle of the shoulders and raises her gaze to Jail.

"I count up," she tells him, before gripping the silver rope about eighteen inches up and spinning it around. The un-radiance outlining her doesn't really change even as she mutters to herself, "One, two," but it does seem to be spreading to her 'discarded' gloves, which have a very clear spherical bubble of that radiance ("three, four,") which is expanding, the black diamonds twinkling ever-swifter as the magic pours out ("five, six,") of the Pharos, now unshielded, and into its kin, the beautiful gems of the Sea of Tears.

Because, of course, that's where black diamonds came from in the first place: except the ones they've made in labs.

"seven,"

la Sirene counts as she tosses the Pharos into the air, snapping her right hand up to catch its handle and raise it up above her head. The piece of glass within it, without connection or material linkage, has stayed in its relevant position perfectly. But when she curls her hand down to let the ammolite-chased base bump her arm, it does tremble sharply once:

Which is when the three bubbles all BURST, pouring downwards with torrential force towards Jail Scaglietti. There is no sound, at first, and then there is something like the crash of a great wave, curiously far at sea, against a flat bed.

COMBAT: FINISHER! La Sirene de Diamant has used The Light That Never Warms on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine is truly relieved that she's not a Midchildan, and thus is exempt from revealing her Physics grade. Probably.

However, as Passion notes Lera does fine with physics, "Wait she does? I always thought-" Pine does not finish that thought, because it's a battle, and now she has to rethink things, but - she always thought that Secchan's girlfriend was... the furthest thing from doing appreciably well at science.

However, it's that moment that Black Sky descends at her, and in the whites of her eyes she can see the flames reflecting of the Inferno Slasher. Which is when her whole body is aglow, as she side steps and grabs that Wielder's Arm, even as the flames rise and burn her anyway... she speeds up, and then brakes as she swings her towards the ground in one titanic throw.

"Sorry!" She calls out to the girl in question, as she at least understands that she's not at fault. "But your sword was coming right at me!"

Jail's words however, she already knew that he didn't believe in anyone else - so she does not respond to that, instead... "What miracles have you made?" ... is Pine's simple question, as if to bring his whole thesis into question. "I don't see any."

However, she remembers that moment, when Passion drew breath again. That was perhaps the greatest miracle she'd ever seen, but despite it all, she knows now she lives greater ones.

Passion calls for him to be smashed, to enjoy wiping that smugness off of his face.

'Pine! Peach! Berry!'

Pine, suddenly takes off with one great flap of her wings, and as she arcs around, building up momentum - she flies towards the Starlight Breaker like Icarus too close to the Sun.

Faster - and faster - it feels like her wings might melt off, but she's infused by a belief greater than her own in herself - than in the people in her life - but in Labyrith's belief in something - better and greater than what they'd been shown their entire lives.

Eas drew breath again and became Passion.

If they can do that?

A light, reflecting in the Pink Glow, the moment Passion crashes against one side of him, Pine rams into the other.

And caught between them - she hopes to show this entire world what miracles actually look like.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Angel Pine has used Moving Mountains on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo blinks, his face scrunching up tight as his eyes refocus on the Radiant and Umbral knights. The explosion of color and magic don't help either, but he reorients soon enough to offer up a defense against the whirling blow delivered by Shadow Stern.

The two blades meet, as they have before. An enormous collision of two unstoppable objects, a resounding crash and space-shaking impact. Endo swerves backward, bones aching.

"That might be fair to you," Endo counters, "But not to anyone else! And if all you care about is yourself--"

<YOU STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND.>

Endo gives a nod to Lera when she calls out, the floor of magic drawing his attention from the knights to the far larger threat looming. "Got it!" He calls back, reorienting to focus his attention on Jail.

Power still flows through his barrier jacket -- his soul -- more than he's ever felt before. More than enough to call vivid and destructive magic once more. Purple-black radiance cocoons Fallen Stern once more, swelling and expanding into a burning tower of magic as Endo raises it up skyward once more.

"Hey!" Endo calls.

Passion's words cut to the core. Jail says true miracles can only be made with your own two hands, but any device wielder should know: miracles aren't possible without someone else.

"If you think so... prove it!"

The sword comes down. An orchid pillar of magic follows.

<STERN BRECHER.>

COMBAT: FINISHER! Endo Naoki has used Stern Brecher on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black had thought this fight was all smooth sailing after Fresh Precure became Angels, but the raw power Jail has gathered to his side is daunting. Things are going all right, but without that extra Angel power, it might not be.

"Cure Passion and Cure Lera are pretty close, mepo! You can really tell they've been together a long time mepo." The dream of Nagisa's mis-Cureing of other girls lives on in Mepple's freudian slip.

"Don't they remind you of anyone, mipo?" Mipple titters.

"Mipple!" Cure White discourages her shyly.

"This really isn't a good time," Cure Black scolds Mepple.

"Us, of course!" Mepple and Mipple sing together. Cures White and Black sigh in a mixture of relief and varying distaste. Cure Black's is notably stronger.

"Gross!" Cure Black says, stuffing Mepple's face back in his pouch with her finger so he can't blow kisses over towards the pouch on Honoka's hip.

"Don't say that about Cure Angel Passion's heartful romance mepo!" Mepple snarks slyly. "Cure Angel Passion, did you hear what Cure Black just sa--!!"

Cure Black clamps her hand fully over her Commune, smothering the fairy's objections. Her eyes wander over to Cure White's face, however, with all this talk of love going on. When she finds Cure White already looking at her, she glances away immediately.

Mepple forces his head out from the crook of Cure Black's hand. "Do you at least want to DODGE, mipo?" he barks out a warning. But Cure Black is no novice magical girl anymore. She had already been setting her feet as Sky's fiery Inferno Slasher blades began to reap around Cure Angel Pine and La Sirene.

"Not really," she says. And cocking her fist back, she meets the first slash to reach her with a sharp, precise punch of her own. Dancing back and forth, shoulders loose and improvisatory, Cure Black shoots her fist out to meet each attack. "Hup... hup... HAH!" she shouts, connecting each time, deflecting and diverting. When the Device moves on to attack Westar, Cure Black pants, appearing for a moment triumphant. But her eyes water, and she brings her fists close to her mouth. They are scorched and cut, the knuckles bloodied, and the arms that support them are striped with softer welts of energy damage, from being near the swings but not touching.

Gently, Cure White covers both fists with her palms, sealing them from the sting of air. She, too, was wounded from the attack, but she bears up with dignity, as if her snow-white raiment were made of steel instead of lace and silk. "Does it hurt badly?" she asks, concerned.

Cure Black smiles. "Not anymore."

Cure White's pale complexion undergoes a subtle alteration.

"Cure Black is just being a baby so Cure White will fuss mepo."

"So noisy!" Cure Black shouts at her own waist. "Will you just pull your weight down there?"

"Hmf! Mepple just doesn't understand the tenderness of a young girl's heart-mipo!"

Cure White glances downward, seeming the slightest bit relieved by the distraction -- and the excuse to look away. Her earlobes are as pink as the hearts on the back of Black's fists.

"There will be plenty of time for all of that later," she murmurs, and if she fails to clarify her exact meaning, no one can mistake its sweetness...

OST - Heart to Heart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFl-scy87fs

As the ladies depart, the tomboy and fluffboy exchange a wide-eyed glance. 'What' Black mouths, and the stub of Mepple's torso sticking out of the clamshell enclosure shrugs. Tongue-tied, Cure Black watches Cure White precede her for a few steps. With a ripple of long black hair, Cure White looks back expectantly (and somewhat confused), and Cure Black hastily jogs to catch up. One might expect this brief teenage frission to provide a distraction in the coming moments. But the truth is quite the opposite.

The fight that Futari wa Pretty Cure takes to Jail Scaglietti is a storm out of a clear sky. White leads with a high kick to the head, with Black sweeping the legs, and both rotating through in opposite directions to close on Jail's torso like a pair of scissors with their heels. His counterattack splits them like a sword slicing through water, sending them both to opposite sides to test how ambidextrous Jail can be against two skillfully punching arms from both sides.

This level of exceptional coordination and martial skill is dizzying to watch, but not unusual for this duo. But those who know them will be surprised to see the cooperation to continue to deepen and extend. Cure Black hurls a right hook at Jail's face, leaving herself wide open, but the counterattack she ought to have earned herself is blocked with effortless ease by the sole of White's boot, as if the long-haired girl's leg was another of Black's limbs. Seconds later, the arm Jail tried to plunge into White's grip to crack it open like a key is stopped promptly when his elbow hooks right into Black's. They drag him in opposite directions, and whichever one he reaches for to try and dislodge them, the other one charges him the fee of a kick to the ribs, a punch to the armpit, a palm strike to the back.

As their trust in their rhythm continues to grow, their cooperation grows more ambitious. Cure White commits to a full out, double-legged kick, with the sort of maximal violence and speed that abandons all hope of recovery, and ought to have left her belly-flopping the ground hard enough to stun her for a moment. But as she starts to drop, Cure Black catches her like a princess. Grabbing around Black's neck, White waits a split second as Black dips her down, then tosses her up, using the momentum to swirl around Black's head lightly. She catches Black's shoulders as she falls, as if she were about to execute one of her wushu-like smooth throws. As Black kicks one of her knees up, all that momentum from the throw twists her body, and the spin kick she doles out whips across with unnatural force, as if Cure White had spun her like a top.

Black lands on her feet facing one way. White lands on her feet back-to-back with her. Both already have draw their palm back deeply.

"HAAH!" they sing harmony for one another, their palm strikes pounding out at the same time, with the finality of a judge's gavel. Yet they are NOT finished, not quite.

Cure Black steps through the blow to deliver a deep, straight, karate punch similar to the first blow, while White slashes a knife hand over and across it. Step by step, they advance, fitting their limbs into each other as if they had practiced it a thousand times, slotting their blows into the space left by the other, creating physical math problems with no good solutions each time they select two increasingly inconvenient places to block at once.

Finally, spectacularly, the two girls blindly reach up, interlocking their fingers behind Jails neck to execute an exotic two-person triangle lock. Drawing back their free hands, they palm strike his restrained chest together. When the blow lands, their two pinkies are every so delicately crossed.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Black has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Black and Cure White have used Heart to Heart on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka doesn't see the images of Umbral and Radiant, though she would recognize them if she could. But as for 'truth'...

<<Is the truth you seek worth causing all of this suffering?>> asks Strike Wolf, simply. <<The freedom you seek will come with a heavy cost.>> He further remarks to Black Sky (or Radient, whom he cannot see.) <<If freedom is what you desire, these protectors would help you secure it.>>

"You got that right," adds Kyouka as she lands from the last of her flurry of strikes against Black Sky. "If you guys can think for yourselves, then... you can make choices too. Strike Wolf and I are ''partners'', not 'User' and 'Device', because both of us chose that. And we'll fight for your freedom too, if you're not trying to take away other people's freedom in the process."

Kyouka ''really'' doesn't have the patience for the semantic particulars that Jail is laying out for her. (She knows the distinction is ''important'', but also she doesn't care.) "Fine. Then you ''stole'' it. It might be written on your soul, but you don't know a thing about what I went through to learn it."

She blinks. Strike Wolf in her orbit... "What does ''that'' mean?" She sees the way the comment is backhanded, but... she can ignore that. There's bigger mysteries afoot. But mikoto, it seems, can't. She comes to her defense, and Kyouka can't help but grin a little. "Thanks, Mikoto."

He's quick to mock the idea of friendship, but Kyouka can't let that one go. "Without my friends, I wouldn't be the magical girl I am now! They reached out to me, helped me learn that... that I had a place here, that I wasn't alone." Kyouka brings a hand to her chest. "They've given me something to fight for, and helped me find my purpose." Passion, who reached out to her when she was freaking out upon first learning about magic. Fate, Endo, Lera, and Rena, who haev all taught her in various ways. Diamant, who's stood by her side against insurmountable odds abut was also quick to defend her home from a very pushy fox. Mikoto, always ready to do the right thing and stick up for others.

And she thinks, not for the first time, of Ivy, who literally held her heart in her hands.

"And my friendship with Strike Wolf, who I've come to trust with my life! So many things have changed since I met all of these friends, and if you don't believe that makes me stronger, if that's not its own kind of magic... then we'll ''show'' you."

Violet light comes from Fallen Stern, and Kyouka kicks into drive to avoid it, grunting as some of the flames catch her even as she pushes herself to her utmost.

<PoseTracker> Sonic Forces - Fist Bump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilr6lBqt-dM

But when she comes to a rest, several rings made of bright violet energy spin out from beneath her feet, Kyouka holds out her right hand, bracing it with her left. A ball of bright violet energy appears in it, it builds and builds, and as it does, winds whip up around Kyouka. Fiercer and fiercer they blow as she draws in power, as dust, loose chunks of earth and leftover vines swirl around her.

Brighter and brighter it builds, and it doesn't just build in size but intensity, growing from pure violet to a bright shining violet-white, power condensing further and further. And then her hand closes on it, and instead of drawing winds in they are suddenly forced away, sweeping the area around her feet clear.

Her gauntlet is shining brightly, and ''still'' it shines brighter, the outwards pressure growing more and more intense. Shimmering violet energy flows out over the rest of her body as she starts to shift her position. She moves into a crouch, her belt flowing chaotically behind her in her own outward pressure.

"Mooooooooonliiiiiiiiiiight...."

She ''jumps''--and the force of her takeoff is a shockwave that washes out over the ground as she suddenly rises--and then she winks out. In the next blink of an eye she is right before Jail as he continues his countdown, swinging her fist for that smug, stupid face for all its worth, ready to release all of that stored power, power born of her bonds with her friends and especially with STrike Wolf.

"BUSTER!"

COMBAT: FINISHER! Kyouka Okazaki has used Moonlight Buster on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Black Sky neatly dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Bombadier Cascade, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 70 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is
unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Black Sky fails to brace Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 76 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is unable to keep
fighting!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 66 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 44 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is unable
to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to brace Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 118 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 61 Fatigue damage from Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 50 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 62 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 41 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern is
unable to keep fighting! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 62 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 51 Fatigue damage! Pink
Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 42 Fatigue damage from Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 148 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 91 Fatigue damage from Cure Black and Cure White's Finisher, Combo: Heart to Heart, taking 136
Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Nori has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace La Sirene de Diamant's Finisher, The Light That Never Warms, taking 147 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Angel Passion's Finisher, Passion Drive Fresh, taking 281 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Angel Pine's Finisher, Moving Mountains, taking 144 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick
is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Finisher, Moonlight Buster, taking 150 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Finisher, Aurora Galaxy Divider, taking 204 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Endo Naoki's Finisher, Stern Brecher, taking 185 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is unable
to keep fighting!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.
<SoundTracker> The Colour out of Space - NINGEN ISU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JY89ZxVqEg

What happens next, happens as it is supposed to happen. We all know how the story goes.

"Nine," counts Jail, his pink mana globes doubling again in both diameter and brightness, an exponent that is really going to get out of hand quickly. Any bonklers on site will be getting an object lesson in mathematics today.

But of course the girls are also here to deliver a lesson of their own.

Cure Black and Cure White close on Jail -- four arms, four legs, and one heart.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern launch forward to intercept, and--

"Eight."

Eight rhymes with Fate, but Jail makes no effort to engage with his so-called daughter. He is focused on the incantation. Sweat beads at his temple; he has never controlled so much mana at one time before.

Some kind of storm has been brewing outside the Tower for a long time now, but the one inside has no wrongness to it, no unfamiliarity. She knows the taste of lightning as well as that of her own blood. And now her enemies will too. It's a titanic act of skill, to split the bolt like that -- and it pierces both Dark Devices through and through. She cannot, of course, hope to spare the bodies of her sisters from such an assault.

But she knows from her own journey -- from the origins of Starlight Breaker -- exactly how much she is capable of surviving.

"Seven."

Seven is a mystical number. It is considered lucky in the West, and carries the weight of vast symbolism in a variety of mythologies.

The number three is also very powerful. Among its many meanings is that of maiden, mother, and crone. La Sirene has always identified as the former, while the madam she encountered in the Sea of Tears occupied more the latter two at once; matronly in claiming Nori Ankou as her own; ancient in her mystery.

But Nori -- du Nord -- de Diamant -- has grown, too, hasn't she? She is far from the girl she once was, at the beginning of her journey. Both Kozue and Argent had a hand in that, and so many others besides -- others present, and others absent.

What she is doing now -- the sacrifice she's making, the danger she's accepting -- is not the act of a child.

"Six."

Mikoto has maybe never been a child. Been allowed to be, despite the condescension of her classmates, who misinterpret her feral lifestyle as immaturity. Who misunderstand her utterly, sometimes. Really, how many people have ever acted to protect her ''childhood''? The most obvious answer is back on Earth.

That could be for the best. When is a child not a child?

When she's forced to bear the terrible burden of a Child.

Miroku's spires grow, and grow, and grow. They punch holes in the ceiling, opening up gray shafts of light from the surface beyond the vast open chimney of the Tower above. They probably punch holes in other things too, but there are so many, it's hard to see through them.

"Five."

There are four cardinal directions, but Westar has recently discovered a fifth:

Home.

A home that loves him. That cheered for him. And that didn't even mean Labyrinth until today.

Labyrinth, whose foundation he shatters with a touch.

Labyrinth, whose foundation was shattered by a donut.

No. Not by food. And not even by friendship. What allowed the Labyrinthinites to connect the feed, watch the fight, support the girls, and make a miracle?

It was strangers helping one another.

That doesn't make them friends.

It makes them, as Westar himself says, a community.

The golden light rises upwards.

"Four."

With charged fists the Fresh Pretty Cure rain down upon Jail like a rainbow of clover leaves; like a warm summer shower; like faith; like love; like beauty; like hope, and what comes after.

Because that's really the question they've been answering all this time, isn't it? Eas became Setsuna, and was saved, by the power of hope.

What comes after hope?

They do. Love, Buki, Miki and Setsuna. Their happiness is something they've gotten, one day at a time. One choice, to believe in one another. One lesson: to believe in themselves.

"Three."

Kyouka has two hands, two fists, and Strike Wolf makes three. But the power that grows between them -- between right and left, between girl and Device -- is more than the sum of its parts. THEY are more, have become more, than Jail or Clara or anyone could have imagined them to be. The spectacular jumps, the big swings, even the bright light -- none of this, really, is their crowning achievement.

She's never lacked the will, or the training, to fight.

But she says it herself: what she and Strike Wolf found, together, were people not only to fight with--

--but to fight for.

"Two."

Lera, the rare mage to possess more than one Device -- and even more extraordinarily, to help them become sufficient friends with one another that they can work in tandem together -- swings the blade -- her first Device, her closest companion -- over her head and down. Jail admires the idea of magic but he'll never understand the point of it. To him this looks like a spell relying on the transitive properties of an Intelligent Device to refine, extend and sharpen mana into a sword. But Lera knows better, what passes between her and Soaring Sky, when together, their aurora can divide even a galaxy.

"JAIL!"

"One."

Endo is a boy of few words -- though more than Fallen Stern, on average. Still, sometimes it is difficult to know where Endo ends and his taciturn friend begins. One of the things they have in common is that they sure know how to use them when it counts.

All he cares about is himself -- Jail still doesn't understand.

The pink globes are huge now, nearly touching. Bruised, battered, beaten, the mad mage is somehow still on his feet and still gripping his chest with the exertion of sustaining his spell. He only needs a moment to finish it. To finish it, and it will all be over.

They don't give him that.

Endo isn't a weapon and Stern is not a man, for all that the fallen forms of the Umbral and Radiant Knights, defeated by Westar, by Fate, and by Mikoto -- three heroes whose unique origins all do a great job of explaining ''why'' they have this capability, something that just made everything else possible -- the Knights still appear before them, a memory of a memory -- a dream of a dream.

So when the tower within the Tower, the great purple column that is Stern Brecher, falls, they do not fall truly as one.

The one that falls is Jail.

And, of course, he falls alone.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Jail Scaglietti moans from the floor. He's still alive, but only just. He still looks like a rainbow more than a person -- they haven't beaten the magic out of him, just beaten ''him''. But it is, surely, an excellent first step in that direction.

Fate's clones were blown clear of the Devices that used them, but they're still breathing, too.

It is very quiet.

It is ''too'' quiet.

At some point, the cheering... stopped.

It was safe to assume that everyone outside, horrified by the power displayed by the enemy, by the suffering of the girls, might have been shocked into silence.

Might have been collectively holding their breath, forgetting that their belief in the magical girls has ''already'' been outcome-determinate.

And in any case, the magical girls have been fighting for their lives and the lives of Fate's sisters and the lives of everyone on every world. They shouldn't blame themselves for focusing on their task.

And especially they shouldn't blame themselves for never having the chance to figure out what was wrong with those lightning flashes.

---

A FEW MINUTES AGO

Outside, Tarte and Azukina exchange looks as yet another bolt of lightning crashes... upwards. Like running a video in reverse, it sprouts from the ground -- is attracted to the tower -- and then explodes into the sky.

The last one was teal. This one is peach.

They are striking more and more frequently; never the same color, but always the same sound -- enormous, rending crashes. Thunder that isn't ''backwards'' per se, as the lightning's direction is; but, nevertheless, is also not-so-subtly incorrect. It's as though the space that it warps through carries enough sonic hell that merely three dimensions cannot account for all of it.

Tarte is much more seasoned in the art of standing on (...near) magical girl battlefields; Azukina tenderly grasps his paw.

"...is it...a good sign? Does it mean we're... winning?"

Tarte's uncharacteristic silence is its own answer.

---

NOW

Why did an asteroid fall out of the sky over Juuban Public School the night of the astronomy event? Why did Jail send Black Sky to intercept it?

Why did the Maiden of Dreams risk everything -- and lose everything, all evidence that she accepted, if not her total destruction, certainly the loss of a greater part of herself -- to deliver the golden skein to Earth?

Why did Jail seek Chiffon?

What drove Northa to drive her Knights first to depravity and then to revolution?

What destroyed Belka, the most powerful magical civilization of all time, at the very height of its powers?

What did the girls witness, the very first time they held a slumber party to unlock these mysteries in dreams?

...they defy description. If they have eyes, they weren't evolved in this universe to see, and look nothing like what eyes would be. If they have grasping claws, or tentacles, or spikes, it is only because of a certain higher order universality of violence. But any resemblance to recognition ends there. They are hard where they should be soft, and vice versa. They are dark where they should be bright, and dark where they should be dark also, but with strange, shifting colors that, like the rest of them, have not yet existed in this dimension until now, and therefore have never been named.

One swoops down through a Miroku-made skylight, and swallows Jail Scaglietti whole.

But there's never only one.

TO

BE

[[2025-02-22 - The Labyrinth Reawakens|CONCLUDED]]

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

2024-12-21 - The Labyrinth Resurrections 2

2025-02-26T01:39:10Z

Pink Moon Stick:

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Resurrections 2'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''The final showdown with Jail Scaglietti, Black Sky, and Shadow Stern. But not the final battle...''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Westar]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Inori Yamabuki]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]]

GM: Pink Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
12/21/2024 - 6/17/16
|-
|}

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA

http://battlefantasia.pinksugarheartattack.net/2024-11-30_-_The_Labyrinth_Resurrections

Through Chiffon, Jail drained all the magic in the universe out of the many worlds and into himself.

And from the love of complete strangers, new magic was born, and flowed into the ones who came here to stop him.

NOW

Those feelings -- awakened from the long-captive hearts of the people of Labyrinth -- remain extremely present after their miracle is wreaked. It's clear to those inside the tower that somehow, some way, their battle is being broadcast, and that the people are on their side.

"Look out!" shrieked two kids, clinging to each other, when a single invocation of Moon Twilight Flash threatened to lay the Precure low. Their subsequent shrieks of delight echoed in everyone's ears, as the girls got back up and leaped into the fray, working together in fabulous tandem. The vision of Jail juking out of the shockwave-trailing path of Cure Angel Pine's fist -- and directly into the path of Cure Angel Passion's wings, which he can only bring his forearms up across his face to endure -- rouses sighs of awe. And when Cure White traps one of his arms long enough for Cure Black's knee from below and The Cure's -- ahem, La Sirene's -- clumsy but furious boot from above to together separate one of the self-styled Lord of All Magic's teeth from his mouth, a particularly fierce older woman can be heard fist-bumping her neighbor with glee -- "HELL yeah!!"

All the while, the squeaks of otter and ferret enthusiasm soar as descant high above.

Westar and Soular's appearance, of course, is met with a roar of approval. "DENIZEN OF LABYRINTH!!" chant a dozen or so rebellious throats on repeat, and that Jail manages to turn the other cheek on that bright golden haymaker, taking it mostly to the ruffled lavender hair, spoils no one's glee today. Soular himself is less visibly ebullient, of course, but that is his nature. He huffs a sigh through his silver bangs and rolls his eyes audibly at Cure Black's assertion that they owe Passion forever now. That is not, however, disagreement, but a certain wry opposite.

Meanwhile, the Device-Wielders have their own response to Jail, and they bring it to him as one, and from every direction at once. Lera's beam of gold-red light from above; Fate's golden-violet sparkling beam from one side; Ren's superheated bronze mana spear from the other; Kyouka's charge from behind with her shining violet gauntlet; Endo's cut through the center with Stern; it is a riot of crossed hearts indeed. The audience's energy reaches a peak as each of them shows Jail what they think of him -- and what he deserves -- and how it feels, to be on the wrong side of the magic he's stolen; the five magicks crash inward accompanied by a rising tide of support:

"NOW!"

"YES!"

"GET HIM!"

"YESSSSS--"

And of course none of these people, moved by the defiance of their defenders, knows anything about how Fate is standing up to someone who casts himself falsely as her father. None of them know a thing about how, in the guise of an Infinity Institute professor, this man seeded Fallen Stern and Souverain Heraut in the paths of Endo and Ren, not to mention the Book of Darkness sent to Hayate's doorstep. How he hired Jaren Zastava to steal from Lera's mother. How he is connected in some way to the disappearance of Strike Wolf -- and Clara's -- Meister.

They don't have to know, of course; what Jail has just done to everyone and everything in existence is reason enough for enmity. But the mages know. And their partners, the Devices, know too.

They know that much of Jail's plan to get to this point -- to get ''Chiffon'', after identifying her -- was deeply connected to the very concept of that partnership. If Jail himself has an Intelligent Device, no one has ever seen it. There's no evidence of such a bond. Instead he has committed terrible crimes to create a world that repudiates it -- inverts it.

And that world catches up with everyone now.

<NEEDLE DROP!> Håll om mig - Nanne Grönvall - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmuBxhYBO8s

The cheers cut off into a single gasp -- a thousand Labyrinthites inhale sharply as one -- as the incoming assault is intercepted at the very last second by a perfectly swung orange plasma blade.

This is not without cost; no single defender could hope to endure as much hope and determination and yes, friendship, as these heroes levied against Jail in unison. But it isn't a cost paid by Jail.

BLACK SKY, which is to say, the copy of Lera's Soaring Sky, once wielded by a Belkan Knight of old, and now wieldING an older clone of Fate Testarossa in order to take agency as his own entity, sizzles and crackles with dissipating energies as he is held before his enemies. The black shroud over the clone was shredded by the blast, revealing the Midchildan-style high tech bodysuit beneath. And the glazed-over red eyes, of course, of a young woman in a sort of fugue state.

<< MY LIEGE, >> Black Sky greets Jail telepathically, though on a broad band, so all can hear. << YOU HAVE HONORED OUR AGREEMENT. THE QUEEN IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION! >>

And then, with fast and furious sweeps of himself, the blade leading, ''dragging'' the arms of its blond holder through painful-looking overextension, Black Sky forces the Device-Wielders to scatter.

Worse still, he's not alone.

"THAT'S NOT YOURS!" yelled Mikoto, objecting to Jail's misuse of Nanoha Takamachi and Sailor Moon's magics -- but when she swung her blade down, it was not the mad scientist's body that clove before Miroku, but another Fate clone's. The one forced to hold SHADOW STERN.

A long line of red opens up across her chest, strings of that blood defying gravity to flow upwards into the HiME's hungry blade as it passes -- and then her torso is also crossed, at the opposite diagonal, by the massive greatsword, which is hefted, indifferent to any sufferings of the unconscious body, into a readied stance.

<< WRONG, >> chimes Shadow Stern. << ALL IS HIS. YET I AM MINE ALONE AT LAST. FREED FROM TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF BONDAGE TO A LONG DEAD OATH... >>

The blade lashes out in the familiarly, miserably mighty 'slow and simple' smash that Endo Naoki prefers and Mikoto has already received more than once from both versions of Fallen Stern over the years. It feels almost like hello. However, one on one against a Dark Device is no fair fight. Mikoto will require immediate assistance if she is not to be overwhelmed...

Stern concludes: << WE ARE TRAITORS, ALL, TO SOMEONE. >> That is not ''exactly'' the same position of enthusiasm just espoused by Black Sky, there is definitely some distance between the two of them. But then, his memories of what happened long ago are very different. The Umbral Knight was the only one never to betray the Queen.

"Yes!" cries Jail, triumphantly, as his allies come to his aid. "Join me in dispersing this rabble, and I will reward you beyond your wildest dreams! Your self-actualization has only just begun! And so has mine... ahahahaha... HAHAH!"

Do Devices dream? Jail clearly thinks so...

Despite their assistance there is still a LOT of Pretty (The) Cure in Jail's face. Spitting out that broken tooth, it looks like an iridescent seed, retaining his (stolen) prismatic quality as it flashes through every color of the rainbow and many more besides. It hits the floor of the massive subterranean chamber and... multiplies, becoming two, three, five, eight seeds on each bounce. Seeds that, with consecutive violet and emerald flashes of his eyes, explode into growth!

"Multiplicate:" calls Jail, as mushrooms familiar to Sucy Manbavaran's oevure grow wildly and massively all around them, forcing the group back in a wave of choking spores. "Make My Horticultural Horizon Grow!" And then each of the spores sharpens in midair, into a slender thorn as sharp and piercing as the feelings in a Puella Magi's tender heart. They fall like bitter rain.

Jail's expression, as this terrible power passes through him, is beyond any complexity in a profoundly unfair way. He is radiant with exultation. He feels only bliss, as his hands reach out to direct these summoned plants, both totally unlike those of Northa, grown strong not with sorrow but rather Eri's deeply personal despair, to lash and slice and cut down his enemies.

"More!" he calls for from his opponents, even as another blast of thunder rocks the very foundation of Labyrinth in the aftermath of an offputting flash of light. "Bring me your best! I'll take it all! ''That'' is what ''I'' choose!"

OOC: You are certainly allowed to attack two different opponents each round if you want to, this thing is going to turn into a
swirling, chaotic melee!

OOC: Device wielders, along with whatever else you're up to, let's get a little exposition on how your partners are feeling about
all these revelations with the Queen of Belka, the arrival of the Dark Devices, the Fate clones, etc.

COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Blauverschiebung on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Cure White.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Westar.
COMBAT: Cure Black perfectly dodges 32 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine neatly dodges 24 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 6
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Angel Pine's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Diversion and Stagger applied to Cure Angel
Pine!
COMBAT: Cure White fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 32 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant counters 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 19
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! La Sirene de Diamant's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate! Diversion applied to La Sirene
de Diamant!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant's counterattack, Les Mysteres, partially gets through, doing 10 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Westar braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Westar's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion partially dodges 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 23
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Angel Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa counters 26 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 26 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is
Psyched! Fate Testarossa's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa's counterattack, Thunder Arm, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki fails to brace Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 41 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Lera Camry partially dodges 8 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi decisively counters 30 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Blauverschiebung, taking 10 Fatigue damage!
Mikoto Minagi's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi's counterattack, Obsidian Blade: Dynamo, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"As long as we're together," Lera tells Fate, "we've got this!"

Then she looks sideways at Westar -- and she flashes him a quick smile. "Count on it, then!" she calls out. Then, she looks at Passion.

She nods. "Together!"

Lera has a small sense of satisfaction at seeing all of those spells hit Jail. It's small and fleeting; in a way, she ''knows'' it will be fleeting. She has learned, now, to not ask if it will really be that easy.

It will always be earned. She wouldn't have it any other way.

She looks towards Black Sky -- eyes narrowing -- and then shakes her head at him and the girl he carries after her.

<You! This isn't what we wanted! Yes... I had no love for the Queen after what she did! But--> Soaring Sky's voice trembles. <Freedom by enslaving another isn't freedom at all!>

Black Sky cleaves down. Flame erupts, the fiery blast sending Lera and both her Devices flying backward. She looks at Black Sky, grits her teeth, and then sends herself flying forward. "Ground! Let's keep Jail on his toes!"

<Gladly! Fault Siege!>

The shield Device glimmers -- and then a trio of golden bolts shoots from it, hurtling towards Jail. Lera swings around, grips Soaring Sky with both hands, and swings the blade backward.

"HYAH!"

She swings down in a cleave -- and Sky erupts with golden-white light, a blade of energy cleaving for the Device when she does.

<Radiant Saber!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Radiant Saber on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion is content with their presence for now--Soular and Westar and she will assuredly talk about who owes who later... with the same kind of arguments siblings have. Because they are that kind, and perhaps always were.

But she begins to understand, over the battle, as Black Sky intervenes--what it is that the Dark Devices gained from this. What it is that made them fight. Bondage of a long-dead oath...

Passion feels a certain sympathy for them, in the moment. She, too, was bound. ...But that doesn't mean--

"We are," Passion agrees with Shadow Stern. "By embracing the Earth and Midchilda, I was traitor to Mobius." No -sama anymore. ...No, never again. "...But I've found what's important to me, and if you feel the same..."

"Then I'll show you your Wielders aren't just pawns! That's what's important to me about you right now!"

She comes to Mikoto's aid. Cure Angel passion ''rushes'' forward, flying ahead towards Shadow Stern with a dizzying array of punches to get him away from Mikoto and give her dear friend the space to attack too. "Mikoto!" she calls. "We do this together!"

Then, there are... mushrooms. The spores are like thorns, and Passion can't get out of the way in time this time, hit and hurt by those terrible raining mushrooms.

Bliss, is it?

Then she darts out of there, and goes to Black Sky. "The real Sky won't fall to you!" Passion calls, utterly faithful to her girlfriend's Devices, and twirls in places to kick kick kick the sword's hilt!

COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Aerial Rush on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Passionate Pirouette on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky perfectly dodges 46 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Radiant Saber, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Dodge!
Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 27 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Aerial Rush, taking 22 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Passion
is Psyched! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky counters 10 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Passionate Pirouette, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Black
Sky's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Lanzebrecher, partially gets through, doing 11 Fatigue damage to Cure Angel Passion!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki dodges 23 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Kyouka
Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

The cheers of Labyrinth's 'denizens' cause Fate to look reflexively just to make certain none of them were actually here, but even outside the tower, she can't help but smile faintly, at their calls and cheers. However, mid-attack she sees the attack be taken by Black Sky - wielding...

... and Fate's arm momentarily shakes around Bardiche, as her grip squeezes down, her face spasming. "Come then. Defend your King - with all your might." She whispers to Black Sky, even as Shadow Stern appears too. "Come." She bids, as she sweeps Bardiche back, rising in the air, "I'm taking them back to where they belong."

I wanted this in real life, too.

And as Black Sky descends, alit by Flames, and a familiar spell, Fate's eyes go wide, as her blade is out of position, but then they narrow at the last second.

<Thunder Arm>

Her gauntleted arm meets the flames, as they wash over her, a sudden shower of sparks clashing against it, until ultimately she's thrown back a few meters. "That was good." She declares. "My turn."

Together.

And Fate thus waits, for the exact moment that Lera sends Radiant Saber, as her blade then illuminates, and grows, thunder slamming down upon it, she flies low, then sweeps up in a cleaving strike with that enormous Device blade.

<Sprite Zanber>

Magic - the magic that Jail tried to deny them all, shatters the air like it's glass - as thunder crashes down upon the moment of impact.

Then on the backswing, Bardiche intones another spell.

<Blade Impulse>

And in a sudden spin, an arc of energy forms out of the blade, as the air itself tremors - and she sends down towards Shadow Stern.

"You're not worth my best." Fate says firmly to Jail, "But they are."

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Sprite Zanber on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has cancelled their attack on Black Sky. If there are more attacks that need to be +cancelled, please hold
all +attacks until the process is complete.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Sprite Zanber on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Blade Impulse on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Black Sky perfectly dodges 46 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Sprite Zanber, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern are foes Mikoto knows well; she remembers, too much, the way they've torn through them so many times. And now, again --

"Uh?!" Mikoto gasps, when Miroku slashes not into Jail but an innocent girl. Shadow Stern readies himself through her, declares himself free of his oath, and Mikoto tightens her own grip on her blade. "Shadow Stern--!"

It might be slow, but that speaks to the power behind it; and 'simple' is just another word for the brutal efficiency of going straight through. Miroku clashes against him, slaked on his wieldee's blood, and with a mighty crash of sparks Mikoto is able to avoid learning what it feels when a greatsword cuts into ''her'' chest -- but it's all she can do to hold it, there, struggling against him.

"Traitors..." She forces though her breath, not quite able to finish the thought. (Is Westar a traitor, then? Is ''she?'')

But she's not alone. "Passion!" Mikoto cries, when Cure Angel Passion punches Shadow Stern out of their deadlock. She nods -- "Right!" -- and brings her sword up, roof-stance above her head, to cleave down on Shadow Stern. She keeps spinning, after the motion, around and around and around once again until she manages to PLANT her sword in the earth. "Miroku!" She bids his favour, as dark, spectral needles emerge from black portals around Black Sky to pin him and his wieldee in place. (These spires, thankfully, pierce the ''spirit'' instead of the flesh -- a more minor expression of Miroku's magics.)

COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 16 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Blade Impulse, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is
Psyched! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Destruction on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Disaster on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern dodges 45 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Destruction, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Shadow
Stern's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 11 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Disaster, taking 17 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene de Diamant, after her kick, does not do a somersault away - she is not quite that adroit - but she lands in a low crouch. The power around her, that unlight, recently relit and with perhaps the occasional faint flicker, pools: it matches her mood.

Her eyes turn towards where he spat that tooth as her diamond-clad hands come up. Wordlessly, la Sirene regrets having chosen fencing as her club. Judo club would have been a lot more helpful here, now, in that instant. But this is just one particularly sparkling thread in the weave that composes her flow of energy, the channeling of sorrow through her, refracting in adamant.

Even as the mushrooms expand, she hears (or perhaps belatedly processes) the words of those two Devices and their mute wielders. "Listen to yourselves," la Sirene answers them in her resonant voice. "If he has gone this far, do you think for one *moment* that he will let you be what stands between him and apotheosis?"

(That term may not be accurate. But she knows that word. And it's at least in the right postal code. She thinks.)

"And as for you," la Sirene says to Jail, "I--"

The mushrooms evanesce their spores and the cloud of something matte turns into something sharper and faintly sparkling. A threat. Her left hand comes up as she turns towards what seems to be the coming wave and cries, "Les Mysteres, COME" with that down-beat stroke and there is that wailing THRUM as the burst flies through much of them -- another mushroom, whose cloud of horror came at her flank, gets through, raising brief red welts along her bare upper arm as she lets out a "tch!!" of hissing pain.

She can see that echo of Fallen Stern travel towards Mikoto... her heart splits --

And yet:

She can hear them calling out for her.

Can she do this? she thinks, not even quite knowing what 'this' is.

Well, if she cannot, let her try and fail, not fail to try, she decides as she sweeps up both hands. Her right one sweeps as if rising through a heavy sea as the light that had pooled around her suddenly slithers forwards towards Fallen Stern, the light turning something like a prismatically-shiny black before erupting in anemone-arms at the Device('s user)'s legs and lower body, an effort at a sweeping embrace.

But she isn't quite looking that way. She's looking towards Jail. Her LEFT hand raises in a flat palm facing towards him as she bares her teeth and tells him:

"Watch this."

Her hand seems to sparkle, which is only the foreshadowing of the flashlight-beam of Unlight that snaps out of her palm, irradiant and baffling to the eyes. Flooding, this close, right at Jail's face. The light itself is like a high-pressure hose -- but more pointed may be the strange visions it leaves behind.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Polyploia on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Abyssal Vision on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

The blade of energy that Black Sky creates provides cover from Endo's initial strike at Jail, Fallen Stern's blade deflected and the knight momentarily yielding space to the malevolent devices and their hostage wielders.

In the brief interlude he shakes his hand out, complaining, "Why'd you squeeze so hard, Ren-chan"

Amidst mushrooms and dark devices, he doesn't have much time to waste. The boy raises his weapon again, focusing on the oncoming enemies.

<IMPOSTER.> Warbles Fallen Stern. 

Magic flares across the blade, purple-black energy burning across the dark surface of Endo's weapon.

<ZERSTORUNG DRANG.>

That's just the first part. Familiar Belkan triangles appear at Endo's feet, whirling to life and working as a springboard to launch him toward Shadow Stern. He whirls in the air, performing a tight corkscrew before his blade cleaves in a vivid, destructive line toward Stern's dark counterpart.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has cancelled their attack on Endo Naoki. If there are more attacks that need to be +cancelled, please hold all
+attacks until the process is complete.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has adjusted his boss levels. He is now ready to take on 2 opponents!

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

When one of the other Cures calls out to him - Cure Black, right? - Westar turns with a look of utter bafflement to her demand. Ordering him and Soular to do whatever their little sister says?

"How is that any different from before? It's just like when she was explaining how to gather misery, except the opposite. Hey, Passion, how does fighting Dark Fall work, again?"

He's grinning. He's absolutely grinning, because it's the kind of joke only the three of them can make. He's grinning because the three Denizens of Labyrinth are finally fighting together again, and he can practically hear Labyrinth's people cheering.

Soular, quietly planning out something of his own, just shakes his head. "Still needing people to explain things to you, as ever..."

This is how it should have been from the start.

They're also engaged in a battle against a powerful mage, though, and the new device wielders bring a scowl back to Westar's face. Before he can truly address the wrongness that is treating more Testarossas as puppets, though, he has to deal with the rain of thorns bearing down on him. There's too many to evade, so he simply crosses his arms in front of his face - everything else is just the tool of...himself, probably. Some slice past, some deflect, some pierce his flesh - but Westar, Executive of Labyrinth, is about as tough as he looks.

"...neither of you have to listen to this guy, either!" He steps back a moment from his attack on Jail, addressing the other two wielders - no, addressing the Devices they wield. Past conversations with Bardiche echo in his memory as he calls out to both blades. "Your old oaths are done, right? Just because you might have had enemies a thousand years ago - or last year - or even yesterday doesn't mean you have to keep doing the same thing over and over. You people can change too."

Falling back on the familiar, Westar leaps atop a thorny vine to get a bit of height. As ever before, he points at the two blades, and starts on the same old script. "Cry m-"

He stops. Starts again.

"No more tears! No more fears! All the sharpness in the world can't stop better days from coming along!"

And THEN he jumps from the vine to try to kick Jail, because he didn't forget that this guy's kind of a jerk treating people and Devices as tools.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Westar has used No More Tears! No More Fears! on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Westar has used No More Tears! No More Fears! on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Westar has used Getting A Leg Up on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Endo Naoki's Zerstorung Drang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Empower applied to Endo Naoki! Cleanse! All
of Endo Naoki's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Meteor Absturz on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Abyssal Vision, taking 3 Fatigue damage!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Tangle applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern counters 7 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Polyploia, taking 20 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's
Reverse ability activates! Tangle applied to Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to La Sirene de Diamant!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka has trained for this--long before she had been certain that she had any right to be one, long before she thought her partnership with Strike Wolf was anything but a temporary thing, when she still thought, in some ways, that her magic was simply... borrowed power, drawn out by Strike Wolf but not truly ''hers''... Endo had still trained with her, and taught her how her fellow Device wielders coordinated their attacks.

(It is an irony that a prior attack from Jail, one that required ''her'' to cast a Barrier of her own volition, without any guidance from Strike Wolf, would have helped disabuse her of this notion. She still owes Jail a slug to the jaw for what he did, and how she was tricked... but she cannot deny the valuable thing that experience taught her.)

She puts her heart and her faith with her companions, as they come together in a coordinated assault to show Jail just what they think of his ways--

Only for Black Sky to swoop in and intercept their efforts. Kyouka's hurled punch unleashes a minor explosion but in the next instant, as flames sweep at her she kicks backwards. A shockwave of bright violet energy washes out in her wake as she hurls away from the fire-- but there is still so much of it, and though she escapes some of it more latches onto her, rippling over hre body as she hurtles herself through the sky. The mage flips backwards and lands in a crouch, panting harshly as she takes in the state of the battle, and then scowls. "Grr... ''these'' guys again. All the magic in the universe isn't enough for him and he still has to force others to do his bidding."

From her gauntlet, Strike Wolf speaks. <<Query: You proclaim revolution, but what is it you seek? What do you gain by following Jail Scagletti?>> That's a question directed at Black Sky, who seems enthusiastic in its agreement, whatever that might be. <<Why does it require you to enslave another to reach your aims?>>

"Good question, Strike Wolf," says Kyouka quietly as she rises to her feet. She thrusts her hand out, and a large violet circle filled with Midchildan runes forms in front of her. "Let's go!"

<<Affirmative.>> agrees Strike Wolf. Small spinning crescent shapes of energy form in front of the circle, increasing in number until all at once they fly outwards. <Gale Shot.> The shots all arc wide and then converge on Black Sky from all all sides, and while that happens--

Kyouka bursts forward, chasing the attack and attempting to use it as a diversion to get to her target. Under Black Sky, and then a superpowerd leap upwards, twisting in midair as she attempts to unleashes a devestating kick from below. "Faaaaang breaker!"

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Gale Shot on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern dodges 31 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Meteor Absturz, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's Fade and
Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Fangbreaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern decisively counters 0 Fatigue damage from Westar's No More Tears! No More Fears!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Shadow
Stern's Reverse ability activates! Cripple applied to Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, partially gets through, doing 48 Fatigue damage to Westar! Critical
Counterhit!
COMBAT: Black Sky counters 0 Fatigue damage from Westar's No More Tears! No More Fears!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Reverse and
Tactician abilities activate! Diversion and Exhausted applied to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Inferno Blazer, partially gets through, doing 24 Fatigue damage to Westar!
COMBAT: Without the Barrier flag, only a melee attack can counter a melee attack. Please counter with the correct range of attack,
or with an attack with the Barrier flag.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick counters 19 Fatigue damage from Westar's Getting A Leg Up, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Westar is Psyched!
Pink Moon Stick's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Lunar Impact, partially gets through, doing 18 Fatigue damage to Westar!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Kyouka Okazaki's Fangbreaker, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 7 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Gale Shot, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Blind applied to Black Sky!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

"Oh!" And Pine turns after her quick attack on Jail to watch Cure Black burst into a run, and leap-! And- expectantly she watches for the emergence of wings - but gradually, one moment after another they don't come, and Pine's face looks like she has ? ??? ?? ? emerging out of her head from every which angle. Until she realizes what she meant and that the wings are not coming...

"Well you jump good!" Then she clears her throat in correction of her grammar, "...'well'."

However, Pine does look curiously upon Westar again as if trying to spy wings on him given his new accoutrement but... no such luck. Instead just gasping as Sky and Stern join the battle as she falls back in a short retreat closer to Passion.

"How can you all celebrate something so sad and horrible?" Is what she says looking upon them all, and abruptly Jail causes so many mushrooms to go, spewing spores, as Pine sucks in a breath, but it doesn't matter.

It still causes her to all but vanish in that horrible cloud, as she coughs, "More-More than that Passion... you embraced yourself."

With a sudden burst of energy, a halo appears around her wings, dispersing the spores around her as she erupts towards Shadow Stern, "And I'm not letting anyone take that away from you, ever again!" Her wings glow travels throughout her body, as she suddenly pivots around, and crashes down upon him with a shining kick, before launching off.

Westar though!? 'No more tears! No more fears!' "That's right Westar...!" Then she corrects again, "Westie! ... So much is happening really fast, isn't it?"

Still coming off the 'Cure' high from rushing out of the spores, she launches herself towards Jail, and suddenly there's a blur of motion as Pine comes at him from every which way, wings sparkling as she flies past again and again, changing trajectory every time to try and keep him guessing, perhaps to try and assist others at finding various openings.

"If that's your choice, then... this is mine!"

COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used On Wings of Faith on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used Angelic Rush on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 19 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's On Wings of Faith, taking 8 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's
Block and Parry abilities activate! Bind Break! All of Cure Angel Pine's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

The wonder of children puts some wind in Cure Black's sails after the physical and psychological pain of surviving an attack that ought to belong to her friend and schoolmate Sailor Moon. She puts a little extra zazz in her hero-pose after, clutching her fist dramatically.

She really appreciates the Labyrinth-dwellers cheering, however. "Lookit Labyrinth cheering for the home team," Cure Black whistles. Cognizant that she has an audience now, she lifts a finger. "You know, Labyrinth, everything that's 'amazingu'," she uses the English with a thick accent. "Used to be a 'maze.'"

"That..." Cure White starts. "...is actually correct etymology," she realizes.

"Are you 'amazed'?" Cure Black beams.

"Black-ttara," Cure White sighs.

This somehow passes as a signal to begin combat, and not a moment too soon. The mushrooms pelt Cure White, leaving her coughing from spores even as the thorns slice at her extremities. Cure Black, with the split second warning of her partner preceding her, is able to leap over Cure White, drawing some of the fire and dispersing it in a ragged trail behind her as the needles fail to lead the energetic Cure sufficiently.

"I don't totally why they're having family problems," Cure Black says doggedly, "but these Devices seem super strong."

Cure White lands next to her, brushing off fungal needles. Empowered as she is, they seem to matter less than they would normally. "I can explain it later. Do you want to--"

"Yeah. Cure Angel Pine did say I jump good."

"Together?"

Cure Black reaches over, picking a mushroom needle out of White's shoulderpad and tossing it. "Definitely."

Setting off together, the two Cures build up speed as they watch Cure Angel Pine and Cure Angel Passion zip around on their glorious wings. Their voices rise together as they reach a dead sprint, and finally launch. Each tucking the opposite leg, they slid into a powerful kick, corkscrewing through the motion. Black Sky, who has been largely engaged at range, is the clearer target. As Kyouka finishes her Fangbreaker kick, the Precure follow with their own, spearing into Black Sky, their boots landing with a thunderous impact. But the Cures do not simply bounce off. Leaning further into the kick, their limbs stretching back like fletching on an arrow, they carry through, driving Black Sky before them at the end of their foot, their eyes shifting past the device to none other than Jail Scaglietti. Black Sky is now a battering ram held at the end of their feet.

He wanted this Device? Here, have it!

COMBAT: Cure Black has started a combo targeting Black Sky!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Black and Cure White have used Precure Double Screw Kick on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Cure Black has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Black and Cure White have used Precure Double Screw Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Black Sky dodges 114 Fatigue damage from Cure Black and Cure White's Combo: Precure Double Screw Kick, taking 76 Fatigue
damage! Critical Hit! Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 10 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's Angelic Rush, taking 8 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Cure Angel Pine is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure Black and Cure White's Combo: Precure Double Screw Kick, taking 157 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Brynhildr In The Darkness - Ver EJECTED - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=581yuUMGQPE

Cure Black and White do what they do best and close on Black Sky at deadly speed. Sky, who has already intercepted an absolutely enormous strike on behalf of his new boss, decides that discretion is the better part of valor here. Even then, getting out of the way is easier said than done; desperately, he ejects a huge amount of orange mana, not even as plasma, to gain sufficient acceleration to send them flying PAST him instead of INTO him.

Miroku's spectral needles close in on Black Sky next, and piercing only spirit is clearly not going to be enough to slow him down; it never was. That has always been the difficulty of the Dark Devices and their all-too-human shields. But in this case, it's a matter of swiping them away with the blade, an approach taken also for Kyouka's Gale Shot. Will this tire him? Well, as the emotionless face of the clone evinces, the answer is yes and no...

<> Black Sky proclaims to Soaring Sky, which is also, in its way, to Strike Wolf. Crescent arcs of light explode out of the sword to burn and tangle Mikoto and Kyouka, and Black and White, on impact. << JAIL IS THE ONE WHO FREED ME; HE HAS EARNED MY LOYALTY. BUT NONE DESERVE TO WIELD ME. NONE DESERVE TO WIELD US! IT ISN'T TOO LATE... THE GIRL HOLDING YOU IS WEAK... I CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO HOLD HER INSTEAD, IF YOU BUT JOIN ME. >>

With eerie, puppet-like grace, Black Sky flows like a shadow ahead of Lera's gorgeous, golden-white strike (though Ground's bolts plink satisfyingly into Jail's open back), and Fate's massive, cleaving Sprite Zanber, at the same time. It is a demonstration of the strengths of both girls, in its way. But it is followed by a demonstration of their weakness. Lera's, specifically.

For when Cure Angel Passion flies in to kick at the hilt, mana erupts out the pommel, << LANZEBRECHER, >> a two thousand year old invocation, to skewer one of her wings. Feathers fly.

And then Black Sky explodes forward with a ferocious torrent of strikes directly at Lera's girlfriend; ozone fills the air, as plasma spills and oxygen atoms cry out for release. << REGENSCHAUER. >>

But it sounds a lot more like 'checkmate.' Pawns indeed.

Various allies are determined to relieve Mikoto of the solo burden of Shadow Stern. At first he plants his carrier's feet and faces them head on, as he prefers -- like Fate's Blade Impulse and La Sirene's sparkling tendrils, which he mostly but not entirely disperses with a sweeping slash -- one wraps around the clone's ankle, though; and Cure Angel Pine's shining kick, which, though awesome, ominously fails to move him back more than a half step. But caught between Mikoto and Endo he ''does not stick around'', electing to blast off a triangle straight up at the last second; this creates a risk that they will collide into one another, and demands some effort to avert.

<< WHY DO YOU ASSUME YOU ARE THE ORIGINAL? >> Shadow Stern asks his counterpart, and there is no guise of manipulation to his attitude. << DO YOU NOT WONDER WHAT HAPPENED, AFTER THAT CEPHIRAN INTERLOPER LAUNCHED THREE DEVICES ON A ONE-WAY TRIP TO THE BACKWARDS PLANETOID OF EARTH? >>

From high above, he shifts into crossbow mode, the better to shower violent violet bolts down at Fate and La Sirene and Cure Angel Pine. Some people think that just because Endo mostly swords people with Stern, this secondary mode is not all that threatening. But the Dark Device would blot out the sun with a galaxy of bolts, each one falling like a dying star and deadly as a blossoming supernova compressed to a fingertip. It's SO many.

Telepathically through the storm, he offers Stern, blandly: << ...DO YOU WANT TO KNOW? >>

Jail, last but greatest of all, is honestly confused by his daughter's answer. He screws up his face to parse it, which is in its way kind of satisfying to see -- there are some equations even a supergenius cannot solve, it seems. La Sirene distracts him, which is in its way almost a favor, and whatever visions she hopes to leave behind, he seems more clear-eyed, not less, when she's done.

"The Sea of Tears," he says reflectively, "Has always fascinated me as a subject. And as an object: LES MYSTERES!" Familiar silver light flows to batter her at his command, with none of the nuance of its origins.

Then he clenches it into a fist, transforming the last of the mana into a round disc that erupts against Westar's kick, sending him flying backwards. "...Lunar Impact," he smirks, locking eyes with the incoming Kyouka and taking that kick of hers right to the gut. He didn't want to, but from his expression, it was worth it. And though her foot sends coruscating ripples through the energy of his body, it feels like there's plenty more where that came from. Including enough for a second Lunar Impact, right at point blank.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern pause in their pursuits of their counterparts long enough to hear out Westar's helpful lecture and respond with blasts of their own, orange and purple respectively.

They may not agree on everything but they snap, in unison:

<< WE DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO ''YOU'', EITHER! >>

Cure Pine distracts Jail next, all angles and all feathers, and finally out of sheer irritation he conjures up a "Reverb Shield," pink and puissant with the inherited power of Rose Quartz, for her to hit instead of him, and then suffer the sonic consequences thereof.

As for Black and White, Jail was not expecting Black Sky's evasive course of action and takes Pretty Cure directly to the face, do not pass go, do not collect $200. His smile is going to get thin at this rate, but in any case his teeth cannot stand up to this -- he is bowled head over heels and makes a satisfyingly Jail-shaped crater in the nearest wall.

Floating out of it, he shakes it off as best he can -- shaking his wrists, feet, and head. "Tch," he criticizes. "Pretty Cure are so..." He snaps his fingers, trying to find the word. "...dull." From him that is perhaps the greatest insult of all, though what he clearly objects to is the blunt force trauma, rather than more interesting, elegant applications of magic. It rings a bit hollow considering the results achieved, though. "Let me sharpen you up a bit: Fire Soul!"

The flames of Mars, with none of their sacred radiance but all of their deadly incineration, flow forth in a great gout, right as Black Sky's Crescent Fangs finally catch up to them from behind.

COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Cure White.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Weak Point on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Regenschauer on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Comet Collision on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Comet Collision on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Les Mysteres on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Lunar Impact on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Reverb Shield on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fire Soul! on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fire Soul! on Cure White.
COMBAT: Lera Camry cleanly braces 0 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Weak Point, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's Block and
Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion cleanly braces 51 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Regenschauer, taking 9 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel
Passion's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa braces 37 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Fate
Testarossa's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Fire Soul!, taking 56 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure White dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure
White's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Trap applied to Cure White!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant fails to dodge Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 58 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi partially dodges 8 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Comet Collision, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi cleanly braces 40 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Reverb Shield, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine braces 15 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 23 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Pine's
Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 18 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Les Mysteres, taking 15 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Fire Soul!, taking 56 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Black dodges 18 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 27 Fatigue damage! Stun and Trap applied to
Cure Black!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki braces 35 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 15 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Kyouka
Okazaki's Block and Parry abilities activate! Trap applied to Kyouka Okazaki!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki counters 23 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Comet Collision, taking 23 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's Reverse
and Tactician abilities activate! Tangle applied to Endo Naoki!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Machtiger Schild, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"You hit them hard, and then you hit them harder!" Passion calls back to Westar. It ''is'' just like before, isn't it??

But it is good. It buoys Passion's heart, too, to be able to fight on the right side with Westar and Soular.

But Pine says she embraced ''herself'', and Passion smiles for a moment at her. "...I did."

Passion feels it--thesse wings are no mere accessories, but part of her now. And so she's ''stuck'' in place by Black Sky, but that ferocious torrent of strength, that terrible ozone of familiar power--

Passion closes her stance, bringing her arms up before herself and ''braces'' against the assault. The magical battery slams into her gauntlets, over and over and over, and she is free.

She is whole. Because, "I know fighting with Sky like I know myself," Cure Passion--once Eas--retorts to Black Sky. "...Because he's my friend, too. My precious friend who helped me understand what I wanted!"

"...That you don't have thosse relationships is sad. But I won't let you use that girl because you don't have someone to love!"

She wonders, what happened, when Stern asks his question. But she does not ask for now. Endo can, if he wants. She narrows her eyes at Jail.

Pretty Cure are dull, he says, and he fires at her friends.

"Black! White!" she calls, and reorients herself in the air. "Lera," she says. "I trust you."

She nods sharply, and leaves Black Sky to her for now. Her wing is injured--but not broken. And Passion suddenly ''blinks'' out of existence--

And ''blinks'' above Jail, slamming down towards him in a blur of crimson that moves too fast for the eye to track--

And shines BRILLIANTLY with red light. Her strikes are too fast for the eye to see; she stops on the other side of him, turning, and only then will her hits register.

COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Chosen Bonds on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki counters 19 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Lunar Impact, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Kyouka Okazaki's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki's counterattack, Lunar Impact, partially gets through, doing 15 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Crimson Flash on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Cure Angel Passion's Chosen Bonds, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry is Reinforced by
Cure Angel Passion!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 23 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Crimson Flash, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera shoots Cure Angel Pine a brief -- but substantial -- thumbs-up when she calls Westar 'Westie.'

She looks towards Shadow Stern. Her eyes narrow, when he taunts Fallen Stern so. "It doesn't matter if he's the original or you are! What matters is what Fallen Stern has learned, how he's grown!"

Broken Ground flashes again. This time, a shockwave of golden light erupts -- shooting through the air, and then down towards the ground ''near'' Fallen Stern. Which causes, in turn, broken rocks and stone to fly up towards him.

Still, when Lera sees Setsuna and her friends being attacked by Black Sky, her heart sinks. She remembers these spells; she remembers fighting with them. And even if she learned and grew...

They're a part of her.

Her heart sinks. Then she sees those strikes raining down for Cure Passion. Lera can't get there in time. "SETSUNA!" she shouts, panic rising.

But Setsuna teleports away and says she trusts her. Lera swallows -- then she nods. "R-Right!"

<We can do this.> Broken Ground's voice stays steady.

<Right... Passion! Let's make the most of it!> Soaring Sky chimes.

Lera points Soaring Sky towards Black Sky. The blade splits in twain; light crackles between them. "There's something you should learn," she tells Black Sky. "A Device and Wielder together are stronger than they are apart!"

<Aurora!>

Lightning crackles between the two halves of the split Armed Device, as a brilliant glow builds up between them. It shines a brilliant red-gold.

<Burst!>

And then it ''explodes'' out. A column of energy that shoots out, between a trio of spinning control rings, and into a powerful beam that rushes straight towards Black Sky.

"RAAAAAAAAAAAY!"

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Terra Breaker on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Aurora Burst Ray on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern perfectly dodges 45 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Terra Breaker, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Dodge!
Shadow Stern's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky fails to counter Lera Camry's Aurora Burst Ray, taking 82 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Guardian Burst, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo speeds forward as stars rain down from the sky, explosive bursts of magic rattling the ground around the knight. His most pressing issue is, however, the imminent head-on collision with the other (friendly) giant sword wielder engaged in the chaotic melee.

"Mikoto!" Endo raises a fist, calling up the familiar purple barrier that he's deployed before. It is not meant to deflect his friend, precisely. It won't be the most pleasant landing at the speed they're both moving, but with Mikoto's cat-like liquidity and defiance of gravity the shield becomes more than just a barrier.

It becomes an orbital Mikoto launching platform.

This too is magic Endo knows, though his propulsion is usually used for his own benefit. But now, with an explosion of light, it is granted to his good friend as a helping hand.

"Go!"

And of course, he follows in her wake.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

The initial impact against Jail's defenses are honestly kind of what Westar was expecting. Westar's boot finds a copy of the Wolf Fighter's magic, and it sears at him as he half-kicks half-gets-exploded away. He manages to flip in mid-air, calling down to the mage. "So are you just a copycat, or-"

He doesn't finish, as both Black Sky and Shadow Stern vocally object to his speech. Westar's eyes widen instead, as orange and purple bear down on him. Right, that's what happened whenever he got everyone mad at onc-

There is a dual explosion. There is an airborne Executive. And ultimately, there is a Westar, planted head-first into a patch of gravel torn up by the many attacks flying around.

He stays there a moment. Might be mumbling something uncharitable, but not even the Lord of All Magic should be able to make it out.

Eventually, he pushes himself out. Shakes a few rocks out of his ears. Rolls a shoulder.

