I had a short dream about a new True Ending to Mother 3 last night

[snarp]

and then extended the middle section after I woke up:

There's no blackout after Flint finds out about Hinawa. Dawn comes, and you now have control of Lucas. Also, it's autumn, and the rain is sleet, and the woods are covered in frost.

Claus tells Lucas he's going to kill the Drago. Lucas has the choice of either promising to keep it secret, or going with him.

If they go together, they find Hinawa standing next to Lighter's burned house talking to the mouse. She acts as if nothing is wrong. Her chest has a little blood on it, and she's wearing lipstick.

Hinawa sends Lucas to Alec's house to "check on" Alec and takes Claus to "talk to" the Dragos, ostensibly to prove to him that everything's fine. Lucas can either go to Alec's house (it'll be empty), or follow them; either way, she'll manage to lose him. He eventually finds the Drago's body. She has taken Claus away.

Flint can't use PK, right? So Hinawa's got to be the one the kids got it from. And Hinawa's "death" is what allowed Porky to take control over Tazmily so easily. Hinawa has been a cyborg all along. The first needle was in her heart, and she pulled it before the game began.

When the time came to "die," she simply slotted the fang into the hole in her heart and laid down in the mud. No one in Tazmily knows what violence looks like, so no one questioned why there was so little blood.

Fassad never appears; the needle in Hinawa's heart was, implicitly, Locria's. She had been Hinawa's guardian in the same way Ionia had been Kumatora's, and Hinawa put on her lipstick after she died.

Claus is never able to learn PK, and his mind is never entirely destroyed. He takes on Fassad's role, and Hinawa is the Masked Woman. But neither Claus nor Hinawa ever tries to hurt Lucas.

Years pass. The city sprawls outward, eventually overtaking most of the island. It decays as quickly as it spreads, and plants and animals fill the cracks.

Claus is aging more slowly than Lucas - they're both fifteen, but he looks only eleven or twelve. Claus gets confused about who he is. Sometimes he thinks he's Lucas.

Lucas convinces Kumatora, Duster, and Boney to humor this and take Claus on adventures with them, in an effort to make him more human again. Hinawa invariably comes to collect him again in the evening - just at dinner time - and he seems to forget immediately upon taking her hand. He remembers a little more each time.

The seventh needle wasn't actually the final one. There's one more somewhere, and Porky can't find it. Hinawa sweeps ceaselessly through the vast city "searching" for it. When Claus is with Kumatora or Duster or Boney, Lucas and one of the others goes with her.

Lucas often grieves for the person he thought she was, and is angry with her for pretending to be that person, and for being so cold now, and so apparently impossible to love. But she cannot be remade into someone who never existed; she's alive again, and must be accepted this way.

She speaks mostly only in short, impatient sentences, and her voice is deeper than it used to be. This does not seem unnatural to her. Claus has been harmed, has had parts of his life stolen. But Hinawa is complete in herself, moreso than she ever was before. If something was taken from her, she has long since replaced it.

Kumatora, who had met her before she died, says that she likes her better this way. Kumatora would, of course, say this regardless of whether or not it was true, but uncomfortably, it is true. This Hinawa seems a more appropriate sort of "Mother" to her.

And that's worrying. They are all, including Claus, now reluctant to find the last needle. It seems very likely that Hinawa herself is the eighth guardian. No one wants to lose her for the final time. And she seems to be doing something important.

The city never reaches Flint's house, and he rarely goes out into it; he doesn't know about her. But one day he is going to find out, and one day Claus will be entirely himself again. At that point, Hinawa and Lucas will have to decide what to do with the world. For now, they are holding it still and watching one another.

One day a metal Porky delivers an ultimatum to Hinawa: She must destroy the world herself, or he will do his best to do it with his machines. He is rusted and, and his voice sometimes glitches out. He has not been maintaining himself well. He may not be able to do this. The real one may already be dead.

Hinawa tells Claus something:

The last needle, like the first, was once inside Hinawa - it was in her navel, and now it is in Claus's. She will not tell him what to do, and she will not ask him what she wants. Regardless of what she is, or what he and Lucas are to her, she is never going to pull that needle.

But Claus doesn't think he knows how to make decisions for himself anymore. They all turn out wrong. If she won't decide for him, he'll have to ask Lucas.

Claus and Lucas talk in a broken glass overlooking the forest. It is an autumn morning again, and there is frost on the ground. A metal Porky is nearby watching, or maybe recharging its failing old batteries. It was threatening them earlier, but it shut up and walked out into a sunbeam.

Lucas could pull the needle and wake the dragon, but they're still not sure what that means. Porky seems already to be losing. Can't things be made better in some other way - without destroying the world and remaking it all at once, incomprehensibly? This is the world they live in. The light is pretty on the melting frost through the broken windows. So maybe they're not ready to give it up. Was that even the right thing to do the first time?

Lucas is never going to pull that needle, and Claus can't - he never learned how. But he can make it impossible, so he does. He rips his stomach open and tears the needle into pieces. It is soft and tough and fibrous, like a root, and a dirty brassy color. Lucas, who of course has healing powers, fixes him neatly back up. He's fine. It feels appropriately anticlimactic.

Hinawa has not remade the world as she wanted it - she probably has no clear idea of what that is. But she has held it back from something else. Maybe she is the eighth guardian, or maybe she is the dragon itself, keeping her eyes firmly closed as her many children climb across her back. There's time to figure things out.

She goes regularly to visit Alec in his cabin, never burned, and now with a little mess of windmills and solar panels out back to power an elevator she had installed. He thinks that's a little much, and ugly. But it works, he has trouble getting up and down the stairs these days.

-

(The dream itself was pretty short, basically just: 1) the sequence with Claus and Lucas finding slightly-bloody Hinawa in the frosty woods and Hinawa hurriedly losing Lucas; 2) Kumatora and Lucas anxiously following taciturn makeup-wearing-cyborg-Hinawa and small, sick-looking, fretful Claus through a falling-apart cyberpunk city on an incoherent shounen-manga adventure; 3) Claus angrily ripping the root-needle out of his stomach and tearing it up in front of Lucas in a chilly broken building, after being threatened by a glitchy Porkybot standing outside a glass door.

Duster, Boney, Flint, and Alec didn't actually show up. Had to write mans and dog back in. My subconscious is misandrist.)