Canon background;

[caladrius]

(Note: This post only includes FFXIII and FFXIII-2, including their respective supplementary material. A write-up of LR and its novel will come later. ... Much, much later.)

A Dyson sphere-like world wherein people lived for over a thousand years isolated from the rest of the world, and thus had misconceptions about what exactly was out there. That's the kind of world Hope had been born and raised in for the first fourteen years of his life, so it's not really surprising that he carried the same prejudices himself when he'd been younger. As far as he knew, the world below, Pulse, was Hell, filled with savage creatures, and they were all safe in Cocoon where the walls were strong and the government, called the Sanctum, could take care of them, along with the unfathomable god-like creatures they called fal'Cie that cared for them. After all, Cocoon was self-sustaining-- everything they could ever want was always there. Heck, right underneath Hope's own home city was their food processing plant, maintained by its own fal'Cie.

Their prejudices were justified somewhat-- about six hundred years before Hope's birth, there was a war between Pulse and Cocoon that was now being called the War of Transgression, wherein both peoples fought against each other. It ended with Cocoon's victory, but with a price-- several cities were damaged and a piece of Cocoon's shell was permanently cracked because of a monster named Ragnarok that the Pulse fal'Cie had unleashed, despite the Sanctum fal'Cies' rebuilding efforts.

But with those prejudices came a huge fear, the kind of fear that could and would put the entire nation into a panic if word got out that something from the outside managed to get in.

And that's exactly what happened when Hope was fourteen.

Before that, he'd been just a regular boy, the only child of Bartholomew and Nora, who lived in Palumpolum, the city of commerce. His father was a Sanctum official, thus made a lot of money, but at the cost of spending many days at work and too little time with his family. This drove Hope to hate him and rely on his mother for everything, including the affection that he could not get due to the regular absences of his father and the lack of any real friends.

During a trip to the seaside city of Bodhum to watch fireworks with his mother, the entire city was put on lockdown due to an artifact-- a piece of a building-- from the outside world having been spotted in it. For years the people of the city didn't think much about it, thinking it was some kind of relic from the old days, when Cocoon was still rebuilding after the War. And besides, it had always been closed, letting no one in and everyone assumed nothing within it could get out.

But the military noticed that it had indeed been opened, and possibly from the inside too, because there was evidence of someone or something inside it. Unfortunately, whoever or whatever it was long been gone. Naturally, word got out and the entire country knew about it. And began to panic, because what if whatever had been in it was among the people of Bodhum already, and infected them with something?

The building itself had already been hauled away to be disposed of, but to appease the people, the Sanctum decided that the best course of action was for PSICOM, the military branch that had been to deal specifically with Pulse-related issues, to conduct a Purge-- or simply, the removal everyone who had been Bodhum at the time to leave them stranded in Pulse, thus cutting off any chance of whatever had been in the old building to get to the rest of Cocoon. And Hope and Nora had been included in that Purge, despite only being on vacation.

Naturally, some people didn't agree, including the local resistance group that resided in Bodhum. Before the trains could reach the outer walls of Cocoon, they launched an attack to free the people. Nora herself joined them, but she died protecting the resistance leader from PSICOM armaments as Hope watched, which made Hope believe that the man was responsible for his mother's death. A girl beside him, another passenger of their train, then urged Hope to go speak with the resistance leader, ultimately making him follow the man all the way to the old building that caused the mess in the first place.

Within the building, Hope met three more people who had ventured into it, but one of them-- the resistance leader's fiancee and sister to the lone soldier in their small band-- somehow turned into a block of clear crystal. This reminded everyone of an old legend in Cocoon-- that fal'Cie that would take people, named l'Cie to differentiate them from the rest of the population, and give them missions or Foci to complete and if they succeeded, they would be granted eternal life as a crystal, while those who failed to accomplish their Focus before time ran out would be turned into Cie'th-- zombie-like monsters-- to wander forever in punishment. And clearly that crystallized girl was proof that the old legends were true.

