I've never been very good at this 'writing documentation' thing, but I'll do my best, okay?

Besides, you probably won't believe half of this, anyways.

There's a lot of stuff here that I'd prefer to keep between you and me, at least for now, either way, although I suppose it's out of my hands at this point - I can't stop you from sharing this with everyone, so I'll trust your judgement completely. It's a lot to take in, but I'm already relying on you almost completely to save the world, so...

...first of all, let's get one thing out of the way.

I'm from this world's future, and it doesn't end well.

I don't really want to talk about it, why it happened, or what I saw there, other than that I was one of the last people left alive in the world. I tried so hard with the time I had left to piece together a sanctuary, then when that went to pieces, went digging through the ruins, hoping to find some insane hope of a miracle.

The person I was then didn't believe in miracles.

The person I am now, does.

There are elements of reality well outside the realm of what I thought I understood. Maybe if there were /any/ remnants of the old religion in my timeline I would have been more open to the possibility, but I doubt it. There wasn't even any natural Ragnite left, at that point, although artificial Ragnite is a thing that's possible to create, and we used that. Anyways, that's not really relevant -

Are you familiar with the concept of an 'outside context problem'? Imagine what would happen if people like us - with Force Gears, power over fate and fortune, Harriet's BFG - showed up in a little isolated village somewhere that didn't have any technology or magic and had been apart from the world for hundreds of years. They wouldn't be able to handle us; we'd be completely outside of their model of reality, intruders from a stranger universe than the one they'd imagined.

Right now, I'm an outside context problem for this entire world. I'm going to save it, no matter what it takes. If it takes a miracle, well, I know that anything can happen.

You might be the only person alive right now, not counting the Black Viper, who knows all this. I've found that... in general, telling people the truth doesn't end well. It's not easy for me, and I'm sorry I was so evasive about everything when we first met. Honestly...?

This is the third time I've written a letter like this to you. The first two times didn't go very well! I think it was my fault and not yours, and at the very least you've seen things now that you can't ignore, and Anton's figured out way more than he should about me and what I can do, so there's not really much I can do to get out of it at this point... worst case scenario, I can keep editing the letter and trying again, haha...

(When things go wrong, I can reset time back to when things were going okay. You remember one of our first missions, when time was of the essence and I kept knowing the right way to go, but I looked really tired by the end of it? I was cheating. I haven't had to use this very much. It's hard to keep track of what really happened, sometimes...)

Anyways, I'm here, now, because this period of time is -the- critical point in history, as far as I can tell. In my timeline, the War of Bread and Steel lasted almost a century and when the dust settled... there wasn't even a Masharas in recorded history, for me. I'm not sure if some of the discrepancy between what I remember and what this world is like is because stuff was deliberately forgotten, or lost in the war, or whether it's because of Weird Time Shit happening in this timeline because of Lola and the Amazing Thirty Oracle Pile-up. There's this huge snarl in the worldlines coming up, but I have a feeling we'll worry about that -after- helping the Pope secure the peace treaty.

Even though I spent a lot of time with the Lost Vipers in Rissan, it feels like this is the longest I've spent with the same group of people. It probably sounds super weird to phrase it this way, but in a lot of ways, it felt like I was forgetting how to be human. That's... a lot of why I've tried to downplay everything, to be honest. It's easy for me to lose track of myself in the service of some bigger narrative. To think that everything's a game, that "who I really am" is some entity looking down on the warp and weft of the world from above. That's not what I want to be.

I'm not a god. I don't want to be one. I'm just someone who believes in miracles.