- Pronouns
- SL
Who are these guys? Also, why doesn't MC order cheap clothes using Kihara's front company?
A Certain Little Legion (Recursive Raildex SI)
- Thread starter TacitSoliloquy
- Start date
-
- Tags
- raildex self insert
Dark Matter's team.
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
While Best knows that money can be exchanged for goods and services, she is still less than 24 hours old.
She hasn't discovered how to access the accounts of Kihara's front companies yet.
Also at present I'd bet she's prioritize ordering flatpack furniture for beds over clothes.
Chapter 24
- Location
- Terra-Luna
I moaned into my desk, thumping one of my heads against it in heavy, solid thunks. It didn't hurt, I couldn't even really register the impact, but it made me feel better.
Slightly.
I had four jobs now, four! And I hadn't earned one single coin. I had even technically performed an actual mission for one of them even if it was only a trial run!
And yet I wasn't broke, strictly speaking. Except that sort of even made it worse!
Far from my desk, I swooped down toward the street and plucked the shiny metal circle from the side of the road. The holed silvery coin of a fifty-yen piece stared back at me like a little metal eyeball.
By an infinite margin, I was making more money scavenging for lost change than clandestine gun-running, contract wetwork, fighting to save the world as a magical girl, and whatever it was that my newest friend(s) and associates did. I had 4,855 yen, yay me! ...Now I just had to pretend that one yen wasn't an itty-bitty amount to the point that the last two digits might as well be negligible and that I hadn't put in an entire solid work week in man-hours to do it, trying to race the stupid cleaning bots to my lacklustre prizes.
Just as the oh so amazing and awesome cherry on top (not), the boss guy who never actually told me his name—because of course not, why would anyone ever introduce themselves plainly and explicitly?—did in fact have an assignment that needed done, that being why mister Fried Brain Sans Tentacles had badgered Senpai to rush over before school hours, and apparently it wasn't even something anybody was paying for!
I was still unclear just what kind of work Senpai did, but from what the boss guy and the last girl in the team had complained about, I gathered that this assignment was all about sending a message to a former client who had dealt in bad faith and betrayed the team, so it was starting from a deficit and wasn't being funded by any new client, just needing an example to be made to at least kinda-sorta break even again, so this team might be like my other team, or maybe dealt in image management or something?
I sat in the taxi next to Senpai in the back feeling glum, especially since it was indeed in a taxi in the first place. It seemed kind of lame that some kind of special team of elite operatives working in the shadows like we were the cast of a spy thriller action movie actually flagged down a taxi. The boss guy up in the would-be driver's seat in a manually-driven car managed to actually pull off the maroon suit look surprisingly well, but I couldn't help but think Mugino was cooler.
Mugino had her own ride, with a mobile briefing room in the back.
The boss guy was almost cool, but then he ruined it and it nosedived into totally uncool.
He was so incredibly lame that he got picked for double-crossing and didn't catch it in time, so now nobody got any money, just reputation and status.
I sighed lightly to myself, wishing that Senpai had a better job. I didn't know about the other girl in the front passenger seat ahead of me, but sticking with Senpai might be a real pain. We pulled up onto an entry ramp for the freeway, puttering along at a tepid trundle, and I bemoaned the idea that I'd probably have to get another job just to support myself on this job, and maybe help Senpai too. Or at least, another job might help if I could actually make any money anywhere.
Across the city, deep underground beneath where my tedious coverup of the earlier battle against the murderbots inched over the ground, I sat slumped in one of my office chairs much as I simultaneously did in the car with Senpai.
"Onichaaan?" I drew out, head lolling to regard him where he stood hunched over the long computer table looking away from me to peer at a document that he was sort of helping me interpret but more seemed to be trying to turn into a lesson where I also sat right next to him.
He twitched awkwardly, then straightened and regarded me, eyes flicking between me and me before settling on me.
"Yeah?"
