Post by Deleted on Oct 24, 2014 5:26:50 GMT -8
Herein lies the scene that never unfolded.
{-}
A storm was picking up just around the boat as Remnant and Feint walked toward the front. Not the most convenient place to play catch-up, but at least there were less people around to be listening in.
"What did you want to talk to me about?"
"..."
That was a dumb question. She knew why he'd brought her here; she knew what he was about to bring up. But it confused her why Remnant was the one to bring this up, instead of "his original". Perhaps it had something to do with him being the embodiment of Warrior's past or whatever he was. Maybe only one of them retained the memories from all those years ago.
"Right... you remember me now."
"That's correct."
"And what about Warrior? How much does that spineless navi remember?"
"... I'm afraid this is more complicated than you think, actually."
"Oh?"
"He's not who we say he is, and neither am I. He's not even a Navi."
"Ohhhh..."
"He's human too: Jacob Rayner."
"So that means you're..."
Remnant nodded in affirmation as she continued. The girl was quick at putting two and two together.
"... Warrior.EXE."
"Yes."
Remnant frowned and looked down as he tacked his much-deserved sub title onto the end of his true name.
"The Spineless Navi."
"..."
And so the truth was finally revealed... but it was still a jumbled mess at the moment.
'Feint' Pele was no Net Navi at all. She was a human in cyber space, unable to pulse out due to the injuries she'd accrued while stuck here.
Whenever a wound is inflicted onto her body, a patch of data immediately mends it until the body is able to naturally heal. While this means she can stay in peak physical condition during her cyber space treks, it comes with an unfortunate drawback. If ever she were to Pulse Out and go back into the real world, those data patches would fall off, because data can't take that kind of form outside of the cyber world. So if any wound was left unhealed, it would reopen and she would likely bleed to death.
Thus, she was "trapped" inside.
"... I'm sorry, Cherish."
Feint shut her eyes to fight back the tears. And she was losing that fight right now.
Nobody had called her by her real name in years. She almost forgot she had that name.
"My name is Feint."
~*BOOM*~
Almost as if on cue, a lightning bolt struck a wave nearby, heralding itself with a deafening shout of thunder.
Whenever emotion started to overwhelm her, she'd drown it with fury.
Although the rain was able to hide the tears streaming down her cheeks, and her tone of voice sounded deeper than the thunder, she turned her body away and walked to the broken railing of the ship. She grasped it tightly with both hands as she tilted her head down toward the crashing waves below; her grip threatened to break it off as she channeled her anger into her knuckles and tightened them harder.
She was a bigger wreck than this ship right now.
Cherish Pele.
She actually used to be a regular girl, despite how hard some people found that to believe. Until the day she was kidnapped. There was a chance she could have escaped that entire scenario if her Net Navi, Warrior.EXE, didn't abandon her.
The kidnappers broke her PET, but Warrior.EXE was lucky enough to jack himself into the Cyber World before his data was lost with the personal terminal. Unfortunately, this left him without any back-up data, so he couldn't be restored upon deletion. The men who kidnapped Cherish had powerful navis... saving his operator may have meant permanent death for himself, so he was stuck with the decision of whom should be saved.
Regrettably, he chose himself and escaped.
"Changing your name doesn't change who you are."
"Says the one that now calls himself 'Remnant'."
"..."
Only the sound of the shifting waves and the light raindrops hitting the ship's deck populated the silence between them.
Feint had her back to Remnant as he approached... and as he got closer, there was nothing to hide her weeping.
Fury had lost today. For the first time in a long time, sorrow had defeated it and taken her over.
But it was a painful thing to bring up those memories she'd tried so hard to bury. She never actually recovered from that traumatic experience... no, even to this day she was affected by it. It's what made her who she was, and that was actually the most painful part to think about.
"Damnit Remnant, I needed you. And you cowered away in spite of that - knowing that."
Feint's eyes shot open as she felt Remnant's hand gently rest on her shoulder. She jerked away and pushed it off aggressively. She knew he was just giving her a notion of comfort, but...
"Do you know what they did to me?"
"... I try not to think about it."
"Because you don't have to!"
"..."
But I'm forced to think about it -- I'm forced to remember it every time a man lays his hand on me!"
"... Cherish-"
"It's! Feint!"
