cr au write-up.

[reassures]

DEVELOPMENT:

Nill is not a young girl anymore. She still becomes teary-eyed easily, and she still cries when she’s really angry, or relieved, or happy; she’s still eager to help however she can, even if she’s not as clumsy as she was once upon a time. She’s outgrown much of the naïveté that once made up a great portion of her way of thinking, and she no longer holds any illusions about the people that she’s close to. She no longer looks back on her life and avoids thinking about the people that Heine and Badou probably had to kill on a regular basis in order to come home safely. She knows full well all the things they probably needed to do in order to survive, and she does not hold it against them, does not judge them for it. They mean the same to her as they ever did, because she’s known so many people over the past several years who have had to do similar things.

The main change in her way of thinking began when Nill was forced into something called Battle Royale. The people running NeoGenesis from behind the scenes thought of it as a game, but it was far from being a simple game. Most of the people that Nill loved at the time were dragged into it along with her, and contestants were told at the start that only one person would make it out alive. Everyone was expected to kill everyone else in order to be that one last person left standing, and Nill realized before the game even started that she wouldn’t be making it out alive. When her name was called, she took her bag, and made a break for it. She absolutely refused to let the people she cared about see her die, and she refused to let them be the ones to kill her. So, knowing full well that she would probably not make it through the day, Nill left them behind.

She didn’t make it through the day. She was found by someone with a sadistic streak, and died a horrible, painful death, all the while wishing she could go home. She’d never been more terrified in her life, and would never be more terrified again after. But through some fluke, some strange stroke of luck, Nill was revived. Everyone was revived, and no one was put up for auction. The people she loved came home, and they got to live together again. Everything was okay, but the world was no longer a beautiful place after that. People that she loved did dangerous things, and most of them died. They were all put up for auction, and most of them were lucky enough to be bought by friends instead of the wealthy people of Elysium, but a few weren’t. People disappeared from the city entirely, or were found dead and never brought back. Laws were put in place that said anyone who was a mutant would be killed, and many of her friends had to go into hiding, constantly afraid for their lives. Even Nill herself needed to hide her wings in public, because that too was considered a mutation by the rules of the new law. It was around the time that Nill began to realize how awful the world really was that strangers from others worlds began to filter into the city, and some of them had the faces of her loved ones. Every last one of them died, killed by the Alpha & Omega, and Nill was told after by one of her loved ones that their lives were a lie. All of their memories were false, and their friendships were probably fabricated.

Nill realized at this point that all of the hope she had ever held on to for a better tomorrow was pointless, because there was something pulling the strings, and as long as they remained in that place none of them would ever be happy. For the first time in her life, Nill saw the big picture of everything, and it made her miserable.

When NeoGenesis began to crumble, she and a few of her loved ones managed to escape to a better place – or so they thought. They were aiming for the home world of two of her friends, a place called Konoha, but instead ended up in a place called Siren’s Port. The moment Nill landed on the baseball field she could remember all the things that she couldn’t in NeoGenesis; she remembered Heine, the man in the fractured bits of memories she’d regained during her time there, Badou, Naoto, Bishop. She remembered everything, but with remember came forgetting. Many of the people who didn’t make it to Siren’s Port were removed from her memories. She could still recall little things they did, what they meant to her, but no faces would appear in her memory, and names were always right on the edge of her thinking, but never close enough to be recalled. Though Nill could differentiate between her two different sets of memories, and she knew which one was meant to be “real” and which was “fake”, one never felt more real than the other. Nill began her new life with two sets of memories full of holes.

If at all possible, the discrimination in Siren’s Port was even worse than it was in NeoGenesis. Newcomers were easily identifiable as such, and the law was largely on the side of Natives over Newcomers. Nill began to adjust to her new life, though her loved ones were hardly around. She was lonely, but not necessarily unhappy, because they were all alive. But as time went on, the Natives became more and more violent towards Newcomers. Nill and one of her loved ones, the people she considered her family, were in their apartment specifically for Newcomers the evening that terrorists blew it up. Another home lost, and some of her faith in humanity diminished, they moved on to a new home. Nill gradually began to resent her inability to protect her loved ones; they were always getting hurt, and she was always the one being protected.

