Chapter 41 - The Seraphim Twins P11
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Larie shook her head. "No. Your determination to help and their determination to see it through is why I'm here. You notice how quickly I arrived? Barely a few hours after the storytelling ended yesterday? Rather than the truth, Luna told you to try knowing it was impossible because she wanted to speak to me about it first. After that conversation, we decided that I would come to tell you it is not necessary. Since their split, Elysia and Alfia can coexist... forever. They are individual souls, not halves of one. The lot of you who can sense how dense a soul is likely thought that their 'halves' were as dense as any other soul because of how powerful their 'originals' were. Nope, they were actually just two souls cohabitating, one active and one dormant. The same applies to Maya and 'Mavel'."
I saw Mavel glared at her out of the corner of my eye. "I heard those air quotes, Larie."
"Come on, you know what I mean. Mavel is a compound of Maya Velinova. You don't actually intend to keep that name, do you?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. I don't exactly have another name to go by."
"Ask Mabel and Velarus," Alethea suggested. "You were 'born' on Gaia, and you've had a proper parent-child relationship with them this whole time. Mabel is our mother, and Velarus is our father. We were estranged from our Eden family, so..."
Mavel looked at me and Fia, and we both nodded.
"I like Alfia and Sanae, so I don't need another name. But if you don't like Mavel or want a name that isn't just Maya Velinova put together... then why not?"
She sighed. "This is a lot to take in. I'm not a soul half? I'm... my own individual? How does that affect our romantic relationships?"
"It doesn't need to affect our romantic relationships at all," I said. "We already thought of each other as separate people," I smiled at Fia, "as sisters. Now we know that we actually are sisters. Each of us is in love with all seven of you. The connections we have now don't change at all."
"I agree," Luma said. "It doesn't matter to me that they're two souls or two halves of one soul." She smirked at us with an obviously thirsty look in her eyes. "I want 'em both!"
"Yep," Michelle added. "Eli and Fia, Aya and Mavel... nothing changes."
"Nothing changes," Adele echoed.
""Nothing changes,"" Lily and Ally said, both smiling at me and Fia.
"Althoooooough," Luma mused as she slipped over behind Lily and Ally. "Now that these two are being more open about their feelings... perhaps-"
I chopped her on the head. "Let them move at their own pace, you thirsty cat."
She crouched holding her head. "Oww... Eli! You actually can hurt me in here, you know!"
"Oh." I held my hand on her head and wrapped my mana around her to sooth it. "I... forgot that I need to hold back in here." I leaned down and kissed her cheek. "Better?"
She hopped up and grinned. "Better!"
"You silly cat." I giggled and turned back to the mental constructs. "Anyway, back to the topic. So... what happens now? You told us that you're not living entities. You chose those words carefully, did you not? Explain yourself."
"We can't be given life outside of your mind scapes. We can take over your bodies at your leisure and appear as holograms, both at the cost of mana spent permanently, but we cannot become souls."
"Why were you created in the first place?"
"We were created by Lady Luna when you split yourselves. Because of how traumatic those memories are, she took them from you and created us with the instructions to tell you eventually when we decided you were ready." She glared at Larie. "Though that decision was forced on us before we got to that point."
"Wait, if this is all true," Mavel said, "then what about the futures I've searched through? In some of them, Maya and I merge, in others Eli and Fia merge, in some both pairs merge, and in some neither pair merges."
The constructs both shook their heads. "I don't know."
"I can answer that," Larie said. "In those futures where you merge, Fia and Mavel die and are permanently merged with their twins. It becomes irreversible. It's no longer two souls cohabitating. It's one soul absorbing the other like what happens with every other Transcendent twins-to-be, without the new soul part. Elysia becomes more powerful than she and Alfia were separately, and same for Maya and Mavel."
"That cannot happen," I said immediately, looking at Fia. "Never. No matter what happens, we will find a way to win without that. I was already determined to never merge, and now that determination is exponentially greater. I absolutely forbid it for all four of us! We figure it out without losing any of us! And no more casual mentions of merging or jokes about it."
"I agree," Alethea said as she grabbed Mavel's hands. "Never!"
"If we hadn't done what we did yesterday, I might have argued... but things are different. I want to be my own person, for myself." She looked at Alfia, as did the rest of us. "And you already got to that point."
"Yeah." Fia reached out and grabbed my hand. "We figure it out together. Nobody dies. Nobody is lost."
"Except..." I said, looking at the person I thought was my original until now. "You said you cannot become souls. So then you will forever be artificial entities inside our dreamscapes?"
She smiled. "More or less. Until you grow tired of us, we'll always be here."
"Yes," the pink-haired construct said. "But you should give us our own names. Now that you know the truth, we shouldn't use your names anymore."
I smiled and glanced at Alethea. She shrugged.
"We'll think about it, or you can come up with your own names," I said.
"As far as I'm concerned," Michelle said. "Nothing changes. I just have two less to worry about with my project."
"No, Adara," Larie said, shaking her head. "You can't magically turn two artificial constructs into real people."
"Says who?" she shot back. "Just because nobody has done it before doesn't mean nobody will ever do it. Watch me. I'll figure it out one way or another."
"Hear that?" I said, looking at the two in question. "She'll do it."
They exchanged glances and giggled, the pink-haired one saying, "I believe it."
My look-alike added, "Yeah. I do, too."
"Girls..." Larie said. She looked almost sad.
Why that kind of look, Larie? Why do you look sad after hearing Mimi's determination?
She shook her head rapidly and seemed to hype herself up. "Never mind. You're right. If anyone can make it possible, it's you lot."
You're not hiding it from me. Something is bothering you.
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Revision: 2025-7-29