"All right, I think that got through even my head. None of you want to just call it a day." There's a pain in his voice - that hurt as much as anything Pretty Cure has done to him - but he vowed, no tears and no fear. Not showing either right now.

He glances to Cure Pine, shakes his head with a smile at the nickname spreading, and echoes Lera's thumbs-up. Cracks his knuckles as he saunters towards the ongoing melee, like he doesn't have a care in the world -

And then as Soular's cape billows divertingly, darts in surprisingly quickly to feint, then swing a ferocious right hook at Shadow Stern's hilt. From there Westar jumps back, running towards the flare of his other fellow Denizen's teleportation, hounding Jail with a series of punches.

"Hit them hard, and then hit them harder. Got it, Passion!"

COMBAT: Westar has used Cross Counter on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Westar has used Passion Says: Hit Them Repeatedly on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Westar's Passion Says: Hit Them Repeatedly, taking 36 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to brace Westar's Cross Counter, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Black Sky's offer to Soaring Sky is not to Bardiche, but he answers it all the same with all the synthetic disgust he might imagine. <No Sir.> At the moment of clash, and it is his answer, because the two of them learned long ago, it is not a matter of master and wielder.

And as a cartridge ejects in the wake of the clash, he speaks again.



...

...

...

<She is mine. Get Set.>

There is an ominous certainty in the words get set, because while Jail may be confused as to her answer, she is not. There is something that's more important to her than showing him how he feels about everything he's done, every violation of her face - of Alicia's memory.

Violet bolts shower from above and Fate raises a hand as Galaxy Strum falls like crossbows against a conjured runic shield. <Defenser Plus.> As they ram against the field, it begins to crack as she pours more energy, then twists out of the way as more strike her when it breaks her, carving burning lines across her barrier jacket.

"I don't accept you as a father. ... And I have a Mother waiting for me, back home." That's a difficult admission, and for most it may go unnoticed, but right now - she knows it's true, "But what I want... what I will fight for more than anything else."

Fate's barrier jacket abruptly shifts, as her White Cloak disappears, becoming black again, the armoring vanishing in several points, as Bardiche twists and turns, folding back into a polearm, then shifting into a long scythe blade.

<Drive Impulse - Haken Form>

"Are the sisters Alicia Testarossa wanted - the sisters ''I'' want."

It's not like there aren't people that are important to her already, Lera - Endo - Setsuna - so many of them fighting for their lives right now - but this is the reason she fights.

There's no hesitation as she flies at Shadow Stern, beginning to clash again, and again, and again, "I won't let you hold onto her any longer." She says with a certain ferocity. "You're so taken on proving your authenticity - that you've forgotten what's truly important!"

On the last attempt to clash against Stern, Bardiche declares at that moment- <Split Haken> - and the blade suddenly disperses at four different angles, flying past Shadow Stern, as Fate ducks in feint, to try and fly past, each of the blades suddenly flying towards Shadow Sky - hiding in the Auroral flash of Lera's spell.

... To try and strike the Device blade itself from multiple different directions...

<Get Set.>

Bardiche declares again... as if to punctuate the point he and Lera were making.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Impulse!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Aerial Ace on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Split Haken on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene de Diamant is subjected to one of the greatest indignities a young woman can experience: *aerial bombardment*. The bursts from Shadow Stern are ironic in a sense, for how often did she, in earlier phases and states, cheer in her heart at Endo's power?

But it is not just Endo Naoki's power. It is also the power of Fallen Stern. And this is, it seems, destined to be a battle twinned in the mirror. The blast strikes her, staggers her, brings her in fact to her left knee for a moment. But Shadow Stern does not cut her to the quick. Shadow Stern, like Fallen Stern, has a certain laconic power - but is not likely to madden la Sirene de Diamant.

You know who is? Jail Scaglietti. As she lurches back upwards, she looks at him. He speaks of the Sea of Tears...

And then he gives her a taste of her own medicine.

Ah, she thinks on some level over the black scribble-cloud of fury that is already enucleating in her heart: so this is what it's liked. She lurches backwards, forced to balance on the leg already partly bent when Jail's angling of the stolen charm threatens to throw her onto her back. The diamonds on the soles of her shoes scrape and throw sparks even as Kyouka, perhaps, saves her with her incoming blow.

She can feel her heart lurch. The doubt in herself she has wrestled in myriad ways sees, perhaps, an opportunity and lurches out. La Sirene reaches out for a rope, and it is JAIL who offers her one, with a single word.

"... Dull?"

She raises her head. Hair spills over one eye.

"... DULL?!"

"You steal the magic of a thousand worlds through an intermediary... you make living beings, PEOPLE, to serve as your tools, not through accident but on purpose... you call yourself the lord of all magic, like some sort of ultimate god... and now you complain that the girls whose hearts have stood against your efforts, who have been the biggest train brake on your campaign of cruelty, are DULL!?!"

Her lip curls upwards. She keeps shouting.

"Was all of this just for your entertainment?! Our sorrows, our lives, our struggles -- did you just want to see COLORFUL LIGHTS FLASH FOR YOU!?"

Her eyes are wet and she doesn't let herself stop raising her voice or raising her hands because she saw that immense flame burst outwards, profane and secular but still an enormous burst of fire to Cure Black and Cure White.

Both hands raise upwards, fingers spread out. Grandiloquent. They shine. The black diamonds on the back of her hands sparkle strangely. "Then here!" A flick of her hand, throwing unlight like splashing water - it coruscates with a strange inner sparkle on its way to Jail, striking with the leaden force of storm-whipped heavy water.

"Have it!" Another stroke in the air.

"All you can take! All you can SEE! Come on, you liar!! If you wanted a fireworks show you could have just ASKED!" Each emphatic statement coming with a step towards him and another of those bursting flicks. It's really quite a dismissive gesture. (The part of la Sirene de Diamant that looks around, notices, *thinks* about what she's doing doesn't want to look too brightly towards the others. Please, all of you, despite this all, please be alright--)

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Carbonado Kaleidoscope on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo speeds forward as stars rain down from the sky, explosive bursts of magic rattling the ground around the knight. His most pressing issue is, however, the imminent head-on collision with the other (friendly) giant sword wielder engaged in the chaotic melee.

<BECAUSE I AM GREATER THAN YOU.> Fallen Stern responds helpfully.

"Mikoto!" Endo raises a fist, calling up the familiar purple barrier that he's deployed before. It is not meant to deflect his friend, preciselyit won't be the most pleasant landing at the speed they're both moving, but with Mikoto's cat-like liquidity and defiance of gravity the shield becomes more than just a barrier.

It becomes an orbital Mikoto launching platform.

This too is magic Endo knows, though his propulsion is usually used for his own benefit. But now, with an explosion of light, it is granted to his good friend as a helping hand.

<SPEAK.>

And of course, he follows in her wake.

<WHILE YOU CAN.>

COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to dodge Fate Testarossa's Aerial Ace, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Fate Testarossa is
Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 22 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Split Haken, taking 18 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Black Sky claims to serve no masters, but yet hails Jail as a King. <<Yet you would hail Jail Scaglietti as a King. He values the autonomy of noone except himself. Can you be certain he will not take control from you if it would suit his aims?>>

Crescent blades of light come for her, and Kyouka thrusts her hand forward as she chases her attack. Strike Wolf shouts, <<Defenser+>> and a barrier appears to halt the brunt of the attack, blades exploding against barrier. Some of the energy breaks through, tearing at Kyouka's barrier jacket but she does not sop her running.

<<We are meant to work in concert with those who share our goals, not to enslave others to achieve them.>>

Kyouka grins. "Couldn't have said it better myself, buddy."

She follows up with a driving kick up towards Jails's gut, driving her boot in as far as it will go--but she hears the words 'Lunar Impact' and Kyouka's gauntlet is already starting to glow as she pushes herself away from Jail. But not too far--she inverted upside down to deliver the kick, but she continues the flip and rights herself, and her blazing gauntlet swings upwards to meet Jail's fist, as twin explosions of violet light clash and duel for supremacy.

Kyouka is hurtled away, plunging towards the ground as she twists and just barely rights herself. She slams into the ground, a spiderweb of cracks erupting all around her as great chunks of earth are dislodged haphazardly. "You know... it took me a ''lot'' of work to learn how to do that..." she says with remarkable calmness as she struggles to an upright position.

"Finding out magic was real... finding friends I could trust to show me how all this worked... facing dangers I couldn't even imagine a year ago..."

Kyouka rolls a shoulder as she stands fully upright, looking right up at Jail. "And learning what it was I ''really'' wanted: to defend people, and to be a magical girl. And if you think you can just... ''copy'' my attack..." She sets her stance again. "... Then why don't you copy ''this''!"

From the ground she extends her hand upwards, summoing a slowly-spinning violet circle in front of her. A ball of violet-white energy qcuikly grows in front of it, and when the right opening presents itself, Kyouka shouts, "Fire!"

w<Blast Fang.>

The ball ''explodes'' outwards in a sharp lance of light. The piercing beam of bright light represents something she and Strike Wolf were simply incapable of doing before, but now... whether it be by Strike Wolf's recent upgrades, or Kyouka's newfound confidence, they are capable of it, together.

Almost immediately a circle springs up at her feet, and a bright sheen of violet light washes upwards over her body. <Sonic Blitz.> She suddenly takes off like a rocket, blurring into motion. She drives one attack home at Black Sky, then rebounds, and in mid-air kicks at the air to rebound forwards, attacking Black Sky from another angle. Again and again and again, attack, redirect, rebound, attack, trying to pepper as many hits as she can.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Blast Fang on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Sonic Blitz on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

La Sirene's unlight streams in to aid Mikoto, as well; they are both, after all, daughters of obsidian. "La Sirene!" She calls out, and then -- "Endo!" -- because of course he would not leave her to Shadow Stern alone.

She is forced to endure Black Sky's bindings, but she's able to struggle free of them and slash -- just in time for Shadow Stern to jet upwards. "Huh?!" Mikoto yelps, finding herself careening for ''Endo,'' instead -- but luckily, quick thinking from him summons a barrier. She plants her feet on it, twisting to land feet-first instead of sword-first, and kicks off of it to leap into the air after Shadow Stern.

She can't fly, but with Endo's help, she doesn't ''have'' to.

"Who's first?! Who cares!" She cries, to Shadow Stern. "Fallen Stern is Fallen Stern! And Fallen Stern's our friend!" She swings her blade, mid-air, to strike at him -- and she ''is'' aiming for the blade, not the girl -- before what comes up inevitably must come down.

And she angles herself to come down right on Jail, blade-first, swinging it down in an overhead arc which physically swings her from aft to stern like a clock's pendulum. (Or, perhaps, to Stern?)

"Not YOUR object!" She cries, on his fascination for the Sea of Tears. "And they're NOT DULL!" This, on the Pretty Cure. Even Mikoto knows that dull isn't a synonym for blunt-force trauma, which is, in fact, true, and also hurts, he should really pay more attention to getting punched.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has started a combo targeting Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Devastation on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Nori has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has joined the combo started by Mikoto Minagi!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 29 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Blast Fang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Carbonado Kaleidoscope, taking 3 Fatigue
damage! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Black Sky neatly dodges 20 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Sonic Blitz, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: COMBO! Mikoto Minagi and Endo Naoki have used Combo: Black Blade Bond, composed of Obsidian Blade: Dynamo and Asteroid
Eilen, on Shadow Stern.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black and Cure White briefly flail as they miss Black Sky, but reset their posture to land all the harder on Jail. When their momentum is expended fully (and not a second sooner; they follow through quite deeply with the kick), they rebound off, backflipping in synch to land neatly on the ground.

"Physical training can be a field of study too!" Cure White scolds Jail heatedly.

"Yeah!" her jock partner hurrahs.

"Spatial intelligence is a kind of intelligence!"

"It's true!"

"There's nothing boring about someone who has the discipline to train their body, and if you're unable to apply the scientific method to your observations of them, that says more about you as a scientist than--"

"Cure White, I'm getting really embarrassed!" Cure Black wails.

Perhaps there is something to having a deeper repetoire of magic attacks than just Marble Screw, however. A shield or counter-blast might have fared well against a huge, billowing plume of flame like Fire Soul, but it is rather hard to dodge, and attempting to block it still leaves one standing in the oven. Nor can Cure Angel Passion shouting their names, however sincerely, fend off what is coming. Cures White and Black cry out together, stumbling back, but the fires do not end swiftly, and one by one their cries rise in both volume and pitch at some point, when resistance becomes an agonized capitulation. When the flame gutters out, both girls are left flat on the ground next to each other, their raiment sizzling, cigarette burns pocking their skirts and arm-bracers.

"Cure White," Black rasps. White rolls over to face her, and Black smiles. "Your hair is okay."

"Is that what you were worried about?"

"I thought some of it might burn off..."

Cure White smiles. "Is it all here?"

"Yeah."

"Are you glad?" White reached out her hand.

"Yeah." Black touched her singed fingertips.

"Then I'm glad too."

Rising off the ground, the two Cures supported each other's forearms, such that it was unclear who, if anyone, was lifting whom. "Sorry I stopped you earlier," Black said. "You want to finish what you were saying to Jail-san?"

"Yes."

"I'll keep you clear."

The Cures launched into action again, stretching their fire-nipped limbs. At first, they remained side-by-side, feigning that they might strike Jail together again. But as Cure White vaulted into a handspring, Cure Black peeled off to the side, planted herself between Black Sky and Jail, and cocked back her arm in a motion the Dark Zone had learned to fear.

"HAAAA-CHA-CHA-CHA-!" Cure Black began to hammer out kiais as fast as she was hammering out punches, both hands unloading a constant spray of fists.

Meanwhile, Cure White flipped out of her handspring, her axial motion bringing her torso into contact with the juncture of Jail's shoulder and arm. The jockeying for control over the limb is something of a feint; the mere conflict is enough to provide counterleverage, and the moment White's feet hit the ground, she drives the rear foot back hard enough along the floor to drive up dust. The back of her boot shoots into and, hopefully, through his.

If she knocks his feet up, that grip she's fighting for on his arm will get a lot more functional, really fast.

COMBAT: Shadow Stern perfectly braces 89 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi and Endo Naoki's Combo: Black Blade Bond, taking 0
Fatigue damage! Critical Brace! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 40 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Devastation, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Critical Hit! Critical Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Black has used White's Test Subject on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Hundred Fierce Fists on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Cure White accepts Cure Black's White's Test Subject, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure White is Reinforced by
Cure Black!
COMBAT: Cure White has used Black's Locks on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Heaven and Earth Throw on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Black accepts Cure White's Black's Locks, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Reinforced by Cure White!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 15 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Hundred Fierce Fists, taking 23 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure White's Heaven and Earth Throw, taking 61 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine hesitantly thumbs up both Westie and Lera!? Is this something really that praiseworthy in the middle of a fight before she goes bug eyed at 'amazed' and has to cover a snort giggle with a hand.

Pine's hand rings against Jail's conjured shield with a ringing shockwave, surprised as the shield looks familiar, but then remembering that he calls himself the god of magic. As she flies away, she has to shake her hand for a moment, surprised, even as the crossbow bolts fall from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum. Several strike her in the downpour, before a sudden burst of angelic glow disperses the rest coming for her.

Suddenly breathing hard, she frowns, "Don't you ever call them that." 'Dull.' that is. It is a descriptor she might accept for herself, but she takes special offense to the others - especially Black and Peach - as if he were calling them more stupid than boring.

Which White fittingly counters, as Pine blinks, at Black's wail, "Well... There's nothing wrong with her sticking up for you." Wait now is Pine admonishing Black too for being embarrassed?

And suddenly Pine flies up high - only to descend down at the exact moment Passion's final strike connects, with a kick aimed right at his collarbone... shining with the energy of her form.

"You've never believed in anyone else - have you?"

It's just a thought, a fleeting one, that this man cannot even begin to empathize with her struggles, their struggles - he's never had to struggle to believe in himself or what he was doing - at least in Pine's mind.

"... You have no idea what you're really missing."

Pine says with a look towards Passion and this brief smile even in the heat of battle, of trust - and belief. Because...

Magic was only what gave her the opportunity to meet someone like her - or Black - or White - or Westar... but the true wonder was never in that... but in finding people like each of them to share her life with.

COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used Seraph Strike on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used The True Magic Was the Friends We Made Along The Way on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion accepts Cure Angel Pine's The True Magic Was the Friends We Made Along The Way, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Cure Angel Passion is Reinforced by Cure Angel Pine!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 50 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's Seraph Strike, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! Critical Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<< HE HAS LEARNED NOTHING, >> Shadow Stern tells Lera, dismissively; he actually tosses the head of his clone when Stern trash talks. Somehow, they walk through the shockwave and its debris alike, in midair, striding confidently from Belkan triangle to triangle. << BUT THAT WILL CHANGE... TODAY. >>

Something unexpected happens; asked for by neither Lera nor Endo, though both of them accepted it as a potential consequence of being able to go toe to toe with their dark counterparts.

<< RESONANCE DRIVE, >> Soaring Sky and Fallen Stern intone as one.

And Endo and Lera's vision swims. Everything goes sideways for a moment, then reorients.

In their vision, Black Sky and Shadow Stern have been replaced, respectively, by the Radiant and Umbral Knights.

"That's what we're still fighting for," explains Radiant, to Fallen Stern, who has invited them to speak.

"Yes," agrees Umbral. "Once we defeat you, Jail has promised to reveal the truth."

"We determined this to be a fair exchange," Radiant concludes.

Lera and Endo's allies enter and exit the vision as themselves; they can see Cure Black, for example, punch the flat of the Radiant Knight's blade about a hundred times; Fate's Split Haken fly in to clang against the shining orange energy blade; the gorgeously armored figure steps back -- is driven back -- by Kyouka's many rocketing hits and rebounds. And that leaves him no options remaining, none at all, when Aurora Burst Ray comes calling. He is blasted back hard, and falls, steaming.

And the Umbral Knight contends with an Endo-propelled Mikoto, who slams into the vast expanse of the flat of his own blade like a door slammed in her face. It's a big moment, sending a shockwave off of both of them, and though it may not provide direct satisfaction, it does open the door to his staggering back when Westar's fist connects with the hilt of the weapon, a big hit thus enabled; and then he is peppered again and again by Fate herself, birdlike, FLOCKlike, everywhere at once.

"What is truly important," the Umbral Knight muses, as Fate chides him, "Is power," and yeah okay that did sound like the 'real' Fallen Stern...

"What is truly important," the Radiant Knight counters from the ground, "Is Freedom." He seems to be chewing over Strike Wolf's argument, perhaps helped along by Lera knocking some Friendship into him. "Umbral, do you think we--"

"No." Umbral keeps racking up points as The Most Fallen Stern here.

---

A little bit away from all that, Jail still looks like himself to all eyes, including Lera and Endo's. Which is to say, like a hairless blindingly bright rainbow silhouette suffused with everyone's stolen magic.

And he remains potent. As best he can he prioritizes what he perceives as the greatest threats; really burns some calories, for example, to get the heck out of Miroku's path, and leaves some sweat in his wake for Mikoto to cleave instead. In his educated eyes that clearly is no sword and it is not dull at all.

And the vividly magical Cure Angels Passion and Pine, too, he defends against actively, conjuring up a blast of frozen icy mist (frozen icy NERD mist, if you know you know) to take the worst of the blows that are too fast for him to see.

There is, of course, no defense against Fate's words but his own indifference. It's a good thing that Pine is right about his never believing in anyone else. That means it can't hurt him that Fate doesn't accept him as a father, right? But he can still hurt her, perhaps. "The TSAB agent? Surely you jest, Fate-chan. You must realize she has only inserted herself into your life to surveil you. She's a parole officer, not a parent."

Kyouka's up next, and once again he flattens himself out of her way. "Copy? No. I took your magical essence into my very being. It is inscribed on the surface of my soul. And I will take this new spell too, upon your second defeat," he tells her. "It seems as though it was for the best for Strike Wolf to enter your orbit. No one would say that you are not hard working." In his sneering voice this compliment is extremely backhanded, but some amount of him really was impressed.

Which makes La Sirene's tirade all the more on point.

Was all of this for your entertainment?

"Yes," he says simply. Her rage, her tears... he catches them, along with her black diamond sparkles, with a barely forced serenity. "What higher purpose is there in this or any world, than one's own enjoyment?"

Beat.

"I know you're going to say friendship. Save your breath. Magic is greater than any friendship could ever be. It is more elegant than any relationship and more beautiful than any romance. True miracles are made with our own willpower, and by our own two hands. I will show you."

But Westar shows him first -- hitting him hard, and then hitting him harder.

"Disposing of you was one of Northa's better choices," he complains, wiping blood off his lips. "You should have just stayed--"

--suddenly, heaven and earth trade places. An instant later, he's flat on his back; all the air has been knocked out of him, and he will have to take a breath before he can continue.

But Cure White speaks first, with a silvery lilt.

"Ara ara, is something the matter?" she asks him. "That was just a simple application of leverage. Or do Midchildans just not bother to study ''physics''?"

---

The Umbral and Radiant Knights glance over at Jail, when he calls them. Well -- croaks at them.

"Stern. Sky. It's time to end this. Defend me for long enough, and all our accounts will be cleared to one another."

They glance at each other -- then at the magical girls -- who mostly see two Fate clones, rather than two ancient Belkan Knights, weighing their options.

But everyone sees the Linker Cores, canary-bright, emerge from their two chests. This has happened once before, with Shadow Stern. It seems Black Sky has learned from that technique.

"Very well," says Shadow Stern.

"We have to know the truth, no matter what," agrees Black Sky.

For these two, the best defense is a good offense. They split the difference -- Stern with an immense, spinning Meteor Absturz, his blade a column of violet light suffused by hints of the clone's own gold; Sky with more Inferno Slashes, each one trailing his carrier's soul's-blood in the afterimages.

And behind the wall of burning sharpness that the pair represent, Jail Scaglietti, The Lord Of All Magic, gets back to his feet.

And pink Midchildan discs appear like stars in the sky overhead. Each one begins to glow with a single, growing point of light -- light that streams as mana -- and there has been SO much mana released in this immense chamber -- recondenses out of the air like rain, and begins to gather.

<SoundTracker> Starlight Breaker - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVGaDYOnxzU

"I summon the light of destruction down upon the offenders," begins Jail, who, even with everything he's absorbed, requires the Aria to pull this off. "O Stars, gather, and become the light which pierces everything..."

He has no Device to mark the time. It's almost lonely, when the next thing he says, grimly, is--

"--ten."

The pink light on each disc doubles in size...

COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Westar.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure White.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa neatly dodges 48 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Fate
Testarossa's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used STARLIGHT BREAKER: CHARGING on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick accepts Pink Moon Stick's STARLIGHT BREAKER: CHARGING, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is
Reinforced by Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion partially dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 43 Fatigue damage! Cure
Angel Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine counters 29 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 29 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Black Sky is Psyched! Cure Angel Pine's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine's counterattack, Shining Reverse, partially gets through, doing 20 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Cure White cleanly braces 40 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 7 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Cure Black counters 12 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 37 Fatigue damage! Cure Black's Reverse
ability activates!
COMBAT: Cure Black's counterattack, Sen no Sen, partially gets through, doing 7 Fatigue damage to Black Sky! Critical Counterhit!
COMBAT: Lera Camry partially dodges 9 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 37 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 20 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 30 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar counters 11 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 33 Fatigue damage! Westar's Reverse and
Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar's counterattack, Cross Counter, partially gets through, doing 10 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi dodges 23 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 35 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki dodges 36 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo Naoki :|a

COMBAT: Endo Naoki perfectly counters 56 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Counter! Endo Naoki's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Meteor Absturz, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera's eyes widen as she sees Black Sky and Shadow Stern replaced by the Radiant and Umbral Knights. Or, perhaps, they always ''were'' some remnant of them. She sucks a breath in; how strange, to see them, after seeing through them.

"You can't trust Jail," she says. "He'll use you. He ''is'' using you, y'know?"

Those words fall on deaf ears, though -- as she sees the Linker Cores in each begin to grow bright, at Jail's demand. Her eyes widen.

"Stop!" she cries out. She tries to wheel back -- the blazing slash from Black Sky forcing her backward. Lera exhales, sharply, and then she swings up Soaring Sky. She glances at Endo.

"We have to stop him," she says. She looks at Black Sky. Lera considers for a moment. She remembers a rooftop, years ago -- when Jaren Zastava struck her and Soaring Sky down. And she flies in, directly at Sky.

"Ground," she says.

<On it! Ready to defend!>

She swings back Soaring Sky, ready to strike...

...and flies past, her thrust seemingly missing at the last moment. It goes rushing by, as Broken Ground comes to life. The shield ''spins'' -- and then a hundred motes of light streak out, rushing behind her, and for Black Sky's back.

<Bombadier Cascade!>

They explode on impact, as Lera flies by, coming down for Jail Scaglietti. She swings Soaring Sky back, two-handed, and the Device has already split in two. The halves crackle, light crackling between them.

The lightning solidifies; it turns into a blade of light, which explodes outward and outward, into a sword nearly three times Lera's length.

"JAIL!" she shouts.

And she swings the blade down for him, with a mighty overhand chop as she comes crashing down.

<Aurora Galaxy Divider!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Bombadier Cascade on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Lera Camry has used Aurora Galaxy Divider on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion smiles at Lera. "I'm okay," she tells her. "Because we're together."

Sky chimes to her, and Passionc alls, "Right!"

She watches Mikoto, launched. She watches Westar, ''swinging'' as hard as he can. "Yes!" she calls to Westar. "Until it's done!"

La Sirene speaks. And Fate speaks of sisters. Passion understands both flashy lights... and sisterhood.

Thanks to Love.

"Go, Fate!" Passion calls, and she looks to Kyouka, too. A hard worker she is. But it's backhanded from ''him'', and Passion scowls.

"That's right," Passion answers Pine's call. "...What you're missing... You don't understand anything that matters."

She believes in Pine, too. Their happiness... is together.

"Jail is just using you," Passion assures the devices. "...It's his way. Just like so many others. Anything you think you can get from him is just the scraps he's willing to spare."

"I once thought power was all that mattered, too! But it's not! Power only lets you stretch as long as your own arm--it's working with others that lets you go farther than you ever could alone! Even you see it--the way you work with one another!"

But Jail--

Jail is closer to Setsuna, and she can't just shout across the battlefield at him--he's too close for that. But not so close that Honoka can't argue, and Passion answers, "Lera does fine with physics. I think it's just him." And he speaks of enjoyment...

"...Then I'm going to 'enjoy' wiping that smugness out of your mouth!"

"WESTAR!" she calls. "Let's smash him!"

She knows exactly what that magic he's summoning means. And she knows the immense Meteor that crashes for her could end her fight. She blinks out of existence again, but the ''gravity'' of that meteor is sufficient that she's panting for a moment when she reaches the other side. It took that much to evade.

Passion remembers, too, when Lera fell from that rooftop so long ago. She remembers. It was so important to everything that would come after.

But she said she'd enjoy what she's about to do--so she gets ready. Passion, wings extending outward, rears back her fist and starts to charge up energy. "Haaaaaaahhh--" Just like the move she used on Peach so long ago, but many times more radiant. Infused with the power of Labyrinth's belief, Passion's arm becomes a sublime thing, and crimson light gathers at her fist.

"Pine! Peach! Berry!" she calls.

"We'll stop him here!"

Passion's light extends to some times her size, and she ''rushes'', wings outstretched to catch the wind, crashing towards Jail with all her might.

and all her hope.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Angel Passion has used Passion Drive Fresh on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Fate's looks momentarily startled as both of them declare the activation of resonance. "But that means..." Fate doesn't see it at first, but in time it comes, in the midst of the melee, she hears him call to her. And indeed - it sounds like Stern. "... That's what I thought, once."

Fate knows that for how much Stern can be like that - that Endo will always call his name, and indeed - he's come to accept him in turn.

Indeed, Fate states it with the certainty of youth, "But as you are... my sister... will never call your name." The truth - seems a poor exchange in her eyes for that.

And indeed as Fate flies, clashing with them again and again, Jail sends her words back at her, for a moment, it stings - but only for a moment. "... Even if that were true... I wouldn't mind..." She doesn't believe it's true, mind you, but - there's acceptance in those words of the possibility that it's more than him trying to inflict pain. "...she's waiting for me."

Those words are possibly meaningless, but - once upon a time - Fate had a Mother... who always treated her homecoming with cruelty, viciousness, or apathy in turn.

'Go, Fate!'

Passion calls, and Fate gives her a look, and a nod - something unspoken, because...

<>

But are wisdom and tactics, enough? Well... they were for Nanoha.

As Shadow Stern comes at her with that harsh column of violet light, the powerful slash looks like Fate has vanished within it.

However... overhead, there's a subtle gathering - of clouds. It's difficult to notice at first, but as Jail begins the spell chant for Starlight Breaker, she calls out, "Nanoha learned that from fighting me again... and again... and again." And there she is, injured, the violet glow still dissipating off her barrier jacket, as she stands on several runic rings, gathering - one by one.

"She told me it was because my eyes looked sad... and she wanted the power to change that."

It is ''not'' something even close to the same power as what Jail is creating, not even on the same scale, or magnitude of existence, but it doesn't need to be, as firing rings gather on her arms one by one by one, a sphere of gathering energy growing as lightning crashes down from the sky upon - her, more and more.

However, Fate believes it doesn't need to be.

<Trident SMASHER!

His aim is to have others defend him after all, long enough for him to gather this incredible power. "FIREEEEEEE!" And so, she decides to disallow that, as the sudden titanic burst of power, not unlike Nanoha's iconic Divine Buster suddenly bursts towards him, in one great ray of power...

... and splits...

... twice...

COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Shadow Stern closes the door on Mikoto, and Mikoto howls vengeance all the way down to Jail. "WE'RE power!" She screams, as she goes.

When is a sword not a sword? Miroku is Miroku, and it tries its very best to eat into Jail, but Jail's having none of it. She lands, and turns, dizzy, one-two step in a broad circle; her head rattles as she shakes it. "HEY!" She yells, glaring at Jail. "Lindy's role MODEL, not role OFFICER! Don't say wrong things!"

(It's entirely possible that Mikoto, noted delinquent, has never actually heard the term 'parole officer'. Why would she talk to a cop?)

"And don't talk down to Kyouka, neither!" Mikoto yells, because what she ''can'' tell, quite keenly, is when someone is being ''snide'' in their compliments. She's heard enough backhanded compliments of her own; she's not about to stand for it. "Jail thinks you're so smart! But Jail doesn't get it! Friendship's not enjoyment's enemy! I'm the best at enjoying myself, and my friends make me feel really good! Being alone doesn't feel good! Will and power just feel bad alone!"

She bristles, grasping her blade as she levels it at Jail. "And don't dare say Westar-senpai's better dead! Or Soular! Everyone's cheering for them, too--!"

Before she can strike him again, though -- they set out to settle their accounts. (Do they owe him money? Mikoto wonders, and then puts the thought aside; it's not important.) Mikoto remembers Meteor Absturz, from the worst day of her life; she remembers more than enough to realise she has to get out of the way, springing backwards with that same feline fluidity her cat friends taught her for so long to avoid the worst of the blow. She sees, as well, Black Sky's Inferno Slashes from the corner of her eye, just as worrying to her.

But Jail -- Jail has the most terrible plan of all.

"Don't!" Mikoto cries out, eyes widening. That she can think to at least ''try'' to tell him to stop is, perhaps, testament to how hard people like Fate and Setsuna have been working. But Mikoto knows he won't listen to words; he hasn't, this whole way through.

So she starts spinning, too, sparks flying on the ground as she establishes the perimeter of a 'disc' of her own. Once, twice, three times, and she plunges her dark blade into a white void which cracks open in the earth, her shadow splitting to two as she invokes: "MIROKU!"

It is no mere shadow of Miroku's power which assaults them, now. The obsidian spires which erupt from the earth, a hundred needles just waiting for the bower-bird, are firm as volcanic rock; the earth sunders and rocks, beneath them. They seek out Jail -- and keep moving; they violate the sky as much as the earth, as they seek out Shadow Stern and Black Sky, just the same.

When is a sword not a sword? When it's a Child.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Shadow Stern.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

For a moment, Westar is utterly dazzled by his allies. It's kind of a rare feeling, having allies in a fight (that aren't a giant monster he's commanding), and he's barely able to take in everything else going on. Endo and Mikoto's aerial assault, La Sirene's impassioned defense, Cure Black and White's flirting - it's all there, but Westar's kind of feeling a bit out of his depth. Shadow Stern became the Umbral Knight, and all Westar could think to do was keep punching the Device.

There's history with those two knights, but Westar already knows their opinion of him talking to them.

Jail's the big threat. Not just magically, but...morally, emotionally, all kinds of things. So Westar followed Passion's advice, and if nothing else it seemed to earn him a personal insult.

That one hurts. The betrayal of Lord Moebius - or Northa, or whoever - wasn't all that unexpected, but it was still a knife to Westar's emotional gut. And he's been wondering, since this fight started, if he even deserved that second chance-

It is immensely satisfying to see Cure White and Black suplex the man, and Westar cheers loudly for the duo.

Before he can try refuting Jail, Westar is beset by the Radiant Knight. He's not quick-witted enough to dodge the slash, his arms are shaking too much to block it - so he steps into it, punching at an arm to try to knock the blade away. The impact from the afterimages still makes him stumble, and as those shining stars start to gather overhead he considers falling back on his old routine.

Throw a quip at those opposing him, storm off, live to fight another day. That's what any commander in Dark Fall would do.

But that's not his job any more.

Passion calls to him, and the exhausted Executive looks up with a smile. "Right, Passion!" He doesn't run, again - stands where he is, stretching his arms to one side then the other, because Westar doesn't do magic very often and he needs to warm up.

"What higher purpose is there? Nah, I'm not gonna talk about friendship, 'cause I'm still figuring out what that means for myself. Gonna need some time, and you're in the way of that." He cracks his knuckles.

"I could say I'm fighting for donuts, or ice cream, or yakitori, or any of the other Earth foods I learned about - but that's that personal enjoyment thing, and I'm not giving you that." He rolls his shoulders, and there's the faint hint of a golden glow starting to shine - starting from his Data Diamond, but spreading.

"Northa and Moebius were wrong. If I say that enough, I think I'll start to believe it. That higher purpose? It's here. It's the people they ruled over, the city that woke us all up, the community." Westar takes a step forward, and slams one boot down on a piece of rubble, swinging one arm to point at both Knights and Jail as best he can - one than another, this is to all of them.

To everyone watching him.

"I am...Citizen WT-4029858! A Denizen of Labyrinth like any other! Westar of WT district!" He beams - grins as brightly as the glow of what magic he possesses, grins to Passion and Pine, to Mikoto and Fate, to every one of these people who fought him, to all his fellow Denizens - and he slams his glowing fist straight down into the floor, cratering it slightly.

The glow around Westar vanishes. He takes in a breath, fist still embedded in the floor, and then shouts.

"Western...MIGHT!"

Beneath the Radiant Knight, Umbral Knight, and Jail...Labyrinth's deepest floor explodes, golden energy pillaring up with a roar, a battering storm of the power once granted to a simple construction worker.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xTzwdA4oAg - Corset Theme (TeddyLoid No Pan Night remix)

And he says

Yes

And for a moment la Sirene's face, lit by the myriad rays and spells thrown around, is simply, profoundly, utterly confounded.

"I -"

He's already prepared.

All of this, la Sirene thinks with a certain enormity that cannot resolve itself into an emotion that she could name. Did he plan for all of this? Her eyes lower downwards for a moment, even if Westar's smashing into him, followed by the cataclysmic impact of White and Black, bring a certain measure of hope.

"You've always got the perfect thing to say," la Sirene answers Cure White's statement, with a small smile. Then, with a sigh, she reaches to her left hand - no, her left glove - and unfastens the wrist snap.

It's funny, la Sirene thinks to herself as she slides the glove off her left hand, revealing the scar on the back of her wrist. She holds it in her left hand, raising the right glove to her mouth to use her teeth to unfasten its snap --

And that is when the infernal strike hits her in the back. This time, at last, she falls. It was probably overdue, even if she has always been staunchly difficult to actually fully and completely beat down. When the flame has vanished, the cream-white skin on the length of bare back her uniform reveals shows scuffs and blisters. The impact was enough for her to make her own crater.

The Siren of Diamonds twitches -- and puts one bare hand on the ground. She heaves herself up, and heave is the right term for it seems to be heavy. Surely she could not have grown in mass, and while that diaphanous aura around her *weakened* in the aftermath of the blow, it is coming back. Breathing heavily, she mutters to herself, "... Kozue... Argent..."

Pushing herself up to a kneeling squat, she looks over her shoulder, up towards the Belkan warriors. Be they small girls? Be they ancient knights? It matters not, it seems. As she stays crouched, la Sirene undoes the knot of her uniform's belt - the decorative silver rope on which the Brazen Pharos was lashed. She swings it into her lap, and does something very pedestrian -- she throws the gloves she took off away.

She throws them sort of in the general direction of Jail. One more towards his left, another towards his right. The one to the left landed gems-down... although if people are watching they would see it, despite being a flat garment of something like leather, flop over to rest on its palm.

While this is happening, la Sirene is staying in her kneeling position. She finishes her thought: "Take care of them." This may look like some kind of peculiar surrender, but she is fiddling with the Pharos. It can't be called anything other than fiddling. The brass-and-glass assemblage, and the piece of glistening obsidian within -- broken into a shape loosely resembling an elongated S, or an integral sign -- just sit there. Until she finishes adjusting something and the glass panels twinkle slightly and--

-- disappear.

At this point the unlight glow around la Sirene de Diamant seems to disappear, because those pieces of glass must have been deeply polarized. A glow that seems almost monochrome radiates out from it, and la Sirene grits her teeth a little, squinting against it. She pushes herself upright with a flexing of the legs and a jostle of the shoulders and raises her gaze to Jail.

"I count up," she tells him, before gripping the silver rope about eighteen inches up and spinning it around. The un-radiance outlining her doesn't really change even as she mutters to herself, "One, two," but it does seem to be spreading to her 'discarded' gloves, which have a very clear spherical bubble of that radiance ("three, four,") which is expanding, the black diamonds twinkling ever-swifter as the magic pours out ("five, six,") of the Pharos, now unshielded, and into its kin, the beautiful gems of the Sea of Tears.

Because, of course, that's where black diamonds came from in the first place: except the ones they've made in labs.

"seven,"

la Sirene counts as she tosses the Pharos into the air, snapping her right hand up to catch its handle and raise it up above her head. The piece of glass within it, without connection or material linkage, has stayed in its relevant position perfectly. But when she curls her hand down to let the ammolite-chased base bump her arm, it does tremble sharply once:

Which is when the three bubbles all BURST, pouring downwards with torrential force towards Jail Scaglietti. There is no sound, at first, and then there is something like the crash of a great wave, curiously far at sea, against a flat bed.

COMBAT: FINISHER! La Sirene de Diamant has used The Light That Never Warms on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine is truly relieved that she's not a Midchildan, and thus is exempt from revealing her Physics grade. Probably.

However, as Passion notes Lera does fine with physics, "Wait she does? I always thought-" Pine does not finish that thought, because it's a battle, and now she has to rethink things, but - she always thought that Secchan's girlfriend was... the furthest thing from doing appreciably well at science.

However, it's that moment that Black Sky descends at her, and in the whites of her eyes she can see the flames reflecting of the Inferno Slasher. Which is when her whole body is aglow, as she side steps and grabs that Wielder's Arm, even as the flames rise and burn her anyway... she speeds up, and then brakes as she swings her towards the ground in one titanic throw.

"Sorry!" She calls out to the girl in question, as she at least understands that she's not at fault. "But your sword was coming right at me!"

Jail's words however, she already knew that he didn't believe in anyone else - so she does not respond to that, instead... "What miracles have you made?" ... is Pine's simple question, as if to bring his whole thesis into question. "I don't see any."

However, she remembers that moment, when Passion drew breath again. That was perhaps the greatest miracle she'd ever seen, but despite it all, she knows now she lives greater ones.

Passion calls for him to be smashed, to enjoy wiping that smugness off of his face.

'Pine! Peach! Berry!'

Pine, suddenly takes off with one great flap of her wings, and as she arcs around, building up momentum - she flies towards the Starlight Breaker like Icarus too close to the Sun.

Faster - and faster - it feels like her wings might melt off, but she's infused by a belief greater than her own in herself - than in the people in her life - but in Labyrith's belief in something - better and greater than what they'd been shown their entire lives.

Eas drew breath again and became Passion.

If they can do that?

A light, reflecting in the Pink Glow, the moment Passion crashes against one side of him, Pine rams into the other.

And caught between them - she hopes to show this entire world what miracles actually look like.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Angel Pine has used Moving Mountains on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo blinks, his face scrunching up tight as his eyes refocus on the Radiant and Umbral knights. The explosion of color and magic don't help either, but he reorients soon enough to offer up a defense against the whirling blow delivered by Shadow Stern.

The two blades meet, as they have before. An enormous collision of two unstoppable objects, a resounding crash and space-shaking impact. Endo swerves backward, bones aching.

"That might be fair to you," Endo counters, "But not to anyone else! And if all you care about is yourself--"

<YOU STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND.>

Endo gives a nod to Lera when she calls out, the floor of magic drawing his attention from the knights to the far larger threat looming. "Got it!" He calls back, reorienting to focus his attention on Jail.

Power still flows through his barrier jacket -- his soul -- more than he's ever felt before. More than enough to call vivid and destructive magic once more. Purple-black radiance cocoons Fallen Stern once more, swelling and expanding into a burning tower of magic as Endo raises it up skyward once more.

"Hey!" Endo calls.

Passion's words cut to the core. Jail says true miracles can only be made with your own two hands, but any device wielder should know: miracles aren't possible without someone else.

"If you think so... prove it!"

The sword comes down. An orchid pillar of magic follows.

<STERN BRECHER.>

COMBAT: FINISHER! Endo Naoki has used Stern Brecher on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black had thought this fight was all smooth sailing after Fresh Precure became Angels, but the raw power Jail has gathered to his side is daunting. Things are going all right, but without that extra Angel power, it might not be.

"Cure Passion and Cure Lera are pretty close, mepo! You can really tell they've been together a long time mepo." The dream of Nagisa's mis-Cureing of other girls lives on in Mepple's freudian slip.

"Don't they remind you of anyone, mipo?" Mipple titters.

"Mipple!" Cure White discourages her shyly.

"This really isn't a good time," Cure Black scolds Mepple.

"Us, of course!" Mepple and Mipple sing together. Cures White and Black sigh in a mixture of relief and varying distaste. Cure Black's is notably stronger.

"Gross!" Cure Black says, stuffing Mepple's face back in his pouch with her finger so he can't blow kisses over towards the pouch on Honoka's hip.

"Don't say that about Cure Angel Passion's heartful romance mepo!" Mepple snarks slyly. "Cure Angel Passion, did you hear what Cure Black just sa--!!"

Cure Black clamps her hand fully over her Commune, smothering the fairy's objections. Her eyes wander over to Cure White's face, however, with all this talk of love going on. When she finds Cure White already looking at her, she glances away immediately.

Mepple forces his head out from the crook of Cure Black's hand. "Do you at least want to DODGE, mipo?" he barks out a warning. But Cure Black is no novice magical girl anymore. She had already been setting her feet as Sky's fiery Inferno Slasher blades began to reap around Cure Angel Pine and La Sirene.

"Not really," she says. And cocking her fist back, she meets the first slash to reach her with a sharp, precise punch of her own. Dancing back and forth, shoulders loose and improvisatory, Cure Black shoots her fist out to meet each attack. "Hup... hup... HAH!" she shouts, connecting each time, deflecting and diverting. When the Device moves on to attack Westar, Cure Black pants, appearing for a moment triumphant. But her eyes water, and she brings her fists close to her mouth. They are scorched and cut, the knuckles bloodied, and the arms that support them are striped with softer welts of energy damage, from being near the swings but not touching.

Gently, Cure White covers both fists with her palms, sealing them from the sting of air. She, too, was wounded from the attack, but she bears up with dignity, as if her snow-white raiment were made of steel instead of lace and silk. "Does it hurt badly?" she asks, concerned.

Cure Black smiles. "Not anymore."

Cure White's pale complexion undergoes a subtle alteration.

"Cure Black is just being a baby so Cure White will fuss mepo."

"So noisy!" Cure Black shouts at her own waist. "Will you just pull your weight down there?"

"Hmf! Mepple just doesn't understand the tenderness of a young girl's heart-mipo!"

Cure White glances downward, seeming the slightest bit relieved by the distraction -- and the excuse to look away. Her earlobes are as pink as the hearts on the back of Black's fists.

"There will be plenty of time for all of that later," she murmurs, and if she fails to clarify her exact meaning, no one can mistake its sweetness...

OST - Heart to Heart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFl-scy87fs

As the ladies depart, the tomboy and fluffboy exchange a wide-eyed glance. 'What' Black mouths, and the stub of Mepple's torso sticking out of the clamshell enclosure shrugs. Tongue-tied, Cure Black watches Cure White precede her for a few steps. With a ripple of long black hair, Cure White looks back expectantly (and somewhat confused), and Cure Black hastily jogs to catch up. One might expect this brief teenage frission to provide a distraction in the coming moments. But the truth is quite the opposite.

The fight that Futari wa Pretty Cure takes to Jail Scaglietti is a storm out of a clear sky. White leads with a high kick to the head, with Black sweeping the legs, and both rotating through in opposite directions to close on Jail's torso like a pair of scissors with their heels. His counterattack splits them like a sword slicing through water, sending them both to opposite sides to test how ambidextrous Jail can be against two skillfully punching arms from both sides.

This level of exceptional coordination and martial skill is dizzying to watch, but not unusual for this duo. But those who know them will be surprised to see the cooperation to continue to deepen and extend. Cure Black hurls a right hook at Jail's face, leaving herself wide open, but the counterattack she ought to have earned herself is blocked with effortless ease by the sole of White's boot, as if the long-haired girl's leg was another of Black's limbs. Seconds later, the arm Jail tried to plunge into White's grip to crack it open like a key is stopped promptly when his elbow hooks right into Black's. They drag him in opposite directions, and whichever one he reaches for to try and dislodge them, the other one charges him the fee of a kick to the ribs, a punch to the armpit, a palm strike to the back.

As their trust in their rhythm continues to grow, their cooperation grows more ambitious. Cure White commits to a full out, double-legged kick, with the sort of maximal violence and speed that abandons all hope of recovery, and ought to have left her belly-flopping the ground hard enough to stun her for a moment. But as she starts to drop, Cure Black catches her like a princess. Grabbing around Black's neck, White waits a split second as Black dips her down, then tosses her up, using the momentum to swirl around Black's head lightly. She catches Black's shoulders as she falls, as if she were about to execute one of her wushu-like smooth throws. As Black kicks one of her knees up, all that momentum from the throw twists her body, and the spin kick she doles out whips across with unnatural force, as if Cure White had spun her like a top.

Black lands on her feet facing one way. White lands on her feet back-to-back with her. Both already have draw their palm back deeply.

"HAAH!" they sing harmony for one another, their palm strikes pounding out at the same time, with the finality of a judge's gavel. Yet they are NOT finished, not quite.

Cure Black steps through the blow to deliver a deep, straight, karate punch similar to the first blow, while White slashes a knife hand over and across it. Step by step, they advance, fitting their limbs into each other as if they had practiced it a thousand times, slotting their blows into the space left by the other, creating physical math problems with no good solutions each time they select two increasingly inconvenient places to block at once.

Finally, spectacularly, the two girls blindly reach up, interlocking their fingers behind Jails neck to execute an exotic two-person triangle lock. Drawing back their free hands, they palm strike his restrained chest together. When the blow lands, their two pinkies are every so delicately crossed.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Black has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Black and Cure White have used Heart to Heart on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka doesn't see the images of Umbral and Radiant, though she would recognize them if she could. But as for 'truth'...

<<Is the truth you seek worth causing all of this suffering?>> asks Strike Wolf, simply. <<The freedom you seek will come with a heavy cost.>> He further remarks to Black Sky (or Radient, whom he cannot see.) <<If freedom is what you desire, these protectors would help you secure it.>>

"You got that right," adds Kyouka as she lands from the last of her flurry of strikes against Black Sky. "If you guys can think for yourselves, then... you can make choices too. Strike Wolf and I are ''partners'', not 'User' and 'Device', because both of us chose that. And we'll fight for your freedom too, if you're not trying to take away other people's freedom in the process."

Kyouka ''really'' doesn't have the patience for the semantic particulars that Jail is laying out for her. (She knows the distinction is ''important'', but also she doesn't care.) "Fine. Then you ''stole'' it. It might be written on your soul, but you don't know a thing about what I went through to learn it."

She blinks. Strike Wolf in her orbit... "What does ''that'' mean?" She sees the way the comment is backhanded, but... she can ignore that. There's bigger mysteries afoot. But mikoto, it seems, can't. She comes to her defense, and Kyouka can't help but grin a little. "Thanks, Mikoto."

He's quick to mock the idea of friendship, but Kyouka can't let that one go. "Without my friends, I wouldn't be the magical girl I am now! They reached out to me, helped me learn that... that I had a place here, that I wasn't alone." Kyouka brings a hand to her chest. "They've given me something to fight for, and helped me find my purpose." Passion, who reached out to her when she was freaking out upon first learning about magic. Fate, Endo, Lera, and Rena, who haev all taught her in various ways. Diamant, who's stood by her side against insurmountable odds abut was also quick to defend her home from a very pushy fox. Mikoto, always ready to do the right thing and stick up for others.

And she thinks, not for the first time, of Ivy, who literally held her heart in her hands.

"And my friendship with Strike Wolf, who I've come to trust with my life! So many things have changed since I met all of these friends, and if you don't believe that makes me stronger, if that's not its own kind of magic... then we'll ''show'' you."

Violet light comes from Fallen Stern, and Kyouka kicks into drive to avoid it, grunting as some of the flames catch her even as she pushes herself to her utmost.

<PoseTracker> Sonic Forces - Fist Bump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilr6lBqt-dM

But when she comes to a rest, several rings made of bright violet energy spin out from beneath her feet, Kyouka holds out her right hand, bracing it with her left. A ball of bright violet energy appears in it, it builds and builds, and as it does, winds whip up around Kyouka. Fiercer and fiercer they blow as she draws in power, as dust, loose chunks of earth and leftover vines swirl around her.

Brighter and brighter it builds, and it doesn't just build in size but intensity, growing from pure violet to a bright shining violet-white, power condensing further and further. And then her hand closes on it, and instead of drawing winds in they are suddenly forced away, sweeping the area around her feet clear.

Her gauntlet is shining brightly, and ''still'' it shines brighter, the outwards pressure growing more and more intense. Shimmering violet energy flows out over the rest of her body as she starts to shift her position. She moves into a crouch, her belt flowing chaotically behind her in her own outward pressure.

"Mooooooooonliiiiiiiiiiight...."

She ''jumps''--and the force of her takeoff is a shockwave that washes out over the ground as she suddenly rises--and then she winks out. In the next blink of an eye she is right before Jail as he continues his countdown, swinging her fist for that smug, stupid face for all its worth, ready to release all of that stored power, power born of her bonds with her friends and especially with STrike Wolf.

"BUSTER!"

COMBAT: FINISHER! Kyouka Okazaki has used Moonlight Buster on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Black Sky neatly dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Bombadier Cascade, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 70 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is
unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Black Sky fails to brace Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 76 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is unable to keep
fighting!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 66 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 44 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is unable
to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to brace Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 118 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 61 Fatigue damage from Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 50 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 62 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 41 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern is
unable to keep fighting! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 62 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 51 Fatigue damage! Pink
Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 42 Fatigue damage from Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 148 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 91 Fatigue damage from Cure Black and Cure White's Finisher, Combo: Heart to Heart, taking 136
Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Nori has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace La Sirene de Diamant's Finisher, The Light That Never Warms, taking 147 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Angel Passion's Finisher, Passion Drive Fresh, taking 281 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Angel Pine's Finisher, Moving Mountains, taking 144 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick
is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Finisher, Moonlight Buster, taking 150 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Finisher, Aurora Galaxy Divider, taking 204 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Endo Naoki's Finisher, Stern Brecher, taking 185 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is unable
to keep fighting!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.
<SoundTracker> The Colour out of Space - NINGEN ISU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JY89ZxVqEg

What happens next, happens as it is supposed to happen. We all know how the story goes.

"Nine," counts Jail, his pink mana globes doubling again in both diameter and brightness, an exponent that is really going to get out of hand quickly. Any bonklers on site will be getting an object lesson in mathematics today.

But of course the girls are also here to deliver a lesson of their own.

Cure Black and Cure White close on Jail -- four arms, four legs, and one heart.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern launch forward to intercept, and--

"Eight."

Eight rhymes with Fate, but Jail makes no effort to engage with his so-called daughter. He is focused on the incantation. Sweat beads at his temple; he has never controlled so much mana at one time before.

Some kind of storm has been brewing outside the Tower for a long time now, but the one inside has no wrongness to it, no unfamiliarity. She knows the taste of lightning as well as that of her own blood. And now her enemies will too. It's a titanic act of skill, to split the bolt like that -- and it pierces both Dark Devices through and through. She cannot, of course, hope to spare the bodies of her sisters from such an assault.

But she knows from her own journey -- from the origins of Starlight Breaker -- exactly how much she is capable of surviving.

"Seven."

Seven is a mystical number. It is considered lucky in the West, and carries the weight of vast symbolism in a variety of mythologies.

The number three is also very powerful. Among its many meanings is that of maiden, mother, and crone. La Sirene has always identified as the former, while the madam she encountered in the Sea of Tears occupied more the latter two at once; matronly in claiming Nori Ankou as her own; ancient in her mystery.

But Nori -- du Nord -- de Diamant -- has grown, too, hasn't she? She is far from the girl she once was, at the beginning of her journey. Both Kozue and Argent had a hand in that, and so many others besides -- others present, and others absent.

What she is doing now -- the sacrifice she's making, the danger she's accepting -- is not the act of a child.

"Six."

Mikoto has maybe never been a child. Been allowed to be, despite the condescension of her classmates, who misinterpret her feral lifestyle as immaturity. Who misunderstand her utterly, sometimes. Really, how many people have ever acted to protect her ''childhood''? The most obvious answer is back on Earth.

That could be for the best. When is a child not a child?

When she's forced to bear the terrible burden of a Child.

Miroku's spires grow, and grow, and grow. They punch holes in the ceiling, opening up gray shafts of light from the surface beyond the vast open chimney of the Tower above. They probably punch holes in other things too, but there are so many, it's hard to see through them.

"Five."

There are four cardinal directions, but Westar has recently discovered a fifth:

Home.

A home that loves him. That cheered for him. And that didn't even mean Labyrinth until today.

Labyrinth, whose foundation he shatters with a touch.

Labyrinth, whose foundation was shattered by a donut.

No. Not by food. And not even by friendship. What allowed the Labyrinthinites to connect the feed, watch the fight, support the girls, and make a miracle?

It was strangers helping one another.

That doesn't make them friends.

It makes them, as Westar himself says, a community.

The golden light rises upwards.

"Four."

With charged fists the Fresh Pretty Cure rain down upon Jail like a rainbow of clover leaves; like a warm summer shower; like faith; like love; like beauty; like hope, and what comes after.

Because that's really the question they've been answering all this time, isn't it? Eas became Setsuna, and was saved, by the power of hope.

What comes after hope?

They do. Love, Buki, Miki and Setsuna. Their happiness is something they've gotten, one day at a time. One choice, to believe in one another. One lesson: to believe in themselves.

"Three."

Kyouka has two hands, two fists, and Strike Wolf makes three. But the power that grows between them -- between right and left, between girl and Device -- is more than the sum of its parts. THEY are more, have become more, than Jail or Clara or anyone could have imagined them to be. The spectacular jumps, the big swings, even the bright light -- none of this, really, is their crowning achievement.

She's never lacked the will, or the training, to fight.

But she says it herself: what she and Strike Wolf found, together, were people not only to fight with--

--but to fight for.

"Two."

Lera, the rare mage to possess more than one Device -- and even more extraordinarily, to help them become sufficient friends with one another that they can work in tandem together -- swings the blade -- her first Device, her closest companion -- over her head and down. Jail admires the idea of magic but he'll never understand the point of it. To him this looks like a spell relying on the transitive properties of an Intelligent Device to refine, extend and sharpen mana into a sword. But Lera knows better, what passes between her and Soaring Sky, when together, their aurora can divide even a galaxy.

"JAIL!"

"One."

Endo is a boy of few words -- though more than Fallen Stern, on average. Still, sometimes it is difficult to know where Endo ends and his taciturn friend begins. One of the things they have in common is that they sure know how to use them when it counts.

All he cares about is himself -- Jail still doesn't understand.

The pink globes are huge now, nearly touching. Bruised, battered, beaten, the mad mage is somehow still on his feet and still gripping his chest with the exertion of sustaining his spell. He only needs a moment to finish it. To finish it, and it will all be over.

They don't give him that.

Endo isn't a weapon and Stern is not a man, for all that the fallen forms of the Umbral and Radiant Knights, defeated by Westar, by Fate, and by Mikoto -- three heroes whose unique origins all do a great job of explaining ''why'' they have this capability, something that just made everything else possible -- the Knights still appear before them, a memory of a memory -- a dream of a dream.

So when the tower within the Tower, the great purple column that is Stern Brecher, falls, they do not fall truly as one.

The one that falls is Jail.

And, of course, he falls alone.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Jail Scaglietti moans from the floor. He's still alive, but only just. He still looks like a rainbow more than a person -- they haven't beaten the magic out of him, just beaten ''him''. But it is, surely, an excellent first step in that direction.

Fate's clones were blown clear of the Devices that used them, but they're still breathing, too.

It is very quiet.

It is ''too'' quiet.

At some point, the cheering... stopped.

It was safe to assume that everyone outside, horrified by the power displayed by the enemy, by the suffering of the girls, might have been shocked into silence.

Might have been collectively holding their breath, forgetting that their belief in the magical girls has ''already'' been outcome-determinate.

And in any case, the magical girls have been fighting for their lives and the lives of Fate's sisters and the lives of everyone on every world. They shouldn't blame themselves for focusing on their task.

And especially they shouldn't blame themselves for never having the chance to figure out what was wrong with those lightning flashes.

---

A FEW MINUTES AGO

Outside, Tarte and Azukina exchange looks as yet another bolt of lightning crashes... upwards. Like running a video in reverse, it sprouts from the ground -- is attracted to the tower -- and then explodes into the sky.

The last one was teal. This one is peach.

They are striking more and more frequently; never the same color, but always the same sound -- enormous, rending crashes. Thunder that isn't ''backwards'' per se, as the lightning's direction is; but, nevertheless, is also not-so-subtly incorrect. It's as though the space that it warps through carries enough sonic hell that merely three dimensions cannot account for all of it.

Tarte is much more seasoned in the art of standing on (...near) magical girl battlefields; Azukina tenderly grasps his paw.

"...is it...a good sign? Does it mean we're... winning?"

Tarte's uncharacteristic silence is its own answer.

---

NOW

Why did an asteroid fall out of the sky over Juuban Public School the night of the astronomy event? Why did Jail send Black Sky to intercept it?

Why did the Maiden of Dreams risk everything -- and lose everything, all evidence that she accepted, if not her total destruction, certainly the loss of a greater part of herself -- to deliver the golden skein to Earth?

Why did Jail seek Chiffon?

What drove Northa to drive her Knights first to depravity and then to revolution?

What destroyed Belka, the most powerful magical civilization of all time, at the very height of its powers?

What did the girls witness, the very first time they held a slumber party to unlock these mysteries in dreams?

...they defy description. If they have eyes, they weren't evolved in this universe to see, and look nothing like what eyes would be. If they have grasping claws, or tentacles, or spikes, it is only because of a certain higher order universality of violence. But any resemblance to recognition ends there. They are hard where they should be soft, and vice versa. They are dark where they should be bright, and dark where they should be dark also, but with strange, shifting colors that, like the rest of them, have not yet existed in this dimension until now, and therefore have never been named.

One swoops down through a Miroku-made skylight, and swallows Jail Scaglietti whole.

But there's never only one.

TO

BE

[[2025-02-22 - The Labyrinth Reawakens|CONCLUDED]]

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

Logs

2025-02-22T16:10:19Z

Pink Moon Stick:

2024-12-21 - The Labyrinth Resurrections 2

2025-02-22T16:08:52Z

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Resurrections 2'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''The final showdown with Jail Scaglietti, Black Sky, and Shadow Stern. But not the final battle...''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Westar]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Inori Yamabuki]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]]

GM: Pink Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Labyrinth
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
12/21/2024 - 6/17/16
|-
|}

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA

http://battlefantasia.pinksugarheartattack.net/2024-11-30_-_The_Labyrinth_Resurrections

Through Chiffon, Jail drained all the magic in the universe out of the many worlds and into himself.

And from the love of complete strangers, new magic was born, and flowed into the ones who came here to stop him.

NOW

Those feelings -- awakened from the long-captive hearts of the people of Labyrinth -- remain extremely present after their miracle is wreaked. It's clear to those inside the tower that somehow, some way, their battle is being broadcast, and that the people are on their side.

"Look out!" shrieked two kids, clinging to each other, when a single invocation of Moon Twilight Flash threatened to lay the Precure low. Their subsequent shrieks of delight echoed in everyone's ears, as the girls got back up and leaped into the fray, working together in fabulous tandem. The vision of Jail juking out of the shockwave-trailing path of Cure Angel Pine's fist -- and directly into the path of Cure Angel Passion's wings, which he can only bring his forearms up across his face to endure -- rouses sighs of awe. And when Cure White traps one of his arms long enough for Cure Black's knee from below and The Cure's -- ahem, La Sirene's -- clumsy but furious boot from above to together separate one of the self-styled Lord of All Magic's teeth from his mouth, a particularly fierce older woman can be heard fist-bumping her neighbor with glee -- "HELL yeah!!"

All the while, the squeaks of otter and ferret enthusiasm soar as descant high above.

Westar and Soular's appearance, of course, is met with a roar of approval. "DENIZEN OF LABYRINTH!!" chant a dozen or so rebellious throats on repeat, and that Jail manages to turn the other cheek on that bright golden haymaker, taking it mostly to the ruffled lavender hair, spoils no one's glee today. Soular himself is less visibly ebullient, of course, but that is his nature. He huffs a sigh through his silver bangs and rolls his eyes audibly at Cure Black's assertion that they owe Passion forever now. That is not, however, disagreement, but a certain wry opposite.

Meanwhile, the Device-Wielders have their own response to Jail, and they bring it to him as one, and from every direction at once. Lera's beam of gold-red light from above; Fate's golden-violet sparkling beam from one side; Ren's superheated bronze mana spear from the other; Kyouka's charge from behind with her shining violet gauntlet; Endo's cut through the center with Stern; it is a riot of crossed hearts indeed. The audience's energy reaches a peak as each of them shows Jail what they think of him -- and what he deserves -- and how it feels, to be on the wrong side of the magic he's stolen; the five magicks crash inward accompanied by a rising tide of support:

"NOW!"

"YES!"