Not long after this, Nill’s Core-given power awakened, and she found quickly that she could read minds and hear the thoughts of others. All notions of returning to school immediately left her mind when she found that simply going grocery shopping could be too overwhelming for her to manage. She spent much of the next several months rarely leaving her home, though she paid attention to the Network and knew what was going on in the Port.

You have to understand, people think awful things, and Nill never found a way to turn off her ability. When she was awake she noticed every thought running through every single person’s head, and when she slept she had dreams (or nightmares) that didn’t belong to her, but to someone living in the same building as her. There are few things as all-encompassing as the thoughts and the feelings of others. Her ways of thinking gradually began to change the more time she spent around someone, because it was easy to forget the way she thought and to instead recall the ways other people thought. This became apparent when one of her family members, Shikamaru Nara - the same person that had been in the apartment with her when it blew up, who NIll adored and who she owed her life to in many ways - was forced to become a slaver for one of the big corporations of Siren’s Port, and Nill threatened the city at large if anyone came after him for it. Shikamaru meant the world to Nill, and she would stand up to the rest of the world to protect him if she needed to. Shikamaru began to teach Nill how to use a gun, and she devoted a large portion of her time to practicing her aim.

Time went by, and Nill realized she could do a lot more with her abilities than simply read the thoughts of others and ‘talk’ to them. Eventually she realized she could contact people she knew well from halfway across the city; she could force her way into the thoughts of others, feel their emotions, and push images or feelings or experiences onto them. It was a versatile skill, and she dedicated much of her time to honing that, as well.

Things began to go wrong, though. Nill’s loved ones began to disappear or die, and they never came back. It started with Yosuke Hanamura, who had taken Nill in back in NeoGenesis; he wandered the streets at night and died, and he was never brought back to life. So many of his loved ones were devastated, Nill and Shikamaru included. Then, another one of the people that had come with them from NeoGenesis, a boy named Naruto Uzumaki from Shikamaru’s world, disappeared, and never came back. Nill’s outlook went downhill as the world she’d built for herself grew smaller and smaller, and worse and worse things happened. Shikamaru began doing drugs and getting himself killed regularly, and Nill watched, helpless to do anything for him.

Some time before Naruto disappeared, Yosuke came back to the Port, but he wasn’t the Yosuke that Nill had known. He was younger than Nill now, and he had no memories of either her or Shikamaru. Nill remained conflicted over his existence for a long time, because she didn’t know if she should hate him for not being the Yosuke she knew, or if she should adore him, because he genuinely cared about her and Shikamaru, where the previous Yosuke didn’t.

Then, one day, Shikamaru disappeared, and Nill fell into despair, thinking the last member of her family – and the only person left in the world who could confirm whether or not everything that occurred in NeoGenesis really happened – was gone forever. Yosuke stayed by her, making sure she didn’t do anything hasty, until the day Nill found a snowglobe with images from Shikamaru’s memories in it, along with snowglobes for other people. It meant that he was still somewhere on the island, and Nill immediately started searching the entire city to find him.

She did find him eventually. She heard him begging her to find him, and when she and Uryuu – Shikamaru’s boyfriend – got into the building he was in, they found out why. He’d been turned into a grotesque cyborg, unable to move or scream, just feel pain and wait for the end. Nill tried to shoot him so that she could end his suffering, but found that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t pull the trigger. Uryuu had to be the one to kill him, and Nill had never hated herself so much in her life. Shikamaru revived a little while later, and abused drugs more, and Nill, who was a bartender at the time, began slipping alcohol into her coffee at work. For a few months, things were as okay as they ever were, and nothing really bad happened until the day of the first Newcomer Hunt.

Newcomers from all over the city were kidnapped, and held in cages without food for days. They were fitted with collars that were screwed into the tops of their spines, and caused unimaginable agony if any of them tried to use their powers. They were told they were going to be hunted down like animals and that their bodies would be used as trophies. Then they were released into the hunting grounds, and the game began.