What happened to them was also proof that the old legends were true, because Hope and the rest of them were taken by the dying fal'Cie hiding deep within the structure and given their own Focus through images sent directly through their brain, and powers they would use to carry it out. However, because of how their mission was presented, they didn't understand what they needed to do. After all, they only saw a creature with several arms standing on top of one of the buildings of the capital city, and what were they supposed to do with something that vague? Not to mention they had pressure in the form of PSICOM and their cybernetically-enhanced animals bearing down on them as well, because they were running from the Purge and the Sanctum.

Everyone split up, leaving the leader of the resistance-- now known as Snow Villiers-- with the crystal body of his fiancee, while Hope all but plastered himself to the side of the poor lady's sister, a former Guardian Corps (the other branch of the military, tasked with domestic disturbances) soldier codenamed Lightning, because out of all of them, she was the strongest and had the most experience in combat. That left the last two, Vanille and the man named Sazh, teaming up to survive.

At first, Lightning disliked having Hope as a tag-along, and Hope only used her as protection and a means to get stronger so he could exact revenge on Snow, but eventually they warmed up to each other and bonded to the point that Hope allowed himself to be convinced to return home and speak to his father. They also helped each other deal with their newfound abilities, Hope figuring out he had a knack for magic and healing, while helping Lightning deal with what the legends called an Eidolon, a creature sent by a goddess to l'Cie who were suffering under the weight of their Focus in order to either end them or help them. And of course they won, and Lightning tamed that particular Eidolon, earning the right to summon him whenever she wished, which was a big help when soldiers caught up to them every so often, forcing them into fights that always ended in someone's death.

In Hope's hometown, they met Snow again, and this time he was accompanied by a woman named Fang. But with the military so close to capturing them, they split up, the women going one way and the males going the other. When they had a moment to breathe, Hope confronted Snow about the Purge, and revealed that he was the son of the woman who died in front of Snow. He also attempted to murder Snow, but the soldiers had caught up to them and Snow became badly injured trying to get Hope to safety. In that moment, Hope had decided he needed to stop being such a child and defended Snow, his way of forgiving the man and letting go of his need for revenge, until Lightning and Fang arrived to assist him.

After that battle, they found out that Fang was apparently in the same boat as they were, except she was older-- about a few hundred years old, and she had been one of the two people within the old structure in Bodhum, one of those that started it all. That she and her companion had actually come from Pulse-- or Gran Pulse as they called it-- and spent hundreds of years as crystal within the building, so they never aged or even realized that they were in Cocoon until they had woken up from crystal stasis. That she and her friend had gotten separated, and so she made a deal with one subversive division of the Corps in order to find her again. And that friend? Was none other than Vanille herself.

Before they could do anything with the revelation, Hope needed to mend ties with his father. Contrary to their expectations, Bartholomew had allowed them into the Estheim home, even thanking Snow when he revealed that he had been responsible for his wife's death because he upheld Nora's last wish to get Hope home. He then urged Hope to do what he thought was right and what he needed to survive.

Not long after, PSICOM came to arrest Hope and the rest, but Fang's allies appeared and manipulated the scene in order to rescue them and take Bartholomew to a safe haven. It's with the Cavalry commander, Cid Raines, that they discovered that Vanille and Sazh had been captured and were awaiting execution. So of course the four launched a rescue operation and infiltrated the airship wherein they were being held.

However the rescue had been soured by a painful revelation-- that the Primarch, the leader of the Sanctum was not human, and in fact a fal'Cie just like Eden, except Barthandelus controlled the country directly with his human guise. He had captured the Pulse fal'Cie within its home, planted it in Bodhum, and then waited for it to grab whatever human unlucky enough to get close and give them the Focus of destroying Cocoon in retaliation. So not only did he reveal that he had been manipulating Cocoon all along, making them believe they were free people when they were in fact not, he also revealed the group's Focus-- become the creature from their shared visions, which was Ragnarok itself, and destroy Orphan, the fal'Cie deeply embedded into the country's power grid in order to cut off all power to Cocoon and allow it to crash into the world below in order to kill everyone within it.

Why? Because every single fal'Cie in Cocoon wanted their "Maker" back-- this was why they had created Cocoon all along. They had this plan in motion for such a long time, luring people into this floating sphere that seemed like a paradise in order to kill as many humans as possible. All they wanted was their Maker back and had no qualms about using humans they raised and controlled as sacrificial lambs in order to catch this Maker's attention, whoever it was.

