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meng_huan_myuuThe Mew first arrived in Ink City at a time of significant turmoil. Due to the psychotic breakdown of a robot she would never meet, the world itself had been split into two seperate dimensional halves, a gritty, unpleasant 'ink' side and an overly emotional 'paint' side. Trapped on the "ink" side of the world, she tried to make the best of things in her first days in the city, playing the typical mewish role of the trickster. It didn't work too well, as she probed a little too deeply into the thoughts of one Mordecai Heller and then proceeded to further provoke the murderous cat into shooting at her. She escaped, but not unscathed, leading a trail of ink-blood all the way to the center of town. It was there that she met Dot Warner, who offered her first aid (cartoon physics bandages are surprisingly good at stopping bloodloss, who knew?), but perhaps a bit too late. The scent of her blood had drawn out the triffid-like 'children' of Audrey II, who proceeded to go into a feeding frenzy on both "sides" of the city. In helping to stave off the swarm of Audlings, Berri also first met a strange creature in a mechanical exosuit by the name of Trevor Goodchild. Trevor had, due to repeatedly dying and being regenerated in the "broken" world, degenerated to a point that he was little more than a mindless, zombie-like beast, only having his former scientific prowess to grant him proper stability. Given that she could provide the brains to his brawn, the two of them made a surprisingly efficient team.
After the attack from the Audlings had been repressed, the city was headed down the path of recovery. The mayor's arrival allowed many harmed by the city's split, such as Trevor, to be healed from their degeneration and injuries. Of course, the Mew's wounds weren't physical, at that point. No, instead she'd learned her first harsh lesson about the city: folks in Ink City were incredibly violent, moreso than even her own world. Instead of simply using pokémon as weapons of war, they had no qualms in taking the lives of other beings. And why should they? It didn't take long for her to be told that one of the rules of the city was that death was impermanent. While musing over this fact, the Mew was approached by Bass.EXE, whom took to calling her "Berry", based on a fractured memory she had of one of Team Rocket's researchers calling her by that nickname during her time in imprisonment.
A week or so after meeting Bass at the ink fountain, someone outed Trevor as capturing and experimenting on others throughout his time in the city. Feeling betrayed by someone she saw as an ally and also being reminded of her own time as a test subject, the Mew snapped. With little more than a few creepy messages, she found her way into Trevor's compound and hid deep in the building's air vents, biding her time and gradually wearing away at the scientist-politician's mind with subtle telekinetic tricks. At the same time, she paid little heed to her own sanity slipping, the tricks getting more blatant and sinister... until after two weeks hidden away, she finally decided to go for the only revenge she felt appropriate. Since death was cheap in this City, she'd leave him alive, able to suffer like she did. The fight was short and anticlimactic, the Mew managing to get Trevor cornered and drugged up on the same paralytic agent he'd used on his own test subjects. Then, she cut him open, making sure to inflict as much pain as she could while keeping him alive.
It would have been the perfect crime, except in her manic, delirious state, she decided to broadcast it to the entire city under an anonymous filter, with warnings that other scientifically-minded denizens of the city would suffer similar fates. While she did not out herself to any but the city's robotic denizens (who could hack her signal with ease), she still managed to draw two seperate forms of attention she hadn't expected. Notably, several of the more morally upstanding citizens of the city saw it fit to try to rescue Trevor from his state, regardless of the harm he'd done to others. However, Bass also disapproved of her methods - he saw little point in letting Trevor survive, and went in to finish the job. While the Mew was smart enough to flee the building before either group arrived, Bass and the would-be "heroes" arrived on the scene almost simultaneously. There were no survivors, due to Bass attacking Trevor with enough force to obliterate nearly the entire compound.
Certainly, the impact was lessened when all those involved reemerged from the fountain, but the damage was done. One of the people involved in the botched rescue attempt was Yakko Warner, who had been rattled to the core at his sudden vulnerability. He and his family never came to harm beforehand, after all. Dot likewise blamed the anonymous broadcaster with her brother's death, a connection that finally shocked the Mew out of her delirious revenge-high and made her actively withdraw. Dot had been the first friend she had within the city, and the Mew had gotten so wrapped up in her own maniacal lust for vengeance that Dot had been hurt worse than ever before in her life. After that night, the Mew did the only thing that seemed sensible for someone who'd realized the weight of what her actions had caused...
