Of One Blood - Ar Tonelico fanfiction (Shurelia, Mir, 949 words, no warnings)

"We be of one blood, thou and I," Mowgli answered. "I take my life from thee, to-night."
--The Jungle Book


The hallways were saturated with it.

I would have called it a stink, a stench, this metallic bitterness that assaulted the back of my throat, but for that it was not quite a taste or a smell or a sound; it was something more living even than music, a feeling worming its way through my systems like no feeling I'd ever known. It made my throat want to close up, made all the pathways in my brain want to constrict in self-defence, my overloaded mind protesting with painful static hiss. Through the noise, awareness flickered dimly: it wanted to shut me down.

I knew it couldn't overpower me, no more than it could take out the Tower itself, but the desfel thing was trying, and that alone wrenched at me. It had entered my inviolate space, was trying to clone its filthy self into every segment of my being; it was trying to be where it didn't belong. Trying to be everywhere, to fill up every bit of breathing room, to bloat out my code with its garbage.

I couldn't tell if it was me or the hallways that reeked with it anymore, the taste of corruption, and it occured to me that there was no difference; and I fell to my knees, my mind churning with purgative code. It felt like my brain was trying to vomit, largely because it was.

It was everywhere, everywhere in the Tower, and that meant it was everywhere in me too, sickening, no escape--

I tried to raise my voice in song, something to drive off the feeling, but controlling any part of myself felt like an effort. So this is it, I thought, ruefully. If I can't even sing.... The temptation to just lie down and close my eyes was great, but I knew if I did I'd never wake up. At least, not as myself. Life from behind the eyes of some virus-controlled puppet: an unthinkable fate, and it stirred what little fight I had left in me, my brain redoubling its efforts to push out the invader.

It wasn't enough. I was walls, barriers, solid things, and it was liquid, flowing around every obstacle I threw at it, finding the cracks in my defences and battering me directly. Why, Mir? was my last coherent thought before I drowned. Or rather, that was what I expected; but somehow, in the midst of what felt like waves of feeling-sound, I was still there, still conscious, a spark of life within the swirl of the Tower's corrupted data.

As I waited-- no, to wait implies a sense of time; as I existed within the swirl, it began to take on a structure less corrupt, coalesced into some kind of order, within which I thought I could pick out meanings, sentiments. Was Mir trying to communicate?

Leave me be, wretched virus! I wanted to shout, but Mir's presence now seemed to massage the edges of my anger, weakening my desire to protest. The harsh, spiking feelings in my brain were all but gone, replaced by something almost deceptively fond; a cruel parody of a mother's love, a caress that should have made me shudder but, insanely, verged on being comforting. I knew what that meant: she was changing me, drawing me in, confounding my common sense with her creeping seductions; but it was so hard not to want, even as I knew the purity I felt in her was the infection numbing my instincts. Again I fought the desire to close my eyes, this time to relax into the feeling, relentless lapping at my brainstem like surf against a shore.

You remember the ocean, don't you? It was less a voice and more a string of concepts, welling up like memories as if from within my own mind; so familiar, so insidious. You remember when the world wasn't ravaged scraps of land clinging to life. So peaceful, so... hopeful. Let it be perfect again; let's make a paradise....

Presia, Shurelia....

"Shurelia, please!" Mir had screamed, her face twisted and reddened. "You have to understand why I want this. Don't leave me, no, please don't, don't go! You're the only one! Shurelia!"

I'd closed the door on her prison, but I could still hear her squalling from inside, a bird in a gilded cage. No, a monster justly barred. They may have made her a monster, she may not have been to blame, but she was a monster no less. Ironic that in imprisoning what was probably once an innocent, they had made something that now could never be set free.

"Don't hate me! Don't abandon me! Please, Shurelia...."

It was not my place to dwell on it. My only duty was to ensure she did no harm; my only loyalty, to humanity. Not to one such as her, a rogue element, a corruption in the system that preserved the lives of countless people. I wanted to protect. She wanted to annihilate. We were fundamentally at odds; I could not suffer her to proceed.

"Shurelia...."

