Unknown
Unknown Phase
You find yourselves....floating, but not in a void.
Around you float the stars; countless, numberless and nameless, sparkling in the darkness of space, swirling around you as you float-
"Ah. Hello".
A sickly-looking robed woman appears to them, her skin pallid with illness and her posture bent with the effort of standing to the extent of using a cane. Her clothes seem to reflect the stars and the void they float in, seeming to mesh perfectly with the background.
The woman takes a moment to cough. And another cough. With every hacking deep cough, she seems to hack up some sort of golden ichor.
"I.....am but an avatar of existence. I'm essentially what you may refer to as the face of the multiverse.
You have done well, children of the world, to slay such a powerful Trespasser. That one.....had destroyed many worlds before attempting to feed upon this one. To stop it was....no small feat, and yet that is what you did.
You are all now part of a war that rages throughout all of existence. You have stopped but one soldier, in an infinite war spanning endless worlds. Throughout existence, many like yourselves march across to stop the threat that endangers us."
She extends her hand to form a pool of light in front of her, allowing the party to see the extent of the conflict.
A girl in red impales her scythe into a vast, tentacled creature raging upon a stormy sea off a rocky cliff, wrenching it out to allow a person in blue armour with a golden-horned helmet to impale it with a golden lance. The armoured warrior wrenches his weapon out and changes to a warrior in red in a blink of an eye, kicking aside another tentacle. Behind them, a girl in bronze fires upon the creature's eyes, using her shield to protect herself from debris flying from above. With a flick of her hand, her rifle becomes a spear, as she leaps upwards to join her allies in the assault, her crimson hair blowing in the wind behind her.
A masked warrior in blue with a sword that Eirika recognises fights back to back with a girl in blue and white armour with an invisible sword, throwing back a horde of black, tar-like slimes upon a burned, desolate plain. A white-haired man with a red book runs towards them, blasting orbs of flame into the horde in an attempt to lighten the weight upon them. Behind him rides another masked warrior on a motorcycle, his armour silver rather than blue, with a single horn and red eyes upon his helmet, lifting his bike upwards to drive directly onto the teeming mass.
A girl in white and gold blasts aside a horde of batlike creatures with equally numerous muskets, swatting one away with an unloaded one and jumping back to allow her ally, a man clad in only shoes and long pants with a blindfold, to unleash a kick into the largest creature, sending it into the weapon of a flying warrior in golden armour with a large sword, who sears the creature alive before casting off the husk onto the city road below. A girl dressed in pink sends a volley of arrows into the bat-creatures, but it seems this group cannot hold out much longer.
The pool of light disappears.
"This conflict reaches us all, whether we want it or not.
I have attempted to summon the best of the warriors I could find throughout this existence, in an attempt to preserve all that is. However.....with the Trespassers eating away at my being....my power wanes, and some can manipulate the process of selection, should they possess enough power.
That is, I fear, the only explanation I have for some of you being here.
Yet, regardless of any tampering, you have slain a Trespasser. Many, even. All the same......it is not my right to force you to stay."
Another pool of light appears, this time large enough for anyone to walk through.
"That portal will take you back home. If you wish for your participation in this war, the war that has engulfed all worlds, to end, and to return to a brief bliss before your world is thrown into turmoil, there is your way out. That is all I can offer by way of apology for the manipulation of your selection.
However.....should you choose to stay.....you accept the risk and the burden. This war will take much from us all, and even if you were never meant to be chosen, you accept the burden regardless and so must bear as those who were meant to be.
I will leave it to you, to choose. Will you leave, return home, and live in peace until the Trespassers arrive, hoping that the rest of existence will stop them in their tracks, or will you stay, knowing the risk, and fight on, keeping all that exists alive?"
It That Embraces has returned to only being her avatar. This is a plane of bodies, not of souls.
Even so, she seems to smile a wistful smile. Amusement.
[Do you even have to ask? The only home I have left is myself. If anything, I would be much obliged if you could instead bring my home
here. Or at least, a bit closer.*]
*What she's describing is a complicated metaphysical concept, probably hard to fit in English. But basically, the Primordial's soul is still anchored in what remains of her home dimension. If she could 'un-anchor' it, she could perhaps bring it closer to the plane she's currently operating on as her avatar, thus allowing a lot more of her to come through.