She hid. Using someone else's party as a distraction, she hid herself in the fountain, creating a human form for herself and then emerging good as new, as if she'd never been to the city in the first place. Using her former nickname as her cover name, "Berri" quickly acquainted herself with the locals... including a strange gentleman known as Crmsn. Crmsn was another of the group attempting to rescue Trevor, and yet he seemed to harbor no ill will towards those responsible - in fact, it appeared that he and Bass had been friends for quite some time and he actually hadn't been surprised by the NetNavi's actions in the slightest. Crmsn and Berri hit it off quickly, and she agreed to stay with him for a while, though she did have a few odd quirks, such as insisting on sleeping on his roof instead of in the house itself.
That Halloween, a costume party was crashed by Discord, who caused all of those in attendance to actually become their costumes for a week. In an odd twist of coincidence, another Mew arrived in town while Berri was stuck in the form of a Gardevoir. Crmsn referred to her as Kat, and apparently had a bit of history with the Mew - apparently their paths had crossed before in his home world. Realizing the utter innocence of the other psychic-type, Berri panicked and rushed into making amends. She outed herself first to Trevor, then to Crmsn, and finally the city as a whole, seeking to draw ire back on her instead of on the new arrival in town. Surprisingly, ripping off the bandage like that caused no immediate harm - Trevor was far more interested in taunting her effective powerlessness over him, Crmsn forgave her readily for her involvement, and many of those who had seen what she had done weren't of the sort to approach her anyway. She was effectively a bit of a pariah, but that allowed her to grow closer with other relative outcasts, such as Bass and Ren Hoek, a rather psychotic chihuahua whom Berri had known in passing and took quite a shine to.
The incident was resolved and things slowly calmed, but all was not well. Crmsn was starting to succumb to a case of emphysema he'd arrived with, an affliction that had only grown worse with the stress he'd gone through in the city. A good number of his friends rallied together to help him, including Berri, who had been thrown into an utter panic by the possibility she could lose one of her closest friends. In her panic, Berri enlisted the assistance of a new arrival in the city, a ghostly doctor by the name of "Arty". Arty's powers were in tune enough with the City that it was possible to reverse and even halt Crmsn's problems, but the process was invasive and unpleasant enough that Berri started to guilt herself over once again putting someone she cared about in a painful situation. Making matters worse, Dot was one of the people who had rushed to Crmsn's aid, and in the confusion, Berri glanced into her former friend's thoughts. What she saw there were the Warner sister's nightmares, something surreal and almost... otherworldly. It was only the briefest of glimpses, but it was enough to confirm she'd somehow utterly traumatized someone undeserving of such things.
It didn't take long for Berri to convince herself that she'd hurt both Dot and Crmsn irrepairably, and once again she withdrew from people. This time, though, she didn't hide in plain sight. Instead, she sought out a means of escaping the city. In the process, she learned what lied beyond the turbulent, stormy waters out further into the ocean... she managed to witness a split second of literal void before nonexistance effectively killed her. The trip took longer than she had expected, as well - by the time she regenerated from the fountain, the city had been beset by a harsh, cutting blizzard. Already in a bitter, self-actualized loop of delusion, she believed that the city was trying to punish her for leaving. Instead of just lying there and taking it, though, she stayed her course out of sheer stubbornness, trying another avenue. This time, she flew towards the mountains out past the forest, knowing there was an ipassable rock cliff deep within. Worried from her near-delirious posting on the communicator network, Bass tracked her into the mountains, mere inches away from the wall. He tried his best to stop her, but to no avail. In a final, desperate attempt to flee, Berri threw herself at the barrier keeping them within the city.
There's no telling what exactly Berri saw when she touched the wall. Text, certainly... in a language she couldn't recognize. Tables full of numbers she didn't have context for. Faceless people in an empty room, speaking of her. The specifics never quite made sense even afterwards, and the moment only lasted a fraction of a second before Bass pulled her away from the wall. Her thoughts were jumbled, almost alien to her, and it didn't take long before the combination of hypothermia, emotional shock, and a mild concussion left her in a critical state. With the help of Kat, the other Mew in town, Bass took Berri back to their house so that she could be nursed back to health.