~*BA-BOOM!*~
Another bright bolt of lightning struck down nearby. Feint's anger was back, almost enough to erase the memory of her sobbing just a second ago. One would have thought her rage was what caused the lightning to strike so violently, but Remnant knew better than that.
This girl was practically his little sister, and he forsook her when she needed him most.
What made it even worse was that he forgot about her. Years after the incident, in the Eternal Endgame, he was deleted in the aftermath of the final battle. Most of his memories were lost after that day, namely the ones involving Feint at all.
"..."
Feint closed her eyes again. A few more tears came, but not as much as before.
"Why didn't you protect me? Why did you run away?"
"Because of the same reason you are, right now."
"..."
"Because I was confronted with an enemy I couldn't defeat... and I was scared."
He knew even more than she thought. He must have been doing his research lately.
"So you're saying I should fight it? I should fight The Colossus and die for a species that betrayed me?"
"The fate of all Net Navis shouldn't be reliant on one's past failures."
"But evidently it should be reliant on one human's decision."
The Colossus... a massive abomination created for the sole purpose of destroying all of Navi kind.
Humans were afraid of the terrors that the Cyber World held. It was no secret that they were quickly losing their place as the dominant species on the earth. So in fear of them, and in order to secure their own future by preventing their nightmares from becoming a reality, they constructed a monster to eradicate the Cyber World and all of its inhabitants. If they could start fresh and anew, they could prevent future digital disasters from ever happening.
It stirred up much controversy though, and the plan was never initiated. Not by the governing forces, at least.
An ex-agent, 'Delilah Ruse', got her hands on the blueprints before going rogue and becoming a ringleader for a band of masterminds with the same intents as her. They began building The Colossus without anybody knowing, and by the time proper authorities had found out, it was too late to shut it down.
But The Colossus was small in its early days, not much bigger than the size of an average virus. That made it difficult to track down; difficult to find. For decades, it would feed on smaller data and eventually grow larger and larger, deep in the Secret Areas of the net, far below even where the Undernet would reach. No one had heard of it for years, and it eventually just became a myth among a few.
That ex-agent, Delilah Ruse, was Feint's mother.
"You're one of the few that can stop it, Cherish. That's basically what your suit was designed for."
"Then take the suit and stop it yourself!"
"You'll pulse out and die if you take it off now."
"Like I even mattered to you before."
She was done here. This navi left her with the wolves once, and now he was just trying to throw her right back at them. And just for the sake of other net navis... why would she help somebody like that? Why would she help a net navi in general? There wasn't one she even cared about, much less one that showed any concern for her.
She walked passed him to leave, but he stepped in front of her and stopped her.
"Cherish, I'm sorry."
"..."
"I can't change what's happened or the decisions I've made, but if I could, you need to know that I would. I'm sorry that I abandoned you, but I'll never let anything happen to you again."
"..."
"You need to face this, Cherish. You can't run away from it."
"I don't run away from anything."
"Well you are now."
"You don't understand, Remnant. It's not a thing you can fight."
"... You've seen it, then?"
"..."
"... How big has it become?"
The Colossus was a complex creature. If one could reach its core, they could probably dismantle it, but that core was buried deep inside of its body of stone. To make matters worse, that stone was coated in impenetrable metal. One couldn't simply blast their way through either, because the metal is constantly reproduced by generators about its body. Not to mention the fact that it could crush most opposition outright, anyway.
Strength and durability played large roles in fighting The Colossus, but stealth and mobility were even more vital. Feint was blessed to excel at all four and then some. Added to the fact was that she was the daughter of the woman responsible for its creation, there was an off chance she would have some sort of authority over it because of that.
But its size... that was the issue.
"I wager it's probably the size of a mountain. Maybe the width of a few city blocks at best. Only slightly larger than a Cybeast."
"..."
"We've defeated enemies of similar enormity before. I have no doubt thi-"
"You're wrong."
"..."
Even still... Remnant was convinced there was no enemy too large to defeat, despite past shortcomings.
But Feint was about to change his mind.
"The Dark Colony. The entire continent..."
"..."
That was pretty big. The size of a continent... to even think of a monster that enormo-
"... could fit in the palm of its hand."
" ! "
The storm suddenly subsided. The rain had stopped, but the sun remained hidden behind the clouds. The thunder dare not interrupt the description of this monstrosity... even nature became silent in reverence and fear of what was being spoken.
Feint continued.
