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When the Queen Jyamato came to them with open arms and declared that she, Sara Sakurai, had clawed her way out of oblivion with her own hands, they were all hesitant, but once she transformed into her human self and chastised herself for the strange seriousness Neon was the first to run up and embrace her.
"It's really you, Sara-san!"
"It's me!"
The touch of her warm skin wasn't quite right, but Neon didn't mind. She knew she herself wasn't quite right either.
Keiwa wanted nothing to do with the Queen. The very idea of her scared him. He'd fallen for cheap imitations of the dead before. Neon understood, but that didn't mean she had to like it.
It hurt Sara. She was a full backup, as real as any revival, as real as Keiwa himself , but she was a Jyamato, so she was no longer his sister? Neon's parents had learnt to love her even if she was fabricated, so maybe there was still hope, but it'd taken eleven years. Who knew if there'd still be a world in eleven years.
(They had to believe in Ace, she knew. She did. More than anything, she did.)
There were no longer imperfections in Sara's face that could be smoothened by beauty masks in relaxing rituals. The cherry blossom pistils that sometimes escaped her cheeks could be pulled with an expert tweezer, but the flowers would be ripped to shreds, the scar of human vanity as visible on the Queen's wreath as it was on the green bruises on Sara's face.
"You should let yourself overlap," Neon whispered against rice lily black hair, quoting Ace's own tale about her dealings with Samsara, arms tight against Sara's waist one night (This relaxed state was as much sleep as she got now - aware, but no longer photosynthesising, simply breathing -, but Neon still let her lay in her bed while Keiwa dominated the apartment that nominally belonged to his sister), "Trying to smooth out the places where the identities don't fit together just hurts you. It's all you."
It's all me , Neon thought too, Akari's memories are part of me even if that life is not mine, if I'm her replacement.
"It's easy to say when you look perfectly human. I can't always keep myself looking like myself. I slip. I'm a Jyamato, that's fine, but… I'm afraid I'll stop being me."
Neon held her tighter.
"I guess even if I'm human, there's still a disconnect. I look just like Akari-san if she got to grow up. It used to hurt every time I looked in the mirror, feeling like I had no identity of my own. Like I was an usurper."
The bark-braided tentacle from the back of the Queen's head sprouted from Sara's nape and the mandible at its end kissed Neon's face, softly caressing her cheeks.
"Someone like you shouldn't be sad. Neon-chan deserves to be happy."
"So do you, Sara-san," she kissed the soft vine, "Even if you lose your humanity you'll still deserve it."
The Queen was a formidable fighter. Her Jyamato genetic memory imprinted in her very DNA the dexterity to maneaouvre her tentacles and vines while dashing through solid surfaces as though they were water. Wild blooms choked enemy fire like a tree's roots bursting through a water pipe. A Last Boss and an Ancient Beast mutant all in one, surely the result of the hellish selection Daichi had given his archival livestock.
He fought alongside her now though, Marrella back to back with Tullimonstrum even as distrust festered. Neon felt wrong to allow him, but Ace claimed memory intoxication in the end beget empathy, or not quite that - a fragmentation of identity, a mind full of the hopes and dreams of others, including Sara, almost as fully thinking and feeling clones confined to a host mind. True identity dissolution. Perhaps as scary as apotheosis.
Neon wondered if Sara could see the ghost of herself in him among all the others, and if being seen was what finally cut off the once-sparrow's sharp tongue.
Swirling stripes and spots in pink, red and yellow began to show in Sara's skin, and she was beautiful like this, especially because she seemed happy, comfortable.
Maybe talking to the copy of herself that existed in Daichi, and to the strange hybrid existence of the Marrella Jyamato himself made her feel more at ease with the reality of change. She wasn't the same Sara, but she was her sequel, carrying on her feelings. That wasn't the end of her.
And then, the bells of a new world tolled.
The upheaval had put a taste of dread in Neon's mouth even before her vision cleared and she noticed Sara's disappearance.
She transformed to Na-go for maneaouverability as she ran across the city, dialing for Ace on the Spider Phone.
What picked her up was laboured breathing, a rasp of rough metal on silk cloth, and the background noise of the normal and silly sibling conversation that drew Neon to the Sakurais in the first place.
The Phone almost slipped from her hand in the broken gasp that left her, but it tied its digital thread around her fingers.
Keiwa, what did you do ?
There had been a lurch of wrongness in Sara's stomach the whole day, and she couldn't put a finger as to why. Keiwa seemed strange, more desperate, more clingy, unwilling to let go of her even when she reminded him one of them had to work. She managed to get through her day at the dispatch, but the spots at the edge of her vision remained all day, swimming closer and closer into centre at times.
When she returned home, her brother was nowhere to be found. A hastily scribbled note said he needed to take care of business really quick and to please stay safe, and Sara couldn't help but sigh deeply. She was three years older than him. Who here was the adult with a job?
Scrawled in even messier handwriting was a crooked post-script: DON'T LET THEM TAKE THE GOD FROM YOU.
A wash of confusion came over her reading it. Sara sometimes prayed at shrines, but she was not particularly devout. This seemed different from everyday religion though - how could one take a god, even more one that someone didn't even know they had?
The spots came again, and with them a drive to find this god as her mind got messier.
She wandered all rooms in the apartment, bits and pieces of nonsensical memory filling her head with impossible tales of monsters and heroes and time travellers until all she could hear was a sharp ringing noise.
It ended at Keiwa's room. It'd always been here, hadn't it? Since the beginning, when he began hiding his vlogs from her.
With barbed wire circling the white robes of a saint, an angelic figure laid sickly in Keiwa's bed, marble creeping at bare hands and feet.
"...Ace-sama?"
"Why can't you be happy for her, Neon-chan?!" Keiwa shouted, sword rattling against the glowing protective sabers summoned by the Fantasy Buckle. "She's human again! Alive, not a- Not a monster pretending to be my sister."
Neon blew him away with a wave of kinetic energy in anger and hurt. Keiwa was her friend . He of all people should know that Neon was the wrong person to bark about impostors pretending to be your family members. But this was about Sara.
"You used Ace to do this though, didn't you? Was exploiting Tsumuri for power not enough? You had to hurt Ace?" She pinned him against the wall, grabbing him by the cape. "You couldn't get it through your head that your sister could save her own damn self so you go and hurt all the women in your life to put her back in her place?"
"Ace is not a- He agreed. We saved both our sisters. It shouldn't have hurt him. "
Neon scoffed behind the mask.
"You never got to know how the Goddesses' powers actually work."
Large electrical pliers made work of the barbed wire in grueling, tense work, but Ace still could barely move after freed, as if the ties remained even if their physical form was severed.
"How did Keiwa…" It pained Sara to consider it, but how else was she to interpret a captive deity bound to her brother's bed, even if the knowledge that impelled this conclusion hadn't finished settling in yet?
Ace gave a crooked smile, but there was a sad look in those electric blue eyes.
"He wished the mistakes he made with the Apocalypse Game away. That was a very radical world transformation that violated many wills."
Sara furrowed her brows. "...If you go against someone's wishes, this happens to you?"
"Including my own. It's a godly tradeoff. Great power comes at the costs of many, so it must be punished."
The expression in Sara's face must've given away her horror, because a marble hand worked enough power to poke her in the forehead with a fox hand puppet.
"It's not the end. I reverted the Apocalypse Game . Nothing else. Which Sara are you?"
Realisation dawned as her body began to sprout small blossoms.
"Jya-jya-"
"Exactly."
The Star of the Stars of the Stars gave her a truly winning smile.
"Knock some sense into this world, Queen Jyamato."