Chapter 47: What Are We?

After standing in awe for a moment, Clyde shook his head, pushing aside all his nostalgic feelings to study the piano before him once more. Then he turned to look at his surroundings, his gaze locking back onto the piano as he realized something.

"Strange," he muttered unconsciously.

Hearing Clyde’s words, Craig, who stood beside him, turned to look at Clyde, followed by Casca and Corie, who also turned their heads upon seeing Craig look over.

"What’s strange, Brother?" replied Craig, who had also come to his senses.

"Look at this piano... why is it still intact and still the same as in the dream... while the garden has turned into this, the building is ruined, and even the bench is destroyed?" Clyde answered, gesturing around and pointing to the piano bench, which no longer looked anything like a seat.

Craig, Casca, and Corie stared at the piano and its bench. The contrast was truly stark. Then they looked around their surroundings before returning their gaze to the piano.

"Hmm... come to think of it, you’re right. That piano stands out... and it’s like it doesn’t belong here," Casca added, studying the piano.

"And the keys are covered with a lid... where is this song we’re hearing coming from?" Corie asked, only just realizing it.

Craig said nothing, but he stepped forward slowly toward the piano. Clyde followed behind him, while Casca and Corie still stood frozen outside the circle. Craig opened the key cover, revealing neat rows of keys without a single one missing, yet none of them moved. Clyde, standing beside him, reached out his hand and pressed a key.

"Plink."

A piano note echoed from within the cover, but it sounded muffled and dull, like a piano that hadn’t been played in ages, while the song continued to drift through the air. Then Clyde, paying attention to the music, crouched down while holding onto the piano and stared at the floor. He laid his body down and pressed his ear against the circular floor. After that, he stood back up and turned to look at Craig.

"The song is coming from underneath here," Clyde said, pointing toward the circular floor section that sat slightly higher than the surrounding ground.

"Is that so... what’s even down there? Strange," Craig muttered, walking over to Clyde and looking down.

They fell silent again. Casca and Corie appeared to be investigating the floor. There was a gap between the circular floor section that rose slightly from the surrounding ground, and the melody could be heard coming through that gap, along with a noticeable flow of air.

"It feels like there’s something down here, but how do we get down?" Corie asked.

Then Clyde turned to Casca and walked over to her. He pulled Casca’s hand up onto the circular floor and brought her to the front of the piano.

"Casca, you knew how to play the organ back then, right? Try playing this piano just like when you played the organ in the rehab center chapel back then," Clyde said.

"Oh... okay... I’ll try," Casca said.

Casca got ready. She briefly glanced at the ruined bench, which was clearly no longer fit to sit on, and finally leaned down slightly with both hands raised, ready to press the keys in front of her. But because they were dusty, she wiped the keys clean with her hand. Beneath the dust, a sequence of musical notes was revealed, seemingly written there on purpose. Casca turned to look at Clyde and Craig, who nodded at her, and Casca returned their nods.

"Plink... plonk... tink... tang..."

Casca began playing the melody in accordance with the tune still ringing out and filling the entire room, but nothing happened. She stopped playing, then studied the musical notes written on the piano keys.

"Brother... could these musical notes be a code?" Casca asked, pointing at the keys.

"I don’t know... but clearly nothing happened when you played the melody," Clyde answered.

"Hmm... just try pressing the marked keys in sequence," Craig replied.

Casca immediately tried pressing the keys one by one according to the order written from right to left, but nothing happened. Then she pressed them from left to right.

"G-D-A-B,"

"Click,"

Suddenly, a loud sound of something unlocking echoed. "Whoa!" Casca, Clyde, and Craig gasped in surprise as the floor beneath them vibrated and began descending rapidly. Clyde glanced to the side and saw Corie still standing beside the circular floor, frozen in shock.

"Hey... Corie, jump quick!" shouted Clyde, seeing that Corie was still on the edge.

"Oh... right, catch me!" Corie yelled.