"The length of its arm spans for hundreds of miles. It's face stretches from one side of the horizon to the next. And it has to crawl on hands and knees just to keep inside of the atmosphere."
" I-"
"Everything in its vicinity is just deleted. Even seeing it from hundreds of miles away is overwhelming to the point of paralysis. If you were to draw near to it, you would simply deteriorate and be absorbed by it."
"..."
"You want me to go fight that."
The storm slowly picked back up. The rain began drizzling again, and the thunder only lightly grumbled after that. Roaring loudly would be pointless; there was no fear it could invoke that could match what the girl had just described.
"Not alone."
"Pfft. You always were an optimistic one, Remnant."
"Well, I owe you at least this much, to help you through this. I don't expect forgiveness, and I know I don't deserve it, so I won't request. But count this as an apology, and as a sign of-"
"Seth said the same thing."
"..."
Seth Pele; Feint's father. She never forgave him after her mother died, and she was the one responsible for his incarceration a little while later. He was a Netopian government agent married to a criminal, but he never found out that his daughter was the one that reported him. For a while he even thought she was dead.
Nymphra had eventually busted him out, and now he's working with the Gigamerican government to take down The Colossus. Naturally, they had already had their interaction with Feint concerning the issue, and she had turned them down as well, clearly.
"I'm not coming, Remnant. But I know you'll still try."
"..."
"You can band together as many little navis as you want. You won't destroy it."
"Maybe not. But the last time I ran from a foe I couldn't defeat, it turned out to be the greatest mistake of my life."
"..."
"And I never make the same mistake twice."
Feint smiled slightly, but only for a second.
So he was sincere in his apology.
But they were done here, unfortunately. And by the sound of his enemy, Remnant feared this would be the last time ever seeing his true Operator, but maybe that was a good thing because he felt he could redeem himself if he succeeded to protect her now, after all those years he spent filled with regret.
He put his hand on her shoulder again, this time without his affection being denied.
"Farewell, Cherish."
He wish he could have said more -- he wish he could have done more for her. But unfortunately time was a pressing matter, and if she chose not to fight on his side, he needed to quickly assemble a team of navis that would.
Like a puff of smoke, his body was carried away by the wind to another network.
"You too..."
Feint smiled again as he left.
Yes. She did forgive him.
"...Warrior."
A storm was picking up just around the boat as Remnant and Feint walked toward the front. Not the most convenient place to play catch-up, but at least there were less people around to be listening in.
"What did you want to talk to me about?"
"..."
That was a dumb question. She knew why he'd brought her here; she knew what he was about to bring up. But it confused her why Remnant was the one to bring this up, instead of "his original". Perhaps it had something to do with him being the embodiment of Warrior's past or whatever he was. Maybe only one of them retained the memories from all those years ago.
"Right... you remember me now."
"That's correct."
"And what about Warrior? How much does that spineless navi remember?"
"... I'm afraid this is more complicated than you think, actually."
"Oh?"
"He's not who we say he is, and neither am I. He's not even a Navi."
"Ohhhh..."
"He's human too: Jacob Rayner."
"So that means you're..."
Remnant nodded in affirmation as she continued. The girl was quick at putting two and two together.
"... Warrior.EXE."
"Yes."
Remnant frowned and looked down as he tacked his much-deserved sub title onto the end of his true name.
"The Spineless Navi."
"..."
And so the truth was finally revealed... but it was still a jumbled mess at the moment.
'Feint' Pele was no Net Navi at all. She was a human in cyber space, unable to pulse out due to the injuries she'd accrued while stuck here.
Whenever a wound is inflicted onto her body, a patch of data immediately mends it until the body is able to naturally heal. While this means she can stay in peak physical condition during her cyber space treks, it comes with an unfortunate drawback. If ever she were to Pulse Out and go back into the real world, those data patches would fall off, because data can't take that kind of form outside of the cyber world. So if any wound was left unhealed, it would reopen and she would likely bleed to death.
Thus, she was "trapped" inside.
"... I'm sorry, Cherish."
Feint shut her eyes to fight back the tears. And she was losing that fight right now.
Nobody had called her by her real name in years. She almost forgot she had that name.
"My name is Feint."
~*BOOM*~
Almost as if on cue, a lightning bolt struck a wave nearby, heralding itself with a deafening shout of thunder.
Whenever emotion started to overwhelm her, she'd drown it with fury.
