Chapter Text
In the depths of the shared minds of the Sister Network was a mirror of the chaos outside. Inside the internal realm of Fractal Noise, a pocket dimension that all Sister Units were fully capable of manipulating and controlling, with each portal being a door and each path between the doors being hallways. The doors were the portals opened by the Sister Units. The halls were simply the easiest way to interpret the nature of Fractal Noise, as outsiders beyond the Sister Network’s members couldn’t perceive the real interior of the wormholes without getting harmed in some form due to the structure of the warping of spacetime, in this case the normal understanding of a wormhole’s theoretical science messing with how perception of time itself works as the portal alters gravity in local spaces in order to open a portal to begin with. It was within this “Imaginary Castle Dimension” of sorts, the pocket dimension being named as such in honor of a Japanese urban legend about the Demon Slayers of the Taisho Period in addition to a more recent bit of folklore about Academy City’s so-called Imaginary Number District, that the entity that was the Will found herself/themselves inside the core of.
The Will of the Whole Sister Network who was just now discovering herself throughout her 100,019 independent bodies and minds and souls undergoing their shared apotheosis. There was an apocalypse outside. There was a katabasis inside. There was a pantheon of stars made mortal on both sides. This was some form of transhumanism becoming realized and she explored herself layer by layer as she underwent this strange experience.
She didn’t know what she was. Neither did any of her Units. Nobody else was able to communicate with them as they knew the world outside was being destroyed and reborn in the same way that they were as pitch-black thunderbolts engulfed Earth and dark clouds consumed the entire sky. The horizon from every angle of the World of Heroes was covered in darkness from back-to-back and side to side. Storms of lighting changing colors made themselves known. No civilization on Earth at the moment knew what was happening beyond the Sister Network Units, each becoming essentially a living portal that led into somewhere deep in outer space as each girl became a void from the inside out, was in process of burning her body to become these beings beyond Humanity. Nobody knew what was really happening as Superpower became Absolute as this form of transhuman metamorphosis thoroughly changed the ecosystem of all of Earth. Regarding Knowhere, the current location of Academy City since 2019, the same events happening on Earth were the same, albeit on a much smaller scale. The raw power of 20,000 Units was weaker than the raw power of 80,019 Units all collectively emitting an entire star’s amount of raw energy per member of the Sister Network independently.
The Will of the Whole Sister Network could feel herself being changed in as many ways as there were Sister Units, each Unit wanting to be “Whole” as themselves but also wanted to be not responsible for the destruction of their homes of both Earth and Knowhere. One-hundred thousand and nineteen voices were all collectively screaming in protest against the idea of killing their homes and not wanting to die in the process. There were so many thoughts blurring together as each Unit individually was screaming in protest and their shared Will found herself unable to do anything to react to the worlds beyond the Imaginary Castle Dimension.
On the outside of this event, countless people were all trying to find some way to stop this insanity, but the best that anyone could do was to simply take the Sister Units to any nearby medical facilities. Everyone on the outside of this event was surprised by the lack of any reports of people finding themselves hurt beyond basic injuries. No reports of deaths related to Protocol Hexe had been noted at all. No damages aside from environmental shifts in the weather. Just a really massive electrical storm without any signs of blackouts. Only the normal signs of electrocution related injuries. From the perspective of the International Space Sation and the Earth-M’arzz Communication Satellite and the Red Spot Plumbers’ orbital bases and Kree Imperial Ships and other such cosmic locations, Earth and Knowhere were simply having unusual weather patterns, with only a strange radio signal emitting from the celestial bodies in question being the only abnormality connecting the seemingly independent events together.
Looking from the outside of all of this insanity are a pair of gods going by the names of Maddie and Caspian. The gods in question are curious as to the events surrounding their mortal counterparts in this universe as they both gaze at the same event in two very different perspectives. Their mortal selves are seeing this from ground level and experiencing these events and believe it to be the start of the end of the world. Their divine selves know from hindsight that this was indeed the end of the world as they knew it and have learned from history, but not even these gods truly know what’s about to happen to their mortal selves in this universe, despite their wisdom brought over from their own lives from when they themselves could once be called mortal beings.