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"Good morning! This is my spot and you can't have it. Good morning! This is my spot and you can't have it."
"Feed me first, I'm the cutest! Feed me first, I'm the cutest!"
"Hey, look what I did! I built this nest. Isn't it a good nest? Aren't I a good builder? Hey, look what I did!"
Yamabuki Inori rolled over in bed and glanced ruefully at her alarm clock, which wasn't even set. This was her day off. She should have been sleeping in. Unfortunately, Inori was in the habit of waking up at dawn so she could visit with the boarders at the clinic before school. Even more unfortunately, dawn was when her wild neighbors were chattiest, making falling back to sleep next to impossible.
When she had first noticed that she was learning to recognize common animal phrases even without Kirun's help, Inori had been delighted about it. Most of the time, she was still delighted about it! But she hadn't realized initially how disruptive to her daily life being semi-fluent in bird could be.
Just as Inori was weighing the merits of getting up and making breakfast over staying put and at least resting her head for a bit longer, her phone rang. For a moment she considered grumpily ignoring whoever it was for calling so early, but decided instead to be grateful to them for giving her something to justify being awake at this hour anyway. Getting to the phone and seeing who the call was from immediately confirmed that as the right decision.
"Good morning, Setsuna!" Inori answered, and found to her pleasant surprise that she didn't even need to will herself to be cheerful. "It's been so long! How are you?"
For a moment, there was silence on the other end. Then: "Are you home right now, Buki?"
"I am!"
"Would it be all right if I came over?"
"Of course! It will only take a—"
In an instant, Setsuna was standing beside her.
"—couple of minutes for me to get dressed," Inori finished uselessly. "Setsuna, did something bad happen?"
"Is it that obvious?" Setsuna asked.
"I'm sorry. It's just, you look..." She looked, Inori realized as she searched for the right words, a little more than usual like Eas. Part of the reason for that, to be fair, was just that she was dressed in Labyrinth fashion. Apparently Setsuna's taste for high collars and long, broad coattails was as enduring as her interest in crystals and Tarot, though this outfit at least was red instead of black. Much more alarming, though, was the exhaustion in her eyes and in her posture. It reminded Inori of how Eas had appeared in the last couple of days before her death. "...really tired."
"I've been up all night," Setsuna admitted. "And not for the first time recently. Do you have any black tea or coffee?"
"Caffeine is not a substitute for sleep," Inori scolded her. "If you've missed more than one night, you really shouldn't try to put that off any longer. Extended sleep deprivation can physically damage your brain!"
"The truth is, even now that I have a moment, I can't sleep. There's too much weighing on my mind."
"Then we'll talk about it until you feel better! But if we have coffee while we talk, you won't be able to sleep even once you do."
Setsuna sighed. "You say that, but at this rate, I'm not sure how coherent our 'talk' will be without it."
"Have you at least been eating properly?" Inori asked. Setsuna's only response was to glance sheepishly down at her feet. "Then we'll talk over breakfast. You'll be surprised how much just having some food in your stomach will perk you up."
Setsuna smiled wanly at her. "Doctor's orders?"
"Doctor's orders!"
Inori led Setsuna down to the kitchen and opened up the pantry. Setsuna watched over her shoulder as she rummaged through it. "Donuts?" she asked suddenly.
"What? Oh, no. Bagels," Inori corrected her. "You eat them toasted." She held up two bags of them. "Would you like green tea or maple-nut?"
"Maple sound delicious," Setsuna murmured dreamily. "I would love some maple glaze..."
"I just said they weren't doughnuts," Inori teased. Nevertheless, she grabbed two of that flavor, as well as a breadknife from the cutlery.
"Bread?" wondered a sparrow perched outside the kitchen window as Inori cut the bagels in half. He cocked his head to get a better look. "Bread! Bread!"
Inori laughed. "This bird is as excitable as you are," she told Setsuna. "Mr. Sparrow, this is our breakfast. Go eat some bugs, please. The protein is good for you, and the flies have been bothering our boarders."