It didn't take long for Berri to realize that, after the incident with the city's wall, she... wasn't alone. Something about the power she clashed with and her own psychic abilities mingled, and she found herself sharing thoughts with two other versions of herself. In all respects, they were essentially split personalities, yet they had memories and lives all their own. One of them had been captured by Team Rocket like she had, but managed to escape and hide herself away on an untamed jungle island, where she formerly lived as an elder and oracle. The other... hadn't had any of the trauma that they had at all. She seemed simpler, more carefree - there were occasional memories of a "Tree of Beginning", and a Lucario, but she had spent most of her days in a school meant for training fighters of all sorts, not just pokémon.
Berri remained in recovery for several months, slowly getting accustomed to having three seperate personalities that were entirely aware of one another. During that time, another resident unleashed an intergalactic space disease amongst the city. Called "Cosmic Rust", it didn't affect her personally, instead eating away at pretty much all metallic material in the city. Unfortunately, that included living beings that had metal in their composition as well... such as Bass. Bass managed to avoid the Rust for a large portion of its presence in the city, but his own sanity was rapidly degrading. Berri hadn't suffered trauma from the wall on her own, after all - pulling her away from it further unhinged Bass's already shaky grip on things.
That was when she first met some of the creatures from outside the wall. A boy and his dog, it seemed, the former of them constantly dripping ink and the latter not seeming entirely right in the head. The trauma Berri endured had managed to give her the knowledge she needed to recognize them - they were the physical manifestations of "mundanes", though she didn't know such terms herself. The boy laid it out straight - Bass was damaged beyond repair in several ways that couldn't be fixed normally, but he had a last ditch plan to save the netnavi. With the help of Crmsn, Berri, and Kat, Bass was restrained and essentially forced "better" in a similar fashion to Crmsn's own healed lungs. The two outsiders then vanished without a trace. Nobody came to "fix" Berri, and she actually resented that to a large degree.
She managed to keep such thoughts to herself with the help of her "other selves", and life continued as normal...or what passed for normal in the city. After a few weeks time, though, Crmsn had turned up missing. A fellow housemate, a half-dragon named Saft, found a strange egg in her bedroom around the same time, but no thought was given to it at the time. When the egg hatched, though, it was a different story entirely. Apparently, the lingering stress from Cosmic Rust incident, the fight with Bass, and an obsessive-compulsive fit of Spring Cleaning had overloaded Crmsn emotionally, awakening digimon blood inside of him and causing him to regress to a childlike state. With Kat busy in her own issues and the others less-than-suited for the job, Berri took it upon herself to play surrogate mom for the child Crmsn.
Nothing's ever easy, though.
While Berri was trying her best to be a good parent for the half-digimon, things started cascading into an utter chaotic whirlwind around her. Saft started acting suspiciously, doing odd things like flirting with Trevor and hacking into computer databases without any former experience of such things. Ren was starting to get an odd psychic... growth coming out of the top of his head and coloring his thoughts, and the mew's attempts at helping only made things worse. The still-present effects of the wall caused Berri to have recurring, inexplicable nightmares. Nothing seemed to be going right.
To top it all off, Saft asked the two Mews present in the city if they could probe inside her head and see if they could find out what was wrong with her, if there was a reason for the blackouts. Berri dove deep into the dragonling's memories, finding a large number of 'blind spots' she couldn't sense at all. Unfortunately, she dove too deep, uncorking repressed traumas in Saft that caused the girl to lash out and flee the house, hiding away in the forest for several months. Unable to properly approach the problem, Berri buried herself in fixing her other problems. Crmsn recovered with little issue, but Ren's odd "growth" was getting worse, starting to cause the chihuahua a significant amount of mental and physical pain. Berri wasn't there for its "cure", something involving a pickaxe and another "mundane" springing out of the chihuahua's burst melon. However, she was there to extract vengance on the creature for harming her friend, even if she knew he would recover from the ink well soon enough. It was a small moment of personal satisfaction when she disabled the creature with a potent psychic attack, but that was all it was - a fleeting victory in the abject face of failure. Saft was still missing, and Ren, while recovered physically, was a nervous wreck.
