Final Fantasy Altera VI

**Final Fantasy Altera VI** is a Story Arc of the Exteria Multiverse. It takes place in Ultyma, in the subplane of **Odya**, and follows the perspective of vigilante and scholar Dvorah.

## Main Arc

### Time's Distortion

In a world of peace, prosperity and scientific progress, the young Dvorah studies as an academic on one of the setting's main sky islands. However, at night, she also acts as a vigilante, making sure justice is upheld and keeping watch over the mysterious Harmonian Consortium, the political power that controls the world. One day, she witnesses a strange phenomenon in a Consortium laboratory: the appearance of young boy Elric, who acts and speaks like a medieval squire. When Dvorah and Elric discuss, they are interrupted by a strange creature who attacks them and seemingly teleports them away.

Dvorah and Elric appear in a modern setting university, quickly understanding that they traveled through time, towards the future. There, they encounter Christa Morrowstar, a genius student in physics and temporality. However, Christa dies, from no apparent cause, in front of them. A dark visitor appears in the room: the enigmatic Lord Paradox, whom Elric recognizes as the "source of all evil" from his own time. Paradox hints that Christa disappeared due to time being altered, and Dvorah and Elric investigate on how to go back to their time.

With the help of Christa's teacher, Cid Harmonia, and the use of strange crystals, the pair travels back to the era of sky islands, where they discover Christa's ancestor was taking in by the Consortium for experiments. Using strange powers they developed during the first time travel, they rescue him and go back to the modern setting, where they find Christa, alive and well. The trio discuss, with Christa attempting to understand the logic behind time-traveling. Christa's attempts to replicate the phenomenon teleports the trio into a grim, apocalyptic scene of the end of the world.

### In Darkness and Faith

There, they learn that the world's timeline is made of six successive Ages: an **Age of Nature** and primitive beasts, devoid of civilization; an **Age of Faith** and medieval crusades (from which Elric comes); an **Age of Skies** where human evolution brought them to new heights (from which Dvorah comes); an **Age of Steel** where the islands have fallen and people have learned to live through technology (from which Christa comes) ; an **Age of Void** in which the world slowly degrades under the weight of oppression; and finally, this **Age of Darkness**, ruled by Lord Paradox, full of fear and death.

They also discover Paradox's end goal: to make a massive Meteor fall upon the world and finally destroy it. The group, however, is not strong enough to stop the dark messiah, whose power surpasses their own. They are thus forced to escape by counting once more on the power of the crystals, and find themselves in the **Age of Faith**, grievously wounded, where they are healed by young acolyte Tali, who claims that time-travel is made possible through the will of goddess Chronodia, and that Christa, Vadrakh and Elric are chosen ones.

Tali joins the group, explaining she is a chosen one too, and she and Elric explain that the world's sacred peace has been threatened by Lord Paradox, enemy to the Goddess and the Church of Chronodia, who among other things destroyed Elric's hometown. Seeking revenge, the young man became a squire to Athalia Luxis Caela, a holy paladin whose powers were enough to destroy Paradox, but not before he could kill her as well. This explains Elric's resentment towards the evil king, and surprise at him being still alive.

### Into Individuality

Afterwards, Tali guides the rest of the party towards obtaining a powerful Crystal-based artifact, which would allow them to travel through time freely. They are however impeded by monks of the **Harmonic order**, a sect that opposes individualities and seems to oppose Dvorah and her allies, for reasons unknown. To escape the monks, and to sabotage Paradox's plans, the group travels to the Age of Void, where they believe to be safe, only to enter a technological dystopia, overseen by omnipotent artificial intelligence HAR-302.

Chased by HAR's minions, the group escapes into a secret laboratory, where they are protected by Adam, a strange mechanical being. Claiming to be a "proto fal'Cie", an artificial Angel, Adam instructs the group to leave this Age and hide into another: Dvorah chooses the **Age of Nature**. There, Adam explains HAR's goals: to destroy the Hume barrier that divides living beings and allows for individuality, in order to merge all beings in a singular one. From Harmonic order monks, to the Harmonian Consortium, to HAR and their similar goals, Dvorah and Christa deduce the culprit of all these conspiracies is Cid Harmonia, who has learned of time-traveling due to Dvorah's own actions, and affected time much like them.

### Age of Wilderness

Now stuck in the Age of Nature, the group encounters their last member: Vadrakh, a warrior from a primitive tribe, whom Tali believes to be a chosen one as well. Vadrakh has been tasked with retrieving a mythical spear from a still-fuming crater on the northern pole. Dvorah, believing the crater to house Chronodia's secrets, travels back to the ages of Faith and Sky in order to obtain an airship from a secretive scientifically-advanced civilisation, Gaarladians, from which both Dvorah and Cid apprently descend.

With a time-traveling airship in their possession, the group now accesses the crater, where they find nothing but the melted corpse of a gigantic organism, which they believe to be deity Chronodia. With Tali and Elric traumatized at the sight of their decaying goddess, Vadrakh notices a spear-like protrusion on the body and tries to seize it, only for it to be stolen by **Har Mon**, a primitive man named and influenced by Cid in order to steal the spear and bring it back to the **Age of Darkness**. This is the group's next destination.

