Vanisher seethed with rage.
Brokencore had been dealt with quickly and punished even more quickly, Mizuki had been warned accordingly, because although she would like to, she couldn't punish Mizuki for not hurting her sister.
Zeitwächter stared at the ground in front of her, trying to busy herself with Kongou to keep from exploding, successfully so far, but she was beginning to lose the feeling in her hands from clutching her own dress so tightly.
The design of Vanisher's concept communication system was intriguing, in its own way even fancier than Zeitwächter's: the pillars of the pavilion were so far in the background that they weren't really noticeable, looking like illusions from a dream, the table at which they sat was the standard one, but larger to hold those present and behind Vanisher's back, who sat in front of them all, was a weeping willow in a large raised bed of reddish-brown stones on a hilltop.
"Actually, I wanted to tell you differently, but then we'll just do it now."
Vanisher had removed her mask and her eyes pierced them all equally as they passed over them.
"Hah," she sighed with a hand to her head, "how am I supposed to start this now? Zeitwächter," she opened her eyes again and put her hand down and Zeitwächter froze, because instead of blue eyes, she was looking into eyes the color of hair that the silhouette had worn, "Brokencore proved what we've all known for a long time-"
"Don't make me battleship- er, flagship!" She'd jumped to her feet, slamming her palms on the table to lean forward as far as she could.
"You're already doing all the chores that Broken was supposed to do because she doesn't. Stop whining."
If she weren't so insecure about the change in character and appearance, Zeitwächter would probably have openly protested and whined instead of making a whimpering noise and letting her wife pull her back into the chair.
"Ordnung, is Youkai disabled?"
"Put to sleep as ordered," from Order's, or more precisely defined and concretized, Tenshi's voice, one could tell that she didn't trust the "new" Vanisher any more than the rest of those present.
"Good, because that's none of her business. All of you- well, almost all of you, have had dreams or flashes of memories over the past few weeks or months that you can't explain, correct?"
"Correct," said Ordnung, Musubi, Monogatari, Parasite, and Zeitwächter, only Kongou gave them a sideways glance.
"After you had begun to see these images, how did your feelings change, hm?"
"...It felt like a missing part had returned", Ordnung answered for all of them, a hand on her chest and face sour, as if she was angry for feeling lonely in her own body, her own head, when it was occupied by two consciousnesses, "but when it returned, it didn't bring the relieve we hoped for, it just brought us knowledge we could have used sooner, so stop talking with these empty words, created by a soul as full and empty as ours, and spill the truth about this Try!"
"Well, alright: I built you and my own body," she ignored the questioning face of Kongou, "a fish who pulls the strings of fate, the twin who sees life passing by, the demon who is nothing half and nothing whole, mask number 11 who understood how this world works and the demon who didn't fall to insanity but merely to madness."
It sounded like absolute bullshit to Kongou, like grand speeches out of a fantasy novel or weird metaphors, but the others made faces like the flagship had hit the bull's eye with vengeance.
"Jūni," Twelve, said Parasite.
"It's striking on the hour, huh?" Zeitwächter stated as she planted a leg on the chair, the anger draining and only cold calculation and tactics taking its place.
Monogatari tossed her book on the table, "so it took us twelve Trys."
"Eleven," Parasite corrected, wearing the same emotional mask as Zeitwächter, "Chaos is a fool."
"Isn't she?" said Vanisher amused, her appearance changing more and more, "however I'm surprised, positively, that you all accept this so readily."
"Don't kid yourself," Ordnung now chimed in, "you're us, but we're probably not you, that these 'dreams' would help us accept this possibility, abstract as it is, was soemthing you were aware of from the start."
"You are also aware that no one here will believe you without a doubt, even if you speak the pure, pure truth," Musubi now interjected.
Vanisher just looked at them all as they spoke, always with the same nondescript smile on her lips: "Of course, but I'm also aware that you'll think twice about anything I say and won't deny the possibility to be the truth, because theoretically, everything I say, will say and have already said, is possible", which also meant Kongou.
"OK guys, I think we should just give my wife a quick briefing because she has no idea what's going on here," Zeitwächter interrupted with a hand clapping.
"Oops, sorry dear," Parasite dodged her sister's kick with skill, "well...this is probably going to be very hard to believe now and we may have left the realm of tech by now, but we're all not from this world, we're from parallel universes we call Trys. Musubi is from 3, Ordnung from 6? Zeity from 10, Mono from 9 and I'm number 11, which makes the one over there number 12, the end of the end, so to speak. I can't tell you how she got us, who are essentially the same person split up, here, though," at the last sentence she looked at the Mental Model, whose hair had completely changed color by now, "Also we always had a certain companion."