"But! Bread!" the sparrow exclaimed. He trilled out something that might either have been flattery or some rather rude insinuations about her reasons for not sharing. Inori couldn't follow it.
"If you be good and eat lots of maggots this morning, I'll give you some crumbs later," Inori promised as she popped the bagels into the toaster.
"I would rather have all of the bread right now!"
"Do you really think that's a good idea? You couldn't even eat half a bagel, let alone carry it off somewhere to hide it. If I did give you one, you would just end up fighting over it with the other sparrows."
"That's fine!" The little bird flexed his shoulders and puffed out the feathers on his neck. "I'm tough!"
"Yes," Inori agreed, "you are a very manly sparrow. I bet you catch more bugs than any of the other boy sparrows."
"That's right!" said the sparrow, hopping up and down and waggling his tail imposingly. "I am the best at catching bugs!"
"Although," Inori said, tapping her chin thoughtfully, "I just realized that this morning, you're letting the others get a head start. That can't be good for your reputation."
The sparrow's ruffled feathers suddenly sagged. "Oh no!" he chirped. "You're right! I will see you later, Miss Human! Don't forget the bread!" And with that, he flew off to root around in the yard.
"Sorry for getting distracted." Inori turned back to Setsuna, expecting to see some mixture of amusement and confusion on her face. Instead, she just looked wistful. "Um, you can sit down at the table, you know. I'll get everything ready."
"Thank you," Setsuna said, and did so. Inori poured a couple glasses of cold milk, snapped a pair of bananas off the bunch sitting on the counter, and buttered the bagels when they finished toasting.
"It's good to eat a banana when you're feeling down," Inori said, bringing the food to the table. "They have lots of potassium, which is an important nutrient for your brain, and they can even promote dopamine production." She took a seat opposite Setsuna. "Let's eat!"
"Let's eat," Setsuna echoed, and tentatively bit into her bagel. Her second bite was less tentative, and by her fifth she had downed the entire half. "Not as good as doughnuts," she proclaimed, "but it's still delicious I'm amazed at how many kinds of food Earth has. And you seem to know so much about them, Buki."
"I still have a lot to learn," Inori told her. "It's embarrassing for a future medical doctor to pass out in the middle of the sidewalk because she hasn't taken care of her health. Ever since that time, I've been studying fitness and nutrition." Almost as soon as she'd finished saying that, it occurred to her that mentioning Eas-related incidents to Setsuna when she was already feeling bad about something might not have been the best idea. Fortunately, Setsuna seemed too preoccupied with her breakfast to have noticed. "Setsuna, I'm worried about you. You're eating like you've been starving."
"When you feel as though you don't have time to eat, the staple foods of Labyrinth don't do much to tempt you otherwise. And they aren't exactly comfort food, so when you're stressed almost to the point of feeling sick..." She trailed off as she picked up her milk glass and proceeded to sip pensively from it. "Unless, of course," she added after a moment, "you have regularly scheduled meal times and are marched to and from them. So many of the things he did are starting to make more sense now that I understand what really happened."
"What really happened?" Inori asked
"That's a large part of what I wanted to talk to you about. Buki, when Lord Moebius said that he took over because humanity couldn't manage on its own, he was telling the truth."
"I don't believe that," Inori said, reflexively and with full conviction.
"I didn't want to believe it either. But I've seen the evidence. We were on the brink of destroying our own civilization and possibly even driving ourselves to extinction. The problem was that we used up too many of our natural resources. Technological infrastructures in all but the wealthiest nations collapsed, and even in the places that were holding together, unprecedented numbers of citizens were starting to go hungry, or losing access to basic necessities such as electrical power. Thousands of people were dying every day. And on top of all that, multiple countries were poised to go to war over the resources that were left. Some leaders were threatening to unleash weapons of mass destruction. For many years, it had been understood that using such weapons would lead to the whole world being destroyed in the retaliation, but with civilization already ending there was a lot less to lose."