"Oniichan, how do I make money?" I asked with a little bit of a whine slipping in in my exasperation.
He frowned, then quirked an eyebrow, pointing between me and the document up on the screen.
"You... aren't thinking about trying to sell any of this, are you?"
He looked more than faintly disturbed.
Huh?
I just blinked at him.
"Oh, right, uh," I waved in front of me. "Totally different subject for you, I guess."
And I frowned as a realisation struck me, and I looked up at him in front of me while I also looked at the screen in front of me too, thinking back a moment about how Oniichan had just been trying to turn his talk-through about the document into a sort of impromptu tutoring, and seemed to have liked it, too; except now I was interrupting that.
Except except, now I had his attention with this.
Down the hall in one of the four cloning chambers, I heaved a sigh while pondering over the internals of my single unbroken gestation pod that somehow conjuring up some multitude gestalt version of Oniichan so that he could do more than one thing at once too sounded like a terrible idea, and in front of him did my best to accommodate his one train of thought.
"I'm trying to do the whole, y'know, gainful employment thing," I told him with an abstract gesture. "I've got four jobs, four," I complained, holding up my fingers for him to see, just to emphasise the point. "And so far, the best way to get money seems to be flying around looking for spare change. I mean, how dumb is that?"
Oniichan pursed his lips a little giving me a thoughtful look, even as I paused for a moment too, thinking about the stuff I had sort of inherited-slash-conquered from Doctor Kihara and Saten's rescue.
"Wait, five jobs," I corrected. "I... sorta became an emergency disaster relief group thing? Except that's basically volunteer work too!"
I pouted.
"I'm not very good at this," I admitted testily.
Oniichan sat up on the computer table adopting a thinker pose, tapping his chin while eying me consideringly.
"So what brought this on in the first place?" He asked.
I huffed, and waved at... everything.
"I'm trying to do all sorts of stuff, especially getting this place back up and running. I mean, I died, Oniichan, like, kerploosh!" I mimed what happened to a couple of my heads, prompting Oniichan to turn faintly greenish. "And yeah, it's sorta not like it really counts, but I think I'm gonna need to be a lot bigger if I'm going to help everyone who needs it, and that's entirely separate from the fact that other people are set on stopping me, plus there's just the fact that, you know," I shrugged, "lots and lots of bodies, lots and lots of mouths to feed and whatnot; the storerooms downstairs have loads of those nutrition pills and whatnot, but I'm trying to think about longer term, and I could burn through everything pretty quick anyway. It'd also be nice just to have some real clothes, too."
Oniichan's face seemed professionally neutral as he cocked his head a little.
He nodded.
"That's a mature outlook, Best-chan, good job. Not just gutsy, but good thinking ahead."
...I looked away, feeling abruptly inordinately warm inside and trying not to show it on my faces. I didn't think I'd really done anything exactly special per se, b-but Oniichan was free to praise me more if he thought so, so I could hardly stop him.
I still saw him continuing to nod, not having to actually look at him in order to see.
He clapped.
"So, the issue is that you're looking for a part time job—jobs", he corrected. "But you need to find the right ones, that's about how it is?"
I snapped up to stare intently at Oniichan, clenching my fists and nodding. Oniichan was onto something.
"Yeah!"
Oniichan kept bobbing his head, and moved to cross his arms.
"Alright, well, how about you tell Oniichan what you've got going for you so far, and maybe we can sort out what's working well and what you can do better."
"Right!" I smiled energetically, excited that Oniichan had a real plan for this, and dug out a sheet of printer paper from the machine at the end of the computer table, bringing it over to me.
Eagerly, I slapped it down between me and Oniichan and walked back to my own computer as I leaned over the paper I brought for me.
I lasered in writing in lieu of a pencil, printing out my list.
Oniichan froze as the pattern charred into the paper, and his face turned plastic.
I paused, suddenly uncertain.
It... I didn't look that bad, did I?
