Editing City Series:Volume5a Chapter2 (section)

===Letter from Sword Lady #7: To Beretta who Inherited my Name===

Are you reading this, Beretta who inherited my name?

These letters developed by the US military are expensive, but I hope that means you really can take them with you into France. Well, they were made by people I’ve relied on a lot in the past and the 7th letter is hardly the time to start worrying.

Now, I told you to open one of these a month and this is the 7th one. That means it’s February, Beretta.

By that time, you might just be finding yourself caught in – or causing – incidents I know nothing about. When I infiltrated the city as a special spy, I had a new Heavy Barrel sent in with me, but the Germans discovered it and blew it up, so I had to run for it. Disguising myself after that wasn’t easy.

Now, the big incident in February would be the small Wort Bombe arriving in Paris. At 2:03 AM on the 14th, the Neue Bladlikburg IV lands at Paris’s international airport (which I believe was half militarized at the time) and the bomb is transferred to a storage space below the airport.

During the Allies and Resistance’s movement to the liberate Paris on August 6, 1944, the frightened military commanders decided to drop the small Wort Bombe on central France using a transport plane. That destroyed France and started the endless repeating of history.

I’m guessing the lesson Germany learned in Russia wasn’t when to give up; it was to use scorched earth tactics. In that case, they achieved the best results they could have hoped for. Think about it, Beretta. As long as France cannot escape the repeating age of the Rondeau, World War Two will never truly end. That was a fortunate result for Germany.

After all, the world has already given up on France.

The world will be destroyed if the 54-year paradox hits it. If that happened, you would live on in there, but those of us out here would be wiped out.

It’s a tricky thing.

But can you see the world on the move outside that country? Outside that closed space, it’s 1999, but from in there, everything outside France is still in 1944, isn’t it? You’re receiving information on the Allied and German activities outside the country, aren’t you?

To perfect its own closure, France is attempting to recreate that year based on what information it has.

Everything you see outside France is only the “bare necessities”.

France absorbed the memories of the people caught in the Format, so it knows who will contact someone outside the country and what response they’ll get. So the information needed to respond is created based on their memory Lives. It’s pre-established harmony.

For example, think about the soldiers who landed at Normandy and were later caught in the Format. Until June of ’44, they are placed in a world created based on their own memories and they live out their exact same life there in the Rondeau. Anything they didn’t see isn’t created. It’s a world entirely based on their memories.

But what about someone like you who arrived from the outside world? If you try to contact someone outside the country, France will use all of the information it has to try and fool you.

So if you were to send a letter to that M. Schrier you look up to (He was in the US at the time, wasn’t he?), since he briefly visited France in ’39, France will use the memories of that time to build up his character and provide a response. (Of course, he was only in France for 3 days, so the answer will only be as accurate as those 3 days’ of information allow.)

The problem is the Format concept.

You know I was there in ’43 and ’44, right? My personal reason was to search out why your great-grandfather died and my official reason was to support the Resistance as a Knight Striker sent in by the US. I was publicly known as an exchange student, so my circumstances were a lot like yours now.

I was born in France, so I found it all so nostalgic when I arrived in ’43.

But I escaped France just before August 6 and was not caught in the Format. France is repeating that year based on the worldview built up before August 6, 1943, but it does not contain my Lives or those of any of the other Erased.

France has its own memories of everything before August 6, 1943 and that includes us. But France does not remember the people who were not caught in that first Format.

Listen carefully, Beretta. The Paris I know is only the Paris I experienced. The Paris you learned about at school and read about in various documents is a second Paris that exists without me.

And the Paris you are in now is your Paris. You are borrowing my identity while there, but you are not my replacement. Keep that in mind.

Each year, Paris is a little different and then is Formatted again.

All of those are mistaken and false while also correct and true.

So don’t worry about whether you’ve screwed everything up. I think I’ve given you everything I have other than my hair color, but I’m not going to take away your freedom. Everyone only gets one shot at reality. Once you’re expelled by the Format on August 6, you can never enter France again. The immune system of France’s own Lives will never again allow in anything “extra” once it’s gotten in once. So focus on this one shot at being an exchange student.

If there is a right answer, it would be a way to liberate Paris from the Rondeau so it is never Formatted again. Of course, we don’t even know if that’s possible. You were taught all about this, weren’t you? The immune system is gradually eliminating outsiders as it tries to immerse itself in that year of history undisturbed. And the scientists predict that, by 2005, France will fully reject the intrusion of anything from outside and become a truly closed city.

It really is a shy city, isn’t it?