Without a second thought, Corie leaped toward her three siblings, and of course, Clyde and Craig caught her. Then they all descended downward through a shaft resembling a bright vertical tunnel with yellow lights, acting just like an elevator. The sound of the melody below, which had previously sounded faint, was now completely clear and unmistakably broadcast on a specific frequency.

"Um... where are we going down to?" Corie asked.

"I don’t know... we’ll just see when we get there," Clyde answered.

After that, the four fell silent, feeling themselves sink lower and lower alongside the piano beside them. Five minutes later, "clunk," the piano landed in a hangar. "Buzz... buzz..." The lights flickered on, illuminating the corridor. The circular piano platform along with its hangar began moving straight ahead into a long corridor made of metal, resembling the hallway of a massive spaceship, as wide as a tunnel and illuminated by lights.

"Well now... where to next?" Casca asked.

"Enough... stop asking so many questions, just wait and see, nobody knows," replied Craig, tense and annoyed.

As they moved further along, they could feel the corridor sloping gently downward, and the movement of the floor beneath their feet began to pick up speed. The four stared straight out ahead. They saw something straight out of a sci-fi movie right in front of them, and this time they embraced each other tightly, preparing to face whatever was about to happen.

After descending down the corridor for quite some time, the elevator finally slowed down and, "clunk," came to a stop. "Hiss," the hangar gate opened. Clyde, Casca, Craig, and Corie, holding hands and huddled closely together, stepped out and walked down a relatively short, slightly damaged corridor where fluorescent lights still managed to glow, eventually coming to a halt in front of a steel door.

"Hiss,"

The door opened immediately. They stepped inside, their eyes widening in shock. They found themselves in a ruined lobby: numerous cables hung down from a shattered ceiling, the floor was broken, and half-standing walls still bore the emblem of a terrestrial globe flanked by wings and a shield, with an inscription beneath it reading: G.D.A.B., short for Global Defense Army Bureau, which looked ancient.

"What... is this place?" Craig asked, looking around.

"Oh... I know... GDAB... the musical notes I played on the piano earlier," Casca said, pointing toward the wall.

"Yeah... yeah... you’re right, now please be quiet," Corie said, lowering Casca’s finger beside her.

The sound of the tune was still playing within the room. Clyde turned to his left and spotted a steel door that was already half-open, and it seemed the song was coming from there.

"Let’s go over there... the song is coming from inside," Clyde suggested.

The four of them began walking toward the half-open steel door on the left. They walked carefully, avoiding the cables hanging down from the ceiling and the debris on the floor. They traversed another ruined corridor, though flickering fluorescent lights forced themselves to stay on. They walked with caution due to the many ruined walls, the wiring protruding from behind the walls, and the collapsed ceiling.

After reaching the end, they stepped out and arrived at a spacious ward room, standing upon an iron mezzanine like an elevated work platform enclosed by safety railings. They stood at the edge, holding onto the railings and looking down. Below, they saw rows of tubes forming aisles; half of them were destroyed, but some appeared intact with occupants inside. They climbed down using the stairs, and their faces turned deathly pale.

"W-what is this? What is this?" Clyde asked.

Craig, Casca, and Corie were also left speechless, standing completely stunned. Before them, inside the tubes lined up in rows and aisles, were copies of the four of them along with Celes when they were twelve years old, in their gray-skinned forms: Clyde had moth wings, Casca had horns and a tail, Corie had frog-like hands and feet with lizard-like skin, Craig was covered in white fur with black hands, and finally Celes, who had silver hair draping her body like a cloak and a large, round gem-like eye on her forehead.

Every single tube contained their duplicates stretching all the way back, leaving the four of them deeply shaken at the sight of themselves existing in vast numbers as if mass-produced.

"Brother... w-what is this... are we... humans... what are we?" Casca asked, trembling as she gripped Clyde’s arm tightly with both hands.

"I don’t want to see this... I don’t want to," Corie cried out, clutching her head with both hands.

Clyde and Craig remained silent. They too were unable to speak a single word, their faces tense with their jaws practically dropped and completely pale, clearly, they were just as shaken.