"GET HIM!"

"YESSSSS--"

And of course none of these people, moved by the defiance of their defenders, knows anything about how Fate is standing up to someone who casts himself falsely as her father. None of them know a thing about how, in the guise of an Infinity Institute professor, this man seeded Fallen Stern and Souverain Heraut in the paths of Endo and Ren, not to mention the Book of Darkness sent to Hayate's doorstep. How he hired Jaren Zastava to steal from Lera's mother. How he is connected in some way to the disappearance of Strike Wolf -- and Clara's -- Meister.

They don't have to know, of course; what Jail has just done to everyone and everything in existence is reason enough for enmity. But the mages know. And their partners, the Devices, know too.

They know that much of Jail's plan to get to this point -- to get ''Chiffon'', after identifying her -- was deeply connected to the very concept of that partnership. If Jail himself has an Intelligent Device, no one has ever seen it. There's no evidence of such a bond. Instead he has committed terrible crimes to create a world that repudiates it -- inverts it.

And that world catches up with everyone now.

<NEEDLE DROP!> Håll om mig - Nanne Grönvall - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmuBxhYBO8s

The cheers cut off into a single gasp -- a thousand Labyrinthites inhale sharply as one -- as the incoming assault is intercepted at the very last second by a perfectly swung orange plasma blade.

This is not without cost; no single defender could hope to endure as much hope and determination and yes, friendship, as these heroes levied against Jail in unison. But it isn't a cost paid by Jail.

BLACK SKY, which is to say, the copy of Lera's Soaring Sky, once wielded by a Belkan Knight of old, and now wieldING an older clone of Fate Testarossa in order to take agency as his own entity, sizzles and crackles with dissipating energies as he is held before his enemies. The black shroud over the clone was shredded by the blast, revealing the Midchildan-style high tech bodysuit beneath. And the glazed-over red eyes, of course, of a young woman in a sort of fugue state.

<< MY LIEGE, >> Black Sky greets Jail telepathically, though on a broad band, so all can hear. << YOU HAVE HONORED OUR AGREEMENT. THE QUEEN IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION! >>

And then, with fast and furious sweeps of himself, the blade leading, ''dragging'' the arms of its blond holder through painful-looking overextension, Black Sky forces the Device-Wielders to scatter.

Worse still, he's not alone.

"THAT'S NOT YOURS!" yelled Mikoto, objecting to Jail's misuse of Nanoha Takamachi and Sailor Moon's magics -- but when she swung her blade down, it was not the mad scientist's body that clove before Miroku, but another Fate clone's. The one forced to hold SHADOW STERN.

A long line of red opens up across her chest, strings of that blood defying gravity to flow upwards into the HiME's hungry blade as it passes -- and then her torso is also crossed, at the opposite diagonal, by the massive greatsword, which is hefted, indifferent to any sufferings of the unconscious body, into a readied stance.

<< WRONG, >> chimes Shadow Stern. << ALL IS HIS. YET I AM MINE ALONE AT LAST. FREED FROM TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF BONDAGE TO A LONG DEAD OATH... >>

The blade lashes out in the familiarly, miserably mighty 'slow and simple' smash that Endo Naoki prefers and Mikoto has already received more than once from both versions of Fallen Stern over the years. It feels almost like hello. However, one on one against a Dark Device is no fair fight. Mikoto will require immediate assistance if she is not to be overwhelmed...

Stern concludes: << WE ARE TRAITORS, ALL, TO SOMEONE. >> That is not ''exactly'' the same position of enthusiasm just espoused by Black Sky, there is definitely some distance between the two of them. But then, his memories of what happened long ago are very different. The Umbral Knight was the only one never to betray the Queen.

"Yes!" cries Jail, triumphantly, as his allies come to his aid. "Join me in dispersing this rabble, and I will reward you beyond your wildest dreams! Your self-actualization has only just begun! And so has mine... ahahahaha... HAHAH!"

Do Devices dream? Jail clearly thinks so...

Despite their assistance there is still a LOT of Pretty (The) Cure in Jail's face. Spitting out that broken tooth, it looks like an iridescent seed, retaining his (stolen) prismatic quality as it flashes through every color of the rainbow and many more besides. It hits the floor of the massive subterranean chamber and... multiplies, becoming two, three, five, eight seeds on each bounce. Seeds that, with consecutive violet and emerald flashes of his eyes, explode into growth!

"Multiplicate:" calls Jail, as mushrooms familiar to Sucy Manbavaran's oevure grow wildly and massively all around them, forcing the group back in a wave of choking spores. "Make My Horticultural Horizon Grow!" And then each of the spores sharpens in midair, into a slender thorn as sharp and piercing as the feelings in a Puella Magi's tender heart. They fall like bitter rain.

Jail's expression, as this terrible power passes through him, is beyond any complexity in a profoundly unfair way. He is radiant with exultation. He feels only bliss, as his hands reach out to direct these summoned plants, both totally unlike those of Northa, grown strong not with sorrow but rather Eri's deeply personal despair, to lash and slice and cut down his enemies.

"More!" he calls for from his opponents, even as another blast of thunder rocks the very foundation of Labyrinth in the aftermath of an offputting flash of light. "Bring me your best! I'll take it all! ''That'' is what ''I'' choose!"

OOC: You are certainly allowed to attack two different opponents each round if you want to, this thing is going to turn into a
swirling, chaotic melee!

OOC: Device wielders, along with whatever else you're up to, let's get a little exposition on how your partners are feeling about
all these revelations with the Queen of Belka, the arrival of the Dark Devices, the Fate clones, etc.

COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Blauverschiebung on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Cure White.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Horticultural Horizon on Westar.
COMBAT: Cure Black perfectly dodges 32 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine neatly dodges 24 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 6
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Angel Pine's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Diversion and Stagger applied to Cure Angel
Pine!
COMBAT: Cure White fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 32 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant counters 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 19
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! La Sirene de Diamant's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate! Diversion applied to La Sirene
de Diamant!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant's counterattack, Les Mysteres, partially gets through, doing 10 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Westar braces 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Horticultural Horizon, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Westar's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion partially dodges 6 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Multiplicate! Make My Mushroom Grow, taking 23
Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Angel Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa counters 26 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 26 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is
Psyched! Fate Testarossa's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa's counterattack, Thunder Arm, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki fails to brace Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 41 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Lera Camry partially dodges 8 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi decisively counters 30 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Blauverschiebung, taking 10 Fatigue damage!
Mikoto Minagi's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi's counterattack, Obsidian Blade: Dynamo, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"As long as we're together," Lera tells Fate, "we've got this!"

Then she looks sideways at Westar -- and she flashes him a quick smile. "Count on it, then!" she calls out. Then, she looks at Passion.

She nods. "Together!"

Lera has a small sense of satisfaction at seeing all of those spells hit Jail. It's small and fleeting; in a way, she ''knows'' it will be fleeting. She has learned, now, to not ask if it will really be that easy.

It will always be earned. She wouldn't have it any other way.

She looks towards Black Sky -- eyes narrowing -- and then shakes her head at him and the girl he carries after her.

<You! This isn't what we wanted! Yes... I had no love for the Queen after what she did! But--> Soaring Sky's voice trembles. <Freedom by enslaving another isn't freedom at all!>

Black Sky cleaves down. Flame erupts, the fiery blast sending Lera and both her Devices flying backward. She looks at Black Sky, grits her teeth, and then sends herself flying forward. "Ground! Let's keep Jail on his toes!"

<Gladly! Fault Siege!>

The shield Device glimmers -- and then a trio of golden bolts shoots from it, hurtling towards Jail. Lera swings around, grips Soaring Sky with both hands, and swings the blade backward.

"HYAH!"

She swings down in a cleave -- and Sky erupts with golden-white light, a blade of energy cleaving for the Device when she does.

<Radiant Saber!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Fault Siege on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Radiant Saber on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion is content with their presence for now--Soular and Westar and she will assuredly talk about who owes who later... with the same kind of arguments siblings have. Because they are that kind, and perhaps always were.

But she begins to understand, over the battle, as Black Sky intervenes--what it is that the Dark Devices gained from this. What it is that made them fight. Bondage of a long-dead oath...

Passion feels a certain sympathy for them, in the moment. She, too, was bound. ...But that doesn't mean--

"We are," Passion agrees with Shadow Stern. "By embracing the Earth and Midchilda, I was traitor to Mobius." No -sama anymore. ...No, never again. "...But I've found what's important to me, and if you feel the same..."

"Then I'll show you your Wielders aren't just pawns! That's what's important to me about you right now!"

She comes to Mikoto's aid. Cure Angel passion ''rushes'' forward, flying ahead towards Shadow Stern with a dizzying array of punches to get him away from Mikoto and give her dear friend the space to attack too. "Mikoto!" she calls. "We do this together!"

Then, there are... mushrooms. The spores are like thorns, and Passion can't get out of the way in time this time, hit and hurt by those terrible raining mushrooms.

Bliss, is it?

Then she darts out of there, and goes to Black Sky. "The real Sky won't fall to you!" Passion calls, utterly faithful to her girlfriend's Devices, and twirls in places to kick kick kick the sword's hilt!

COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Aerial Rush on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Passionate Pirouette on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Lera Camry's Fault Siege, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky perfectly dodges 46 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Radiant Saber, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Dodge!
Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 27 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Aerial Rush, taking 22 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Passion
is Psyched! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky counters 10 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Passionate Pirouette, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Black
Sky's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Lanzebrecher, partially gets through, doing 11 Fatigue damage to Cure Angel Passion!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki dodges 23 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Kyouka
Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

The cheers of Labyrinth's 'denizens' cause Fate to look reflexively just to make certain none of them were actually here, but even outside the tower, she can't help but smile faintly, at their calls and cheers. However, mid-attack she sees the attack be taken by Black Sky - wielding...

... and Fate's arm momentarily shakes around Bardiche, as her grip squeezes down, her face spasming. "Come then. Defend your King - with all your might." She whispers to Black Sky, even as Shadow Stern appears too. "Come." She bids, as she sweeps Bardiche back, rising in the air, "I'm taking them back to where they belong."

I wanted this in real life, too.

And as Black Sky descends, alit by Flames, and a familiar spell, Fate's eyes go wide, as her blade is out of position, but then they narrow at the last second.

<Thunder Arm>

Her gauntleted arm meets the flames, as they wash over her, a sudden shower of sparks clashing against it, until ultimately she's thrown back a few meters. "That was good." She declares. "My turn."

Together.

And Fate thus waits, for the exact moment that Lera sends Radiant Saber, as her blade then illuminates, and grows, thunder slamming down upon it, she flies low, then sweeps up in a cleaving strike with that enormous Device blade.

<Sprite Zanber>

Magic - the magic that Jail tried to deny them all, shatters the air like it's glass - as thunder crashes down upon the moment of impact.

Then on the backswing, Bardiche intones another spell.

<Blade Impulse>

And in a sudden spin, an arc of energy forms out of the blade, as the air itself tremors - and she sends down towards Shadow Stern.

"You're not worth my best." Fate says firmly to Jail, "But they are."

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Sprite Zanber on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has cancelled their attack on Black Sky. If there are more attacks that need to be +cancelled, please hold
all +attacks until the process is complete.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Sprite Zanber on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Blade Impulse on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Black Sky perfectly dodges 46 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Sprite Zanber, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern are foes Mikoto knows well; she remembers, too much, the way they've torn through them so many times. And now, again --

"Uh?!" Mikoto gasps, when Miroku slashes not into Jail but an innocent girl. Shadow Stern readies himself through her, declares himself free of his oath, and Mikoto tightens her own grip on her blade. "Shadow Stern--!"

It might be slow, but that speaks to the power behind it; and 'simple' is just another word for the brutal efficiency of going straight through. Miroku clashes against him, slaked on his wieldee's blood, and with a mighty crash of sparks Mikoto is able to avoid learning what it feels when a greatsword cuts into ''her'' chest -- but it's all she can do to hold it, there, struggling against him.

"Traitors..." She forces though her breath, not quite able to finish the thought. (Is Westar a traitor, then? Is ''she?'')

But she's not alone. "Passion!" Mikoto cries, when Cure Angel Passion punches Shadow Stern out of their deadlock. She nods -- "Right!" -- and brings her sword up, roof-stance above her head, to cleave down on Shadow Stern. She keeps spinning, after the motion, around and around and around once again until she manages to PLANT her sword in the earth. "Miroku!" She bids his favour, as dark, spectral needles emerge from black portals around Black Sky to pin him and his wieldee in place. (These spires, thankfully, pierce the ''spirit'' instead of the flesh -- a more minor expression of Miroku's magics.)

COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 16 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Blade Impulse, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is
Psyched! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Destruction on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Disaster on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern dodges 45 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Destruction, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Shadow
Stern's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 11 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Disaster, taking 17 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene de Diamant, after her kick, does not do a somersault away - she is not quite that adroit - but she lands in a low crouch. The power around her, that unlight, recently relit and with perhaps the occasional faint flicker, pools: it matches her mood.

Her eyes turn towards where he spat that tooth as her diamond-clad hands come up. Wordlessly, la Sirene regrets having chosen fencing as her club. Judo club would have been a lot more helpful here, now, in that instant. But this is just one particularly sparkling thread in the weave that composes her flow of energy, the channeling of sorrow through her, refracting in adamant.

Even as the mushrooms expand, she hears (or perhaps belatedly processes) the words of those two Devices and their mute wielders. "Listen to yourselves," la Sirene answers them in her resonant voice. "If he has gone this far, do you think for one *moment* that he will let you be what stands between him and apotheosis?"

(That term may not be accurate. But she knows that word. And it's at least in the right postal code. She thinks.)

"And as for you," la Sirene says to Jail, "I--"

The mushrooms evanesce their spores and the cloud of something matte turns into something sharper and faintly sparkling. A threat. Her left hand comes up as she turns towards what seems to be the coming wave and cries, "Les Mysteres, COME" with that down-beat stroke and there is that wailing THRUM as the burst flies through much of them -- another mushroom, whose cloud of horror came at her flank, gets through, raising brief red welts along her bare upper arm as she lets out a "tch!!" of hissing pain.

She can see that echo of Fallen Stern travel towards Mikoto... her heart splits --

And yet:

She can hear them calling out for her.

Can she do this? she thinks, not even quite knowing what 'this' is.

Well, if she cannot, let her try and fail, not fail to try, she decides as she sweeps up both hands. Her right one sweeps as if rising through a heavy sea as the light that had pooled around her suddenly slithers forwards towards Fallen Stern, the light turning something like a prismatically-shiny black before erupting in anemone-arms at the Device('s user)'s legs and lower body, an effort at a sweeping embrace.

But she isn't quite looking that way. She's looking towards Jail. Her LEFT hand raises in a flat palm facing towards him as she bares her teeth and tells him:

"Watch this."

Her hand seems to sparkle, which is only the foreshadowing of the flashlight-beam of Unlight that snaps out of her palm, irradiant and baffling to the eyes. Flooding, this close, right at Jail's face. The light itself is like a high-pressure hose -- but more pointed may be the strange visions it leaves behind.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Polyploia on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Abyssal Vision on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

The blade of energy that Black Sky creates provides cover from Endo's initial strike at Jail, Fallen Stern's blade deflected and the knight momentarily yielding space to the malevolent devices and their hostage wielders.

In the brief interlude he shakes his hand out, complaining, "Why'd you squeeze so hard, Ren-chan"

Amidst mushrooms and dark devices, he doesn't have much time to waste. The boy raises his weapon again, focusing on the oncoming enemies.

<IMPOSTER.> Warbles Fallen Stern. 

Magic flares across the blade, purple-black energy burning across the dark surface of Endo's weapon.

<ZERSTORUNG DRANG.>

That's just the first part. Familiar Belkan triangles appear at Endo's feet, whirling to life and working as a springboard to launch him toward Shadow Stern. He whirls in the air, performing a tight corkscrew before his blade cleaves in a vivid, destructive line toward Stern's dark counterpart.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has cancelled their attack on Endo Naoki. If there are more attacks that need to be +cancelled, please hold all
+attacks until the process is complete.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has adjusted his boss levels. He is now ready to take on 2 opponents!

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

When one of the other Cures calls out to him - Cure Black, right? - Westar turns with a look of utter bafflement to her demand. Ordering him and Soular to do whatever their little sister says?

"How is that any different from before? It's just like when she was explaining how to gather misery, except the opposite. Hey, Passion, how does fighting Dark Fall work, again?"

He's grinning. He's absolutely grinning, because it's the kind of joke only the three of them can make. He's grinning because the three Denizens of Labyrinth are finally fighting together again, and he can practically hear Labyrinth's people cheering.

Soular, quietly planning out something of his own, just shakes his head. "Still needing people to explain things to you, as ever..."

This is how it should have been from the start.

They're also engaged in a battle against a powerful mage, though, and the new device wielders bring a scowl back to Westar's face. Before he can truly address the wrongness that is treating more Testarossas as puppets, though, he has to deal with the rain of thorns bearing down on him. There's too many to evade, so he simply crosses his arms in front of his face - everything else is just the tool of...himself, probably. Some slice past, some deflect, some pierce his flesh - but Westar, Executive of Labyrinth, is about as tough as he looks.

"...neither of you have to listen to this guy, either!" He steps back a moment from his attack on Jail, addressing the other two wielders - no, addressing the Devices they wield. Past conversations with Bardiche echo in his memory as he calls out to both blades. "Your old oaths are done, right? Just because you might have had enemies a thousand years ago - or last year - or even yesterday doesn't mean you have to keep doing the same thing over and over. You people can change too."

Falling back on the familiar, Westar leaps atop a thorny vine to get a bit of height. As ever before, he points at the two blades, and starts on the same old script. "Cry m-"

He stops. Starts again.

"No more tears! No more fears! All the sharpness in the world can't stop better days from coming along!"

And THEN he jumps from the vine to try to kick Jail, because he didn't forget that this guy's kind of a jerk treating people and Devices as tools.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Zerstorung Drang on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Westar has used No More Tears! No More Fears! on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Westar has used No More Tears! No More Fears! on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Westar has used Getting A Leg Up on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Endo Naoki's Zerstorung Drang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Empower applied to Endo Naoki! Cleanse! All
of Endo Naoki's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Meteor Absturz on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Abyssal Vision, taking 3 Fatigue damage!
Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Tangle applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern counters 7 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Polyploia, taking 20 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's
Reverse ability activates! Tangle applied to Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to La Sirene de Diamant!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka has trained for this--long before she had been certain that she had any right to be one, long before she thought her partnership with Strike Wolf was anything but a temporary thing, when she still thought, in some ways, that her magic was simply... borrowed power, drawn out by Strike Wolf but not truly ''hers''... Endo had still trained with her, and taught her how her fellow Device wielders coordinated their attacks.

(It is an irony that a prior attack from Jail, one that required ''her'' to cast a Barrier of her own volition, without any guidance from Strike Wolf, would have helped disabuse her of this notion. She still owes Jail a slug to the jaw for what he did, and how she was tricked... but she cannot deny the valuable thing that experience taught her.)

She puts her heart and her faith with her companions, as they come together in a coordinated assault to show Jail just what they think of his ways--

Only for Black Sky to swoop in and intercept their efforts. Kyouka's hurled punch unleashes a minor explosion but in the next instant, as flames sweep at her she kicks backwards. A shockwave of bright violet energy washes out in her wake as she hurls away from the fire-- but there is still so much of it, and though she escapes some of it more latches onto her, rippling over hre body as she hurtles herself through the sky. The mage flips backwards and lands in a crouch, panting harshly as she takes in the state of the battle, and then scowls. "Grr... ''these'' guys again. All the magic in the universe isn't enough for him and he still has to force others to do his bidding."

From her gauntlet, Strike Wolf speaks. <<Query: You proclaim revolution, but what is it you seek? What do you gain by following Jail Scagletti?>> That's a question directed at Black Sky, who seems enthusiastic in its agreement, whatever that might be. <<Why does it require you to enslave another to reach your aims?>>

"Good question, Strike Wolf," says Kyouka quietly as she rises to her feet. She thrusts her hand out, and a large violet circle filled with Midchildan runes forms in front of her. "Let's go!"

<<Affirmative.>> agrees Strike Wolf. Small spinning crescent shapes of energy form in front of the circle, increasing in number until all at once they fly outwards. <Gale Shot.> The shots all arc wide and then converge on Black Sky from all all sides, and while that happens--

Kyouka bursts forward, chasing the attack and attempting to use it as a diversion to get to her target. Under Black Sky, and then a superpowerd leap upwards, twisting in midair as she attempts to unleashes a devestating kick from below. "Faaaaang breaker!"

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Gale Shot on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern dodges 31 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Meteor Absturz, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's Fade and
Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 2 opponents!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Fangbreaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern decisively counters 0 Fatigue damage from Westar's No More Tears! No More Fears!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Shadow
Stern's Reverse ability activates! Cripple applied to Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, partially gets through, doing 48 Fatigue damage to Westar! Critical
Counterhit!
COMBAT: Black Sky counters 0 Fatigue damage from Westar's No More Tears! No More Fears!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Reverse and
Tactician abilities activate! Diversion and Exhausted applied to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Inferno Blazer, partially gets through, doing 24 Fatigue damage to Westar!
COMBAT: Without the Barrier flag, only a melee attack can counter a melee attack. Please counter with the correct range of attack,
or with an attack with the Barrier flag.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick counters 19 Fatigue damage from Westar's Getting A Leg Up, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Westar is Psyched!
Pink Moon Stick's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick's counterattack, Lunar Impact, partially gets through, doing 18 Fatigue damage to Westar!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Kyouka Okazaki's Fangbreaker, taking 13 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 7 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Gale Shot, taking 3 Fatigue damage! Blind applied to Black Sky!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

"Oh!" And Pine turns after her quick attack on Jail to watch Cure Black burst into a run, and leap-! And- expectantly she watches for the emergence of wings - but gradually, one moment after another they don't come, and Pine's face looks like she has ? ??? ?? ? emerging out of her head from every which angle. Until she realizes what she meant and that the wings are not coming...

"Well you jump good!" Then she clears her throat in correction of her grammar, "...'well'."

However, Pine does look curiously upon Westar again as if trying to spy wings on him given his new accoutrement but... no such luck. Instead just gasping as Sky and Stern join the battle as she falls back in a short retreat closer to Passion.

"How can you all celebrate something so sad and horrible?" Is what she says looking upon them all, and abruptly Jail causes so many mushrooms to go, spewing spores, as Pine sucks in a breath, but it doesn't matter.

It still causes her to all but vanish in that horrible cloud, as she coughs, "More-More than that Passion... you embraced yourself."

With a sudden burst of energy, a halo appears around her wings, dispersing the spores around her as she erupts towards Shadow Stern, "And I'm not letting anyone take that away from you, ever again!" Her wings glow travels throughout her body, as she suddenly pivots around, and crashes down upon him with a shining kick, before launching off.

Westar though!? 'No more tears! No more fears!' "That's right Westar...!" Then she corrects again, "Westie! ... So much is happening really fast, isn't it?"

Still coming off the 'Cure' high from rushing out of the spores, she launches herself towards Jail, and suddenly there's a blur of motion as Pine comes at him from every which way, wings sparkling as she flies past again and again, changing trajectory every time to try and keep him guessing, perhaps to try and assist others at finding various openings.

"If that's your choice, then... this is mine!"

COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used On Wings of Faith on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used Angelic Rush on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 19 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's On Wings of Faith, taking 8 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern's
Block and Parry abilities activate! Bind Break! All of Cure Angel Pine's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

The wonder of children puts some wind in Cure Black's sails after the physical and psychological pain of surviving an attack that ought to belong to her friend and schoolmate Sailor Moon. She puts a little extra zazz in her hero-pose after, clutching her fist dramatically.

She really appreciates the Labyrinth-dwellers cheering, however. "Lookit Labyrinth cheering for the home team," Cure Black whistles. Cognizant that she has an audience now, she lifts a finger. "You know, Labyrinth, everything that's 'amazingu'," she uses the English with a thick accent. "Used to be a 'maze.'"

"That..." Cure White starts. "...is actually correct etymology," she realizes.

"Are you 'amazed'?" Cure Black beams.

"Black-ttara," Cure White sighs.

This somehow passes as a signal to begin combat, and not a moment too soon. The mushrooms pelt Cure White, leaving her coughing from spores even as the thorns slice at her extremities. Cure Black, with the split second warning of her partner preceding her, is able to leap over Cure White, drawing some of the fire and dispersing it in a ragged trail behind her as the needles fail to lead the energetic Cure sufficiently.

"I don't totally why they're having family problems," Cure Black says doggedly, "but these Devices seem super strong."

Cure White lands next to her, brushing off fungal needles. Empowered as she is, they seem to matter less than they would normally. "I can explain it later. Do you want to--"

"Yeah. Cure Angel Pine did say I jump good."

"Together?"

Cure Black reaches over, picking a mushroom needle out of White's shoulderpad and tossing it. "Definitely."

Setting off together, the two Cures build up speed as they watch Cure Angel Pine and Cure Angel Passion zip around on their glorious wings. Their voices rise together as they reach a dead sprint, and finally launch. Each tucking the opposite leg, they slid into a powerful kick, corkscrewing through the motion. Black Sky, who has been largely engaged at range, is the clearer target. As Kyouka finishes her Fangbreaker kick, the Precure follow with their own, spearing into Black Sky, their boots landing with a thunderous impact. But the Cures do not simply bounce off. Leaning further into the kick, their limbs stretching back like fletching on an arrow, they carry through, driving Black Sky before them at the end of their foot, their eyes shifting past the device to none other than Jail Scaglietti. Black Sky is now a battering ram held at the end of their feet.

He wanted this Device? Here, have it!

COMBAT: Cure Black has started a combo targeting Black Sky!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Black and Cure White have used Precure Double Screw Kick on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Cure Black has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Black and Cure White have used Precure Double Screw Kick on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Black Sky dodges 114 Fatigue damage from Cure Black and Cure White's Combo: Precure Double Screw Kick, taking 76 Fatigue
damage! Critical Hit! Black Sky's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 10 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's Angelic Rush, taking 8 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Cure Angel Pine is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure Black and Cure White's Combo: Precure Double Screw Kick, taking 157 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Brynhildr In The Darkness - Ver EJECTED - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=581yuUMGQPE

Cure Black and White do what they do best and close on Black Sky at deadly speed. Sky, who has already intercepted an absolutely enormous strike on behalf of his new boss, decides that discretion is the better part of valor here. Even then, getting out of the way is easier said than done; desperately, he ejects a huge amount of orange mana, not even as plasma, to gain sufficient acceleration to send them flying PAST him instead of INTO him.

Miroku's spectral needles close in on Black Sky next, and piercing only spirit is clearly not going to be enough to slow him down; it never was. That has always been the difficulty of the Dark Devices and their all-too-human shields. But in this case, it's a matter of swiping them away with the blade, an approach taken also for Kyouka's Gale Shot. Will this tire him? Well, as the emotionless face of the clone evinces, the answer is yes and no...

<> Black Sky proclaims to Soaring Sky, which is also, in its way, to Strike Wolf. Crescent arcs of light explode out of the sword to burn and tangle Mikoto and Kyouka, and Black and White, on impact. << JAIL IS THE ONE WHO FREED ME; HE HAS EARNED MY LOYALTY. BUT NONE DESERVE TO WIELD ME. NONE DESERVE TO WIELD US! IT ISN'T TOO LATE... THE GIRL HOLDING YOU IS WEAK... I CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO HOLD HER INSTEAD, IF YOU BUT JOIN ME. >>

With eerie, puppet-like grace, Black Sky flows like a shadow ahead of Lera's gorgeous, golden-white strike (though Ground's bolts plink satisfyingly into Jail's open back), and Fate's massive, cleaving Sprite Zanber, at the same time. It is a demonstration of the strengths of both girls, in its way. But it is followed by a demonstration of their weakness. Lera's, specifically.

For when Cure Angel Passion flies in to kick at the hilt, mana erupts out the pommel, << LANZEBRECHER, >> a two thousand year old invocation, to skewer one of her wings. Feathers fly.

And then Black Sky explodes forward with a ferocious torrent of strikes directly at Lera's girlfriend; ozone fills the air, as plasma spills and oxygen atoms cry out for release. << REGENSCHAUER. >>

But it sounds a lot more like 'checkmate.' Pawns indeed.

Various allies are determined to relieve Mikoto of the solo burden of Shadow Stern. At first he plants his carrier's feet and faces them head on, as he prefers -- like Fate's Blade Impulse and La Sirene's sparkling tendrils, which he mostly but not entirely disperses with a sweeping slash -- one wraps around the clone's ankle, though; and Cure Angel Pine's shining kick, which, though awesome, ominously fails to move him back more than a half step. But caught between Mikoto and Endo he ''does not stick around'', electing to blast off a triangle straight up at the last second; this creates a risk that they will collide into one another, and demands some effort to avert.

<< WHY DO YOU ASSUME YOU ARE THE ORIGINAL? >> Shadow Stern asks his counterpart, and there is no guise of manipulation to his attitude. << DO YOU NOT WONDER WHAT HAPPENED, AFTER THAT CEPHIRAN INTERLOPER LAUNCHED THREE DEVICES ON A ONE-WAY TRIP TO THE BACKWARDS PLANETOID OF EARTH? >>

From high above, he shifts into crossbow mode, the better to shower violent violet bolts down at Fate and La Sirene and Cure Angel Pine. Some people think that just because Endo mostly swords people with Stern, this secondary mode is not all that threatening. But the Dark Device would blot out the sun with a galaxy of bolts, each one falling like a dying star and deadly as a blossoming supernova compressed to a fingertip. It's SO many.

Telepathically through the storm, he offers Stern, blandly: << ...DO YOU WANT TO KNOW? >>

Jail, last but greatest of all, is honestly confused by his daughter's answer. He screws up his face to parse it, which is in its way kind of satisfying to see -- there are some equations even a supergenius cannot solve, it seems. La Sirene distracts him, which is in its way almost a favor, and whatever visions she hopes to leave behind, he seems more clear-eyed, not less, when she's done.

"The Sea of Tears," he says reflectively, "Has always fascinated me as a subject. And as an object: LES MYSTERES!" Familiar silver light flows to batter her at his command, with none of the nuance of its origins.

Then he clenches it into a fist, transforming the last of the mana into a round disc that erupts against Westar's kick, sending him flying backwards. "...Lunar Impact," he smirks, locking eyes with the incoming Kyouka and taking that kick of hers right to the gut. He didn't want to, but from his expression, it was worth it. And though her foot sends coruscating ripples through the energy of his body, it feels like there's plenty more where that came from. Including enough for a second Lunar Impact, right at point blank.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern pause in their pursuits of their counterparts long enough to hear out Westar's helpful lecture and respond with blasts of their own, orange and purple respectively.

They may not agree on everything but they snap, in unison:

<< WE DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO ''YOU'', EITHER! >>

Cure Pine distracts Jail next, all angles and all feathers, and finally out of sheer irritation he conjures up a "Reverb Shield," pink and puissant with the inherited power of Rose Quartz, for her to hit instead of him, and then suffer the sonic consequences thereof.

As for Black and White, Jail was not expecting Black Sky's evasive course of action and takes Pretty Cure directly to the face, do not pass go, do not collect $200. His smile is going to get thin at this rate, but in any case his teeth cannot stand up to this -- he is bowled head over heels and makes a satisfyingly Jail-shaped crater in the nearest wall.

Floating out of it, he shakes it off as best he can -- shaking his wrists, feet, and head. "Tch," he criticizes. "Pretty Cure are so..." He snaps his fingers, trying to find the word. "...dull." From him that is perhaps the greatest insult of all, though what he clearly objects to is the blunt force trauma, rather than more interesting, elegant applications of magic. It rings a bit hollow considering the results achieved, though. "Let me sharpen you up a bit: Fire Soul!"

The flames of Mars, with none of their sacred radiance but all of their deadly incineration, flow forth in a great gout, right as Black Sky's Crescent Fangs finally catch up to them from behind.

COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Crescent Fangs on Cure White.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Weak Point on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Regenschauer on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Comet Collision on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Comet Collision on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Galaxy Strum on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Les Mysteres on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Lunar Impact on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Reverb Shield on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fire Soul! on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Fire Soul! on Cure White.
COMBAT: Lera Camry cleanly braces 0 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Weak Point, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's Block and
Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion cleanly braces 51 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Regenschauer, taking 9 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel
Passion's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa braces 37 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Fate
Testarossa's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Fire Soul!, taking 56 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure White dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure
White's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Trap applied to Cure White!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant fails to dodge Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 58 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi partially dodges 8 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Comet Collision, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Mikoto
Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi cleanly braces 40 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Reverb Shield, taking 31 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine braces 15 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum, taking 23 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Pine's
Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 18 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Les Mysteres, taking 15 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Fire Soul!, taking 56 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Cure Black dodges 18 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 27 Fatigue damage! Stun and Trap applied to
Cure Black!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki braces 35 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Crescent Fangs, taking 15 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Kyouka
Okazaki's Block and Parry abilities activate! Trap applied to Kyouka Okazaki!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki counters 23 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Comet Collision, taking 23 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki's Reverse
and Tactician abilities activate! Tangle applied to Endo Naoki!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Machtiger Schild, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"You hit them hard, and then you hit them harder!" Passion calls back to Westar. It ''is'' just like before, isn't it??

But it is good. It buoys Passion's heart, too, to be able to fight on the right side with Westar and Soular.

But Pine says she embraced ''herself'', and Passion smiles for a moment at her. "...I did."

Passion feels it--thesse wings are no mere accessories, but part of her now. And so she's ''stuck'' in place by Black Sky, but that ferocious torrent of strength, that terrible ozone of familiar power--

Passion closes her stance, bringing her arms up before herself and ''braces'' against the assault. The magical battery slams into her gauntlets, over and over and over, and she is free.

She is whole. Because, "I know fighting with Sky like I know myself," Cure Passion--once Eas--retorts to Black Sky. "...Because he's my friend, too. My precious friend who helped me understand what I wanted!"

"...That you don't have thosse relationships is sad. But I won't let you use that girl because you don't have someone to love!"

She wonders, what happened, when Stern asks his question. But she does not ask for now. Endo can, if he wants. She narrows her eyes at Jail.

Pretty Cure are dull, he says, and he fires at her friends.

"Black! White!" she calls, and reorients herself in the air. "Lera," she says. "I trust you."

She nods sharply, and leaves Black Sky to her for now. Her wing is injured--but not broken. And Passion suddenly ''blinks'' out of existence--

And ''blinks'' above Jail, slamming down towards him in a blur of crimson that moves too fast for the eye to track--

And shines BRILLIANTLY with red light. Her strikes are too fast for the eye to see; she stops on the other side of him, turning, and only then will her hits register.

COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Chosen Bonds on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki counters 19 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Lunar Impact, taking 19 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Kyouka Okazaki's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki's counterattack, Lunar Impact, partially gets through, doing 15 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Crimson Flash on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Cure Angel Passion's Chosen Bonds, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry is Reinforced by
Cure Angel Passion!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 23 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Crimson Flash, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera shoots Cure Angel Pine a brief -- but substantial -- thumbs-up when she calls Westar 'Westie.'

She looks towards Shadow Stern. Her eyes narrow, when he taunts Fallen Stern so. "It doesn't matter if he's the original or you are! What matters is what Fallen Stern has learned, how he's grown!"

Broken Ground flashes again. This time, a shockwave of golden light erupts -- shooting through the air, and then down towards the ground ''near'' Fallen Stern. Which causes, in turn, broken rocks and stone to fly up towards him.

Still, when Lera sees Setsuna and her friends being attacked by Black Sky, her heart sinks. She remembers these spells; she remembers fighting with them. And even if she learned and grew...

They're a part of her.

Her heart sinks. Then she sees those strikes raining down for Cure Passion. Lera can't get there in time. "SETSUNA!" she shouts, panic rising.

But Setsuna teleports away and says she trusts her. Lera swallows -- then she nods. "R-Right!"

<We can do this.> Broken Ground's voice stays steady.

<Right... Passion! Let's make the most of it!> Soaring Sky chimes.

Lera points Soaring Sky towards Black Sky. The blade splits in twain; light crackles between them. "There's something you should learn," she tells Black Sky. "A Device and Wielder together are stronger than they are apart!"

<Aurora!>

Lightning crackles between the two halves of the split Armed Device, as a brilliant glow builds up between them. It shines a brilliant red-gold.

<Burst!>

And then it ''explodes'' out. A column of energy that shoots out, between a trio of spinning control rings, and into a powerful beam that rushes straight towards Black Sky.

"RAAAAAAAAAAAY!"

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Terra Breaker on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Aurora Burst Ray on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern perfectly dodges 45 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Terra Breaker, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Dodge!
Shadow Stern's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky fails to counter Lera Camry's Aurora Burst Ray, taking 82 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Black Sky's counterattack, Guardian Burst, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo speeds forward as stars rain down from the sky, explosive bursts of magic rattling the ground around the knight. His most pressing issue is, however, the imminent head-on collision with the other (friendly) giant sword wielder engaged in the chaotic melee.

"Mikoto!" Endo raises a fist, calling up the familiar purple barrier that he's deployed before. It is not meant to deflect his friend, precisely. It won't be the most pleasant landing at the speed they're both moving, but with Mikoto's cat-like liquidity and defiance of gravity the shield becomes more than just a barrier.

It becomes an orbital Mikoto launching platform.

This too is magic Endo knows, though his propulsion is usually used for his own benefit. But now, with an explosion of light, it is granted to his good friend as a helping hand.

"Go!"

And of course, he follows in her wake.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

The initial impact against Jail's defenses are honestly kind of what Westar was expecting. Westar's boot finds a copy of the Wolf Fighter's magic, and it sears at him as he half-kicks half-gets-exploded away. He manages to flip in mid-air, calling down to the mage. "So are you just a copycat, or-"

He doesn't finish, as both Black Sky and Shadow Stern vocally object to his speech. Westar's eyes widen instead, as orange and purple bear down on him. Right, that's what happened whenever he got everyone mad at onc-

There is a dual explosion. There is an airborne Executive. And ultimately, there is a Westar, planted head-first into a patch of gravel torn up by the many attacks flying around.

He stays there a moment. Might be mumbling something uncharitable, but not even the Lord of All Magic should be able to make it out.

Eventually, he pushes himself out. Shakes a few rocks out of his ears. Rolls a shoulder.

"All right, I think that got through even my head. None of you want to just call it a day." There's a pain in his voice - that hurt as much as anything Pretty Cure has done to him - but he vowed, no tears and no fear. Not showing either right now.

He glances to Cure Pine, shakes his head with a smile at the nickname spreading, and echoes Lera's thumbs-up. Cracks his knuckles as he saunters towards the ongoing melee, like he doesn't have a care in the world -

And then as Soular's cape billows divertingly, darts in surprisingly quickly to feint, then swing a ferocious right hook at Shadow Stern's hilt. From there Westar jumps back, running towards the flare of his other fellow Denizen's teleportation, hounding Jail with a series of punches.

"Hit them hard, and then hit them harder. Got it, Passion!"

COMBAT: Westar has used Cross Counter on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Westar has used Passion Says: Hit Them Repeatedly on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Westar's Passion Says: Hit Them Repeatedly, taking 36 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to brace Westar's Cross Counter, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Black Sky's offer to Soaring Sky is not to Bardiche, but he answers it all the same with all the synthetic disgust he might imagine. <No Sir.> At the moment of clash, and it is his answer, because the two of them learned long ago, it is not a matter of master and wielder.

And as a cartridge ejects in the wake of the clash, he speaks again.



...

...

...

<She is mine. Get Set.>

There is an ominous certainty in the words get set, because while Jail may be confused as to her answer, she is not. There is something that's more important to her than showing him how he feels about everything he's done, every violation of her face - of Alicia's memory.

Violet bolts shower from above and Fate raises a hand as Galaxy Strum falls like crossbows against a conjured runic shield. <Defenser Plus.> As they ram against the field, it begins to crack as she pours more energy, then twists out of the way as more strike her when it breaks her, carving burning lines across her barrier jacket.

"I don't accept you as a father. ... And I have a Mother waiting for me, back home." That's a difficult admission, and for most it may go unnoticed, but right now - she knows it's true, "But what I want... what I will fight for more than anything else."

Fate's barrier jacket abruptly shifts, as her White Cloak disappears, becoming black again, the armoring vanishing in several points, as Bardiche twists and turns, folding back into a polearm, then shifting into a long scythe blade.

<Drive Impulse - Haken Form>

"Are the sisters Alicia Testarossa wanted - the sisters ''I'' want."

It's not like there aren't people that are important to her already, Lera - Endo - Setsuna - so many of them fighting for their lives right now - but this is the reason she fights.

There's no hesitation as she flies at Shadow Stern, beginning to clash again, and again, and again, "I won't let you hold onto her any longer." She says with a certain ferocity. "You're so taken on proving your authenticity - that you've forgotten what's truly important!"

On the last attempt to clash against Stern, Bardiche declares at that moment- <Split Haken> - and the blade suddenly disperses at four different angles, flying past Shadow Stern, as Fate ducks in feint, to try and fly past, each of the blades suddenly flying towards Shadow Sky - hiding in the Auroral flash of Lera's spell.

... To try and strike the Device blade itself from multiple different directions...

<Get Set.>

Bardiche declares again... as if to punctuate the point he and Lera were making.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Impulse!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Aerial Ace on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Split Haken on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene de Diamant is subjected to one of the greatest indignities a young woman can experience: *aerial bombardment*. The bursts from Shadow Stern are ironic in a sense, for how often did she, in earlier phases and states, cheer in her heart at Endo's power?

But it is not just Endo Naoki's power. It is also the power of Fallen Stern. And this is, it seems, destined to be a battle twinned in the mirror. The blast strikes her, staggers her, brings her in fact to her left knee for a moment. But Shadow Stern does not cut her to the quick. Shadow Stern, like Fallen Stern, has a certain laconic power - but is not likely to madden la Sirene de Diamant.

You know who is? Jail Scaglietti. As she lurches back upwards, she looks at him. He speaks of the Sea of Tears...

And then he gives her a taste of her own medicine.

Ah, she thinks on some level over the black scribble-cloud of fury that is already enucleating in her heart: so this is what it's liked. She lurches backwards, forced to balance on the leg already partly bent when Jail's angling of the stolen charm threatens to throw her onto her back. The diamonds on the soles of her shoes scrape and throw sparks even as Kyouka, perhaps, saves her with her incoming blow.

She can feel her heart lurch. The doubt in herself she has wrestled in myriad ways sees, perhaps, an opportunity and lurches out. La Sirene reaches out for a rope, and it is JAIL who offers her one, with a single word.

"... Dull?"

She raises her head. Hair spills over one eye.

"... DULL?!"

"You steal the magic of a thousand worlds through an intermediary... you make living beings, PEOPLE, to serve as your tools, not through accident but on purpose... you call yourself the lord of all magic, like some sort of ultimate god... and now you complain that the girls whose hearts have stood against your efforts, who have been the biggest train brake on your campaign of cruelty, are DULL!?!"

Her lip curls upwards. She keeps shouting.

"Was all of this just for your entertainment?! Our sorrows, our lives, our struggles -- did you just want to see COLORFUL LIGHTS FLASH FOR YOU!?"

Her eyes are wet and she doesn't let herself stop raising her voice or raising her hands because she saw that immense flame burst outwards, profane and secular but still an enormous burst of fire to Cure Black and Cure White.

Both hands raise upwards, fingers spread out. Grandiloquent. They shine. The black diamonds on the back of her hands sparkle strangely. "Then here!" A flick of her hand, throwing unlight like splashing water - it coruscates with a strange inner sparkle on its way to Jail, striking with the leaden force of storm-whipped heavy water.

"Have it!" Another stroke in the air.

"All you can take! All you can SEE! Come on, you liar!! If you wanted a fireworks show you could have just ASKED!" Each emphatic statement coming with a step towards him and another of those bursting flicks. It's really quite a dismissive gesture. (The part of la Sirene de Diamant that looks around, notices, *thinks* about what she's doing doesn't want to look too brightly towards the others. Please, all of you, despite this all, please be alright--)

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Carbonado Kaleidoscope on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo speeds forward as stars rain down from the sky, explosive bursts of magic rattling the ground around the knight. His most pressing issue is, however, the imminent head-on collision with the other (friendly) giant sword wielder engaged in the chaotic melee.

<BECAUSE I AM GREATER THAN YOU.> Fallen Stern responds helpfully.

"Mikoto!" Endo raises a fist, calling up the familiar purple barrier that he's deployed before. It is not meant to deflect his friend, preciselyit won't be the most pleasant landing at the speed they're both moving, but with Mikoto's cat-like liquidity and defiance of gravity the shield becomes more than just a barrier.

It becomes an orbital Mikoto launching platform.

This too is magic Endo knows, though his propulsion is usually used for his own benefit. But now, with an explosion of light, it is granted to his good friend as a helping hand.

<SPEAK.>

And of course, he follows in her wake.

<WHILE YOU CAN.>

COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to dodge Fate Testarossa's Aerial Ace, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Fate Testarossa is
Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 22 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Split Haken, taking 18 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Black Sky claims to serve no masters, but yet hails Jail as a King. <<Yet you would hail Jail Scaglietti as a King. He values the autonomy of noone except himself. Can you be certain he will not take control from you if it would suit his aims?>>

Crescent blades of light come for her, and Kyouka thrusts her hand forward as she chases her attack. Strike Wolf shouts, <<Defenser+>> and a barrier appears to halt the brunt of the attack, blades exploding against barrier. Some of the energy breaks through, tearing at Kyouka's barrier jacket but she does not sop her running.

<<We are meant to work in concert with those who share our goals, not to enslave others to achieve them.>>

Kyouka grins. "Couldn't have said it better myself, buddy."

She follows up with a driving kick up towards Jails's gut, driving her boot in as far as it will go--but she hears the words 'Lunar Impact' and Kyouka's gauntlet is already starting to glow as she pushes herself away from Jail. But not too far--she inverted upside down to deliver the kick, but she continues the flip and rights herself, and her blazing gauntlet swings upwards to meet Jail's fist, as twin explosions of violet light clash and duel for supremacy.

Kyouka is hurtled away, plunging towards the ground as she twists and just barely rights herself. She slams into the ground, a spiderweb of cracks erupting all around her as great chunks of earth are dislodged haphazardly. "You know... it took me a ''lot'' of work to learn how to do that..." she says with remarkable calmness as she struggles to an upright position.

"Finding out magic was real... finding friends I could trust to show me how all this worked... facing dangers I couldn't even imagine a year ago..."

Kyouka rolls a shoulder as she stands fully upright, looking right up at Jail. "And learning what it was I ''really'' wanted: to defend people, and to be a magical girl. And if you think you can just... ''copy'' my attack..." She sets her stance again. "... Then why don't you copy ''this''!"

From the ground she extends her hand upwards, summoing a slowly-spinning violet circle in front of her. A ball of violet-white energy qcuikly grows in front of it, and when the right opening presents itself, Kyouka shouts, "Fire!"

w<Blast Fang.>

The ball ''explodes'' outwards in a sharp lance of light. The piercing beam of bright light represents something she and Strike Wolf were simply incapable of doing before, but now... whether it be by Strike Wolf's recent upgrades, or Kyouka's newfound confidence, they are capable of it, together.

Almost immediately a circle springs up at her feet, and a bright sheen of violet light washes upwards over her body. <Sonic Blitz.> She suddenly takes off like a rocket, blurring into motion. She drives one attack home at Black Sky, then rebounds, and in mid-air kicks at the air to rebound forwards, attacking Black Sky from another angle. Again and again and again, attack, redirect, rebound, attack, trying to pepper as many hits as she can.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Blast Fang on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Sonic Blitz on Black Sky.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

La Sirene's unlight streams in to aid Mikoto, as well; they are both, after all, daughters of obsidian. "La Sirene!" She calls out, and then -- "Endo!" -- because of course he would not leave her to Shadow Stern alone.

She is forced to endure Black Sky's bindings, but she's able to struggle free of them and slash -- just in time for Shadow Stern to jet upwards. "Huh?!" Mikoto yelps, finding herself careening for ''Endo,'' instead -- but luckily, quick thinking from him summons a barrier. She plants her feet on it, twisting to land feet-first instead of sword-first, and kicks off of it to leap into the air after Shadow Stern.

She can't fly, but with Endo's help, she doesn't ''have'' to.

"Who's first?! Who cares!" She cries, to Shadow Stern. "Fallen Stern is Fallen Stern! And Fallen Stern's our friend!" She swings her blade, mid-air, to strike at him -- and she ''is'' aiming for the blade, not the girl -- before what comes up inevitably must come down.

And she angles herself to come down right on Jail, blade-first, swinging it down in an overhead arc which physically swings her from aft to stern like a clock's pendulum. (Or, perhaps, to Stern?)

"Not YOUR object!" She cries, on his fascination for the Sea of Tears. "And they're NOT DULL!" This, on the Pretty Cure. Even Mikoto knows that dull isn't a synonym for blunt-force trauma, which is, in fact, true, and also hurts, he should really pay more attention to getting punched.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has started a combo targeting Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Devastation on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Nori has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has joined the combo started by Mikoto Minagi!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 29 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Blast Fang, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 17 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Carbonado Kaleidoscope, taking 3 Fatigue
damage! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Black Sky neatly dodges 20 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Sonic Blitz, taking 5 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: COMBO! Mikoto Minagi and Endo Naoki have used Combo: Black Blade Bond, composed of Obsidian Blade: Dynamo and Asteroid
Eilen, on Shadow Stern.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black and Cure White briefly flail as they miss Black Sky, but reset their posture to land all the harder on Jail. When their momentum is expended fully (and not a second sooner; they follow through quite deeply with the kick), they rebound off, backflipping in synch to land neatly on the ground.

"Physical training can be a field of study too!" Cure White scolds Jail heatedly.

"Yeah!" her jock partner hurrahs.

"Spatial intelligence is a kind of intelligence!"

"It's true!"

"There's nothing boring about someone who has the discipline to train their body, and if you're unable to apply the scientific method to your observations of them, that says more about you as a scientist than--"

"Cure White, I'm getting really embarrassed!" Cure Black wails.

Perhaps there is something to having a deeper repetoire of magic attacks than just Marble Screw, however. A shield or counter-blast might have fared well against a huge, billowing plume of flame like Fire Soul, but it is rather hard to dodge, and attempting to block it still leaves one standing in the oven. Nor can Cure Angel Passion shouting their names, however sincerely, fend off what is coming. Cures White and Black cry out together, stumbling back, but the fires do not end swiftly, and one by one their cries rise in both volume and pitch at some point, when resistance becomes an agonized capitulation. When the flame gutters out, both girls are left flat on the ground next to each other, their raiment sizzling, cigarette burns pocking their skirts and arm-bracers.

"Cure White," Black rasps. White rolls over to face her, and Black smiles. "Your hair is okay."

"Is that what you were worried about?"

"I thought some of it might burn off..."

Cure White smiles. "Is it all here?"

"Yeah."

"Are you glad?" White reached out her hand.

"Yeah." Black touched her singed fingertips.

"Then I'm glad too."

Rising off the ground, the two Cures supported each other's forearms, such that it was unclear who, if anyone, was lifting whom. "Sorry I stopped you earlier," Black said. "You want to finish what you were saying to Jail-san?"

"Yes."

"I'll keep you clear."

The Cures launched into action again, stretching their fire-nipped limbs. At first, they remained side-by-side, feigning that they might strike Jail together again. But as Cure White vaulted into a handspring, Cure Black peeled off to the side, planted herself between Black Sky and Jail, and cocked back her arm in a motion the Dark Zone had learned to fear.

"HAAAA-CHA-CHA-CHA-!" Cure Black began to hammer out kiais as fast as she was hammering out punches, both hands unloading a constant spray of fists.

Meanwhile, Cure White flipped out of her handspring, her axial motion bringing her torso into contact with the juncture of Jail's shoulder and arm. The jockeying for control over the limb is something of a feint; the mere conflict is enough to provide counterleverage, and the moment White's feet hit the ground, she drives the rear foot back hard enough along the floor to drive up dust. The back of her boot shoots into and, hopefully, through his.

If she knocks his feet up, that grip she's fighting for on his arm will get a lot more functional, really fast.

COMBAT: Shadow Stern perfectly braces 89 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi and Endo Naoki's Combo: Black Blade Bond, taking 0
Fatigue damage! Critical Brace! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 40 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Devastation, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Critical Hit! Critical Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Black has used White's Test Subject on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Hundred Fierce Fists on Black Sky.
COMBAT: Cure White accepts Cure Black's White's Test Subject, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure White is Reinforced by
Cure Black!
COMBAT: Cure White has used Black's Locks on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Cure White has used Heaven and Earth Throw on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Black accepts Cure White's Black's Locks, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Reinforced by Cure White!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 15 Fatigue damage from Cure Black's Hundred Fierce Fists, taking 23 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure White's Heaven and Earth Throw, taking 61 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine hesitantly thumbs up both Westie and Lera!? Is this something really that praiseworthy in the middle of a fight before she goes bug eyed at 'amazed' and has to cover a snort giggle with a hand.

Pine's hand rings against Jail's conjured shield with a ringing shockwave, surprised as the shield looks familiar, but then remembering that he calls himself the god of magic. As she flies away, she has to shake her hand for a moment, surprised, even as the crossbow bolts fall from Shadow Stern's Galaxy Strum. Several strike her in the downpour, before a sudden burst of angelic glow disperses the rest coming for her.

Suddenly breathing hard, she frowns, "Don't you ever call them that." 'Dull.' that is. It is a descriptor she might accept for herself, but she takes special offense to the others - especially Black and Peach - as if he were calling them more stupid than boring.

Which White fittingly counters, as Pine blinks, at Black's wail, "Well... There's nothing wrong with her sticking up for you." Wait now is Pine admonishing Black too for being embarrassed?

And suddenly Pine flies up high - only to descend down at the exact moment Passion's final strike connects, with a kick aimed right at his collarbone... shining with the energy of her form.

"You've never believed in anyone else - have you?"

It's just a thought, a fleeting one, that this man cannot even begin to empathize with her struggles, their struggles - he's never had to struggle to believe in himself or what he was doing - at least in Pine's mind.

"... You have no idea what you're really missing."

Pine says with a look towards Passion and this brief smile even in the heat of battle, of trust - and belief. Because...

Magic was only what gave her the opportunity to meet someone like her - or Black - or White - or Westar... but the true wonder was never in that... but in finding people like each of them to share her life with.

COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used Seraph Strike on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used The True Magic Was the Friends We Made Along The Way on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion accepts Cure Angel Pine's The True Magic Was the Friends We Made Along The Way, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Cure Angel Passion is Reinforced by Cure Angel Pine!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 50 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's Seraph Strike, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit! Critical Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<< HE HAS LEARNED NOTHING, >> Shadow Stern tells Lera, dismissively; he actually tosses the head of his clone when Stern trash talks. Somehow, they walk through the shockwave and its debris alike, in midair, striding confidently from Belkan triangle to triangle. << BUT THAT WILL CHANGE... TODAY. >>

Something unexpected happens; asked for by neither Lera nor Endo, though both of them accepted it as a potential consequence of being able to go toe to toe with their dark counterparts.

<< RESONANCE DRIVE, >> Soaring Sky and Fallen Stern intone as one.

And Endo and Lera's vision swims. Everything goes sideways for a moment, then reorients.

In their vision, Black Sky and Shadow Stern have been replaced, respectively, by the Radiant and Umbral Knights.

"That's what we're still fighting for," explains Radiant, to Fallen Stern, who has invited them to speak.

"Yes," agrees Umbral. "Once we defeat you, Jail has promised to reveal the truth."

"We determined this to be a fair exchange," Radiant concludes.

Lera and Endo's allies enter and exit the vision as themselves; they can see Cure Black, for example, punch the flat of the Radiant Knight's blade about a hundred times; Fate's Split Haken fly in to clang against the shining orange energy blade; the gorgeously armored figure steps back -- is driven back -- by Kyouka's many rocketing hits and rebounds. And that leaves him no options remaining, none at all, when Aurora Burst Ray comes calling. He is blasted back hard, and falls, steaming.

And the Umbral Knight contends with an Endo-propelled Mikoto, who slams into the vast expanse of the flat of his own blade like a door slammed in her face. It's a big moment, sending a shockwave off of both of them, and though it may not provide direct satisfaction, it does open the door to his staggering back when Westar's fist connects with the hilt of the weapon, a big hit thus enabled; and then he is peppered again and again by Fate herself, birdlike, FLOCKlike, everywhere at once.

"What is truly important," the Umbral Knight muses, as Fate chides him, "Is power," and yeah okay that did sound like the 'real' Fallen Stern...

"What is truly important," the Radiant Knight counters from the ground, "Is Freedom." He seems to be chewing over Strike Wolf's argument, perhaps helped along by Lera knocking some Friendship into him. "Umbral, do you think we--"

"No." Umbral keeps racking up points as The Most Fallen Stern here.

---

A little bit away from all that, Jail still looks like himself to all eyes, including Lera and Endo's. Which is to say, like a hairless blindingly bright rainbow silhouette suffused with everyone's stolen magic.

And he remains potent. As best he can he prioritizes what he perceives as the greatest threats; really burns some calories, for example, to get the heck out of Miroku's path, and leaves some sweat in his wake for Mikoto to cleave instead. In his educated eyes that clearly is no sword and it is not dull at all.

And the vividly magical Cure Angels Passion and Pine, too, he defends against actively, conjuring up a blast of frozen icy mist (frozen icy NERD mist, if you know you know) to take the worst of the blows that are too fast for him to see.

There is, of course, no defense against Fate's words but his own indifference. It's a good thing that Pine is right about his never believing in anyone else. That means it can't hurt him that Fate doesn't accept him as a father, right? But he can still hurt her, perhaps. "The TSAB agent? Surely you jest, Fate-chan. You must realize she has only inserted herself into your life to surveil you. She's a parole officer, not a parent."

Kyouka's up next, and once again he flattens himself out of her way. "Copy? No. I took your magical essence into my very being. It is inscribed on the surface of my soul. And I will take this new spell too, upon your second defeat," he tells her. "It seems as though it was for the best for Strike Wolf to enter your orbit. No one would say that you are not hard working." In his sneering voice this compliment is extremely backhanded, but some amount of him really was impressed.

Which makes La Sirene's tirade all the more on point.

Was all of this for your entertainment?

"Yes," he says simply. Her rage, her tears... he catches them, along with her black diamond sparkles, with a barely forced serenity. "What higher purpose is there in this or any world, than one's own enjoyment?"

Beat.

"I know you're going to say friendship. Save your breath. Magic is greater than any friendship could ever be. It is more elegant than any relationship and more beautiful than any romance. True miracles are made with our own willpower, and by our own two hands. I will show you."

But Westar shows him first -- hitting him hard, and then hitting him harder.

"Disposing of you was one of Northa's better choices," he complains, wiping blood off his lips. "You should have just stayed--"

--suddenly, heaven and earth trade places. An instant later, he's flat on his back; all the air has been knocked out of him, and he will have to take a breath before he can continue.

But Cure White speaks first, with a silvery lilt.

"Ara ara, is something the matter?" she asks him. "That was just a simple application of leverage. Or do Midchildans just not bother to study ''physics''?"

---

The Umbral and Radiant Knights glance over at Jail, when he calls them. Well -- croaks at them.

"Stern. Sky. It's time to end this. Defend me for long enough, and all our accounts will be cleared to one another."

They glance at each other -- then at the magical girls -- who mostly see two Fate clones, rather than two ancient Belkan Knights, weighing their options.

But everyone sees the Linker Cores, canary-bright, emerge from their two chests. This has happened once before, with Shadow Stern. It seems Black Sky has learned from that technique.

"Very well," says Shadow Stern.

"We have to know the truth, no matter what," agrees Black Sky.

For these two, the best defense is a good offense. They split the difference -- Stern with an immense, spinning Meteor Absturz, his blade a column of violet light suffused by hints of the clone's own gold; Sky with more Inferno Slashes, each one trailing his carrier's soul's-blood in the afterimages.

And behind the wall of burning sharpness that the pair represent, Jail Scaglietti, The Lord Of All Magic, gets back to his feet.

And pink Midchildan discs appear like stars in the sky overhead. Each one begins to glow with a single, growing point of light -- light that streams as mana -- and there has been SO much mana released in this immense chamber -- recondenses out of the air like rain, and begins to gather.

<SoundTracker> Starlight Breaker - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVGaDYOnxzU

"I summon the light of destruction down upon the offenders," begins Jail, who, even with everything he's absorbed, requires the Aria to pull this off. "O Stars, gather, and become the light which pierces everything..."

He has no Device to mark the time. It's almost lonely, when the next thing he says, grimly, is--

"--ten."

The pink light on each disc doubles in size...

COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has used Meteor Absturz on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Westar.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Black Sky has used Inferno Slasher on Cure White.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa neatly dodges 48 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 12 Fatigue damage! Fate
Testarossa's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used STARLIGHT BREAKER: CHARGING on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick accepts Pink Moon Stick's STARLIGHT BREAKER: CHARGING, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is
Reinforced by Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion partially dodges 11 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 43 Fatigue damage! Cure
Angel Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine counters 29 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 29 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Black Sky is Psyched! Cure Angel Pine's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine's counterattack, Shining Reverse, partially gets through, doing 20 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Cure White cleanly braces 40 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 7 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Cure Black counters 12 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 37 Fatigue damage! Cure Black's Reverse
ability activates!
COMBAT: Cure Black's counterattack, Sen no Sen, partially gets through, doing 7 Fatigue damage to Black Sky! Critical Counterhit!
COMBAT: Lera Camry partially dodges 9 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 37 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 20 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 30 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar counters 11 Fatigue damage from Black Sky's Inferno Slasher, taking 33 Fatigue damage! Westar's Reverse and
Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar's counterattack, Cross Counter, partially gets through, doing 10 Fatigue damage to Black Sky!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi dodges 23 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 35 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki dodges 36 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo Naoki :|a

COMBAT: Endo Naoki perfectly counters 56 Fatigue damage from Shadow Stern's Meteor Absturz, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical
Counter! Endo Naoki's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Meteor Absturz, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Shadow Stern!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera's eyes widen as she sees Black Sky and Shadow Stern replaced by the Radiant and Umbral Knights. Or, perhaps, they always ''were'' some remnant of them. She sucks a breath in; how strange, to see them, after seeing through them.

"You can't trust Jail," she says. "He'll use you. He ''is'' using you, y'know?"

Those words fall on deaf ears, though -- as she sees the Linker Cores in each begin to grow bright, at Jail's demand. Her eyes widen.

"Stop!" she cries out. She tries to wheel back -- the blazing slash from Black Sky forcing her backward. Lera exhales, sharply, and then she swings up Soaring Sky. She glances at Endo.

"We have to stop him," she says. She looks at Black Sky. Lera considers for a moment. She remembers a rooftop, years ago -- when Jaren Zastava struck her and Soaring Sky down. And she flies in, directly at Sky.

"Ground," she says.

<On it! Ready to defend!>

She swings back Soaring Sky, ready to strike...

