END GAME INFORMATION PART I
※ THE BEGINNING ※
In the present day, in the present time but in a parallel universe very close to ours, there was a pair of siblings - twins, in fact. They had the very colorful names of Rembrandt and Reneé Lloyd. Now, to most, Remmy and Reneé's pasts aren't all that interesting, for their lives began as mundane ones. They grew up in a average household and had normal childhoods. They did the same things that countless, ordinary children do; they played together and created their own imaginary games. Reneé was always the more creative of the twins. She often created complex, imaginary worlds for her and her brother to 'live' in and made many maps of their kingdom--even if that 'kingdom' only extended only as far as their treehouse, built in the great oak in their backyard. Remmy was the more passive of the two, for he had low self esteem and preferred to follow rather than lead. While he was introverted and moody, she was extroverted and upbeat. He was always afraid of making mistakes; she never colored in the lines. He preferred to sit at home holed up in front of a TV while she preferred to be active outdoors. Despite their notable differences, Remmy still held his sister dear and maintained a close relationship with her.
But as always, time passes and children grow up. Eventually the twins, by nature of their opposing personalities, grew apart. While Reneé, the more outgoing twin, was able to put aside childish things and mature into adolescence and later adulthood, her brother Remmy shied away from maturity and deigned to dwell in his childhood for as long as possible. In high school Reneé fell in love with a musician named Victor Manson and at the age of 16, eventually became pregnant with his child and dropped out of school to live with him. Remmy on the other hand became increasingly reclusive as the years dragged on. He spent more and more of his time online and spent his time endlessly consuming anime and video games in an attempt to replace the fantasy world he had once shared with his sister with all manners of fiction.
Reneé tried to drag her anti social brother out of his self imposed exile but to no avail, for Remmy proved to be too immature and too fearful to take that step. Once Reneé became pregnant she was forced to grow up very quickly, far too quickly for Remmy's tastes. Remmy had once been the centre of his sister's world, but now he found himself pushed aside in favour of her son, Denzel. Remmy soon became consumed with jealousy and bitterness, and their relationship reached a breaking point when Renee decided to marry Victor at the age of 22. She had a creative little wedding planned out wherein Victor wore the wedding dress and she wore the tux and as the shining glory of this ceremony, she dyed her hair all the colours of the rainbow. After receiving the wedding invitation, Remmy made a friends-cut post on his LiveJournal wherein Renée was the only person he cut in hopes of showing her (passive-aggressively) that he was discontent with her decision to get married. However, she was far too busy getting married to check her own LiveJournal and thus failed to notice at all. After this failure, Remmy grew even more depressed. In his eyes, this was the ultimate betrayal and the final straw. He then cut off all ties to his sister and did his best to exclude her from his life.
At twenty-four years old, Renée got pregnant with her second child. She went to visit her brother one last time in the hopes she could get him to clean up his lifestyle and learn to live in the real world. Instead the two fell into a heated argument in their parents basement.
※ THE UN END ※
On February 29th, the argument between Renée and Remmy ended tragically with Remmy stabbing his sister several times in the chest. From the last franatic stab, it took her precisely 23 seconds for her to die, at 9:32:59. A few seconds before Renée died, Remmy threw the knife away, curled up against the wall of his basement room, and fell into a catatonic state.
And he dreamed.
Remmy dreamed of a reality where he could deny his own murderous actions in the most complete and complex way imaginable. He denied his own identity and his own memories and created a new, innocent self to reside in. He called this self Fugue. Fugue lived in a reality that was a combination of his most cherished memories, the primary one being his backyard fantasy world that he had created with his sister in a far more innocent time. He molded the Great Oak and it's first two floors on Renée's kingdom.
But Fugue wasn't done there. Since he recreated a fantasy world of his sister's creation, it only made sense that he would bring her into the dream, and so Cancer?, originally named Canon, was born.
