fandoms 36-38
36.
Title: Centenary
Fandom: Tokyo Jungle
Rating: T (spoilers, references to a specific let's play, harm to animals, pollution, general post-apocalyptic doom and gloom)
Word Count: 1,032
Summary: On the hundredth year of the Bear dynasty, things went from bad to worse.
The hundredth year of the Great Bear Dynasty should have been a time for celebration but the relentless march of time just felt like a death sentence. As he stared at himself in a pool of water, searching for grey hairs and wondering if it was time to produce an eighteenth generation, the seventeenth heir to the title of Alpha Male Great Bear couldn't help but feel a shudder down his powerful spine.
It didn't help that the water was toxic. You could not only smell its taint, acrid and burning on the tongue even before you put your snout anywhere near it, it was now visible. Black murk covered the water in an oily film. His mother had taught him, as his mother's mother had taught her, that the foul black water meant sickness and death that would spread to his brothers and sisters. It was everywhere now, though, and he still needed water to live, no matter how dirty. He would have to dip into the family's store of medicine, produced by humans long ago but now owned by the strongest animal in the urban jungle who could wrest it from the grasp of the others.
Without doubt, the title of 'King of the Jungle' belonged to the bears. Strong, vicious, untiring, surprisingly fast and cunning when they needed to be, they had seen the rise and fall of countless other would-be regimes. First it was the Pomeranians, with their endless numbers and terrifying, unearthly yips. Then the Tosa and their ancient ancestral knowledge of Tokyo's terrain and the ways of its spirits. The lions and hyenas had fought endless wars, wiping each other out. Even the housecats had enjoyed a long reign, their ruthlessly efficient hunter's nature coming to the fore. Now it was between the bears and the reborn great lizards, and the lizards were losing.
Not that it would matter once the last pool of water was spoiled, the air completely clouded over with black fog, the plants died out and the stockpiles of medicine and dried food ran out. Soon there would be nothing to hunt, either, once the weaker animals died out. They had been forced to ration their food, to hunt less and rest more in preparation for an inevitable famine. It wasn't the way of a bear. Hibernation was for winter and Tokyo hadn't had things like normal seasons and weather for a long time, only a spreading cloud of poison and death.
A flash of muddy green scales and sharp sickle-like claws flitted in the periphery of his vision. He pounced without needing to think, his teeth fastened around the dinosaur's throat before it could react. The kill was instantaneous. Fellow carnivores weren't tasty but at least it was fresh, clean food. As he wiped the blood from his maw, he looked around for the rest. There was never only one of those things.
Or there shouldn't be. As he sniffed the air, he realised that he was alone, except for the corpses of every other dinosaur in the region, torn limb from limb by something that smelled of such murderous savagery that it went beyond the simple thrill of the hunt. He smelled insanity, like the time his brother caught rabies and attacked him, except that there were far too many of these things at once, moving too fast and with too much purpose.
He hid behind the carcass of a rusty, beat-up old van, praying that they didn't pick up his scent. One disadvantage of being such a big bear was that there was virtually nowhere to hide on the few occasions that something was stronger than you. The things poured over the rubble of the collapsed buildings. At first he thought they were some sort of ape. Then he saw that they held themselves too straight, walking fully on two legs and only stooping their backs a little, their arms not even slightly scraping along the floor. Their dark, matted hair only covered patches of their skin. Some of them had grabbed random objects, sharp rocks, sticks and jagged pieces of broken metal, and were waving them around in a way that unmistakenly signalled a desire to kill something with them.
They were only small - a little numerous, maybe, but there were still enough bears to deal with those numbers if they all worked together properly. He didn't understand why his heart was pounding from such primal terror that he was worried it would burst.
He ran to warn the rest of his family. Please don't let them have seen me, he thought to himself. For some reason - maybe some distant memory, shared down the generations, from the time before the fall - he knew that, if these creatures even knew that one bear existed, they would relentlessly hunt down every single one to extinction. It wouldn't even be for food. If all those dinosaur corpses were fresh, those humans were killing their prey at a rate far beyond anything they could eat, and the taint had gotten so bad these days that food rotted away before you could even think about leaving it for later.