Nill, who relied heavily on her telepathy, was left helpless. She found two knives and grabbed them for self-defense, and she found Shikamaru. The two stayed away from everyone else, who joined together, and they managed to stay safe until a woman named Jaina Fife found them. Jaina’s power was to inflict pain on others, and she used it to incapacitate them. Desperate, Nill moved past the pain, past the agony of the collar, and pushed her own agony and pain onto Jaina. In that moment, she genuinely wished for death, but it was enough that Shikamaru was released. He grabbed Nill and got her out of there, and Jaina never came after them. They survived the night of darkness and monsters even without their powers, and when the dawn came Nill and Shikamaru walked out of the hunting grounds together.

They were not sad, though. They didn’t fall into bottles or drugs. Being forced into something like that for the second time in their lives broke something inside of Nill, and eroded some of her sweetness irreparably into something angry and sour. If the world would not let her live happily, which is all she had ever wanted, then she wouldn’t let the people pulling the strings live happily either. Nill never forgot the serial number she’d been given in NeoGenesis, and she believed the same people secretly ran Siren’s Port as well. So she began using her serial number as an anonymous tag, using it for conversations that could otherwise get her put into jail, and she began training with Shikamaru to make herself stronger so that if she were put into a situation like that ever again, she would not need him to survive on her own.

Then, something unexpected happened. Barely a few months after the first Newcomer Hunt occurred, a second one took place, and most of the Newcomer population revolted. They attacked the hunting grounds, Nill included, and they made sure that everyone made it out of the hunt alive this time. Nill was shot in the process, but Yosuke, who had been taken this time, made it out alive, and she was healed for the most part. The events only served to fuel her anger, and she began taking more drastic measures.

Soon after, she began working with a woman by the name of Lisbeth Salander and a man named Claire Stanfield. They all wanted revenge for what had been done to them and the people they cared about, and they were going to get it together. She began spending money she had been left by dead loved ones to buy herself powers from Jesse Pinkman, who sold them at high prices to whoever came looking. She also did her best to get into Jesse’s good graces, knowing that if she could get him to trust her, then she’d be able to use him later for whatever she needed. It worked like a charm. Nill bought the ability to freeze time, which she used constantly so she could better practice her skills, and she bought the ability to manipulate air, which let her get around much more easily. She could almost fly with it, and for the first time in her life, Nill felt strong.

Shikamaru moved faster than Nill did in getting his revenge, though. He did something reckless and stupid, and he got himself killed; and like so many other people that Nill had known over the years, he never came back. Nill was alone, and without anyone left to confirm if a good portion of her memories were real or if the people she loved had ever really existed, she began to self-destruct. Yosuke was the only person around that Nill still really cared about – no, who she had grown to love – and even he disappeared one day. At the same time, Nill’s other good friend, a boy named Dave Strider, disappeared as well. So Nill took the list of names that Claire had left behind for her and Lisbeth when he, too, disappeared, and she stopped time. She found the man known as Mr. Fife, the father of the woman who had attacked her and Shikamaru in the first Newcomer Hunt, and she slit his throat.

It didn’t feel real, because he didn’t die while she was there. She went home, and started time up again, and waited for the news to report his death. Even after what had happened sank in, Nill didn’t regret what she did.

Dave came back, and he still remembered Nill; and Yosuke came back a month later, and he remembered her too. And though Newcomers were losing their rights all over the island, though nothing was really better, Nill wasn’t alone. It was the only good thing that had happened to her in months, and she was so beyond grateful that she had no words.

Nill had been living with Shika’s ghost for a long time, though. She had moved into his empty apartment after he died, and had stayed there for several months. He was the man that she set many of her standards to, whose methods she used in her own life and way of doing things. His absence was a weight on her shoulders that never lifted no matter what she did, and Nill never got over his death. She decided that she couldn’t keep living with something that was gone, so she decided to burn down the apartment. She left many of the mementos of people that she’d gained over the years in the apartment (sets of keys from numerous homes, belongings of people that were no longer there, gifts that she had held onto over the years) and she sat outside, smoking with one of her closest friends - Gilbert Nightray - while they watched it burn. Even if she would never forget the people that had died, she concluded that she was still alive even if they weren’t, and she needed to start acting like it, because up until that point she had forgotten what that meant.