I really had been trying my best to get a good job.
Or should I have worked at it more before asking for help?
...suddenly the paltry list looked almost mocking. And it was. I'd messed up! I should have had at least a couple hundred, maybe arguably a little less since some of me was banged up some from the gunfight, but I had five plus the token extra and that was all I had to show for it!
I was the one who could do so much at once, the one who had just been complaining to myself that it was inconvenient that Oniichan couldn't multitask hundreds of times over.
"I'm sorry," I appologised quietly, for all the good it was worth, not able to bring myself to face Oniichan, for all the good that was.
I swallowed.
I didn't want to disappoint him. I... I just didn't.
But I was disappointing myself, and that wasn't something he could be proud of.
"This isn't my best," I admitted with a voice that felt somehow far too small and too big at once and cringed inside at having to confront the truth that I wasn't living up to what I had promised. "We could... We could get back to what you were talking about earlier. I-I'll keep working hard, I promise! I can do it at the same time!"
Further south in my other base, I switched tasks from trying to work out how the sonic defences of the MAR headquarters worked to rifling through the unlocked cellphone that had been left behind for any potentially useful personal information, simultaneously for getting up from my new desk in my upstairs office and trying to find anything about financial records or similar in any of the filing cabinets. Likewise, on several computers there-here, I simply plugged in searches on the quirky alt-Google, how to make money, how to get a job, local hiring, local jobs available...
Oniichan picked up the paper like it might bite him, eyes flicking back and forth across it, over and over.
"Ah, you know what, Best-chan?" He asked tonelessly. "I, uh, well there's some really important-looking stuff on the computers here," he began to ramble in what grew to an almost spacy voice. "I mean, I'm not an expert, but I definitely have some health concerns about what I've seen already, but... organic chemistry has never been my favourite anyway; why don't we take a break and go over your job search stuff?"
"Okay..." I mumbled, simultaneously still grateful he was helping me anyway but wishing he wasn't anyway.
"Great!" Oniichan brightened enormously in an extreme beaming grin that completely dominated his face in a way that... I wasn't sure what it signified really, but that was nothing new, so I could only pass over it.
I fidgeted in my office chairs.
"So, top of the list!" He began with expression never wavering in the slightest. "Multi Active Rescue? I've seen them around some, the Anti-Skill division for disaster response. You, uh... You put in a job application or something with them? I know Anti-Skill is sometimes pretty tightly knit with Judgment."
I wasn't really sure how to explain it.
I decided that was the best option, actually, so admitted such.
"I'm not sure how to explain," I confessed. "I... It's complicated?" But then I frowned, thinking about it further and my relationship with Doctor Kihara and herself with the group. "Or maybe it's really simple?"
Oniichan shifted on the computer table to sit more directly next to me, almost bumping the monitor I sat in front of.
"Okay," He said evenly. "Let's break it down and start at the beginning, then."
Oniichan leaned forward toward me to rest his elbows on his knees, hands bridged over his chin still grasping the paper.
I nodded slowly. It made sense, I supposed.
"Well, Doctor Kihara—er, Therestina Kihara," I amended. "I think there's more than one Doctor Kihara, actually. But she's the one who was in charge of... all this," I gestured vaguely around. "Project Misaka BEST. But she was also the captain of Multi Active Rescue and head of its research," I pointed over in the direction of my other base and much of the rest of me not around me here-there.
"So... I'm... sort of a MAR employee?" I hedged. "Or at least kind of equipment from a technical standpoint"
Oniichan shook his head slightly.
"I don't think equipment would be a very appropriate term."
I shrugged uncertainly, not really wanting to disagree but making the point on a technical basis as I'd said.
"Anyway, I kinda-sorta make up MAR now, I guess, and I'm the one staffing and operating the building, anyway, and I'm patched into all the stuff getting reports and whatnot. There was an incident automatically forwarded to MAR as the closest law enforcement earlier, for example, so I went and rescued a girl, and... yeah..."
