Conclusion

[voidtreckermods]

Thank you.

For those inside the system the voices of the Great-Seasons ring out around them once the red mass has vanished and the blue plinth it was smothering is freed once more. They don't have all that much time to reflect on that before they find themselves waking up once more in their bodies around the tree trunks.

Or at least, around the tube that is the Great-Season they entered through. All illusions have vanished now, all that is left are pipes and metal.

The Great-Seasons allow them passage out from the centre, no sentries or pipes attack them this time. Everything seems to have been put to rights, the walls in the Autumn sector have stopped moving, there is no strange weather effects in the Summer Sector, no engineering problems in Winter and all the camaloid creatures in Spring are calm. Any Helpmates they come across are doing their jobs and no longer malfunctioning.

After a small amount of time, enough to check that all is well, their SCA's light up. All Passengers are to return to the Voidtrecker Express.

Considering the vast distances involved it is probably best that they use the evacuation function to return to the Luggage carriage.

Once all Voidtreckers have returned the train returns to the Void once more.

Comments

[its_dad_sanzo]

"Oh, undoubtedly," Koumyou blows a few smoke rings up at the ceiling.

He doesn't seem particularly concerned by it, but that's pretty normal for him.

"Personally, I'm fine with being here anyway."

[worthallthis]

Soldat wants to get to the bottom of it, wants to save worlds that might be in danger, but they're also not really great for working out big-picture strategy. They're made for details, practicalities. This whole over-arching, world-ending threat thing? Not really their wheelhouse. It sucks.

"Rather be here than back home, with your important paper of creation?" they say, only a little bit dryly.

[its_dad_sanzo]

"Well, I'm very much dead back on my world," Koumyou says it so very casually, like he says most things to most people. He takes a drag and blows another smoke ring up at the ceiling. "So if I wasn't here, I imagine I'd be reincarnating into someone new right about now."

But.

"But I have someone here who likes me, so I'd like to stay 'me', at least for now."

Until Devero's tired of him, at the very least.

[worthallthis]

"Oh, yeah. Me, too. Being dead, I mean. But I was somewhere else after, before the train caught me, and... well, maybe I'm dead there, now, too. I don't know," they admit. "I'm glad you have someone here to live for, though. That's important."

[its_dad_sanzo]

"Somewhere else... was that the place with no sun?"

Speaking of the sun, Koumyou lets the light and warm radiation from the sutra start to taper off. He doesn't know about the other guy, but he's going to have a sun burn if it keeps going much longer.

And the longer it's floating up there and glowing like one of the stars it created, the more likely someone is to wander in on this and freak the hell out. Koumyou's learned to expect any number of reactions to it; his own boyfriend wouldn't be precisely thrilled to wander into a car and find it active.

Let alone any number of other people who know what it is.

[worthallthis]

"Right, that place." They sigh a little at the dimming of their personal little sun, but it's fine. It lasted longer than they'd hoped for. "We were trying to stop the World Eaters. If we succeeded-- it's possible we just would've stopped existing there. In which case. Being here is better, I guess." But they just wish maybe their friends could've come with them....

[its_dad_sanzo]

The Seiten sutra flutters down from the ceiling and floats back to Koumyou's shoulders, settling back into its rightful place like a living thing coming back to roost.

"World Eaters, huh? Sounds vaguely familiar."

The Muten sutra, with its dominion over nothingness and destruction, and its Sanzo, Ukoku, who only feels alive when it's 'eat or be eaten'.

What a pairing.

"So did you win?"

[worthallthis]

Sounds familiar here, too, in the creatures hunting the train. Soldat is convinced they're related.

"No idea," they sigh. "I hope so. I was taken by the train right as we launched the missiles. So I don't know if they hit, or if they did enough damage."

[its_dad_sanzo]

There's that, too, which has also reminded him of the Muten's power to remove anything from existence.

The Muten wouldn't have left any traces, though. The train itself wouldn't be around, and Halo certainly wouldn't have survived long enough to speak to the small group who had found her -- Koumyou included.

"Well, I suppose there's nothing to do about it now, then."

Either the missiles hit, or they didn't. Either they did enough damage, or they didn't. And now Soldat's here, so--

"Wait, you launched missiles at something called a World Eater?"

Never mind, now he's curious.

[worthallthis]

"Well. We called them that. I don't know if that was their official name, or if they called themselves that, or if it just came because they ate life and made stars go out," Soldat says. "Maybe the scientist who summoned us to her dying world called them that because it sounded ominous."

They tilt their head back, looking up at the void through the greenhouse windows. "They were. Big. Dark. Sucked up light. Quadropedal, though we couldn't see exactly how many legs they had, so maybe hexapedal or something. Radioactive, maybe. Being too close to one made some of my hair fall out. Made some of the others want to hurt people. Whipped the spirits up into a frenzy of violence."

[its_dad_sanzo]

"Well, I'm lucky I didn't end up in that place instead of this place, then," Koumyou says cheerfully, "I imagine the Seiten sutra would be quite the target for them."

Being that it's the concept of light and creation itself.

[worthallthis]

"The Seiten sutra wouldn't have worked," Soldat says with a little shrug. "No light magic worked. It would get swallowed up before it actually lit anything. The only light we had were these--" They tap their lantern gently again. "--and the stars."

[its_dad_sanzo]

"I can't imagine it wouldn't be quite the tempting meal, regardless."

It's a hell of a lot of power, and light's only the one aspect.

"And then I would have been obligated to help kill them. Which just sounds terribly troublesome! So I'm glad I didn't go there when I died."

[worthallthis]

Soldat snorts a little, amused. "Not everyone there participated in trying to kill them. But you woulda gotten a pretty big side-eye from people if you didn't help at all. We worked together, there. We were a. A community."

[its_dad_sanzo]

"Well, I try not to get involved in anything too troublesome, but protecting the sutras is sort of my life's purpose."

Plural because Koumyou still forgets sometimes that he's no longer the guardian of two of the damn things. The first and only Sanzo with two sutras to guard, and he'd done so for longer than many Sanzos survived guarding one.

[worthallthis]

Frankly, having one doesn't necessarily mean one's job description isn't protecting all of them in general. Soldat doesn't even remotely question it. "Suppose it only matters if the things after the train are the same thing. Or are susceptible to the same weapons."

[its_dad_sanzo]

That's also very true! That's certainly how Koumyou had ended up with the Maten alongside the Seiten -- it needed a protector when Tenkai died, and he was it.

Though why it hadn't been assigned a whole other Sanzo later was anyone's guess. Tenkai had probably seen Genjo in Koumyou's future, and knew Koumyou was the path to its next guardian.

Shit was complicated like that when seeing the future got involved.

"That, I don't know. And I certainly have other reasons to help murder anything that comes after the train, now."

[worthallthis]

"Yeah," Soldat agrees sleepily, resting their head back down on their knees. "There's good people here. Don't want anything to happen to 'em."

[its_dad_sanzo]

"Indeed," and unless Soldat says anything else to him, Koumyou is willing to just nap in peace.