[Oh. Right, that... had happened. Xion lifts her hand and stares at it, dispassionately. She then says, with equal lack of gravity.]
Oh... yeah. I died, so... they came back.
[Right. That... actually was a good place to start.]
I guess it wasn't... exactly dying. Not completely.
[She hesitates again, still picking her point, but the beginning, the how was probably easiest]
That's... what made you guys - the ones from Hinoto-Ri - so different from us. Why you didn't have the collars, why it was so much more dangerous for you. Why they had to change the Tower so much before you guys could go into it. For so long they'd made it for us.
That world... it was never a good one. Even before it was destroyed. The scientists in the Tower of Animus... they were trying to experiment to create immortality. By splitting the soul from the body. And with Ruana, the one admin you saw who was a girl... it worked. They did it, but destroyed all of their world in the process.
She was really alone, for a long time. Until... she wanted company. So she brought us there, by doing the same thing to us that was done to her.
[Destroying their worlds, splitting their souls from their bodies. Making them essentially immortal.
She starts suddenly when a memory comes back to her. She hadn't thought about it for the longest time - at the time it'd happened, Nyarlahotep's words had meant little to her, with news of the infiltration still leaking out. And yet-]
He said it. When Zo turned on the terminals. That... thing you all came here, to try to chase. He said something about us being... "disembodied souls."
[Her hands come up to make a circle, thumbs upward, which she rests on her own body, right around the middle of her chest, where her heart was. To frame where the light of their souls had been.]
We... that's all we ever were. Our souls were taken from our bodies and put in these wireframes, which they made to look like our own.
Nothing in that place was really real, by then. Except us.
[Their souls, the bonds they'd made. And the Hinoto-Ri residents who'd visited. As Xion had said, that was what had made them different.]
no subject
Oh... yeah. I died, so... they came back.
[Right. That... actually was a good place to start.]
I guess it wasn't... exactly dying. Not completely.
[She hesitates again, still picking her point, but the beginning, the how was probably easiest]
That's... what made you guys - the ones from Hinoto-Ri - so different from us. Why you didn't have the collars, why it was so much more dangerous for you. Why they had to change the Tower so much before you guys could go into it. For so long they'd made it for us.
That world... it was never a good one. Even before it was destroyed. The scientists in the Tower of Animus... they were trying to experiment to create immortality. By splitting the soul from the body. And with Ruana, the one admin you saw who was a girl... it worked. They did it, but destroyed all of their world in the process.
She was really alone, for a long time. Until... she wanted company. So she brought us there, by doing the same thing to us that was done to her.
[Destroying their worlds, splitting their souls from their bodies. Making them essentially immortal.
She starts suddenly when a memory comes back to her. She hadn't thought about it for the longest time - at the time it'd happened, Nyarlahotep's words had meant little to her, with news of the infiltration still leaking out. And yet-]
He said it. When Zo turned on the terminals. That... thing you all came here, to try to chase. He said something about us being... "disembodied souls."
[Her hands come up to make a circle, thumbs upward, which she rests on her own body, right around the middle of her chest, where her heart was. To frame where the light of their souls had been.]
We... that's all we ever were. Our souls were taken from our bodies and put in these wireframes, which they made to look like our own.
Nothing in that place was really real, by then. Except us.
[Their souls, the bonds they'd made. And the Hinoto-Ri residents who'd visited. As Xion had said, that was what had made them different.]