"That's horrible," said Inori. "Even if our civilization were ending, I wouldn't want the world to be destroyed. As long as there's life, there's a reason to keep believing that things will get better. And even if humans went extinct, there would still be other species who deserve to have a world to live on too."
"You're a remarkable person for feeling that way," Setsuna told her.
Inori shook her head. "If everyone really searched their hearts, I'm sure most humans would come to the same conclusion. People do care about animals. I believe that. It's why pets are so precious to us."
Setsuna smiled at that, but the smile faded as she resumed her story. "In any case, in certain areas, some wealthier people still lived normally. In one of these areas, desperate technological research led to a kind of miracle: the awakening of a singularity."
"'Singularity'?"
"Well, it's a bit complicated, but... Infinity is a being of infinite memory. I suppose you could say that a singularity is a being of infinite thought."
"And that was Moebius?"
Setsuna nodded. "When Lord Moebius assumed the task of ensuring human survival, the world began changing so rapidly that even with the full historical archives available to me, I have trouble following exactly what happened. But even if you're just looking at the end results, it's obvious that he was brilliant. For example, I mentioned the food. It doesn't taste as good as Earth food, but all of it is made out of only three different genetically engineered species of plant that together supply all of the nutrients humans need. The parts of those plants that can't be eaten all have other uses — for example, as textiles. They are also designed to grow very close together, and under conditions that many plants could not survive. Instead of farms that take up miles upon miles of space, we have greenhouses the size of skyscrapers. Because that set-up doesn't allow for natural sunlight to reach all of the crops, we supplement it with low energy use green LEDs. As fertilizer, we use the same bacterial strains we cultivate for processing into biofuel. At the height of the pre-singularity crisis, it would not be an exaggeration to say that most of the world was either starving or in danger or starving. Under Lord Moebius, however, no human being ever went hungry."
"That is brilliant," Inori admitted. "No wonder introducing new foods is going so slowly, if it was all set up that carefully." Setsuna grimaced a bit at that, and did not resume talking. She returned to her breakfast, drinking her milk and eating her fruit at a much more deliberate pace than that at which she had devoured her bagel. Inori did not want to disrupt her or force her to talk about anything she would rather avoid, but after a few minutes, the silence grew too uncomfortable for her to let it go on any longer. "Um, did I say something wrong?"
"That's not it," Setsuna assured her. "It's just... even now, I have trouble knowing how to feel about Lord Moebius. I admire him, and I'm furious at him, and I pity him, sometimes all at once. In his own way, he really did have humanity's best interests at heart. He was horribly, monstrously arrogant, and he didn't understand us nearly as well as he thought. But nothing he did was out of greed, and his self-destruction may well have been the only thing he ever did out of malice. When I look at everything he accomplished, I think, 'If he were just a little bit different, he really could have saved the world.'"
"In a sense, it sounds like he did," Inori mused.
"No," said Setsuna, "saving the whole world was never his objective. Buki, you've been to Labyrinth a few times now. Since it's you, you must have noticed."
Inori recalled her most recent visit there. Clover had reunited for a dance concert on the first annual Doughnut Day, a holiday declared to honor the anniversary of the Doughnut Revolution. Dessert foods were still rare on Labyrinth, but for that one day, the event planners had used huge amounts of luxury reserves, including donations from Sweets Kingdom, and commandeered much of the food production infrastructure to bake enough doughnuts for every last citizen to have some. Dances were held all over the world, and Clover's concert at the capital was broadcast to all of them. The people were not just happy but ecstatic, so even though the environment hadn't changed much, it felt like a whole different planet from the one Inori remembered from a year before. Somehow, though, something still didn't seem quite right to her. Though she couldn't quite place why, after just ten or fifteen minutes of walking through the streets, she started to feel on edge. The feeling persisted until the concert began, at which point she quickly got lost in her dancing and in the energy of the crowd and forgot all about it. Some time after the music had stopped and the cheering had faded, it suddenly struck her again. When that happened, she at last understood the problem: whenever Labyrinth was not overwhelmingly loud, it was always much too quiet.