What were they eating? How had they bred so fast, gotten so strong and fast and vicious, in such a short period of time when things were so bad for everyone? Why did they smell insane?
As if in answer, he suddenly heard a ferocious simian growl. He froze and his head whipped around in time to see two of the creatures bump into each other, starting a fight between them. One of them immediately sprang at the other and stabbed him with a sharp metal pipe until the other stopped moving. Then, without pausing for breath, he tore into the corpse and started devouring it.
The one thing that nobody in the urban jungle would do. The one unwritten rule, to stop what was already a mad, unnatural situation from growing even worse.
He began to run faster but he already knew that the brief stop had lost him too much time. The things - humans, he finally understood, but reborn even worse than before - had already spotted him.
They could not be stopped.
37.
Title: Heaven Cannot Create A Path For Man
Fandom: Soleil/Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor
Rating: T (spoilers, religious controversy)
Word Count: 582
Summary: Corona had trespassed on the grounds of St. Heaven, had slain the Dragon and even tried to open the Forbidden Door. Metatron was hoping Sariel would be able to sort out the situation down there on his own but clearly it's a two-Archangel job.
"Your Grace, the situation in the Soleil Kingdom has gotten out of hand!"
Metatron peered over his laptop at Sariel, who had brought his scythe into the office again despite being repeatedly asked not to. He looked as eager to get into the field as a new recruit. The Voice of God had to admit that he would like a break from all the admin as well. He was having to send emails again today. Why he was handed all the tasks that involved modern human technology, he had no idea. It was more Remiel's field. Metratron missed the days when you got to fly around blowing trumpets and watching people fall over and speak in tongues whenever you so much as brushed up against their minds.
"What's happening there now?" he sighed.
"Someone broke into Saint Heaven. They got all the way to our door, even took down our Dragon!"
"How did they even get upstairs? I thought you trashed their Tower."
"Magic beans, Your Grace. They, er, grew a beanstalk," Sariel began to stutter, sweat forming on his brow. He thinks I'm going to accuse him of lying, Metatron realised, but I've been following the Soleil case for long enough to know that it's a very weird place.
"And where are they getting these beans?"
"The old Temple to Leviathan in Freesia," explained Sariel, "They crossed the sea with the help of that dinosaur I was warning you about."
"The one hiding in the desert," Metatron sighed, wishing that he could have a normal conversation about Soleil for five seconds, "Erm, there's worse news. The Temple... Leviathan was actively aware that he was being worshipped. He's back, Your Grace, and actively helping the intruder."
"Oh, just great," Metatron resisted the urge to facepalm. Satanic interference was just what he didn't need. There was already a constant problem with a wave of lesser demons getting trapped here after the lock on the portal between worlds failed. The monsters just wanted to hide in caves and live their own life, but of course, diplomacy with the humans went horribly wrong and the homo sapiens responded with their usual genocidal fury at the slightest fear of the unknown. The warfare hadn't ceased since. Throw in awakened animals and a very thin veil between the divine and the mortal realms and you had a pot waiting to bubble over.
Sariel had been keeping an eye on the pot, stirring it when necessary, but it was beginning to sound like a job for more than one Archangel.
"I'll send Anael down," Metatron promised, "And I'm giving you two clearance to use localised time travel and weather manipulation. Try not to murder everyone with it, okay? They're mostly good people who've been fighting the same war for so long that they don't understand why they're in this mess any more. I don't even think Corona really knows what he's doing."
"I'll try and let him know before its too late," promised Sariel, "Showing him the history of this accursed place first-hand will be a good start."
"While you're down there, please do something about that Fortune Teller," ordered Metatron, "It just has to be Lucifer in disguise."
"I thought you said the flower was Lucifer."
"The flower's just out to make money. He's a distraction. Go and find the real mastermind."
As Sariel floated out of the office, Metatron shook his head and went back to composing his email. Soleil makes everyone have such bizarre conversations.
38.
Title: The Crumbling Id
Fandom: NiER:Gestalt/Undertale
Rating: T (spoilers, D ending for Nier, Genocide Route for Undertale, apocalyptic doom)
Word Count: 1005
Summary: Sans doesn't like it when unpleasant people have access to technology (or magic, same difference) that can erase the memory of one's very existence from the Universe.