Canon was born into the dream with nothing but skepticism. Things like giant squirrels and trees of life were, as far as she knew, only possible in fiction. She would befriend the other amnesiac inhabitants that Fugue created to populate his fantasy world-- even though she thought it odd that they reminded her of fictional characters. The plot holes always seemed to mend themselves--or at least try to--after she pointed them out, though this only caused them to grow even more obvious. However, after a stretch of time, even she began to believe in Edensphere and began to believe in her new, amnesic identity. That's when things began to get really strange.
Eventually Canon's own imagination began to affect the world around her, and things she wanted would start coming true: she wanted a way to regain memories, and so memory crystals began cropping up in the sphere; she wanted a way to find basic necessities that floating islands didn't provide, and so the sphere itself expanded, creating new islands. Three new floors formed in Edensphere that never existed before Canon. Yet for some reason, none of the other residents seemed capable of manipulating the sphere in the way she did. Anyone who tried to question the strange reality of the sphere was killed in random terrifying ways. But Canon--she had a strange relationship to the Sphere and eventually she discovered the reason why.
※ DREAMS ※
Remmy and Renée were twins and in their universe, twins possessed a special bond. It can also be said that a murderer shares a unique albeit twisted bond to his victim, for he alone sees their last moments and feels their last breaths. At the moment of her death, Reneé's soul reached out to enter Remmy's catatonic dream, becoming Canon. This made her both the real Renée and not, for she was merely a dream copy of the real person. Her existence in Fugue's dream has been the lingering traces of their connection to each other, fading slowly away as Reneé's body in the real world died. In turn, Remmy's dreaming mind has been exerting more and more energy to try and keep his sister here and to stay in his catatonic state. All of Edensphere's existence has been happening in the 23 seconds it has taken for Renée to die--it's why time and space have never worked ordinarily in Edensphere and why clocks are forever stalled ticking between 44 and 59 seconds.
The other residents of Edensphere had a far more complicated arrival than that of Renee's. Although originally 'created' by Fugue's dream, they are all subconscious imaginings of 'real' people, pulled by Fugue from the collective unconscious--the place where all the dreams come together. Real and yet not, the residents are dream versions of people that are fictional in Renée and Remmy's world, held trapped by Fugue's powerfully repressive dream.
The consequence of Renée reaching her final second of life has resulted in her slowly breaking from the mind of Remmy and into into the collective unconscious - the world beyond. Her disappearance from Fugue's mind has cause the destabilization of Edensphere and the approaching end of the dream. No place has this been more evident that on the third floor, the Wilderness.
The wilderness had always been the strangest floor of Edensphere. While Fugue's realm consisted of the 1st and 2nd levels (which held the homes and businesses of the residents, his hostages) and the 4th and 5th were created by Canon (the floors that gave residents memories and items from their past), the 3rd floor acted as the neutral zone between the two siblings. This floor constantly shifted to locations from Fugue and Cancer?'s universe as well as the universes for the other residents. It even pulled in role playing games that Remmy was familiar with. This was because this truly was the edge of Fugue's mind and Cancer?'s dying one. It is a small slice of the collective unconscious trapped between the twins. As Renée has pulled away, this level has actually grown, although it's growth has gone unnoticed by all, including Fugue and Cancer?. It has become increasingly blank because it has waited for someone to manipulate it and to will it back into being. Someone…or someones.
For years, Cancer? has been trying to escape from the sphere in order to embrace her own death with nihilistic fervor. Her desire to pull away from Fugue earned her the title Exile since tragically Fugue has never remembered that Renée is the sister he had once loved and killed. Through Renée, the Central Planning Agency was born. Agents like Orca and Locke were residents that Cancer? influenced as she forcefully opened their eyes to the truth. Some of them, like Nothing, went mad from the revelation. Others, like Spade, chose a position of neutrality. Still, others sided with Fugue, deciding it was better to live a lie than to simply disappear out of existence. This is the war that has been raging for 23 years, and the war that is finally coming to a close now that Renée's strength is waning and Remmy is close to awakening.