[Video | Locked to Precure | Super-Ultra Locked from Ayumi]

[sunbloom]

[Itsuki is pretty obviously very spooked by something; what in the world could have happened?]

Girls, I'm sure you've all seen this post by now. I specifically have four problems with it:

[A screenshot of the pan across the Heartcatch team.] One, I'm not a Precure yet, though I recognize what I know will become my form. Two, Yuri can't transform, so her being there is physically impossible. [Another still, this one of the Suite team.] Three and four. We've seen Melody and Rhythm fight, and their team is two, not four.

Are there any other discrepancies? And more importantly... what does this mean?

[Five minutes after the original posting, there's new text:] And I almost forgot, Yayoi's whole team is missing, which is five more people that should be there but aren't. Isn't that odd?

Comments

[wildmelody]

You're telling me! Who the heck are those other two? I didn't even know there was supposed to be two more people in our team!

[sunbloom]

Don't ask me, we all saw the same thing. And it's not like I can give you an answer anyway - I'm not even a Precure yet.

[wildmelody]

Great. There's a blue and a yellow. The yellow is TINY though. Tinier than Erika is. We've got a shortie on our team.

The blue kind of looks familiar though... like I've seen her before.

[sunbloom]

You'd know better than I would on the blue one, though she is pretty... The yellow one doesn't just look short, though... she looks young, which isn't normal. I would bet quite a bit that all of us became Precure at the same relative time - our second year of middle school, at fourteen years old. This yellow Cure is several years younger than that.

[pikapikapikarin]

I didn't see me. Which means maybe my team wasn't active at this point in time? But this is too weird to ignore.

[sunbloom]

Yeah, that's right...! Let me write that down so I don't forget.

[There's an edit to the original post just a moment later noting this.]

[pikapikapikarin]

How strange... do you think... no... it couldn't be...

[And Yayoi's fingers are flying across the keyboard.] If this is our world, there would have been records of it, but there isn't. No news in the past year, and scanning that girl's post said she was in 2012. We would have been active by that point.

... Itsuki... call me crazy but I think we might be looking at another precure world.

[sunbloom]

Another... As in, another World Without Riders, or whatever Kaitou said our world was called? We already know that our worlds are instances of each other, separated by time... but could she be on some kind of alternate continuity?

[fightbymoonlight]

Completely impossible. [Wow, Yuri is... actually kind of freaking out.] I'd very much like to know what the hell is going on.

[sunbloom]

So would I. I mean, you and I both know that Cure Moonlight cannot be there. Yet there you stand, right next to me. Which is only slightly less impossible.

[fightbymoonlight]

Indeed. Nor is it possible for me to ever be Cure Moonlight again, so it can't be the future. Yet you, Cure Blossom and Marine are there, not to mention Hibiki and Kanade-san. So it's not the past.

However you look at it, it is impossible.

[sunbloom]

Which leaves... what? Us somehow being pulled across time? This being some alternate iteration of the World Without Riders, where you never lost your powers and Yayoi's team doesn't exist?

[bag_has_snapped]

[To see Itsuki take charge of the situation is like having a weight lifted off of her. It's still something of a shock to see, though.]

...wh-what else could it be? I mean... all of them... all of us, it's...

[What scared her was that there wasn't anything showing her or Itsuki being close. If that blonde-haired one that LOOKED like Itsuki WAS Itsuki, well...]

[sunbloom]

[Itsuki ponders for a moment.] Well... Clearly we have a problem one way or another. Because going off the most popular theory, another version of "us" exists - all of us. It's possible that they've had time run normally, too, rather than how mangled everything is because of the community; so it's possible that they just ran straight through, from the first team - Black and White - on through to their most recent team, Melody and Rhythm's, with Yayoi's team not having started yet.

[She glances sideways at Tsubomi, considering they're still tied together.] It's a mystery, but it's something we can work out together, if it comes to that.

