A Third Butterfly Flaps its Wings (HI3 Seele SI - No Metaknowledge)

[Nameless Arsenal]

Chapter 1 - Drifting, Alone


How long did I drift through this place? There was nothing I could use to track the passage of time and I'd long lost count of the things I saw.

So many worlds I glimpsed as I drifted through this eldritch space… Some were on the verge of destruction by individuals able to command the very elements and bend the laws of the Universe. Sometimes it was hordes of white monsters or even zombies. Sometimes the worlds had already been destroyed and all that was left was crumbling ruins that were rapidly decaying in the hostile environment that was this… Realm? Dimension?

It was like a sea filled with the rotting remains of shattered worlds. Time seemed to have no meaning and Space was barely any better.

How long had I spent drifting? Days? Weeks? Maybe even years?

Long enough to have begun forgetting things. Forgetting my past. Who had I been before ending up here?

I'd been losing parts of myself for some time, long enough that I sometimes wondered if this life I vaguely remembered had ever actually happened or if I'd just imagined it all from pieces of fragmented worlds that I'd picked up along the way.

I still existed in some way, of that I was sure.

Did I even have a body?

I extended an arm in front of me, only to see a purple-veined translucent green shadow in place of my flesh and blood arm. It was like looking at some kind of off-color ghost.

Huh.

How strange. Intellectually, I figured that I should be freaked out by this, yet I couldn't seem to feel anything about my current situation.

I simply… am.

In the distance—as much as I could call anything distant in this strange space—I saw one of those strange blue and purple ghost-shadow things that I remembered seeing roaming around this place. This one was swimming towards me. Probably.

As it closed in, I began to distinguish its form more clearly. It was made of many disconnected floating parts and even sported some kind of segmented tail. It looked interesting.

I remembered touching one of those ghost things at some point, was this one the same?

No, it had been some kind of strange, vaguely bird-shaped ghost, hadn't it? These ghosts had mostly been ignoring me, so I wondered why this one had suddenly taken an interest in me.

Was it dangerous?

I supposed I would find out soon…

The creature eventually reached me and then stopped, like it was staring at me—not that it had any visible eyes.

The ghost-shadow was large. Far larger than me, at least.

Suddenly, its segmented tail swung forward and through my chest.

I looked down to see the massive ghostly appendage going through my own green shadowy torso. I looked back up at the overly aggressive thing in front of me.

Dick.

I plunged my own arm in its central section in retaliation. A green glow began to build up around my limb and the creature started thrashing. It couldn't escape.

The green glow detonated and I flew back. I saw some of the detached segments of the creature flying off alongside me. Looking down, I saw that its severed tail was still stuck inside me.

I drifted for some time. Thinking was becoming more difficult. I didn't feel pain but it seemed like the monster had still wounded me in some way.

…

I regained consciousness to see blue and red. I was heading towards something… different. Something I didn't remember seeing in this space before.

---

The air—what air?—tasted of blue and red. The floor smelled like uncertainty and determination, kindness and cruelty and love and longing.

I opened my eyes—I had eyes, now?—to see red and black hanging right above me. Hair, that was someone's hair. Someone who was standing above me. A girl.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds, trying to gather my thoughts. They were… scattered after what had happened to me before ending up in this new location. Suddenly feeling after staying numb to everything for so long… It was disorienting.

I opened my eyes once more.

Mesmerizing eyes that shone like perfect rubies, staring at me with a cold, calculating glare. Soft, delicate features that seemed to beg for a gentle caress yet were twisted in a scowl. Magnificent lustrous black hair with a red underlayer the color of freshly spilled blood which gave the pretty girl a dangerous air. She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever laid eyes on.

Was she blushing?

"Shut," she snarled at me.

What–?

"Your thoughts are too loud," she clarified, still just as aggressive. There was an odd reverberation to her voice, an echo that made it sound much more ominous.

My thoughts? She could read them? No, it was something else, I could feel it. It was this strange space we were in, it had something to do with thoughts, ideas and feelings. It was why I knew that…

…This girl wasn't angry at me, per se. No, she was doing this to protect someone.

She frowned and I felt something shift against my neck. I went to look, only to feel something sharp against my jugular the moment I began moving.

I finally noticed that she was holding some kind of pole. My eyes followed its length all the way to the point where it connected to an overly large and ornate scythe head. The point of which was resting against the side of my throat.

Lovely. The prettiest girl I'd ever seen was standing over me and holding a scythe to my throat.

She could have chosen a more practical weapon, really.

She scowled, a light blush on her cheeks, "I said to stop that!"

Cute.

Her eyes widened in anger and she pushed her scythe harder against my neck. Was that blood I could feel slowly dripping along my neck?

