DIVA: SYSTEMIC #0

[deucexm]

Ladies!  Gentlemen!  Nonbinaries!  I have begun crafting a delightfully tragic 
space opera from the Nameless arc of the DiVerse, which will finally throw 
together some of my favorite things - Pantheon shenanigans, magical shenanigans, 
general meddling with fate and destiny, characters from previous arcs that only 
one or two of you will probably recognize but that's perfectly fine, and of 
course, story ideas ripped straight from anime and then molded and shaped to be 
completely unlike the source material.  So here we are at last, the first (if 
you count prologues I guess) installment of the ambitiously all-caps title...!

SYSTEMIC: A DiVerse Alpha Chronicle
by Colin Stokes

00/Prologue

The E-System Core never slept, not truly.  Perhaps part of her did, but never all 
of her at once; that would be far too dangerous.

But for a moment, she surged her consciousness into a state approximating 'awake', 
and felt - as she always did - the millions of lives ebbing and flowing beneath her 
fingertips; swirling around her body, touching her in the non-physical but all-too-
real way that only a fellow Core could ever understand.

Not that she /had/ fellow Cores, or anyone - anything - else.  She was alone here.  
She was always alone, despite her best efforts to the contrary.

She felt the E-System's five massive Void Reactors pulsing at her back, their 
searing purple-white light bright enough to permanently blind the unprotected eye.  
But the E-System Core was made to live with a reactor, to mediate between it and 
the output; to stabilize it, and to coax more energy from its cold metal heart.  
She needed no protection from this light; /it/ protected /her/.

Satisfied that all was as it should be, that things were as good as they could be, 
the Core slid back into her dreamlike state; directing the flow of energy as she 
always did, as she had for countless... centuries?  Had it truly been so long?

It didn't matter.  Nothing would change.  She had hoped it would, in the beginning, 
but that hope was taken from her.  Now it was simply a matter of routine: the 
reactors would create energy, she would regulate it and pass it to the E-System, 
and that system would provide it to its authorized users.

And those users would burn, and fade away, their lives spent; and new users would 
replace them, and they too would burn and fade.  But there would always be more.

And she would always be there to watch over it all.

Alone.

It had to be that way, she told herself.

It had to...

At the edge of her perception, one of the users screamed; and the E-System pulsed, 
replying to the urgent request with a burst of energy.  The user burned fiercely 
for an instant, then vanished.

The E-System Core gave no thought to the matter, as always.

She let her consciousness slip deeper...