Slight shaking turned to slight nodding.
"Well, that's good, I suppose," Oniichan affirmed. "Maybe unorthodox, but it takes guts to run a whole Anti-Skill department by yourself, and they do good work. None of the other officers are involved with... Doctor Kihara?"
I blinked.
"No, uh, I guess I probably wasn't clear," I corrected with a familiar wish that I could be better with words. "There are no other employees anymore; it's just me and no one else."
It was Oniichan's turn to stare silently for a moment.
"Best-chan, what happened to the other employees?"
"Oh, I, y'know, killed them, and stuff," I answered, glad to have a straight and simple direct question with an answer I could be confident of as a plain fact. "Million-degree cremation properly contained."
Oniichan didn't move. He sat there on the table, motionless, staring at me, staying just staring, as the redder-than-red tones dimmed and his forehead around his headband started to sweat.
And... he just stayed like that.
I started to get weirded out.
Oniichan's eyes weren't even moving. Like, at all.
I exchanged a glance with myself in self-conscious reflex.
"Are you okay?" I asked him, and he jerked violently in a sudden full-body twitch.
"Moving on!" He announced, snapping the paper out in front of him with both arms extended as he rigidly sat bolt upright. "What's this about being a magical girl?!"
I eyed Oniichan from several positions. The way he was acting had to count as at least a little weird, didn't it? With no idea what to actually make of it, though, I could only answer as best I could as the avatar in front of him, nodding.
"Right, I found my mascot. Or he found me, anyway. He's a dog who says he likes robots, and we fought a mechanical worm-wyrm thing on the side of a tower to take out the enemy mascot behind it, or them, depending on how you look at it; they combined into a bigger robot," I explained, holding up my hands to punctuate it framing a miniaturised little illusion of the tilted battlefield of glass and sky against Shundou's combined robo-minions as best as I remembered it.
I animated the image to breathe fire at the itty-bitty Best that was about as dangerous as the real conflagration had been.
"Huh..." Oniichan commented dully, then he focused squarely on me. "Point of order," he said with a raised finger that he then pointed at my illusory display. "One, that is cool, this needs to be acknowledged."
I smiled a little more confidently.
"Two," he added with the inclusion of his other index finger that he waved around me. "Mmmagical girl."
...
"Yes?" I tried.
"You were being absolutely serious and in fact completely literal that you, Misaka Best, are, indeed, a genuine and actual magical girl who uses the power of heart as a real live shoujo manga heroine, not just an esper who figured out how to make a theme help with her ability development and learned something new?"
I have Oniichan my flattest stare. I got up from my adjacent chair to stand by myself and direct attention to me where I sat, as well as weave a solid white backdrop that I decorated with a cartoon rendition of what I dryly deadpanned next as a giant manga page, just in case Oniichan needed pictures to follow.
"Oniichan, channeling the power of heart causes me to transform and it let a magic talking dog find me so that we could go fight an evil orca who empowered another girl who has sparkly eyes. The evidence could be perhaps considered somewhat suggestive, yes."
Oniichan gave me a sage nod.
"Magical girl. I totally walked straight into that one," he declared solemnly.
"Indeed," I nodded back.
"Indeed," was his own reply.
"Indeed." I kept my faces straight.
Oniichan stared back likewise a picture of serenity.
"...indeed."
Oh, Oniichan wasn't going to win this one!
I sprang up as all of me in the room at the same time that I started creeping noiselessly down the hall toward the computer room I was in, then, loudly, pointedly, cleared my throats, waited an unnecessary moment, and somberly declared in low chorus, "Indeeeed!"
Oniichan's upper lip twitched.
I peeked around the open doorframe, sticking my head around.
"Indeed!" I whispered harshly in follow-on into the room, then snapped back out again.
Oniichan snickered at the antics, and it dragged me in too.