"Noticed that there were no birds, you mean?" Inori asked, feeling something inside of her twist and clench up. "It was so strange. Even in such a dense city, you would expect there to at least be pigeons. I guess I thought, 'Maybe it's different from Earth, and there never were any.'"
"I wish that were the case," Setsuna said. "For a long time, I believed that it was. During our childhood education, we were told a little about the starvation and conflict that plagued humanity before Lord Moebius came to power. But we were never told about the good things we lost. Lord Moebius was only concerned with preserving humanity. Most species were simply allowed to die off with the final stages of resource consumption. The few that held on were deemed disease vectors or threats to infrastructure and eradicated. Because he recognized the potential value to humans of biodiversity, Lord Moebius did maintain a gene bank, but cultivating that diversity in living form seemed inefficient to him. Aside from humanity and the plants we grow to serve us, Labyrinth is a dead planet."
"Everyone..." Inori listened to the sounds of the birds still chattering outside the window. They seemed strangely distant, but also somehow painfully clear. "That really happened somewhere. Everyone died." Her eyes burned, and when she tried to blink the sensation away, a few droplets of moisture clung to her eyelashes. "Setsuna, can I ask you something?"
"What?"
"Why did you want to tell me this, and not Love or Miki?"
"Actually..." Setsuna hesitated. "That wasn't even the worst thing that I came to talk about."
"Oh." Inori crossed her arms over her chest and hugged her own shoulders.
"I'm sorry," said Setsuna. "The truth is, there are things that I'm almost afraid to say. At first I wanted to get all three of you together to tell you, but when I thought about doing that, I felt sick. Then I remembered that night at the beach, and how kindly you listened to me, and it just seemed like the right thing to do. But I shouldn't pay back your kindness by burdening you with knowledge that will hurt you. I don't know what I was thinking." She leaned her elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands.
Though her heart was already hurting, Inori still felt a pang at seeing her friend so miserable. Without hesitation, she rose from her seat, walked around the table, and wrapped her arms around Setsuna. Setsuna, who hadn't seen her coming, tensed and let out a small startled sound as she looked up, but relaxed once she understood what was happening, and rested the side of her head against Inori's chest. "I didn't mean that at all," Inori told her. "I'm happy that Setsuna trusts me and thinks of me as a kind person. It happened, and it's sad, and my not knowing about it wouldn't make it less sad. You haven't done anything wrong."
Setsuna reached up and clasped a hand on Inori's shoulder. Aside from that, she did not move or respond in any way for several minutes, only leaned limply into the embrace. She seemed so peaceful that Inori began to wonder whether Setsuna had fallen asleep after all, and if so how she was going to extricate herself from the hug without waking her. Before it could worry her too much, though, Setsuna spoke again. "Buki, you haven't eaten your banana," she said with a hint of reproach. "Didn't you tell me that bananas can make you feel more cheerful?"
Inori found herself smiling. "That's right, Setsuna. We both have to keep our energy up, huh? Did you know that hugging your friends is also good for your health?"
"Now you're making things up," Setsuna accused her.
"Nope! It decreases stress responses, boosting your immune system and correcting high blood pressure. That's probably why people who keep pets live longer than people who don't: all the extra hugs and cuddles. Although some say that just being around animals and nature is good for us too."
"Hm," said Setsuna noncommittally, but she didn't make any move to pull away.
"That's why the gene bank is a good thing, right?" Inori continued. "You can't bring back everyone who died, but you can at least rebuild the ecosystem, can't you?"
Setsuna sighed. "The answer to that is: 'perhaps, eventually, but it will take a very long time.' The reasons are the beginning of more bad news."
"I'm still here to listen," Inori assured her.
"The thing is," Setsuna said, "at the moment, there's simply no space for that. Moebius had Labyrinth running at what he considered peak efficiency. There are now nearly as many humans alive as the planet can support, and that's with the entire planet dedicated to supporting them. Even things like small parks or amenities for producing luxury goods need to be carefully planned. It will take a full generation of population reduction before we can even begin to make the kind of improvements to quality of life we hope to achieve."