Once again, Berri withdrew from interacting with others. For a few months, she kept quiet until Saft finally made her presence known again... after a fashion. Saft had been indoctrinated and assimilated by a Reaper lurking deep in the city's forests, and had to be stopped. Berri naturally joined the group attempting to rescue the girl and stop her from harming the city, though when the moment came, she balked, unable to hurt a girl she had come to know as family. Saft was eventually saved, and recovered from the brainwashing with remarkable speed after being freed from the Reaper's control, but the damage was done, all in all. Berri was never quite the same after that. Sure, she still tried to help out around Crmsn's house, but her former enthusiasm never quite returned. Several more months passed without incident for Berri, mostly by choice of isolation.
Then she started hearing the voices.
While she was busy dealing with Crmsn's regression earlier in the year, the "mayor" of the city and his sister had officially retired, so to speak. They weren't told how it was going to happen, but they were basically being let out of the city that had been their home. They were no longer needed. However, something went wrong as they left. The two had become stuck in the unnatural wall itself, begging desperately to be freed from their prison. It was bitterly ironic to Berri, who had been trapped in the city for more than a year, that others would want back in. Regardless, she did feel a bit of sympathy towards them, and had become one of the few people remaining who could actually hear them due to her own connection with the wall. She helped the others in the city find their way to where the two ink-citizens were trapped... and with the combined forces of creatures native to the world and those trapped in it, the wall was finally broken open.
Berri never got to see the aftermath of that incident; she found herself back home. Everything was like a vague, disjointed illusion to her - alternate personalities that weren't there any more, fourteen months of suffering that never, she thought, happened. She returned to her own world... and nothing had changed. The only difference was that it was easier to hide. And hide the Mew did; she had given up on humanity, given up on thoughts of revenge or redemption, and given up on herself. Thus, it was little surprise to her that it was only a few days later that she ended up in the city once more... though several months had passed within its walls.
At that point, the Mew was starting to lose her grip on reality, especially as something felt distinctly wrong with the world this time through. Like something fundamental had changed. Berri didn't know what it was, but a sassy young girl by the name of Asagi managed to unintentionally remind her. Through her own blatant disregard of the figurative fourth wall, Asagi reawakened the memories of the Mew's contact with the physical wall within the city. While the other 'personalities' never returned, it was still like ripping a bandaid off a still-healing wound, causing pain and anguish to rush out. Chronic migraine headaches became common, and she sought to escape them in any way possible. Usually that involved indulging in darker habits with Ren, or just trying to block out the world as much as possible...
After the attack from the Audlings had been repressed, the city was headed down the path of recovery. The mayor's arrival allowed many harmed by the city's split, such as Trevor, to be healed from their degeneration and injuries. Of course, the Mew's wounds weren't physical, at that point. No, instead she'd learned her first harsh lesson about the city: folks in Ink City were incredibly violent, moreso than even her own world. Instead of simply using pokémon as weapons of war, they had no qualms in taking the lives of other beings. And why should they? It didn't take long for her to be told that one of the rules of the city was that death was impermanent. While musing over this fact, the Mew was approached by Bass.EXE, whom took to calling her "Berry", based on a fractured memory she had of one of Team Rocket's researchers calling her by that nickname during her time in imprisonment.
A week or so after meeting Bass at the ink fountain, someone outed Trevor as capturing and experimenting on others throughout his time in the city. Feeling betrayed by someone she saw as an ally and also being reminded of her own time as a test subject, the Mew snapped. With little more than a few creepy messages, she found her way into Trevor's compound and hid deep in the building's air vents, biding her time and gradually wearing away at the scientist-politician's mind with subtle telekinetic tricks. At the same time, she paid little heed to her own sanity slipping, the tricks getting more blatant and sinister... until after two weeks hidden away, she finally decided to go for the only revenge she felt appropriate. Since death was cheap in this City, she'd leave him alive, able to suffer like she did. The fight was short and anticlimactic, the Mew managing to get Trevor cornered and drugged up on the same paralytic agent he'd used on his own test subjects. Then, she cut him open, making sure to inflict as much pain as she could while keeping him alive.