I think I might have actually lost any and all sense of preservation by spending so long in a state between life and death. Now I couldn't seem to even fear for my own life.

"Arrgh!" The girl growled, taking a step back and spinning her scythe around to bring its other end towards me. I looked at the short, very sharp blade standing on the end of the weapon's haft. A blade that was being pointed right between my eyes.

"Enough of this, talk! Who are you and how did you get in here?!"

"Ah, honestly, I'd like to–" I trailed off.

That wasn't my voice… was it?

I tried again before the girl lost all her patience—she grumbled at that thought. "Unfortunately for you, I have no idea who I am. All I remember is drifting in some strange space full of broken worlds for who knows how long and that I saw some red and blue thing that didn't seem familiar before ending up here."

Well, there was the thing with the purple-blue ghost thing that impaled me on its tail, but she didn't need to know that.

…

Oops?

"You're being completely honest," she stated more than she asked, even if she sounded somewhat incredulous.

It didn't stop me from answering, "Yup."

A moment of silence passed during which the prettiest girl in the world just stared at me—stop scowling, you're too cute to scowl like this.

She growled again and spun her weapon away from me, throwing it to the side where it dispersed into red mist. Then she turned away and threw her hands to the sky, screaming in frustration as she did.

"Whatever. If you do anything to hurt her, I'm killing you," she warned me, the strange properties of this place fully conveying her willingness to follow through on that threat.

"Reasonable," I replied. Was it really? I didn't really have any proper frame of reference anymore…

She huffed as she walked to sit on some fancy-looking upholstered armchair, crossing her legs and leaning against the side to watch something. That chair was the only object in this whole space, unless you counted the black-and-white tiled floor.

I followed her and leaned against her chair to look in the same direction. "Sooo, who is 'her'?" I asked, only for the girl to glare at me like she was offended that I didn't know who she was talking about.

"Seele," she eventually answered after a while, having long returned to staring into the void.

A few… minutes? passed in silence before I decided to bother the pretty girl again. "What are you looking at, actually?"

"Just focus, if you're anything like me, then it should be enough," she replied dismissively.

How useful…

Still, might as well try. I closed my eyes and tried to focus, to find what the girl in red was doing.

I found it. All of a sudden, I could see even though my eyes were still closed. I could feel it, I instinctively knew that I was looking through her eyes. Seele.

She was walking aimlessly in a space similar to the one I was in—no, it was our space that had come to resemble the one Seele was inside of. The same black and white tiles lit by a dim light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Both the sky and horizons were dark, like they were shrouded in some kind of fog. The square pattern on the floor twisted into some fractal mess when it got a few meters away from Seele. Worse yet, even though Seele was moving through the space, nothing seemed to change. That tile pattern moved under her feet as she walked, yet neither the fog or the twisting fractal seemed to get any closer or farther.

She was trapped in some kind of warped space. A fancy prison, nothing more. And us? I believed we were in her mind, just as trapped as she was.

---

How much time did I spend watching through Seele's eyes? Hours? Days? Weeks? What did time even mean, here?

I watched her wander without purpose. I watched her sit and stare into the void for uncountable lengths of time. I watched her curl into a ball and cry for someone to save her until she had no more tears to shed. It was heart-wrenching, yet I couldn't do anything.

So I waited. I waited and I spent the time slowly extracting information from the girl at my side. She didn't have a name and neither did she want one—I chose to call her 'Red'. She generally called me 'You', often with frustration in her voice.

I learned that my theory of us being inside Seele's mind was correct, well, correct enough for our purpose as even Red lacked deeper knowledge on our situation. I learned that Seele had been trapped here for a very long time, even by the standards of this strange place where time had almost no meaning. I also learned that she didn't need food or water—in fact, she hadn't felt hungry in a long, long time.

Most importantly, I learned of how Seele had become trapped here. She had participated in an experiment meant to grant her the ability to not only resist but use 'Honkai', some kind of harmful energy. However, something had gone wrong with the process and she'd ended up in what seemed to be the same chaotic 'Sea' I'd drifted through for ages. For a time, she'd been able to stay close to the metaphorical surface, but after using her 'Stigma' powers to help someone, she had been dragged deeper and deeper until the cage she was currently in formed around her.

All throughout, I continued to gaze through Seele's eyes. I felt her despair, her loneliness, her pain. I felt that tiny spark of hope slowly diminishing, day by day.

How could I not want to help her in these conditions?

"You said that this 'Stigma' granted you two powers of some kind, did you try to use them to break out of this space?" I asked Red. She'd grown… used to my presence, enough so that I felt I could ask more complex questions without getting rebuffed and ignored. She'd even made a chair for me recently, arguing that I was bothering her by leaning on hers. It looked quite similar to hers, only mine was upholstered in a nice forest green.

