Lydia
Main Processing Unit: Online
Location: Astrolabe
---Obliteration.
While there is a certain sense of human warmth in loyally following along in the wake of slowly resurfacing memories, it is also a path that can only lead to the exact same result in the end; it is a simple enough truth, if the footsteps you were following had led their original owner to oblivion, then following along in those footsteps means the same fate awaits you.
There shouldn't be anything surprising about this inevitable outcome.
If you touch this being, that will be that, that is the warning your senses have given you and one you have chosen to disregard, and-!
"..."
---Cool to the touch.
While the light is unbearably bright now, so bright that it wipes all vision away for what may just be an eternity, that burning mass of light doesn't incinerate you when you touch it. No, it's cool to the touch, or rather, the warmth you can physically feel is comparable of that to a human, even if everything else about it denies that result as the truth... Yes, it's a very human warmth, but the thrumming of some strange immeasurable power beneath the skin, and the way your body instinctively seizes up the moment you touch it...
---You don't know what to think about this thing anymore.
It's a mass of contradictions; strangely human in some ways, falsifying humanity in others, clearly divine but not in a way that makes sense, an Unknown God of Unknown Origin that feels like it both belongs and does not belong in the world... Nothing about it feels concrete, it looks like it's burning and yet it's skin is cool to the touch, it's an entity that contradicts itself in so many ways that you're sure it has to be on purpose, that it's acting in this way precisely because it knows you will not be able to grasp it if it does, but...
"My my, well wasn't that a proud approach?"
It questions you, entirely without malice.
"I already told you I'd allow the World to challenge me if I'm proven wrong, but I won't be proven wrong, in this, I am at my most confident. I will win, for the sake of everything."
It states this simply.
Absolute belief in oneself.
True Faith.
It doesn't get angry because there is no need for it to get angry, in the end, a God allowing an ant to inconvenience it even slightly would -in and of itself- be a great shame.
"You want my name? To remember me? Very well."
It speaks.
---Inside the light, that human form grasps your wrist.
It's not a tiny being at all, not at all, there's someone tall in there, tall and proud, a light so bright that it has become an unknowable star, drifting throughout the realm of the unconscious.
"A name that humans would understand..."
In the infinite light, it ponders for a time.
"You may call me Marlene. Marlene Binit. The one who rules over possibility."
---It smiles.
You can't see it, but you can feel it.
"But that is all you will get from me."
It laughs, and the infinite light rumbles along with that laughter.
No...
The universe shakes with it.
"To defy me is to deny me, so I will not protect you. The other Savior, the horrors in the Kakera no Umi, the invasion of the Sefirot, the plots by your own kind... If they are things that can be solved without me, then feel free, solve them without me, struggle until your spirit breaks and you realize the futility of it all, or you are able to overcome my World and return here at the end of it all to defeat me."
Those words are absolute.
Those are the terms it will go by, there is no negotiation with it anymore, it will not destroy you here, but it will absolutely defend it's 'answer' to the very last moment.
---In other words, one way or another, this thing will be an enemy.
"It's quite the unenviable position, one with opponents on all sides..."
---It's grip on your wrist becomes painful, the universe trembles, and out from the infinite light pours infinite light, an abyss from which limitless colors emerge as one.
"...But do your best, I suppose. As your former sovereign, I should wish you that much at least."
---With that, it ends.
Not your life, but merely your time in the world beyond the horizon.
You fall.
The sensation is that of gravity tearing at your body, visuals come online and show an impossible scenery, you flying through the universe at impossible speeds, spinning and flailing and turning and crashing down onto the form of a familiar blue planet. It all goes crashing by like a fever dream, a storm of sights and sounds that do not make sense, that cannot be properly formed into any image other than a chaotic star-filled sky as you tumble down, down, down, down, down, and...
It stops.
No physical damage is dealt, no built up kinetic energy obliterates both you and the place where you landed, no...
It's as if the entirety of the fall was simply in your head, and perhaps...
Perhaps it was?
After all, you're in a room.
A very familiar room.
One of a certain User who you had forgotten and begun to remember, and one who, right now...
Was laying asleep in bed, as if absolutely everything was fine?
And...
Perhaps it was?
The morning air is warm and sweet, brighter than the usual, more cheerful than the usual, and...
In that strangeness alone...
---Comes the foreboding feeling that the entity had not been joking...
Not in the slightest.
Ludwig/Lydia
Zero Seal/The Four Administrators
END
Next Time...
"Reverie Complex"