Although the rain was able to hide the tears streaming down her cheeks, and her tone of voice sounded deeper than the thunder, she turned her body away and walked to the broken railing of the ship. She grasped it tightly with both hands as she tilted her head down toward the crashing waves below; her grip threatened to break it off as she channeled her anger into her knuckles and tightened them harder.
She was a bigger wreck than this ship right now.
Cherish Pele.
She actually used to be a regular girl, despite how hard some people found that to believe. Until the day she was kidnapped. There was a chance she could have escaped that entire scenario if her Net Navi, Warrior.EXE, didn't abandon her.
The kidnappers broke her PET, but Warrior.EXE was lucky enough to jack himself into the Cyber World before his data was lost with the personal terminal. Unfortunately, this left him without any back-up data, so he couldn't be restored upon deletion. The men who kidnapped Cherish had powerful navis... saving his operator may have meant permanent death for himself, so he was stuck with the decision of whom should be saved.
Regrettably, he chose himself and escaped.
"Changing your name doesn't change who you are."
"Says the one that now calls himself 'Remnant'."
"..."
Only the sound of the shifting waves and the light raindrops hitting the ship's deck populated the silence between them.
Feint had her back to Remnant as he approached... and as he got closer, there was nothing to hide her weeping.
Fury had lost today. For the first time in a long time, sorrow had defeated it and taken her over.
But it was a painful thing to bring up those memories she'd tried so hard to bury. She never actually recovered from that traumatic experience... no, even to this day she was affected by it. It's what made her who she was, and that was actually the most painful part to think about.
"Damnit Remnant, I needed you. And you cowered away in spite of that - knowing that."
Feint's eyes shot open as she felt Remnant's hand gently rest on her shoulder. She jerked away and pushed it off aggressively. She knew he was just giving her a notion of comfort, but...
"Do you know what they did to me?"
"... I try not to think about it."
"Because you don't have to!"
"..."
But I'm forced to think about it -- I'm forced to remember it every time a man lays his hand on me!"
"... Cherish-"
"It's! Feint!"
~*BA-BOOM!*~
Another bright bolt of lightning struck down nearby. Feint's anger was back, almost enough to erase the memory of her sobbing just a second ago. One would have thought her rage was what caused the lightning to strike so violently, but Remnant knew better than that.
This girl was practically his little sister, and he forsook her when she needed him most.
What made it even worse was that he forgot about her. Years after the incident, in the Eternal Endgame, he was deleted in the aftermath of the final battle. Most of his memories were lost after that day, namely the ones involving Feint at all.
"..."
Feint closed her eyes again. A few more tears came, but not as much as before.
"Why didn't you protect me? Why did you run away?"
"Because of the same reason you are, right now."
"..."
"Because I was confronted with an enemy I couldn't defeat... and I was scared."
He knew even more than she thought. He must have been doing his research lately.
"So you're saying I should fight it? I should fight The Colossus and die for a species that betrayed me?"
"The fate of all Net Navis shouldn't be reliant on one's past failures."
"But evidently it should be reliant on one human's decision."
The Colossus... a massive abomination created for the sole purpose of destroying all of Navi kind.
Humans were afraid of the terrors that the Cyber World held. It was no secret that they were quickly losing their place as the dominant species on the earth. So in fear of them, and in order to secure their own future by preventing their nightmares from becoming a reality, they constructed a monster to eradicate the Cyber World and all of its inhabitants. If they could start fresh and anew, they could prevent future digital disasters from ever happening.
It stirred up much controversy though, and the plan was never initiated. Not by the governing forces, at least.
An ex-agent, 'Delilah Ruse', got her hands on the blueprints before going rogue and becoming a ringleader for a band of masterminds with the same intents as her. They began building The Colossus without anybody knowing, and by the time proper authorities had found out, it was too late to shut it down.
But The Colossus was small in its early days, not much bigger than the size of an average virus. That made it difficult to track down; difficult to find. For decades, it would feed on smaller data and eventually grow larger and larger, deep in the Secret Areas of the net, far below even where the Undernet would reach. No one had heard of it for years, and it eventually just became a myth among a few.
That ex-agent, Delilah Ruse, was Feint's mother.
"You're one of the few that can stop it, Cherish. That's basically what your suit was designed for."
"Then take the suit and stop it yourself!"
"You'll pulse out and die if you take it off now."
"Like I even mattered to you before."