"Well, you're the same person, but not the identical one, just as I'm not. When I created this world here, I took a lot from others and put it together. I got you guys by traveling to the different Trys and copying your souls as they were at that point in time. I got Kongou and Co the same way, just from a completely different universe that has nothing to do with our masks."
Musubi tentatively raised a hand, "So...I basically don't know anything compared to the rest of you," a chorus of "Yes" was her reply, "Great."
At least she was in the same place as kongou with that.
Said fast battleship thought about what was said for a while before pointing to SW2, who had been standing silently at Vanisher's side the whole time: "And then she's..."
SW2 bowed like a butler: "Soundwave: Companion."
The group — with the exception of Vanisher — looked at the sub in shock before Monogatari said, "I'm simping a bit for female soundwave voice."
"Ne!?" Vanisher asked, as if she'd told the whole world that herself and only now found someone to believe her for the first time.
"Yeah, I mean, that's true, but 'female soundwave voice'? What kind of grammar is that?"
"I don't want to hear that from you, Zeitwächter."
Zeitwächter made a movement with her head which meant something like "touché" and drank from the cup in front of her.
"So Kongou, believe yes or no?" Vanisher brought her back to business.
"Well..." Kongou had collapsed while she pondered, "I'll doubt the implied magic, but as already mentioned, I won't totally dismiss it, but for now, I'll analyze everything from a scientific point of view, for my processor's sake.
The theory of parallel universes has already been proposed by human scientists. Assuming this is true and your "magic" is just advanced technology, then it wouldn't be illogical to assume that Vanisher pulled each of us from a parallel universe without us noticing or even being able to notice it," a realization seemed to force her way into her thought process, "if you created us all, does that make you a god?"
"I'm not sure if you can say that in a technological sense, since I don't know what science defines a 'god' as, but it can be said that in the theory of magic."
"Then we define magic as a technology I don't understand, like humans don't understand ours. As God according to this technology, I'm sure you can answer three questions for me: "What are we?", "Where do we come from?" and "Where are we going?""
Vanisher grinned; the legendary three questions she had been waiting for to finally answer: "According to the thesis of magic, you are the fragments of the ships after which you were named and whose bodies you carry. A fragment of your soul that felt a greater desire to live on than the rest of you and split off because of it, while the rest went to the afterlife, giving birth to different beings. You, the Fog, wanted to live, but had to wait for someone to help you, which is why you yourself say that you have "awakened again". Where do you come from? That should also answer that question. Where are you going? If you somehow manage to die, into the afterlife like any other living being."
"I saw that you have claimed the position as High Flagship of the Fleet of Fog and gave the succession to us, although it borders on disrespecting I-401's wish, then I need not ask who was the one who helped us, do I, Admiralty Code?"
A bestial grin, like the one Zeitwächter wore when she returned from her hunts and Kongou wiped the rest of the blood off her, formed: "Hai."
"Then, Admiralty Code: Oki is not a Fog ship, but she is undoubtedly a Mental Model, report."
"I think she'd better tell you about that herself," she pointed to the tree, behind which a small, white thing stepped out, which they all knew only too well, and paused uneasily in front of Kongou, although she addressed them all:
"I'm... a, um, low god. I'm the soul of the 797!" she assured frantically, "not that of the ship, but that of the blueprint," Oki fumbled with her fingernails, "Bravepie-sam- uhhh, I mean Lord Vanisher was watching me and lead me to a place where there were no demons, because a soul without a body is very easily vulnerable and I had made my own world and put all the ship souls that wanted in it and... erm... at some point the demons found me and I got scared and mom was closest, and..." she turned to Zeitwächter, held out a hand and squinted her eyes, "that's why i was scared of you! Because your soul smells like demon and you're really terrifying! Can I call you dad!?", flustered, not the graceful entry she had wanted to give, but she wasn't as good with that as Vanisher anyway.
So that was the "bad stuff," thought Zeitwächter, "Bitch you can try- ow!"
Kongou smashed her entire hand and part of her forearm against the skull.
"I'm sorry! I swear it was instinct!"
"I just want to mention," Vanisher began one last time, purely to have her fun with Oki, "that Oki didn't create a universe because she was a god, but that creating it made her a god. She was so sad that she herself was never built and seeing so many of her "sisters" die, that wishing they could all live was enough to create a small universe inside my big one."
Oki blushed and hid behind Kongou's legs.