It would have been the perfect crime, except in her manic, delirious state, she decided to broadcast it to the entire city under an anonymous filter, with warnings that other scientifically-minded denizens of the city would suffer similar fates. While she did not out herself to any but the city's robotic denizens (who could hack her signal with ease), she still managed to draw two seperate forms of attention she hadn't expected. Notably, several of the more morally upstanding citizens of the city saw it fit to try to rescue Trevor from his state, regardless of the harm he'd done to others. However, Bass also disapproved of her methods - he saw little point in letting Trevor survive, and went in to finish the job. While the Mew was smart enough to flee the building before either group arrived, Bass and the would-be "heroes" arrived on the scene almost simultaneously. There were no survivors, due to Bass attacking Trevor with enough force to obliterate nearly the entire compound.
Certainly, the impact was lessened when all those involved reemerged from the fountain, but the damage was done. One of the people involved in the botched rescue attempt was Yakko Warner, who had been rattled to the core at his sudden vulnerability. He and his family never came to harm beforehand, after all. Dot likewise blamed the anonymous broadcaster with her brother's death, a connection that finally shocked the Mew out of her delirious revenge-high and made her actively withdraw. Dot had been the first friend she had within the city, and the Mew had gotten so wrapped up in her own maniacal lust for vengeance that Dot had been hurt worse than ever before in her life. After that night, the Mew did the only thing that seemed sensible for someone who'd realized the weight of what her actions had caused...
She hid. Using someone else's party as a distraction, she hid herself in the fountain, creating a human form for herself and then emerging good as new, as if she'd never been to the city in the first place. Using her former nickname as her cover name, "Berri" quickly acquainted herself with the locals... including a strange gentleman known as Crmsn. Crmsn was another of the group attempting to rescue Trevor, and yet he seemed to harbor no ill will towards those responsible - in fact, it appeared that he and Bass had been friends for quite some time and he actually hadn't been surprised by the NetNavi's actions in the slightest. Crmsn and Berri hit it off quickly, and she agreed to stay with him for a while, though she did have a few odd quirks, such as insisting on sleeping on his roof instead of in the house itself.
That Halloween, a costume party was crashed by Discord, who caused all of those in attendance to actually become their costumes for a week. In an odd twist of coincidence, another Mew arrived in town while Berri was stuck in the form of a Gardevoir. Crmsn referred to her as Kat, and apparently had a bit of history with the Mew - apparently their paths had crossed before in his home world. Realizing the utter innocence of the other psychic-type, Berri panicked and rushed into making amends. She outed herself first to Trevor, then to Crmsn, and finally the city as a whole, seeking to draw ire back on her instead of on the new arrival in town. Surprisingly, ripping off the bandage like that caused no immediate harm - Trevor was far more interested in taunting her effective powerlessness over him, Crmsn forgave her readily for her involvement, and many of those who had seen what she had done weren't of the sort to approach her anyway. She was effectively a bit of a pariah, but that allowed her to grow closer with other relative outcasts, such as Bass and Ren Hoek, a rather psychotic chihuahua whom Berri had known in passing and took quite a shine to.
The incident was resolved and things slowly calmed, but all was not well. Crmsn was starting to succumb to a case of emphysema he'd arrived with, an affliction that had only grown worse with the stress he'd gone through in the city. A good number of his friends rallied together to help him, including Berri, who had been thrown into an utter panic by the possibility she could lose one of her closest friends. In her panic, Berri enlisted the assistance of a new arrival in the city, a ghostly doctor by the name of "Arty". Arty's powers were in tune enough with the City that it was possible to reverse and even halt Crmsn's problems, but the process was invasive and unpleasant enough that Berri started to guilt herself over once again putting someone she cared about in a painful situation. Making matters worse, Dot was one of the people who had rushed to Crmsn's aid, and in the confusion, Berri glanced into her former friend's thoughts. What she saw there were the Warner sister's nightmares, something surreal and almost... otherworldly. It was only the briefest of glimpses, but it was enough to confirm she'd somehow utterly traumatized someone undeserving of such things.