She was done here. This navi left her with the wolves once, and now he was just trying to throw her right back at them. And just for the sake of other net navis... why would she help somebody like that? Why would she help a net navi in general? There wasn't one she even cared about, much less one that showed any concern for her.
She walked passed him to leave, but he stepped in front of her and stopped her.
"Cherish, I'm sorry."
"..."
"I can't change what's happened or the decisions I've made, but if I could, you need to know that I would. I'm sorry that I abandoned you, but I'll never let anything happen to you again."
"..."
"You need to face this, Cherish. You can't run away from it."
"I don't run away from anything."
"Well you are now."
"You don't understand, Remnant. It's not a thing you can fight."
"... You've seen it, then?"
"..."
"... How big has it become?"
The Colossus was a complex creature. If one could reach its core, they could probably dismantle it, but that core was buried deep inside of its body of stone. To make matters worse, that stone was coated in impenetrable metal. One couldn't simply blast their way through either, because the metal is constantly reproduced by generators about its body. Not to mention the fact that it could crush most opposition outright, anyway.
Strength and durability played large roles in fighting The Colossus, but stealth and mobility were even more vital. Feint was blessed to excel at all four and then some. Added to the fact was that she was the daughter of the woman responsible for its creation, there was an off chance she would have some sort of authority over it because of that.
But its size... that was the issue.
"I wager it's probably the size of a mountain. Maybe the width of a few city blocks at best. Only slightly larger than a Cybeast."
"..."
"We've defeated enemies of similar enormity before. I have no doubt thi-"
"You're wrong."
"..."
Even still... Remnant was convinced there was no enemy too large to defeat, despite past shortcomings.
But Feint was about to change his mind.
"The Dark Colony. The entire continent..."
"..."
That was pretty big. The size of a continent... to even think of a monster that enormo-
"... could fit in the palm of its hand."
" ! "
The storm suddenly subsided. The rain had stopped, but the sun remained hidden behind the clouds. The thunder dare not interrupt the description of this monstrosity... even nature became silent in reverence and fear of what was being spoken.
Feint continued.
"The length of its arm spans for hundreds of miles. It's face stretches from one side of the horizon to the next. And it has to crawl on hands and knees just to keep inside of the atmosphere."
" I-"
"Everything in its vicinity is just deleted. Even seeing it from hundreds of miles away is overwhelming to the point of paralysis. If you were to draw near to it, you would simply deteriorate and be absorbed by it."
"..."
"You want me to go fight that."
The storm slowly picked back up. The rain began drizzling again, and the thunder only lightly grumbled after that. Roaring loudly would be pointless; there was no fear it could invoke that could match what the girl had just described.
"Not alone."
"Pfft. You always were an optimistic one, Remnant."
"Well, I owe you at least this much, to help you through this. I don't expect forgiveness, and I know I don't deserve it, so I won't request. But count this as an apology, and as a sign of-"
"Seth said the same thing."
"..."
Seth Pele; Feint's father. She never forgave him after her mother died, and she was the one responsible for his incarceration a little while later. He was a Netopian government agent married to a criminal, but he never found out that his daughter was the one that reported him. For a while he even thought she was dead.
Nymphra had eventually busted him out, and now he's working with the Gigamerican government to take down The Colossus. Naturally, they had already had their interaction with Feint concerning the issue, and she had turned them down as well, clearly.
"I'm not coming, Remnant. But I know you'll still try."
"..."
"You can band together as many little navis as you want. You won't destroy it."
"Maybe not. But the last time I ran from a foe I couldn't defeat, it turned out to be the greatest mistake of my life."
"..."
"And I never make the same mistake twice."
Feint smiled slightly, but only for a second.
So he was sincere in his apology.
But they were done here, unfortunately. And by the sound of his enemy, Remnant feared this would be the last time ever seeing his true Operator, but maybe that was a good thing because he felt he could redeem himself if he succeeded to protect her now, after all those years he spent filled with regret.
He put his hand on her shoulder again, this time without his affection being denied.
"Farewell, Cherish."
He wish he could have said more -- he wish he could have done more for her. But unfortunately time was a pressing matter, and if she chose not to fight on his side, he needed to quickly assemble a team of navis that would.
Like a puff of smoke, his body was carried away by the wind to another network.
"You too..."
Feint smiled again as he left.
Yes. She did forgive him.
"...Warrior."