She turned her head away from me. "No." I waited for her to explain further, which she eventually did with a sigh, "What powers we can use would be useless here. Plus, it's those exact powers that got us here in the first place. We were doing fine until she decided to dig deeper into the Stigma…" she answered, trailing off at the end. Her tone was less aggressive than usual, more subdued.

If there was to be any way to get us out of here, I needed to know all of our options. "What can you do, exactly?"

"See for yourself," she replied, waving her hand towards me.

I witnessed memories as if I was the one living through them. I saw myself invading some kid's mind and tormenting them, all the while feeling justified in doing so and taking pleasure in the act of retribution. I felt myself create and manipulate shadowy limbs out of nothing but energy. I felt myself use that same energy to turn mere data into reality, creating a machine that would protect the person I loved the most. And I felt the pain of being separated from her.

So many powers, all seemingly disconnected from one another… There must be more to it, more to discover.

I wiped tears out of my eyes before asking, "Why didn't you try to experiment? Try to figure out new ways these powers could be used?"

She'd turned to look at me from the corner of her eyes while I was going through the memories. All that meant was that she could turn away from me once more as she refused to answer. She was… sulking? No, that wasn't quite right. There was a lot more to it that I could feel through the minspace—mindscape?

There was something more to it, a deeper reason as to why neither Seele nor Red had even tried to escape with their powers.

"I saw other bits and pieces attached to these memories. You used to talk to her pretty frequently, at least after ending up here." And yet she hadn't said a word to Seele since I'd stumbled here. "How long has it been since you last talked to her?"

Red didn't answer. Instead, I felt a mix of dark emotions coming from her that I could hardly describe. That wasn't her sending me these feelings, that was her losing her hold on them, causing them to leak into the mindscape for me to sense.

"You–" I began.

"Don't say it!" She snapped, interrupting me.

I soldiered on in a softer voice, "You're just as lost as Seele is, are you? You've lost all hope, to the point where you know that trying to escape and failing would just break the both of you."

"YES!" She screamed back, the eldritch echo in her voice making the walls of the mindscape tremble. "Is that what you want to hear!? I'm just as powerless as she is! I can't even help her out of this hole we dug ourselves into!"

I stood up from my chair and walked to Red's. She looked at me, tears in her eyes. "Don't touch me, I'll kill you," she warned me. It barely had any heat compared to the promise she'd made when she had me at scythe-point.

"That'd just leave you even more lonely," I replied just before squeezing besides her into her chair. Red barely even protested when I picked her up to place her in my lap and hug her. I figure she felt too exhausted to really fight back.

Time passed. Eventually she untensed and turned to ball her fists into my top and press her head against my shoulder. I just held her tighter.

We were all in the same boat, now. And I planned on rowing until it got us out of that sea.

"Don't you dare give her a false hope," she mumbled into my shoulders. I barely understood her words, but her thoughts were loud and clear in that moment.

"I won't," I promised. "We will find a way out of here. All three of us, together. We'll escape this prison no matter what. We'll even break this world in two if we have to." I refused to believe otherwise. These girls didn't deserve this kind of ending.

"But first, there's someone we need to talk to," I added. The beautiful girl with a face marred by tear streaks lifted her head to stare at me. I called out into the void, the same way Red had done in her memories.

"Seele?"

---

A/N: It should probably be stated that "Green" currently looks like a palette-swapped Seele, just like "Red".

And now we have RGB Seele. That's a whole 50% more Seele.
This is the product of sudden obsession that started with shower thoughts. Surprisingly, I have actual plans on where this will go.
Also, many thanks to the Discord people for the feedback, you know who you are and you're all great.

Did I just recklessly post this as a thread without even posting it in the Honkai Snippets Thread? Yes, yes I did. Because I only remembered it existed after filling out 3/4 of the "post thread" stuff and couldn't be bothered after that.

 

[Zamoah]

"That'd just leave you even more lonely," I replied just before squeezing besides her into her chair. Red barely even protested when I picked her up to place her in my lap and hug her. I figure she felt too exhausted to really fight back.

Click to shrink...

Cute.
Watched.

And now we have RGB Seele.

Click to shrink...

Finally, the prophecy is complete.

 

[Theotherknight]

Wait, green Seele is just plot relevant Wendy!

 

[IridumSky]

No, Wendy is TEMU green seele.

 

[To-be-hero-X]

Ohh wait three colors green blue and red fuck rowdyruff seele become a rowdyruff

 

[Pyro Hawk]

I am extremely interested in seeing what comes of this.

 

[ArsMagna1337]

RGB Seele

Click to shrink...

Soon... The Prismatic Herrscher of Lesbianism will be born... And all females will goon in her vicinity.