Sans watched as he chose his new name.
The man who had been known as 'Nier' five seconds ago had not only lost his name, but also the ability to ever pick it up again. Sans was a special case, but the skeleton wasn't sure if anyone else in the Universe would ever remember that there had been a Nier, that any of the events in his life had ever happened. That entire period of time may even have disappeared entirely from everyone's memory, along with the knowledge of the very existence of the name 'Nier'. That was the sort of power behind the magic - or it might have been science, Sans found that there was little difference at this level - that had been used on Nier. No, that he had used on himself. Under any other circumstances, Sans would have called him the biggest madman and fool in the Universe, but he knew that it had been done in the name of love. Love, not LOVE - the man known as Nier had just sacrificed his very soul, his core existence, so that another person who he cared about more than anything else in the Universe could carry on existing. It would have brought a warm glow to Sans' heart if the skeleton had internal organs.
He was still concerned that the people of this world had that sort of technology, though.
When he said 'people of this world', Sans was fairly sure there were, like, three or four beings who even knew such power existed. One of them was about to be removed from the collective memory of the Universe like someone who had pissed off the wrong Egyptian deity. No doubt he would forget he had the power in the process, then any of the others who only knew about the power because he had it would also forget about it. Sans was fairly sure the entity known as Tyrann knew all about it anyway. This was hardly reassuring. Tyrann was such a nasty piece of work, Sans was beginning to miss the days when he only had to deal with Flowey. Of all the entities in the Universe who could possess the secret knowledge to permanently erase someone's soul, Tyrann was on his top ten least favourites.
That said, Tyrann had told Nier that he had the power, even though the man was going to use it against him, to unleash the power he needed to free Khaine, Tyrann's host, from the parasitic relationship and stop Khaine from dying under its strain. A parasite couldn't survive without its host, or at least without the ability to jump to a new host, and Tyrann had nowhere to go. He must have known he wouldn't survive that. Why would someone responsible for so much suffering, responsible for the whole mess in the first place, commit such an act of self-sacrifice? Was it an apology for being unable to go against his own essential nature, that of an unusually destructive parasite?
Or was it also love?
It didn't matter, Sans told himself sternly. Anyone - well, almost anyone, he corrected, shuddering at the memory of the knife flashing towards him and the fevered grin on the child's face - could have a redeeming moment, a single mote of light in the darkness of their soul. Heck, even Flowey could give out vital advice when he actually had the confidence to think it might make a difference. It didn't change the fact that a very dangerous power was just sitting there waiting to end up in the hands of any psychopath who wandered past, and there were some very messed-up people in that particular world. There had been a tragic accident with a very similar type of magic, one that was supposed to separate everyone's psyche from their physical shells to stop them dying of a plague, except that their psyches had malfunctioned in some way, rejected their forms when they tried to to go back in, then gone crazy and started attacking the shells on sight. This was exactly the reason why people shouldn't just be allowed to obtain this kind of magic without any supervision, Sans thought to himself.
It was probably too late to save the original personalities, the 'shades' as they were called, for the simple reason that the shells, who believed themselves to be the 'real people', had already murdered most of the shades. To be fair, they had no idea about their true nature and almost all the shades attacked them on sight, but, as usual, the humans had taken it too far, begun to actively hunt down the shades and destroy their means of reproduction in an attempt to wipe out their entire race.
Sans ran into the same scenarios wherever he went.
At least now the whole disaster with the shades was beginning to resolve itself, if to no-one's satisfaction, and Sans would be less likely to get attacked by both sides when he went to investigate the forbidden technology.
If he did end up confiscating it, he wondered, would he playing God? Was this the natural flow of scientific progress, to always end this way? Did he truly have the right to say which worlds were and were not ready to access certain technology and magic, that some worlds were faulty and some worlds were working? He wished Gaster were still here, so that he could spend hours bitterly arguing the point with his mentor without ever coming close to reaching a conclusion. Those had been good days, when it seemed like his own world was actually getting somewhere. He wondered if there had been scientists sitting around a table in some institute in this world, too, praising each other over their latest accomplishments until they realised what they had just done and their looks turned into frozen masks of horror.
Sans also wondered what the man formerly known as Nier would end up naming himself. He was sure taking his time over it.