...and flies past, her thrust seemingly missing at the last moment. It goes rushing by, as Broken Ground comes to life. The shield ''spins'' -- and then a hundred motes of light streak out, rushing behind her, and for Black Sky's back.

<Bombadier Cascade!>

They explode on impact, as Lera flies by, coming down for Jail Scaglietti. She swings Soaring Sky back, two-handed, and the Device has already split in two. The halves crackle, light crackling between them.

The lightning solidifies; it turns into a blade of light, which explodes outward and outward, into a sword nearly three times Lera's length.

"JAIL!" she shouts.

And she swings the blade down for him, with a mighty overhand chop as she comes crashing down.

<Aurora Galaxy Divider!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Bombadier Cascade on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Lera Camry has used Aurora Galaxy Divider on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion smiles at Lera. "I'm okay," she tells her. "Because we're together."

Sky chimes to her, and Passionc alls, "Right!"

She watches Mikoto, launched. She watches Westar, ''swinging'' as hard as he can. "Yes!" she calls to Westar. "Until it's done!"

La Sirene speaks. And Fate speaks of sisters. Passion understands both flashy lights... and sisterhood.

Thanks to Love.

"Go, Fate!" Passion calls, and she looks to Kyouka, too. A hard worker she is. But it's backhanded from ''him'', and Passion scowls.

"That's right," Passion answers Pine's call. "...What you're missing... You don't understand anything that matters."

She believes in Pine, too. Their happiness... is together.

"Jail is just using you," Passion assures the devices. "...It's his way. Just like so many others. Anything you think you can get from him is just the scraps he's willing to spare."

"I once thought power was all that mattered, too! But it's not! Power only lets you stretch as long as your own arm--it's working with others that lets you go farther than you ever could alone! Even you see it--the way you work with one another!"

But Jail--

Jail is closer to Setsuna, and she can't just shout across the battlefield at him--he's too close for that. But not so close that Honoka can't argue, and Passion answers, "Lera does fine with physics. I think it's just him." And he speaks of enjoyment...

"...Then I'm going to 'enjoy' wiping that smugness out of your mouth!"

"WESTAR!" she calls. "Let's smash him!"

She knows exactly what that magic he's summoning means. And she knows the immense Meteor that crashes for her could end her fight. She blinks out of existence again, but the ''gravity'' of that meteor is sufficient that she's panting for a moment when she reaches the other side. It took that much to evade.

Passion remembers, too, when Lera fell from that rooftop so long ago. She remembers. It was so important to everything that would come after.

But she said she'd enjoy what she's about to do--so she gets ready. Passion, wings extending outward, rears back her fist and starts to charge up energy. "Haaaaaaahhh--" Just like the move she used on Peach so long ago, but many times more radiant. Infused with the power of Labyrinth's belief, Passion's arm becomes a sublime thing, and crimson light gathers at her fist.

"Pine! Peach! Berry!" she calls.

"We'll stop him here!"

Passion's light extends to some times her size, and she ''rushes'', wings outstretched to catch the wind, crashing towards Jail with all her might.

and all her hope.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Angel Passion has used Passion Drive Fresh on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Fate's looks momentarily startled as both of them declare the activation of resonance. "But that means..." Fate doesn't see it at first, but in time it comes, in the midst of the melee, she hears him call to her. And indeed - it sounds like Stern. "... That's what I thought, once."

Fate knows that for how much Stern can be like that - that Endo will always call his name, and indeed - he's come to accept him in turn.

Indeed, Fate states it with the certainty of youth, "But as you are... my sister... will never call your name." The truth - seems a poor exchange in her eyes for that.

And indeed as Fate flies, clashing with them again and again, Jail sends her words back at her, for a moment, it stings - but only for a moment. "... Even if that were true... I wouldn't mind..." She doesn't believe it's true, mind you, but - there's acceptance in those words of the possibility that it's more than him trying to inflict pain. "...she's waiting for me."

Those words are possibly meaningless, but - once upon a time - Fate had a Mother... who always treated her homecoming with cruelty, viciousness, or apathy in turn.

'Go, Fate!'

Passion calls, and Fate gives her a look, and a nod - something unspoken, because...

<>

But are wisdom and tactics, enough? Well... they were for Nanoha.

As Shadow Stern comes at her with that harsh column of violet light, the powerful slash looks like Fate has vanished within it.

However... overhead, there's a subtle gathering - of clouds. It's difficult to notice at first, but as Jail begins the spell chant for Starlight Breaker, she calls out, "Nanoha learned that from fighting me again... and again... and again." And there she is, injured, the violet glow still dissipating off her barrier jacket, as she stands on several runic rings, gathering - one by one.

"She told me it was because my eyes looked sad... and she wanted the power to change that."

It is ''not'' something even close to the same power as what Jail is creating, not even on the same scale, or magnitude of existence, but it doesn't need to be, as firing rings gather on her arms one by one by one, a sphere of gathering energy growing as lightning crashes down from the sky upon - her, more and more.

However, Fate believes it doesn't need to be.

<Trident SMASHER!

His aim is to have others defend him after all, long enough for him to gather this incredible power. "FIREEEEEEE!" And so, she decides to disallow that, as the sudden titanic burst of power, not unlike Nanoha's iconic Divine Buster suddenly bursts towards him, in one great ray of power...

... and splits...

... twice...

COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Fate Testarossa has used Thunder Blade on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Shadow Stern closes the door on Mikoto, and Mikoto howls vengeance all the way down to Jail. "WE'RE power!" She screams, as she goes.

When is a sword not a sword? Miroku is Miroku, and it tries its very best to eat into Jail, but Jail's having none of it. She lands, and turns, dizzy, one-two step in a broad circle; her head rattles as she shakes it. "HEY!" She yells, glaring at Jail. "Lindy's role MODEL, not role OFFICER! Don't say wrong things!"

(It's entirely possible that Mikoto, noted delinquent, has never actually heard the term 'parole officer'. Why would she talk to a cop?)

"And don't talk down to Kyouka, neither!" Mikoto yells, because what she ''can'' tell, quite keenly, is when someone is being ''snide'' in their compliments. She's heard enough backhanded compliments of her own; she's not about to stand for it. "Jail thinks you're so smart! But Jail doesn't get it! Friendship's not enjoyment's enemy! I'm the best at enjoying myself, and my friends make me feel really good! Being alone doesn't feel good! Will and power just feel bad alone!"

She bristles, grasping her blade as she levels it at Jail. "And don't dare say Westar-senpai's better dead! Or Soular! Everyone's cheering for them, too--!"

Before she can strike him again, though -- they set out to settle their accounts. (Do they owe him money? Mikoto wonders, and then puts the thought aside; it's not important.) Mikoto remembers Meteor Absturz, from the worst day of her life; she remembers more than enough to realise she has to get out of the way, springing backwards with that same feline fluidity her cat friends taught her for so long to avoid the worst of the blow. She sees, as well, Black Sky's Inferno Slashes from the corner of her eye, just as worrying to her.

But Jail -- Jail has the most terrible plan of all.

"Don't!" Mikoto cries out, eyes widening. That she can think to at least ''try'' to tell him to stop is, perhaps, testament to how hard people like Fate and Setsuna have been working. But Mikoto knows he won't listen to words; he hasn't, this whole way through.

So she starts spinning, too, sparks flying on the ground as she establishes the perimeter of a 'disc' of her own. Once, twice, three times, and she plunges her dark blade into a white void which cracks open in the earth, her shadow splitting to two as she invokes: "MIROKU!"

It is no mere shadow of Miroku's power which assaults them, now. The obsidian spires which erupt from the earth, a hundred needles just waiting for the bower-bird, are firm as volcanic rock; the earth sunders and rocks, beneath them. They seek out Jail -- and keep moving; they violate the sky as much as the earth, as they seek out Shadow Stern and Black Sky, just the same.

When is a sword not a sword? When it's a Child.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Shadow Stern.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

For a moment, Westar is utterly dazzled by his allies. It's kind of a rare feeling, having allies in a fight (that aren't a giant monster he's commanding), and he's barely able to take in everything else going on. Endo and Mikoto's aerial assault, La Sirene's impassioned defense, Cure Black and White's flirting - it's all there, but Westar's kind of feeling a bit out of his depth. Shadow Stern became the Umbral Knight, and all Westar could think to do was keep punching the Device.

There's history with those two knights, but Westar already knows their opinion of him talking to them.

Jail's the big threat. Not just magically, but...morally, emotionally, all kinds of things. So Westar followed Passion's advice, and if nothing else it seemed to earn him a personal insult.

That one hurts. The betrayal of Lord Moebius - or Northa, or whoever - wasn't all that unexpected, but it was still a knife to Westar's emotional gut. And he's been wondering, since this fight started, if he even deserved that second chance-

It is immensely satisfying to see Cure White and Black suplex the man, and Westar cheers loudly for the duo.

Before he can try refuting Jail, Westar is beset by the Radiant Knight. He's not quick-witted enough to dodge the slash, his arms are shaking too much to block it - so he steps into it, punching at an arm to try to knock the blade away. The impact from the afterimages still makes him stumble, and as those shining stars start to gather overhead he considers falling back on his old routine.

Throw a quip at those opposing him, storm off, live to fight another day. That's what any commander in Dark Fall would do.

But that's not his job any more.

Passion calls to him, and the exhausted Executive looks up with a smile. "Right, Passion!" He doesn't run, again - stands where he is, stretching his arms to one side then the other, because Westar doesn't do magic very often and he needs to warm up.

"What higher purpose is there? Nah, I'm not gonna talk about friendship, 'cause I'm still figuring out what that means for myself. Gonna need some time, and you're in the way of that." He cracks his knuckles.

"I could say I'm fighting for donuts, or ice cream, or yakitori, or any of the other Earth foods I learned about - but that's that personal enjoyment thing, and I'm not giving you that." He rolls his shoulders, and there's the faint hint of a golden glow starting to shine - starting from his Data Diamond, but spreading.

"Northa and Moebius were wrong. If I say that enough, I think I'll start to believe it. That higher purpose? It's here. It's the people they ruled over, the city that woke us all up, the community." Westar takes a step forward, and slams one boot down on a piece of rubble, swinging one arm to point at both Knights and Jail as best he can - one than another, this is to all of them.

To everyone watching him.

"I am...Citizen WT-4029858! A Denizen of Labyrinth like any other! Westar of WT district!" He beams - grins as brightly as the glow of what magic he possesses, grins to Passion and Pine, to Mikoto and Fate, to every one of these people who fought him, to all his fellow Denizens - and he slams his glowing fist straight down into the floor, cratering it slightly.

The glow around Westar vanishes. He takes in a breath, fist still embedded in the floor, and then shouts.

"Western...MIGHT!"

Beneath the Radiant Knight, Umbral Knight, and Jail...Labyrinth's deepest floor explodes, golden energy pillaring up with a roar, a battering storm of the power once granted to a simple construction worker.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Black Sky.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Shadow Stern.
COMBAT: FINISHER! Westar has used Western Might on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xTzwdA4oAg - Corset Theme (TeddyLoid No Pan Night remix)

And he says

Yes

And for a moment la Sirene's face, lit by the myriad rays and spells thrown around, is simply, profoundly, utterly confounded.

"I -"

He's already prepared.

All of this, la Sirene thinks with a certain enormity that cannot resolve itself into an emotion that she could name. Did he plan for all of this? Her eyes lower downwards for a moment, even if Westar's smashing into him, followed by the cataclysmic impact of White and Black, bring a certain measure of hope.

"You've always got the perfect thing to say," la Sirene answers Cure White's statement, with a small smile. Then, with a sigh, she reaches to her left hand - no, her left glove - and unfastens the wrist snap.

It's funny, la Sirene thinks to herself as she slides the glove off her left hand, revealing the scar on the back of her wrist. She holds it in her left hand, raising the right glove to her mouth to use her teeth to unfasten its snap --

And that is when the infernal strike hits her in the back. This time, at last, she falls. It was probably overdue, even if she has always been staunchly difficult to actually fully and completely beat down. When the flame has vanished, the cream-white skin on the length of bare back her uniform reveals shows scuffs and blisters. The impact was enough for her to make her own crater.

The Siren of Diamonds twitches -- and puts one bare hand on the ground. She heaves herself up, and heave is the right term for it seems to be heavy. Surely she could not have grown in mass, and while that diaphanous aura around her *weakened* in the aftermath of the blow, it is coming back. Breathing heavily, she mutters to herself, "... Kozue... Argent..."

Pushing herself up to a kneeling squat, she looks over her shoulder, up towards the Belkan warriors. Be they small girls? Be they ancient knights? It matters not, it seems. As she stays crouched, la Sirene undoes the knot of her uniform's belt - the decorative silver rope on which the Brazen Pharos was lashed. She swings it into her lap, and does something very pedestrian -- she throws the gloves she took off away.

She throws them sort of in the general direction of Jail. One more towards his left, another towards his right. The one to the left landed gems-down... although if people are watching they would see it, despite being a flat garment of something like leather, flop over to rest on its palm.

While this is happening, la Sirene is staying in her kneeling position. She finishes her thought: "Take care of them." This may look like some kind of peculiar surrender, but she is fiddling with the Pharos. It can't be called anything other than fiddling. The brass-and-glass assemblage, and the piece of glistening obsidian within -- broken into a shape loosely resembling an elongated S, or an integral sign -- just sit there. Until she finishes adjusting something and the glass panels twinkle slightly and--

-- disappear.

At this point the unlight glow around la Sirene de Diamant seems to disappear, because those pieces of glass must have been deeply polarized. A glow that seems almost monochrome radiates out from it, and la Sirene grits her teeth a little, squinting against it. She pushes herself upright with a flexing of the legs and a jostle of the shoulders and raises her gaze to Jail.

"I count up," she tells him, before gripping the silver rope about eighteen inches up and spinning it around. The un-radiance outlining her doesn't really change even as she mutters to herself, "One, two," but it does seem to be spreading to her 'discarded' gloves, which have a very clear spherical bubble of that radiance ("three, four,") which is expanding, the black diamonds twinkling ever-swifter as the magic pours out ("five, six,") of the Pharos, now unshielded, and into its kin, the beautiful gems of the Sea of Tears.

Because, of course, that's where black diamonds came from in the first place: except the ones they've made in labs.

"seven,"

la Sirene counts as she tosses the Pharos into the air, snapping her right hand up to catch its handle and raise it up above her head. The piece of glass within it, without connection or material linkage, has stayed in its relevant position perfectly. But when she curls her hand down to let the ammolite-chased base bump her arm, it does tremble sharply once:

Which is when the three bubbles all BURST, pouring downwards with torrential force towards Jail Scaglietti. There is no sound, at first, and then there is something like the crash of a great wave, curiously far at sea, against a flat bed.

COMBAT: FINISHER! La Sirene de Diamant has used The Light That Never Warms on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Pine is truly relieved that she's not a Midchildan, and thus is exempt from revealing her Physics grade. Probably.

However, as Passion notes Lera does fine with physics, "Wait she does? I always thought-" Pine does not finish that thought, because it's a battle, and now she has to rethink things, but - she always thought that Secchan's girlfriend was... the furthest thing from doing appreciably well at science.

However, it's that moment that Black Sky descends at her, and in the whites of her eyes she can see the flames reflecting of the Inferno Slasher. Which is when her whole body is aglow, as she side steps and grabs that Wielder's Arm, even as the flames rise and burn her anyway... she speeds up, and then brakes as she swings her towards the ground in one titanic throw.

"Sorry!" She calls out to the girl in question, as she at least understands that she's not at fault. "But your sword was coming right at me!"

Jail's words however, she already knew that he didn't believe in anyone else - so she does not respond to that, instead... "What miracles have you made?" ... is Pine's simple question, as if to bring his whole thesis into question. "I don't see any."

However, she remembers that moment, when Passion drew breath again. That was perhaps the greatest miracle she'd ever seen, but despite it all, she knows now she lives greater ones.

Passion calls for him to be smashed, to enjoy wiping that smugness off of his face.

'Pine! Peach! Berry!'

Pine, suddenly takes off with one great flap of her wings, and as she arcs around, building up momentum - she flies towards the Starlight Breaker like Icarus too close to the Sun.

Faster - and faster - it feels like her wings might melt off, but she's infused by a belief greater than her own in herself - than in the people in her life - but in Labyrith's belief in something - better and greater than what they'd been shown their entire lives.

Eas drew breath again and became Passion.

If they can do that?

A light, reflecting in the Pink Glow, the moment Passion crashes against one side of him, Pine rams into the other.

And caught between them - she hopes to show this entire world what miracles actually look like.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Angel Pine has used Moving Mountains on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo blinks, his face scrunching up tight as his eyes refocus on the Radiant and Umbral knights. The explosion of color and magic don't help either, but he reorients soon enough to offer up a defense against the whirling blow delivered by Shadow Stern.

The two blades meet, as they have before. An enormous collision of two unstoppable objects, a resounding crash and space-shaking impact. Endo swerves backward, bones aching.

"That might be fair to you," Endo counters, "But not to anyone else! And if all you care about is yourself--"

<YOU STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND.>

Endo gives a nod to Lera when she calls out, the floor of magic drawing his attention from the knights to the far larger threat looming. "Got it!" He calls back, reorienting to focus his attention on Jail.

Power still flows through his barrier jacket -- his soul -- more than he's ever felt before. More than enough to call vivid and destructive magic once more. Purple-black radiance cocoons Fallen Stern once more, swelling and expanding into a burning tower of magic as Endo raises it up skyward once more.

"Hey!" Endo calls.

Passion's words cut to the core. Jail says true miracles can only be made with your own two hands, but any device wielder should know: miracles aren't possible without someone else.

"If you think so... prove it!"

The sword comes down. An orchid pillar of magic follows.

<STERN BRECHER.>

COMBAT: FINISHER! Endo Naoki has used Stern Brecher on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure Black had thought this fight was all smooth sailing after Fresh Precure became Angels, but the raw power Jail has gathered to his side is daunting. Things are going all right, but without that extra Angel power, it might not be.

"Cure Passion and Cure Lera are pretty close, mepo! You can really tell they've been together a long time mepo." The dream of Nagisa's mis-Cureing of other girls lives on in Mepple's freudian slip.

"Don't they remind you of anyone, mipo?" Mipple titters.

"Mipple!" Cure White discourages her shyly.

"This really isn't a good time," Cure Black scolds Mepple.

"Us, of course!" Mepple and Mipple sing together. Cures White and Black sigh in a mixture of relief and varying distaste. Cure Black's is notably stronger.

"Gross!" Cure Black says, stuffing Mepple's face back in his pouch with her finger so he can't blow kisses over towards the pouch on Honoka's hip.

"Don't say that about Cure Angel Passion's heartful romance mepo!" Mepple snarks slyly. "Cure Angel Passion, did you hear what Cure Black just sa--!!"

Cure Black clamps her hand fully over her Commune, smothering the fairy's objections. Her eyes wander over to Cure White's face, however, with all this talk of love going on. When she finds Cure White already looking at her, she glances away immediately.

Mepple forces his head out from the crook of Cure Black's hand. "Do you at least want to DODGE, mipo?" he barks out a warning. But Cure Black is no novice magical girl anymore. She had already been setting her feet as Sky's fiery Inferno Slasher blades began to reap around Cure Angel Pine and La Sirene.

"Not really," she says. And cocking her fist back, she meets the first slash to reach her with a sharp, precise punch of her own. Dancing back and forth, shoulders loose and improvisatory, Cure Black shoots her fist out to meet each attack. "Hup... hup... HAH!" she shouts, connecting each time, deflecting and diverting. When the Device moves on to attack Westar, Cure Black pants, appearing for a moment triumphant. But her eyes water, and she brings her fists close to her mouth. They are scorched and cut, the knuckles bloodied, and the arms that support them are striped with softer welts of energy damage, from being near the swings but not touching.

Gently, Cure White covers both fists with her palms, sealing them from the sting of air. She, too, was wounded from the attack, but she bears up with dignity, as if her snow-white raiment were made of steel instead of lace and silk. "Does it hurt badly?" she asks, concerned.

Cure Black smiles. "Not anymore."

Cure White's pale complexion undergoes a subtle alteration.

"Cure Black is just being a baby so Cure White will fuss mepo."

"So noisy!" Cure Black shouts at her own waist. "Will you just pull your weight down there?"

"Hmf! Mepple just doesn't understand the tenderness of a young girl's heart-mipo!"

Cure White glances downward, seeming the slightest bit relieved by the distraction -- and the excuse to look away. Her earlobes are as pink as the hearts on the back of Black's fists.

"There will be plenty of time for all of that later," she murmurs, and if she fails to clarify her exact meaning, no one can mistake its sweetness...

OST - Heart to Heart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFl-scy87fs

As the ladies depart, the tomboy and fluffboy exchange a wide-eyed glance. 'What' Black mouths, and the stub of Mepple's torso sticking out of the clamshell enclosure shrugs. Tongue-tied, Cure Black watches Cure White precede her for a few steps. With a ripple of long black hair, Cure White looks back expectantly (and somewhat confused), and Cure Black hastily jogs to catch up. One might expect this brief teenage frission to provide a distraction in the coming moments. But the truth is quite the opposite.

The fight that Futari wa Pretty Cure takes to Jail Scaglietti is a storm out of a clear sky. White leads with a high kick to the head, with Black sweeping the legs, and both rotating through in opposite directions to close on Jail's torso like a pair of scissors with their heels. His counterattack splits them like a sword slicing through water, sending them both to opposite sides to test how ambidextrous Jail can be against two skillfully punching arms from both sides.

This level of exceptional coordination and martial skill is dizzying to watch, but not unusual for this duo. But those who know them will be surprised to see the cooperation to continue to deepen and extend. Cure Black hurls a right hook at Jail's face, leaving herself wide open, but the counterattack she ought to have earned herself is blocked with effortless ease by the sole of White's boot, as if the long-haired girl's leg was another of Black's limbs. Seconds later, the arm Jail tried to plunge into White's grip to crack it open like a key is stopped promptly when his elbow hooks right into Black's. They drag him in opposite directions, and whichever one he reaches for to try and dislodge them, the other one charges him the fee of a kick to the ribs, a punch to the armpit, a palm strike to the back.

As their trust in their rhythm continues to grow, their cooperation grows more ambitious. Cure White commits to a full out, double-legged kick, with the sort of maximal violence and speed that abandons all hope of recovery, and ought to have left her belly-flopping the ground hard enough to stun her for a moment. But as she starts to drop, Cure Black catches her like a princess. Grabbing around Black's neck, White waits a split second as Black dips her down, then tosses her up, using the momentum to swirl around Black's head lightly. She catches Black's shoulders as she falls, as if she were about to execute one of her wushu-like smooth throws. As Black kicks one of her knees up, all that momentum from the throw twists her body, and the spin kick she doles out whips across with unnatural force, as if Cure White had spun her like a top.

Black lands on her feet facing one way. White lands on her feet back-to-back with her. Both already have draw their palm back deeply.

"HAAH!" they sing harmony for one another, their palm strikes pounding out at the same time, with the finality of a judge's gavel. Yet they are NOT finished, not quite.

Cure Black steps through the blow to deliver a deep, straight, karate punch similar to the first blow, while White slashes a knife hand over and across it. Step by step, they advance, fitting their limbs into each other as if they had practiced it a thousand times, slotting their blows into the space left by the other, creating physical math problems with no good solutions each time they select two increasingly inconvenient places to block at once.

Finally, spectacularly, the two girls blindly reach up, interlocking their fingers behind Jails neck to execute an exotic two-person triangle lock. Drawing back their free hands, they palm strike his restrained chest together. When the blow lands, their two pinkies are every so delicately crossed.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Black has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Black and Cure White have used Heart to Heart on Pink Moon Stick.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka doesn't see the images of Umbral and Radiant, though she would recognize them if she could. But as for 'truth'...

<<Is the truth you seek worth causing all of this suffering?>> asks Strike Wolf, simply. <<The freedom you seek will come with a heavy cost.>> He further remarks to Black Sky (or Radient, whom he cannot see.) <<If freedom is what you desire, these protectors would help you secure it.>>

"You got that right," adds Kyouka as she lands from the last of her flurry of strikes against Black Sky. "If you guys can think for yourselves, then... you can make choices too. Strike Wolf and I are ''partners'', not 'User' and 'Device', because both of us chose that. And we'll fight for your freedom too, if you're not trying to take away other people's freedom in the process."

Kyouka ''really'' doesn't have the patience for the semantic particulars that Jail is laying out for her. (She knows the distinction is ''important'', but also she doesn't care.) "Fine. Then you ''stole'' it. It might be written on your soul, but you don't know a thing about what I went through to learn it."

She blinks. Strike Wolf in her orbit... "What does ''that'' mean?" She sees the way the comment is backhanded, but... she can ignore that. There's bigger mysteries afoot. But mikoto, it seems, can't. She comes to her defense, and Kyouka can't help but grin a little. "Thanks, Mikoto."

He's quick to mock the idea of friendship, but Kyouka can't let that one go. "Without my friends, I wouldn't be the magical girl I am now! They reached out to me, helped me learn that... that I had a place here, that I wasn't alone." Kyouka brings a hand to her chest. "They've given me something to fight for, and helped me find my purpose." Passion, who reached out to her when she was freaking out upon first learning about magic. Fate, Endo, Lera, and Rena, who haev all taught her in various ways. Diamant, who's stood by her side against insurmountable odds abut was also quick to defend her home from a very pushy fox. Mikoto, always ready to do the right thing and stick up for others.

And she thinks, not for the first time, of Ivy, who literally held her heart in her hands.

"And my friendship with Strike Wolf, who I've come to trust with my life! So many things have changed since I met all of these friends, and if you don't believe that makes me stronger, if that's not its own kind of magic... then we'll ''show'' you."

Violet light comes from Fallen Stern, and Kyouka kicks into drive to avoid it, grunting as some of the flames catch her even as she pushes herself to her utmost.

<PoseTracker> Sonic Forces - Fist Bump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilr6lBqt-dM

But when she comes to a rest, several rings made of bright violet energy spin out from beneath her feet, Kyouka holds out her right hand, bracing it with her left. A ball of bright violet energy appears in it, it builds and builds, and as it does, winds whip up around Kyouka. Fiercer and fiercer they blow as she draws in power, as dust, loose chunks of earth and leftover vines swirl around her.

Brighter and brighter it builds, and it doesn't just build in size but intensity, growing from pure violet to a bright shining violet-white, power condensing further and further. And then her hand closes on it, and instead of drawing winds in they are suddenly forced away, sweeping the area around her feet clear.

Her gauntlet is shining brightly, and ''still'' it shines brighter, the outwards pressure growing more and more intense. Shimmering violet energy flows out over the rest of her body as she starts to shift her position. She moves into a crouch, her belt flowing chaotically behind her in her own outward pressure.

"Mooooooooonliiiiiiiiiiight...."

She ''jumps''--and the force of her takeoff is a shockwave that washes out over the ground as she suddenly rises--and then she winks out. In the next blink of an eye she is right before Jail as he continues his countdown, swinging her fist for that smug, stupid face for all its worth, ready to release all of that stored power, power born of her bonds with her friends and especially with STrike Wolf.

"BUSTER!"

COMBAT: FINISHER! Kyouka Okazaki has used Moonlight Buster on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Black Sky neatly dodges 28 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Bombadier Cascade, taking 7 Fatigue damage! Black Sky's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 70 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 47 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is
unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Black Sky fails to brace Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 76 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is unable to keep
fighting!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 66 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 44 Fatigue damage! Black Sky is unable
to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to brace Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 118 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 61 Fatigue damage from Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 50 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern braces 62 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 41 Fatigue damage! Shadow Stern is
unable to keep fighting! Shadow Stern's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 62 Fatigue damage from Fate Testarossa's Finisher, Thunder Blade, taking 51 Fatigue damage! Pink
Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 42 Fatigue damage from Westar's Finisher, Western Might, taking 34 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon
Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 148 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 91 Fatigue damage from Cure Black and Cure White's Finisher, Combo: Heart to Heart, taking 136
Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Nori has not concluded their actions. Reactions are not yet available.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace La Sirene de Diamant's Finisher, The Light That Never Warms, taking 147 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Angel Passion's Finisher, Passion Drive Fresh, taking 281 Fatigue damage! Critical
Hit! Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Cure Angel Pine's Finisher, Moving Mountains, taking 144 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick
is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Finisher, Moonlight Buster, taking 150 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Lera Camry's Finisher, Aurora Galaxy Divider, taking 204 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to brace Endo Naoki's Finisher, Stern Brecher, taking 185 Fatigue damage! Pink Moon Stick is unable
to keep fighting!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.
<SoundTracker> The Colour out of Space - NINGEN ISU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JY89ZxVqEg

What happens next, happens as it is supposed to happen. We all know how the story goes.

"Nine," counts Jail, his pink mana globes doubling again in both diameter and brightness, an exponent that is really going to get out of hand quickly. Any bonklers on site will be getting an object lesson in mathematics today.

But of course the girls are also here to deliver a lesson of their own.

Cure Black and Cure White close on Jail -- four arms, four legs, and one heart.

Black Sky and Shadow Stern launch forward to intercept, and--

"Eight."

Eight rhymes with Fate, but Jail makes no effort to engage with his so-called daughter. He is focused on the incantation. Sweat beads at his temple; he has never controlled so much mana at one time before.

Some kind of storm has been brewing outside the Tower for a long time now, but the one inside has no wrongness to it, no unfamiliarity. She knows the taste of lightning as well as that of her own blood. And now her enemies will too. It's a titanic act of skill, to split the bolt like that -- and it pierces both Dark Devices through and through. She cannot, of course, hope to spare the bodies of her sisters from such an assault.

But she knows from her own journey -- from the origins of Starlight Breaker -- exactly how much she is capable of surviving.

"Seven."

Seven is a mystical number. It is considered lucky in the West, and carries the weight of vast symbolism in a variety of mythologies.

The number three is also very powerful. Among its many meanings is that of maiden, mother, and crone. La Sirene has always identified as the former, while the madam she encountered in the Sea of Tears occupied more the latter two at once; matronly in claiming Nori Ankou as her own; ancient in her mystery.

But Nori -- du Nord -- de Diamant -- has grown, too, hasn't she? She is far from the girl she once was, at the beginning of her journey. Both Kozue and Argent had a hand in that, and so many others besides -- others present, and others absent.

What she is doing now -- the sacrifice she's making, the danger she's accepting -- is not the act of a child.

"Six."

Mikoto has maybe never been a child. Been allowed to be, despite the condescension of her classmates, who misinterpret her feral lifestyle as immaturity. Who misunderstand her utterly, sometimes. Really, how many people have ever acted to protect her ''childhood''? The most obvious answer is back on Earth.

That could be for the best. When is a child not a child?

When she's forced to bear the terrible burden of a Child.

Miroku's spires grow, and grow, and grow. They punch holes in the ceiling, opening up gray shafts of light from the surface beyond the vast open chimney of the Tower above. They probably punch holes in other things too, but there are so many, it's hard to see through them.

"Five."

There are four cardinal directions, but Westar has recently discovered a fifth:

Home.

A home that loves him. That cheered for him. And that didn't even mean Labyrinth until today.

Labyrinth, whose foundation he shatters with a touch.

Labyrinth, whose foundation was shattered by a donut.

No. Not by food. And not even by friendship. What allowed the Labyrinthinites to connect the feed, watch the fight, support the girls, and make a miracle?

It was strangers helping one another.

That doesn't make them friends.

It makes them, as Westar himself says, a community.

The golden light rises upwards.

"Four."

With charged fists the Fresh Pretty Cure rain down upon Jail like a rainbow of clover leaves; like a warm summer shower; like faith; like love; like beauty; like hope, and what comes after.

Because that's really the question they've been answering all this time, isn't it? Eas became Setsuna, and was saved, by the power of hope.

What comes after hope?

They do. Love, Buki, Miki and Setsuna. Their happiness is something they've gotten, one day at a time. One choice, to believe in one another. One lesson: to believe in themselves.

"Three."

Kyouka has two hands, two fists, and Strike Wolf makes three. But the power that grows between them -- between right and left, between girl and Device -- is more than the sum of its parts. THEY are more, have become more, than Jail or Clara or anyone could have imagined them to be. The spectacular jumps, the big swings, even the bright light -- none of this, really, is their crowning achievement.

She's never lacked the will, or the training, to fight.

But she says it herself: what she and Strike Wolf found, together, were people not only to fight with--

--but to fight for.

"Two."

Lera, the rare mage to possess more than one Device -- and even more extraordinarily, to help them become sufficient friends with one another that they can work in tandem together -- swings the blade -- her first Device, her closest companion -- over her head and down. Jail admires the idea of magic but he'll never understand the point of it. To him this looks like a spell relying on the transitive properties of an Intelligent Device to refine, extend and sharpen mana into a sword. But Lera knows better, what passes between her and Soaring Sky, when together, their aurora can divide even a galaxy.

"JAIL!"

"One."

Endo is a boy of few words -- though more than Fallen Stern, on average. Still, sometimes it is difficult to know where Endo ends and his taciturn friend begins. One of the things they have in common is that they sure know how to use them when it counts.

All he cares about is himself -- Jail still doesn't understand.

The pink globes are huge now, nearly touching. Bruised, battered, beaten, the mad mage is somehow still on his feet and still gripping his chest with the exertion of sustaining his spell. He only needs a moment to finish it. To finish it, and it will all be over.

They don't give him that.

Endo isn't a weapon and Stern is not a man, for all that the fallen forms of the Umbral and Radiant Knights, defeated by Westar, by Fate, and by Mikoto -- three heroes whose unique origins all do a great job of explaining ''why'' they have this capability, something that just made everything else possible -- the Knights still appear before them, a memory of a memory -- a dream of a dream.

So when the tower within the Tower, the great purple column that is Stern Brecher, falls, they do not fall truly as one.

The one that falls is Jail.

And, of course, he falls alone.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Jail Scaglietti moans from the floor. He's still alive, but only just. He still looks like a rainbow more than a person -- they haven't beaten the magic out of him, just beaten ''him''. But it is, surely, an excellent first step in that direction.

Fate's clones were blown clear of the Devices that used them, but they're still breathing, too.

It is very quiet.

It is ''too'' quiet.

At some point, the cheering... stopped.

It was safe to assume that everyone outside, horrified by the power displayed by the enemy, by the suffering of the girls, might have been shocked into silence.

Might have been collectively holding their breath, forgetting that their belief in the magical girls has ''already'' been outcome-determinate.

And in any case, the magical girls have been fighting for their lives and the lives of Fate's sisters and the lives of everyone on every world. They shouldn't blame themselves for focusing on their task.

And especially they shouldn't blame themselves for never having the chance to figure out what was wrong with those lightning flashes.

---

A FEW MINUTES AGO

Outside, Tarte and Azukina exchange looks as yet another bolt of lightning crashes... upwards. Like running a video in reverse, it sprouts from the ground -- is attracted to the tower -- and then explodes into the sky.

The last one was teal. This one is peach.

They are striking more and more frequently; never the same color, but always the same sound -- enormous, rending crashes. Thunder that isn't ''backwards'' per se, as the lightning's direction is; but, nevertheless, is also not-so-subtly incorrect. It's as though the space that it warps through carries enough sonic hell that merely three dimensions cannot account for all of it.

Tarte is much more seasoned in the art of standing on (...near) magical girl battlefields; Azukina tenderly grasps his paw.

"...is it...a good sign? Does it mean we're... winning?"

Tarte's uncharacteristic silence is its own answer.

---

NOW

Why did an asteroid fall out of the sky over Juuban Public School the night of the astronomy event? Why did Jail send Black Sky to intercept it?

Why did the Maiden of Dreams risk everything -- and lose everything, all evidence that she accepted, if not her total destruction, certainly the loss of a greater part of herself -- to deliver the golden skein to Earth?

Why did Jail seek Chiffon?

What drove Northa to drive her Knights first to depravity and then to revolution?

What destroyed Belka, the most powerful magical civilization of all time, at the very height of its powers?

What did the girls witness, the very first time they held a slumber party to unlock these mysteries in dreams?

...they defy description. If they have eyes, they weren't evolved in this universe to see, and look nothing like what eyes would be. If they have grasping claws, or tentacles, or spikes, it is only because of a certain higher order universality of violence. But any resemblance to recognition ends there. They are hard where they should be soft, and vice versa. They are dark where they should be bright, and dark where they should be dark also, but with strange, shifting colors that, like the rest of them, have not yet existed in this dimension until now, and therefore have never been named.

One swoops down through a Miroku-made skylight, and swallows Jail Scaglietti whole.

But there's never only one.

TO

BE

CONCLUDED

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

2024-11-30 - The Labyrinth Resurrections

2025-02-22T15:49:47Z

Pink Moon Stick:

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Resurrections'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''As the Queen of Belka falls, Jail Scaglietti rises. The magical girls find out who they would be without magic -- and with a little help from unexpected friends, remember who they are with it.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Jail Scaglietti]], [[Soular]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Yumi Ohzora]], [[Raiko Takashima]], [[Mami Tomoe]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Mai Tokiha]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Ginka Shimizu]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Westar]], [[Inori Yamabuki]]

GM: Pnk Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Dark Realms
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
11/30/2024 - 6/17/16
|-
|}

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Dark Realms +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
Light cannot exist without darkness, nor darkness without the light, or so
some claim. Whether the Dark Realms are simply the Fairy Realms through a
mirror darkly is difficult to ascertain, but it's undeniable that some
realms in either domain lack an obvious counterpart in the other. Certainly
the ceaseless war between bright virtue and dark evil gives little heed to
the notion that ultimate victory is impossible.

Indeed, a given realm of darkness will often commit itself solely to
extinguishing the light forever. With names like Minor Land, Labyrinth and
Dark Kingdom, perhaps that isn't all that surprising. Endless plains beneath
a midnight sky lit only by bolts of violet lightning harbor armies of
strange creatures, or yet stranger war machines. If there is water, it is
brackish, tainted. The air itself stabs lungs like a superheated knife. Some
denizens of the Dark Realms claim that they're trying to transform the
entire universe into worlds like their own, but colonizing more pleasant
environments might be sufficient motivation alone.

Black, too, has shades; there are many dark wastelands, but also dark
cities, dark oceans, dark forests, dark deserts, dark skies. Some are even
possessed of a loveliness all their own; as beautiful as it is deadly, with
shadowy landscapes that mesmerize before they surprise. No matter how
populous, all are pervaded by a sense of emptiness, of absence, masked at
times by swirling rage or despair, but never erased.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA

Lera is a child of the stars, by Earthly perspectives, but well has she internalized one lesson of her adopted home: that though roots can break rock -- rocks can also break plants. No matter how mighty, the vine cannot withstand the landslide. And she summons one, aureate and shimmering, to crash against the first layer of vines, to bury it. They fade back into the motes of magic from whence they came, but the damage does not.

Mikoto is next; adopted also, but not by Earth; Lera's perfect opposite, in some sense. And now literally, in their perfectly complementary approaches; where the Midchildan bludgeons broadly, the HiME pierces precisely; shocking, really, compared to how Miroku is normally wielded, normally seen. She targets not the wall itself but the response from it, as Northa seeks to mount a final defense through offense.

It will take Pretty Cure a long time to summon their full strength, and any single one of those vines might have laid a legendary warrior low. But none of the lush, jagged, and deadly appendages make contact -- not even one -- with anything but obsidian.

Kyouka materializes beyond that clash of titans, mid-swing, directly in front of the trunk. The explosion before her is so bright that she casts such a long shadow behind her; though her body is tiny in comparison to the immense column of power busting (bustering) forth from her fist, that just means she is power compressed, power made dense, power called forth. She feels the next layer of vines disintegrate on contact -- and a satisfying recoil, as she is propelled backwards, back amongst her friends, by the sustained impact of her moonlit magic.

La Sirene de Diamant has many missions. Some she was assigned and others she volunteered for. Some she bears resentfully, and others eagerly, but all of them dutifully. But one and only one has the distinction of being first; the first she was given, if not always the first in her heart. In seeking to claim Northa's sorrow, by right and by conquest, she is also seeking to REclaim the sorrow of everyone Northa harvested. So, so many people, across time, across space. And she can feel, as the starlette bursts against her hand, and streams into the wall, into the fallen Queen, that as she reduces each molecule of plant stuff into barest atoms she is also separating from Northa's engorged form, all Sirene's functions. And not only functions, not only sorrow in general, but... sorrow in particular. Northa has hurt Nori Ankou more than once, and dearly. Some of the sorrow she reclaims now is her own, cruelly stolen.

Six Pretty Cure, and one Knight, remain.

Marble Screw is a known quantity and an absolutely notoriously destructive grim reaper, ironic indeed for the channeling of the cosmic profundity of Creation itself. What is a mystery about it is how every time it appears, it is even greater than the last. How, through their darkest adventures and their softest normal lives, day after day, two girls become closer. Two girls fall more profoundly for one another. Two girls rise, hand in hand.

The Lucky Clover is a new miracle; one never before seen on this or any world. Perhaps, from the other side of the wall, Chiffon is helping her guardians help her. Or perhaps not. Fairies are not the only birthplace of miracles. And that which dwells not only within but more crucially flowers between Peach, Berry, Pine and Passion is assuredly as puissant a love as exists. Not every love is romance (nor every romance love, as some are unlucky enough to know). But the lack of romance here is no lack of love. The four girls know that deepest and most profound of magics: love is something that when you give it away, you end up having more. Their friendship has saved Eas' world. Their friendship has saved their own world, more than once.

And now their friendship will save every world.

The primal truth normally kept in the Garden of Light joins with the wondrous, musical finale born in the Garden of Rainbows, and with one other thing--

--the biggest needle in the world, held in the hands of the bravest boy. Endo Naoki, so like and so unrecognizably unlike the Umbral Knight; Fallen Stern, who forgot much of his old master and all of his old liege, perhaps as much in self-defense as in brokenness. Theirs is different than Fresh friendship; theirs is partnership, but different too from Honoka and Nagisa. They are together but they are not one. Stern is from the past and Endo represents the presence, but for the first time maybe ever, what they are forging together is not destruction; is not violence--

--it is the future.

Stern pierces the center (a center! at last!) of where the Grand Finale and Marble Screw roar against the last and toughest and oldest of the vines -- against a suffering more ancient and more desolate than anyone's -- and Endo PUSHES --

--and as the final wall is breached by his thrust, allowing the magic of Pretty Cure to surge through and then balloon outward, whiting out every last vine, every last leaf, everything --

--the future, it seems, is mercy.

One could not call the end of the Belkan Queen's sorrow anything but that.

<SoundTracker> Chiffon Awakens - Fresh OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG9b9pN7t8g

And, of course, there behind it all -- exposed at last -- is the first and final victim of Northa's kidnapping plot. Midchildans might call the contents of that vault the Linker Cores of both the ancient worlds stolen by the Knights of Belka, and of every modern world Labyrinth could reach -- which is to say all of them. Others might turn to the metaphor of the heart, and no one could be wrong to do so. To deny a world its magic is to deny a world its essence; a vital fragment of its very soul.

The Queen of Belka hid it so thoroughly that it took even the Pericosmic Array, the ultimate time-space observatory, thousands of years to find.

Hid her.

Not that the Queen ever shrank from the possibility of storing a Pillar -- a person -- for their own safety, but there's a sense that perhaps the Royal Vault was not always a baby lamb. That Infiniti became soft and cuddly and, for that matter, meaningfully sentient, because of what the Queen forced it to capture. To contain. You are what you eat... and Infiniti consumed the very essence of Shining Carousel of Talasta, and Dzhamura, and Valdamere, and Wirral-au-main, and the Demense of Jagged Waters, and Mor Cynddeiriog, and Old Phoria; those worlds that weren't reduced to dust at the hands of conquering Knights instead suffering a longer, slower execution as absent any warmth they became colder, and stranger, and worse than dead, before death finally claimed them.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," bleats the being that was, for a time, called Chiffon in the arms of her Pretty Cure. Who was changed by the warmth within her, and then, much more, by the warmth that they surrounded her with. Who was, in a way, born -- at the very least, reborn -- raised, cared for, for the very first time.

And who, now, as Labyrinth's energy source -- as Moebius' -- and as Northa's -- is once again nothing but a tool, with eyes empty blank black holes, radiating not love and not joy and not even sorrow but nothing -- nothing but power.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," the cosmic being repeats, dully; though now also forced to digest all magic from the Garden of Light to the Garden of Rainbows, she -- forced once again to be an it -- is beyond transformation, beyond ascension. Beyond reach...?

Not beyond everyone's reach.

"Come here," says You, coaxingly, with the gentle body of an innocent and the silken voice of a criminal.

From the sidelines, from the shadows, she walked through the wall of vines as quickly as the magical girls brought it down; step by step matched their layer by layer.

Her arms are thrust into the column of cyan light suspending Chiffon -- radiating from Infiniti -- and she isn't wearing a Barrier Jacket, she has no Device and no ability to transform, she's just a girl -- she's just a puppet. The sleeves of her robe disintegrate instantly; and the smell of fast-burning skin fills the air, stinking beneath the fading verdancy of what once was Northa. This body cannot possibly withstand the force of Infiniti, but it only has to for a moment longer, just a single heartbeat until she touches Infiniti, until she claims it for his own --

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Invisible Heat (Acoustic ver.) - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txf_64xFAp0

Sometimes you just aren't fast enough, you fly to catch up to everyone, but instead you find yourself... her. With that man's voice - reaching - reaching for...

Their precious charge

It's like looking into the Future tsaP

And at the sight the jungle warps and buckles as she races forward, arcing lightning spilling off of her like a brightly lit coil.

You look at yourself Reaching for Chiffon rehtoM ruoy gniyebO

There's not enough time, and time is one thing you can't make more of. Your barrier jacket detonates, all the metal shattering as it flies off of her and dissipating into light, wings so like Nanoha's appearing on her feet and wrist. Because as fast as she can be, she can still go faster.

Fractions of a second away and a life ends in Teal Light gninthgiL teloiV

The air screams around her as she hurtles towards it dangerously, even less protected now. Misjudging this even slightly will harm her too, maybe even end her life.

A life can Begin dnE in moments like these, did you know?

I know

Only you're not a mirror

You're not me

You're you

I want to see

Want to know

Who You Will Become

She can smell flesh burning, already from that light, unprotected as it is. Any longer, and it might cause her worse harm. It is the worst kind of puppetry, to take away even her own sense of self-preservation, to sublimate it entirely to infinite desire.

Make a small wish, hope that you can do it. That you can grasp her with your smaller hands, and hold her tight.

And in that moment, hands encircle her waist, as she barrels into her, to carry her away, out of that light momentarily searing her far too thin barrier jacket, as Fate cries only, "YOU CAN'T!"

It's unclear if she's talking to her, or to Jail, or even both.

She expects her motion to stop at any moment if he has active the Momentum Eater spell he used before. But she's so fast... maybe maybe... all she needs is one.

Just one.

Let it be enough.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Fate slams through the cyan pillar and comes out the other side with her arms full of You -- full of her. Her other self. Not just a clone of a clone, not to Fate. And certainly not a mere puppet. This is a sister. This is her big little sister.

And they are both still alive.

You blinks up at her through an unmistakably soft, cherry-red pair of eyes that have nothing of the coldness of her creator.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," bleats what was formerly known as Chiffon, yet again.

"Close," croons the criminal, from a new direction; a direction only lately occupied via a swift dimensional transfer. "You are infinite... and you are MINE."

The pillar of cyan radiance flicks off like a switch. But the darkness that plunges the vast subterranean cavern into is not, cannot be complete. Because the lingering energies of the magical girls are present like so many pretty candles, each a part greater than their rainbow sum. So specific and so beautiful, the violet born of Strike Wolf's contract with Kyouka's spirit, which is not at all like that of Endo and Fallen Stern; and in their differences, their distinctions, each is rendered more gorgeous still. So fiery and fierce, Sky and Ground in unison with Lera; so passionate and joyful, the ruddy crimson of Setsuna's heart. Very differently from one another, Nori's unlight and Mikoto's shadow span the spectrum well beyond mere roygibiv, but for all that Northa reminded Mikoto of her beginnings, and for all that Nori often feels different and apart, neither is dark as the Dark Realms are dark; both are very much themselves, girls shaped by sorrow but no longer defined by sorrow alone. Love is as lovely in pink as Miki is perfect in blue and Buki faithful in yellow, the yellow of the crocus, that brave first blossom amid the winter's snow, which is not at all the sunshine gold shining forth from the hair, and the heart, of Fate. Bracketing them all, the black and white of Nagisa and Honoka respectively represent the incredible void that awaits every color, and all hues at once, radiant beyond distinction; and they are pretty and they are pure, so long as they are together.

Together. Everyone is together, and everyone is a light.

And everyone's lights are swirling...

...streaming from them...

...draining away...

...into the four-leaf clover crest that adorns Chiffon's brow.

No. Not into her.

Through her.

Lord Moebius was as much a puppet as You, created to be the Lord of All Worlds.

But this man is self-made, at least in every way that matters to him.

Cyan light is weeping from behind his eyes, and drooling from the corners of his mouth, as he tosses his purple hair back and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, forced by Fate to finally be present in the flesh among them for the very first time:

"I AM JAIL SCAGLIETTI... THE LORD OF ALL MAGIC!"

He tosses what was in his arms at the feet of the girls and boy below him. It's as ordinary a thing, as mundane, as they suddenly are, have forcibly become.

A stuffed animal shaped like a lamb flops over, lifeless and dumb.

---

A small, ordinary life is among the most precious things in the whole entire world for a magical girl to protect, and under the blessing of Queen Serenity she fights for them every day, in their thousands, their millions, and one at a time; for her parents'; for her classmates'; for her friends'. But her own is usually the first thing sacrificed to the cause. How many times has she missed sports matches -- club events -- hobbies, interests, after-school meet-ups at the park -- because a youma or worse decided that it was a good day to attack? How many friends have drifted away as they discover she is mysteriously too busy for them now? Too unreliable? Too flaky?

Some girls find balance and some do not. Some are glad of the continuous interruptions and others resentful. For some, awakening to their destiny was the worst thing that ever happened to them -- and for others, the very best. Honestly, for a lot of girls, both are true at once.

One way or another a price is always paid.

But there are also treasures to be found. The people she met, the new friendships forged, drawn to strangers, far from her normal circles, who might have eternally remained so otherwise. The lessons learned, some in triumph and some in sorrow, about who she truly is when the chips are down -- opportunities in adversity that she might otherwise never have faced, for better and for worse. Truths about the world she lives in, some harsh and some beautiful. Often magical girldom makes one grow up too quickly and too soon, but not always; for some, it is a redemptive pathway, bent towards an innocence and purity they feared already denied them by that very same ordinary life. A purpose is a powerful thing to have.

Smaller wonders too. Like what Tokyo looks like at night from the rooftops. Or what she looks like in spectacular raiment her parents would never allow, let alone afford. The sound of a fairy's laughter. The taste of a miracle romance. The feel of a hand clasped tightly, standing side by side at the end of the world.

No one could ever be the same.

To have not just your magic but the ''memory'' of magic itself drained from you by Infiniti, and sucked up directly into Jail Scaglietti, is an astonishing violation. First you lose your transformation, which goes all to ribbons of light, then to nothing at all.

What do you lose after that? And what might you gain?

If your world had no gods and no monsters save money and mankind? If your childhood had diverged -- months ago for some, years ago for others?

Who are you, if you had never been a magical girl at all?

OOC: This is intended as a full cut away from Labyrinth; please show us your alternate universe life in situ, rather than as
amnesiacs at the feet of Jail (we'll get back to him later). We're not going to be here all night, you can expect approximately
one and a half rounds in your AU, so don't hold anything back!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka pours everything she has into the attack, feeling the next layer of vines disintegrate... and when she has nothing left to give she is flung back. She is sent flying, flipping over backwards to land in a 3-point stance that just slides backwards for quite some time, kicking up a cloud of dust and a spray of earth behind her. When she finally stops there is a long gouge in the ground in front of her, and then she sags, pitching forward onto all fours to catch her breath.

They are fighting a great injustice (perhaps including one Northa has inflicted as much on herself as on countless other worlds), but even so... watching the combining of so much magic, of love and duty made manifest... it's a beautiful sight, despite that.

But then You appears-- but it isn't You, it's Jail, and if he wants Chiffon that can only be bad news. ''Come on, Kyouka. Get ''up''.'' All of her muscles are burning with fatigue and exhaustion, trembling as she tries to force a foot under her. ''Just get moving. If you're fast enough--''

But who's faster than Fate? She comes tearing through the sky, and relief floods Kyouka's body as You is snatched away from her self-destructive task. As Fate saves her sister. "Fate!" she calls out, relieved.

Only to be plunged into fresh terror as Jail appears in the flesh. She cannot possibly know that face but yet she ''does''--because she owes it a sock to the jaw. But just as quickly that terror is giving way to despair as something starts to leave her. Something she's learned is so very intrinsic not just to her but the world. Bright violet energy streaming directly from her, the last scraps of her barrier jacket vanishing, breaking apart into motes of light. She reaches out to grab that energy, trying to reclaim it. Trying desperately to stoke that flame she imagines in her heart even as it slowly dwindles to embers and then... even the embers grow cold.

Tears are streaming down her face. "Y-you... ''bastard''," she spits out, with the last little bit of invective she has left in her.

He's draining their magic.

Except he isn't.

Because magic doesn't--

----

The campfire was lively, crackling with a gently radiating heat underneath a slowly darkening twilight sky. Kyouka sat, her back against a log, soaking up the warmth as she stared upwards, scanning the heavens for the stars as they slowly began to appear. Their campsite overlooked a beautiful lake, on they had caught their dinner from, in fact. And they were far enough from civilization that she knew the stars would just ''pop'', once the sun had fully set.

It was a sight she had sorely missed.

It'd also been far too long since she'd gotten to do this. She'd floated the idea to some of her new friends, and proposed a group trip with her fellow club members, but... they either hadn't been interested, or the scheduling didn't work out, or they ''had'' been interested until they realized just how ''serious'' Kyouka was about it.

Yes, it'd be real tents and real sleeping bags. On the ground. Yes, really, the ''ground'' ground. No, there probably wouldn't be internet access. Yes, that meant GPS too. A map and compass. Yes, really. What do you think they used before GPS? No, you'd bring the food with you, but she'd probably also catch some fish. No, you have to dress it first-- Well you don't have to ''watch'', then.

No there isn't even-- how would there be ''plumbing''?

She'd relented, eventually. It was just... easier to go with the flow. There'd been plenty of other group activities that were still enjoyable (and far more palatable to most of her peers), but it left her feeling... lacking, somehow, not to be able to share the experience.

Kyouka sighed, before taking in a deep breath to take in the smells of the outdoors, the remains of their dinner, the earthy scent of the soil, the fragrance of various trees and bushes in various states of bloom. She was dressed in jeans and a warm jacket, and her favorite hiking boots. Her long blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail, all the better for staying out of her face while working.

The crunching of leaves and a faint panting alerted her to the return of her father and pet dog, and she raised an arm in a sort of wave without looking back. "Hey."

Wolfy barked and ran forward, jumping over the log to get to Kyouka's side, nuzzling at her briefly before curling up to her side. Kyouka smiled and lowered her hand, giving the Siberian husky a few pets over his side. He was warm and comforting, and she rested her hand for a moment just to feel the slow rise and fall of his body as he relaxed.

Her father, Drew Channing, took the long way around, stoking the fire gently before settling in on Kyouka's other side. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with short blonde hair and the same bright blue eyes Kyouka had. "Heya, Kyou-chan," he said amiably as he ruffled Kyouka's hair. "Campsite looks good."

Kyouka smiled faintly, leaning against her dad a little as he settled in. "Thanks. Everything's cleaned up, I got all the food stashed, and the tents are all ready to go."

"Sounds good," said Drew. "So... how've things been going? I know it's been a while since we've gotten to talk like this, so... fill me in."

"Well..." Kyouka shrugged. "They've been fine, I guess."

"Just fine?"

Kyouka winced. She hadn't meant to say it like that. Her parents were putting a lot of effort into making this arrangement work for her. "Sorry, I... I guess it's just kind of a mixed bag? I love getting to explore Tokyo, but..."

Drew placed an arm around Kyouka's shoulders to give her a gentle squeeze. "Kyou-chan, if something's not working, feel free to tell us."

"Thanks," said Kyouka with a sigh. "I'm just... trying to figure out how to say this. I guess I just feel like... there's always been something... missing, you know? Like... sure I've made friends, but... I'm never around long enough to like... ''be'' in a place. Or even ''from'' a place. I go visit Grandma and Grandpa in the states sometimes but... I'm not ''from'' there, either."

"Mmm." Drew sighed as he considered Kyouka's words. "I'm sorry, kiddo. Your mom and I know this hasn't always been easy on you. We've tried to give you as much support as we could, but if it hasn't been enough, then... we're sorry."

Sliding her arm around her father's back, Kyouka gave her dad a hug. "Hey, no, you guys have been great. I just... whenever people ask me where I'm from, I never really know what to say. I kinda thought, maybe ''this'' could be a place I'm 'from', but... I'm still an outsider here, too. Mom can explain Japanese culture to me, but that's not the same as living it, and things have changed so much...Like, Mom can explain what an Idol is, but that doesn't tell me like... how to act at a concert. I don't know all the moves and chants, I'm just... out of sync."

Kyouka sighed, looking up to the rapidly darkening night sky. Her voice was quiet and pensive. "... I just... haven't found anyone I feel like I have something in common with. Like, in a real way."

Giving her daughter another squeeze, Drew shook his head gently. "I wish I had some answers for you, but... Unfortunately, that's a tricky one. I wish I knew how to help."

Kyouka glanced to Drew for a moment, offering a small smile. "It helps that you're listening." Looking back to the sky, Kyouka thought some more. "There's also... well... I'm thinking about the future, you know?"

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." Kyouka let her thoughts stew for a moment more, tracing out constellations in the night sky. "Everybody's always talking about their future plans, colleges, senior exams, all that stuff. That 'what do you want to be when you grow up' thing. And... I dunno. It's always been hard to imagine what my life is going to look like in three years let alone one. I try not to worry about it, but..."

"... It's hard not to, when all your peers are," supplied Drew. He tousled Kyouka's hair gently.

Kyouka nodded. "Yeah."

"Well... you know your mom and I will do our best to support you. If you want to go to school here, or... back in the States, we can find a way to make that work. Or if you want to go into vocational training of some kind."

Another nod, and Kyouka kept looking at the sky. "I know, but... Um..." Kyouka glanced at her father again. "... I know this is going to sound a little silly, but... can I share something?"

Drew chuckled, gently. "Say anything you want, Kyou-chan. I'm here to listen."

"Thanks." Kyouka looked back to the stars again, collecting her thoughts. "I always felt like... like I wanted to do something ''big'', you know? Something... important." Kyouka lifted her right hand up to the sky, reaching for... something, she wasn't sure what. "Something that I was..." Her hand closed into a fist, as if she were trying to grab hold of the moon.

As if one could hold onto something so far away any more than they could grasp a ball of light.

"... ''meant'' to do."

She let her hand fall again, moving to continue petting Wolfy. There was a faint tinge on her cheeks. "... I dunno. It's silly, isn't it?"

Drew gave Kyouka's shoulder another squeeze. "Noth8ing wrong with wanting to make a big impact... but don't forget, small things can be important, too."

"Yeah, I know..." Kyouka leaned against her dad , returning the squeeze with another hug. "I just... whatever it was, I was hoping that I could find people I wanted to do it with. I've got friends all over the world, but... everyone's doing their own things."

"Well, from where I stand, you care about people, and you think of others... I'm sure you'll figure it out, eventually. And you know your mom and I will help you however we can."

Kyouka nodded. "Yeah... thanks. And thanks for the talk."

They sat there together in comfortable silence, watching the night sky twinkling high above.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Northa is brought down. Lera exhales, with relief -- and with no small amount of regret. The knowledge that she was the Belkan Queen; that their sorrows and conflicts came back to her...

It's going to weigh on her mind for years to come. It maybe done, but grappling with that isn't over.

She looks at Chiffon, and opens her mouth. Ready to say something -- and then You steps in. Jail's voice echoes out.

"Wait!" Lera cries out. "Stop!"

Darkness enfolds her. Jail's words -- his proclamation that he is the Lord of All Magic -- echo in her ears. But darkness takes her.

...

Life on Midchilda has always had magic. But there is the magic that is indistinguishable from technology and there is ''magic''. The former is everywhere; supersonic mag-levs, Storage Devices that offer ten thousand different conveniences, transit between the stars. But there weren't the mages and knights with bonds with Intelligent and Armed Devices.

For Lera Camry, it was the life she always knew. The differences were small; her mother was a designer of some of the best Storage Devices on the market, though she always seemed... ill at ease.

And for Lera, there wasn't a pressure to follow in those footsteps. That was a career; it wasn't a family passion.

She stands on her balcony, just outside of her room. Lera looks at the mountains in northern Midchilda, eyes focused on the horizon. She knows them all, by now. There's still fulfillment in climbing them.

But there's always that sense, at the back of her mind, that there ''should'' be higher peaks to climb.

<Pose Tracker> Setsuna Higashi [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Cure Passion and Cure Peach both stand watching the end, when it is finished. Passion looks to where Northa was, a little longer, and then looks away from what was father and mother both and neither.

"Passion..." Peach starts, and then--

Infiniti.

"Chiffon!" they say as one. Both immediately start moving. But not in time. THe light there radiating becomes--

"NO!"

Fate and You both live. But the new direction comes, and it is...

"You--You can't!" Passion starts, betrayal obvious in her voice for another time in a life of many betrayals. As Jail starts to laugh, Love Momozono reaches for that little lamb--

But it is done.

-=-=-

A girl with silver hair and red eyes walks along with the crowd, looking at nothing in particular and thinking to herself. She doesn't say anything about her thoughts, of course; that's just not how it's done here. But she has them.

She thinks of her duties later, the schooling she'll complete. She thinks of the partner she was assigned at the lab class, and whether or not that last time he actually looked at her or not. But of course, he must not have.

In Labyrinth, they all do their work both together and alone at the same time. And Citizen #ES-4039781 is no exception. ...Though she is an exception in some other ways. She wonders things. She wonders about where she came from. She wonders where she's going tomorrow. She wonders why it feels so lonely, when she does not have a word like 'lonely'.

The crowd turns, and she turns with it, towards the dining facility. There will be more time to think to herself after she has acquired dinner. Then...

Then evening work, then rest, then...

Was it always like this? Was there ever anything more?

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

One needle, two needles, four, ten; Mikoto defends the approach. Mercy... is it that a Queen tries her best? Mikoto will wonder.

And the Infinite Memory. Infinite enough to kill You, and Mikoto, at least, is not fast enough to stop her. But, "Fate!", Fate has always been faster. Fate saves You, as she always has.

Mikoto's relief over her rescue is cut short, though, by a prickle of warning at the back of her neck. She growls, hearing that croon, turning sharply to face the criminal responsible. The light flicks off -- and her own shadow, call it a light of her own, seeps into Infiniti.

"Don't!", she cries, as that stuffed lamb falls down --...---...

The Minagi Shrine, deep in the mountains, has espoused its faith to the mountain kami for many centuries; they receive few visitors, but they are satisfied with their quaint existence. Mikoto's older brother is slated to become the next Head Priest. She, of course, is a shrine maiden.