Obviously the group refused to go along with this, and attempted to fight back. Barthandelus sent them away to yet another hidden structure he had planted, this time underneath the capital city. It was called the Fifth Ark, an ancient Pulsian training ground for Pulse l'Cie filled with monsters that tested their abilities, and within they found Cid Raines again, but he revealed that he'd been a puppet for Barthandelus as well and attempted to kill them in order to protect the country. But they killed him first, and fled using an old airship to Gran Pulse.

That they experienced culture shock was a big understatement. Instead of the hell they had expected, the Cocoon people discovered that Gran Pulse was a beautiful world-- while seemingly devoid of people, to Hope it was a wilderness full of untapped potential. Meanwhile, Fang and Vanille, having been asleep for such a long time, felt grief at losing everyone they loved, and they shared some of their memories to their companions.

However, Hope also faced depression, and the knowledge that time was running out for them, because they still had a Focus to fulfill and not getting it done at all was just as bad as actually doing it. He didn't want to become a monster and destroy his home, but he certainly didn't want to become a different monster and stay that way forever either. Thinking he would be a hindrance, he asked everyone to leave him behind. It's due to these thoughts and words that Hope came face to face with the Eidolon Alexander and challenged him to a battle to the death. With Lightning and Fang supporting him, Hope managed to tame Alexander and become his master and with the knowledge that he actually managed to do something like that, Hope found new courage and continued on with the others.

Barthandelus caught up with them though, and delivered a piece of news to them-- in his human guise, he had resigned from his position as Primarch. But instead of this being a relief, he went on to add that he had also revived Cid Raines and named him successor in order to trick the Cavalry into attacking Orphan themselves as they believed that Orphan was behind all of their troubles. This was an obvious ploy to get the group to return to their homeland, but it was still true, and they still returned to Cocoon, touching down in Eden in order to stop the Cavalry.

Meanwhile, the monsters they didn't kill in the Fifth Ark were released onto the streets, and eventually the six were led into Orphan's home deep within the city, Cocoon's power plant. Orphan forced them into battle, attempting to drive them into becoming Ragnarok so they could fulfill its wish for death, but they managed to kill it without doing so. And this was significant, because fighting Orphan as themselves saved Cocoon from significant damage.

But with the power source dead, Cocoon's entire infrastructure went offline, and Cocoon began the fall the fal'Cie had been waiting for. In order to stop this, Vanille, Fang and Lightning sacrificed themselves, the first two transforming into Ragnarok themselves and creating a crystal pillar to hold Cocoon up, with Lightning giving her life to support them. Meanwhile, the rest of them turned into individual crystal statues and when they returned to normal hours later, they discovered that they lost their powers, but more importantly, that the women of their group were either dead or in a permanent crystal sleep and grieved for them.

Nevertheless, they took what little comfort they could in their success. The Sanctum fal'Cie were all offline. Snow was reunited with his fiancee, who had miraculously come out of her own crystal sleep the moment her sister and the two other women saved Cocoon. Hope gave her the only thing he had managed to salvage from the destruction, a knife which had apparently been her birthday gift to Lightning. Sazh returned to his son. Hope was escorted by Cavalry soldiers to his father.

The catastrophe in Eden marked a new era for Cocoon, and people changed the way they counted the years, this time using the catastrophe as a starting point. They named it the Fall, as in fall of Cocoon, and any year that came before that was named BF for Before the Fall, and any year after it AF or After the Fall.

In the six months after the Fall, Eden had been deemed too ruined and Palumpolum became the new capital city. While Hope didn't mind the increased activity in his hometown, there were some people who sought to bring back the old ways and seek the fal'Cie to help them once again. The Cavalry, now led by Raines' former second named Rygdea, secretly met with Bartholomew in order to prevent this, examining files made by a deceased PSICOM colonel named Yaag Rosch, who secretly caught footage of the Purge and the journey of Hope and his companions, ultimately revealing the truth behind... well, everything.