Title: Centenary
Fandom: Tokyo Jungle
Rating: T (spoilers, references to a specific let's play, harm to animals, pollution, general post-apocalyptic doom and gloom)
Word Count: 1,032
Summary: On the hundredth year of the Bear dynasty, things went from bad to worse.
The hundredth year of the Great Bear Dynasty should have been a time for celebration but the relentless march of time just felt like a death sentence. As he stared at himself in a pool of water, searching for grey hairs and wondering if it was time to produce an eighteenth generation, the seventeenth heir to the title of Alpha Male Great Bear couldn't help but feel a shudder down his powerful spine.
It didn't help that the water was toxic. You could not only smell its taint, acrid and burning on the tongue even before you put your snout anywhere near it, it was now visible. Black murk covered the water in an oily film. His mother had taught him, as his mother's mother had taught her, that the foul black water meant sickness and death that would spread to his brothers and sisters. It was everywhere now, though, and he still needed water to live, no matter how dirty. He would have to dip into the family's store of medicine, produced by humans long ago but now owned by the strongest animal in the urban jungle who could wrest it from the grasp of the others.
Without doubt, the title of 'King of the Jungle' belonged to the bears. Strong, vicious, untiring, surprisingly fast and cunning when they needed to be, they had seen the rise and fall of countless other would-be regimes. First it was the Pomeranians, with their endless numbers and terrifying, unearthly yips. Then the Tosa and their ancient ancestral knowledge of Tokyo's terrain and the ways of its spirits. The lions and hyenas had fought endless wars, wiping each other out. Even the housecats had enjoyed a long reign, their ruthlessly efficient hunter's nature coming to the fore. Now it was between the bears and the reborn great lizards, and the lizards were losing.
Not that it would matter once the last pool of water was spoiled, the air completely clouded over with black fog, the plants died out and the stockpiles of medicine and dried food ran out. Soon there would be nothing to hunt, either, once the weaker animals died out. They had been forced to ration their food, to hunt less and rest more in preparation for an inevitable famine. It wasn't the way of a bear. Hibernation was for winter and Tokyo hadn't had things like normal seasons and weather for a long time, only a spreading cloud of poison and death.
A flash of muddy green scales and sharp sickle-like claws flitted in the periphery of his vision. He pounced without needing to think, his teeth fastened around the dinosaur's throat before it could react. The kill was instantaneous. Fellow carnivores weren't tasty but at least it was fresh, clean food. As he wiped the blood from his maw, he looked around for the rest. There was never only one of those things.
Or there shouldn't be. As he sniffed the air, he realised that he was alone, except for the corpses of every other dinosaur in the region, torn limb from limb by something that smelled of such murderous savagery that it went beyond the simple thrill of the hunt. He smelled insanity, like the time his brother caught rabies and attacked him, except that there were far too many of these things at once, moving too fast and with too much purpose.
He hid behind the carcass of a rusty, beat-up old van, praying that they didn't pick up his scent. One disadvantage of being such a big bear was that there was virtually nowhere to hide on the few occasions that something was stronger than you. The things poured over the rubble of the collapsed buildings. At first he thought they were some sort of ape. Then he saw that they held themselves too straight, walking fully on two legs and only stooping their backs a little, their arms not even slightly scraping along the floor. Their dark, matted hair only covered patches of their skin. Some of them had grabbed random objects, sharp rocks, sticks and jagged pieces of broken metal, and were waving them around in a way that unmistakenly signalled a desire to kill something with them.
They were only small - a little numerous, maybe, but there were still enough bears to deal with those numbers if they all worked together properly. He didn't understand why his heart was pounding from such primal terror that he was worried it would burst.
He ran to warn the rest of his family. Please don't let them have seen me, he thought to himself. For some reason - maybe some distant memory, shared down the generations, from the time before the fall - he knew that, if these creatures even knew that one bear existed, they would relentlessly hunt down every single one to extinction. It wouldn't even be for food. If all those dinosaur corpses were fresh, those humans were killing their prey at a rate far beyond anything they could eat, and the taint had gotten so bad these days that food rotted away before you could even think about leaving it for later.
What were they eating? How had they bred so fast, gotten so strong and fast and vicious, in such a short period of time when things were so bad for everyone? Why did they smell insane?