She is of course something of a ''strange'' shrine maiden, of course. They have to be, living rurally like this -- bringing down their own deer for dinner, fixing their own chest freezers so they can ''store'' the meat, maintaining their own histories through painstaking paper and ink.

It falls to the women to hunt, in their tradition. In order to respect the spirits of the mountain, they don't use modern weapons like guns when they do. Mikoto hunts with blades and her own body; she has learned how to be quiet in the woods, how to scale trees and lie in wait. She has grown quite strong -- and quite large, a whole five-foot-four even in her teenage years -- through years of dragging deer home.

When she isn't operating as a maiden of the forest, she's maintaining the ''shrine'' grounds, sweeping the decks, cleaning the brass, and keeping things in order. Her older brother is there to aid her; he will never be called away from the shrine grounds, due to his responsibilities. Neither of them go to school -- the nearest is many miles away -- but they study, under their grandfather, to understand the writings of the shrine and its necessary financial upkeep. Even the most remote shrine cannot escape ''taxes.''

(Rei Hino, meanwhile, is ''also'' a shrine maiden -- though her shrine is in the middle of the city, not the middle of the woods. She is a cantankerous young woman with few friends in Ohtori, a true oracle-witch held aside from the princesses of the world.

(People do not disappear by the busloads, in this world; Rei never meets an annoying blonde girl, trying to set things right. She has no ''reason'' to. Why would she interact with Juuban girls for any span longer than selling them love charms? Certainly she doesn't need to ''socialise,'' doesn't need to make ''friends.'' She's not a politician like her father -- she doesn't ''need'' to win anyone's heart.

(She'll just impress them until they can't help but listen.

(Many girls fear her, in her classes, as much as she is treated coldly.)

<Pose Tracker> Inori Yamabuki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

She was their most terrible enemy by far, but as their magic undoes her immense essence, bringing a merciful end to ancient sorrow.

Cure Pine can only feel pity.

"I believe..."

That this is kinder? A mercy? Perhaps that is the privilege of the victor to think such of the vanquished, but she actually does believe that, in this case. But as the scenery changes, and reveals the contents of the Infinite Memory... Pine only knows it by one name.

"Chiffon!"

And as a girl reaches for her, Pine begins to run, "CHIFFON!" Even as a blur of yellow strikes her and carries her far, but not far enough.

Because with a crooning noise, something begins to drain away, her footsteps feeling slower, less powerful... then, she's having to catch her breath, like she's been in dance practice non stop for hours, sweat on her forehead as she looks up to the thief...

... or perhaps the master.

"No... please... if you do that..."

As Chiffon flops over, lifelessly... she cannot think anything but how she failed her.

-=-=-

"He's so handsome." Inori said with a smile, a part of the standing audience on this exclusive cruise ship tour, her dress a frilly yellow, with orange ribbons. Standing beside her with hair coiffed to several points in a suit, was her date, one Kento Mikoshiba.

Her arm was laced in his, as she looked upon the magic show with the masked Lady Magician and White Tiger, as doubt entered her face, "Is she really going to let him out though?" His arm laced around hers protectively. "Don't worry, she's a professional."

Indeed, he did, and despite her wonder at the magnificent feline, she found herself moving up against him with a gasp. The stage Magician asking, "Can I have a volunteer from the audience? How about you, young lady?"

"Me?" Buki squeaked, a little put out by it. She loved seeing these animals, but outside of his cage... her date cleared his throat, "I-I'll do it." "Kento-kun?" She asked in surprise, as he slipped away, "Oh, be careful!"

However, the show proceeded apace, as the nervous, arm slightly trembling young man held up the hoop of roses, and the white tiger leapt through... her eyes admiring in wonder his bravery, as he returned to the sound of the audience clapping.

Shortly after, on the deck, he asked the question that made tongue feel like it was frozen, her throat locked up, "Are you enjoying yourself?" Love and Miki had both encouraged her to come, despite her lack of confidence, but she felt out of sorts in this glamorous setting, "Y-Yes." She said with a smile, "I very much am. How about you?"

"I feel out of sorts here... myself." He admitted after several long moments staring out into the sea, "I admit... I had an ulterior motive for asking you to be here with me. You see, one day I'm expected to run the Mikoshiba group, and so I was asked to run this event to gain experience. But, I don't have much confidence in myself." He looked then at her, searching, "I thought, if you were by my side... I'd be that much more confident. I'm sorry that I wasn't considerate of your feelings..."

Inori's eyes shined for a moment, before doubt crept in again, and she looked away shyly, "W-Well... I think you were being very considerate of my feelings. I'm happy... happy that I was able to be here to support you."

"Inori...chan." And as he put his arm around her, drawing her close, he said, "... then, if that's how you feel, please continue to support me."

Was that really how she felt? ... Maybe it didn't matter, this is what she was supposed to feel, right?

-=-=-

So Happy World - Persona 5 Royal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybhlFj3D_gw

She still remembers the feel of Love's arm around her, telling her 'Congratulations 'Buki! You got your happiness!' It was a moment locked in time, she could see it in front of her. Her in her White Dress, Love dressed as her Maid of Honor.

Conversations about finishing her Diploma, Veterinary School after felt more ephemeral in comparison. Her mind couldn't fathom them as arguments, after all, she never could manage to argue back to the words.

'This is where I need you.'

She told herself this was her happiness, and made it true, again, and again, and again, no matter her doubts. Getting together with Love and Miki several times a week made it easier.

Kento brought the animals to her, as if in apology, to see her smile even if they always went away at the end of the day with their handlers, so often instead she took advantage of her VIP status as a patron of the Ueno Zoological Gardens.

More often than not...

"Look Secchan... look at the Polar Bears!"

The toddler, Setsuna Mikoshiba, happily tried to sound it out for her Mother from her stroller, "Kuuuma!" as Buki happily told her back, "That's right!"

One doesn't need to believe in themselves to find happiness. One simply has to convince themselves hard enough that they've found it.

<Pose Tracker> Yumi Ohzora [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Yumi Ohzora looks out over the crowd at the auditorium, standing at the podium herself where the Principal has just ceded the space to her. "My fellow students," she begins, and her voice as always is calm and full of certainty. "As your Student Council President, you have given me a great responsibility to see all of you through the year to come. But I cannot do it alone."

Yumi Ohzora is a very tall girl--but it would be unfair to say that she is gangly. She is appropriate for her height, with long gray hair and deep red eyes, and she is every bit the image of her mother. She has always been strong and healthy, and always paid close attention to her responsibilities.

"I will require each of you to do your best at our school, so that together, we can make this year greater than any that has come before. From my position, I will support you, ensure that you have the opportunity to fulfill your potential. But only you can decide what form that potential will take. Only you can decide the paths you will walk. Only by putting aside what is unimportant can we focus on what truly matters--and I will rely on each of you to decide for yourselves what that means."

The crowd watches her, but there's whispering here and there. She pretends she doesn't hear it as she finishes her speech.

"Please join me in this endeavor. Thank you."

Yumi bows, and starts to walk off. ...But while she pretends not to hear it...

"That girl," someone whispers. "Of course she was elected. Considering her parents..."

"Did you hear?" she says. "She crushed a ''teacher'' with one look!"

"What did he even do?"

"He told her she shouldn't ignore her electives so much; that art might be important to her life one day."

"I wouldn't want her to look at ''me'' like that..."

Yumi finishes walking off the stage, and goes behind the curtain at the auditorium. She pulls out her phone, and then, "...Mother?" she asks. "Yes. The speech went fine. Did you have time for our lunch today?" A pause. "I see. Well, of course. Later, then. Good luck with your work, Mother."

Yumi Ohzora is a very serious girl. She's never been sick a day in her life. And they say she is ''just'' like her mother.

<Pose Tracker> Raiko Takashima [Infinity Institute (9)] has posed.

Soft, rhythmic thumping filled the dorm room as Raiko studied the inside of the microwave. Not the part with the turntable, but the ''inside''--she'd pulled it out from the wall, unplugged it, and removed the outer housing. Bright orange eyes traced lines of circuitry and wiring, and she'd tied her long blue hair back into a ponytail to keep it from being a distraction.

She bit her lip as she studied it. ''Something'' had shorted, and she was certain she'd almost figured it out. She was ''almost'' there, if she didn't lose her concentration--

"Oi, Sprocket! You done yet?"

Nope. She'd lost her train of thought. Raiko sighed, glancing over her shoulder. "I told you, I'll be done sooner if you stop asking me when I'll be done." She was dressed in sky blue overalls and a plain white t-shirt.

The dorm was lavishly appointed but still small, despite being for 3 people. Kiyo was in the middle of the living space. She was taller and more athletic than the other two, with short, unruly green hair and clear blue eyes, dressed in a pair of plain black shorts and a green tank top. She'd been practicing juggling a soccer ball, bouncing it from knee to knee to head, for at least the last 20 minutes. "C'mon, I'm getting hungry over here."

Raiko rolled her eyes. "Yeah, well, maybe if you'd stop playing with your ball in the dorm, you wouldn't be so hungry."

The ball hit the floor, and Kiyo trapped it with her foot. "Well ''maybe'' if you didn't insist on taking everything apart around here I could've eaten sooner."

"Oh yeah?" Raiko crossed her arms, letting her screwdriver dangle from her fingertips. "Hey, in case you forgot, ''I'' was the one who fixed the baseball team's pitching machine when ''someone'' hit a line drive right into it, ''Ace''."

Kiyo stepped forward, the ball and her practice forgotten for the moment. "Oh yeah? And who was it ''I'' had to organize a search party for on the last field trip when you went missing?"

Raiko's cheeks flushed. "I wasn't missing, I said I'd be right back," she protested hotly. "''You'' just got impatient."

"Oh please," said Kiyo with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. "It was like, half an hour. And don't give me that 'you lost track of time' line again."

On the couch sat the third member of the dorm room, Cheiko. She was much more quiet, her long rose-red hair fixed up into an elaborate bun. She'd been relaxing on the couch, dressed in a t-shirt and skirt, sketching ideas in a sketchbook. She did her best to ignore the shouting, but finally her green eyes flickered up to look at the two shouting girls. "Get a room why don't you," she muttered under her breath.

... She thought better of it when she remembered her bedroom was in between theirs. Maybe not, then.

Cheiko sighed, raising her voice and taking on a far more gentle but still firm tone. "Kiyo-chan, Raiko-chan."

Both girls paused and looked to her questioningly.

Pointing her pencil at Kiyo, Cheiko said, "We agreed no balls in the dorm. The carpet is still stained from where you knocked my ink pot over last week."

Kiyo rubbed the back of her neck, blushing as she glanced aside. "Ahhh... yeah..."

Turning her attention to Raiko, Cheiko said, "And we agreed on a three 'oops' limit, didn't we? How many are you at?"

Raiko blinked, counting off something on her fingers, then looked chagrined. "... Oh. Five."

Cheiko raised an eyebrow at Raiko.

"Fiiiiine," said Raiko with a sigh. "I'll call maintenance." She pushed the half-disassembled microwave aside. "Sorry, Ki-chan. You're gonna have to use the stove top." Raiko moved to take a seat on the couch, while Kiyo headed to the sink and started filling a small pot.

"It's fine, the cup of noodle shouldn't take ''that'' long," said Kiyo quietly.

Raiko looked at the sketches in Cheiko's notebook. "Whatcha working on, Manga-chan?"

Without looking up, Cheiko said, "It's a new story about a girl who has to put up with her roommates constantly bickering, and the stress of it finally makes her snap and become a serial killer."

Kiyo and Raiko shared a glance, and both had the grace to blush.

"I mean... it ''was'' sweet of you to be so concerned, Ki-chan..." admitted Raiko.

Kiyo grunted a bit as she prepared her cup noodles. "And it ''was'' pretty cool how you discovered the limiter setting on the pitching machine... Probably wouldn't have scored that last home run without all that practice batting fastballs."

Both girls looked to Cheiko, who finally looked up to them and smiled. "Better."

The other two girls let out a sigh of relief.

Suddenly, Raiko's phone chimed, and she pulled it out of her pocket to check it. "Oh! Hey, they're ready for the video call!" She sprang up and dashed to her room to grab her laptop, coming back and setting it on the table. The screen sprang to life as she started the right app, initiated the call...

And suddenly there was a full-screen video of her parents. Asami Yakumo, who had the same blue hair and bright eyes, was wearing a bright yellow sundress. Her hair had been left free to drape about her shoulders. She grinned broadly and waved, "RAichan! It's so good to see you!"

Next to her sat Takeshi Yakumo, who had short brown hair and half-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a simple polo shirt, grinning as he spotted his daughter. "Rairai!"

And last but not least, to their side, was an older gentleman with silver hair, wearing a shirt with the last few buttons casually undone. He smiled kindly, "Ahh, Mago-chan, it's so good to see you." He was really just a friend of the family, but he'd been so for a very long time.

Raiko beamed, addressing each one in turn, "Okachan, Otochan! Ojiisan! It's so good to see you all!"

A cat suddenly wandered into frame on the other side of the call, a calico tabby that sniffed the screen and then mewed plantively.

"Hiii, Shiori," said Raik. "It's nice to see you, too."

Asami quickly stood up and picked up Shiroi, placing the cat into her lap and petting it. "I think Shiori misses you, dear."

"Aww, I miss her too! And I miss all of you! Oh! And my friends are here, too!"

Cheiko leaned in close to Raiko to get into frame, smiling and offering a wave. "It's very nice to see you all again, Asami-san, Takeshi-san, Kenji-san!"

"Ahhh, Otomo-chan," said Takeshi. "It's nice to see you again as well!"

"Thank you for agreeing to have us again for our next break!" said Cheiko, doing her best to affect a bow from a seated position.

"Think nothing of it! It's always a delight to have Rairai's friends over. You're welcome anytime!" said Takeshi with a bright smile.

Cheiko smiled warmly, "You're too kind!"

Kiyo suddenly barged into the frame on the opposite side of Raiko, slinging an arm around her shoulders so she could get in close. "Hey! I'm looking forward to the trip, too! Thank you!"

Raiko laughed and playfully shoved at Kiyo's side without any real force. H-hey! C'mon."

Asami laughed softly, smiling at the sight of her daughter flanked by her friends on the screen. "Hello, Kiyo-chan. It's nice to see you too."

The green-ahired girl pointed emphatically at the screen. "Kenji-ojiisan, your teriyaki was amazing last time! Can we have some more?"

Kenji chuckled softly, "I'll see what I can do."

Raiko grinned, "Oh, I can't wait. There's so much to catch up on-- Oh! And guys, I can't wait to show you what my mom's been working on, too. It's state of the art robotics stuff, it'll be really cool, promise."

Noogying Raiko, Kiyo stood up. "As long s you don't take it apart like you did the microwave."

"Wha--hey, that's..." Raiko's cheeks flushed. "... I'd ''never'' do that to one of my mom's projects."

"Yes you would," said both Kiyo and Asami at the same time.

Raiko groaned and covered her face with her hands. "... is it too late to stay here for break?" she muttered.

"Yes," said Cheiko gently. "But you'll be fine."

"So, Mago-chan," started Kenji, trying to move the topic to a happier subject. "Your parents tell me you've been up to plenty of your own projects."

"Oh! Yeah!" Raiko brightened, getting up from the couch. "One sec!" she called out from over her shoulder. She came back a moment later, her arms laden with several small machines she'd built. "Some of these are hard to see, but I'll bring them with me on break. So this one..."

<Pose Tracker> Mami Tomoe [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

A girl with white hair and pink clothes looks down at a set of gravestones. The narrow planks with the engraved names on them are worn, but in good condition nevertheless.

There are three, but she only looks at one.

'Mami Tomoe'.

The girl looks down, sad, and says nothing.

Onlookers wonder if she might be a relative.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

"Ren! You're going to be late!"

The familiar voice of Mrs. Aizawa calls out from the kitchen, loud enough to be heard upstairs.

"I'm coming!" The voice of a girl calls back, and moments later Ren Aizawa herself comes nimbly running down the stairs, clad in her Juuban High School uniform. She turns sharply once she reaches the bottom, making a beeline for the kitchen. She's all smiles, drifting over to give her mother a kiss on the cheek before plopping down at the table across from her father who is reading the newspaper.

"Can't stay long!" She insists as she quickly starts working on the breakfast her mother so dutifully laid out for her in advance.

Mr. Aizawa chuckles, looking at his daughter as he lowers the paper momentarily. "Cutting it close, Ren."

"I know! I know! My alarm clock didn't go off!" She replies in-between bites of food, pausing to check her watch. "Ok-I'm-going-now-bye!" She takes a quick sip of orange juice before bounding up from the chair and running out of the kitchen, stopping to put her shoes on at the door before swinging it open and taking off into the bright sunny morning.

"Ren!" Her mother calls, and Ren skids to a halt, spinning around.

"Wha- OH!" Her cheeks redden as she sees her mother standing there with an amused smirk, holding her school satchel that she completely forgot to pick up. "Thanks mom!" She runs over and grabs it, giving her mother a hug before hurrying off again.

"Have a great day!" Mrs. Aizawa calls, before shaking her head and going back into the house, shutting the door firmly behind her.

A normal day...

...A normal life...

For Ren Aizawa...

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Fate looks into her sister's Eyes and asks, "Are you alright?" As her hand reaches out to touch hers, and Bardiche gleams with... <Divide Energy>

It turns out it was the last act of her magic, for some to pour into burn wound, to try and knit it back together, before- in alarm, she hears that croon and turns in mid-air. "Get away from-!" But as the yellow falls away from her, Fate begins to fall, and all she can do is encircle her arms around her sister.

She never feels the impact, only the declaration of her 'father's' triumph.

-=-=-

"She can't hurt you anymore."

This echoed in Fate Testarossa's head again and again, as she laid down the Blossoms from the Altsam mountains on a grave. They were her mother's favorite, even if she refused to share anything about herself, Fate found out one day in her journal.

Four graves now, two marked.

Precia Testarossa, Beloved Mother

Alicia Testarossa, Beloved Daughter

And two more unmarked graves for animals, one a wolf cub that Fate found and nursed that perished from illness shortly after, and another their elderly cat. Years of Abuse and Neglect was something a small rural Midchildan town could easily turn a blind eye to. People were resilient in that way, when they thought she was her daughter.

But then came a publication, an expose of a breakthrough that rocked the entire Midchildan Political structure, a great Scandal. 'Infinite Desire' and 'Project FATE'

It wasn't long after that the authorities came, led by tall woman in a green pony tail, and a smart suit, and the townsfolk began to whisper something different whenever they saw Fate Testarossa.

'Artificial.'

It was so easy for her to feel shame, like she's done something wrong. After all, she'd been made to feel that way her whole life.

'They're trying to figure out what to even charge her with. That thing she made doesn't even have rights.'

And then before the arrest could be made... a collapse, as she was transferred to the hospital. Fate was let in, only to be told by a dying woman.

"I always... hated you."

It was over soon after. It was a kindness of Lindy Harlaown that the body of the girl they found in their household was allowed to be buried alongside her mother - next to the mounds of the animals Fate herself had buried years ago.

Still part of her thought that the idea that her Mother can't hurt her anymore might be a premature statement.

"What happens now?" Fate asked numbly, her eyes still on the grave... as Lindy Harlaown tried to smile, but... "You'll be coming to live with me for now. Artificial Persons are... controversial in Midchilda, to say the least. I won't lie to you, it's going to be a long road before the government even recognizes you have rights... but I'm hopeful that one day they'll recognize you're a girl that was just born a little differently from everyone else."

Fate nodded sullenly, and turned to follow her, as they walked together, away from that place, as Lindy made conversation, "Does everyone hate me right now?" "No... not at all." Lindy said with a smile, "Just because... the science is controversial, doesn't mean that. ''I'' like you very much. And I met with a man recently who wrote an opinion piece advocating for your personhood based on his experiences from other worlds... in fact, I'd like for you to meet him."

As child looked her way, Lindy smiled and told her, "His name is Frederick Camry."

<Pose Tracker> Nori Ankou [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The light is pouring from her. It's being drained, drawn off. La Sirene de Diamant tilts her head up, alert. Ready, perhaps, to resist. To throw a charm or a countering spell, or at least another of her fearsome bursts, towards -

Towards Jail Scaglietti. She can see Fate rescue (herself?) and she looks towards Jail, with a fluctating sense in her heart, in her guts. Something is wrong. She reaches out towards her --

The Brazen Pharos winks out. Its prismatic, almost inhuman shape fades away, evaporating like a glamour at the end of the May-eve. What's left looks like a piece of nautical surplus, the sort of thing you might use as an element of decor... except that someone stepped on it once, and it is held together with tape.

By the time she falls to one knee, she isn't la Sirene de Diamante any more.

* * * * * * *

The ride back from Odawara was, for the most part, silent.

The young woman let out a small sigh, gazing out towards the darkness of the ocean.

"You keep doing that," he said, his voice slightly too nasal, a little too high, to be a man's.

He was driving, perhaps naturally; the car was imported, a German car, though Nori Ankou had observed that it was an eleven year old model the first time she'd seen it. She didn't disapprove, or really approve, but it was something that went into the tallybook; the tallybook she kept in her head.

There wasn't much else to life than a tallybook, Nori had found.

"Hm?" Nori said, as if she hadn't heard him.

"You... I mean, just now."

"I didn't do anything, just now."

"You sighed," he said, his face hidden in the gloom of the car. There was a suggestion of his face, from the lights of the instrument panel, but it wasn't enough to see.

"Did I?"

"Yes," he affirmed, with a note of grit.

"Oh," Nori answered: "I didn't mean to."

Three kilometers later, he said, "These fancy restaurants are always a gamble. They pay for reviews, you know. And your taste isn't always going to match theirs."

"Mm," Nori replied, still gazing out the window.

Another kilometer, and he said, "Once, when I was in the US, Father took me to a steakhouse. It turned out they served you as much meat as you could eat, from swords. They'd set it over your plate and cut slices - pretty thin slices, but still, whatever you wanted. It wasn't quite high class, but I thought it was enjoyable. Brazilian, allegedly."

Nori didn't reply, because she didn't hear. She let out another small sigh.

"Though, speaking of the US... this summer, if you're interested, I'm sure we..." he began, but it trailed away. After another kilometer, he gave up, and as he reached to click on the radio, he did not quite notice that something had passed; a thin shoot that had begun to grow, perishing without evidence in a frost.

Nori didn't feel it either. She didn't feel a lot. Sometimes she thought it was abnormal, but those thoughts came, usually, when things were quiet and by herself, and she could usually find something to look at or to watch. For a few months she had even tried social media out, but it paled, too.

The radio played - a violin concerto, something that sounded live. Over in Osaka, the announcer said six kilometers later. The National Route bent from east to northeast, and as they past Terugasaki Nori wondered just how cold and how dark that sea must feel. Her lips pursed faintly when she spotted a ship, breaking that cool black infinity, and she leaned back into the seat.

"I don't know if I want to go anywhere," she said, eyes lidding shut.

"Well... there's time to think about it," he replied, but he sounded diffident now, too. His eyes lowered slightly, though they did not leave the road.

The car was silent after that, other than the sorrow-sweetness of Michiru Kaioh's violin, receding swiftly behind them.

<Pose Tracker> Mai Tokiha [Ohtori Academy (12)] has posed.

Back on Earth, Mai was among those trying to hold down the home front. Try was the operative word, as the tendrils of Labyrinth had spread ever further, until her fires were guttering out - but there was a glimmer of hope near the end. A glimmer, but Mai was so tired, tired enough that she didn't notice something leaving-

...

There isn't really that much to pack, in the end.

The apartment Mai's been sharing with her brother the last few years was small by necessity. They had savings, of course, but every yen counted when looking at the costs in the future - and a few listings online were enough to divest themselves of the handfuls of household appliances.

It had been a normal enough high school life, Mai thinks to herself, holding up a rare indulgence in the form of a sundress. Not so much in the way of school clubs - she'd found a culinary club that met rarely enough to allow part-time work - and a few fleeting grasps at romance. A few dates with boys who seemed nice enough, fleeting things that could be left to smother under a blanket called 'scheduling concerns'.

"Mai, are you seriously going to bring that? It was out of date when you wore it!"

Mai turns, huffing, to her younger brother - grinning, despite how short of breath he is. "It's shiny. I get to have one shiny thing, as a treat."

The little jokes they share might be a consequence. Life was too short to not talk - and part-time work aside, Mai didn't have that much else going on that she could avoid her brother in this small apartment. No deep friendships, no blazing romances to consume her passion, no shining dreams to chase.

Her path was set long ago, after all. No greater duty than a promise.

Mai tucks that last dress into a box of clothes, sealing it up, and takes a moment to smile sadly at how easily her high school life can be just...carried away. A moment - and then it's time to close up. Time to follow her brother to America, so he can finally get the heart surgery he needs.

No one here in Tokyo is going to miss her that much.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo slumps, exhausted. Fallen Stern is not carefully lowered, but falls to the cold floor of Labyrinth with a heavy clang. The vines that he'd been tangled in are no longer an agonizing prison, but also no longer a means of support. So he sinks down, a hand extending to touch the ground.

But it's not over. His eyes rise as Yuu moves under the possession of Jail, and Fate races to stop herhim.

Endo's not faster than Fate, not even close. And even she's not fast enough.

"You"

* - * - *

"Irasshaimase!"

The door of the little konbini, one of three on a block a few streets down from Juban Middle School, slides open for the hundredth time that evening. The routine is simple and never ending; greet, count the money, put the onigiri in the bag. Endo Naoki is a very good employee, and he does his work diligently.

Occasionally familiar faces pop in after school clubs are finished, friends and classmates he doesn't have as much time to speak with these days. Akeda and Honda from rugby club, Ishida, Goya, even the quiet girl in the back of classAizawa? He spent more time sleeping than doing much else at school.

It's somewhere around midnight when he finishes his shift, after he's done wiping down the glass doors and rearranging the half-emptied shelves. He grabs his usual on the way out, a bottle of juice, chips, and a rice ball.

The train isn't running this late but it's not that long of a bike ride home. There's a pleasant breeze and the sky is clear, and Endo pulls off into one of the small parks on the way. It's just a single tree and a patch of grass on a concrete plane, but there's a little fountain that bubbles pleasantly without the daytime Tokyo traffic to muffle it.

There's no reason he shouldn't go home. His mother knows he'll be out late, she's probably asleep by now. She'll likely be out before he wakes, but they'll catch each other eventually. They operate by their own mechanical schedules.

He dusts a few flecks of rice from his hands as he swallows the last bite of his dinner. As he does he turns his eyes skyward, to the black expanse above.

There are a few blinking lights traveling across the horizon; airplanes and little red warning blips gracing the top of towering skyscrapers. The light pollution obscures anything that may hang higher in the heavens.

There are no stars in Tokyo.

<Pose Tracker> Ginka Shimizu [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The sitting room was hushed, silent save for the gentle, delicate melody that wafted through the air. Gentle streams of notes twined and wove themselves through the def hands of their players, rising and falling in sublime harmonies and creshendos.

Ginka sat in an ornate wooden chair, violin tucked under her chin, left hand deftly dancing across the strings, her right hand carefully measuring and doling out angle, tension, and tempo. Her long, wavy, honey blonde hair spilled down to midback, her brown eyes were closed as she lost herself into the music for the recital. She was wearing a long black dress, sleeveless, not quite her formal concert wear.

This was a dinner party, after all, not a concert.

Seated across from her, at a piano was a young man a year her senior, dressed in a tuxedo with a dark black tie. He had short brown hair, and he was letting his fingers dance lightly across the keys of the piano. This was soft, delicate music; neither of them could afford too heavy a hand, lest a melody clutch up, or a chord simply fall flat.

The young man, Hiroshi, gently produced the final chord of the melody, a soft, trembling chord signaling resolution cast out into the audience. Ginka joined that with a single long violin note, sounded out in wistful, aching tension as the piano chord faded and it was the only note left.

It lingered in the air, before poignantly dissipating into the ether.

The assembled guests clapped politely, and Ginka slowly opened her eyes. She always imagined a caged bird when she played this song, eternally seeking freedom, eternally hopeful and yet... denied, in the end, every time.

No, that was absurd. How else would the song end, if not for the way it was written?

"Shimizu-san," said Hiroshi, reaching a hand to her.

Ginka realized she'd been lost in her thoughts, and hastily set her bow and violin down to reach out and take Hiroshi's hand. "My apologies, that song... it simply captivates my imagination." She took Hiroshi's hand and gracefully rose to her feet, where they took a bow together.

After they finished bowing, Hiroshi lifted her hand to place a kiss on the back of it. Ginka allowed her cheeks a light flush. "Merci, you are too kind, Iyama-san."

"I can't help it, you are simply captivating," murmured Hiroshi before the dinner guests started to crowd them.

Ginka made polite conversation, laughing amiably at poor jokes, expressing condolences and sympathy at all of the right moments, and made all the empty promises expected of her. Eventually she excused herself, explaining that she was seeking out her mother.

She stepped out from the crowd, and an older woman with short brown hair and a red cocktail dress instantly fell into step with her.

"Ojou-sama, your performance was splendid, as always." This was Misaki Tokita, who had been in her family's employ for as long as Ginka could remember. Her role had changed quite a bit over the years, but... she was a constant in Ginka's life, even when her mother was off on yet another business trip.

Ginka smiled a smile she did not feel, and simply said, "Of course it was." After a moment, more gently, she said, "... But it was kind of you to say."

Misaki just smiled, "Of course. Please, your mother is this way."

In another sitting room, devoid of all guests but two, Ginka found her mother, Momoka Shimizu. She'd worn her hair up in an ornate bun for this occasion, wearing a sleek black dress and long white gloves. She was seated, leg crossed, talking to an older gentleman. Ginka walked in, approaching the two, while Misaki steped to the side of the door, remaining at a respectful distance.

"Mother, Iyama-sama," said Ginka respectfully, clasping her hands in front of her. "I hope you enjoyed the performance."

"Mmm, yes, quite so," said the older man. "I've never heard anyone who can perform quite like you and my Hiroshi. I'm sure your partnership will be quite rewarding going forward."

"Yes, of course," said Ginka amiably, smiling a perfectly polished smile.

"Speaking of partnerships," said Momoka with a gracious smile, "we were discussing a sort of... partnership between our families, if you will."

And there was that sinking feeling. She'd suspected it would come, eventually. "Ah, tres bien. I am, of course, looking forward to working together."

She noticed her mother hadn't even ersaid what she thought of the performance. But now wasn't the time to bring that up--there was ''never'' a time to bring that up.

The role of the caged bird was to sing, after all.

"If you would excuse me," Ginka said with a bow. "I have something I must see to, but I wanted to make sure I paid my respects."

"Of course, of course. We will come find you when dinner is served."

Ginka smiled a hollow smile and turned, heading out of the sitting room and heading for... anywhere.

Anywhere but here.

<Pose Tracker> Nagisa Misumi [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

"Hey hey hey, why did you take such a hard science class to start with?" Nagisa's friend Shiho scolds, looking up from Nagisa's latest failed quiz as they walk. "The regular chemistry class is supposed to be way easier than bio, though you shouldn't take the advanced one..."

"I thought chemicals sounded boring," Nagisa sighs. "Biology is animals and stuff."

"Did you think you'd be learning about baby seals?" Shiho laughs.

"Sort of..."

"Well, get it together," Shiho tried to joke, but she meant it a little too much, and they both heard that as they stopped in front of Nagisa's apartment building. Shiho glanced away. "I just mean... I know you're not getting into college at this point unless you get scouted. That's fine. But you have to at least graduate, to get scouted. You can't play for a college team without a high school degree."

"I know."

-=-=-

In her bedroom, Nagisa booted up her wheezy school laptop. Navigating to youtube, she tapped her fingers lightly on the keys without typing anything. Having an idea, she reached into her backpack to pull out the syllabus for AP Bio (which just floats around, dusty with graphite and stained with juice, without a folder to call home, but she knows where everything is). Setting it down on the table, she painstakingly types in the exact header of the unit she is working on. Maybe someone will have a tutorial on something similar?

To her surprise, the first video has the same title as what she typed, even though it has just a couple hundred views. ''Unit 14B: Cycles and Apoptosis''

Even Nagisa understands what has happened. This isn't just a video about her topic. This person goes to Juuban! "Lu-cky!" she sings, clicking immediately.

The face that greets her is familiar, though only somewhat. Yukishiro-san, class rep, and more famously, the 'Queen of Knowledge.' Nagisa has seen her in passing many times, and remembers speaking to her once, when she weighed on a discussion she and her friends were having about shooting stars. That was years ago, though. It's almost alarming to see her class's distant royalty in casual clothing, but she understands why; school uniforms are somewhat identifiable.

Yukishiro is sitting a desk also, in what looks like a traditional Japanese bedroom. She begins with a hello, which Nagisa cannot hear because she forgot about her headphones, and she instinctively rushes for them as if this were a video call; when else do you see people you know on the laptop? Nearly falling off her chair, she manages to cram the headphones on before she misses too much.

"...club members find this to be the most challenging semester. While this series was originally intended only for my science club kouhai, they thought it might be useful to others, so I've started to release these publicly. Let's get right into it."

Nagisa would not have been physically capable of saying that last sentence without exclaiming it, but the way Yukishiro says it so gently and assuredly is hypnotic. In a few short, simple words, she has Nagisa's trust immediately. She feels she is about ot learn what Apop... a-poptart-osis is.

And over the next thirty minutes, she is proven utterly correct in her faith. Yukishiro teaches so insightfully, seeming to anticipate every point of confusion. She always has the perfect metaphor. And her voice... it's like a musical instrument.

After that, Nagisa begins by listening to Yukishiro's youtube videos on a topic after lectures. But after a few pretty-good quiz grades, she has a brainwave... why get confused listening to it explained okay first, when she could listen to it explained amazingly, and be able to follow along? Feeling a little guilty about cheating like that, she nonetheless starts watching Yukishiro's videos the night before class.

-=-=-

"Are you listening? C'mon c'mon c'mon," Shiho demands, annoyed.

"Sorry," Nagisa yelps, putting her phone down. "I'll put it away. I wanted to know if a new video got posted yet."

"God, you use technology like a grandma," Shiho rolls her eyes. "Gimme gimme gimme."

Relinquishing her phone, Nagisa watches pensively as Shiho examined Yukishiro's Youtube profile. "Is this the channel?" she asks.

Nagisa is unsure why her mouth is so dry suddenly. "Ye-" She clears her throat. "Yeah."

Opening her mouth to speak, Shiho thinks better of it. She taps a few icons, including one that looks like a bell, and hands the phone back.

"Ah!" Nagisa exclaims. "Will she know?" She wishes she had not said 'she', had used a more neutral word.

"Eh? I don't think so. Besides, that's what they're for, right? Science class." It still feels like there's something she isn't saying.

"That's true." It's super true, Nagisa realizes. Why does it still make her nervous? "I'll see now, when..."

"When they release a new video," Shiho agrees.

-=-=-

Yukishiro uploaded fairly regularly, usually more than once a week. But after a while, Nagisa got tired enough of waiting for that notification that she decided she didn't have to, and started delving back through older videos. None of them were about her bio class, but she was just impatient, and it seemed like a good thing to do in the meanwhile. So she started watching videos now and then of this girl at her school explaining about the speed of light, or where the garbage goes when you throw it away, or why metal feels cold at room temperature. Then she started watching them all the time. They were usually pretty long. Sometimes there was a white board, or little props. Sometimes she would share her computer screen somehow(!), but normally it was analog like that. It was always in her bedroom, though. Nagisa began to know the place well. She noticed when Yukishiro moved something in between days. She learned the name of her big yellow dog Chuutaro, and would audibly say hi to the screen when the pup occasionally wandered into frame. She started to get to know Yukishiro's outfits, and come to have particular favorites.

At some point, biology became just another class. Nagisa did not transform into a top student, or get recognized by the teacher. Her mother did not really understand that this was a hard class, or quite what had been achieved here.

At last, the moment Nagisa was afraid of arrived. She reached the beginning of the channel. She watched a slightly younger Yukishiro fiddle with the camera, tell it a reassuring "yosh," then jog away from the computer to give a happy self-introduction. It was at once awkward and unselfconscious, a combination the shy Nagisa never really managed. Her smile was bright and ready. She bubbled over when talking about science. Nagisa was entranced. She could not look away as Yukishiro sternly admonished her about eye protection in the lab.

When it was over, Nagisa sat at her computer for a while, unsure what to do. She just wanted there to be another video, is all. Eventually, she helplessly gave in, and clicked around to get to Yukishiro's most recent upload. It was a few weeks ago now, which had fed her impatience to begin with. Putting it on, she considers starting over and going backwards all the way to the beginning again.

The girl who greets her is the familiar one, the one she got to know first, in the most recent videos. But watching it right after the first one, Nagisa actually rocks back in her chair at the difference. Yukishiro's gentleness, her keen mind, her self-assured style are still all intact. In her head, the early videos and the new ones were all the same Yukishiro, because she was always pale and soft-spoken, always had a little distance in her eyes at odd moments. But seeing the Yukishiro of just a year and some ago against the Yukishiro of today shows clearly that she was not always THIS pale, that her cheeks were rounder, that the soft instrument of her flute-like voice was not always played in a minor key, even if it was silverine all along.

Feeling a chill on her skin, Nagisa watches for as long as she can bear it. Then she closes the laptop and begins to pace, for want of something better to do with her need to do...

...what?

-=-=-

"Hey, you know Yukishiro-san? Queen of Knowledge?" Nagisa asks Shiho the next morning.

"Yeah, of course," Shiho says. "You were watching some of her tutorials or something right?"

''Some of''. Nagisa blanches. "R-right. She used to be in the same class as us, right? Do you know what class she's in now? I thought maybe she transferred, but she talks about the science club, in some of the videos, I guess she's the president..."

Shiho bites her lip. "She used to be."

"Eh? Did she quit?" Nagisa suddenly worries the several weeks isn't just a slow upload period. If Yukishiro isn't in the science club anymore...

"She dropped out of it a long long long time ago," Shiho says. "I was surprised when you showed me the channel, dunno who she was doing that for."

Nagisa feels as if she had been in a lecture hall with Yukishiro these past months, only to realize the other attendees were all cardboard cutouts. "What class is she in?" she asks again.

Shiho looks up at her taller friend, pained. "Nagisa... you really haven't heard?"

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Jail's toes leave the ground. He hovers in an antigravity not of his conscious making, but rather what happens when too much magic warps too small a space. His face lifts blindly to a sky invisible through the vast tower above them all, but not -- it feels -- invisible to him. His eyes are blind with all that he can see, now. His skin is radiant not with ten lights or even a hundred, but as many magical cores as there are people -- as there are worlds.

The purple in his shoulder-length hair bleaches white in an instant. His clothing -- crisp suit and slovenly lab coat -- incinerate. By then he's already too bright to look upon, a prismatic sunspot of a silhouette, whose color whirls continuously, an intense, chaotic kaleidoscope.

Not that the children at his feet see any of this. To the last they are collapsed on the ground, insensate, lost. Infiniti took all of their energy along with the vital essence of their soul where the magic used to be, as easily as taking candy from a baby. And then Jail took it all from her, because she really is a baby.

Was a baby.

The stuffed animal flung to the ground beside the collapsed children shows not a single hint of life.

---

<>

"I... I don't understand," says a familiar towheaded child, gazing up at the screen. Movie theater sized, it was hooked up to the Tower feeds by a variety of local citizens, working in tandem. All it took to get them to do it was a little encouragement, a little kindness, and, admittedly, a little refined sugar.

They, and dozens, hundreds of fellow Labyrinthinites, gape in horror at the sight before them. Some weep. All were rapt, amazed, by the sight of the magical girls before them. They witnessed their Lord, the very purpose of their existence, revealed as a sham and torn down off his throne. They gasped in awe at the battle with Northa. At the bright lovebeams and frilly lace, and almost moreso at the raw emotion, the likes of which are so forbidden as to be forgotten in this bleak demesne: Courage. Hope. Embrace of one another. Friendship. Romance. Duty. Sacrifice.

How did this come to be?

Separated from the others when Moebius portaled the fight indoors, Tarte, Azukina, Clara and Batiste were at a loss for what to do... and decided to do what they do best:

Make friends, and eat snacks.

"This isn't right," insists the tiny child, tiny-voiced, clenching an even tinier fist. "They... they fought so ''hard''!"

An older woman sucks a tear into her nostrils with a sharp intake of breath. "Don't... don't just lay there," she murmurs at the children on the screen. "Please, get up. You have to get up."

The chorus grows like an infection. It leaps from man to man, from face to face -- a liveliness unheard of for generations within Labyrinth. A roar of feelings, and occasionally also of words.

"This isn't how it should end!"

"It can't be over!"

"I can't accept this!"

"You can't let him do this!"

"Leave them alone, you-- you ''jerk''!"

''Fierce'' feelings: shock becomes anger. Despair becomes defiance. Solitude becomes--

--the woman picks up the child and holds them close to her chest.

"Don't give up!" they cry in spontaneous unison, their hearts as one. And the chorus grows, swells, becomes a riot of screaming...

"Wake up!"

"Please be okay..."

"Get up and fight!"

"You can do it. You can do it!"

A huge crash of thunder drowns out the uproar as the sky is split by unnatural-looking lightning. Bad lightning. There's something off about it, something wrong, but nobody's paying close attention; in any case it's above the tip of the Tower, impossibly high up. Another consequence of Jail's infinite desire, his endless greed, perhaps.

But that isn't what woke up Tarte.

Cheers ringing in his ears, he shakes his ruff, emerging from his slumber... like the fairies everywhere, he had been unable to withstand the vast, universal draining. And he is astonished by what he sees.

"It ain't possible," he breathes. "That man... Jail... I felt him strip even the memory of magic from me. The memory of... Azukina!" He crouches beside his girlfriend, shaking her gently awake. "Azukina, wake up! Look! Lookit the people!"

Her pretty purple eyes open and blink, then widen at the clamor. Nothing has changed about these people physically; they're still all in those dull gray uniforms. Their hair and skin are still washed out pastels. But their expressions -- their eyes -- are unrecognizable.

They are afire.

They are alight.

"They saw everything," she realizes, as hushed in her wonder as the populace is getting rowdy in theirs. "They bore witness. They made... new memories. The people in Labyrinth, the first ones ever drained. There was no reason for anyone to believe there was anything left to take."

They are a light...

Gasping, Tarte plops down his much-reduced rucksack (it had been mostly donuts by volume, which are now but crumbs on the mouths of a few dozen Labyrinthites) and rummages around in the remainder. A pink wand emerges, no longer than a matchstick. It is capped in a heart. But it is just cold plastic in his paws. Just plastic, but...

Azukina places her paw on his.

"I'm awake," Tarte says, swallowing a lump in his throat. "And so're you. It ain't too late. It can't be too late. Batiste! Take these," there are more of the same toyetic wands, enough to distribute widely, as long as people share. "Give them to the people. An'... tell 'em what to do! It's... it's all up to them, now!"

<Pose Tracker> Nori Ankou [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Batiste gazes at Tarte and Azukina, brushing the powdered sugar and crumbs from his clever little paws. He is sitting back on his hind legs and tail, as he did after the great sharing of the sweets. His dark eyes are wet with sympathy, and perhaps relief. He waddles forwards a step to gather up the pink wands. "I understand, my comrades," he says.

He hops - a little clumsily, for he has to use his tail and his legs and hug the small pink treasures close to his belly - onto a bench, and thence, to the tabletop it borders. As he does, he sweats -- or an otter's closest equivalent -- for this is a great charge, and he knows the stakes before him.

May every moment of that study guide me, Batiste silently prays. May it not all prove for nothing. Please, O Mother, look kindly upon my --

A leap to the tabletop!

-- works, he concludes as he lands on his belly and lays there for a moment before wiggling his way fully upright. He sways a little. Perhaps he is nearer to the ordinary in some ways than the fairies, but it's all a matter of degrees. Magic can be subtle, after all.

He closes his eyes for a moment and breathes in. Deep, deep, deep - as if he intended to stay below the water for a quarter hour. Much of it comes off in his first declaration: "My friends!"

"It is said that sometimes aeons of history happen in a single day, and you stand here on one of those days. You gaze on our brave heroines, and I can hear your cheers... and your fears, as well. Fear of what has been shown to you; fear, perhaps, of more."

He hefts up the bundle of little pink sticks before him. "They are far away, and we are gathered here. Do you fear that your prayers may be unanswered? Well..."

A pause. The pause has to be perfect, Batiste thinks. He sees eyes turn towards him. Two and a half seconds, he thinks at last, and then he sheds that last bit of worry to simply *speak*:

"They shall NOT go unanswered. No sincere hope, no true prayer, fails to echo in the vast universe. All will bear fruit, if not always in the time we hope... But time! Time is what we don't have much of! There is no time for theory, my friends. I will tell you simply - that your hopes WILL reach them - and all you have to do is hold THIS aloft!" He raises one of the little pink sticks up, a bit clusmily, but nonetheless illustratively.

"Hold it aloft!" Batiste shouts, his squeaky voice acquiring a subtle timbre, perhaps, that it doesn't usually have. "Pour your hopes, your dreams, your passions into this - THE MIRACLE LIGHT - and they will reach them! I swear this to you on the seven stars of the Golden Gates! My friend!" he says, looking now -- to that small child.

And to that child, he tosses one of the pink sticks. Gently, firmly - and with a "Yes! That's the way!" when it is caught and then turned around in the kid's grasp.

"Every single one of you," Batiste intones, "is a star. Here! Catch them! Share them with each other--" And he throws the Miracle Lights forwards, by twos and threes, high lobbing tosses that strain him. When he wobbles, his grip on the other Miracle Lights lets then clatter forwards --

Only for one of the Labyrinth residents to grasp a handful - take one - and pass the rest back. At this, Batiste laughs, with a delight that surprises even him. He gathers up what's left -- and tosses them high!

"Now raise them, with all your hopes and dreams, and send your pleas once more--!!!"

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Friendship, Gently And Warmly -- Fresh Pretty Cure OST -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SceOScrJBY8

Batiste gives the people of Labyrinth the Miracle Lights, and bestows upon them their charge: to give the magical girls their feelings. They can reach. They ''will'' reach, if only they dare to believe.

Each of them, the otter says, is a star. This turns out to be more true than even he might have expected.

The towheaded child's carrier cries out again, and a pink heart blossoms on her chest, her feelings too great to be contained: "Gooo, Pretty Cure!"

They know their names. They heard them call out to one another. And they remember... remember them picking each other up when they fell. Taking hits for one another. Taking hits for ''them''. For the people of Labyrinth. For all people, everywhere.

"Piichii! Piiine!!" Another heart is born. "Blacku!" "Hwaito!" Two more.

"Don't give up, mages!" Hearts open like a field of flowers.

Dueling fandoms, all of fifteen minutes old, try to outcheer one another: "EN-DO! EN-DO! EN-DO!" "KYOU-KA! KYOU-KA! KYOU-KA!"

"Feito! Lera! You got this!" One at a time.

"Fiiight, La Sirene!" Then dozens.

"Rise up! Mikoto!" Then hundreds.

And for the one the people of Labyrinth recognize as their own, eyes shine. Hearts yearn. A vast outpouring of love and support for a girl whose Earth name they do not know -- but whose ''new'' name they heard on the lips of her allies:

"Passion... PASSION! ''PASSION''!!"

"We want to be like you! Think for ourselves! ''Feel'' for ourselves!"

"Figure things out for ourselves!"

"You saved us, didn't you?"

"Now it's our turn to save you!"

"We believe in you..."

"Believe in yourselves, everyone--!"

All together now, in every size and shape and color, hearts swell both in and on the chests of everyone:

"Give the heroes power!"

Louder. Lightning flashes again, but nobody flinches this time, not even the towheaded child. Who could be frightened amid such a collective outpouring of emotion?

"Give The Heroes Strength!"

...and the tips of the Miracle Lights twinkle, sparkle, and erupt in rainbow light. They almost look like microphones. They ARE microphones, amplifying heartsong... each one is its own perfect little beacon; each rainbow a different spectrum; each as pretty and pure and perfect as the heart that holds it.

A heart-shaped explosion advances on the Tower and engulfs it.

Try as she might, the Queen of Belka could never have hidden all the magic of the universe away. Nor can Jail contain it.

Because magic doesn't truly come from Linker Cores or Silver Crystals; from Pillars or HiME marks or even from fairies. Artifacts are imbued by it; and can distribute it, channel it.

But beneath the glitter of the transformation item; the sublime of the ruffles; the edge of the soul's sword; there is a deeper truth, and a greater one.

"GIVE THE HEROES LOVE!"

Faintly at first, then more strongly... from inside the lives you've been living in your own head, you can hear them! You can hear everyone! And you awaken at Jail's feet, suffused by a miracle: the miracle of everyone's feelings.

Feelings that you created, kindled, just by standing up against evil. By fighting for love and justice -- fighting WITH love, and WITH justice.

By simply being yourselves...

It feels... warm...!

---

"What?" Jail shouts, dismayed, as his rainbow existence is no longer the ONLY rainbow in the room; the light from outside is pouring in through invisible cracks in the layers and layers of tower and foundation between them and the crowd, spreading to trace and fill even the circuitry upon which Labyrinth is made. The vast universe of magic contained within him is pivoting on an axis that didn't exist but a moment ago. It's still his, everything he stole... but he is no longer alone. "This," he sputters, "This is impossible--!"

---

Now it's your turn to make a miracle.

No, the source of the oldest and most powerful magic of all... was never the Heart of any World.

It's in the hearts of everyone.

The magic is in you.

OOC: Time for some OOC clarifications and invitations.

OOC: First of all, just to be clear, that AU didn't really happen, except for inside the minds of unconscious magical girls trying
to make sense of a magic-free sense of self. You do remember it though, as one might remember a dream, as the voices of support
from the Labyrinthites reach and reawaken you. You may have learned something about yourself and your relationship to magic, in
the dreaming...

OOC: Furthermore everyone should +heal/boss 2 for some EXTRA fatigue and mana, you are coursing with the power of the feelings of
those who believe in you! And then I can hit you really hard without worrying as much about accidentally oneshotting you! This
also gives you a second attack per round. The restriction is going to be one 'offensive' attack and one 'buff' attack per round,
you are encouraged to do more with the csys to interact with and support one another with flags like Reinforce, Cheer, Cleanse,
etc.

OOC: After you're healed and transformed you'll be receiving a buff from me; that's going to be it for csys this round, no csys
attacks on Jail or each other, I daresay you have enough to do this round

OOC: BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

OOC: This miracle also includes the strength of YOUR feelings drawing your loved ones to your side! Specifically anyone with
strong feelings for REN AIZAWA is invited to explore them a bit -- the power of those feelings will create a different sort of
rainbow bridge to transport her here. (Ren, please stand by, you'll go at the end of the round once you know what you're working
with.)

OOC: Strong feelings for WESTAR and SOULAR are also very welcome, and will culminate in a miracle resurrecting them from the
Delete Hole. (Westar, also please stand by, let it all come in, then you can pose the results...)

OOC: You can also pose the miracle lights reaching and reviving your alts back on Earth (if you have time; don't work too hard).
Just leave them on Earth. There's plenty going on back home for them to do (but we'll leave it strictly off camera to avoid
getting distracted).

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick transforms into Jail, Lord of All Magic!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

'Feito! Lera! You got this!'

Lera's amber eyes blink open. She looks up; lightning flashes and a blast of pink light erupts, like a heart, and washes over her. She sees those mountains. The beautiful, white-capped peaks that she saw every day from her home. She loves them, but she has her answer.

Yes. There are higher peaks than these.

She finds herself standing, again, in Labyrinth. She looks up, the Miracle Lights' glow still surrounding her. Soaring Sky is lifted up.

<I'm glad you're back with us!> he chimes.

<Let's show him a thing or three!> Broken Ground chimes, his voice rougher.

"Yeah," Lera says, as she looks at Jail. She lifts up Soaring Sky, pointing the sword Device towards Jail. "This is for Solar and Westar... who'd want to defend their home. And for Ren-chan, and everything you did to her!"

Lera shouts. "Because it doesn't matter where we are... we stand side by side!"

COMBAT: Lera Camry transforms into Barrier Jacket Dynamic!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Lera Camry! Cleanse! All of Lera Camry's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi transforms into HiME Mikoto!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Mikoto Minagi! Cleanse! All of Mikoto Minagi's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Setsuna Higashi [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"Gh..."

Setsuna Higashi starts to awaken. It's hard for a moment, to shake off the sleepiness--no, not sleepiness. Something different. But only for that one, brief moment, because--

"The..." Tears sting in Setsuna's eyes. "The people of Labyrinth..." She hears it--no, she ''feels'' it, their calls. Calls from a home she just experienced again. Calls from those she always wondered about, but could never know.

And they believe in her. THey want... what she's found, for herself. Setsuna's red eyes stare into the floor for a few moments longer before she pushes herself up, one hand at a time. "Everyone..."

Her purple hair, longer than it was when she lived here, is pushed out of her face as she rises again. Once she's at her knee, she reaches out to Love Momozono next to her. And she rises--

"Labyrinth," she says softly, reverently. "I... I won't let you down. I'll do my very best!"

"But I--"

She sighs, once. "I wish... I wish that Westar and Soular could see this," murmurs Setsuna Higashi, who was once Eas. "Could see our home... alive..."

She picks up her Linkrun once again, and she remembers the many times she used it against them. She remembers the patient, almost kind advice Soular gave her; she remembers sitting quietly over coffee... or making fun of Westar.

She remembers Westar, always reaching back to her. Always trying. Always wanting to be--

"We should've been friends," Setsuna whispers, "Or maybe we..."

"He knew it the whole time," Love says to Setsuna. And Setsuna nods, blinking away enough of her tears to look forward. "...Pretty Cure!" she says, holding her Linkrun before herself with her partners. "Change! Beat...Up!"

But this time, it is more brilliant than it has ever been. Crimson light shines from Akarun and Setsuna, and her transformation begins. The familiar jump; the move beneath spectral waves, rising again from where she had fallen. Her armor appearing piece by piece, cloth pauldrons and red dress and fabric gauntlets and clover emblem. But that is not all.

This time, standing next to her first friend, Passion is... more. A ring of light bursts out from all around her, and a pair of feathery wings sprout at her back. Her voluminous pink hair rushes in an unseen wind.

And with three other voices, "The white heart is the heart of everyone! Freshly flapping, Cure Angel!"

She and the others hover over the battlefield--and Cure Angel Passion looks to Lera, with a smile. "...It's my home!" she tells her, her heart full of a love she never thought she would know quite like this. "And they're here, too!"

Soular and Westar...

"I'll fight for them, and for all of Labyrinth! And..."

"For Chiffon!" Angel Passion and Angel Peach say as one, though it is Peach who moves to cradle their lost lamb if she can get to her, to get her to safety.

COMBAT: Setsuna Higashi transforms into Cure Angel Passion!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Setsuna Higashi.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and
Withstand applied to Cure Angel Passion! Cleanse! All of Cure Angel Passion's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Nagisa Misumi transforms into Cure Black!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Honoka Yukishiro transforms into Cure White!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Black accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Cure Black! Cleanse! All of Cure Black's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Cure White accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure White is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Cure White! Cleanse! All of Cure White's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Inori Yamabuki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

It's difficult to hear at first on that day at the zoo. But eventually Inori Yamabuki, stops as if hearing something in the distance. "Mama... Pengin!" Snapping back into this, she smiles, "Sorry Secchan... Mama's really spacing out isn't she?" Pushing the stroller forward, her steps slow again...

Because she hears it.

'Piichii! Piiine!!'

"Pine?" She echoes, then looks around like there's a vendor offering a frozen drink, "Hmmm, I don't see any special offers."

But more and more the chorus grows in her own mind, like a bright light, at the end of a long tunnel.

'Give the heroes power!'

'Give The Heroes Strength!'

And Buki's eyes close briefly, as a smile comes upon her face, "Did you know Secchan? Your Mama... usually she has a lot more confidence in herself." Moving along the side of the stroller, she puts out a hand to brush the side of her face, "And I hope if we ever do come to be together again... that I'm able to pass on how to believe in yourself. I had to learn the hard way." She smiles ruefully, as if slightly embarrassed, "And it was so easy for someone to take it all away."

'GIVE THE HEROES LOVE!'

The lights are taking over her entire vision, and fishing something out of her bag, she takes out her Linkrun, even as Kirun bursts out in a shower of light.

It's thanks to the people of Labyrinth! Their hearts created a miracle! Now it's time for you to answer them with one.

Holding up her Linkrun, her last vision of her fictional happiness faded, as she stated to- what she knew came from herself, this representation of who she might have been. "Then watch me. I believe... we can all be together again." As she thinks of Love and Miki and Setsuna... Nagisa and Honoka... "All of us." And yes, even Westar and Soular, who were cruelly punished for their undying loyalty.

Despite their methods, she knows that Westar was never really malicious, and Soular was always acting out of loyalty and that... Setsuna truly cares about them both.

And in a moment she's right there. "You always were. It's the way friends are, when they get frustrated with one another." She agrees with Love on this matter.

"Change! Pretty Cure! Beat... UP!"

A corona of yellow light becomes a transformation. There is no leap of faith, she already took it, returning here, as her outfit becomes a haze of sparkling white, and despite the new brightness and unfamiliarity of this feeling - she knows how she should feel.

This is her happiness.

Light cascades off her back, and feathers appear, spreading out in a flap. They are different from the wings of the others, but they're hers.

"The white heart is the heart of everyone! Freshly-flapping, Cure Angel!"

As she lines up alongside Cure Angel Passion with a quick flap of her wings, she tells her, "I won't let Labyrinth's faith in us go unrewarded- I'm with you! We're bringing Chiffon home!"

COMBAT: Inori Yamabuki transforms into Cure Angel Pine!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Pine is Cheered!
Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Cure Angel Pine! Cleanse! All of Cure Angel Pine's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

RISE UP;

There is a reason Mikoto left the mountain. She travelled down and made friends and enemies and enemies and enemies and then they became her friends as well; a dozen spears pointed towards her, and then pointed away. She remembers Ren Aizawa, first titanic in her terror and then in her trust.

They ate together. And she thinks, with the call, that they could do so again.

She ate with Westar, too, when he was supporting her in Dark Fall. He actually kept her ''company,'' during those frigid gatherings, when few others had ''time'' for a girl not yet grown. Sometimes they'd coax Soular to join in, though he always acted quite put-upon by the invitation. But she escaped, and she tried to share food with Westar, even then -- though the spice of his obligation was bitter. She wanted to reach him, anyway. She wonders if Soular was trying to reach her, just the same, when he coaxed her towards her Lord Brother... the only way he knew how. Perhaps Westar was just the same.

She is smaller than she felt she was, a few moments prior. Stunted by the demands placed upon her. But she is still strong enough to lift her blade. She has no extra decorations; she comes as she is. She hefts Miroku, towards Jail, and shouts: "I'M possible! Westar-senpai, watch!"

<Pose Tracker> Nori Ankou [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCO-X5iFPFE - Blue Öyster Cult - Astronomy (Imaginos) - Sacramento CA 11/4/88

It's everywhere, isn't it? If it can come to life this vividly from the denizens of Labyrinth...

How could you hide it?

Perhaps you might conceal it - perhaps you might eclipse it - perhaps a heart might be attuned only to some portion of it.

But nevertheless

LOVE PREVAILS

The first sign, for la Sirene, is that the battered shape of the Pharos - quietly, and without fanfare - resumes its previous form. She doesn't move. Lost, perhaps, in that darkling dream, staring out into the night-time ocean.

But...

Someone's calling for her.

Are they?

She can hear the song from the ocean, and in a moment, she wonders, because it's coming from

her own lips

as she breathes out, "It..."

As she pushes herself to her hands and knees, her eyes well up. The tears run down her cheeks. She can hear them, all of them. Batiste's high-pitched register carries forwards, and behind it, others. Unfamiliar voices. People who she never knew, who never met her. And yet, they're giving their faith to her. Her face crumples for a moment -- and then she laughs. It's a small sound.

After this the un-light that folds around her returns, pouring forwards. She can feel the cool, so-cool light, its temperature a non-existent quality that's nevertheless delicious on her skin. Something comforting enveloping her, mingled with the waves of love and trust. She pushes herself up, first with her hands and then in a flexing of the legs. There are a few musical chimes from where gem and metal gently bump against each other.

"I do not think," says la Sirene de Diamant as she raises upright, "that that word means, what you think it means." Her head tilts back slightly as she takes in a deep breath and lets it out.

She thinks she can taste the sea.

Her heart beats swiftly. There is that anonymous sensation of being supported, of being watched. It isn't like modelling, where the exchange is swift, light, craving and being craved. It is something deeper, like hands pressing her up.

Here she is with so many others. How many did she fight against? Oh, for a minute it was most of them, wasn't it? And yet time after time the boundaries between them eroded, the spiked stone and jagged metal turning into comfortable cushions, things there in mutual respect. Love, itself.

"If it were impossible... then we would not stand here..."

Her eyes focus, on Jail, and her hands come together in a clasp.

"... and nevertheless... we do."

La Sirene smiles, faintly. "I wonder, perhaps, at the road you've been travelling. It's been a long one... with many tolls to pay... but if you DO want to stop..." Her hands spread slightly, and the smile fades. "You had better decide and quickly."

Some part of her wonders. She should be angry. Abstractly perhaps, she is angry, somewhere. For the myriad horrors that Jail has wreaked.

But they're all cheering for her. For all of them. She has to be worthy of such devotion.

COMBAT: Nori Ankou transforms into La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de Diamant is Cheered!
Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to La Sirene de Diamant! Cleanse! All of La Sirene de Diamant's debuffs are
cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Years pass.

The Harlaown Household comes to be. And despite the age difference, she still forms a bond with Frederick Camry's daughter, Lera.

There is always a risk, a chance. Their location remains a secret, because of the possibility that Jail Scaglietti might come for her.

But, little by little, Fate Testarossa recovers from abuse, by the patience and kindness of those in her life.

'Feito! Lera! You got this!'

It was like a sound of distant thunder, and Fate, sitting on the rooftop watching the clouds roll in, listens to it.

"Oh." Her red eyes blink, as if she'd remembered something important, "That's right. I never did it properly." Drawing herself up, she smiles, "Even here, we became friends again. But I never learned that I was supposed to call your name, Lera."

As she heard it more and more, more names come unbidden to her.

"Endo, Ren, Kyouka... Hayate, Vita, Signum, Shamal, Zafira... Setsuna, Westar, Soular... and... Nanoha. ''Nanoha''."

She smiles as she repeats that last one, "Even if you take it from me, I can always learn again. Always." Then looking up, "You. I hope... one day I can teach you that too. ... Bardiche!"

In a flash of gold, he apepared in her hand.

<Yes Sir! Get Set.>

"SET UP!"

<Drive Impulse - Ignition>

In a flash of lightning she was armored again, though it felt like it had layers upon layers from the prismatic light.

Invisible Heat - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfDNO4C-nSs

And with a swing of a blade her inner world fractured again, as she leapt out skyward, to catch 'You' before she even hit the ground.