This is where things start to get a little tricky. One of the last things she can really remember doing in Siren's Port was setting her apartment on fire, smoking with Gilbert and asking him to look after something for her. She had been on the way to Yosuke's apartment, and then suddenly, what she could remember just cut off. There was no moment of her passing out, no acknowledgment of fatigue. She was walking, and the next thing she knew, she was waking up and the world was wrong.

She woke up in Exsilium scared half out of her mind, because there was another woman in the room with her, and Nill couldn't hear her thoughts. Nill pulls her gun on her, terrified, until the woman calmly talked Nill down and explained the situation to her.

Exsilium was a world gone wrong. Taken in by people to help fight their war, Nill's abilities were taken from her and replaced with a new weapon of her choice. When asked by the Initiative - the people running the small-scale, severely outnumbered side of the war - she requested that she be made the weapon. She regained her telepathy and mind reading, at the cost of needing to relearn how to use it, along with some additional skills she had yet to discover fully. Her days (a good five months) were mostly spent training, because there was nothing else for her in Exsilium - until the day that Transports began getting sick, a tactical move of biological warfare ordered by the enemies of the Initiative, the United Earth. Eventually they deemed the island unfit for human life (a technicality, something to make them look good to the rest of the population on their side), and they bombed the hell out of the Transports. Things began to mirror the environment of the Port as the Natives began to turn against the Transports. Even as conditions began to get worse, Nill slowly became accustomed to life there. There was nothing about it she liked, but there were a few people - a man calling himself Kaneis, who told more lies than truths, and children in a group called the Mekakushi Dan - that almost made her feel at home there. They made her feel like her time there wasn't meaningless

Even so, Nill was always driven by her desire to return to Siren's Port. She people she loved were still there - no matter how wretched the world, her heart was there.

Despite this, Nill found herself giving a part of her heart to the people she was with in Exsilium as well. She looked after the members of the Mekakushi Dan to the best of her ability, and she became good friends with Kaneis, as well as a troll by the name of Kanaya. Though she would not stay behind for them, she did everything she could for them.

One day, someone that had been Nill's friend for years arrived in Exsilium. Back in NeoGenesis there had been a woman by the name of Seras Victoria, who worked with Shikamaru briefly, and who had always been very motherly towards Nill. Nill had never known what parents were meant to be like, but when she thought about it, the only thing that came to mind was Seras. And by some miracle Seras actually knew Nill, she was her Seras, and for one amazing moment Nill was overjoyed.

Her joy lasted for about as long as it took Seras to begin talking to her. There, in Seras's head, were images that Nill didn't know, things she didn't remember. The Port had gone berserk - and in Seras's mind there was Nill's face, a brief flicker of them saying goodbye to each other. When asked, Seras said she didn't know what had happened to Nill or her friends after that, and that was all it took for Nill to know that something had gone wrong. That maybe if she didn't have these memories now that they just hadn't happened to her yet, and that if she got back to the Port, it might be just so she could experience that.

Her desire to get back there was not lessened, but after that it came with a certain amount of fear. But for the moment her priorities had to remain elsewhere, because soon Exsilium needed to be evacuated. Just after the Initiative got all of the Transports off the planet and up to a base on the moon, the entire island of Exsilium was nuked, and all of the Exiles died in an instant. The mushroom cloud was visible from space, and while many of the Transports watched in horror, Nill ran into another room and vomited.

