FATHER WINTER THE 2ND
NORTH POLE H0H 0H0
HOENN

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To whom it may concern,

I’m not addressing this correspondence as dear Father Winter because I don’t really believe you entirely exist. While I dabble in theoretical physics and calculations, I wholeheartedly believe in the capitalist conglomerate, and the statistical likelihood of you just being a single person (and not an entire company) is incredibly slim.

Also, you died. So there’s that.

You will see attached a copy of the crossword puzzle you wanted us to fill out. I’m going to pretend that’s all it was, a silly little crossword puzzle for silly little funtime games, like when we used to solve riddles to get toys off the back of cereal boxes as kids. Well, some kids. My parents never let me have cereal. Or have fun times.

This entire endeavor could be considered a conceptual ‘fun time’, because the idea of me, a practiced and vouched scientist, writing to a fictional figurehead of an erstwhile pagan religion thoroughly masticated and spat back up by the economic powers that be, is entirely laughable. But you know what they say about desperate times and the measures that stem from them.

There are a lot of things I want for Wintertide. I want my ex-fiance to not be a traitor. I would love for him to stop getting hurt. I want to stop the world from ending. I want to save the universes.

But, perhaps most simply, I want to see my stupid bird.

It’s hard to put into words the relationship I had with Chocobo, back in that doomed Galarian dream. If you’ve not been chronically ill and disabled your entire life, you don’t really understand the kind of freedom that comes with overcoming it. But not only did he make me strong, he made me feel wanted-- needed-- for the first time, ever. And Ashley Shepard tries, he does, but then he goes off and does dumb shit and gets fucking murdered anyway and it’s all outside of my control. So it still hurts.

But Chocobo wouldn’t do any of that to me. And so I would like to see him, again. I don’t want to be an avatar or anything of that height of audacity… but I just want him (them? it?) to be okay. To not be used and churned out by either Rocket or the League, to not be weaponized in this stupid, ceaseless war. I don’t want him to be tamed, I want him to be unruly and free.

Asking people what they’d want to change in their past is perhaps the stupidest thing you could have done. I hope you’re ready to be inundated with boo-hoo sob stories about people asking to redirect paths entirely under their choice of control. Here’s another one: I wouldn’t have gone to the meteor, and stood there and done absolutely nothing. I would have gone with Ashley Shepard to Mt. Pyre and stopped… whatever happened there. I would have been there for him. I would have cut out this strange codependency with disaster at the root.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. If wishes were fishes, there’d be no room in the world for water.

Besides, my ex-fiance is a traitor to the cause, and I don’t associate with him anymore. [What follows is a long-winded tirade of disclaimers thoroughly disassociating Kepler from Ashley. You get the sense this has been practiced and repeated many, many times.]

As for what I would change about the present, I would simply want to put myself in a position to utilize Rocket’s exceptional resources for the sciences better. As previously stated, I would like to save the world. Assisting Lulu Flint in her research, like I've been doing, seems like the best way to get where I want to go in the org. She might be slightly crazy (who isn't, nowadays) but if she has delusions of grandeur spurring her to bigger and brighter scientific horizons, more power to her, and I'll follow along behind, gleaning what I can, stealing what I can't.

Someone has to do it, and it doesn’t look like very many people are trying. It might as well be me, huh?

Besides, I more or less owe Lulu Flint my life. Probably have offed myself by this point if I'd stayed in Sinnoh. Weird how the world works, huh?

And finally, on the topic of deciding the future, I want to save the fucking world. Not out of any heroic sense or requirement of duty, but because, for the first time in my entire, shitty life… I don’t want to die. I don’t want to lose this. I don’t want to lose what I have. It’s not perfect, but it’s real. Living in that Galarian dream… made me see that happiness is possible. It eventually gets mucked up, but it’s worth it while it lasts.

This is another thing you don’t understand unless you’ve lived your entire life under the shadow of affliction. I’ve spent every day feeling like a parasite in my own, broken body; if it isn’t my heart, it’s my brain; if it isn’t my brain, it’s my circulatory system. Or my lungs. Or my own fucking biology, fighting, fighting, fighting. Like somewhere along the line, whatever twist of fate decreed that I should operate this broken, busted chassis wedged a space in here and I slithered in, an unwanted pilot in a rusted-down mech that everyone expects to give out and shunt away sooner rather than later.

Having those brief, beautiful moments where I don’t just live, I belong... they’re addicting. I need more of them. And for that to happen, you see, I need life to continue existing.

It’s entirely selfish. Not being the ultimate demise of billions, if not trillions, of other sentient lifeforms is also important, but as we’ve ascertained, I don’t really care about them. I care about me.

So, anyway. Thank you for your time, whatever nameless entity is forced to read this; or hello to the garbage can this gets tossed into as you copy down the return address for your holiday coupon book scam. I don’t want any magazines, thanks.

Yours,

Kepler Brueshaber.

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KEPLER BRUESHABER
METRO SANCTUARY, APARTMENT 3102, SLATEPORT CITY
HOENN