With a glare at the God of Magic, she says reprovingly, "When it was my Mother, I just wanted her to know how I felt. With you? I'll show you." Holding You with one arm, her other one extended the point of the blade towards him with a hard glare, "With this... I'll make certain you never hurt my family ever again."

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Sonic!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Blaze!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is Cheered!
Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Fate Testarossa! Cleanse! All of Fate Testarossa's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Clara huffed. She'd been reduced to a babysitter for a bunch of animals. (She will not concede the point that she is, in fact, an animal herself; she is a ''familiar'', she is something more than just 'an animal.')

... But she wasn't about to go it alone, either.

But snacks and sweets seemed to be the way to reach the people, and when more had been needed... with a grumbling and muttering she had oh-so-reluctantly provided her own stash, sourced from countless vending machines and many late-night konibi trips.

"But I better be reimbursed for this!" she'd insisted.

But when all magic had been drained.... so had she. Even though she'd taken her more humanoid form in the blink of an eye she hadn't the energy to maintain it--there was no energy for ''anything'', in that moment, anywhere, not anything that required magic.

And in a flare of green magic she'd collapsed to the ground, a fox with impossibly bright orange fur and two tails, laying concious, a half-finished bag of white chocolate-covered pretzels spilled beside her on the ground.

She wakes up to the shouting of the denizens of Labyrinth. She'd been drained of all magic, she remembered that much... Her eyes slowly open, and she blinks. <What the... How...>

Slowly getting up to all fours, she shakes her head out. She watches on in befuddlement as Tarte gives Batiste the Miracle Lights, as he makes a speech, as the citizens take up arms and just... call out their feelings.

Quietly, to herself, almost not wanting to disrupt the upswell of emotions, she mutters, <There's no way... can... can this really work...?>

She's worked with magic for years--she knows intelligent devices in and out, but for all that she has never really worked with a true and proper magical girl. Until a certain brat came into her life.

So much of this is out of her depth. This can't ''possibly'' work... and yet...

It is.

She stares, mouth agape as hearts and wants light up, names are chanted. Well, if they can do that much, then...

She whirls around, facing the screen, looking at the image of Kyouka laying on the ground. <You better get up you stupid brat! After everything you put me through I'm not letting you give up on your promise! So just...> She leans forward, her thoughtspeak louder. <GET UP KYOUKA!>

Maybe a fox can believe in something every once in a while, too.

----

"Thanks." Kyouka looked back to the stars again, collecting her thoughts. "I always felt like... like I wanted to do something ''big'', you know? Something... important." Kyouka lifted her right hand up to the sky, reaching for... something, she wasn't sure what. "Something that I was..." Her hand closed into a fist, as if she were trying to grab hold of the moon.

As if one could hold onto something so far away any more than they could grasp a ball of light.

"... ''meant'' to do."

"EN-DO! EN-DO! EN-DO!" "KYOU-KA! KYOU-KA! KYOU-KA!"

"Feito! Lera! You got this!"

... She knows those names. She's not sure how, at first, but then, slowly but surely... She remembers.

Endo, ever dependable and stalwart.

Fate, her teacher, that she still wants to protect.

Lera, who she still needs to go mountain climbing with, who took the time to teach her how to use her magic. ''Her'' magic.

That's right, she has magic.

And there were others. Ren, a friend made by chance, and a shared bond of magic discovered with a little leap of faith (and a leap for a hat.) Who tought her a spell, even after Jail tricked her into endangering Ren's brother.

And of course... Passion. ''Setsuna-chan''. Her first magical girl friend, who'd found her and helped her when everything had seemed so crazy and unreal, when she'd discovered magic entirely by accident.

... But maybe it wasn't an accident, after all.

She's grasped a ball of light before. She's seen sights of Tokyo she never could have imagined, seen its wonders and horrors, both... She's felt her own Pure Heart ripped from her chest, but also had it returned by someone she holds dear.

Something alights in her clenched fist as she holds it aloft, a bright light seeping out between her clenched fingers.

She has magic in excess to give, more than she'd ever thought.

And she has--

Kyouka blinks, in the light of the campfire, as the light solidifies into something hard and firm. She lowers her hand, opening her palm to reveal a small five-sided gem.

She smiles. "Strike Wolf."

Kyouka looks up to her father and down at Wolfy, hugging the first and patting the second as she stands up. "Thanks for the chat but... There's someplace I gotta be."

Drew looked at Kyouka with only a slightly confused frown, but then nodded. "Knock 'em dead, Kiddo." Wolfy sat up and barked.

Kyouka grinned. "YUou got it."

---

Kyouka groans, slowly pushing her hands underneath herself as she wakes up, still clad in sneakers, jeans, and a tank top. On her right wrist is a black leather bracelet, with STrike Wolf's form seated atop it. She gets to her feet, unsteady at first, but... she can hear it. The chanting, the upswelling of emotions.

Just eight months ago this might have been utterly incomprehensible to her. Seven months ago, she would have wondered if she was truly worthy of this power. 3 months ago, she made a choice, an affirmation to herself about what kind of person she wanted to be, and 2 months ago...

She was reunited with STrike Wolf.

Her eyes are clear but not dry as she looks up to Jail. That face needed to be punched. A lot.

"Strike Wolf!" Kyouka thrust her fist into the air, aware that the eyes of Moebius were upon her, and determined to pay them back for their feelings. "SEEEEET UP!"

<Stand by ready. Set up.>

A riotous burst of wild, violet magic erupts around her, wild and carefree, just like herself. And when it bursts away from her body, she is renewed once more. A bright violet tunic, a belt that trails behind her in the wind, gleaming gauntlets and boots, with Strike Wolf's active form on the back of her right hand. One last ripple of magic shimmers over her body and she slides her left foot forward, bringing her hands up as she readies to attack.

Her eyes are dry now, and focused entirely on Jail. "Alright, you jerk. Let's go, round 2. I've been ''waiting'' for this."

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki transforms into Barrier Jacket Fang!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Cheered!
Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Kyouka Okazaki! Cleanse! All of Kyouka Okazaki's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssS-UIKZh8 - Determination

"Believe in yourselves, everyone--!"

Slowly Endo's eyes open, the world coming into bleary focus once again. He takes a breath, sucking in air like he's coming up from a deep, dark ocean. A second later he becomes aware of the ground, and his palm finds purchase to begin lifting him up once again.

"Ahh" He says, "I guess I'm back.."

<SET UP.>

Endo's fingers flex, purple light burning along his digits and further upward as the boy's barrier jacket reforms around him. His hand curls around the familiar grip of his devicehis friend.

He belongs here, with everyone. The people that gave his life purpose other than grief. He's here for them, even the ones that don't stand by his side right now. There's not place for a world without his friends, and with Ren Aizawathe girl back on earth, the one who he's shared his entire magical life with.

<WELCOME BACK, KNIGHT.>

"Thanks, Stern. I missed you too." Replies Endo. "Fate, Lera, Mikoto, Pretty Cure, Diamant, I missed all of you"

For the first time in days and buoyed by the sudden lightness of both body and soul, a laugh bubbles to Endo's lips. "If you think that's impossible," He tells the Lord of All Magic, "Wait until you see what we do next."

COMBAT: Endo Naoki transforms into Barrier Jacket Zerstörer!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Endo Naoki! Cleanse! All of Endo Naoki's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

After the titanic struggles and epic adventures to create this reunion, it is almost an offensive anticlimax. Jail does not intervene; he barely even seems to perceive the urgency and warmth that draws Pretty Cure to their ward. To him, Infiniti is just a tool -- and one useless to him now, at that. All used up.

And so,

Chiffon stirs in Angel Peach's arms. When her eyes open they are soft brown lambkin eyes, not the empty blackness of infinity. Jail has, by some lights, lifted a burden from her, even if it was in the cruelest possible way and for the ugliest of all reasons.

"Puripii," she burbles, her smile audible across the battlefield.

Not entirely without resources of her own, the four-leaf clover on the fairy's forehead lights up with the same white shed by the Cure Angels.

And, across impossible distances, back on Earth, Ren Aizawa suddenly feels intensely close to Endo and her other friends.

Beyond even the gates of deletion, Soular and Westar find that their minds have survived, and their hearts are being touched -- and that they can see a way back.

A way forward, for all of them.

All they have to do is follow these feelings back to their source...

...along a path of rainbow light, accompanied by joyful infant babbling.

"Purikyua!" Chiffon opens and closes her furry little paws in greeting. "Puu! Rii! Kaaaahihihihiii!!"

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

"It seems like a lot of people are watching that channel now," Shiho says gently one morning. "That one that you liked."

The past tense on that verb gives Nagisa too much credit for sanity. But then, this might be a dream. When Shiho shows her the screen, the 'likes' aren't numbers, but some sort of light that gives Nagisa a headache to look at.

"I guess that's nice." They walk along in silence for a while.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to, um... I just thought you might like that."

"How did they find it?" Nagisa asks, not because she wants to know. She's pretending, to keep Shiho from feeling guilty.

Shiho shrugs. "I guess they were watching you watch it?"

That would feel even worse to hear if it made any sense at all. But Nagisa's vision keeps unfocusing. She's dreaming. Or she's trying to dream.

"You look kinda rough. You got a headache?" Shiho asks.

"That sound," Nagisa says. "It hurts."

"It sounds nice to me. Sorta... happy."

"It's like scratching... like..." She makes a claw of her hand to show Shiho, but she can't find any other words.

Shiho, ever the thespian, helps. "Screek, screek..."

SCREEEEEEK.

Honoka Yukishiro pauses, still facing the whiteboard. The lecture hall behind her is still silent. The cardboard cutouts of girls she used to know are still there. But the vast, dark lecture hall is not as empty as it was supposed to be.

"You're not supposed to be there," she says, without turning around.

Nagisa, from her seat, looks down at her notes. She does not remember taking them, cannot make sense of them. "I'm sorry. I know."

Honoka resumes writing a formula in blue marker. She keeps writing for a long time. "...are you still there? You need to leave."

"But why..." Nagisa stays in her seat. "Why do you keep coming here?"

Screek. Honoka's marker slides through some Greek letter Nagisa does not recognise. "Do you have a science question?" she asks, almost too quietly to hear.

Nagisa's head crowds with them all at once. The comments were always off on the youtube videos. When you're as pretty as Yukishiro, that's necessary. Not like Nagisa would have been brave enough to leave a comment anyway. She has a lot of questions about the universe, now, about light and time and life. But most of her science questions lately about herself.

"Why... can't I stop thinking about you?" Nagisa asks.

Yukishiro freezes. For the first time, she turns, her wan, sad face looking at her lone living audience member. She has been given a science question. She tries to answer it rationally.

"Maybe you know me." The blue marker in her hand keeps changing colors.

"Why is the sound of your voice still right here, in my ear," Nagisa touches the lobe, pained. "Even though I'm not using headphones anymore?"

"The acoustics of the room," Honoka ventures weakly. "Are designed to direct the sound of my voice to the audience."

"Why..." Nagisa lets her pencil drop to the ground, where it continues to rotate through a rainbow of colors, abandoning any pretense of taking notes. "...does my heart beat so fast, when I look at you?"

It's so rare for Honoka to say this, but whenever she does, so beautiful. So free. Free to be imperfect. Free to be complicated. Free to not have all the answers. "I don't know," she whispers. "Mine is too."

And she reaches out a pale hand, tentatively at first, then faster, accelerating along with their twinned heartbeats like a roller coaster down the drop.

The formulae on the whiteboard pass through the full rainbow of colors behind Honoka. Nagisa, dazed, stands, expecting somehow that when she meets Honoka's eyes, they too will represent many colors, many different hearts. Yet what she finds is a singular blue. One person's feelings.

"But we only can find out... together."

Their fingertips touch.

-=-=-

"Honoka is awake-mipo!" Mipple cries happily.

"It's about time mepo!" Mepple grouses.

"Even though Honoka and Nagisa's bonds are so strong, you took a little longer, mipo! We thought something was wrong mipo."

Cure Black and Cure White are still staring into each other's eyes, an unwelcome reality draining from their consciousness, leaving them together again. They smile, a little rueful.

"It's because Nagisa is such a scaredy cat mepo!" Mepple groans, exasperated. "How many times have you held Cure White's hand already mepo? When I wanna touch Mipple's paw, I just reach out and..."

"Eee," Mipple delights, as the two fairies try to extend their heads out of their cases to boop noses. They have a much too limited range of stretching when they are in their cell-phone like Commune form, but their heads can stretch out a bit like bubblegum, and they both giggle.

Cure Black hastily breaks her handhold with White to reclose the case and lock Mepple in there. "I am not scared!"

"She's thinking, no way, am I still dreaming mepo? A lame girl like me can be Honoka's partner in real life mepo?"

"Sh-shut up!" Cure Black orders her apparently psychic fairy. "This is serious! We might not be the only ones still..."

"Westar," Cure White remembers. "And Soular."

"If we can come back from..." Black follows her reasoning.

"Then maybe they can..."

Cure Black looks up at Cure Angel Passion, Cure Angel Peach, Cure Angel Berry, and Cure Angel Pine, their transfiguration halting her breath for a moment. Even Buki, who had always been so humble, so unassuming, had that sort of power inside. "I believe they can," she decides. "I don't want Setsuna-chan to have to leave here... without her brothers."

Cure White reclaims her partner's hand, freeing Mepple to slightly loosen the case of his Commune enough to gasp a little. Cure Black smiles.

"Together," she says, meaning it differently this time, as the Miracle Lights swell. They have their hands to say it the other way.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

The Delete Hole was always the ultimate destination for Labyrinth's garbage. Anything that Labyrinth didn't need would be sent there to cease existing. A suitable fate for that which Moebius no longer needed.

Westar and Soular were condemned to that fate. Years of service were rewarded with oblivion. For all his repeated failures, Westar should no longer exist.

He knows that. And that's the first weird thing to strike Westar, that he still knows anything. And the second is that, in the depths of oblivion, he can hear voices. The voices of Labyrinth calling encouragement for Pretty Cure, for mages, for all the heroes he's faced in all his time on earth. Imploring them to get back up, to shine brightly, to find the strength to save the day.

'...heh. They're good at that. I should know...'

That's a nice thought to have, right? Westar - Hayato Nishi - has been a faithful servant of Lord Moebius all his life, and see where that got him. It's kind of nice to have that faith in everyone else - believe that they'll make sure that things are put right. He can do that much, right?

...he shouldn't be doing anything, though. Right? And then Westar realizes that there are some of those wishes meant for him.

"This is for Soular and Westar... who'd want to defend their home."

"I wish... I wish that Westar and Soular could see this. Could see our home... alive... We should've been friends."

"I believe... we can all be together again. All of us."

"I don't want Setsuna-chan to have to leave here... without her brothers."

"I'M possible! Westar-senpai, watch!"

And more. Executive of Labyrinth's western districts, supervisor to dozens of Nakewameke, the worst at gathering misery, an unasked-for teammate, a voice of support to those serving Dark Fall, gourmand seeking out every flavour Earth has to offer, a muscle-bound goofball trying his best - Westar is remembered.

And he can remember in turn. Hundreds of nights of questioning his purpose, of falling back on faith in Moebius because he'd never known anything else. Seeing those sworn to the darkness turn away time and time again, fearful and envious of that step into the unknown. Seeing first-hand the light of camaraderie, of friendship and love, and knowing but never admitting that it was something to be sought. Of all the times he tried to be better at quenching happiness by trying to understand where it came from to begin with.

A memory cast into oblivion turns to his partner in so many crimes, giving Soular an awkward smile - and then to the sounds of babbling that herald a path of gleaming rainbow light. It's a warm light, as warm as fresh donuts, and it beckons. The Executives of Labyrinth have both seen so many impossible feats - maybe it can be their turn.

---

Heavy footfalls emerge from a gleam of rainbow light, courtesy of one who never learned to walk quietly. He wears clothes familiar and changed - it's as if the uniform of a Labyrinth executive has been bleached, blacks and greys replaced with white and sky-blue, lined with the same familiar yellow heraldry as ever. A silver Data Diamond sits sideways on his belt, gleaming in the rainbows that shine throughout this sanctum.

The man in the clothes is likewise familiar and a little different. His hair is still mint-green, his arms bare to the world - but instead of the usual confused glower so often present on his face, his expression is more one of wonder. Peace, maybe - a little of the usual surprise - and some of the joy only witnessed by those who have seen him trying a new snack food.

"Pretty Cure," his voice booms out, nearly as imperious as it ever was - before it softens. "...Everyone. Thanks for thinking of us. It meant a lot."

Westar's eyes find those here he knows best - but the smile on his face is to be shared with nearly everyone. That's how smiles work, right? But there's a nearly in that sentence, and his response to Jail is a little different.

He cracks his knuckles. Works a kink out of his shoulders. Slams his fists together. "Feels like it's been ages since we fought hand-to-hand. You all mind if I help out against this guy?"

COMBAT: Westar transforms into Westar!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Westar.
COMBAT: Westar accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Westar is Cheered! Accelerate, Empower,
Surge, and Withstand applied to Westar! Cleanse! All of Westar's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

"Now if we take the coefficient of this number and apply it here, we'll see that..."

The drone of the instructor combined with the sound of chalk scraping on the board as he wrote out various formulas made Ren's eyes quite heavy. She sat in the back, in her usualy spot, the eraser-end of her pencil pressed to her lips as she tried to concentrate to no avail. Math was just ''not'' her subject! And her grades reflected it, too. Thoughts of having to face her parents for her less than stellar performance filled her with dread. They weren't mean about it. They just...

...Were disappointed. And really that only made her feel ''worse''. It certainly didn't help that her older brother Yuu was a certified genius. It all came naturally to him. He'd earned a spot at the prestigious Ohtori Academy where he was top of his class and beloved by his peers. A stark contrast to her, an average (at best) student here at Juuban. She had nothing against being here, really. It suited her just fine, really. Even if she didn't really have any friends...

The sound of the bell sounding overhead, signaling the end of the class period, jolted her out of her thoughts. Grabbing her things to shove into her satchel, she paused as she looked over at the familiar sight of Naoki-kun stretching and yawning. It was easy to tell that he found Math to be boring too. Something they both seemingly have in common. Ren blushes, looking away to finish gathering her things. Once done, she gets up and quietly leaves the classroom. It's lunchtime, though she preferred to eat outside of the classroom.

Alone.

On the roof.

Moments later she's sat down, back against the stone wall and the bento box she'd made the night before for herself laid out next to her. She chews slowly and methodically, her mind wandering to other things as she gazes up at the clear blue sky. She's so distracted that she doesn't even hear when the door to the roof opens and closes. It's not until a voice calls out to her that she realizes she is no longer alone. Blinking, she turns to the source of it -- Endo Naoki!

"Oh! I'm sorry!" She apologizes immediately, than ''instantly'' wonders what she is even apologizing for in the first place. She stands up, awkwardly fidgeting and pulling at her skirt. "N-No one else is usually up here around this time so I come here to eat lunch. If you need the space, I can leave... Yeah, I'll do that!" She bends down to gather her bento, and before the boy can even say anything in protest, she rushes past him and through the door leading back down into the school, cheeks burning red as she thinks about how much of an absolute ''freak'' she must look to him right about now.

...But that doesn't stop her from continuing to visit the store he works at afterschool. She uses the arcade machine in the back -- Super Crimson Fist: World Fighters ~ Reflections in the Spiral of Fate (~Zero~) Act Reload -- as her cover. It helps that she's actually quite good at (and ''really'' enjoys fighting games. She's earned a bit of a reputation with a group of middle school boys who often come by to challenge her, only to leave defeated with their heads hung low. Yes, it's an ''excellent'' and ''foolproof'' cover.

She does eventually get around to striking up an actual conversation with Endo one evening. Purchasing a soda leads to them talking for a full fifteen or so seconds! Exciting! And in the following days, then weeks, they've become friendly with one another -- enough to tell each other "Hi!" in the halls at school at least. It has what feels like a whole kaleidoscope of butterflies fluttering around inside of her. It's unlike anything she's ever felt before.

Three months later sees Ren walking to school one morning, scarf wrapped around her neck to stave off the chilly air of the changing seasons. One of her hands is in the pocket of her jacket, clutching... ''something''. She enters through the school gates like always, wasting no time entering the school building through the main entrance. After switching her shoes out at her locker, she goes to stand by the main stairs, waiting patiently for Endo to arrive.

She doesn't have to wait long, fortunately, before spotting him trudging in. Smiling softly, she continues to wait until he's gone to his locker, and when he turns to walk towards the stairs she gives him a wave. Once he's close enough, she takes a deep breath, and speaks up.

"Hey! So I was wondering if you wanted to go and see Midnight Blaze? I-I have tickets!" She takes the hand she's had stuffed into her coat pocket, and indeed produces two tickets for the aforementioned band's upcoming concert. "T-That is, if you don't have to work..."

Thankfully, he didn't, and they had a great time! Bidding him goodnight after letting him walk her home, Ren goes inside with a happy, blissful sigh, hurrying up to her room to flop on the bed, still smiling brightly at the ceiling while hugging a pillow to her chest. She ends up falling asleep like that, replaying the events of the night in her head...

Ren awakens with a start in the middle of the night. Bolting upright, she's shocked to see a path of light -- shimmering rainbow light -- leading up and into an impossible space that is seemingly connected to her room.

And that's when it hits her.

Endo.

Lera.

Fate.

Setsuna.

Kyouka.

And everyone else, too.

All at once the unshakeable bonds she has with all of them comes crashing down upon her, causing her to gasp and cover her mouth, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Yes. They ''needed'' her.

"Heraut!" She calls out, and the familiar ping of the device rings out, a ball of bronze light winking into existence before her.

 He calls out, and Ren smiles through her tears.

"Of course you are. Like always." She answers back, reaching a hand out to touch the bronze light. "Let's go!"

<SET UP!>

The ball of light follows her hand to where she clasps it against her chest, eyes closed as Heraut and her become one.

Silent Bible - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC6tfg8k7nw

One magnificent flash of light later sees Ren standing there in her barrier jacket, radiating confidence and poise. Flexing her gloved hands, she looks to the rainbow path again, and runs towards it, heart full of swirling emotions that bolster her further. She doesn't know how long she's running like this. The only thing she ''does'' know is that she's going to help her friends. And ''no one'' is going to stop her!

Moments later, she reaches the end of the path, and with a grunt she jumps forward, coming crashing down onto the ground with a mighty quake, kicking up dust in the process. When the dust clears, Ren is revealed, standing triumphantly with a smile for everyone assembled.

"Hope I'm not too late everyone!" She makes a fist and pounds it into her palm, winking. "Let's kick his butt!"

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

"Can't let you have ''all'' the fun," Soular says dryly, stepping up alongside his brother.

He casts a sidelong glance at his sister.

"...thanks," he adds, diffidence doing a poor job of disguising something much more.

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa transforms into Barrier Jacket: Sovereign Mode!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Ren Aizawa.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

To be absolutely clear, there's no reason to feel sorry for Time-Space Criminal Jail Scaglietti. Few others have been as direct an architect in the sorrow of those present (and one rival in malice was just slain for her trouble). Jail has stolen Devices and sometimes their meisters. He has planted them, too, seeding destiny in the paths of innocent schoolchildren and sickbed waifs alike.

Of course, the lives he's touched have also been brought joy from such encounters.

But this being the first time to meet him properly, in the flesh, also presents a kind of opportunity. No one asks the question directly, but he answers it anyway, when La Sirene offers him a swifter and gentler end than mortal combat.

"I can't stop," he mutters, and something strange is in his voice; no one beat him into this admission; it is bragging and it is confession. "Can't stop. Won't stop. As Infinite as the Memory, so is my Desire... this is my purpose. It is why I exist. It is why the Bureau made me, and their unlikely gift."

Fate is the product of grief and mad experiments.

But it seems she may also be the grandchild of the very institution that reviled her -- that blamed her for her very existence. The one Lindy Harlaown resigned from in order to give her the home, and the love, that she deserves.

He rolls his eyes at her. At his 'daughter,' who is, in a twisted way, also his peer.

"Yes, that is right. You look upon the first artificial mage. The original. You were forged to fill a place at your mother's side. I was crafted to find... and secure... and create all the Lost Logia the doddering old fools of the Time-Space Administration could never. Never conceive of. Never discover. Never pursue, lacking the brains, and the guts, and most of all the ambition with which they blessed me in such abundance. And so I did... starting with the Jewel Seeds."

With all of Fate's hard work. Her love and her blood, her loneliness and her tears.

And, ultimately, her friendship.

She has many friends at her side today. One and all they transform, some girding themselves in pretty armor, others simply picking up their weapon once again. Tension rises as Pretty Cure announce their intent; mages make their challenges, formal and otherwise. But what tips the balance, what really starts the battle in earnest, is nothing more and nothing less than the laughter of Endo Naoki.

Jail is many things, yes. But he's nobody's punchline.

The stolen power within him shifts backwards, then upwards, intensifying like a cresting wave -- like a tsunami about to break upon them all. His lips part, he himself overwhelmed, momentarily lost in the totality of what he can now access, what has become a part of him.

And then Fate says a name.

<NEEDLE DROP!> War Paint AMV - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVh6IHowjus

Momentarily Jail's eyes glow with a hot pink quite unlike that of Cure Peach. It's more neon. And more deadly, which is a compliment to both girls, in its way. The pink heart is the symbol of love.

The pink DEVICE is the symbol of

"DIVINE BUSTER," Jail intones calmly, and from each of the five fingers on his extended hand suddenly fires an all too familiar signature beam. It isn't Nanoha's feelings behind it, but it is, unquestionably, Nanoha's magic, magic which chases his enemies with a dismissive curl of his hand.

And it hits like a mack truck, of course. Good old Nanoha.

He swings his other arm in a wide arc; his fingers crooked as though they're holding something like a baton, though there is nothing there at all. It, he, trails a brilliant and gorgeous dusky radiance in the wake of the sweep.

His eyes glow with stolen silver.

"Moon Twilight Flash..."

Sailor Moon's holy light is not really tuned to the spectrum of anything but cleansing darkness -- but everyone has a ''little'' of that inside of them as well, and some of it is even natural. It's supposed to be there. Part of the balance. It may feel lovely to be the victim of such a blow but it is a mighty one indeed.

"But," he adds, circling back to his original point. "I also don't WANT to stop. Isn't it beautiful? To become exactly who you were always meant to be? To fulfill your destiny? I was an empty vessel. For the first time, I am full. But..."

A slasher smile casts a lethal shadow, rather than a toothy whiteness, through the radiance emanating from his face.

"...that is the curse, and the blessing, of infinity. I always have room for more... COME, CHILDREN!"

More lightning strikes, so hard and so bright and so loud that even within the tower, both the flash, and the rumble, make themselves known. The vast chasm that they're fighting in, once full of poison roots, now full of all the magic in the universe, groans with thunder like a living thing.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Westar.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Cure White.
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand
applied to Ren Aizawa! Cleanse! All of Ren Aizawa's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion dodges 26 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Cure
Angel Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine braces 26 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 21 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel
Pine's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant perfectly dodges 52 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Critical Dodge!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa perfectly dodges 48 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge! Fate Testarossa's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White dodges 20 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Cure White's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar dodges 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 34 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi perfectly dodges 43 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge! Mikoto Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa neatly dodges 56 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Ren Aizawa is Quipped! Ren Aizawa's Flash ability activates!
COMBAT: Lera Camry braces 31 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is
Quipped! Lera Camry's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki decisively counters 42 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Endo
Naoki is Quipped! Endo Naoki's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Machtiger Schild, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 49 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"You, too, Endo-san," Lera says, glancing sideways at him -- and giving him a grin. Then, she looks at Fate -- and she nods at her. "Right behind you, Fate!"

She exhales, then, and looks at Cure Angel Passion. There's a smile on her face. She nods. She takes a step forward -- and then her eyes widen a little.

Those heavy footfalls. Lera gasps. "Westie!" she says. "You--you made it! And--"

And Ren, too, flying in to help. She looks at her best friend -- then she grins. "You're a little late... but that's fashionable, y'know?"

Her eyes shift back towards Jail Scaglietti. Her jaw sets. That familiar blast of light explodes from his fingers, streaking out towards Lera -- and for her friends.

Broken Ground chimes: <Shield!>

A barrier of golden light erupts -- and Nanoha's spell smashes into it, throwing Lera backward. She grits her teeth, then she shakes her head. "Shut up!" she calls out to him. "You did all of that... for your own gain! All the people you hurt--the ways you used Fate!"

She slams her fist into the ground, leaps into the air, and then ''flies'' at him. "Endo-san, Ren-chan!" she calls out, looking over one shoulder. Then, she looks over the other. "Fate! Kyouka-san!"

Then, back at Jail. "Let's show him what we think of what he ''wants''!"

Lera suddenly shoots straight up -- over Jail's head, and points Soaring Sky down at him. The blade splits in half -- and then fires a beam of gold-red light down.

"And show him what he ''deserves''!"

COMBAT: Lera Camry has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Linker Core Burst on Ren Aizawa.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"Then I'll make you." Is her succinct response to the idea that he can't and won't stop... while sad, is of no consequence to the fact that he keeps hurting her family. But then he invokes surprise in her red eyes, before they narrow at the invocation of the Lost Logia, "... So you were created to be used. And now you create others to use." It is her own condemnation, "I reject it."

However, as Jail brings forth that Neon Pink, Fate looks at him in momentary alarm, as suddenly the most familiar spell that Fate knows that is not her own comes at her. For a moment she's too stunned to move.

Then reflexes kick in and the child suddenly pivots sideways, flying in a wide arc against the beam of all consuming light. The pivot, was to shield 'You' with her own body. As she swings around, and dives to put her down. "You have no right to that." She tells him, "Not to that spell. It requires wisdom and tactics to use it properly."

Raising Bardiche he intones, <Defenser Plus> And a dome like shield forms over You, as she tells her. "I'll protect you." But it might as well also be 'I'll protect You."

Then taking off again, she swings around to face Jail Scaglietti. "I don't see anything beautiful at all about it. You don't care about anyone or anything else, do you? I find it... pitiable." And then flying up, she turns over in a spin at Lera's call, then comes up alongside her, as Bardiche swings down in a wide arc, suddenly expanding as she points it at him from another angle, that beam crossing with Lera's, golden and sparking with violet.

"Lera!" And it's in that moment, she calls it again, "Even without magic... we still..."

She does not finish, but maybe she doesn't need to, it is in demonstration of the point she's making.

This is what is beautiful to her. Something she was taught years ago, because of them.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 55 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Quipped!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has joined the combo started by Lera Camry!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Call Your Name on Lera Camry.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo's head turns when Ren appears nearby, but he's not entirely surprised. Her presence is natural. It always is. He smiles and reaches to take his girlfriend's hand, squeezing it tight.

The return of Westar and Soular only reinforces the feeling that things have changed for the better. That things have finally turned in their favor in this desperate struggle.

The bloom of pink light races forward and Endo raises his own hand to call defensive magic. The Buster crashes against the purple-black dome, forming an immense bubble of destruction against its surface. That magic is too powerful to be stopped entirely, but what bleeds through he can endure for now.

When the roar of magic fades and Lera calls out he nods, to her and Fate, and then to the girl beside him. "Ready!" He agrees.

As Lera goes upward, he speeds straight toward Jail. They've rehearsed this many times before, and his job is simple: cut through the center.

"Let's show him how it feels!" Jail's deployed Endo's own Device against him and his allies more than once. Now he has the opportunity to experience it firsthand.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used I Wanna Hold Your Hand on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has joined the combo started by Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

And Westar really ''does'' watch. "Westar-senpai! Soular-senpai!" Mikoto chirps, her joy overwhelming her anger for a glorious moment. "You're okay?!"

She grins, because Westar never wanted to fight ''with'' her, before. (She supposes he'd already learned his lesson.) "Yup! Together!" She nods, cheerfully, when he asks to join in.

"Ren!" She calls, with cheer, to her as well. She's glad she's here!

And there -- an artificial human. He got... what he wanted, though he was created for a purpose. But Jail brings Infinity to bear, and...

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE! You can get in trouble just for running by the pool - so I know that destroying pool facilities is out of the question! I'll never forgive anyone who destroys a pool so people can't cool off by daylight - or be romantic by moonlight!

... Mikoto has fought Sailor Moon before. She ''knows'' to get out of the way, before her mind even registers that lovely assault.

"THAT'S NOT YOURS!" She yells, as she leaps forward and swings her blade down.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used We're Not Alone on Westar.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Westar accepts Mikoto Minagi's We're Not Alone, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Westar is Reinforced by Mikoto
Minagi!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

At Jail's reply, la Sirene rotates her hands once and bows her head. Perhaps some point of honor (is this some weird Sorrow Sea thing or her own quirkiness? La Sirene de Diamante has more than her share) compelled her to at least make the proposal.

And then Jail speaks of blasphemies. Her lips thin. The first artificial mage. The rest... perhaps he truly has no choice. And that would be a tragedy, as if Victor Frankenstein's monster had not even had the hope of society and learning.

Endo laughs - la Sirene's eyes cut towards him, but then quickly return to Jail. Her eyes widen at the magic he begins. He is whirling around first, to assail the Device-users with mimicry. La Sirene de Diamant does not know this, and for once she has the *choice* -- this battle is not a shock at this point --

And so when he whirls around to unleash the Moon Twilight Flash, la Sirene de Diamant is simply not there.

Where did she go?

She jumped up, which means that she is coming down -- for she is not blessed with Flight, but she *has* executed truly astounding jumps when she had to -- at the same time that Mikoto is. "Get Sailor Moon's magic out of your mouth," she half-shouts as she leads with one diamond-soled boot -- the form may be a little clumsy, but it is backed by ''fury''. "After everything--!!"

Come what may she lands and tumbles to the side, momentum carrying her enough to get her feet under her. Rising up, she looks towards Mikoto, and despite everything, she smiles. A pure and simple smile: I'm glad that you're here.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Making My Own Path on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used An Encouraging Squeak on Mikoto Minagi.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

Before them is one of the great architects of misery, Jail Scaglietti. A mad scientist, manipulating lives and hoarding weapons of devastation. A man who Westar...might have heard of?

In fairness, his priorities for the last few years were Pretty Cure, Searching For Infinity, and Causing General Misery. He has not been privy to the workings of the Time-Space Administration outside working with Fate and Precia that one time - and look at how that turned out.

On the other hand, Westar has not been aggrieved personally by this man - and something about a person being created for a purpose by an uncaring government kind of resonates a bit. Kind of familiar is all. "I mean. Doesn't stop you from doing something else-"

This might not be the time for diplomacy, though, as Jail unleashes a spell that is all too familiar - Divine Buster. And then another stolen spell that is terrifyingly familiar-

"DUCK AND COVER!" Westar is the one to shout, but both he and Soular bolt on sheer ''instinct'', diving out of the path of a wave of purifying light all too familiar to the former Executives of Labyrinth. (Current Executives? Moebius's HR policies are unfortunately unclear.)

Westar is slower than Soular, to say nothing of Mikoto, and the best he can do is roll with the blast. An experienced wielder of darkness and misery, he's not sure how much of that power was left after his brush with oblivion...but there's definitely less of it now. He picks himself up, smoking slightly from the wave of holy light, and grumbles under his breath.

It's kind of hard to stay angry, though. "It's still - you know what, fine. Call me Westie." He gives Camry a grin, and Minagi a nod. "Yeah, we're fine. Good to be on your side again." An old quip with a new context.

And there's something important to remember. He hasn't been back to supervise 'his' district of Labyrinth in a long time, but the cheers of its denizens are still echoing in his ears. They matter. And it's for them that he bellows out a familiar refrain.

"I am Westar! Denizen of Labyrinth!" Faithful to Moebius no ''more'', and he turns to the comrade who learned that lesson so much faster than he did. "Hey, Passion. Let's protect our home, all right?"

This is different from the situation he's used to - normally he's looking after the monster fighting against a bunch of people. But Westar has fought mages on occasion, and his favourite trick was always getting up close. So he runs in, grabbing instinctively at wisps of rainbow brilliance - and with a handful of light, swings a wild punch at Jail's face.

COMBAT: Westar has used Everything For Labyrinth on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Westar has used Bright Haymaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion accepts Westar's Everything For Labyrinth, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Angel Passion
is Reinforced by Westar!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

There was a lot to take in, and a lot happening. Her friends and comrades are getting back up, ready to rejoin the fight.

And they're not the only ones doing some rejoining. "... Westar?" She only fought him once, but... She has a pretty vivid memory, of yelling at Wester to get off of her planet, when he tried to bring misery to their world.

And now she's on ''his'' planet, instead. Funny ol' universe, that way.

She grins a little. "Like the new threads. And good to see you back."

And Ren joins them next, and she lights up. "Ren-chan! Nah, you're ''just'' in time."

Jail has something to reveal... the ''first'' artificial mage... and he's following through with the purpose he was made for. "You can make a different choice, you know. If you're so powerful, like you claim, then make a different choice! Choose something different from what they made you for!"

Divine Buster comes for her-- Kyouka hasn't seen nearly as much of Nanoha as she'd like, but she's gathered the impression that she's an impressively strong mage, for a girl her age.

She briefly wonders how this compares to the real thing, but she doesn't have long to think about that before she kicks into gear. A burst of purple energy bursts from the ground as she takes off, blurring into motion as she tries to outrun it--

But no, Jail is too fast for her, and the beam tracks and then intercepts her before she can get away. She is sent flying, impacting the ground once, twice, before simply rolling to a halt.

She coughs as she struggles to her feet, but her gaze is firm and determined. "Nobody can ''tell'' you who you're meant to be. That's something you've gotta discover for yourself." She rises, back in her fighting stance, a bit singed and scorched, but stilla ready to fight. "That's a choice you ''make''! Something you discover! If it wasn't for ''my'' choices, for me ''choosing'' the kind of person I wanted to be, then... I wouldn't be here with the people that matter to me."

"I'm with you, Fate!" She's fighting, side by side, at their level, just like Fate said she would, one day. She can't falter now, not with everything riding on this.

Lera calls out to all of them, and Kyouka grins a little, despite herself. "You got it!" Her knees bend, as she gets ready to spring into motion. "You ready, buddy?"

The device on her gauntlet chimes with an inner light. <Affirmative. Syncronizing... start.>

A circle appears at her feet, and purple magic washes up from it, covering her body, imbuing her with speed... and in the blink of an of light Kyouka takes off, streaking across the battlefield with a violet shimmer in her wake. Then she jumps, airborn, and a shckwave of magic erupts in midair as she kicks off with a boot, suddenly alternating directions.

Another one as she winks to the other side of the battlefield, and then a third, and from a new angle she suddenly charges right for Jail, her gauntlet shining with a bright violet light. A diversion and the time to build up mana both.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used A Heartfelt Wish on Fate Testarossa.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

"Lera-chan! Endo-kun! Fate-chan! Kyouka-chan! Setuna-chan! Mikoto-chan! Sirene!" Ren calls out, her vision getting blurry for a bit before she hastily wipes them away. "Everyone...!" As much as she's still overwhelmed by the outpouring of feelings that brought her here... there's an enemy to beat into the ground! She turns sharply to look at Jail Scaglietti, listening to what he says. She casts a sympathetic look at Fate, clenching her fist as she thinks about everything the girl has been through. And how far she's come.

She also thinks about her own part to play in this. Jail, afterall, was responsible for her standing here to begin with. Responsible for bringing Heraut and her together. In a way, she's thankful, for without his intervention she wouldn't be the person she is now.

But ''that'', however, is where any "props" given to the dastardly artificial mage come to an end. Endo takes her hand at that moment, and Ren looks away from Jail to him, a smile reforming on her face as she squeezes it. There's so much she wants to say to him right now, the memories of whatever she experienced before coming here still fresh in her mind.

But of course, Jail has to interrupt! Her eyes widen as the familiar pink light of Nanoha's magic blooms into existence, and she lets go of Endo's hand as she reflexively attempts to dodge out of the way. She's mostly successful, though still gets clipped by some of the attack, feeling the sheer heat of it on her skin -- enough to make her grit her teeth.

"You have no right!" She yells out at Jail, echoing Fate. And then Lera is leaping forward, calling out for them to join her, and Ren falls into line in short-order, again relying on her by now well-honed battle instincts. Dashing forward, she holds a hand out above her as a spell circle traces out within her palm.

"TAKE THIS!" She shouts, flinging her hand forward as the spell circle morphs into a spear of bronze superheated mana that tears forward with mean vengeance and intent for its intended target.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has joined the combo started by Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Perhaps, a lot of her fury in the moment was Chiffon, moreso than taking away the moments that allowed her to believe in herself. However, as he burbles, Pine's eyes grow wider, before "Chiffon!" And flying over to Peach's side, she smiles, and reaches out a finger to touch her paw, "You had me so worried." She beams at that.

Which is why it might be extremely rude that Jail Scaglietti interrupts the moment with a Moon Twilight Flash. As it cascades towards Pine, she stiffens, before holding out her palm, and the brilliant light slams into her palm, initially splitting off of it, but then she turns and joins her other palm to it, an angelic halo glittering as the energy of it slams into it, and she's blasted back, one meter... two... but not more than two, before the barrage tapers off the now aerial Pretty Cure.

"You almost hit Chiffon!" She says, upset at the possibility.

And that's when she sees the Rainbow road glitter out and- "Westar!? Soular? You're-" And then she smiles, "Don't just thank us. The hearts of Labyrinth's citizens are strong, aren't they?"

Then she holds up a finger, "Eh, Westie? Okay!" She then turns to Miki, who shrugs at her, and she shrugs back.

"Then. Let's do it together." She agrees with Cure Black. "Though... where are your wings?" She seems surprised, as if she suspected 'Cure Angel Black' and is instead seeing a dotted line at her back as she flies one full circle looking for her. "It's fine! We'll still do it together!"

And with one great flap of her wings, she rushes into the battle, moving one way and another on the approach as she draws back her fist, then suddenly slams him right in the gut with her fist, as that great glittering streak of power collapses into one great rush of energy, and a fluttering of feathers dissipating into energy.

She tries to drive him right towards...

"Passion!"

COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used Seraph Strike on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used ???Cure Angel Black When??? on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine accepts Cure Angel Pine's ???Cure Angel Black When???, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Pine is
Reinforced by Cure Angel Pine!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion smiles to see CHiffon recover, too. "...I--"

Setsuna's brothers, Black calls them. Of course that would be the word, wouldn't it? That would be the very word itself, one she never would have thought to use... but that is true, even as it's said.

And she doesn't have to leave without them. At least, not now. Heavy footfalls emerge from the light, and Cure Angel Passion turns her head towards the sound despite the pressing threat ahead. And for just a moment...

"Westar!" she cries. Then, "Soular!"

Soular is as Soular as ever, though, and even as Westar thanks them more openly, Passion smiles at Soular too. Thanks, he'd added, and she can tell.

"..." She doesn't know what more to say to Westar in the moment, but she smiles at him, too, and maybe that feeling will cross the distance anyway.

"Ren-chan!" she shouts back at her too. Their friends--everyone--!

But Jail is still here. Jail answers a question La Sirene doens't quite ask--

"You..."

Passion frowns, and shakes her head. "...So you can't do anything other than what you're doing..." It's sad, to her. But sad as that might be--

She's not going to let him have his way any more than she would Northa.

But it's a surprise, to be sure, when Moon Twilight Flash afflicts her. Passion has felt the sting of Sailor Moon's magic before, when her name was Eas. The mighty blow that comes sees her move faster than memory, faster than sight, but not quite fast enough to completely evade its force.

...She ducked and covered just as surely as Westar and Soular. Some memories stay.

But a Denizen of Labyrinth Westar calls himself, and then he looks to her. He doesn't call herEas. He--

"...Yes," Cure Angel Passion answers him. "For our home."

Then she calls to Lera, "And..." She isn't sure what it is exactly that she wants to say right then. She ends up just smiling at Lera, glad she's here.

"Together."

Then, she rises into the air--and with Pine drives forward with a flying strike forward, "Haaaah--!"

COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Chosen Bonds on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Wing Beat on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa accepts Lera Camry's Linker Core Burst, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa is Reinforced by Lera Camry!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa accepts Endo Naoki's I Wanna Hold Your Hand, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa is Cheered!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used You're A Hero on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Fate Testarossa's Call Your Name, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Cheered!
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Cure Angel Passion's Chosen Bonds, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Reinforced by Cure Angel
Passion!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Ren Aizawa's You're A Hero, taking 25 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa accepts Kyouka Okazaki's A Heartfelt Wish, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is Reinforced by
Kyouka Okazaki!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts La Sirene de Diamant's An Encouraging Squeak, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Mikoto Minagi
is Cheered! Withstand applied to Mikoto Minagi!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has joined the combo started by Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure White is an only child. When she sees Westar and Soular return, all she says is, "Cure Angel Passion," with an overjoyed, misty tone.

Cure Black has a little brother. When she sees Westar and Soular return, she points at them. "You two caused nothing but trouble, and your sister saved you! You have to do whatever she says from now on, got it? You owe her big time!"

Jail is not an opponent Cure Black takes lightly. His madness and cruelty, his ability to take even Black's memory of her own partner... it frightens her. But a part of her still, when it comes to a direct, physical attack, cannot help but underestimate the raw power output of someone who looks like a normal human, after fighting a foe like Northa. Gritting her teeth as she watches the effect of Nanoha's attack on her angelically empowered fellow Pretty Cure, she sets her feet alongside Cure White to prepare for what she very much assumes will be more Midchildan magic.

Instead, today he is the one named Sailor Moon.

"Arienai," Cure Black gasps. The energy is so wide-angle that there is no hope of dodging. If she had not flinched, perhaps she could have stood strong enough to let it burn over her, but the divine power pours between her arms and she founders immediately, blazing lunar magic immersing her until she falls.

Cure White is some distance away, and the two share a nod. They are too suffused with the courage of the Miracle Lights to fear for one another, not when they can see the determination in each other's eyes. Cure White launches herself at Jail first, giving her partner time to kick nimbly back to her feet and shake her mussed hair out. Cure Angel Pine lands next to Black in that moment, and though this is not her own partner, she is comfortable enough with her presence to keep her eyes fully on Jail while still lifting a fist to offer a thump of a greeting.

"My wings?" She spares a glance for that question, her eyes widening. A brief image of Cure White bewinged flushes her cheeks, but she looks forward, to her charging partner.

"I'll show you," she says, and bursts into a run.

Cure White has reached the mad doctor, and when he strikes out at her, her forearm strums along the inside of his arm, letting him feel pressure. When he reacts, when he resists, she has him. Letting the pressure catch, she reverses her arms, passing them across each other in a smooth, contained motion. The only trick is, his arm doesn't bend that way. And the moment he gets stuck...

Cure Black comes bounding into him. Her stride is long, almost joyously so, great deep floating shoves, until at last she takes those last few steps she can manage without the benefit of the ground, the closest a runner can get to flying. And the final bicycle of her tawny, well-muscled thighs ends with a rock-hard knee sailing up beneath Jail's chin.

COMBAT: Cure White has used Kansetsu-waza Joint Lock on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Pink Lemonade on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: COMBO! Lera Camry, Fate Testarossa, Endo Naoki, Kyouka Okazaki, and Ren Aizawa have used Raid Cross on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 6 Fatigue damage from Cure White's Kansetsu-waza Joint Lock, taking 1 Fatigue damage! Pink
Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Trap applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure Black's Pink Lemonade, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Psyched!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 11 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Making My Own Path, taking 9 Fatigue damage! La
Sirene de Diamant is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 40 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's Seraph Strike, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 7 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Wing Beat, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Cure Angel Passion is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick partially dodges 10 Fatigue damage from Westar's Bright Haymaker, taking 38 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Blind applied to Pink Moon Stick!
Shadow Stern has arrived.
Black Sky has arrived.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern transforms into SHADOW STERN!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern covers Pink Moon Stick for Mikoto Minagi's attack, Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness, taking it upon herself
instead!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness, taking 28 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi is
Psyched! Diversion applied to Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Black Sky transforms into BLACK SKY!
COMBAT: Black Sky covers Pink Moon Stick for Lera Camry's attack, Combo: Raid Cross, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 137 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry, Fate Testarossa, Endo Naoki, Kyouka Okazaki, and Ren Aizawa's Combo:
Raid Cross, taking 112 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry, Fate Testarossa, Endo Naoki, Kyouka Okazaki, and Ren Aizawa are
Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 5 opponents!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure White has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Westar has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Black Sky has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Black has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Lera Camry has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has saved her current combat state for later!

[[2024-12-21 - The Labyrinth Resurrections 2|TO BE CONTINUED]]

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]

File:9bab1071dbb788f0110b8d07444cb1e4.jpg

2024-12-25T17:20:56Z

Pink Moon Stick:

Logs

2024-12-25T16:18:42Z

Pink Moon Stick:

2024-11-30 - The Labyrinth Resurrections

2024-12-11T03:08:56Z

{|class="toccolours" cellspacing="2"
|-
! style="background:#CC6699; border: 2px #CC0033 solid; font-size: 110%;" align="center" colspan="2" | '''The Labyrinth Resurrections'''
|-
|'''Summary''': 
''As the Queen of Belka falls, Jail Scaglietti rises. The magical girls find out who they would be without magic -- and with a little help from unexpected friends, remember who they are with it.''
|-
|'''Who''': 
[[Jail Scaglietti]], [[Soular]], [[Kyouka Okazaki]], [[Lera Camry]], [[Setsuna Higashi]], [[Mikoto Minagi]], [[Fate Testarossa]], [[Yumi Ohzora]], [[Raiko Takashima]], [[Mami Tomoe]], [[Ren Aizawa]], [[Nori Ankou]], [[Mai Tokiha]], [[Endo Naoki]], [[Ginka Shimizu]], [[Nagisa Misumi]], [[Honoka Yukishiro]], [[Westar]], [[Inori Yamabuki]]

GM: Pnk Moon Stick
|-
|'''Where:''' 
Dark Realms
|-
|'''OOC - IC Date:''' 
11/30/2024 - 6/17/16
|-
|}

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Dark Realms +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
Light cannot exist without darkness, nor darkness without the light, or so
some claim. Whether the Dark Realms are simply the Fairy Realms through a
mirror darkly is difficult to ascertain, but it's undeniable that some
realms in either domain lack an obvious counterpart in the other. Certainly
the ceaseless war between bright virtue and dark evil gives little heed to
the notion that ultimate victory is impossible.

Indeed, a given realm of darkness will often commit itself solely to
extinguishing the light forever. With names like Minor Land, Labyrinth and
Dark Kingdom, perhaps that isn't all that surprising. Endless plains beneath
a midnight sky lit only by bolts of violet lightning harbor armies of
strange creatures, or yet stranger war machines. If there is water, it is
brackish, tainted. The air itself stabs lungs like a superheated knife. Some
denizens of the Dark Realms claim that they're trying to transform the
entire universe into worlds like their own, but colonizing more pleasant
environments might be sufficient motivation alone.

Black, too, has shades; there are many dark wastelands, but also dark
cities, dark oceans, dark forests, dark deserts, dark skies. Some are even
possessed of a loveliness all their own; as beautiful as it is deadly, with
shadowy landscapes that mesmerize before they surprise. No matter how
populous, all are pervaded by a sense of emptiness, of absence, masked at
times by swirling rage or despair, but never erased.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLE FANTASIA

Lera is a child of the stars, by Earthly perspectives, but well has she internalized one lesson of her adopted home: that though roots can break rock -- rocks can also break plants. No matter how mighty, the vine cannot withstand the landslide. And she summons one, aureate and shimmering, to crash against the first layer of vines, to bury it. They fade back into the motes of magic from whence they came, but the damage does not.

Mikoto is next; adopted also, but not by Earth; Lera's perfect opposite, in some sense. And now literally, in their perfectly complementary approaches; where the Midchildan bludgeons broadly, the HiME pierces precisely; shocking, really, compared to how Miroku is normally wielded, normally seen. She targets not the wall itself but the response from it, as Northa seeks to mount a final defense through offense.

It will take Pretty Cure a long time to summon their full strength, and any single one of those vines might have laid a legendary warrior low. But none of the lush, jagged, and deadly appendages make contact -- not even one -- with anything but obsidian.

Kyouka materializes beyond that clash of titans, mid-swing, directly in front of the trunk. The explosion before her is so bright that she casts such a long shadow behind her; though her body is tiny in comparison to the immense column of power busting (bustering) forth from her fist, that just means she is power compressed, power made dense, power called forth. She feels the next layer of vines disintegrate on contact -- and a satisfying recoil, as she is propelled backwards, back amongst her friends, by the sustained impact of her moonlit magic.

La Sirene de Diamant has many missions. Some she was assigned and others she volunteered for. Some she bears resentfully, and others eagerly, but all of them dutifully. But one and only one has the distinction of being first; the first she was given, if not always the first in her heart. In seeking to claim Northa's sorrow, by right and by conquest, she is also seeking to REclaim the sorrow of everyone Northa harvested. So, so many people, across time, across space. And she can feel, as the starlette bursts against her hand, and streams into the wall, into the fallen Queen, that as she reduces each molecule of plant stuff into barest atoms she is also separating from Northa's engorged form, all Sirene's functions. And not only functions, not only sorrow in general, but... sorrow in particular. Northa has hurt Nori Ankou more than once, and dearly. Some of the sorrow she reclaims now is her own, cruelly stolen.

Six Pretty Cure, and one Knight, remain.

Marble Screw is a known quantity and an absolutely notoriously destructive grim reaper, ironic indeed for the channeling of the cosmic profundity of Creation itself. What is a mystery about it is how every time it appears, it is even greater than the last. How, through their darkest adventures and their softest normal lives, day after day, two girls become closer. Two girls fall more profoundly for one another. Two girls rise, hand in hand.

The Lucky Clover is a new miracle; one never before seen on this or any world. Perhaps, from the other side of the wall, Chiffon is helping her guardians help her. Or perhaps not. Fairies are not the only birthplace of miracles. And that which dwells not only within but more crucially flowers between Peach, Berry, Pine and Passion is assuredly as puissant a love as exists. Not every love is romance (nor every romance love, as some are unlucky enough to know). But the lack of romance here is no lack of love. The four girls know that deepest and most profound of magics: love is something that when you give it away, you end up having more. Their friendship has saved Eas' world. Their friendship has saved their own world, more than once.

And now their friendship will save every world.

The primal truth normally kept in the Garden of Light joins with the wondrous, musical finale born in the Garden of Rainbows, and with one other thing--

--the biggest needle in the world, held in the hands of the bravest boy. Endo Naoki, so like and so unrecognizably unlike the Umbral Knight; Fallen Stern, who forgot much of his old master and all of his old liege, perhaps as much in self-defense as in brokenness. Theirs is different than Fresh friendship; theirs is partnership, but different too from Honoka and Nagisa. They are together but they are not one. Stern is from the past and Endo represents the presence, but for the first time maybe ever, what they are forging together is not destruction; is not violence--

--it is the future.

Stern pierces the center (a center! at last!) of where the Grand Finale and Marble Screw roar against the last and toughest and oldest of the vines -- against a suffering more ancient and more desolate than anyone's -- and Endo PUSHES --

--and as the final wall is breached by his thrust, allowing the magic of Pretty Cure to surge through and then balloon outward, whiting out every last vine, every last leaf, everything --

--the future, it seems, is mercy.

One could not call the end of the Belkan Queen's sorrow anything but that.

<SoundTracker> Chiffon Awakens - Fresh OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG9b9pN7t8g

And, of course, there behind it all -- exposed at last -- is the first and final victim of Northa's kidnapping plot. Midchildans might call the contents of that vault the Linker Cores of both the ancient worlds stolen by the Knights of Belka, and of every modern world Labyrinth could reach -- which is to say all of them. Others might turn to the metaphor of the heart, and no one could be wrong to do so. To deny a world its magic is to deny a world its essence; a vital fragment of its very soul.

The Queen of Belka hid it so thoroughly that it took even the Pericosmic Array, the ultimate time-space observatory, thousands of years to find.

Hid her.

Not that the Queen ever shrank from the possibility of storing a Pillar -- a person -- for their own safety, but there's a sense that perhaps the Royal Vault was not always a baby lamb. That Infiniti became soft and cuddly and, for that matter, meaningfully sentient, because of what the Queen forced it to capture. To contain. You are what you eat... and Infiniti consumed the very essence of Shining Carousel of Talasta, and Dzhamura, and Valdamere, and Wirral-au-main, and the Demense of Jagged Waters, and Mor Cynddeiriog, and Old Phoria; those worlds that weren't reduced to dust at the hands of conquering Knights instead suffering a longer, slower execution as absent any warmth they became colder, and stranger, and worse than dead, before death finally claimed them.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," bleats the being that was, for a time, called Chiffon in the arms of her Pretty Cure. Who was changed by the warmth within her, and then, much more, by the warmth that they surrounded her with. Who was, in a way, born -- at the very least, reborn -- raised, cared for, for the very first time.

And who, now, as Labyrinth's energy source -- as Moebius' -- and as Northa's -- is once again nothing but a tool, with eyes empty blank black holes, radiating not love and not joy and not even sorrow but nothing -- nothing but power.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," the cosmic being repeats, dully; though now also forced to digest all magic from the Garden of Light to the Garden of Rainbows, she -- forced once again to be an it -- is beyond transformation, beyond ascension. Beyond reach...?

Not beyond everyone's reach.

"Come here," says You, coaxingly, with the gentle body of an innocent and the silken voice of a criminal.

From the sidelines, from the shadows, she walked through the wall of vines as quickly as the magical girls brought it down; step by step matched their layer by layer.

Her arms are thrust into the column of cyan light suspending Chiffon -- radiating from Infiniti -- and she isn't wearing a Barrier Jacket, she has no Device and no ability to transform, she's just a girl -- she's just a puppet. The sleeves of her robe disintegrate instantly; and the smell of fast-burning skin fills the air, stinking beneath the fading verdancy of what once was Northa. This body cannot possibly withstand the force of Infiniti, but it only has to for a moment longer, just a single heartbeat until she touches Infiniti, until she claims it for his own --

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Invisible Heat (Acoustic ver.) - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txf_64xFAp0

Sometimes you just aren't fast enough, you fly to catch up to everyone, but instead you find yourself... her. With that man's voice - reaching - reaching for...

Their precious charge

It's like looking into the Future tsaP

And at the sight the jungle warps and buckles as she races forward, arcing lightning spilling off of her like a brightly lit coil.

You look at yourself Reaching for Chiffon rehtoM ruoy gniyebO

There's not enough time, and time is one thing you can't make more of. Your barrier jacket detonates, all the metal shattering as it flies off of her and dissipating into light, wings so like Nanoha's appearing on her feet and wrist. Because as fast as she can be, she can still go faster.

Fractions of a second away and a life ends in Teal Light gninthgiL teloiV

The air screams around her as she hurtles towards it dangerously, even less protected now. Misjudging this even slightly will harm her too, maybe even end her life.

A life can Begin dnE in moments like these, did you know?

I know

Only you're not a mirror

You're not me

You're you

I want to see

Want to know

Who You Will Become

She can smell flesh burning, already from that light, unprotected as it is. Any longer, and it might cause her worse harm. It is the worst kind of puppetry, to take away even her own sense of self-preservation, to sublimate it entirely to infinite desire.

Make a small wish, hope that you can do it. That you can grasp her with your smaller hands, and hold her tight.

And in that moment, hands encircle her waist, as she barrels into her, to carry her away, out of that light momentarily searing her far too thin barrier jacket, as Fate cries only, "YOU CAN'T!"

It's unclear if she's talking to her, or to Jail, or even both.

She expects her motion to stop at any moment if he has active the Momentum Eater spell he used before. But she's so fast... maybe maybe... all she needs is one.

Just one.

Let it be enough.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Fate slams through the cyan pillar and comes out the other side with her arms full of You -- full of her. Her other self. Not just a clone of a clone, not to Fate. And certainly not a mere puppet. This is a sister. This is her big little sister.

And they are both still alive.

You blinks up at her through an unmistakably soft, cherry-red pair of eyes that have nothing of the coldness of her creator.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," bleats what was formerly known as Chiffon, yet again.

"Close," croons the criminal, from a new direction; a direction only lately occupied via a swift dimensional transfer. "You are infinite... and you are MINE."

The pillar of cyan radiance flicks off like a switch. But the darkness that plunges the vast subterranean cavern into is not, cannot be complete. Because the lingering energies of the magical girls are present like so many pretty candles, each a part greater than their rainbow sum. So specific and so beautiful, the violet born of Strike Wolf's contract with Kyouka's spirit, which is not at all like that of Endo and Fallen Stern; and in their differences, their distinctions, each is rendered more gorgeous still. So fiery and fierce, Sky and Ground in unison with Lera; so passionate and joyful, the ruddy crimson of Setsuna's heart. Very differently from one another, Nori's unlight and Mikoto's shadow span the spectrum well beyond mere roygibiv, but for all that Northa reminded Mikoto of her beginnings, and for all that Nori often feels different and apart, neither is dark as the Dark Realms are dark; both are very much themselves, girls shaped by sorrow but no longer defined by sorrow alone. Love is as lovely in pink as Miki is perfect in blue and Buki faithful in yellow, the yellow of the crocus, that brave first blossom amid the winter's snow, which is not at all the sunshine gold shining forth from the hair, and the heart, of Fate. Bracketing them all, the black and white of Nagisa and Honoka respectively represent the incredible void that awaits every color, and all hues at once, radiant beyond distinction; and they are pretty and they are pure, so long as they are together.

Together. Everyone is together, and everyone is a light.

And everyone's lights are swirling...

...streaming from them...

...draining away...

...into the four-leaf clover crest that adorns Chiffon's brow.

No. Not into her.

Through her.

Lord Moebius was as much a puppet as You, created to be the Lord of All Worlds.

But this man is self-made, at least in every way that matters to him.

Cyan light is weeping from behind his eyes, and drooling from the corners of his mouth, as he tosses his purple hair back and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, forced by Fate to finally be present in the flesh among them for the very first time:

"I AM JAIL SCAGLIETTI... THE LORD OF ALL MAGIC!"

He tosses what was in his arms at the feet of the girls and boy below him. It's as ordinary a thing, as mundane, as they suddenly are, have forcibly become.

A stuffed animal shaped like a lamb flops over, lifeless and dumb.

---

A small, ordinary life is among the most precious things in the whole entire world for a magical girl to protect, and under the blessing of Queen Serenity she fights for them every day, in their thousands, their millions, and one at a time; for her parents'; for her classmates'; for her friends'. But her own is usually the first thing sacrificed to the cause. How many times has she missed sports matches -- club events -- hobbies, interests, after-school meet-ups at the park -- because a youma or worse decided that it was a good day to attack? How many friends have drifted away as they discover she is mysteriously too busy for them now? Too unreliable? Too flaky?

Some girls find balance and some do not. Some are glad of the continuous interruptions and others resentful. For some, awakening to their destiny was the worst thing that ever happened to them -- and for others, the very best. Honestly, for a lot of girls, both are true at once.

One way or another a price is always paid.

But there are also treasures to be found. The people she met, the new friendships forged, drawn to strangers, far from her normal circles, who might have eternally remained so otherwise. The lessons learned, some in triumph and some in sorrow, about who she truly is when the chips are down -- opportunities in adversity that she might otherwise never have faced, for better and for worse. Truths about the world she lives in, some harsh and some beautiful. Often magical girldom makes one grow up too quickly and too soon, but not always; for some, it is a redemptive pathway, bent towards an innocence and purity they feared already denied them by that very same ordinary life. A purpose is a powerful thing to have.