They were stuck on the moon base for months, and Nill spent most of the time trying to make herself stronger, but sometimes she made friends. A notable one was a boy named Nico di Angelo. When he realized that she had died because of his powers, instead of keeping it a secret he told Nill about it. Nill met Nico during a point in her life where she had forgotten how to trust people, how to really want to live. She spent so much of her time in the Port stuck in the poisonous mind of a very sad friend that she never realized it had impacted her own thinking severely. But Nico told Nill something that he didn't need to, probably would have been much more comfortable never mentioning, and because of that he won Nill's trust instantly. But Nico was not a happy person, and he was young, so Nill made a point of keeping an eye on him after that.

She also became friends with a little girl by the name of Lily, and as Nill spent more and more time with Lily, she realized that Lily was the girl who Heine never got over. That Lily, if she wasn't dead already, was going to die if she went back to her own world. Nill promised Lily that she would never, ever return there, and she fully intended to make sure that promise was kept.

It took dozens of missions before they could change the world in the past enough that the island of Exsilium still existed, and even then it was stuck in nuclear winter. Transports were finally allowed to go back down to the surface, though they needed to find their own ways to get by. Nill began to live with the Mekakushi Dan, in a big house, and for the first time in a long while Nill was genuinely happy. She'd forgotten what it was like to live in a place full of people that she cared about. While she lived with the Dan she made a point of making sure they had food, of showing them how to do things, of protecting themselves. Over the months Nill became a pretty frequent smoker, because it reminded her of the half dozen people she'd known over the years that smoked, and at night she would stand outside the house and smoke, and look up into the sky, and she was so, so happy. She visited Nico in the shrine he had built for Hades frequently, and she made sure he had food too, that he had warm clothes, that he took care of himself. And for a little while, things were quiet.

One day Nill spoke with Kano, a member of the Mekakushi dan, and they found a strange sort of kinship in the fact that they were both liars. They talked about going back to where they needed to be, and trying to have a good life. Nill genuinely believed that it might be possible, even as what she had found out from Seras whispered in the back of her mind that she was going to die.

The problem waas that they stayed quiet. As time went on Nill began to grow anxious, because the feeling in that place reminded her a lot of the feeling that had been in NeoGenesis before the world went to hell. She began texting people to make sure they were still around, but it wasn't long before many disappeared. Seras. Nico. Most of the members of the Mekakushi Dan.

Lily.

Nill began smoking indoors as the world began to slow. And eventually, a day came when the Initiative finally let the Transports leave if they wanted to. For the first time in her life Nill had the opportunity to say goodbye, and decide where she wanted to go.

She was still terrified, but Nill said her goodbyes to the people that she loved. She wished them the best, left Kanaya her guns because she had more in the Port, and Nill went home.

Nill woke up on Yosuke's couch, back to the age she had been when she left, and she remembered nothing of Exsilium.

Every so often she got the feeling that something was wrong - that she was missing something important, but with the way her arrival in the Port had altered some of her memories, she couldn't tell if that was really any different than she'd always felt there. It was like Exsilium had never happened - and because of that, Nill had forgotten that she learned how to trust people again... and that she had learned how to live again.

Almost the day after she burned her previous home down Newcomers were transported to Missionworth, which was the settlement that started Siren's Port years ago. They saw what the island was like before the strike of the darkness-- before the Core. Then, all the Newcomers watched every single settler get overtaken by the darkness, and turn into monsters.

Nill had known about that aspect of the darkness, but few other people did - and even then, no one had ever seen anything like that on such a large scale. They were transported back to the modern day Siren's Port, but no one could look at the world the same way again. Meanwhile, many people returned to their homes to find they'd been evicted. The following months were met with great prejudice to Newcomers. Laws continued to get worse and worse regarding their safety, and the Newcomer Network was eventually seized by the police, and they were able to hack into most everything there. People were arrested or interrogated just for speaking out. Children in schools began to beat up Newcomer kids or give them poisoned food. Some Newcomers were even kicked out of their homes despite never having disappeared to warrant it by law. The structure of the place was collapsing in on itself.

Somehow in the middle of all this madness, despite only just barely even dating (as they never actually went on a date), Yosuke found the time to publicly propose to Nill. Several people congratulated him while others told him he was an idiot, and after much debate and seeking counsel from Dave and admitting that she kept so many secrets from Yosuke (though never admitting that to Yosuke), she eventually turned him down. They had a lot to talk about.