But then it started petering out as Oniichan regarded the paper in his hand, head canted to the side.
"It's... just kind of hard to reconcile this," he muttered as if to himself, then more loudly and with an odd underlying tone I couldn't place, "So then what about assassination? I... Maybe you can help me wrap my head around this, Best-chan, because I'm not sure how magical girls and assassination go together very well. Could you help me with that?"
"Uh..."
Once again I could only blink dumbly up at Oniichan from my office chair.
"I... am a magical girl who is also an assassin? I... sorry, I... I don't really understand the question very well," I admitted feeling a lot more dejected than I had a moment ago.
It always came back to this, didn't it? Holding a conversation with someone was hard; it was impossible to really be sure what the other party meant, or what they actually took out of what was said to them.
I thought he wanted to know how being a magical girl and an assassin weren't mutually exclusive, probably, anyway, but... but I just didn't see any way to break that down further or something from ideas that might be perceived as conflicting; it was already simplistic, and... and why would they not be able to go together?
Was that it?
Oniichan seemed to take my moment of trepidation with more of his own, so I tried to insert what I hoped to be a productive question.
"Um, why do you think they don't?"
Oniichan's face smoothed out into something much more neutral, maybe slightly warry instead of a controlled mild bewilderment as he leaned in slightly, turning his head with one eye more forward than the other towards me.
"Best-chan, magical girls save people, right?"
"Of course," I automatically replied.
"Like that girl you mentioned, the one who was in trouble, and you rescued. You saved her, because you're a magical girl and magical girls help and save people."
I nodded slightly uncertainly, sure about the point he was making, at least, but not where it was going.
"And assassins kill people," Oniichan continued pressingly.
I pulled back and straightened from my slight slouch, raising an eyebrow.
"No they don't? I mean, some do," I corrected. "But I don't."
A flicker of confusion passed over Oniichan's face, so briefly that I wasn't actually sure if I had really seen it at all or if I was just imagining my own upon him.
"Best..." Oniichan spoke heavily, almost wearily. "That woman, up on the surface, in the purple armour... She... She wasn't a nice woman, you know that, right?"
I frowned, puzzled, and Oniichan continued.
"But... Maybe..." He looked away for a moment and took a deep breath before looking me straight in the eyes again. "Maybe it's hard to say if it shouldn't have been done, and maybe it's right in a way that you did it or not, but it's okay... But... Best-chan, those employees, a-and I'm guessing all the original staff here... Best, maybe, maybe, killing people isn't necessarily always bad, not if they're trying to hurt you and you're in real trouble, but it isn't good. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
I... just stared at him, completely at a loss... whatever the hell he was on about for what brought this all on.
"...yeah?" I proclaimed, trying to project that sheer bafflement into the single word. "Killing people is bad. That..." I stretched up a hand giving him a slow thumbs up. "I... I'm gonna be completely honest, I have zero idea why you're being so serious about this, but... yes. Killing people is bad," I affirmed slowly, even as my mind started to ramble a little with one of my mouths in tow. "I mean, I guess maybe it's not an unreasonable concern to try to impart morals to young children and in a way I'm kinda-sorta arguable as a day old, but... I am not a conventional and representatively typical human infant? Message acknowledged and unnecessary?"
Oniichan's head slowly rotated as he stared at me in simultaneously piercingly intent and slack-jawed wonder.
"...from my perspective you are being very weird and I don't know why and think it's a perspective and communication thing," I added in something in the vague direction of barely accusatory.
If Oniichan was actually an idiot hero sort of type, we were screwed. I hadn't thought so earlier—he was clearly way smarter than I was about organic chemistry when I didn't really know much more than enough to sympathise with the sentiment that it sucked as a subject to learn—but I was coming up short on ideas why clearly there was some kind of serious fundamental miscommunication here.
"Best-chan, how many people have you killed?" He asked almost conversationally.
I brightened.