Smaller wonders too. Like what Tokyo looks like at night from the rooftops. Or what she looks like in spectacular raiment her parents would never allow, let alone afford. The sound of a fairy's laughter. The taste of a miracle romance. The feel of a hand clasped tightly, standing side by side at the end of the world.

No one could ever be the same.

To have not just your magic but the ''memory'' of magic itself drained from you by Infiniti, and sucked up directly into Jail Scaglietti, is an astonishing violation. First you lose your transformation, which goes all to ribbons of light, then to nothing at all.

What do you lose after that? And what might you gain?

If your world had no gods and no monsters save money and mankind? If your childhood had diverged -- months ago for some, years ago for others?

Who are you, if you had never been a magical girl at all?

OOC: This is intended as a full cut away from Labyrinth; please show us your alternate universe life in situ, rather than as
amnesiacs at the feet of Jail (we'll get back to him later). We're not going to be here all night, you can expect approximately
one and a half rounds in your AU, so don't hold anything back!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka pours everything she has into the attack, feeling the next layer of vines disintegrate... and when she has nothing left to give she is flung back. She is sent flying, flipping over backwards to land in a 3-point stance that just slides backwards for quite some time, kicking up a cloud of dust and a spray of earth behind her. When she finally stops there is a long gouge in the ground in front of her, and then she sags, pitching forward onto all fours to catch her breath.

They are fighting a great injustice (perhaps including one Northa has inflicted as much on herself as on countless other worlds), but even so... watching the combining of so much magic, of love and duty made manifest... it's a beautiful sight, despite that.

But then You appears-- but it isn't You, it's Jail, and if he wants Chiffon that can only be bad news. ''Come on, Kyouka. Get ''up''.'' All of her muscles are burning with fatigue and exhaustion, trembling as she tries to force a foot under her. ''Just get moving. If you're fast enough--''

But who's faster than Fate? She comes tearing through the sky, and relief floods Kyouka's body as You is snatched away from her self-destructive task. As Fate saves her sister. "Fate!" she calls out, relieved.

Only to be plunged into fresh terror as Jail appears in the flesh. She cannot possibly know that face but yet she ''does''--because she owes it a sock to the jaw. But just as quickly that terror is giving way to despair as something starts to leave her. Something she's learned is so very intrinsic not just to her but the world. Bright violet energy streaming directly from her, the last scraps of her barrier jacket vanishing, breaking apart into motes of light. She reaches out to grab that energy, trying to reclaim it. Trying desperately to stoke that flame she imagines in her heart even as it slowly dwindles to embers and then... even the embers grow cold.

Tears are streaming down her face. "Y-you... ''bastard''," she spits out, with the last little bit of invective she has left in her.

He's draining their magic.

Except he isn't.

Because magic doesn't--

----

The campfire was lively, crackling with a gently radiating heat underneath a slowly darkening twilight sky. Kyouka sat, her back against a log, soaking up the warmth as she stared upwards, scanning the heavens for the stars as they slowly began to appear. Their campsite overlooked a beautiful lake, on they had caught their dinner from, in fact. And they were far enough from civilization that she knew the stars would just ''pop'', once the sun had fully set.

It was a sight she had sorely missed.

It'd also been far too long since she'd gotten to do this. She'd floated the idea to some of her new friends, and proposed a group trip with her fellow club members, but... they either hadn't been interested, or the scheduling didn't work out, or they ''had'' been interested until they realized just how ''serious'' Kyouka was about it.

Yes, it'd be real tents and real sleeping bags. On the ground. Yes, really, the ''ground'' ground. No, there probably wouldn't be internet access. Yes, that meant GPS too. A map and compass. Yes, really. What do you think they used before GPS? No, you'd bring the food with you, but she'd probably also catch some fish. No, you have to dress it first-- Well you don't have to ''watch'', then.

No there isn't even-- how would there be ''plumbing''?

She'd relented, eventually. It was just... easier to go with the flow. There'd been plenty of other group activities that were still enjoyable (and far more palatable to most of her peers), but it left her feeling... lacking, somehow, not to be able to share the experience.

Kyouka sighed, before taking in a deep breath to take in the smells of the outdoors, the remains of their dinner, the earthy scent of the soil, the fragrance of various trees and bushes in various states of bloom. She was dressed in jeans and a warm jacket, and her favorite hiking boots. Her long blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail, all the better for staying out of her face while working.

The crunching of leaves and a faint panting alerted her to the return of her father and pet dog, and she raised an arm in a sort of wave without looking back. "Hey."

Wolfy barked and ran forward, jumping over the log to get to Kyouka's side, nuzzling at her briefly before curling up to her side. Kyouka smiled and lowered her hand, giving the Siberian husky a few pets over his side. He was warm and comforting, and she rested her hand for a moment just to feel the slow rise and fall of his body as he relaxed.

Her father, Drew Channing, took the long way around, stoking the fire gently before settling in on Kyouka's other side. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with short blonde hair and the same bright blue eyes Kyouka had. "Heya, Kyou-chan," he said amiably as he ruffled Kyouka's hair. "Campsite looks good."

Kyouka smiled faintly, leaning against her dad a little as he settled in. "Thanks. Everything's cleaned up, I got all the food stashed, and the tents are all ready to go."

"Sounds good," said Drew. "So... how've things been going? I know it's been a while since we've gotten to talk like this, so... fill me in."

"Well..." Kyouka shrugged. "They've been fine, I guess."

"Just fine?"

Kyouka winced. She hadn't meant to say it like that. Her parents were putting a lot of effort into making this arrangement work for her. "Sorry, I... I guess it's just kind of a mixed bag? I love getting to explore Tokyo, but..."

Drew placed an arm around Kyouka's shoulders to give her a gentle squeeze. "Kyou-chan, if something's not working, feel free to tell us."

"Thanks," said Kyouka with a sigh. "I'm just... trying to figure out how to say this. I guess I just feel like... there's always been something... missing, you know? Like... sure I've made friends, but... I'm never around long enough to like... ''be'' in a place. Or even ''from'' a place. I go visit Grandma and Grandpa in the states sometimes but... I'm not ''from'' there, either."

"Mmm." Drew sighed as he considered Kyouka's words. "I'm sorry, kiddo. Your mom and I know this hasn't always been easy on you. We've tried to give you as much support as we could, but if it hasn't been enough, then... we're sorry."

Sliding her arm around her father's back, Kyouka gave her dad a hug. "Hey, no, you guys have been great. I just... whenever people ask me where I'm from, I never really know what to say. I kinda thought, maybe ''this'' could be a place I'm 'from', but... I'm still an outsider here, too. Mom can explain Japanese culture to me, but that's not the same as living it, and things have changed so much...Like, Mom can explain what an Idol is, but that doesn't tell me like... how to act at a concert. I don't know all the moves and chants, I'm just... out of sync."

Kyouka sighed, looking up to the rapidly darkening night sky. Her voice was quiet and pensive. "... I just... haven't found anyone I feel like I have something in common with. Like, in a real way."

Giving her daughter another squeeze, Drew shook his head gently. "I wish I had some answers for you, but... Unfortunately, that's a tricky one. I wish I knew how to help."

Kyouka glanced to Drew for a moment, offering a small smile. "It helps that you're listening." Looking back to the sky, Kyouka thought some more. "There's also... well... I'm thinking about the future, you know?"

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." Kyouka let her thoughts stew for a moment more, tracing out constellations in the night sky. "Everybody's always talking about their future plans, colleges, senior exams, all that stuff. That 'what do you want to be when you grow up' thing. And... I dunno. It's always been hard to imagine what my life is going to look like in three years let alone one. I try not to worry about it, but..."

"... It's hard not to, when all your peers are," supplied Drew. He tousled Kyouka's hair gently.

Kyouka nodded. "Yeah."

"Well... you know your mom and I will do our best to support you. If you want to go to school here, or... back in the States, we can find a way to make that work. Or if you want to go into vocational training of some kind."

Another nod, and Kyouka kept looking at the sky. "I know, but... Um..." Kyouka glanced at her father again. "... I know this is going to sound a little silly, but... can I share something?"

Drew chuckled, gently. "Say anything you want, Kyou-chan. I'm here to listen."

"Thanks." Kyouka looked back to the stars again, collecting her thoughts. "I always felt like... like I wanted to do something ''big'', you know? Something... important." Kyouka lifted her right hand up to the sky, reaching for... something, she wasn't sure what. "Something that I was..." Her hand closed into a fist, as if she were trying to grab hold of the moon.

As if one could hold onto something so far away any more than they could grasp a ball of light.

"... ''meant'' to do."

She let her hand fall again, moving to continue petting Wolfy. There was a faint tinge on her cheeks. "... I dunno. It's silly, isn't it?"

Drew gave Kyouka's shoulder another squeeze. "Noth8ing wrong with wanting to make a big impact... but don't forget, small things can be important, too."

"Yeah, I know..." Kyouka leaned against her dad , returning the squeeze with another hug. "I just... whatever it was, I was hoping that I could find people I wanted to do it with. I've got friends all over the world, but... everyone's doing their own things."

"Well, from where I stand, you care about people, and you think of others... I'm sure you'll figure it out, eventually. And you know your mom and I will help you however we can."

Kyouka nodded. "Yeah... thanks. And thanks for the talk."

They sat there together in comfortable silence, watching the night sky twinkling high above.

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Northa is brought down. Lera exhales, with relief -- and with no small amount of regret. The knowledge that she was the Belkan Queen; that their sorrows and conflicts came back to her...

It's going to weigh on her mind for years to come. It maybe done, but grappling with that isn't over.

She looks at Chiffon, and opens her mouth. Ready to say something -- and then You steps in. Jail's voice echoes out.

"Wait!" Lera cries out. "Stop!"

Darkness enfolds her. Jail's words -- his proclamation that he is the Lord of All Magic -- echo in her ears. But darkness takes her.

...

Life on Midchilda has always had magic. But there is the magic that is indistinguishable from technology and there is ''magic''. The former is everywhere; supersonic mag-levs, Storage Devices that offer ten thousand different conveniences, transit between the stars. But there weren't the mages and knights with bonds with Intelligent and Armed Devices.

For Lera Camry, it was the life she always knew. The differences were small; her mother was a designer of some of the best Storage Devices on the market, though she always seemed... ill at ease.

And for Lera, there wasn't a pressure to follow in those footsteps. That was a career; it wasn't a family passion.

She stands on her balcony, just outside of her room. Lera looks at the mountains in northern Midchilda, eyes focused on the horizon. She knows them all, by now. There's still fulfillment in climbing them.

But there's always that sense, at the back of her mind, that there ''should'' be higher peaks to climb.

<Pose Tracker> Setsuna Higashi [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Cure Passion and Cure Peach both stand watching the end, when it is finished. Passion looks to where Northa was, a little longer, and then looks away from what was father and mother both and neither.

"Passion..." Peach starts, and then--

Infiniti.

"Chiffon!" they say as one. Both immediately start moving. But not in time. THe light there radiating becomes--

"NO!"

Fate and You both live. But the new direction comes, and it is...

"You--You can't!" Passion starts, betrayal obvious in her voice for another time in a life of many betrayals. As Jail starts to laugh, Love Momozono reaches for that little lamb--

But it is done.

-=-=-

A girl with silver hair and red eyes walks along with the crowd, looking at nothing in particular and thinking to herself. She doesn't say anything about her thoughts, of course; that's just not how it's done here. But she has them.

She thinks of her duties later, the schooling she'll complete. She thinks of the partner she was assigned at the lab class, and whether or not that last time he actually looked at her or not. But of course, he must not have.

In Labyrinth, they all do their work both together and alone at the same time. And Citizen #ES-4039781 is no exception. ...Though she is an exception in some other ways. She wonders things. She wonders about where she came from. She wonders where she's going tomorrow. She wonders why it feels so lonely, when she does not have a word like 'lonely'.

The crowd turns, and she turns with it, towards the dining facility. There will be more time to think to herself after she has acquired dinner. Then...

Then evening work, then rest, then...

Was it always like this? Was there ever anything more?

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

One needle, two needles, four, ten; Mikoto defends the approach. Mercy... is it that a Queen tries her best? Mikoto will wonder.

And the Infinite Memory. Infinite enough to kill You, and Mikoto, at least, is not fast enough to stop her. But, "Fate!", Fate has always been faster. Fate saves You, as she always has.

Mikoto's relief over her rescue is cut short, though, by a prickle of warning at the back of her neck. She growls, hearing that croon, turning sharply to face the criminal responsible. The light flicks off -- and her own shadow, call it a light of her own, seeps into Infiniti.

"Don't!", she cries, as that stuffed lamb falls down --...---...

The Minagi Shrine, deep in the mountains, has espoused its faith to the mountain kami for many centuries; they receive few visitors, but they are satisfied with their quaint existence. Mikoto's older brother is slated to become the next Head Priest. She, of course, is a shrine maiden.

She is of course something of a ''strange'' shrine maiden, of course. They have to be, living rurally like this -- bringing down their own deer for dinner, fixing their own chest freezers so they can ''store'' the meat, maintaining their own histories through painstaking paper and ink.

It falls to the women to hunt, in their tradition. In order to respect the spirits of the mountain, they don't use modern weapons like guns when they do. Mikoto hunts with blades and her own body; she has learned how to be quiet in the woods, how to scale trees and lie in wait. She has grown quite strong -- and quite large, a whole five-foot-four even in her teenage years -- through years of dragging deer home.

When she isn't operating as a maiden of the forest, she's maintaining the ''shrine'' grounds, sweeping the decks, cleaning the brass, and keeping things in order. Her older brother is there to aid her; he will never be called away from the shrine grounds, due to his responsibilities. Neither of them go to school -- the nearest is many miles away -- but they study, under their grandfather, to understand the writings of the shrine and its necessary financial upkeep. Even the most remote shrine cannot escape ''taxes.''

(Rei Hino, meanwhile, is ''also'' a shrine maiden -- though her shrine is in the middle of the city, not the middle of the woods. She is a cantankerous young woman with few friends in Ohtori, a true oracle-witch held aside from the princesses of the world.

(People do not disappear by the busloads, in this world; Rei never meets an annoying blonde girl, trying to set things right. She has no ''reason'' to. Why would she interact with Juuban girls for any span longer than selling them love charms? Certainly she doesn't need to ''socialise,'' doesn't need to make ''friends.'' She's not a politician like her father -- she doesn't ''need'' to win anyone's heart.

(She'll just impress them until they can't help but listen.

(Many girls fear her, in her classes, as much as she is treated coldly.)

<Pose Tracker> Inori Yamabuki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

She was their most terrible enemy by far, but as their magic undoes her immense essence, bringing a merciful end to ancient sorrow.

Cure Pine can only feel pity.

"I believe..."

That this is kinder? A mercy? Perhaps that is the privilege of the victor to think such of the vanquished, but she actually does believe that, in this case. But as the scenery changes, and reveals the contents of the Infinite Memory... Pine only knows it by one name.

"Chiffon!"

And as a girl reaches for her, Pine begins to run, "CHIFFON!" Even as a blur of yellow strikes her and carries her far, but not far enough.

Because with a crooning noise, something begins to drain away, her footsteps feeling slower, less powerful... then, she's having to catch her breath, like she's been in dance practice non stop for hours, sweat on her forehead as she looks up to the thief...

... or perhaps the master.

"No... please... if you do that..."

As Chiffon flops over, lifelessly... she cannot think anything but how she failed her.

-=-=-

"He's so handsome." Inori said with a smile, a part of the standing audience on this exclusive cruise ship tour, her dress a frilly yellow, with orange ribbons. Standing beside her with hair coiffed to several points in a suit, was her date, one Kento Mikoshiba.

Her arm was laced in his, as she looked upon the magic show with the masked Lady Magician and White Tiger, as doubt entered her face, "Is she really going to let him out though?" His arm laced around hers protectively. "Don't worry, she's a professional."

Indeed, he did, and despite her wonder at the magnificent feline, she found herself moving up against him with a gasp. The stage Magician asking, "Can I have a volunteer from the audience? How about you, young lady?"

"Me?" Buki squeaked, a little put out by it. She loved seeing these animals, but outside of his cage... her date cleared his throat, "I-I'll do it." "Kento-kun?" She asked in surprise, as he slipped away, "Oh, be careful!"

However, the show proceeded apace, as the nervous, arm slightly trembling young man held up the hoop of roses, and the white tiger leapt through... her eyes admiring in wonder his bravery, as he returned to the sound of the audience clapping.

Shortly after, on the deck, he asked the question that made tongue feel like it was frozen, her throat locked up, "Are you enjoying yourself?" Love and Miki had both encouraged her to come, despite her lack of confidence, but she felt out of sorts in this glamorous setting, "Y-Yes." She said with a smile, "I very much am. How about you?"

"I feel out of sorts here... myself." He admitted after several long moments staring out into the sea, "I admit... I had an ulterior motive for asking you to be here with me. You see, one day I'm expected to run the Mikoshiba group, and so I was asked to run this event to gain experience. But, I don't have much confidence in myself." He looked then at her, searching, "I thought, if you were by my side... I'd be that much more confident. I'm sorry that I wasn't considerate of your feelings..."

Inori's eyes shined for a moment, before doubt crept in again, and she looked away shyly, "W-Well... I think you were being very considerate of my feelings. I'm happy... happy that I was able to be here to support you."

"Inori...chan." And as he put his arm around her, drawing her close, he said, "... then, if that's how you feel, please continue to support me."

Was that really how she felt? ... Maybe it didn't matter, this is what she was supposed to feel, right?

-=-=-

So Happy World - Persona 5 Royal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybhlFj3D_gw

She still remembers the feel of Love's arm around her, telling her 'Congratulations 'Buki! You got your happiness!' It was a moment locked in time, she could see it in front of her. Her in her White Dress, Love dressed as her Maid of Honor.

Conversations about finishing her Diploma, Veterinary School after felt more ephemeral in comparison. Her mind couldn't fathom them as arguments, after all, she never could manage to argue back to the words.

'This is where I need you.'

She told herself this was her happiness, and made it true, again, and again, and again, no matter her doubts. Getting together with Love and Miki several times a week made it easier.

Kento brought the animals to her, as if in apology, to see her smile even if they always went away at the end of the day with their handlers, so often instead she took advantage of her VIP status as a patron of the Ueno Zoological Gardens.

More often than not...

"Look Secchan... look at the Polar Bears!"

The toddler, Setsuna Mikoshiba, happily tried to sound it out for her Mother from her stroller, "Kuuuma!" as Buki happily told her back, "That's right!"

One doesn't need to believe in themselves to find happiness. One simply has to convince themselves hard enough that they've found it.

<Pose Tracker> Yumi Ohzora [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Yumi Ohzora looks out over the crowd at the auditorium, standing at the podium herself where the Principal has just ceded the space to her. "My fellow students," she begins, and her voice as always is calm and full of certainty. "As your Student Council President, you have given me a great responsibility to see all of you through the year to come. But I cannot do it alone."

Yumi Ohzora is a very tall girl--but it would be unfair to say that she is gangly. She is appropriate for her height, with long gray hair and deep red eyes, and she is every bit the image of her mother. She has always been strong and healthy, and always paid close attention to her responsibilities.

"I will require each of you to do your best at our school, so that together, we can make this year greater than any that has come before. From my position, I will support you, ensure that you have the opportunity to fulfill your potential. But only you can decide what form that potential will take. Only you can decide the paths you will walk. Only by putting aside what is unimportant can we focus on what truly matters--and I will rely on each of you to decide for yourselves what that means."

The crowd watches her, but there's whispering here and there. She pretends she doesn't hear it as she finishes her speech.

"Please join me in this endeavor. Thank you."

Yumi bows, and starts to walk off. ...But while she pretends not to hear it...

"That girl," someone whispers. "Of course she was elected. Considering her parents..."

"Did you hear?" she says. "She crushed a ''teacher'' with one look!"

"What did he even do?"

"He told her she shouldn't ignore her electives so much; that art might be important to her life one day."

"I wouldn't want her to look at ''me'' like that..."

Yumi finishes walking off the stage, and goes behind the curtain at the auditorium. She pulls out her phone, and then, "...Mother?" she asks. "Yes. The speech went fine. Did you have time for our lunch today?" A pause. "I see. Well, of course. Later, then. Good luck with your work, Mother."

Yumi Ohzora is a very serious girl. She's never been sick a day in her life. And they say she is ''just'' like her mother.

<Pose Tracker> Raiko Takashima [Infinity Institute (9)] has posed.

Soft, rhythmic thumping filled the dorm room as Raiko studied the inside of the microwave. Not the part with the turntable, but the ''inside''--she'd pulled it out from the wall, unplugged it, and removed the outer housing. Bright orange eyes traced lines of circuitry and wiring, and she'd tied her long blue hair back into a ponytail to keep it from being a distraction.

She bit her lip as she studied it. ''Something'' had shorted, and she was certain she'd almost figured it out. She was ''almost'' there, if she didn't lose her concentration--

"Oi, Sprocket! You done yet?"

Nope. She'd lost her train of thought. Raiko sighed, glancing over her shoulder. "I told you, I'll be done sooner if you stop asking me when I'll be done." She was dressed in sky blue overalls and a plain white t-shirt.

The dorm was lavishly appointed but still small, despite being for 3 people. Kiyo was in the middle of the living space. She was taller and more athletic than the other two, with short, unruly green hair and clear blue eyes, dressed in a pair of plain black shorts and a green tank top. She'd been practicing juggling a soccer ball, bouncing it from knee to knee to head, for at least the last 20 minutes. "C'mon, I'm getting hungry over here."

Raiko rolled her eyes. "Yeah, well, maybe if you'd stop playing with your ball in the dorm, you wouldn't be so hungry."

The ball hit the floor, and Kiyo trapped it with her foot. "Well ''maybe'' if you didn't insist on taking everything apart around here I could've eaten sooner."

"Oh yeah?" Raiko crossed her arms, letting her screwdriver dangle from her fingertips. "Hey, in case you forgot, ''I'' was the one who fixed the baseball team's pitching machine when ''someone'' hit a line drive right into it, ''Ace''."

Kiyo stepped forward, the ball and her practice forgotten for the moment. "Oh yeah? And who was it ''I'' had to organize a search party for on the last field trip when you went missing?"

Raiko's cheeks flushed. "I wasn't missing, I said I'd be right back," she protested hotly. "''You'' just got impatient."

"Oh please," said Kiyo with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. "It was like, half an hour. And don't give me that 'you lost track of time' line again."

On the couch sat the third member of the dorm room, Cheiko. She was much more quiet, her long rose-red hair fixed up into an elaborate bun. She'd been relaxing on the couch, dressed in a t-shirt and skirt, sketching ideas in a sketchbook. She did her best to ignore the shouting, but finally her green eyes flickered up to look at the two shouting girls. "Get a room why don't you," she muttered under her breath.

... She thought better of it when she remembered her bedroom was in between theirs. Maybe not, then.

Cheiko sighed, raising her voice and taking on a far more gentle but still firm tone. "Kiyo-chan, Raiko-chan."

Both girls paused and looked to her questioningly.

Pointing her pencil at Kiyo, Cheiko said, "We agreed no balls in the dorm. The carpet is still stained from where you knocked my ink pot over last week."

Kiyo rubbed the back of her neck, blushing as she glanced aside. "Ahhh... yeah..."

Turning her attention to Raiko, Cheiko said, "And we agreed on a three 'oops' limit, didn't we? How many are you at?"

Raiko blinked, counting off something on her fingers, then looked chagrined. "... Oh. Five."

Cheiko raised an eyebrow at Raiko.

"Fiiiiine," said Raiko with a sigh. "I'll call maintenance." She pushed the half-disassembled microwave aside. "Sorry, Ki-chan. You're gonna have to use the stove top." Raiko moved to take a seat on the couch, while Kiyo headed to the sink and started filling a small pot.

"It's fine, the cup of noodle shouldn't take ''that'' long," said Kiyo quietly.

Raiko looked at the sketches in Cheiko's notebook. "Whatcha working on, Manga-chan?"

Without looking up, Cheiko said, "It's a new story about a girl who has to put up with her roommates constantly bickering, and the stress of it finally makes her snap and become a serial killer."

Kiyo and Raiko shared a glance, and both had the grace to blush.

"I mean... it ''was'' sweet of you to be so concerned, Ki-chan..." admitted Raiko.

Kiyo grunted a bit as she prepared her cup noodles. "And it ''was'' pretty cool how you discovered the limiter setting on the pitching machine... Probably wouldn't have scored that last home run without all that practice batting fastballs."

Both girls looked to Cheiko, who finally looked up to them and smiled. "Better."

The other two girls let out a sigh of relief.

Suddenly, Raiko's phone chimed, and she pulled it out of her pocket to check it. "Oh! Hey, they're ready for the video call!" She sprang up and dashed to her room to grab her laptop, coming back and setting it on the table. The screen sprang to life as she started the right app, initiated the call...

And suddenly there was a full-screen video of her parents. Asami Yakumo, who had the same blue hair and bright eyes, was wearing a bright yellow sundress. Her hair had been left free to drape about her shoulders. She grinned broadly and waved, "RAichan! It's so good to see you!"

Next to her sat Takeshi Yakumo, who had short brown hair and half-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a simple polo shirt, grinning as he spotted his daughter. "Rairai!"

And last but not least, to their side, was an older gentleman with silver hair, wearing a shirt with the last few buttons casually undone. He smiled kindly, "Ahh, Mago-chan, it's so good to see you." He was really just a friend of the family, but he'd been so for a very long time.

Raiko beamed, addressing each one in turn, "Okachan, Otochan! Ojiisan! It's so good to see you all!"

A cat suddenly wandered into frame on the other side of the call, a calico tabby that sniffed the screen and then mewed plantively.

"Hiii, Shiori," said Raik. "It's nice to see you, too."

Asami quickly stood up and picked up Shiroi, placing the cat into her lap and petting it. "I think Shiori misses you, dear."

"Aww, I miss her too! And I miss all of you! Oh! And my friends are here, too!"

Cheiko leaned in close to Raiko to get into frame, smiling and offering a wave. "It's very nice to see you all again, Asami-san, Takeshi-san, Kenji-san!"

"Ahhh, Otomo-chan," said Takeshi. "It's nice to see you again as well!"

"Thank you for agreeing to have us again for our next break!" said Cheiko, doing her best to affect a bow from a seated position.

"Think nothing of it! It's always a delight to have Rairai's friends over. You're welcome anytime!" said Takeshi with a bright smile.

Cheiko smiled warmly, "You're too kind!"

Kiyo suddenly barged into the frame on the opposite side of Raiko, slinging an arm around her shoulders so she could get in close. "Hey! I'm looking forward to the trip, too! Thank you!"

Raiko laughed and playfully shoved at Kiyo's side without any real force. H-hey! C'mon."

Asami laughed softly, smiling at the sight of her daughter flanked by her friends on the screen. "Hello, Kiyo-chan. It's nice to see you too."

The green-ahired girl pointed emphatically at the screen. "Kenji-ojiisan, your teriyaki was amazing last time! Can we have some more?"

Kenji chuckled softly, "I'll see what I can do."

Raiko grinned, "Oh, I can't wait. There's so much to catch up on-- Oh! And guys, I can't wait to show you what my mom's been working on, too. It's state of the art robotics stuff, it'll be really cool, promise."

Noogying Raiko, Kiyo stood up. "As long s you don't take it apart like you did the microwave."

"Wha--hey, that's..." Raiko's cheeks flushed. "... I'd ''never'' do that to one of my mom's projects."

"Yes you would," said both Kiyo and Asami at the same time.

Raiko groaned and covered her face with her hands. "... is it too late to stay here for break?" she muttered.

"Yes," said Cheiko gently. "But you'll be fine."

"So, Mago-chan," started Kenji, trying to move the topic to a happier subject. "Your parents tell me you've been up to plenty of your own projects."

"Oh! Yeah!" Raiko brightened, getting up from the couch. "One sec!" she called out from over her shoulder. She came back a moment later, her arms laden with several small machines she'd built. "Some of these are hard to see, but I'll bring them with me on break. So this one..."

<Pose Tracker> Mami Tomoe [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

A girl with white hair and pink clothes looks down at a set of gravestones. The narrow planks with the engraved names on them are worn, but in good condition nevertheless.

There are three, but she only looks at one.

'Mami Tomoe'.

The girl looks down, sad, and says nothing.

Onlookers wonder if she might be a relative.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

"Ren! You're going to be late!"

The familiar voice of Mrs. Aizawa calls out from the kitchen, loud enough to be heard upstairs.

"I'm coming!" The voice of a girl calls back, and moments later Ren Aizawa herself comes nimbly running down the stairs, clad in her Juuban High School uniform. She turns sharply once she reaches the bottom, making a beeline for the kitchen. She's all smiles, drifting over to give her mother a kiss on the cheek before plopping down at the table across from her father who is reading the newspaper.

"Can't stay long!" She insists as she quickly starts working on the breakfast her mother so dutifully laid out for her in advance.

Mr. Aizawa chuckles, looking at his daughter as he lowers the paper momentarily. "Cutting it close, Ren."

"I know! I know! My alarm clock didn't go off!" She replies in-between bites of food, pausing to check her watch. "Ok-I'm-going-now-bye!" She takes a quick sip of orange juice before bounding up from the chair and running out of the kitchen, stopping to put her shoes on at the door before swinging it open and taking off into the bright sunny morning.

"Ren!" Her mother calls, and Ren skids to a halt, spinning around.

"Wha- OH!" Her cheeks redden as she sees her mother standing there with an amused smirk, holding her school satchel that she completely forgot to pick up. "Thanks mom!" She runs over and grabs it, giving her mother a hug before hurrying off again.

"Have a great day!" Mrs. Aizawa calls, before shaking her head and going back into the house, shutting the door firmly behind her.

A normal day...

...A normal life...

For Ren Aizawa...

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Fate looks into her sister's Eyes and asks, "Are you alright?" As her hand reaches out to touch hers, and Bardiche gleams with... <Divide Energy>

It turns out it was the last act of her magic, for some to pour into burn wound, to try and knit it back together, before- in alarm, she hears that croon and turns in mid-air. "Get away from-!" But as the yellow falls away from her, Fate begins to fall, and all she can do is encircle her arms around her sister.

She never feels the impact, only the declaration of her 'father's' triumph.

-=-=-

"She can't hurt you anymore."

This echoed in Fate Testarossa's head again and again, as she laid down the Blossoms from the Altsam mountains on a grave. They were her mother's favorite, even if she refused to share anything about herself, Fate found out one day in her journal.

Four graves now, two marked.

Precia Testarossa, Beloved Mother

Alicia Testarossa, Beloved Daughter

And two more unmarked graves for animals, one a wolf cub that Fate found and nursed that perished from illness shortly after, and another their elderly cat. Years of Abuse and Neglect was something a small rural Midchildan town could easily turn a blind eye to. People were resilient in that way, when they thought she was her daughter.

But then came a publication, an expose of a breakthrough that rocked the entire Midchildan Political structure, a great Scandal. 'Infinite Desire' and 'Project FATE'

It wasn't long after that the authorities came, led by tall woman in a green pony tail, and a smart suit, and the townsfolk began to whisper something different whenever they saw Fate Testarossa.

'Artificial.'

It was so easy for her to feel shame, like she's done something wrong. After all, she'd been made to feel that way her whole life.

'They're trying to figure out what to even charge her with. That thing she made doesn't even have rights.'

And then before the arrest could be made... a collapse, as she was transferred to the hospital. Fate was let in, only to be told by a dying woman.

"I always... hated you."

It was over soon after. It was a kindness of Lindy Harlaown that the body of the girl they found in their household was allowed to be buried alongside her mother - next to the mounds of the animals Fate herself had buried years ago.

Still part of her thought that the idea that her Mother can't hurt her anymore might be a premature statement.

"What happens now?" Fate asked numbly, her eyes still on the grave... as Lindy Harlaown tried to smile, but... "You'll be coming to live with me for now. Artificial Persons are... controversial in Midchilda, to say the least. I won't lie to you, it's going to be a long road before the government even recognizes you have rights... but I'm hopeful that one day they'll recognize you're a girl that was just born a little differently from everyone else."

Fate nodded sullenly, and turned to follow her, as they walked together, away from that place, as Lindy made conversation, "Does everyone hate me right now?" "No... not at all." Lindy said with a smile, "Just because... the science is controversial, doesn't mean that. ''I'' like you very much. And I met with a man recently who wrote an opinion piece advocating for your personhood based on his experiences from other worlds... in fact, I'd like for you to meet him."

As child looked her way, Lindy smiled and told her, "His name is Frederick Camry."

<Pose Tracker> Nori Ankou [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The light is pouring from her. It's being drained, drawn off. La Sirene de Diamant tilts her head up, alert. Ready, perhaps, to resist. To throw a charm or a countering spell, or at least another of her fearsome bursts, towards -

Towards Jail Scaglietti. She can see Fate rescue (herself?) and she looks towards Jail, with a fluctating sense in her heart, in her guts. Something is wrong. She reaches out towards her --

The Brazen Pharos winks out. Its prismatic, almost inhuman shape fades away, evaporating like a glamour at the end of the May-eve. What's left looks like a piece of nautical surplus, the sort of thing you might use as an element of decor... except that someone stepped on it once, and it is held together with tape.

By the time she falls to one knee, she isn't la Sirene de Diamante any more.

* * * * * * *

The ride back from Odawara was, for the most part, silent.

The young woman let out a small sigh, gazing out towards the darkness of the ocean.

"You keep doing that," he said, his voice slightly too nasal, a little too high, to be a man's.

He was driving, perhaps naturally; the car was imported, a German car, though Nori Ankou had observed that it was an eleven year old model the first time she'd seen it. She didn't disapprove, or really approve, but it was something that went into the tallybook; the tallybook she kept in her head.

There wasn't much else to life than a tallybook, Nori had found.

"Hm?" Nori said, as if she hadn't heard him.

"You... I mean, just now."

"I didn't do anything, just now."

"You sighed," he said, his face hidden in the gloom of the car. There was a suggestion of his face, from the lights of the instrument panel, but it wasn't enough to see.

"Did I?"

"Yes," he affirmed, with a note of grit.

"Oh," Nori answered: "I didn't mean to."

Three kilometers later, he said, "These fancy restaurants are always a gamble. They pay for reviews, you know. And your taste isn't always going to match theirs."

"Mm," Nori replied, still gazing out the window.

Another kilometer, and he said, "Once, when I was in the US, Father took me to a steakhouse. It turned out they served you as much meat as you could eat, from swords. They'd set it over your plate and cut slices - pretty thin slices, but still, whatever you wanted. It wasn't quite high class, but I thought it was enjoyable. Brazilian, allegedly."

Nori didn't reply, because she didn't hear. She let out another small sigh.

"Though, speaking of the US... this summer, if you're interested, I'm sure we..." he began, but it trailed away. After another kilometer, he gave up, and as he reached to click on the radio, he did not quite notice that something had passed; a thin shoot that had begun to grow, perishing without evidence in a frost.

Nori didn't feel it either. She didn't feel a lot. Sometimes she thought it was abnormal, but those thoughts came, usually, when things were quiet and by herself, and she could usually find something to look at or to watch. For a few months she had even tried social media out, but it paled, too.

The radio played - a violin concerto, something that sounded live. Over in Osaka, the announcer said six kilometers later. The National Route bent from east to northeast, and as they past Terugasaki Nori wondered just how cold and how dark that sea must feel. Her lips pursed faintly when she spotted a ship, breaking that cool black infinity, and she leaned back into the seat.

"I don't know if I want to go anywhere," she said, eyes lidding shut.

"Well... there's time to think about it," he replied, but he sounded diffident now, too. His eyes lowered slightly, though they did not leave the road.

The car was silent after that, other than the sorrow-sweetness of Michiru Kaioh's violin, receding swiftly behind them.

<Pose Tracker> Mai Tokiha [Ohtori Academy (12)] has posed.

Back on Earth, Mai was among those trying to hold down the home front. Try was the operative word, as the tendrils of Labyrinth had spread ever further, until her fires were guttering out - but there was a glimmer of hope near the end. A glimmer, but Mai was so tired, tired enough that she didn't notice something leaving-

...

There isn't really that much to pack, in the end.

The apartment Mai's been sharing with her brother the last few years was small by necessity. They had savings, of course, but every yen counted when looking at the costs in the future - and a few listings online were enough to divest themselves of the handfuls of household appliances.

It had been a normal enough high school life, Mai thinks to herself, holding up a rare indulgence in the form of a sundress. Not so much in the way of school clubs - she'd found a culinary club that met rarely enough to allow part-time work - and a few fleeting grasps at romance. A few dates with boys who seemed nice enough, fleeting things that could be left to smother under a blanket called 'scheduling concerns'.

"Mai, are you seriously going to bring that? It was out of date when you wore it!"

Mai turns, huffing, to her younger brother - grinning, despite how short of breath he is. "It's shiny. I get to have one shiny thing, as a treat."

The little jokes they share might be a consequence. Life was too short to not talk - and part-time work aside, Mai didn't have that much else going on that she could avoid her brother in this small apartment. No deep friendships, no blazing romances to consume her passion, no shining dreams to chase.

Her path was set long ago, after all. No greater duty than a promise.

Mai tucks that last dress into a box of clothes, sealing it up, and takes a moment to smile sadly at how easily her high school life can be just...carried away. A moment - and then it's time to close up. Time to follow her brother to America, so he can finally get the heart surgery he needs.

No one here in Tokyo is going to miss her that much.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo slumps, exhausted. Fallen Stern is not carefully lowered, but falls to the cold floor of Labyrinth with a heavy clang. The vines that he'd been tangled in are no longer an agonizing prison, but also no longer a means of support. So he sinks down, a hand extending to touch the ground.

But it's not over. His eyes rise as Yuu moves under the possession of Jail, and Fate races to stop herhim.

Endo's not faster than Fate, not even close. And even she's not fast enough.

"You"

* - * - *

"Irasshaimase!"

The door of the little konbini, one of three on a block a few streets down from Juban Middle School, slides open for the hundredth time that evening. The routine is simple and never ending; greet, count the money, put the onigiri in the bag. Endo Naoki is a very good employee, and he does his work diligently.

Occasionally familiar faces pop in after school clubs are finished, friends and classmates he doesn't have as much time to speak with these days. Akeda and Honda from rugby club, Ishida, Goya, even the quiet girl in the back of classAizawa? He spent more time sleeping than doing much else at school.

It's somewhere around midnight when he finishes his shift, after he's done wiping down the glass doors and rearranging the half-emptied shelves. He grabs his usual on the way out, a bottle of juice, chips, and a rice ball.

The train isn't running this late but it's not that long of a bike ride home. There's a pleasant breeze and the sky is clear, and Endo pulls off into one of the small parks on the way. It's just a single tree and a patch of grass on a concrete plane, but there's a little fountain that bubbles pleasantly without the daytime Tokyo traffic to muffle it.

There's no reason he shouldn't go home. His mother knows he'll be out late, she's probably asleep by now. She'll likely be out before he wakes, but they'll catch each other eventually. They operate by their own mechanical schedules.

He dusts a few flecks of rice from his hands as he swallows the last bite of his dinner. As he does he turns his eyes skyward, to the black expanse above.

There are a few blinking lights traveling across the horizon; airplanes and little red warning blips gracing the top of towering skyscrapers. The light pollution obscures anything that may hang higher in the heavens.

There are no stars in Tokyo.

<Pose Tracker> Ginka Shimizu [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The sitting room was hushed, silent save for the gentle, delicate melody that wafted through the air. Gentle streams of notes twined and wove themselves through the def hands of their players, rising and falling in sublime harmonies and creshendos.

Ginka sat in an ornate wooden chair, violin tucked under her chin, left hand deftly dancing across the strings, her right hand carefully measuring and doling out angle, tension, and tempo. Her long, wavy, honey blonde hair spilled down to midback, her brown eyes were closed as she lost herself into the music for the recital. She was wearing a long black dress, sleeveless, not quite her formal concert wear.

This was a dinner party, after all, not a concert.

Seated across from her, at a piano was a young man a year her senior, dressed in a tuxedo with a dark black tie. He had short brown hair, and he was letting his fingers dance lightly across the keys of the piano. This was soft, delicate music; neither of them could afford too heavy a hand, lest a melody clutch up, or a chord simply fall flat.

The young man, Hiroshi, gently produced the final chord of the melody, a soft, trembling chord signaling resolution cast out into the audience. Ginka joined that with a single long violin note, sounded out in wistful, aching tension as the piano chord faded and it was the only note left.

It lingered in the air, before poignantly dissipating into the ether.

The assembled guests clapped politely, and Ginka slowly opened her eyes. She always imagined a caged bird when she played this song, eternally seeking freedom, eternally hopeful and yet... denied, in the end, every time.

No, that was absurd. How else would the song end, if not for the way it was written?

"Shimizu-san," said Hiroshi, reaching a hand to her.

Ginka realized she'd been lost in her thoughts, and hastily set her bow and violin down to reach out and take Hiroshi's hand. "My apologies, that song... it simply captivates my imagination." She took Hiroshi's hand and gracefully rose to her feet, where they took a bow together.

After they finished bowing, Hiroshi lifted her hand to place a kiss on the back of it. Ginka allowed her cheeks a light flush. "Merci, you are too kind, Iyama-san."

"I can't help it, you are simply captivating," murmured Hiroshi before the dinner guests started to crowd them.

Ginka made polite conversation, laughing amiably at poor jokes, expressing condolences and sympathy at all of the right moments, and made all the empty promises expected of her. Eventually she excused herself, explaining that she was seeking out her mother.

She stepped out from the crowd, and an older woman with short brown hair and a red cocktail dress instantly fell into step with her.

"Ojou-sama, your performance was splendid, as always." This was Misaki Tokita, who had been in her family's employ for as long as Ginka could remember. Her role had changed quite a bit over the years, but... she was a constant in Ginka's life, even when her mother was off on yet another business trip.

Ginka smiled a smile she did not feel, and simply said, "Of course it was." After a moment, more gently, she said, "... But it was kind of you to say."

Misaki just smiled, "Of course. Please, your mother is this way."

In another sitting room, devoid of all guests but two, Ginka found her mother, Momoka Shimizu. She'd worn her hair up in an ornate bun for this occasion, wearing a sleek black dress and long white gloves. She was seated, leg crossed, talking to an older gentleman. Ginka walked in, approaching the two, while Misaki steped to the side of the door, remaining at a respectful distance.

"Mother, Iyama-sama," said Ginka respectfully, clasping her hands in front of her. "I hope you enjoyed the performance."

"Mmm, yes, quite so," said the older man. "I've never heard anyone who can perform quite like you and my Hiroshi. I'm sure your partnership will be quite rewarding going forward."

"Yes, of course," said Ginka amiably, smiling a perfectly polished smile.

"Speaking of partnerships," said Momoka with a gracious smile, "we were discussing a sort of... partnership between our families, if you will."

And there was that sinking feeling. She'd suspected it would come, eventually. "Ah, tres bien. I am, of course, looking forward to working together."

She noticed her mother hadn't even ersaid what she thought of the performance. But now wasn't the time to bring that up--there was ''never'' a time to bring that up.

The role of the caged bird was to sing, after all.

"If you would excuse me," Ginka said with a bow. "I have something I must see to, but I wanted to make sure I paid my respects."

"Of course, of course. We will come find you when dinner is served."

Ginka smiled a hollow smile and turned, heading out of the sitting room and heading for... anywhere.

Anywhere but here.

<Pose Tracker> Nagisa Misumi [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

"Hey hey hey, why did you take such a hard science class to start with?" Nagisa's friend Shiho scolds, looking up from Nagisa's latest failed quiz as they walk. "The regular chemistry class is supposed to be way easier than bio, though you shouldn't take the advanced one..."

"I thought chemicals sounded boring," Nagisa sighs. "Biology is animals and stuff."

"Did you think you'd be learning about baby seals?" Shiho laughs.

"Sort of..."

"Well, get it together," Shiho tried to joke, but she meant it a little too much, and they both heard that as they stopped in front of Nagisa's apartment building. Shiho glanced away. "I just mean... I know you're not getting into college at this point unless you get scouted. That's fine. But you have to at least graduate, to get scouted. You can't play for a college team without a high school degree."

"I know."

-=-=-

In her bedroom, Nagisa booted up her wheezy school laptop. Navigating to youtube, she tapped her fingers lightly on the keys without typing anything. Having an idea, she reached into her backpack to pull out the syllabus for AP Bio (which just floats around, dusty with graphite and stained with juice, without a folder to call home, but she knows where everything is). Setting it down on the table, she painstakingly types in the exact header of the unit she is working on. Maybe someone will have a tutorial on something similar?

To her surprise, the first video has the same title as what she typed, even though it has just a couple hundred views. ''Unit 14B: Cycles and Apoptosis''

Even Nagisa understands what has happened. This isn't just a video about her topic. This person goes to Juuban! "Lu-cky!" she sings, clicking immediately.

The face that greets her is familiar, though only somewhat. Yukishiro-san, class rep, and more famously, the 'Queen of Knowledge.' Nagisa has seen her in passing many times, and remembers speaking to her once, when she weighed on a discussion she and her friends were having about shooting stars. That was years ago, though. It's almost alarming to see her class's distant royalty in casual clothing, but she understands why; school uniforms are somewhat identifiable.

Yukishiro is sitting a desk also, in what looks like a traditional Japanese bedroom. She begins with a hello, which Nagisa cannot hear because she forgot about her headphones, and she instinctively rushes for them as if this were a video call; when else do you see people you know on the laptop? Nearly falling off her chair, she manages to cram the headphones on before she misses too much.

"...club members find this to be the most challenging semester. While this series was originally intended only for my science club kouhai, they thought it might be useful to others, so I've started to release these publicly. Let's get right into it."

Nagisa would not have been physically capable of saying that last sentence without exclaiming it, but the way Yukishiro says it so gently and assuredly is hypnotic. In a few short, simple words, she has Nagisa's trust immediately. She feels she is about ot learn what Apop... a-poptart-osis is.

And over the next thirty minutes, she is proven utterly correct in her faith. Yukishiro teaches so insightfully, seeming to anticipate every point of confusion. She always has the perfect metaphor. And her voice... it's like a musical instrument.

After that, Nagisa begins by listening to Yukishiro's youtube videos on a topic after lectures. But after a few pretty-good quiz grades, she has a brainwave... why get confused listening to it explained okay first, when she could listen to it explained amazingly, and be able to follow along? Feeling a little guilty about cheating like that, she nonetheless starts watching Yukishiro's videos the night before class.

-=-=-

"Are you listening? C'mon c'mon c'mon," Shiho demands, annoyed.

"Sorry," Nagisa yelps, putting her phone down. "I'll put it away. I wanted to know if a new video got posted yet."

"God, you use technology like a grandma," Shiho rolls her eyes. "Gimme gimme gimme."

Relinquishing her phone, Nagisa watches pensively as Shiho examined Yukishiro's Youtube profile. "Is this the channel?" she asks.

Nagisa is unsure why her mouth is so dry suddenly. "Ye-" She clears her throat. "Yeah."

Opening her mouth to speak, Shiho thinks better of it. She taps a few icons, including one that looks like a bell, and hands the phone back.

"Ah!" Nagisa exclaims. "Will she know?" She wishes she had not said 'she', had used a more neutral word.

"Eh? I don't think so. Besides, that's what they're for, right? Science class." It still feels like there's something she isn't saying.

"That's true." It's super true, Nagisa realizes. Why does it still make her nervous? "I'll see now, when..."

"When they release a new video," Shiho agrees.

-=-=-

Yukishiro uploaded fairly regularly, usually more than once a week. But after a while, Nagisa got tired enough of waiting for that notification that she decided she didn't have to, and started delving back through older videos. None of them were about her bio class, but she was just impatient, and it seemed like a good thing to do in the meanwhile. So she started watching videos now and then of this girl at her school explaining about the speed of light, or where the garbage goes when you throw it away, or why metal feels cold at room temperature. Then she started watching them all the time. They were usually pretty long. Sometimes there was a white board, or little props. Sometimes she would share her computer screen somehow(!), but normally it was analog like that. It was always in her bedroom, though. Nagisa began to know the place well. She noticed when Yukishiro moved something in between days. She learned the name of her big yellow dog Chuutaro, and would audibly say hi to the screen when the pup occasionally wandered into frame. She started to get to know Yukishiro's outfits, and come to have particular favorites.

At some point, biology became just another class. Nagisa did not transform into a top student, or get recognized by the teacher. Her mother did not really understand that this was a hard class, or quite what had been achieved here.

At last, the moment Nagisa was afraid of arrived. She reached the beginning of the channel. She watched a slightly younger Yukishiro fiddle with the camera, tell it a reassuring "yosh," then jog away from the computer to give a happy self-introduction. It was at once awkward and unselfconscious, a combination the shy Nagisa never really managed. Her smile was bright and ready. She bubbled over when talking about science. Nagisa was entranced. She could not look away as Yukishiro sternly admonished her about eye protection in the lab.

When it was over, Nagisa sat at her computer for a while, unsure what to do. She just wanted there to be another video, is all. Eventually, she helplessly gave in, and clicked around to get to Yukishiro's most recent upload. It was a few weeks ago now, which had fed her impatience to begin with. Putting it on, she considers starting over and going backwards all the way to the beginning again.

The girl who greets her is the familiar one, the one she got to know first, in the most recent videos. But watching it right after the first one, Nagisa actually rocks back in her chair at the difference. Yukishiro's gentleness, her keen mind, her self-assured style are still all intact. In her head, the early videos and the new ones were all the same Yukishiro, because she was always pale and soft-spoken, always had a little distance in her eyes at odd moments. But seeing the Yukishiro of just a year and some ago against the Yukishiro of today shows clearly that she was not always THIS pale, that her cheeks were rounder, that the soft instrument of her flute-like voice was not always played in a minor key, even if it was silverine all along.

Feeling a chill on her skin, Nagisa watches for as long as she can bear it. Then she closes the laptop and begins to pace, for want of something better to do with her need to do...

...what?

-=-=-

"Hey, you know Yukishiro-san? Queen of Knowledge?" Nagisa asks Shiho the next morning.

"Yeah, of course," Shiho says. "You were watching some of her tutorials or something right?"

''Some of''. Nagisa blanches. "R-right. She used to be in the same class as us, right? Do you know what class she's in now? I thought maybe she transferred, but she talks about the science club, in some of the videos, I guess she's the president..."

Shiho bites her lip. "She used to be."

"Eh? Did she quit?" Nagisa suddenly worries the several weeks isn't just a slow upload period. If Yukishiro isn't in the science club anymore...

"She dropped out of it a long long long time ago," Shiho says. "I was surprised when you showed me the channel, dunno who she was doing that for."

Nagisa feels as if she had been in a lecture hall with Yukishiro these past months, only to realize the other attendees were all cardboard cutouts. "What class is she in?" she asks again.

Shiho looks up at her taller friend, pained. "Nagisa... you really haven't heard?"

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Jail's toes leave the ground. He hovers in an antigravity not of his conscious making, but rather what happens when too much magic warps too small a space. His face lifts blindly to a sky invisible through the vast tower above them all, but not -- it feels -- invisible to him. His eyes are blind with all that he can see, now. His skin is radiant not with ten lights or even a hundred, but as many magical cores as there are people -- as there are worlds.

The purple in his shoulder-length hair bleaches white in an instant. His clothing -- crisp suit and slovenly lab coat -- incinerate. By then he's already too bright to look upon, a prismatic sunspot of a silhouette, whose color whirls continuously, an intense, chaotic kaleidoscope.

Not that the children at his feet see any of this. To the last they are collapsed on the ground, insensate, lost. Infiniti took all of their energy along with the vital essence of their soul where the magic used to be, as easily as taking candy from a baby. And then Jail took it all from her, because she really is a baby.

Was a baby.

The stuffed animal flung to the ground beside the collapsed children shows not a single hint of life.

---

<>

"I... I don't understand," says a familiar towheaded child, gazing up at the screen. Movie theater sized, it was hooked up to the Tower feeds by a variety of local citizens, working in tandem. All it took to get them to do it was a little encouragement, a little kindness, and, admittedly, a little refined sugar.

They, and dozens, hundreds of fellow Labyrinthinites, gape in horror at the sight before them. Some weep. All were rapt, amazed, by the sight of the magical girls before them. They witnessed their Lord, the very purpose of their existence, revealed as a sham and torn down off his throne. They gasped in awe at the battle with Northa. At the bright lovebeams and frilly lace, and almost moreso at the raw emotion, the likes of which are so forbidden as to be forgotten in this bleak demesne: Courage. Hope. Embrace of one another. Friendship. Romance. Duty. Sacrifice.

How did this come to be?

Separated from the others when Moebius portaled the fight indoors, Tarte, Azukina, Clara and Batiste were at a loss for what to do... and decided to do what they do best:

Make friends, and eat snacks.

"This isn't right," insists the tiny child, tiny-voiced, clenching an even tinier fist. "They... they fought so ''hard''!"

An older woman sucks a tear into her nostrils with a sharp intake of breath. "Don't... don't just lay there," she murmurs at the children on the screen. "Please, get up. You have to get up."

The chorus grows like an infection. It leaps from man to man, from face to face -- a liveliness unheard of for generations within Labyrinth. A roar of feelings, and occasionally also of words.

"This isn't how it should end!"

"It can't be over!"

"I can't accept this!"

"You can't let him do this!"

"Leave them alone, you-- you ''jerk''!"

''Fierce'' feelings: shock becomes anger. Despair becomes defiance. Solitude becomes--

--the woman picks up the child and holds them close to her chest.

"Don't give up!" they cry in spontaneous unison, their hearts as one. And the chorus grows, swells, becomes a riot of screaming...

"Wake up!"

"Please be okay..."

"Get up and fight!"

"You can do it. You can do it!"

A huge crash of thunder drowns out the uproar as the sky is split by unnatural-looking lightning. Bad lightning. There's something off about it, something wrong, but nobody's paying close attention; in any case it's above the tip of the Tower, impossibly high up. Another consequence of Jail's infinite desire, his endless greed, perhaps.

But that isn't what woke up Tarte.

Cheers ringing in his ears, he shakes his ruff, emerging from his slumber... like the fairies everywhere, he had been unable to withstand the vast, universal draining. And he is astonished by what he sees.

"It ain't possible," he breathes. "That man... Jail... I felt him strip even the memory of magic from me. The memory of... Azukina!" He crouches beside his girlfriend, shaking her gently awake. "Azukina, wake up! Look! Lookit the people!"

Her pretty purple eyes open and blink, then widen at the clamor. Nothing has changed about these people physically; they're still all in those dull gray uniforms. Their hair and skin are still washed out pastels. But their expressions -- their eyes -- are unrecognizable.

They are afire.

They are alight.

"They saw everything," she realizes, as hushed in her wonder as the populace is getting rowdy in theirs. "They bore witness. They made... new memories. The people in Labyrinth, the first ones ever drained. There was no reason for anyone to believe there was anything left to take."

They are a light...

Gasping, Tarte plops down his much-reduced rucksack (it had been mostly donuts by volume, which are now but crumbs on the mouths of a few dozen Labyrinthites) and rummages around in the remainder. A pink wand emerges, no longer than a matchstick. It is capped in a heart. But it is just cold plastic in his paws. Just plastic, but...

Azukina places her paw on his.

"I'm awake," Tarte says, swallowing a lump in his throat. "And so're you. It ain't too late. It can't be too late. Batiste! Take these," there are more of the same toyetic wands, enough to distribute widely, as long as people share. "Give them to the people. An'... tell 'em what to do! It's... it's all up to them, now!"

<Pose Tracker> Nori Ankou [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Batiste gazes at Tarte and Azukina, brushing the powdered sugar and crumbs from his clever little paws. He is sitting back on his hind legs and tail, as he did after the great sharing of the sweets. His dark eyes are wet with sympathy, and perhaps relief. He waddles forwards a step to gather up the pink wands. "I understand, my comrades," he says.

He hops - a little clumsily, for he has to use his tail and his legs and hug the small pink treasures close to his belly - onto a bench, and thence, to the tabletop it borders. As he does, he sweats -- or an otter's closest equivalent -- for this is a great charge, and he knows the stakes before him.

May every moment of that study guide me, Batiste silently prays. May it not all prove for nothing. Please, O Mother, look kindly upon my --

A leap to the tabletop!

-- works, he concludes as he lands on his belly and lays there for a moment before wiggling his way fully upright. He sways a little. Perhaps he is nearer to the ordinary in some ways than the fairies, but it's all a matter of degrees. Magic can be subtle, after all.

He closes his eyes for a moment and breathes in. Deep, deep, deep - as if he intended to stay below the water for a quarter hour. Much of it comes off in his first declaration: "My friends!"

"It is said that sometimes aeons of history happen in a single day, and you stand here on one of those days. You gaze on our brave heroines, and I can hear your cheers... and your fears, as well. Fear of what has been shown to you; fear, perhaps, of more."

He hefts up the bundle of little pink sticks before him. "They are far away, and we are gathered here. Do you fear that your prayers may be unanswered? Well..."

A pause. The pause has to be perfect, Batiste thinks. He sees eyes turn towards him. Two and a half seconds, he thinks at last, and then he sheds that last bit of worry to simply *speak*:

"They shall NOT go unanswered. No sincere hope, no true prayer, fails to echo in the vast universe. All will bear fruit, if not always in the time we hope... But time! Time is what we don't have much of! There is no time for theory, my friends. I will tell you simply - that your hopes WILL reach them - and all you have to do is hold THIS aloft!" He raises one of the little pink sticks up, a bit clusmily, but nonetheless illustratively.

"Hold it aloft!" Batiste shouts, his squeaky voice acquiring a subtle timbre, perhaps, that it doesn't usually have. "Pour your hopes, your dreams, your passions into this - THE MIRACLE LIGHT - and they will reach them! I swear this to you on the seven stars of the Golden Gates! My friend!" he says, looking now -- to that small child.

And to that child, he tosses one of the pink sticks. Gently, firmly - and with a "Yes! That's the way!" when it is caught and then turned around in the kid's grasp.

"Every single one of you," Batiste intones, "is a star. Here! Catch them! Share them with each other--" And he throws the Miracle Lights forwards, by twos and threes, high lobbing tosses that strain him. When he wobbles, his grip on the other Miracle Lights lets then clatter forwards --

Only for one of the Labyrinth residents to grasp a handful - take one - and pass the rest back. At this, Batiste laughs, with a delight that surprises even him. He gathers up what's left -- and tosses them high!

"Now raise them, with all your hopes and dreams, and send your pleas once more--!!!"

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

<SoundTracker> Friendship, Gently And Warmly -- Fresh Pretty Cure OST -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SceOScrJBY8

Batiste gives the people of Labyrinth the Miracle Lights, and bestows upon them their charge: to give the magical girls their feelings. They can reach. They ''will'' reach, if only they dare to believe.

Each of them, the otter says, is a star. This turns out to be more true than even he might have expected.

The towheaded child's carrier cries out again, and a pink heart blossoms on her chest, her feelings too great to be contained: "Gooo, Pretty Cure!"

They know their names. They heard them call out to one another. And they remember... remember them picking each other up when they fell. Taking hits for one another. Taking hits for ''them''. For the people of Labyrinth. For all people, everywhere.

"Piichii! Piiine!!" Another heart is born. "Blacku!" "Hwaito!" Two more.

"Don't give up, mages!" Hearts open like a field of flowers.

Dueling fandoms, all of fifteen minutes old, try to outcheer one another: "EN-DO! EN-DO! EN-DO!" "KYOU-KA! KYOU-KA! KYOU-KA!"

"Feito! Lera! You got this!" One at a time.

"Fiiight, La Sirene!" Then dozens.

"Rise up! Mikoto!" Then hundreds.

And for the one the people of Labyrinth recognize as their own, eyes shine. Hearts yearn. A vast outpouring of love and support for a girl whose Earth name they do not know -- but whose ''new'' name they heard on the lips of her allies:

"Passion... PASSION! ''PASSION''!!"

"We want to be like you! Think for ourselves! ''Feel'' for ourselves!"

"Figure things out for ourselves!"

"You saved us, didn't you?"

"Now it's our turn to save you!"

"We believe in you..."

"Believe in yourselves, everyone--!"

All together now, in every size and shape and color, hearts swell both in and on the chests of everyone:

"Give the heroes power!"

Louder. Lightning flashes again, but nobody flinches this time, not even the towheaded child. Who could be frightened amid such a collective outpouring of emotion?

"Give The Heroes Strength!"

...and the tips of the Miracle Lights twinkle, sparkle, and erupt in rainbow light. They almost look like microphones. They ARE microphones, amplifying heartsong... each one is its own perfect little beacon; each rainbow a different spectrum; each as pretty and pure and perfect as the heart that holds it.

A heart-shaped explosion advances on the Tower and engulfs it.

Try as she might, the Queen of Belka could never have hidden all the magic of the universe away. Nor can Jail contain it.

Because magic doesn't truly come from Linker Cores or Silver Crystals; from Pillars or HiME marks or even from fairies. Artifacts are imbued by it; and can distribute it, channel it.

But beneath the glitter of the transformation item; the sublime of the ruffles; the edge of the soul's sword; there is a deeper truth, and a greater one.

"GIVE THE HEROES LOVE!"

Faintly at first, then more strongly... from inside the lives you've been living in your own head, you can hear them! You can hear everyone! And you awaken at Jail's feet, suffused by a miracle: the miracle of everyone's feelings.

Feelings that you created, kindled, just by standing up against evil. By fighting for love and justice -- fighting WITH love, and WITH justice.

By simply being yourselves...

It feels... warm...!

---

"What?" Jail shouts, dismayed, as his rainbow existence is no longer the ONLY rainbow in the room; the light from outside is pouring in through invisible cracks in the layers and layers of tower and foundation between them and the crowd, spreading to trace and fill even the circuitry upon which Labyrinth is made. The vast universe of magic contained within him is pivoting on an axis that didn't exist but a moment ago. It's still his, everything he stole... but he is no longer alone. "This," he sputters, "This is impossible--!"

---

Now it's your turn to make a miracle.

No, the source of the oldest and most powerful magic of all... was never the Heart of any World.

It's in the hearts of everyone.

The magic is in you.

OOC: Time for some OOC clarifications and invitations.

OOC: First of all, just to be clear, that AU didn't really happen, except for inside the minds of unconscious magical girls trying
to make sense of a magic-free sense of self. You do remember it though, as one might remember a dream, as the voices of support
from the Labyrinthites reach and reawaken you. You may have learned something about yourself and your relationship to magic, in
the dreaming...

OOC: Furthermore everyone should +heal/boss 2 for some EXTRA fatigue and mana, you are coursing with the power of the feelings of
those who believe in you! And then I can hit you really hard without worrying as much about accidentally oneshotting you! This
also gives you a second attack per round. The restriction is going to be one 'offensive' attack and one 'buff' attack per round,
you are encouraged to do more with the csys to interact with and support one another with flags like Reinforce, Cheer, Cleanse,
etc.