Almost immediately after the mayor of the city was kidnapped and murdered, and martial law was declared. Natives started openly attacking Newcomers, and the city went to hell. Yosuke and Nill settled things and remained together, although Nill knew that some day she might need to leave him for his own good.

In the misery and the chaos, an opportunity was presented to Nill. She'd kept tabs on a man called Spencer, who funded and ran the Newcomer Hunts from months ago, and she had an opportunity to go after him. She had an opportunity to do what Shika couldn't. Knowing this... Nill took what she was offered. She made sure someone knew she might not be back, because Shika had never done that for her, and then she went out with Gilbert. Together they made sure that Spencer died, eaten alive by one of the largest and most dangerous darkness monsters in the city. Just like Shikamaru Nara never came back to life, Henry D. Spencer III never returned. And just like Jaina's father, Nill felt no regret. She thought it would be the last victory she had in that city.

She was wrong.

One day... one day, something happened that no one expected. Nill could feel the world changing around her, the impending doom that everyone else could feel, but she could never fully guess what would come next.

The Core went berserk, its power reaching out and flooding the outside world. The Pull that kept everyone on the island was lifted, and the island... the island was doomed. The darkness was out of control, and everyone was in danger - but for some, there was hope. The Core fell through the earth, and it created a path out, possibly to home for a hundred different people. Many people said their goodbyes. When Nill realized what was happening, she went to Jesse Pinkman one last time. She gained a few extra powers from him before he went on his way with Lisbeth, and Nill went to fight.

She stayed near the Core and destroyed as many of the monsters that might try to attack it as she could. She said goodbye to Gilbert, and many of the other people that passed through while she protected the way out with Dave. They fought together, keeping each other alive as well as keeping everyone they could safe.

It was a mistake, but Nill saw a monster in the shadows that surrounded them. One that was different than the other darkness monsters, one she had seen before, the morning she and Shikamaru walked out of the hunting grounds alive but other people had not. It was an omen of death, and Nill believed it was there for Dave. She didn't give the omen a chance to get him, and Nill got one last victory in before the island fell apart. She tampered with his senses with her telepathy, made sure his reactions were compromised, and she shoved him into the portal home. Looking back it would still be one of the cruelest things she ever did to anyone, and she would hate anyone that tried to do it to her, but she wanted him to live. Even if that meant he wouldn't remember her anymore.

After that, she thought it was okay. You don't live through the destruction of two worlds, and she thought - just for a moment - that maybe if she could just hold out for as long as she could, she wouldn't end up in worlds like this again. She wouldn't need to see anyone else die. And Yosuke hadn't wanted to leave... so she'd stay behind with him.

But then Yosuke changed his mind. The two of them went across the street from the portal, just to take a moment to themselves so they could figure out what to do. And Yosuke talked her into leaving. Going back to Inaba with him, because even if it wasn't perfect, it was a better world than this one. They'd get puppies and live a good life, in some town with a lot of strange fashion, so maybe no one would look twice at her wings. It would be difficult, but maybe-- maybe they could live together. It would never be perfect, but Nill had never wanted perfection.

The relief the idea brought was short-lived. Nill had been wrong earlier, when she thought that death omen was for Dave. When they were about to leave the store, Yosuke saw them in the coolers - three sets of glowing eyes, staring them down. Then the big ones came. The ones that were too fast for either Yosuke or her, even with both of their wind and speed.

Yosuke was the first to die, nearly eviscerated by one of the monsters. He blamed himself and died too quickly to apologize. Just as the light began to go out of his eyes, perhaps because she was dying herself, Nill finally remembered Exsilium, in broken pieces and fragments. She remembered Kano, and their conversation together, and Nill remembered that she had wanted to live so badly, that she tried for a year just to get back to Yosuke. That in some way she had known this was coming because of Seras, and if she had remembered sooner then maybe she could have stopped all this.

Nill screamed, just before a darkness monster outside destroyed the building, crushing her under the debris.