As if in answer, he suddenly heard a ferocious simian growl. He froze and his head whipped around in time to see two of the creatures bump into each other, starting a fight between them. One of them immediately sprang at the other and stabbed him with a sharp metal pipe until the other stopped moving. Then, without pausing for breath, he tore into the corpse and started devouring it.
The one thing that nobody in the urban jungle would do. The one unwritten rule, to stop what was already a mad, unnatural situation from growing even worse.
He began to run faster but he already knew that the brief stop had lost him too much time. The things - humans, he finally understood, but reborn even worse than before - had already spotted him.
They could not be stopped.
37.
Title: Heaven Cannot Create A Path For Man
Fandom: Soleil/Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor
Rating: T (spoilers, religious controversy)
Word Count: 582
Summary: Corona had trespassed on the grounds of St. Heaven, had slain the Dragon and even tried to open the Forbidden Door. Metatron was hoping Sariel would be able to sort out the situation down there on his own but clearly it's a two-Archangel job.
"Your Grace, the situation in the Soleil Kingdom has gotten out of hand!"
Metatron peered over his laptop at Sariel, who had brought his scythe into the office again despite being repeatedly asked not to. He looked as eager to get into the field as a new recruit. The Voice of God had to admit that he would like a break from all the admin as well. He was having to send emails again today. Why he was handed all the tasks that involved modern human technology, he had no idea. It was more Remiel's field. Metratron missed the days when you got to fly around blowing trumpets and watching people fall over and speak in tongues whenever you so much as brushed up against their minds.
"What's happening there now?" he sighed.
"Someone broke into Saint Heaven. They got all the way to our door, even took down our Dragon!"
"How did they even get upstairs? I thought you trashed their Tower."
"Magic beans, Your Grace. They, er, grew a beanstalk," Sariel began to stutter, sweat forming on his brow. He thinks I'm going to accuse him of lying, Metatron realised, but I've been following the Soleil case for long enough to know that it's a very weird place.
"And where are they getting these beans?"
"The old Temple to Leviathan in Freesia," explained Sariel, "They crossed the sea with the help of that dinosaur I was warning you about."
"The one hiding in the desert," Metatron sighed, wishing that he could have a normal conversation about Soleil for five seconds, "Erm, there's worse news. The Temple... Leviathan was actively aware that he was being worshipped. He's back, Your Grace, and actively helping the intruder."
"Oh, just great," Metatron resisted the urge to facepalm. Satanic interference was just what he didn't need. There was already a constant problem with a wave of lesser demons getting trapped here after the lock on the portal between worlds failed. The monsters just wanted to hide in caves and live their own life, but of course, diplomacy with the humans went horribly wrong and the homo sapiens responded with their usual genocidal fury at the slightest fear of the unknown. The warfare hadn't ceased since. Throw in awakened animals and a very thin veil between the divine and the mortal realms and you had a pot waiting to bubble over.
Sariel had been keeping an eye on the pot, stirring it when necessary, but it was beginning to sound like a job for more than one Archangel.
"I'll send Anael down," Metatron promised, "And I'm giving you two clearance to use localised time travel and weather manipulation. Try not to murder everyone with it, okay? They're mostly good people who've been fighting the same war for so long that they don't understand why they're in this mess any more. I don't even think Corona really knows what he's doing."
"I'll try and let him know before its too late," promised Sariel, "Showing him the history of this accursed place first-hand will be a good start."
"While you're down there, please do something about that Fortune Teller," ordered Metatron, "It just has to be Lucifer in disguise."
"I thought you said the flower was Lucifer."
"The flower's just out to make money. He's a distraction. Go and find the real mastermind."
As Sariel floated out of the office, Metatron shook his head and went back to composing his email. Soleil makes everyone have such bizarre conversations.
38.
Title: The Crumbling Id
Fandom: NiER:Gestalt/Undertale
Rating: T (spoilers, D ending for Nier, Genocide Route for Undertale, apocalyptic doom)
Word Count: 1005
Summary: Sans doesn't like it when unpleasant people have access to technology (or magic, same difference) that can erase the memory of one's very existence from the Universe.
Sans watched as he chose his new name.