Bartholomew and Rygdea then decided that they would create a society wherein the people would live and think for themselves, and to start with a provisional government that was different from the Sanctum. In addition, Bartholomew expressed a desire to create a research institute that would connect with the outside world and also allow the next generation to develop their abilities, using Hope's intelligence and maturity as a basis for his vision. He called this institute the Academy.

While Rygdea dealt with the fanatics by arresting every Sanctum employee who had approved of the Purge, Bartholomew offered Hope a chance to join him in the Academy. Hope jumped at this, realizing it was his opportunity to atone for the crimes he had committed.

Hope also kept in touch with his old friends. However, when Hope was sixteen, Sazh and his son suddenly went missing, and there was no trace of them left. Months later, Snow visited him alone, saying that he wasn't going to be around for a while because his fiancee and Lightning's sister, Serah, was convinced that Lightning was alive because she'd reunited with Serah before suddenly disappearing. After that, he disappeared, leaving his fiancee and gang behind.

At seventeen years old, Hope joined the Academy properly as both a student and an employee. With his tireless work ethic and brilliant mind, he received his degree only two years later at nineteen. Immediately after, he became the Director of the entire institute and was given the leadership of its best research team.

Not long after that, still in 3AF, the world changed once again. Strange machines began to appear in random areas, and none of their efforts could either make them move or work. In addition, time somehow became distorted, patches of land or simple items began appearing where they shouldn't, and careful analysis showed that they were from other timelines-- not just the past, not only the future, but from both. They called these anomalies paradoxes.

He also discovered that Serah too went missing from her home immediately after the mysterious objects began to appear, accompanied by an unfamiliar young man. That they alone could make the strange machines work. That they were talking about time and changing it by traveling through different eras, and it piqued Hope's interest because changing time seemed to be a very good way of fixing the Purge and subsequent events, to bring his mother, Lightning, Vanille, Fang and all the other victims back.

Hope also kept Snow's words in mind-- how could Serah have seen something completely different from the rest of them? It made Hope question his memories, especially when Serah didn't seem like the type to hold onto false memories or make things up instead of accepting that her sister had died. What if time had been changed and only Serah had seen what it had been before? It wasn't a sound theory, but it was all he had at the moment.

During his time as head of Team Alpha, Hope took a girl named Alyssa Zaidelle as his assistant, and delved into the world of archaeology, studying how the people of Gran Pulse had lived without the help of their own fal'Cie. In 10AF, they came across the ruins of the city of Paddra, and within these ruins, Team Alpha discovered that the people living there had an entirely different culture than their own, which included worshipping the same goddess that Eidolons had been said to come from, and that their leader was a young girl named Yeul who could see the past, present and future, which compelled the Academy to dub this particular civilization the Farseers. This girl had stored her visions within a sensory perception device they dubbed the Oracle Drive. In essence, if one were to concentrate hard on their thoughts and then introduce an electric current to the device, the crystal within the Drive would receive the person's thoughts as images and play them back like a film loop.

And within this film loop, Hope saw Lightning fighting a man he'd never seen before. This confirmed Serah's story-- though he didn't recognize the setting, he finally had evidence that Lightning was alive somewhere.

Later in the year, Serah and her new friend Noel reemerged, dropping in at the Farseers' ruins. They explained to Hope that they had met him in the very same place and year in an alternate timeline wherein the entire world was placed under an eternal eclipse, but that was now negated due to their interference. Despite the strangeness of their explanations, Hope accepted their words as truth and showed them the images within the Oracle Drive.

It was during this conversation that Noel revealed that Cocoon was no longer in the sky during his time, far into the future. It had apparently crashed years before his birth, wiping out much of life in the world. This sparked a new discussion-- the need to either stop Cocoon from falling, or protect the people from the fall. Hope resolved to put the Academy behind this important task, while Serah and Noel would do what they could, being the only ones who could use the Time Gates. He then saw them off as they continued on with their journey throughout time.

The need to save mankind brought about the New Cocoon project, in which the Academy began to work on a new shell that could house all human life once again, and at the same time trying to find a way to minimize the damage caused by the fall itself.

Some time later, Bartholomew passed away, which broke Hope's heart and made him decide to throw everything into his work.