It didn't take long for Berri to convince herself that she'd hurt both Dot and Crmsn irrepairably, and once again she withdrew from people. This time, though, she didn't hide in plain sight. Instead, she sought out a means of escaping the city. In the process, she learned what lied beyond the turbulent, stormy waters out further into the ocean... she managed to witness a split second of literal void before nonexistance effectively killed her. The trip took longer than she had expected, as well - by the time she regenerated from the fountain, the city had been beset by a harsh, cutting blizzard. Already in a bitter, self-actualized loop of delusion, she believed that the city was trying to punish her for leaving. Instead of just lying there and taking it, though, she stayed her course out of sheer stubbornness, trying another avenue. This time, she flew towards the mountains out past the forest, knowing there was an ipassable rock cliff deep within. Worried from her near-delirious posting on the communicator network, Bass tracked her into the mountains, mere inches away from the wall. He tried his best to stop her, but to no avail. In a final, desperate attempt to flee, Berri threw herself at the barrier keeping them within the city.
There's no telling what exactly Berri saw when she touched the wall. Text, certainly... in a language she couldn't recognize. Tables full of numbers she didn't have context for. Faceless people in an empty room, speaking of her. The specifics never quite made sense even afterwards, and the moment only lasted a fraction of a second before Bass pulled her away from the wall. Her thoughts were jumbled, almost alien to her, and it didn't take long before the combination of hypothermia, emotional shock, and a mild concussion left her in a critical state. With the help of Kat, the other Mew in town, Bass took Berri back to their house so that she could be nursed back to health.
It didn't take long for Berri to realize that, after the incident with the city's wall, she... wasn't alone. Something about the power she clashed with and her own psychic abilities mingled, and she found herself sharing thoughts with two other versions of herself. In all respects, they were essentially split personalities, yet they had memories and lives all their own. One of them had been captured by Team Rocket like she had, but managed to escape and hide herself away on an untamed jungle island, where she formerly lived as an elder and oracle. The other... hadn't had any of the trauma that they had at all. She seemed simpler, more carefree - there were occasional memories of a "Tree of Beginning", and a Lucario, but she had spent most of her days in a school meant for training fighters of all sorts, not just pokémon.
Berri remained in recovery for several months, slowly getting accustomed to having three seperate personalities that were entirely aware of one another. During that time, another resident unleashed an intergalactic space disease amongst the city. Called "Cosmic Rust", it didn't affect her personally, instead eating away at pretty much all metallic material in the city. Unfortunately, that included living beings that had metal in their composition as well... such as Bass. Bass managed to avoid the Rust for a large portion of its presence in the city, but his own sanity was rapidly degrading. Berri hadn't suffered trauma from the wall on her own, after all - pulling her away from it further unhinged Bass's already shaky grip on things.
That was when she first met some of the creatures from outside the wall. A boy and his dog, it seemed, the former of them constantly dripping ink and the latter not seeming entirely right in the head. The trauma Berri endured had managed to give her the knowledge she needed to recognize them - they were the physical manifestations of "mundanes", though she didn't know such terms herself. The boy laid it out straight - Bass was damaged beyond repair in several ways that couldn't be fixed normally, but he had a last ditch plan to save the netnavi. With the help of Crmsn, Berri, and Kat, Bass was restrained and essentially forced "better" in a similar fashion to Crmsn's own healed lungs. The two outsiders then vanished without a trace. Nobody came to "fix" Berri, and she actually resented that to a large degree.
She managed to keep such thoughts to herself with the help of her "other selves", and life continued as normal...or what passed for normal in the city. After a few weeks time, though, Crmsn had turned up missing. A fellow housemate, a half-dragon named Saft, found a strange egg in her bedroom around the same time, but no thought was given to it at the time. When the egg hatched, though, it was a different story entirely. Apparently, the lingering stress from Cosmic Rust incident, the fight with Bass, and an obsessive-compulsive fit of Spring Cleaning had overloaded Crmsn emotionally, awakening digimon blood inside of him and causing him to regress to a childlike state. With Kat busy in her own issues and the others less-than-suited for the job, Berri took it upon herself to play surrogate mom for the child Crmsn.