OOC: After you're healed and transformed you'll be receiving a buff from me; that's going to be it for csys this round, no csys
attacks on Jail or each other, I daresay you have enough to do this round

OOC: BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

OOC: This miracle also includes the strength of YOUR feelings drawing your loved ones to your side! Specifically anyone with
strong feelings for REN AIZAWA is invited to explore them a bit -- the power of those feelings will create a different sort of
rainbow bridge to transport her here. (Ren, please stand by, you'll go at the end of the round once you know what you're working
with.)

OOC: Strong feelings for WESTAR and SOULAR are also very welcome, and will culminate in a miracle resurrecting them from the
Delete Hole. (Westar, also please stand by, let it all come in, then you can pose the results...)

OOC: You can also pose the miracle lights reaching and reviving your alts back on Earth (if you have time; don't work too hard).
Just leave them on Earth. There's plenty going on back home for them to do (but we'll leave it strictly off camera to avoid
getting distracted).

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick transforms into Jail, Lord of All Magic!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

'Feito! Lera! You got this!'

Lera's amber eyes blink open. She looks up; lightning flashes and a blast of pink light erupts, like a heart, and washes over her. She sees those mountains. The beautiful, white-capped peaks that she saw every day from her home. She loves them, but she has her answer.

Yes. There are higher peaks than these.

She finds herself standing, again, in Labyrinth. She looks up, the Miracle Lights' glow still surrounding her. Soaring Sky is lifted up.

<I'm glad you're back with us!> he chimes.

<Let's show him a thing or three!> Broken Ground chimes, his voice rougher.

"Yeah," Lera says, as she looks at Jail. She lifts up Soaring Sky, pointing the sword Device towards Jail. "This is for Solar and Westar... who'd want to defend their home. And for Ren-chan, and everything you did to her!"

Lera shouts. "Because it doesn't matter where we are... we stand side by side!"

COMBAT: Lera Camry transforms into Barrier Jacket Dynamic!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Lera Camry! Cleanse! All of Lera Camry's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi transforms into HiME Mikoto!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Mikoto Minagi! Cleanse! All of Mikoto Minagi's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Setsuna Higashi [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

"Gh..."

Setsuna Higashi starts to awaken. It's hard for a moment, to shake off the sleepiness--no, not sleepiness. Something different. But only for that one, brief moment, because--

"The..." Tears sting in Setsuna's eyes. "The people of Labyrinth..." She hears it--no, she ''feels'' it, their calls. Calls from a home she just experienced again. Calls from those she always wondered about, but could never know.

And they believe in her. THey want... what she's found, for herself. Setsuna's red eyes stare into the floor for a few moments longer before she pushes herself up, one hand at a time. "Everyone..."

Her purple hair, longer than it was when she lived here, is pushed out of her face as she rises again. Once she's at her knee, she reaches out to Love Momozono next to her. And she rises--

"Labyrinth," she says softly, reverently. "I... I won't let you down. I'll do my very best!"

"But I--"

She sighs, once. "I wish... I wish that Westar and Soular could see this," murmurs Setsuna Higashi, who was once Eas. "Could see our home... alive..."

She picks up her Linkrun once again, and she remembers the many times she used it against them. She remembers the patient, almost kind advice Soular gave her; she remembers sitting quietly over coffee... or making fun of Westar.

She remembers Westar, always reaching back to her. Always trying. Always wanting to be--

"We should've been friends," Setsuna whispers, "Or maybe we..."

"He knew it the whole time," Love says to Setsuna. And Setsuna nods, blinking away enough of her tears to look forward. "...Pretty Cure!" she says, holding her Linkrun before herself with her partners. "Change! Beat...Up!"

But this time, it is more brilliant than it has ever been. Crimson light shines from Akarun and Setsuna, and her transformation begins. The familiar jump; the move beneath spectral waves, rising again from where she had fallen. Her armor appearing piece by piece, cloth pauldrons and red dress and fabric gauntlets and clover emblem. But that is not all.

This time, standing next to her first friend, Passion is... more. A ring of light bursts out from all around her, and a pair of feathery wings sprout at her back. Her voluminous pink hair rushes in an unseen wind.

And with three other voices, "The white heart is the heart of everyone! Freshly flapping, Cure Angel!"

She and the others hover over the battlefield--and Cure Angel Passion looks to Lera, with a smile. "...It's my home!" she tells her, her heart full of a love she never thought she would know quite like this. "And they're here, too!"

Soular and Westar...

"I'll fight for them, and for all of Labyrinth! And..."

"For Chiffon!" Angel Passion and Angel Peach say as one, though it is Peach who moves to cradle their lost lamb if she can get to her, to get her to safety.

COMBAT: Setsuna Higashi transforms into Cure Angel Passion!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Setsuna Higashi.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and
Withstand applied to Cure Angel Passion! Cleanse! All of Cure Angel Passion's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Nagisa Misumi transforms into Cure Black!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Honoka Yukishiro transforms into Cure White!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure Black accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Cure Black! Cleanse! All of Cure Black's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Cure White accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure White is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Cure White! Cleanse! All of Cure White's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Inori Yamabuki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

It's difficult to hear at first on that day at the zoo. But eventually Inori Yamabuki, stops as if hearing something in the distance. "Mama... Pengin!" Snapping back into this, she smiles, "Sorry Secchan... Mama's really spacing out isn't she?" Pushing the stroller forward, her steps slow again...

Because she hears it.

'Piichii! Piiine!!'

"Pine?" She echoes, then looks around like there's a vendor offering a frozen drink, "Hmmm, I don't see any special offers."

But more and more the chorus grows in her own mind, like a bright light, at the end of a long tunnel.

'Give the heroes power!'

'Give The Heroes Strength!'

And Buki's eyes close briefly, as a smile comes upon her face, "Did you know Secchan? Your Mama... usually she has a lot more confidence in herself." Moving along the side of the stroller, she puts out a hand to brush the side of her face, "And I hope if we ever do come to be together again... that I'm able to pass on how to believe in yourself. I had to learn the hard way." She smiles ruefully, as if slightly embarrassed, "And it was so easy for someone to take it all away."

'GIVE THE HEROES LOVE!'

The lights are taking over her entire vision, and fishing something out of her bag, she takes out her Linkrun, even as Kirun bursts out in a shower of light.

It's thanks to the people of Labyrinth! Their hearts created a miracle! Now it's time for you to answer them with one.

Holding up her Linkrun, her last vision of her fictional happiness faded, as she stated to- what she knew came from herself, this representation of who she might have been. "Then watch me. I believe... we can all be together again." As she thinks of Love and Miki and Setsuna... Nagisa and Honoka... "All of us." And yes, even Westar and Soular, who were cruelly punished for their undying loyalty.

Despite their methods, she knows that Westar was never really malicious, and Soular was always acting out of loyalty and that... Setsuna truly cares about them both.

And in a moment she's right there. "You always were. It's the way friends are, when they get frustrated with one another." She agrees with Love on this matter.

"Change! Pretty Cure! Beat... UP!"

A corona of yellow light becomes a transformation. There is no leap of faith, she already took it, returning here, as her outfit becomes a haze of sparkling white, and despite the new brightness and unfamiliarity of this feeling - she knows how she should feel.

This is her happiness.

Light cascades off her back, and feathers appear, spreading out in a flap. They are different from the wings of the others, but they're hers.

"The white heart is the heart of everyone! Freshly-flapping, Cure Angel!"

As she lines up alongside Cure Angel Passion with a quick flap of her wings, she tells her, "I won't let Labyrinth's faith in us go unrewarded- I'm with you! We're bringing Chiffon home!"

COMBAT: Inori Yamabuki transforms into Cure Angel Pine!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Pine is Cheered!
Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Cure Angel Pine! Cleanse! All of Cure Angel Pine's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

RISE UP;

There is a reason Mikoto left the mountain. She travelled down and made friends and enemies and enemies and enemies and then they became her friends as well; a dozen spears pointed towards her, and then pointed away. She remembers Ren Aizawa, first titanic in her terror and then in her trust.

They ate together. And she thinks, with the call, that they could do so again.

She ate with Westar, too, when he was supporting her in Dark Fall. He actually kept her ''company,'' during those frigid gatherings, when few others had ''time'' for a girl not yet grown. Sometimes they'd coax Soular to join in, though he always acted quite put-upon by the invitation. But she escaped, and she tried to share food with Westar, even then -- though the spice of his obligation was bitter. She wanted to reach him, anyway. She wonders if Soular was trying to reach her, just the same, when he coaxed her towards her Lord Brother... the only way he knew how. Perhaps Westar was just the same.

She is smaller than she felt she was, a few moments prior. Stunted by the demands placed upon her. But she is still strong enough to lift her blade. She has no extra decorations; she comes as she is. She hefts Miroku, towards Jail, and shouts: "I'M possible! Westar-senpai, watch!"

<Pose Tracker> Nori Ankou [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCO-X5iFPFE - Blue Öyster Cult - Astronomy (Imaginos) - Sacramento CA 11/4/88

It's everywhere, isn't it? If it can come to life this vividly from the denizens of Labyrinth...

How could you hide it?

Perhaps you might conceal it - perhaps you might eclipse it - perhaps a heart might be attuned only to some portion of it.

But nevertheless

LOVE PREVAILS

The first sign, for la Sirene, is that the battered shape of the Pharos - quietly, and without fanfare - resumes its previous form. She doesn't move. Lost, perhaps, in that darkling dream, staring out into the night-time ocean.

But...

Someone's calling for her.

Are they?

She can hear the song from the ocean, and in a moment, she wonders, because it's coming from

her own lips

as she breathes out, "It..."

As she pushes herself to her hands and knees, her eyes well up. The tears run down her cheeks. She can hear them, all of them. Batiste's high-pitched register carries forwards, and behind it, others. Unfamiliar voices. People who she never knew, who never met her. And yet, they're giving their faith to her. Her face crumples for a moment -- and then she laughs. It's a small sound.

After this the un-light that folds around her returns, pouring forwards. She can feel the cool, so-cool light, its temperature a non-existent quality that's nevertheless delicious on her skin. Something comforting enveloping her, mingled with the waves of love and trust. She pushes herself up, first with her hands and then in a flexing of the legs. There are a few musical chimes from where gem and metal gently bump against each other.

"I do not think," says la Sirene de Diamant as she raises upright, "that that word means, what you think it means." Her head tilts back slightly as she takes in a deep breath and lets it out.

She thinks she can taste the sea.

Her heart beats swiftly. There is that anonymous sensation of being supported, of being watched. It isn't like modelling, where the exchange is swift, light, craving and being craved. It is something deeper, like hands pressing her up.

Here she is with so many others. How many did she fight against? Oh, for a minute it was most of them, wasn't it? And yet time after time the boundaries between them eroded, the spiked stone and jagged metal turning into comfortable cushions, things there in mutual respect. Love, itself.

"If it were impossible... then we would not stand here..."

Her eyes focus, on Jail, and her hands come together in a clasp.

"... and nevertheless... we do."

La Sirene smiles, faintly. "I wonder, perhaps, at the road you've been travelling. It's been a long one... with many tolls to pay... but if you DO want to stop..." Her hands spread slightly, and the smile fades. "You had better decide and quickly."

Some part of her wonders. She should be angry. Abstractly perhaps, she is angry, somewhere. For the myriad horrors that Jail has wreaked.

But they're all cheering for her. For all of them. She has to be worthy of such devotion.

COMBAT: Nori Ankou transforms into La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! La Sirene de Diamant is Cheered!
Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to La Sirene de Diamant! Cleanse! All of La Sirene de Diamant's debuffs are
cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Years pass.

The Harlaown Household comes to be. And despite the age difference, she still forms a bond with Frederick Camry's daughter, Lera.

There is always a risk, a chance. Their location remains a secret, because of the possibility that Jail Scaglietti might come for her.

But, little by little, Fate Testarossa recovers from abuse, by the patience and kindness of those in her life.

'Feito! Lera! You got this!'

It was like a sound of distant thunder, and Fate, sitting on the rooftop watching the clouds roll in, listens to it.

"Oh." Her red eyes blink, as if she'd remembered something important, "That's right. I never did it properly." Drawing herself up, she smiles, "Even here, we became friends again. But I never learned that I was supposed to call your name, Lera."

As she heard it more and more, more names come unbidden to her.

"Endo, Ren, Kyouka... Hayate, Vita, Signum, Shamal, Zafira... Setsuna, Westar, Soular... and... Nanoha. ''Nanoha''."

She smiles as she repeats that last one, "Even if you take it from me, I can always learn again. Always." Then looking up, "You. I hope... one day I can teach you that too. ... Bardiche!"

In a flash of gold, he apepared in her hand.

<Yes Sir! Get Set.>

"SET UP!"

<Drive Impulse - Ignition>

In a flash of lightning she was armored again, though it felt like it had layers upon layers from the prismatic light.

Invisible Heat - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfDNO4C-nSs

And with a swing of a blade her inner world fractured again, as she leapt out skyward, to catch 'You' before she even hit the ground.

With a glare at the God of Magic, she says reprovingly, "When it was my Mother, I just wanted her to know how I felt. With you? I'll show you." Holding You with one arm, her other one extended the point of the blade towards him with a hard glare, "With this... I'll make certain you never hurt my family ever again."

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Sonic!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Blaze!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is Cheered!
Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Fate Testarossa! Cleanse! All of Fate Testarossa's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Clara huffed. She'd been reduced to a babysitter for a bunch of animals. (She will not concede the point that she is, in fact, an animal herself; she is a ''familiar'', she is something more than just 'an animal.')

... But she wasn't about to go it alone, either.

But snacks and sweets seemed to be the way to reach the people, and when more had been needed... with a grumbling and muttering she had oh-so-reluctantly provided her own stash, sourced from countless vending machines and many late-night konibi trips.

"But I better be reimbursed for this!" she'd insisted.

But when all magic had been drained.... so had she. Even though she'd taken her more humanoid form in the blink of an eye she hadn't the energy to maintain it--there was no energy for ''anything'', in that moment, anywhere, not anything that required magic.

And in a flare of green magic she'd collapsed to the ground, a fox with impossibly bright orange fur and two tails, laying concious, a half-finished bag of white chocolate-covered pretzels spilled beside her on the ground.

She wakes up to the shouting of the denizens of Labyrinth. She'd been drained of all magic, she remembered that much... Her eyes slowly open, and she blinks. <What the... How...>

Slowly getting up to all fours, she shakes her head out. She watches on in befuddlement as Tarte gives Batiste the Miracle Lights, as he makes a speech, as the citizens take up arms and just... call out their feelings.

Quietly, to herself, almost not wanting to disrupt the upswell of emotions, she mutters, <There's no way... can... can this really work...?>

She's worked with magic for years--she knows intelligent devices in and out, but for all that she has never really worked with a true and proper magical girl. Until a certain brat came into her life.

So much of this is out of her depth. This can't ''possibly'' work... and yet...

It is.

She stares, mouth agape as hearts and wants light up, names are chanted. Well, if they can do that much, then...

She whirls around, facing the screen, looking at the image of Kyouka laying on the ground. <You better get up you stupid brat! After everything you put me through I'm not letting you give up on your promise! So just...> She leans forward, her thoughtspeak louder. <GET UP KYOUKA!>

Maybe a fox can believe in something every once in a while, too.

----

"Thanks." Kyouka looked back to the stars again, collecting her thoughts. "I always felt like... like I wanted to do something ''big'', you know? Something... important." Kyouka lifted her right hand up to the sky, reaching for... something, she wasn't sure what. "Something that I was..." Her hand closed into a fist, as if she were trying to grab hold of the moon.

As if one could hold onto something so far away any more than they could grasp a ball of light.

"... ''meant'' to do."

"EN-DO! EN-DO! EN-DO!" "KYOU-KA! KYOU-KA! KYOU-KA!"

"Feito! Lera! You got this!"

... She knows those names. She's not sure how, at first, but then, slowly but surely... She remembers.

Endo, ever dependable and stalwart.

Fate, her teacher, that she still wants to protect.

Lera, who she still needs to go mountain climbing with, who took the time to teach her how to use her magic. ''Her'' magic.

That's right, she has magic.

And there were others. Ren, a friend made by chance, and a shared bond of magic discovered with a little leap of faith (and a leap for a hat.) Who tought her a spell, even after Jail tricked her into endangering Ren's brother.

And of course... Passion. ''Setsuna-chan''. Her first magical girl friend, who'd found her and helped her when everything had seemed so crazy and unreal, when she'd discovered magic entirely by accident.

... But maybe it wasn't an accident, after all.

She's grasped a ball of light before. She's seen sights of Tokyo she never could have imagined, seen its wonders and horrors, both... She's felt her own Pure Heart ripped from her chest, but also had it returned by someone she holds dear.

Something alights in her clenched fist as she holds it aloft, a bright light seeping out between her clenched fingers.

She has magic in excess to give, more than she'd ever thought.

And she has--

Kyouka blinks, in the light of the campfire, as the light solidifies into something hard and firm. She lowers her hand, opening her palm to reveal a small five-sided gem.

She smiles. "Strike Wolf."

Kyouka looks up to her father and down at Wolfy, hugging the first and patting the second as she stands up. "Thanks for the chat but... There's someplace I gotta be."

Drew looked at Kyouka with only a slightly confused frown, but then nodded. "Knock 'em dead, Kiddo." Wolfy sat up and barked.

Kyouka grinned. "YUou got it."

---

Kyouka groans, slowly pushing her hands underneath herself as she wakes up, still clad in sneakers, jeans, and a tank top. On her right wrist is a black leather bracelet, with STrike Wolf's form seated atop it. She gets to her feet, unsteady at first, but... she can hear it. The chanting, the upswelling of emotions.

Just eight months ago this might have been utterly incomprehensible to her. Seven months ago, she would have wondered if she was truly worthy of this power. 3 months ago, she made a choice, an affirmation to herself about what kind of person she wanted to be, and 2 months ago...

She was reunited with STrike Wolf.

Her eyes are clear but not dry as she looks up to Jail. That face needed to be punched. A lot.

"Strike Wolf!" Kyouka thrust her fist into the air, aware that the eyes of Moebius were upon her, and determined to pay them back for their feelings. "SEEEEET UP!"

<Stand by ready. Set up.>

A riotous burst of wild, violet magic erupts around her, wild and carefree, just like herself. And when it bursts away from her body, she is renewed once more. A bright violet tunic, a belt that trails behind her in the wind, gleaming gauntlets and boots, with Strike Wolf's active form on the back of her right hand. One last ripple of magic shimmers over her body and she slides her left foot forward, bringing her hands up as she readies to attack.

Her eyes are dry now, and focused entirely on Jail. "Alright, you jerk. Let's go, round 2. I've been ''waiting'' for this."

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki transforms into Barrier Jacket Fang!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Cheered!
Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Kyouka Okazaki! Cleanse! All of Kyouka Okazaki's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssS-UIKZh8 - Determination

"Believe in yourselves, everyone--!"

Slowly Endo's eyes open, the world coming into bleary focus once again. He takes a breath, sucking in air like he's coming up from a deep, dark ocean. A second later he becomes aware of the ground, and his palm finds purchase to begin lifting him up once again.

"Ahh" He says, "I guess I'm back.."

<SET UP.>

Endo's fingers flex, purple light burning along his digits and further upward as the boy's barrier jacket reforms around him. His hand curls around the familiar grip of his devicehis friend.

He belongs here, with everyone. The people that gave his life purpose other than grief. He's here for them, even the ones that don't stand by his side right now. There's not place for a world without his friends, and with Ren Aizawathe girl back on earth, the one who he's shared his entire magical life with.

<WELCOME BACK, KNIGHT.>

"Thanks, Stern. I missed you too." Replies Endo. "Fate, Lera, Mikoto, Pretty Cure, Diamant, I missed all of you"

For the first time in days and buoyed by the sudden lightness of both body and soul, a laugh bubbles to Endo's lips. "If you think that's impossible," He tells the Lord of All Magic, "Wait until you see what we do next."

COMBAT: Endo Naoki transforms into Barrier Jacket Zerstörer!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Endo Naoki is Cheered! Accelerate,
Empower, Surge, and Withstand applied to Endo Naoki! Cleanse! All of Endo Naoki's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

After the titanic struggles and epic adventures to create this reunion, it is almost an offensive anticlimax. Jail does not intervene; he barely even seems to perceive the urgency and warmth that draws Pretty Cure to their ward. To him, Infiniti is just a tool -- and one useless to him now, at that. All used up.

And so,

Chiffon stirs in Angel Peach's arms. When her eyes open they are soft brown lambkin eyes, not the empty blackness of infinity. Jail has, by some lights, lifted a burden from her, even if it was in the cruelest possible way and for the ugliest of all reasons.

"Puripii," she burbles, her smile audible across the battlefield.

Not entirely without resources of her own, the four-leaf clover on the fairy's forehead lights up with the same white shed by the Cure Angels.

And, across impossible distances, back on Earth, Ren Aizawa suddenly feels intensely close to Endo and her other friends.

Beyond even the gates of deletion, Soular and Westar find that their minds have survived, and their hearts are being touched -- and that they can see a way back.

A way forward, for all of them.

All they have to do is follow these feelings back to their source...

...along a path of rainbow light, accompanied by joyful infant babbling.

"Purikyua!" Chiffon opens and closes her furry little paws in greeting. "Puu! Rii! Kaaaahihihihiii!!"

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

"It seems like a lot of people are watching that channel now," Shiho says gently one morning. "That one that you liked."

The past tense on that verb gives Nagisa too much credit for sanity. But then, this might be a dream. When Shiho shows her the screen, the 'likes' aren't numbers, but some sort of light that gives Nagisa a headache to look at.

"I guess that's nice." They walk along in silence for a while.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to, um... I just thought you might like that."

"How did they find it?" Nagisa asks, not because she wants to know. She's pretending, to keep Shiho from feeling guilty.

Shiho shrugs. "I guess they were watching you watch it?"

That would feel even worse to hear if it made any sense at all. But Nagisa's vision keeps unfocusing. She's dreaming. Or she's trying to dream.

"You look kinda rough. You got a headache?" Shiho asks.

"That sound," Nagisa says. "It hurts."

"It sounds nice to me. Sorta... happy."

"It's like scratching... like..." She makes a claw of her hand to show Shiho, but she can't find any other words.

Shiho, ever the thespian, helps. "Screek, screek..."

SCREEEEEEK.

Honoka Yukishiro pauses, still facing the whiteboard. The lecture hall behind her is still silent. The cardboard cutouts of girls she used to know are still there. But the vast, dark lecture hall is not as empty as it was supposed to be.

"You're not supposed to be there," she says, without turning around.

Nagisa, from her seat, looks down at her notes. She does not remember taking them, cannot make sense of them. "I'm sorry. I know."

Honoka resumes writing a formula in blue marker. She keeps writing for a long time. "...are you still there? You need to leave."

"But why..." Nagisa stays in her seat. "Why do you keep coming here?"

Screek. Honoka's marker slides through some Greek letter Nagisa does not recognise. "Do you have a science question?" she asks, almost too quietly to hear.

Nagisa's head crowds with them all at once. The comments were always off on the youtube videos. When you're as pretty as Yukishiro, that's necessary. Not like Nagisa would have been brave enough to leave a comment anyway. She has a lot of questions about the universe, now, about light and time and life. But most of her science questions lately about herself.

"Why... can't I stop thinking about you?" Nagisa asks.

Yukishiro freezes. For the first time, she turns, her wan, sad face looking at her lone living audience member. She has been given a science question. She tries to answer it rationally.

"Maybe you know me." The blue marker in her hand keeps changing colors.

"Why is the sound of your voice still right here, in my ear," Nagisa touches the lobe, pained. "Even though I'm not using headphones anymore?"

"The acoustics of the room," Honoka ventures weakly. "Are designed to direct the sound of my voice to the audience."

"Why..." Nagisa lets her pencil drop to the ground, where it continues to rotate through a rainbow of colors, abandoning any pretense of taking notes. "...does my heart beat so fast, when I look at you?"

It's so rare for Honoka to say this, but whenever she does, so beautiful. So free. Free to be imperfect. Free to be complicated. Free to not have all the answers. "I don't know," she whispers. "Mine is too."

And she reaches out a pale hand, tentatively at first, then faster, accelerating along with their twinned heartbeats like a roller coaster down the drop.

The formulae on the whiteboard pass through the full rainbow of colors behind Honoka. Nagisa, dazed, stands, expecting somehow that when she meets Honoka's eyes, they too will represent many colors, many different hearts. Yet what she finds is a singular blue. One person's feelings.

"But we only can find out... together."

Their fingertips touch.

-=-=-

"Honoka is awake-mipo!" Mipple cries happily.

"It's about time mepo!" Mepple grouses.

"Even though Honoka and Nagisa's bonds are so strong, you took a little longer, mipo! We thought something was wrong mipo."

Cure Black and Cure White are still staring into each other's eyes, an unwelcome reality draining from their consciousness, leaving them together again. They smile, a little rueful.

"It's because Nagisa is such a scaredy cat mepo!" Mepple groans, exasperated. "How many times have you held Cure White's hand already mepo? When I wanna touch Mipple's paw, I just reach out and..."

"Eee," Mipple delights, as the two fairies try to extend their heads out of their cases to boop noses. They have a much too limited range of stretching when they are in their cell-phone like Commune form, but their heads can stretch out a bit like bubblegum, and they both giggle.

Cure Black hastily breaks her handhold with White to reclose the case and lock Mepple in there. "I am not scared!"

"She's thinking, no way, am I still dreaming mepo? A lame girl like me can be Honoka's partner in real life mepo?"

"Sh-shut up!" Cure Black orders her apparently psychic fairy. "This is serious! We might not be the only ones still..."

"Westar," Cure White remembers. "And Soular."

"If we can come back from..." Black follows her reasoning.

"Then maybe they can..."

Cure Black looks up at Cure Angel Passion, Cure Angel Peach, Cure Angel Berry, and Cure Angel Pine, their transfiguration halting her breath for a moment. Even Buki, who had always been so humble, so unassuming, had that sort of power inside. "I believe they can," she decides. "I don't want Setsuna-chan to have to leave here... without her brothers."

Cure White reclaims her partner's hand, freeing Mepple to slightly loosen the case of his Commune enough to gasp a little. Cure Black smiles.

"Together," she says, meaning it differently this time, as the Miracle Lights swell. They have their hands to say it the other way.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

The Delete Hole was always the ultimate destination for Labyrinth's garbage. Anything that Labyrinth didn't need would be sent there to cease existing. A suitable fate for that which Moebius no longer needed.

Westar and Soular were condemned to that fate. Years of service were rewarded with oblivion. For all his repeated failures, Westar should no longer exist.

He knows that. And that's the first weird thing to strike Westar, that he still knows anything. And the second is that, in the depths of oblivion, he can hear voices. The voices of Labyrinth calling encouragement for Pretty Cure, for mages, for all the heroes he's faced in all his time on earth. Imploring them to get back up, to shine brightly, to find the strength to save the day.

'...heh. They're good at that. I should know...'

That's a nice thought to have, right? Westar - Hayato Nishi - has been a faithful servant of Lord Moebius all his life, and see where that got him. It's kind of nice to have that faith in everyone else - believe that they'll make sure that things are put right. He can do that much, right?

...he shouldn't be doing anything, though. Right? And then Westar realizes that there are some of those wishes meant for him.

"This is for Soular and Westar... who'd want to defend their home."

"I wish... I wish that Westar and Soular could see this. Could see our home... alive... We should've been friends."

"I believe... we can all be together again. All of us."

"I don't want Setsuna-chan to have to leave here... without her brothers."

"I'M possible! Westar-senpai, watch!"

And more. Executive of Labyrinth's western districts, supervisor to dozens of Nakewameke, the worst at gathering misery, an unasked-for teammate, a voice of support to those serving Dark Fall, gourmand seeking out every flavour Earth has to offer, a muscle-bound goofball trying his best - Westar is remembered.

And he can remember in turn. Hundreds of nights of questioning his purpose, of falling back on faith in Moebius because he'd never known anything else. Seeing those sworn to the darkness turn away time and time again, fearful and envious of that step into the unknown. Seeing first-hand the light of camaraderie, of friendship and love, and knowing but never admitting that it was something to be sought. Of all the times he tried to be better at quenching happiness by trying to understand where it came from to begin with.

A memory cast into oblivion turns to his partner in so many crimes, giving Soular an awkward smile - and then to the sounds of babbling that herald a path of gleaming rainbow light. It's a warm light, as warm as fresh donuts, and it beckons. The Executives of Labyrinth have both seen so many impossible feats - maybe it can be their turn.

---

Heavy footfalls emerge from a gleam of rainbow light, courtesy of one who never learned to walk quietly. He wears clothes familiar and changed - it's as if the uniform of a Labyrinth executive has been bleached, blacks and greys replaced with white and sky-blue, lined with the same familiar yellow heraldry as ever. A silver Data Diamond sits sideways on his belt, gleaming in the rainbows that shine throughout this sanctum.

The man in the clothes is likewise familiar and a little different. His hair is still mint-green, his arms bare to the world - but instead of the usual confused glower so often present on his face, his expression is more one of wonder. Peace, maybe - a little of the usual surprise - and some of the joy only witnessed by those who have seen him trying a new snack food.

"Pretty Cure," his voice booms out, nearly as imperious as it ever was - before it softens. "...Everyone. Thanks for thinking of us. It meant a lot."

Westar's eyes find those here he knows best - but the smile on his face is to be shared with nearly everyone. That's how smiles work, right? But there's a nearly in that sentence, and his response to Jail is a little different.

He cracks his knuckles. Works a kink out of his shoulders. Slams his fists together. "Feels like it's been ages since we fought hand-to-hand. You all mind if I help out against this guy?"

COMBAT: Westar transforms into Westar!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Westar.
COMBAT: Westar accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Westar is Cheered! Accelerate, Empower,
Surge, and Withstand applied to Westar! Cleanse! All of Westar's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

"Now if we take the coefficient of this number and apply it here, we'll see that..."

The drone of the instructor combined with the sound of chalk scraping on the board as he wrote out various formulas made Ren's eyes quite heavy. She sat in the back, in her usualy spot, the eraser-end of her pencil pressed to her lips as she tried to concentrate to no avail. Math was just ''not'' her subject! And her grades reflected it, too. Thoughts of having to face her parents for her less than stellar performance filled her with dread. They weren't mean about it. They just...

...Were disappointed. And really that only made her feel ''worse''. It certainly didn't help that her older brother Yuu was a certified genius. It all came naturally to him. He'd earned a spot at the prestigious Ohtori Academy where he was top of his class and beloved by his peers. A stark contrast to her, an average (at best) student here at Juuban. She had nothing against being here, really. It suited her just fine, really. Even if she didn't really have any friends...

The sound of the bell sounding overhead, signaling the end of the class period, jolted her out of her thoughts. Grabbing her things to shove into her satchel, she paused as she looked over at the familiar sight of Naoki-kun stretching and yawning. It was easy to tell that he found Math to be boring too. Something they both seemingly have in common. Ren blushes, looking away to finish gathering her things. Once done, she gets up and quietly leaves the classroom. It's lunchtime, though she preferred to eat outside of the classroom.

Alone.

On the roof.

Moments later she's sat down, back against the stone wall and the bento box she'd made the night before for herself laid out next to her. She chews slowly and methodically, her mind wandering to other things as she gazes up at the clear blue sky. She's so distracted that she doesn't even hear when the door to the roof opens and closes. It's not until a voice calls out to her that she realizes she is no longer alone. Blinking, she turns to the source of it -- Endo Naoki!

"Oh! I'm sorry!" She apologizes immediately, than ''instantly'' wonders what she is even apologizing for in the first place. She stands up, awkwardly fidgeting and pulling at her skirt. "N-No one else is usually up here around this time so I come here to eat lunch. If you need the space, I can leave... Yeah, I'll do that!" She bends down to gather her bento, and before the boy can even say anything in protest, she rushes past him and through the door leading back down into the school, cheeks burning red as she thinks about how much of an absolute ''freak'' she must look to him right about now.

...But that doesn't stop her from continuing to visit the store he works at afterschool. She uses the arcade machine in the back -- Super Crimson Fist: World Fighters ~ Reflections in the Spiral of Fate (~Zero~) Act Reload -- as her cover. It helps that she's actually quite good at (and ''really'' enjoys fighting games. She's earned a bit of a reputation with a group of middle school boys who often come by to challenge her, only to leave defeated with their heads hung low. Yes, it's an ''excellent'' and ''foolproof'' cover.

She does eventually get around to striking up an actual conversation with Endo one evening. Purchasing a soda leads to them talking for a full fifteen or so seconds! Exciting! And in the following days, then weeks, they've become friendly with one another -- enough to tell each other "Hi!" in the halls at school at least. It has what feels like a whole kaleidoscope of butterflies fluttering around inside of her. It's unlike anything she's ever felt before.

Three months later sees Ren walking to school one morning, scarf wrapped around her neck to stave off the chilly air of the changing seasons. One of her hands is in the pocket of her jacket, clutching... ''something''. She enters through the school gates like always, wasting no time entering the school building through the main entrance. After switching her shoes out at her locker, she goes to stand by the main stairs, waiting patiently for Endo to arrive.

She doesn't have to wait long, fortunately, before spotting him trudging in. Smiling softly, she continues to wait until he's gone to his locker, and when he turns to walk towards the stairs she gives him a wave. Once he's close enough, she takes a deep breath, and speaks up.

"Hey! So I was wondering if you wanted to go and see Midnight Blaze? I-I have tickets!" She takes the hand she's had stuffed into her coat pocket, and indeed produces two tickets for the aforementioned band's upcoming concert. "T-That is, if you don't have to work..."

Thankfully, he didn't, and they had a great time! Bidding him goodnight after letting him walk her home, Ren goes inside with a happy, blissful sigh, hurrying up to her room to flop on the bed, still smiling brightly at the ceiling while hugging a pillow to her chest. She ends up falling asleep like that, replaying the events of the night in her head...

Ren awakens with a start in the middle of the night. Bolting upright, she's shocked to see a path of light -- shimmering rainbow light -- leading up and into an impossible space that is seemingly connected to her room.

And that's when it hits her.

Endo.

Lera.

Fate.

Setsuna.

Kyouka.

And everyone else, too.

All at once the unshakeable bonds she has with all of them comes crashing down upon her, causing her to gasp and cover her mouth, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Yes. They ''needed'' her.

"Heraut!" She calls out, and the familiar ping of the device rings out, a ball of bronze light winking into existence before her.

 He calls out, and Ren smiles through her tears.

"Of course you are. Like always." She answers back, reaching a hand out to touch the bronze light. "Let's go!"

<SET UP!>

The ball of light follows her hand to where she clasps it against her chest, eyes closed as Heraut and her become one.

Silent Bible - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC6tfg8k7nw

One magnificent flash of light later sees Ren standing there in her barrier jacket, radiating confidence and poise. Flexing her gloved hands, she looks to the rainbow path again, and runs towards it, heart full of swirling emotions that bolster her further. She doesn't know how long she's running like this. The only thing she ''does'' know is that she's going to help her friends. And ''no one'' is going to stop her!

Moments later, she reaches the end of the path, and with a grunt she jumps forward, coming crashing down onto the ground with a mighty quake, kicking up dust in the process. When the dust clears, Ren is revealed, standing triumphantly with a smile for everyone assembled.

"Hope I'm not too late everyone!" She makes a fist and pounds it into her palm, winking. "Let's kick his butt!"

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

"Can't let you have ''all'' the fun," Soular says dryly, stepping up alongside his brother.

He casts a sidelong glance at his sister.

"...thanks," he adds, diffidence doing a poor job of disguising something much more.

COMBAT: Ren Aizawa transforms into Barrier Jacket: Sovereign Mode!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used MIRACLE LIGHTS! on Ren Aizawa.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

To be absolutely clear, there's no reason to feel sorry for Time-Space Criminal Jail Scaglietti. Few others have been as direct an architect in the sorrow of those present (and one rival in malice was just slain for her trouble). Jail has stolen Devices and sometimes their meisters. He has planted them, too, seeding destiny in the paths of innocent schoolchildren and sickbed waifs alike.

Of course, the lives he's touched have also been brought joy from such encounters.

But this being the first time to meet him properly, in the flesh, also presents a kind of opportunity. No one asks the question directly, but he answers it anyway, when La Sirene offers him a swifter and gentler end than mortal combat.

"I can't stop," he mutters, and something strange is in his voice; no one beat him into this admission; it is bragging and it is confession. "Can't stop. Won't stop. As Infinite as the Memory, so is my Desire... this is my purpose. It is why I exist. It is why the Bureau made me, and their unlikely gift."

Fate is the product of grief and mad experiments.

But it seems she may also be the grandchild of the very institution that reviled her -- that blamed her for her very existence. The one Lindy Harlaown resigned from in order to give her the home, and the love, that she deserves.

He rolls his eyes at her. At his 'daughter,' who is, in a twisted way, also his peer.

"Yes, that is right. You look upon the first artificial mage. The original. You were forged to fill a place at your mother's side. I was crafted to find... and secure... and create all the Lost Logia the doddering old fools of the Time-Space Administration could never. Never conceive of. Never discover. Never pursue, lacking the brains, and the guts, and most of all the ambition with which they blessed me in such abundance. And so I did... starting with the Jewel Seeds."

With all of Fate's hard work. Her love and her blood, her loneliness and her tears.

And, ultimately, her friendship.

She has many friends at her side today. One and all they transform, some girding themselves in pretty armor, others simply picking up their weapon once again. Tension rises as Pretty Cure announce their intent; mages make their challenges, formal and otherwise. But what tips the balance, what really starts the battle in earnest, is nothing more and nothing less than the laughter of Endo Naoki.

Jail is many things, yes. But he's nobody's punchline.

The stolen power within him shifts backwards, then upwards, intensifying like a cresting wave -- like a tsunami about to break upon them all. His lips part, he himself overwhelmed, momentarily lost in the totality of what he can now access, what has become a part of him.

And then Fate says a name.

<NEEDLE DROP!> War Paint AMV - One Last Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVh6IHowjus

Momentarily Jail's eyes glow with a hot pink quite unlike that of Cure Peach. It's more neon. And more deadly, which is a compliment to both girls, in its way. The pink heart is the symbol of love.

The pink DEVICE is the symbol of

"DIVINE BUSTER," Jail intones calmly, and from each of the five fingers on his extended hand suddenly fires an all too familiar signature beam. It isn't Nanoha's feelings behind it, but it is, unquestionably, Nanoha's magic, magic which chases his enemies with a dismissive curl of his hand.

And it hits like a mack truck, of course. Good old Nanoha.

He swings his other arm in a wide arc; his fingers crooked as though they're holding something like a baton, though there is nothing there at all. It, he, trails a brilliant and gorgeous dusky radiance in the wake of the sweep.

His eyes glow with stolen silver.

"Moon Twilight Flash..."

Sailor Moon's holy light is not really tuned to the spectrum of anything but cleansing darkness -- but everyone has a ''little'' of that inside of them as well, and some of it is even natural. It's supposed to be there. Part of the balance. It may feel lovely to be the victim of such a blow but it is a mighty one indeed.

"But," he adds, circling back to his original point. "I also don't WANT to stop. Isn't it beautiful? To become exactly who you were always meant to be? To fulfill your destiny? I was an empty vessel. For the first time, I am full. But..."

A slasher smile casts a lethal shadow, rather than a toothy whiteness, through the radiance emanating from his face.

"...that is the curse, and the blessing, of infinity. I always have room for more... COME, CHILDREN!"

More lightning strikes, so hard and so bright and so loud that even within the tower, both the flash, and the rumble, make themselves known. The vast chasm that they're fighting in, once full of poison roots, now full of all the magic in the universe, groans with thunder like a living thing.

COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Fate Testarossa.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Westar.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Moon Twilight Flash on Cure White.
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa accepts Pink Moon Stick's MIRACLE LIGHTS!, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Accelerate, Empower, Surge, and Withstand
applied to Ren Aizawa! Cleanse! All of Ren Aizawa's debuffs are cleared!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has used Divine Buster! on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion dodges 26 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 17 Fatigue damage! Cure
Angel Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine braces 26 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 21 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel
Pine's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant perfectly dodges 52 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 0 Fatigue
damage! Critical Dodge!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa perfectly dodges 48 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge! Fate Testarossa's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure White dodges 20 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 30 Fatigue damage! Cure White's
Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Westar dodges 23 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 34 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi perfectly dodges 43 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge! Mikoto Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa neatly dodges 56 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Ren Aizawa is Quipped! Ren Aizawa's Flash ability activates!
COMBAT: Lera Camry braces 31 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 25 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is
Quipped! Lera Camry's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki decisively counters 42 Fatigue damage from Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 14 Fatigue damage! Endo
Naoki is Quipped! Endo Naoki's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Machtiger Schild, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Cure Black fails to brace Pink Moon Stick's Moon Twilight Flash, taking 49 Fatigue damage!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

"You, too, Endo-san," Lera says, glancing sideways at him -- and giving him a grin. Then, she looks at Fate -- and she nods at her. "Right behind you, Fate!"

She exhales, then, and looks at Cure Angel Passion. There's a smile on her face. She nods. She takes a step forward -- and then her eyes widen a little.

Those heavy footfalls. Lera gasps. "Westie!" she says. "You--you made it! And--"

And Ren, too, flying in to help. She looks at her best friend -- then she grins. "You're a little late... but that's fashionable, y'know?"

Her eyes shift back towards Jail Scaglietti. Her jaw sets. That familiar blast of light explodes from his fingers, streaking out towards Lera -- and for her friends.

Broken Ground chimes: <Shield!>

A barrier of golden light erupts -- and Nanoha's spell smashes into it, throwing Lera backward. She grits her teeth, then she shakes her head. "Shut up!" she calls out to him. "You did all of that... for your own gain! All the people you hurt--the ways you used Fate!"

She slams her fist into the ground, leaps into the air, and then ''flies'' at him. "Endo-san, Ren-chan!" she calls out, looking over one shoulder. Then, she looks over the other. "Fate! Kyouka-san!"

Then, back at Jail. "Let's show him what we think of what he ''wants''!"

Lera suddenly shoots straight up -- over Jail's head, and points Soaring Sky down at him. The blade splits in half -- and then fires a beam of gold-red light down.

"And show him what he ''deserves''!"

COMBAT: Lera Camry has started a combo targeting Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Linker Core Burst on Ren Aizawa.

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

"Then I'll make you." Is her succinct response to the idea that he can't and won't stop... while sad, is of no consequence to the fact that he keeps hurting her family. But then he invokes surprise in her red eyes, before they narrow at the invocation of the Lost Logia, "... So you were created to be used. And now you create others to use." It is her own condemnation, "I reject it."

However, as Jail brings forth that Neon Pink, Fate looks at him in momentary alarm, as suddenly the most familiar spell that Fate knows that is not her own comes at her. For a moment she's too stunned to move.

Then reflexes kick in and the child suddenly pivots sideways, flying in a wide arc against the beam of all consuming light. The pivot, was to shield 'You' with her own body. As she swings around, and dives to put her down. "You have no right to that." She tells him, "Not to that spell. It requires wisdom and tactics to use it properly."

Raising Bardiche he intones, <Defenser Plus> And a dome like shield forms over You, as she tells her. "I'll protect you." But it might as well also be 'I'll protect You."

Then taking off again, she swings around to face Jail Scaglietti. "I don't see anything beautiful at all about it. You don't care about anyone or anything else, do you? I find it... pitiable." And then flying up, she turns over in a spin at Lera's call, then comes up alongside her, as Bardiche swings down in a wide arc, suddenly expanding as she points it at him from another angle, that beam crossing with Lera's, golden and sparking with violet.

"Lera!" And it's in that moment, she calls it again, "Even without magic... we still..."

She does not finish, but maybe she doesn't need to, it is in demonstration of the point she's making.

This is what is beautiful to her. Something she was taught years ago, because of them.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki fails to dodge Pink Moon Stick's Divine Buster!, taking 55 Fatigue damage! Kyouka Okazaki is Quipped!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has joined the combo started by Lera Camry!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has used Call Your Name on Lera Camry.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo's head turns when Ren appears nearby, but he's not entirely surprised. Her presence is natural. It always is. He smiles and reaches to take his girlfriend's hand, squeezing it tight.

The return of Westar and Soular only reinforces the feeling that things have changed for the better. That things have finally turned in their favor in this desperate struggle.

The bloom of pink light races forward and Endo raises his own hand to call defensive magic. The Buster crashes against the purple-black dome, forming an immense bubble of destruction against its surface. That magic is too powerful to be stopped entirely, but what bleeds through he can endure for now.

When the roar of magic fades and Lera calls out he nods, to her and Fate, and then to the girl beside him. "Ready!" He agrees.

As Lera goes upward, he speeds straight toward Jail. They've rehearsed this many times before, and his job is simple: cut through the center.

"Let's show him how it feels!" Jail's deployed Endo's own Device against him and his allies more than once. Now he has the opportunity to experience it firsthand.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used I Wanna Hold Your Hand on Ren Aizawa.
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has joined the combo started by Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

And Westar really ''does'' watch. "Westar-senpai! Soular-senpai!" Mikoto chirps, her joy overwhelming her anger for a glorious moment. "You're okay?!"

She grins, because Westar never wanted to fight ''with'' her, before. (She supposes he'd already learned his lesson.) "Yup! Together!" She nods, cheerfully, when he asks to join in.

"Ren!" She calls, with cheer, to her as well. She's glad she's here!

And there -- an artificial human. He got... what he wanted, though he was created for a purpose. But Jail brings Infinity to bear, and...

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE! You can get in trouble just for running by the pool - so I know that destroying pool facilities is out of the question! I'll never forgive anyone who destroys a pool so people can't cool off by daylight - or be romantic by moonlight!

... Mikoto has fought Sailor Moon before. She ''knows'' to get out of the way, before her mind even registers that lovely assault.

"THAT'S NOT YOURS!" She yells, as she leaps forward and swings her blade down.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used We're Not Alone on Westar.
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Westar accepts Mikoto Minagi's We're Not Alone, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Westar is Reinforced by Mikoto
Minagi!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

At Jail's reply, la Sirene rotates her hands once and bows her head. Perhaps some point of honor (is this some weird Sorrow Sea thing or her own quirkiness? La Sirene de Diamante has more than her share) compelled her to at least make the proposal.

And then Jail speaks of blasphemies. Her lips thin. The first artificial mage. The rest... perhaps he truly has no choice. And that would be a tragedy, as if Victor Frankenstein's monster had not even had the hope of society and learning.

Endo laughs - la Sirene's eyes cut towards him, but then quickly return to Jail. Her eyes widen at the magic he begins. He is whirling around first, to assail the Device-users with mimicry. La Sirene de Diamant does not know this, and for once she has the *choice* -- this battle is not a shock at this point --

And so when he whirls around to unleash the Moon Twilight Flash, la Sirene de Diamant is simply not there.

Where did she go?

She jumped up, which means that she is coming down -- for she is not blessed with Flight, but she *has* executed truly astounding jumps when she had to -- at the same time that Mikoto is. "Get Sailor Moon's magic out of your mouth," she half-shouts as she leads with one diamond-soled boot -- the form may be a little clumsy, but it is backed by ''fury''. "After everything--!!"

Come what may she lands and tumbles to the side, momentum carrying her enough to get her feet under her. Rising up, she looks towards Mikoto, and despite everything, she smiles. A pure and simple smile: I'm glad that you're here.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Making My Own Path on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used An Encouraging Squeak on Mikoto Minagi.

<Pose Tracker> Westar [Infinity Institute (U)] has posed.

Before them is one of the great architects of misery, Jail Scaglietti. A mad scientist, manipulating lives and hoarding weapons of devastation. A man who Westar...might have heard of?

In fairness, his priorities for the last few years were Pretty Cure, Searching For Infinity, and Causing General Misery. He has not been privy to the workings of the Time-Space Administration outside working with Fate and Precia that one time - and look at how that turned out.

On the other hand, Westar has not been aggrieved personally by this man - and something about a person being created for a purpose by an uncaring government kind of resonates a bit. Kind of familiar is all. "I mean. Doesn't stop you from doing something else-"

This might not be the time for diplomacy, though, as Jail unleashes a spell that is all too familiar - Divine Buster. And then another stolen spell that is terrifyingly familiar-

"DUCK AND COVER!" Westar is the one to shout, but both he and Soular bolt on sheer ''instinct'', diving out of the path of a wave of purifying light all too familiar to the former Executives of Labyrinth. (Current Executives? Moebius's HR policies are unfortunately unclear.)

Westar is slower than Soular, to say nothing of Mikoto, and the best he can do is roll with the blast. An experienced wielder of darkness and misery, he's not sure how much of that power was left after his brush with oblivion...but there's definitely less of it now. He picks himself up, smoking slightly from the wave of holy light, and grumbles under his breath.

It's kind of hard to stay angry, though. "It's still - you know what, fine. Call me Westie." He gives Camry a grin, and Minagi a nod. "Yeah, we're fine. Good to be on your side again." An old quip with a new context.

And there's something important to remember. He hasn't been back to supervise 'his' district of Labyrinth in a long time, but the cheers of its denizens are still echoing in his ears. They matter. And it's for them that he bellows out a familiar refrain.

"I am Westar! Denizen of Labyrinth!" Faithful to Moebius no ''more'', and he turns to the comrade who learned that lesson so much faster than he did. "Hey, Passion. Let's protect our home, all right?"

This is different from the situation he's used to - normally he's looking after the monster fighting against a bunch of people. But Westar has fought mages on occasion, and his favourite trick was always getting up close. So he runs in, grabbing instinctively at wisps of rainbow brilliance - and with a handful of light, swings a wild punch at Jail's face.

COMBAT: Westar has used Everything For Labyrinth on Cure Angel Passion.
COMBAT: Westar has used Bright Haymaker on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion accepts Westar's Everything For Labyrinth, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Cure Angel Passion
is Reinforced by Westar!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

There was a lot to take in, and a lot happening. Her friends and comrades are getting back up, ready to rejoin the fight.

And they're not the only ones doing some rejoining. "... Westar?" She only fought him once, but... She has a pretty vivid memory, of yelling at Wester to get off of her planet, when he tried to bring misery to their world.

And now she's on ''his'' planet, instead. Funny ol' universe, that way.

She grins a little. "Like the new threads. And good to see you back."

And Ren joins them next, and she lights up. "Ren-chan! Nah, you're ''just'' in time."

Jail has something to reveal... the ''first'' artificial mage... and he's following through with the purpose he was made for. "You can make a different choice, you know. If you're so powerful, like you claim, then make a different choice! Choose something different from what they made you for!"

Divine Buster comes for her-- Kyouka hasn't seen nearly as much of Nanoha as she'd like, but she's gathered the impression that she's an impressively strong mage, for a girl her age.

She briefly wonders how this compares to the real thing, but she doesn't have long to think about that before she kicks into gear. A burst of purple energy bursts from the ground as she takes off, blurring into motion as she tries to outrun it--

But no, Jail is too fast for her, and the beam tracks and then intercepts her before she can get away. She is sent flying, impacting the ground once, twice, before simply rolling to a halt.

She coughs as she struggles to her feet, but her gaze is firm and determined. "Nobody can ''tell'' you who you're meant to be. That's something you've gotta discover for yourself." She rises, back in her fighting stance, a bit singed and scorched, but stilla ready to fight. "That's a choice you ''make''! Something you discover! If it wasn't for ''my'' choices, for me ''choosing'' the kind of person I wanted to be, then... I wouldn't be here with the people that matter to me."

"I'm with you, Fate!" She's fighting, side by side, at their level, just like Fate said she would, one day. She can't falter now, not with everything riding on this.

Lera calls out to all of them, and Kyouka grins a little, despite herself. "You got it!" Her knees bend, as she gets ready to spring into motion. "You ready, buddy?"

The device on her gauntlet chimes with an inner light. <Affirmative. Syncronizing... start.>

A circle appears at her feet, and purple magic washes up from it, covering her body, imbuing her with speed... and in the blink of an of light Kyouka takes off, streaking across the battlefield with a violet shimmer in her wake. Then she jumps, airborn, and a shckwave of magic erupts in midair as she kicks off with a boot, suddenly alternating directions.

Another one as she winks to the other side of the battlefield, and then a third, and from a new angle she suddenly charges right for Jail, her gauntlet shining with a bright violet light. A diversion and the time to build up mana both.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used A Heartfelt Wish on Fate Testarossa.

<Pose Tracker> Ren Aizawa [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

"Lera-chan! Endo-kun! Fate-chan! Kyouka-chan! Setuna-chan! Mikoto-chan! Sirene!" Ren calls out, her vision getting blurry for a bit before she hastily wipes them away. "Everyone...!" As much as she's still overwhelmed by the outpouring of feelings that brought her here... there's an enemy to beat into the ground! She turns sharply to look at Jail Scaglietti, listening to what he says. She casts a sympathetic look at Fate, clenching her fist as she thinks about everything the girl has been through. And how far she's come.

She also thinks about her own part to play in this. Jail, afterall, was responsible for her standing here to begin with. Responsible for bringing Heraut and her together. In a way, she's thankful, for without his intervention she wouldn't be the person she is now.

But ''that'', however, is where any "props" given to the dastardly artificial mage come to an end. Endo takes her hand at that moment, and Ren looks away from Jail to him, a smile reforming on her face as she squeezes it. There's so much she wants to say to him right now, the memories of whatever she experienced before coming here still fresh in her mind.

But of course, Jail has to interrupt! Her eyes widen as the familiar pink light of Nanoha's magic blooms into existence, and she lets go of Endo's hand as she reflexively attempts to dodge out of the way. She's mostly successful, though still gets clipped by some of the attack, feeling the sheer heat of it on her skin -- enough to make her grit her teeth.

"You have no right!" She yells out at Jail, echoing Fate. And then Lera is leaping forward, calling out for them to join her, and Ren falls into line in short-order, again relying on her by now well-honed battle instincts. Dashing forward, she holds a hand out above her as a spell circle traces out within her palm.

"TAKE THIS!" She shouts, flinging her hand forward as the spell circle morphs into a spear of bronze superheated mana that tears forward with mean vengeance and intent for its intended target.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has joined the combo started by Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Perhaps, a lot of her fury in the moment was Chiffon, moreso than taking away the moments that allowed her to believe in herself. However, as he burbles, Pine's eyes grow wider, before "Chiffon!" And flying over to Peach's side, she smiles, and reaches out a finger to touch her paw, "You had me so worried." She beams at that.

Which is why it might be extremely rude that Jail Scaglietti interrupts the moment with a Moon Twilight Flash. As it cascades towards Pine, she stiffens, before holding out her palm, and the brilliant light slams into her palm, initially splitting off of it, but then she turns and joins her other palm to it, an angelic halo glittering as the energy of it slams into it, and she's blasted back, one meter... two... but not more than two, before the barrage tapers off the now aerial Pretty Cure.

"You almost hit Chiffon!" She says, upset at the possibility.

And that's when she sees the Rainbow road glitter out and- "Westar!? Soular? You're-" And then she smiles, "Don't just thank us. The hearts of Labyrinth's citizens are strong, aren't they?"

Then she holds up a finger, "Eh, Westie? Okay!" She then turns to Miki, who shrugs at her, and she shrugs back.

"Then. Let's do it together." She agrees with Cure Black. "Though... where are your wings?" She seems surprised, as if she suspected 'Cure Angel Black' and is instead seeing a dotted line at her back as she flies one full circle looking for her. "It's fine! We'll still do it together!"

And with one great flap of her wings, she rushes into the battle, moving one way and another on the approach as she draws back her fist, then suddenly slams him right in the gut with her fist, as that great glittering streak of power collapses into one great rush of energy, and a fluttering of feathers dissipating into energy.

She tries to drive him right towards...

"Passion!"

COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used Seraph Strike on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has used ???Cure Angel Black When??? on Cure Angel Pine.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine accepts Cure Angel Pine's ???Cure Angel Black When???, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Cure Angel Pine is
Reinforced by Cure Angel Pine!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Angel Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion smiles to see CHiffon recover, too. "...I--"

Setsuna's brothers, Black calls them. Of course that would be the word, wouldn't it? That would be the very word itself, one she never would have thought to use... but that is true, even as it's said.

And she doesn't have to leave without them. At least, not now. Heavy footfalls emerge from the light, and Cure Angel Passion turns her head towards the sound despite the pressing threat ahead. And for just a moment...

"Westar!" she cries. Then, "Soular!"

Soular is as Soular as ever, though, and even as Westar thanks them more openly, Passion smiles at Soular too. Thanks, he'd added, and she can tell.

"..." She doesn't know what more to say to Westar in the moment, but she smiles at him, too, and maybe that feeling will cross the distance anyway.

"Ren-chan!" she shouts back at her too. Their friends--everyone--!

But Jail is still here. Jail answers a question La Sirene doens't quite ask--

"You..."

Passion frowns, and shakes her head. "...So you can't do anything other than what you're doing..." It's sad, to her. But sad as that might be--

She's not going to let him have his way any more than she would Northa.

But it's a surprise, to be sure, when Moon Twilight Flash afflicts her. Passion has felt the sting of Sailor Moon's magic before, when her name was Eas. The mighty blow that comes sees her move faster than memory, faster than sight, but not quite fast enough to completely evade its force.

...She ducked and covered just as surely as Westar and Soular. Some memories stay.

But a Denizen of Labyrinth Westar calls himself, and then he looks to her. He doesn't call herEas. He--

"...Yes," Cure Angel Passion answers him. "For our home."

Then she calls to Lera, "And..." She isn't sure what it is exactly that she wants to say right then. She ends up just smiling at Lera, glad she's here.

"Together."

Then, she rises into the air--and with Pine drives forward with a flying strike forward, "Haaaah--!"

COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Chosen Bonds on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has used Wing Beat on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa accepts Lera Camry's Linker Core Burst, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa is Reinforced by Lera Camry!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa accepts Endo Naoki's I Wanna Hold Your Hand, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Ren Aizawa is Cheered!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has used You're A Hero on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Fate Testarossa's Call Your Name, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Cheered!
COMBAT: Lera Camry accepts Cure Angel Passion's Chosen Bonds, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Lera Camry is Reinforced by Cure Angel
Passion!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Ren Aizawa's You're A Hero, taking 25 Fatigue damage!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa accepts Kyouka Okazaki's A Heartfelt Wish, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Fate Testarossa is Reinforced by
Kyouka Okazaki!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi accepts La Sirene de Diamant's An Encouraging Squeak, taking 0 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Mikoto Minagi
is Cheered! Withstand applied to Mikoto Minagi!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has joined the combo started by Lera Camry!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure White is an only child. When she sees Westar and Soular return, all she says is, "Cure Angel Passion," with an overjoyed, misty tone.

Cure Black has a little brother. When she sees Westar and Soular return, she points at them. "You two caused nothing but trouble, and your sister saved you! You have to do whatever she says from now on, got it? You owe her big time!"

Jail is not an opponent Cure Black takes lightly. His madness and cruelty, his ability to take even Black's memory of her own partner... it frightens her. But a part of her still, when it comes to a direct, physical attack, cannot help but underestimate the raw power output of someone who looks like a normal human, after fighting a foe like Northa. Gritting her teeth as she watches the effect of Nanoha's attack on her angelically empowered fellow Pretty Cure, she sets her feet alongside Cure White to prepare for what she very much assumes will be more Midchildan magic.

Instead, today he is the one named Sailor Moon.

"Arienai," Cure Black gasps. The energy is so wide-angle that there is no hope of dodging. If she had not flinched, perhaps she could have stood strong enough to let it burn over her, but the divine power pours between her arms and she founders immediately, blazing lunar magic immersing her until she falls.

Cure White is some distance away, and the two share a nod. They are too suffused with the courage of the Miracle Lights to fear for one another, not when they can see the determination in each other's eyes. Cure White launches herself at Jail first, giving her partner time to kick nimbly back to her feet and shake her mussed hair out. Cure Angel Pine lands next to Black in that moment, and though this is not her own partner, she is comfortable enough with her presence to keep her eyes fully on Jail while still lifting a fist to offer a thump of a greeting.

"My wings?" She spares a glance for that question, her eyes widening. A brief image of Cure White bewinged flushes her cheeks, but she looks forward, to her charging partner.

"I'll show you," she says, and bursts into a run.

Cure White has reached the mad doctor, and when he strikes out at her, her forearm strums along the inside of his arm, letting him feel pressure. When he reacts, when he resists, she has him. Letting the pressure catch, she reverses her arms, passing them across each other in a smooth, contained motion. The only trick is, his arm doesn't bend that way. And the moment he gets stuck...

Cure Black comes bounding into him. Her stride is long, almost joyously so, great deep floating shoves, until at last she takes those last few steps she can manage without the benefit of the ground, the closest a runner can get to flying. And the final bicycle of her tawny, well-muscled thighs ends with a rock-hard knee sailing up beneath Jail's chin.

COMBAT: Cure White has used Kansetsu-waza Joint Lock on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Cure Black has used Pink Lemonade on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: COMBO! Lera Camry, Fate Testarossa, Endo Naoki, Kyouka Okazaki, and Ren Aizawa have used Raid Cross on Pink Moon Stick.
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick cleanly braces 6 Fatigue damage from Cure White's Kansetsu-waza Joint Lock, taking 1 Fatigue damage! Pink
Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate! Trap applied to Pink Moon Stick!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick fails to dodge Cure Black's Pink Lemonade, taking 24 Fatigue damage! Cure Black is Psyched!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 11 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Making My Own Path, taking 9 Fatigue damage! La
Sirene de Diamant is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick perfectly dodges 40 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Pine's Seraph Strike, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Dodge! Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick braces 7 Fatigue damage from Cure Angel Passion's Wing Beat, taking 10 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Cure Angel Passion is Psyched! Pink Moon Stick's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick partially dodges 10 Fatigue damage from Westar's Bright Haymaker, taking 38 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit!
Pink Moon Stick's Fade and Flash abilities activate! Blind applied to Pink Moon Stick!
Shadow Stern has arrived.
Black Sky has arrived.
COMBAT: Shadow Stern transforms into SHADOW STERN!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern covers Pink Moon Stick for Mikoto Minagi's attack, Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness, taking it upon herself
instead!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness, taking 28 Fatigue damage! Mikoto Minagi is
Psyched! Diversion applied to Shadow Stern!
COMBAT: Black Sky transforms into BLACK SKY!
COMBAT: Black Sky covers Pink Moon Stick for Lera Camry's attack, Combo: Raid Cross, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Black Sky braces 137 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry, Fate Testarossa, Endo Naoki, Kyouka Okazaki, and Ren Aizawa's Combo:
Raid Cross, taking 112 Fatigue damage! Critical Hit! Lera Camry, Fate Testarossa, Endo Naoki, Kyouka Okazaki, and Ren Aizawa are
Psyched!
COMBAT: Black Sky has adjusted her boss levels. She is now ready to take on 5 opponents!
COMBAT: Pink Moon Stick has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure White has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Shadow Stern has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Westar has saved his current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Black Sky has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Passion has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Angel Pine has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Cure Black has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Lera Camry has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Ren Aizawa has saved her current combat state for later!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has saved her current combat state for later!

[[Category:Logs]]
[[Category:MGLN SeekerS]]