In 13AF, the Academy came up with the idea to create a structure that would house and process all of its information, much like a data center, so it began construction on the Augusta Tower and the AI that would help maintain it. Almost immediately after the idea's inception, Hope and Alyssa came up with Adam, a man-made fal'Cie that would perform the same duties as a regular fal'Cie for the new Cocoon. However, during one of his regular consultations of the Oracle Drive, he watched Serah struggle against a completed Adam in an alternate future, calling Hope out on his "annoying creations" while doing so. Due to this, he scrapped Adam, and negated that particular timeline himself, but it was definitely back to the drawing board.

After consulting the Oracle Drive once more, Hope caught wind of a prediction that an Ark, this one capable of levitation, would appear over three hundred years in the future near the base of Cocoon where the Academy had set up its headquarters. Knowing that this could be the key to levitating the New Cocoon and wanting to build the new future firsthand, Hope built a "time machine" that would place himself and Alyssa into suspended animation, preserve them and wake them up when the time was right.

Waking up in 400AF, Hope and Alyssa found themselves in Academia, a city built and governed by the Academy three hundred years prior. The Ark arrived just on time, and the Academy discovered that it was kept in the air through a material called a Graviton Core, which was built with a system that relied on crystal ores, thus eliminating the need for outside energy sources. The scientists determined that at least five cores were needed for the New Cocoon, but as they could only be found in different timelines, they had nothing else to do. Luckily for them, Serah and Noel arrived just in time, and Hope tasked them with locating all five cores. With the materials complete, Hope parted ways with Serah and Noel once again.

It was determined that the project would be finished in a hundred years, which meant that if Hope wanted to be there for its completion, he needed to go back to sleep. But before he could do so, he and Alyssa were sent word that there were intruders in Augusta Tower, so they went to investigate it for themselves.

Within it, they discovered the duplicates maintaining the Tower-- holographic artificial lifeforms made by the Academy to imitate the humans they were based on (yes, they've perfected cloning of sorts)-- becoming aggressive. With no backup, Hope was forced to shut of all of them down, eventually coming across Alyssa's diary deep within the system. And it's in her notes that when the timeline was completely fixed, she would cease to exist as she had died in the Purge, and through some paradox had come back to life. That she was desperate to stay alive and Serah and Noel's enemy, someone named Caius, had approached her while she was in suspended animation in order to help her do just that. She had planned to remove Serah and Noel from the timeline, and that she had orchestrated the interference with the Tower so she could assassinate Hope without anyone else around.

Hope attempted to negotiate with her to find a way for her to live in the fixed timeline but it was too late-- she disappeared and everyone's memories of her were erased. Hope himself only had vague recollections of an assistant of some sort, but when he climbed into his time machine, he was alone.

Waking up in 500 AF, Hope was given an assistant named Aina Stein, and reunited with Sazh and Dajh, who had somehow turned up in that era as well. He was also told that the New Cocoon was just about to be activated, and so was the metashield, a barrier of energy that would encase Cocoon to cushion its fall. This meant that people were beginning to move into the new sphere. And just in time too, as Caius had come to attack Academia with a platoon of monsters when the duo arrived in the city. Hope led a unit of his own to fight, but returned to his post within the Academy HQ when Cocoon's pillar finally shattered. At the same time, Serah and Noel chased the man into another world for one last battle.

Thanks to Sazh's efforts, Fang and Vanille were extracted from the pillar, allowing the Academy to begin their work. The metashield was deployed safely, and minimal damage was done to the planet, while the New Cocoon, dubbed Bhunivelze by Hope, went online and rose into the sky.

At the same time, Serah and Noel finally returned, apparently victorious. But as soon as they landed, Serah mysteriously collapsed and Hope rushed to her aid-- but was too late anyway. She didn't collapse-- she died, and while Hope attempted to get the whole story out of Noel other than that Serah had had visions like Yeul as well, which shortened her life significantly, a tear in the sky appeared, revealing another world beyond it. And as they watched, a dark mass of energy began to seep out and infect Academia and the rest of Gran Pulse.

They joined the rest of humanity in the New Cocoon, because there was nothing else they could do for the rest of the world.