[bag_has_snapped]

So, they could even be older versions of us, too... it doesn't make sense, but... I'd like to find out what is going on.

[She can't help but inch closer to the other girl, since weirded out by it all.]

[sunbloom]

They... could be, but I doubt it. They look the same age as us, honestly. It's still possible that they were pulled through space-time to be there at the same time, too, considering things. And I get the sense that they didn't develop the same way; they're not... friendly enough. That's why I don't really think of them as "us" - they're like us, they have our powers, but they're not us.

[Sensing Tsubomi's unease, she wraps an arm around her.] We are us. No matter what happens, our actions, our relationships, and our feelings are our own.

[icantbelievethis]

I don't even know what's going on anymore. Do you recognize that enemy?

[sunbloom]

Why would I recognize that enemy? I'm not a Precure. Not yet, at least. Do you recognize it?

[icantbelievethis]

I've never seen it in my life. I thought you might have seen it on the news or something.

[oceanicbutterfly]

Aside from that, what about Sakagami-san?

[sunbloom]

What about her? She seems normal, if a bit distant, and her moving to a new place explains that well enough.

[oceanicbutterfly]

Well, you must have noticed a certain pattern among people from our world who make posts to the community.

[iwontforgivethis]

Well... it's pretty obvious that we don't know enough about what's going on to get any answers right now. It could be several things to explain that.

Tsukikage-san might've gotten her powers back somehow when that happens and it could happen before Yayoi becomes a Precure. Or her team could not be there for other reasons. There could be some time travel thing involved. Or completely different universes.

There might even be another one of those things in a different city, with 20 OTHER precure, including Yayoi, fighting against it instead. We need to learn more about what year it is and what's been going on from Sakagami-san before we even have a chance at figuring this out.

[sunbloom]

Yes, that much is clear. We need more information. That said, we have two alternate theories right now.

One. This is a coherent alternate timeline. Starting from yourself and your partner, and working forward to Melody and Rhythm's team in 2011, or perhaps slightly later, considering Melody and Rhythm have partners. That explains the additional members, too - we already know I'll become a Precure, it just hasn't happened yet; and it's not hard to imagine that the last team fills out to four, considering that seems to be a magic number for our team sizes. Without the community causing a time issue, all of the teams would have appeared one after another, in the spring of each successive year, and somehow gotten to know each other to create this massive show of force. In this case, it's before Peace's team starts in the spring of 2012, so they don't appear. Moonlight's existence is... admittedly still not explained, but we're working on it.

Two. Time-space is being shifted to make this possible. One or more of these teams - or Yayoi's team, or perhaps some other team we don't know about - might be from this time, or perhaps none of them are. But this is clearly an enemy we are intended to fight, and so somehow - fairy magic, the world somehow drawing us there, whatever it might be - we all appear. In this case, it's pulling us from the end of our respective fights, or later, so our teams are assembled, but it's totally possible none of these Precure know each other. Again, it's possible Peace's team doesn't exist at this time, and missed the call.

...Three would be your idea, but I'm not sure I even want to consider it. Another twenty Precure would be a little much to work with, even for us, let alone two enemies of this caliber at the same time in the same world. The potential for catastrophe is too great, let alone collateral damage from four dozen Precure launching special attacks at once. Our regular skills are bad enough, who knows what our top-end powers are like?

[She looks back at the other post for a moment.] We do know it's 2012, I think. She's mentioned it a few times. We don't know when in 2012, though. We don't know about what's going on in her world, either...

[iwontforgivethis]

[Honoka lets out a nervous giggle.]

My idea really wasn't meant to be serious, it was just to show that it could basically be anything going on right now. Though... I'm not too sure how feasible the first idea is. I mean, if Time never got messed up like it is now, Black, Luminous, and I should all look a lot older than we do there, but we still look younger than Moonlight. I mean, if time was working like it should, Black and I would be OLDER than Moonlight.

There's just so much that we have no idea about. We might want to think about going to her version of the world sometime so we can start to figure out what's going on.