Nothing's ever easy, though.
While Berri was trying her best to be a good parent for the half-digimon, things started cascading into an utter chaotic whirlwind around her. Saft started acting suspiciously, doing odd things like flirting with Trevor and hacking into computer databases without any former experience of such things. Ren was starting to get an odd psychic... growth coming out of the top of his head and coloring his thoughts, and the mew's attempts at helping only made things worse. The still-present effects of the wall caused Berri to have recurring, inexplicable nightmares. Nothing seemed to be going right.
To top it all off, Saft asked the two Mews present in the city if they could probe inside her head and see if they could find out what was wrong with her, if there was a reason for the blackouts. Berri dove deep into the dragonling's memories, finding a large number of 'blind spots' she couldn't sense at all. Unfortunately, she dove too deep, uncorking repressed traumas in Saft that caused the girl to lash out and flee the house, hiding away in the forest for several months. Unable to properly approach the problem, Berri buried herself in fixing her other problems. Crmsn recovered with little issue, but Ren's odd "growth" was getting worse, starting to cause the chihuahua a significant amount of mental and physical pain. Berri wasn't there for its "cure", something involving a pickaxe and another "mundane" springing out of the chihuahua's burst melon. However, she was there to extract vengance on the creature for harming her friend, even if she knew he would recover from the ink well soon enough. It was a small moment of personal satisfaction when she disabled the creature with a potent psychic attack, but that was all it was - a fleeting victory in the abject face of failure. Saft was still missing, and Ren, while recovered physically, was a nervous wreck.
Once again, Berri withdrew from interacting with others. For a few months, she kept quiet until Saft finally made her presence known again... after a fashion. Saft had been indoctrinated and assimilated by a Reaper lurking deep in the city's forests, and had to be stopped. Berri naturally joined the group attempting to rescue the girl and stop her from harming the city, though when the moment came, she balked, unable to hurt a girl she had come to know as family. Saft was eventually saved, and recovered from the brainwashing with remarkable speed after being freed from the Reaper's control, but the damage was done, all in all. Berri was never quite the same after that. Sure, she still tried to help out around Crmsn's house, but her former enthusiasm never quite returned. Several more months passed without incident for Berri, mostly by choice of isolation.
Then she started hearing the voices.
While she was busy dealing with Crmsn's regression earlier in the year, the "mayor" of the city and his sister had officially retired, so to speak. They weren't told how it was going to happen, but they were basically being let out of the city that had been their home. They were no longer needed. However, something went wrong as they left. The two had become stuck in the unnatural wall itself, begging desperately to be freed from their prison. It was bitterly ironic to Berri, who had been trapped in the city for more than a year, that others would want back in. Regardless, she did feel a bit of sympathy towards them, and had become one of the few people remaining who could actually hear them due to her own connection with the wall. She helped the others in the city find their way to where the two ink-citizens were trapped... and with the combined forces of creatures native to the world and those trapped in it, the wall was finally broken open.
Berri never got to see the aftermath of that incident; she found herself back home. Everything was like a vague, disjointed illusion to her - alternate personalities that weren't there any more, fourteen months of suffering that never, she thought, happened. She returned to her own world... and nothing had changed. The only difference was that it was easier to hide. And hide the Mew did; she had given up on humanity, given up on thoughts of revenge or redemption, and given up on herself. Thus, it was little surprise to her that it was only a few days later that she ended up in the city once more... though several months had passed within its walls.
At that point, the Mew was starting to lose her grip on reality, especially as something felt distinctly wrong with the world this time through. Like something fundamental had changed. Berri didn't know what it was, but a sassy young girl by the name of Asagi managed to unintentionally remind her. Through her own blatant disregard of the figurative fourth wall, Asagi reawakened the memories of the Mew's contact with the physical wall within the city. While the other 'personalities' never returned, it was still like ripping a bandaid off a still-healing wound, causing pain and anguish to rush out. Chronic migraine headaches became common, and she sought to escape them in any way possible. Usually that involved indulging in darker habits with Ren, or just trying to block out the world as much as possible...