Shurelia....

The concept, the name and all it stood for, reverberated through me, an appeal to my heart. Pity tore at me, but I swallowed it down, and lashed back at her with pointed thoughts. Stop manipulating me! Hateful creature, world-destroyer, genocidal fiend! I'll play no part in your self-absorbed wallowing!

I thought I felt, for a moment, a stinging sensation; like salt in my eyes, a flash of nauseated pain. The surf of Mir's mind rolled over me one last time, lingeringly, drawing out that last, incongruous wave of consoling oneness.

Then it was gone.

I didn't have time to regret it before my world exploded in light.



From the author: Thanks to-- darn, now I can't remember who it was, but if it was you who quoted that line from the Jungle Book in context of Mir and Shurelia's relationship, this shoutout's for you.

You got 1.8x109 nanoseconds.

Another quick post (previous one is here, for those who just click on the latest post in their blogroll and don't actually view the main blog): this was totally not my idea, but born out of a whole lot of injoking about the Domino's Pizza Tracker, being impatient for AT2, and the song Legend of Ar Tonelico ~ Mule Birth, here's a handy Mir Tracker for all your artificial intelligence update needs.

...I apologise for the oh-so-blatant political dig in the bottom right, but I had to do something with that area, and it seemed darkly fitting.


In other news, was speculating yesterday on the fact that Krusche's name sounds a lot like "crushue" ("to craft, to spin" in Hymmnos), and finding this oddly fitting in that she's a Grathmelder; it suddenly makes her name seem a lot more meaningful, if you think of it like that...


Wow. Now I really want pizza...

sleepy speculation

Hmm, so, some thoughts....

I've been speculating on the mortality, or lack thereof, of Mir's body when she's separated from it and sealed away in the Tower. A friend of mine was suggesting that she didn't actually leave a body behind as such, but rather went incorporeal, taking physical form again when she re-emerged; and that her drained appearance could be due to having to divert all her energy towards fighting and creating viruses and not having much left to devote to her own body, not her body having been in storage.

So, is it possible that she didn't actually have a body remaining in the physical world when she went into the Tower? And if she did leave a body behind, and having a physical body of some sort out there was necessary for her to stay alive, why did no one try to destroy her body to get rid of her, given that the alternative was locking generations of young Reyvateil girls up in the Crescent Chronicle to sing until they expired? If someone had destroyed her body, what would have happened?

And, tangentially: if it's possible to Grathmeld a Reyvateil's body from scratch, is it possible that someone as intelligent and ancient as Mir would either know how to do upkeep on her own body to keep it from dying, or simply create new bodies for her mind to inhabit when the old ones expired, keeping herself alive by jumping between physical shells?

Mirspawn?

Okay, so... I kind of just wanted an excuse to use the word "Mirspawn", since as our Esteemed Commenter (No Relation) has so wisely provided, it's just plain fun to say.

But anyway, the main reason I believe this blogger is unrelated to our Mother Virus is that she has two children nicknamed Chickadee and Monkey. (I mean, I hope those are not actually their real names.) Can you imagine Mir naming her kids Chickadee and Monkey, even as blogging pseudonyms? (Actually, we already kind of know the kind of thing she'd name her children: Ayatane Michitaka and ELMA-DS.)

...but back to the point of this entry, which is that I was reading through an old thread on the Reyvateil's Melody forums in which people were arguing that Mir could never possibly have had children or a partner, because she started out emotionless and quickly turned to hating humans. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I didn't want to revive an old thread, so I thought I'd bring it up here, instead.

Basically, we're not really sure when Mir crafted Harmonious (I made a guess in my fanfic, but it's totally a guess; she could have been a lot older). And we know she was thirty years old when she began her rebellion. In the interim, she could have been feeling or doing anything. We don't know how quickly she snapped, how long she was stewing in hatred before she finally broke out. It could have been days, months or years. Yes, she was sealed away, and it's really not likely she actually would have been allowed to have children (or keep them if she got pregnant), but it's not entirely unfeasible, I think, that one of the researchers might have felt for her and secretly carried on a relationship with her at some point in her life. So she could have, at least, had a partner.

