Tonelicant Embolism Event

The Tonelicant Embolism Event was a cataclysm of unparalleled magnitude. In the year 322 EFA, humanity established contact with the Kitsune on the other side of a Frontier Gate. The initial experience was pleasant, and largely uncomplicated, as the Kitsune themselves are.

Six years later, an ambassador of the Kitsune, one Alina Tokoki, learned of the power of the Ars Tonelica. Hearing that one had been built fifty years prior for the Tengu, she began to exert pressure on humanity and qog to construct on on their world. in 331 EFA, an agreement was reached, and construction on Ar Metafalica began. Over the twenty-year course of its construction, a joint decision was made to construct the tower without any evil-aligned Goddesses, to prevent the truly evil from possessing equal power, and stay the hands of sociopathic individuals.

However, as soon as Ar Metafalica was turned on, things went wrong. The system, detecting an imbalance in power, began attempting to generate an 'anti-good force' to prevent an overload. This started with the Choir Magi, the Kitsune who were responsible for the Ar Tonelico's upkeep. The tower's magic twisted them into horrific monstrosities possessing black magicks, and they were unleashed upon nearby settlements, turning the inhabitants into more of their kind. As the plague grew, the imbalance was rapidly over-corrected, and the tower system unleashed a pulse of energy to overload its users and destroy the plague beasts.

The results were absolutely chilling. Eight hundred thousand individuals died almost instantly as a wave of raw psionic energy crashed across an entire city-state, but not before they felt the agony of every blood vessel in their bodies bursting open. A second wave followed ten minutes later, even larger than the first, wiping out surrounding cities and chattels, slaughtering over a million more. Yet for the massive toll on humanoid life, not a single structure or other creature was harmed - the blast affected solely those mentally capable of calling on the tower's magic.

The tower's core systems, noting the new lack of anti-good, began to twist more individuals into the plague beasts, in another attempt to rebalance. In the meantime, the core engines began to melt down, releasing periodic sonic blasts every few hours, each more intense than the last. A team of Qog engineers, coming in to relieve the last group, found themselves in the midst of the chaos.

Accompanied by Alina and her two daughters, they pushed through to Ar Metafalica with grim determination. Once there, the engineers found they had only one option. They needed three people to take the places of the missing Goddesses. As the only flesh and blood humanoids present, Alina and her children volunteered for the task They were directly connected to the existing Goddesses, and the tower's magic fed into their bodies. As they died, screaming soundlessly in a bath of hypersonicated gel, the core processor fed all the evil energy it had gathered into their bodies, reincarnating them as the Goddesses of evil.

With the power balanced, Ar Metafalica resumed operations as normal. However, the use of Kitsune to replace the Goddesses resulted in oddities in the CPU's behavior when handling spells - leading to unpredictable, often dangerous results. The Qog engineers put in a series of APIs to translate commands into language the reformed processor could understand, and left, secure in the knowledge that this would prevent future cataclysms. They carried back the knowledge they gained, and no Ar Tonelico was ever again built without all nine Goddesses.

Even so, all was not well. With Alina (who in the last few years had risen to head of state) gone, and millions dead, more militant politicians riled the Kitsune up into a war against the humans, claiming that Ar Metafalica was a Human scheme to eradicate them and take over their land. After nearly six years of war, an uneasy peace was reached. Eighty years later, although humans and kitsune interact frequently, there is still more than a trace of distrust, and old wounds can be opened up in dark alleyways.