"None, my friend's big sister asked me the same thing earlier and I already thought that one over!" I replied with a more confident aimless point of emphasis, then let out a slight chuckle. "Almost gave her a horrifying answer before I realised I'd misinterpreted her and was overthinking it. That would have been awkward."
That utterly plastic semblance locked into place again across Oniichan's face, and just like that, the upswing of confidence that I'd gotten a handle on this conversation started fraying.
"S-So you've done... maybe kind of a lot of killing," Oniichan began speaking in a thready voice, nodding his head back and forth and not really looking at me as he did; I wasn't exactly sure if he was even really talking to me. "But none of them were people? Right...?" A nervous-sounding little breathy laugh escaped him. "Right."
Oniichan was kind of weirding me out, but it was a relief that he was catching on to what I was trying to say.
"Targets aren't people," I corroborated. "That... wouldn't even really make any sense? It's not like you can murder murder a target when it's, well, a target you know?" I grimaced a little in uncertainty. "I'm not really sure how to simplify that more, but I think we're on the same page now?"
Oniichan swallowed visibly, and his jaw clenched hard enough that I almost expected to hear something crack.
"...yeah," Oniichan said in a weak voice, looking straight at me again with what I wanted to call a sad expression that still didn't make sense in context. "I suppose it wouldn't make sense for targets to be people."
I swiveled back and forth slightly in my office chair, and in each of my other chairs in the room tried not to look too much like I was watching instead of working.
"Sooo... we're good?" I hesitantly offered both thumbs up, only to then instead feel it more reflective to aimlessly waggle my thumbs around.
"We will be, Best-chan, we will be," Oniichan replied sounding very tired, and it dawned on me that Oniichan had been up since who knew when, and unlike me he presumably hadn't started what had since become yesterday at almost the end of the day. His fists clenched hard enough that they actually did turn audible with popping from his knuckles as he took a deep breath and continued—and continued making me feel that we really weren't on the same page, "Just gotta find the guts to see it through, but... that parts easy, really, so..."
He gave me a weak smile that seemed hopeful and sad.
"I guess it's just a matter of time since Oniichan has guts, huh?"
I still felt like I didn't properly get what we were talking about, but that wasn't really anything unusual. Whatever it was, Oniichan was confident that it was okay enough, though?
I tried smiling back, but it ended up more a mirror to his own than I really wanted.
"You know," he went on. "I think maybe I might be more interested in some of the other areas you've been asking about; nobody really likes organic chemistry, but what about neurology questions? I think you mentioned a lot of it was under the Testament program you needed to sort out? I bet I could help with that."
I spun around in another of my chairs and raised a hand from the other computer table across the narrow room where I was in the middle of delving into the topic in question.
"Over here, Oniichan, that's what I'm working on here."
He hopped up and stepped over as I rearranged the windows on the screen and brought up one of the frequently referenced files that looked both important and about as comprehensible as Welsh to me.
"This is one of the points I'm struggling with," I explained, gesturing to the screen. "I've found a lot of other documents calling to this one, but I honestly can't make heads or tails of it; I think it's a listing of chemical compounds affected by the Testament direction or that need to be used in conjunction with it?"
Oniichan's long face turned wry.
"Of course," he muttered aloud. "Organic chemistry for neurology."
He sighed, and I felt that one in lots of my bones. Organic chemistry was the worst.
"Doxirix is a name-brand version of alosirox dextronate, though, yeah," he commented as he leaned in to stare at the monitor. "Pretty common in a lot of power development regimens, same with adexetine quixiprosate, supposed to help promote healthy blood vessel growth in the brain. I was on that one for a while."
I huffed a sigh of my own and settled in for the long haul.
Oniichan set his hand on my head at that, which felt very warm.
"Don't sell yourself short, Chibi-chan, you were right with your guess," he encouraged with a smile.
My own felt a little stronger in response.