"Population reduction?" Inori asked. She drew back a bit so that she would be able to read Setsuna's face as she spoke.
Setsuna seemed to misinterpret the gesture. "I know it's awful," she said. "Essentially, I'm waiting for people to die. Those people will never know the happiness of future generations. We're doing everything we can to make life as good as it can be right now, too. It's what we've spent the whole past year on. Most of the older men and women I talk to are grateful for what we've done so far, but they've been living half-lives for so long that I feel like they don't know what they're missing, and that I can't possibly give them enough to make up for it."
"Ah. Well..." Inori had had something else in mind. "That's..."
"Frighteningly pragmatic?" Setsuna suggested. "A little too much like Lord Moebius?"
"No!" Inori said quickly. "I was trying to think of the best way to say, 'That's one thing, but how are you controlling reproduction?'"
Setsuna's blush started at her neck and shot upward like mercury in a hot thermometer. "Birth control in the water!" She practically spat the words out.
"Setsuna, are you all right?"
"I'm fine. Fine! That was a very interesting and informative conversation to have with Love's mom!" She pressed a hand to her forehead in distress. "And even more interesting to relay to Shun and Hayato afterwards..."
Inori made a valiant effort to suppress her laughter, but there was no stopping it. The look on Setsuna's face was priceless, and the looks she was imagining on Soular's and Westar's were even better. One little snigger escaped from her, and the next thing she knew she was doubled over in a fit of giggles.
"I take it this means you don't think I'm a monster," Setsuna said dryly. For some reason, Inori found that set her giggling even more. Setsuna managed to smile with her, so maybe it was for the best.
"No, of course not," Inori said once she'd composed herself. "It is sad, though, that it will still be a long time before people on Labyrinth can have that kind of family."
"To be honest, I'm not sure most of us would be ready for it anyway," Setsuna told her. "But we are getting there. Already, the citizens of Labyrinth are learning what it means to be husbands and wives and brothers and sisters. Our biological offspring will be mothers and fathers, and their children will be sons and daughters."
"That's right," Inori said. "I believe in you, Setsuna. Everyone believes in you. No one is going to think you're a bad person for not being able to make Labyrinth exactly like Earth in just a few years."
Setsuna's smile vanished in an instant. "What am I doing? Even after I've said this much, I'm still avoiding the main thing."
Inori hadn't realized there was more, but she did her best not to betray any surprise or worry. "Whatever 'the main thing' is, I promise you can tell me that, too."
"Buki," Setsuna said slowly, "Labyrinth is never going to be 'exactly like Earth'."
"I didn't mean that I expected it to be," Inori quickly assured her.
"Maybe not, but I did," Setsuna admitted. "Back when this all began, that was my goal. Of course, I didn't know much about Earth beyond what I'd seen in Clover Town and the surrounding areas. The reason this all came up now is that just recently, we decided we'd finally gotten day-to-day and year-to-year affairs under enough control to get serious about laying out a more long-term plan in detail. We took a look at where we are and where we want to be and ran some analyses to determine how to get from one to the other. Only, the numbers we got back made no sense. They were completely impossible. Shun tried to be practical about it. He argued that if one goal is unobtainable, we should reset our sights on a different one. But I told him that it couldn't be unobtainable. Our model was a world that already existed. He said that numbers don't lie, so to prove that I was right, I... I..."
Finally, Inori realized where this was going. "You pulled up Earth's data, right?" Setsuna nodded. "Setsuna, it's okay. You can tell me what you saw."
Setsuna took a deep breath and looked her in the eyes. "For everyone on Earth to live like you and Love and the other people I've met here, it would take more natural resources than exist on Earth. I realize now that there are many, many people on this planet leading lives that are nowhere near as happy, but even so, you are using too many resources too quickly. At this rate, in just a few hundred years, Earth will reach the same crisis point that on Labyrinth led to the creation of Lord Moebius."
"Setsuna..." She looked so serious, Inori thought. And really, it was something worth being serious about. Setsuna had every reason to believe she was delivering a startling and dramatic revelation. And yet... "Setsuna, we already know that."