My point isn't really that she did - I think it's unlikely, and it's even less likely that she ever had a child (and if she had, it almost certainly would have ended up a lab experiment too) - but that it's at least within the realm of possibility. So, any thoughts?

65 days to go and already I feel like quoting poetry.

'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'

...is a great thing to chant in your head when you're aching with anticipation. I love The Raven; it's a pretty depressing poem if you look at it narratively, not the kind of thing I'd normally revel in, but the cadence of it is just sumptuous.

I really need not to be needing this much when December is so far away. But at the same time, it's not like I want to stop caring, at all. The delicious agony of fannishness...

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Metafalss?

Just because I could. XD

And no, viruses wouldn't typically have hymn codes (or be permitted cargo on any method of transport with electronic navigation systems), most likely, but I like to think Mir cared so much that she wangled it somehow. That, and given the already tight restrictions on name fields on plane tickets, I was amused by the idea of them attempting to fit one in.

I would have had the secondary language be Hymmnos (as opposed to French), but Hymmnos doesn't have words for the majority of the fields on there. I tried to think up close approximations, but in the end it was so unwieldy I had to abandon the idea.

Also, see how many in-references you can spot. I'll be surprised if anyone gets them all. ;)

These aren't too hard to make, so if you want one, let me know what you want on it and I'll cook something up. What to do with them? I suggest printing them and handing them over at the game store with your money, if you're actually buying in person. Or leave them on your coffee table to confuse people...


(Credit for the original blank goes to Jason Dunn, by the way.)

scattershot analysis

Some miscellaneous thoughts on Mir and AT...


One, writing The Ar Tonelico Whistleblower (which, if you're wondering, will indeed be continued in at least one form; I have a non-blog-format bit of accompanying fiction, set shortly after the current logs end, that should be ready for you soon, and I do plan to get some more logs up eventually. Plus I have a couple of other fics on the burner...) has caused something to strike me: if Mir was a kind and loving enough person to compose Harmonious even after seven years of cruelty and abandonment, what on earth might she have been like if she'd been given a more normal upbringing?

She only turns to uglier thoughts because humanity insists on systematically stripping away every possible target for her hope; if she were left to her own devices, it's easy to imagine that hope would get tangled up into everything, every facet of life something fascinating and wondrous to cling to, everything a source of beauty and inspiration. Mir would go from someone struggling to see the light against all odds to someone flooded with it, almost intoxicated.

I can see her as a Zen-like seer, a wise and gentle mystic, or equally, a slightly hyperactive fringe prophet delirious with her own spirituality, yet utterly sweet and friendly once you get to know her. This makes me want to write some altverse fic where Mir was turfed out or escaped before the worst of her treatment kicked in, ended up taking residence with some charming little family, and left home to preach goodness to the world at the age of eighteen, a tie-dye bandanna around her head and a guitar strapped to her back. It would be super-adorable, you have to admit.


I've also been daydreaming about what might have happened if Lyner and co. had gone the final step in helping Mir to recover and actually offered her the option of coming with them. It seems like so often, even when a game does go the "let's spare the bad guy" route, you subsequently end up abandoning them to their fate anyway; sure, they didn't kill Mir, but now she's been jolted out of her old worldview and is probably flailing to try and make sense of reality again, doesn't it seem a bit harsh to just walk off and leave her there without even trying to rehabilitate her?

If Lyner really wanted to drive home the point that humans aren't as bad as all that, he might have said something along the lines of "come with us; we'll take care of you and get you back on your feet, help you to understand the way things work and try and get back to a normal life. And if you can't manage that after all these years, since I know that's a bit of a high bar to leap for you now... well, we'll find someone willing to look after you and keep you safe". She might not have trusted him, but it was worth a try. If you're going to convert your villain through love and caring, you have to follow it through all the way. Otherwise, you risk leaving them more broken than when you started, having been dreaming of salvation and only getting a half-hearted solution.

More thoughts later, perhaps, when I am less blurry-headed. Still not quite over the post-sickness energy loss...