The man who had been known as 'Nier' five seconds ago had not only lost his name, but also the ability to ever pick it up again. Sans was a special case, but the skeleton wasn't sure if anyone else in the Universe would ever remember that there had been a Nier, that any of the events in his life had ever happened. That entire period of time may even have disappeared entirely from everyone's memory, along with the knowledge of the very existence of the name 'Nier'. That was the sort of power behind the magic - or it might have been science, Sans found that there was little difference at this level - that had been used on Nier. No, that he had used on himself. Under any other circumstances, Sans would have called him the biggest madman and fool in the Universe, but he knew that it had been done in the name of love. Love, not LOVE - the man known as Nier had just sacrificed his very soul, his core existence, so that another person who he cared about more than anything else in the Universe could carry on existing. It would have brought a warm glow to Sans' heart if the skeleton had internal organs.
He was still concerned that the people of this world had that sort of technology, though.
When he said 'people of this world', Sans was fairly sure there were, like, three or four beings who even knew such power existed. One of them was about to be removed from the collective memory of the Universe like someone who had pissed off the wrong Egyptian deity. No doubt he would forget he had the power in the process, then any of the others who only knew about the power because he had it would also forget about it. Sans was fairly sure the entity known as Tyrann knew all about it anyway. This was hardly reassuring. Tyrann was such a nasty piece of work, Sans was beginning to miss the days when he only had to deal with Flowey. Of all the entities in the Universe who could possess the secret knowledge to permanently erase someone's soul, Tyrann was on his top ten least favourites.
That said, Tyrann had told Nier that he had the power, even though the man was going to use it against him, to unleash the power he needed to free Khaine, Tyrann's host, from the parasitic relationship and stop Khaine from dying under its strain. A parasite couldn't survive without its host, or at least without the ability to jump to a new host, and Tyrann had nowhere to go. He must have known he wouldn't survive that. Why would someone responsible for so much suffering, responsible for the whole mess in the first place, commit such an act of self-sacrifice? Was it an apology for being unable to go against his own essential nature, that of an unusually destructive parasite?
Or was it also love?
It didn't matter, Sans told himself sternly. Anyone - well, almost anyone, he corrected, shuddering at the memory of the knife flashing towards him and the fevered grin on the child's face - could have a redeeming moment, a single mote of light in the darkness of their soul. Heck, even Flowey could give out vital advice when he actually had the confidence to think it might make a difference. It didn't change the fact that a very dangerous power was just sitting there waiting to end up in the hands of any psychopath who wandered past, and there were some very messed-up people in that particular world. There had been a tragic accident with a very similar type of magic, one that was supposed to separate everyone's psyche from their physical shells to stop them dying of a plague, except that their psyches had malfunctioned in some way, rejected their forms when they tried to to go back in, then gone crazy and started attacking the shells on sight. This was exactly the reason why people shouldn't just be allowed to obtain this kind of magic without any supervision, Sans thought to himself.
It was probably too late to save the original personalities, the 'shades' as they were called, for the simple reason that the shells, who believed themselves to be the 'real people', had already murdered most of the shades. To be fair, they had no idea about their true nature and almost all the shades attacked them on sight, but, as usual, the humans had taken it too far, begun to actively hunt down the shades and destroy their means of reproduction in an attempt to wipe out their entire race.
Sans ran into the same scenarios wherever he went.
At least now the whole disaster with the shades was beginning to resolve itself, if to no-one's satisfaction, and Sans would be less likely to get attacked by both sides when he went to investigate the forbidden technology.
If he did end up confiscating it, he wondered, would he playing God? Was this the natural flow of scientific progress, to always end this way? Did he truly have the right to say which worlds were and were not ready to access certain technology and magic, that some worlds were faulty and some worlds were working? He wished Gaster were still here, so that he could spend hours bitterly arguing the point with his mentor without ever coming close to reaching a conclusion. Those had been good days, when it seemed like his own world was actually getting somewhere. He wondered if there had been scientists sitting around a table in some institute in this world, too, praising each other over their latest accomplishments until they realised what they had just done and their looks turned into frozen masks of horror.
Sans also wondered what the man formerly known as Nier would end up naming himself. He was sure taking his time over it.