"What?" Setsuna's voice was flat, and her grieved expression stayed frozen in place as though out of indecision over what to change to.
"Well, when I say 'we,' I mean humanity in general," Inori amended. "To be honest, I'm not sure whether Love and Miki are aware of it."
"Not... aware?" Setsuna's jaw dropped, her expression apparently having settled on "horrified". "I don't understand. That your world is barreling towards apocalypse is available knowledge, and yet there are people who simply aren't aware of it?"
"It's... complicated?" said Inori. Then she sighed. "No, actually, I don't have any excuses or explanations. That's just kind of the way humans are, and you get used to it."
"But you knew, and you were just going about your life as usual?"
"That's what you do," said Inori. "There are lots of little things I try to do every day to slow it down some, but in the end, you just have to have faith that we'll find a way to fix everything before it's too late."
"But what if you don't?"
Inori held her gaze. "Then I lived without being paralyzed by despair, and helped the humans and animals who are around right now have long, happy lives."
"I don't know if I can handle that," Setsuna told her. "Buki, I love Earth too. I can't just live with the knowledge that it's likely to be destroyed in a matter of centuries. I'm working so hard on plans I won't live to see the final stages of because I believe that the future does matter. If I can feel hopeful believing that Labyrinth will flourish a few generations from now, how can I not despair believing Earth will fall into ruin at the same time?"
Suddenly, Inori was struck by a realization. Listening to Setsuna speak of Labyrinth and Earth in parallel like that, it all seemed so obvious that she was almost embarrassed she hadn't thought of it sooner. "All right," she said. "In that case, let's save it."
"How?" Setsuna's voice rose in frustration.
"Well, I don't know all the details yet," Inori admitted. "But I think it has something to do with bacteria-based biofuels and greenhouse skyscrapers."
Setsuna stared blankly at her.
"You said it yourself," Inori continued. "If he had been a little bit different, Moebius really could have saved the world. The technology he left behind still has that potential. And because this time it will be implemented by people with human hearts, it won't end with us going too far and destroying everything that was worth saving in the first place. If you collect all of the relevant data, we can give it to Kento, and the Mikoshiba Conglomerate can reproduce that technology here."
'That... could actually be a real solution," Sestuna said, hesitantly hopeful. "But even if the technology exists, that doesn't mean everyone will use it. Ultimately, handling things that way means that many, many people will have to give up at least a few luxuries. It wasn't just Moebius's inventions that allowed him to accomplish what he did. In part, he succeeded by taking away everyone's free will."
"We have more time than he did," Inori argued. "It's still possible to change people's minds the right way. Already, there are lots of people trying to do just that. And also," she added as the thought occurred to her, "lately Miki has been talking again about the possibility of going public as Pretty Cure. The world is still wondering what happened back then, and she's always looking for ways to attract attention to her career. The last time she brought it up, I told her I still wasn't sure about going in front of that many people. But you know, if it meant I would have a chance to talk to all of them about things that are really important, I believe I could do it."
"Buki..." Setsuna smiled at her, and this time it was an uninhibited and unwavering smile. "I am so glad I came to you. I have to say, I didn't think this conversation would go anywhere near as well it did."
"How do you think I feel?" Inori teased her. "You came here saying you had bad news, and instead you showed me the way to a miracle."
"Maybe it's a little early to call it a 'miracle'," Setsuna said modestly.
"No way!" Inori told her. "As long as we're working together, there's nothing that can stop us from saving both worlds. We're Pretty Cure, after all. It's what we do." She held out her hand palm-down and looked at Setsuna expectantly.
"Well, when you put it like that..." Setsuna laid her own hand on top of Inori's. "I believe it!"
"Glad to hear it," Inori said. She flipped her hand over to grasp Setsuna's and give it a little squeeze. "Now go take a nap, Setsuna."
Setsuna squeezed back and, after a second's thought, quirked her head to the side and grinned impishly. "Eat your fruit, Buki."