Lore by: LuxiestI was never meant to be here. The future was my home—a world of neon skylines and endless possibilities, where time moved fast and technology bent to my will. I belonged to the electric hum of the city, to the pulse of data running through my veins. But fate had other plans.It happened in an instant. A mistake. A glitch. One moment, I was chasing something—someone—through the depths of the digital world. The next, I was falling. Through light, through static, through time itself. And when I landed… everything was different.The air was thicker. The lights dimmer. The world slower. The early 2000s—primitive, raw, alive in ways I had never seen. My body ached, my mind swayed, and worst of all, I wasn’t whole. Something inside me had fractured.I felt it before I understood it. Two voices, two emotions battling for control. Pink—bright, excitable, eager to embrace this strange new world. She found joy in the simple things: the flip phones, the doodles in the margins of notebooks, the plushies lined up in store windows. Then there was Blue—quiet, heavy, lost in thoughts too deep to escape. She lurked in empty alleyways, left her mark in graffiti, let the weight of a guitar in her hands be the only thing keeping her grounded.I didn’t just time travel. I split.And then there was the plushie. Small, stitched in halves—one pink, one blue, just like me. It wasn’t just a toy. It was something more, something vital. A tether to keep me together, to stop the pull of time from unraveling me completely. When it was near, I could breathe. When it wasn’t… I could feel myself slipping, growing weaker, like time itself was trying to erase me.At first, the goal was clear. Find a way back. Fix the fracture. Return home. But the longer I stayed, the more tangled my thoughts became. The world I left behind was sharp and cold, filled with futures that moved too fast for me to grasp. But this world? It was different. Flawed. Chaotic. Beautiful.I was supposed to fight my way back. But now I’m not so sure.I am EmpressKuma, a traveler lost in time, a girl caught between two selves, two lives, two futures. The past pulls at me, whispering its warmth, its simplicity. The future calls, promising the answers I seek. But if I leave, I may never find myself again.So the question remains—do I go back, or do I finally let go?

The Children