### Truth in Darkness

In the Age of Darkness, the party witnesses the birth of the grim **Bahamut HARMONY**, another avatar of Cid's will, a summon made of several sacrifices whose identity has been destroyed, united as one, and who desires to take the Meteor's power for himself. The group fights and defeats him, barely so, but in the end, his last action forces Elric to jump in front of his companions and take the brunt of a lethal attack, being annihilated from existence. The horror drives the group to despair, especially Dvorah who had formed a close bond with him.

As Dvorah despairs, she is comforted by Lord Paradox, of all people. The dark lord reveals himself as the remains of Elric, his future self. Paradox claims that he has been forced to bring about the Meteor to fall of the world; to avoid a greater calamity. However, he cannot speak more of it. Paradox, joining the party in lieu of his former self, enjoins the group to face Cid's avatars in all times, claiming that they are the true mastermind behind the world's chaos, and they seek to destroy the very concept of humanity.

### Truth in Steel, Nature and Void

In the Age of Nature, the agent of Cid is naturally Har Mon, who still has the spear in this time. The group viciously confronts him as he wields the spear, only to be surprised when the spear takes control of his body and mutates him into a massive abomination. After destroying him, deeply shocking Vadrakh over the fact that her people's prophecy was supposed to turn her into that monster, Paradox explains the spear is part of Chronodia, and the beast's aim is preventing the Meteor from falling upon the planet, as this is Chronodia's true aim.

In the Age of Void, the agent of Cid is HAR, the powerful artificial intelligence who claims to have studied mankind's evolution, and affirms free will and individuality are evolutional mistakes. HAR claims that humans are born of Chronodia's corpse and fluids, that seeks to return as one. Fal'Cie, the emissaries of Chronodia, are in fact humans merged together, and Adam is just an artificial recreation of this. HAR controls Adam, but Dvorah wrests control of him back after an arduous battle. Adam seems to acknowledge Dvorah as "the goddess's human heart" and swears fealty to her once more.

In the Age of Steel, there is no agent; through recordings next to the abandoned military complex next to the crater, the group discovers Cid's past, investigating the crater alongside Christa's father, **Davin Morrowstar**. Davin's exposition to Chronodia's fluids caused him to slowly mutate, and believe he was meant to "unite mankind as one". Cid was forced to shoot him, disguising his death and later adopting Christa out of guilt, while still being infected, physically and mentally, by Davin and Chronodia's influence.

### Truth in Faith and Truth in Skies

In the Age of Faith, the agents of Cid, Harmonic monks, are strangely cooperative; they agree to help Tali with recovering memories lost. These memories show she is in fact Athalia Luxis Caela, the legendary paladin that Paradox supposedly killed - but that he spared and hid from the world, believing her to still have purpose. Dvorah rescues Athalia from her inner chaos during her crisis of faith, caught between her own fractured soul and Chronodia's lies, and allows her to find purpose once more, becoming the voice that guides her again.

Finally, in the Age of Skies, the agents of Cid, the Consortium, investigate a strange, spiral building in the sky. This hides Sapientia, a powerful being from outer space, who agrees to explain the whole truth to Dvorah after an arduous battle. This truth is, time is cyclical - the story of the world has happened, time and time again. The Meteor is nothing but Chronodia herself, who falls to the planet, dies giving birth to the anomaly known as humanity. Humanity briefly flourishes and prosper, then declines, and the Meteor brings about its extinction, with everything restarting.

Chronodia has created this stable time loop in order to prevent her own fall. Using the spear, she intends to be repelled from the planet before her fall, thus creating a world where humanity has never existed. Elric, seeking to prevent this retrocausal destruction of mankind, has forced the Meteor to fall for a thousand time loops or more. And Dvorah was chosen, as a being born of Chronodia's decayed heart, as a vector to stop Elric, protect the planet from the meteor... and eradicate humanity.

### The Fated Role

Dvorah refuses that role and goes on to confront Chronodia at the end of time, but the party is stopped by Cid himself. The man claims that humanity is a decayed race that cannot overcome the barriers between people, and that individuality will inevitably cause its destruction. The party refutes that claim and goes on to fight Cid, once, then once more as he summons Bahamut, and one last time as he allows Chronodia to absorb him and become a monstrosity, Cid All-Encompassing.

With Cid being finally defeated, Dvorah unwittingly fulfills her role as Chronodia's heart by repelling the meteor; however, using her own wish given to Sapientia, she absorbs the goddess's blood into her, reuniting with mankind herself, then rains upon the new world, allowing the world to restart without Chronodia, using her own fluids to birth the world anew; thus creating a timeline where the goddess is absent, yet mankind flourishes. Watching over humans, now a deity of infinite strength and presence, Dvorah has both followed and escaped her fate.

## Characters

* Dvorah
* Elric Sentiment Paradox
* Christa Morrowstar
* Athalia Luxis Caela
* Adam Bahamut
* Vadrakh
* Cid Harmonia
* Chronodia

## Trivia

* This storyline's main themes, as chosen by its creator, are Stargazers, by Nightwish, and Ride on Time, by Tatsuro Yamashita.