"So, I recognise most of these," Oniichan announced then as we both regarded the computer screen next to one another and I rolled in another chair for him to sit in and doled out some of the large and tasteless ration pills to the rest of me in the computer room for what passed as an early breakfast. "Now I seem to remember you passing a comment about liking pattern puzzles; a lot of these compounds follow a logic to their naming structure, so how about I start explaining a few, and then you can start telling me what they're good for as we go?"
I raised my eyebrows, looking at the list.
He was right; there were links between a lot of them, an etymological base I wasn't familiar with, but it hinted at being there.
"That actually sounds kind of fun," I acknowledged.
We sort of made a bit of a game of it, then, though Oniichan caught me out when I started looking up some of the names, which wasn't fair in the slightest since he never explicitly made a rule against it first.
"So... if alitresetron rosimicine helps prevent inflammatory responses, and amabrate and amcizyme are both for disinfecting and synthetic immunoboosters, then... aldonalin roxapizole is be... something for alleviating side effects of immunosuppressants and aldacranon triamroban would be one?"
Oniichan's smile turned sunny, even if it didn't quite light up all the shadows in his eyes.
"You catch on pretty quick!"
Oh...
I turned away, face heating up.
"Well, you know..." It wasn't as if I didn't have dozens and dozens of brains working on it and someone helping me.
"Especially for someone trying to be a cheating cheater!" Oniichan quipped on.
"Hey!" I snapped back up toward him in protest, but I couldn't maintain any heat in the scowl I tried to direct at him when it all pooled together in my chest and fed the grin of my own that supplanted it, and was mirrored in turn by Oniichan too, the glow finally taking over fully and suffusing with a more literal one properly in my sight.
"Mm, mm," Oniichan nodded seriously, crossing his arms. "And never let anyone tell you that you don't have a cute smile, so sayeth the Oniichan."
Gawahhh...!
I couldn't take this kind of onslaught and hid behind a glamour, my ears about to combust!
And then Oniichan leaned forward slightly, raising an eyebrow and staring critically at the professionally polite and attentive facade.
...and he raised a finger!
Pop went my glamour like an audible soap bubble and fell apart into glitters as the finger poked and touched my nose.
"I thought so," Oniichan declared.
"You're the cheater!" I wailed as my nose got smushed and I clapped my hands over my face.
"Cheater, cheater, cheater!" I chorused around me.
Oniichan glanced around.
"Hm, nope, nope, still only counts as one, and I say totally fair and square, so there, we're at least even and my vote counts as 1.1 votes because very important and complex reasony reasons."
Red-faced, I rapidly compiled together a construct based on the printer paper and computer table and slammed it down upon said desk.
Oniichan looked down at what lay there.
The Rules, read the large tome-shaped construct cloaked in such an appearance.
His mouth quirked.
"G-Go on, read it," I prodded.
Oniichan accepted the book-like fiction I held together in my mind, and opened the cover to the first page.
No it doesn't.
The semblance of the words stared up starkly on the otherwise blank sheet.
"It's in the rulebook," I insisted. "So there."
Oniichan laughed.
"You know, I think I was right," he chuckled to himself as he immediately held out protesting hands. "Different thing, different thing!"
I squinted at him. Aggressively. I got up and repositioned to stand by myself to squint at him with more eyes, alternating simultaneous lefts and rights for extra measure. And making them flare ominous crimson for extra extra measure!
"Oh gosh, I was right! So, your other concern, the best job for Best-chan?" He got out between gasping breaths. "I was thinking, I mean, I have a manager guy and he has a whole team and staff and everything that handle a lot of my stuff for me, but I remember some of the ideas I was given a while back when merchandising got brought up, and... well you're a magical girl."
I toned down the hyperbolic glaring.
"Go on," I spoke with all my mouths in the room.
Oniichan's smile turned intent, had a strength well up within it revealing his heart in sudden vibrancy.
"Best-chan, you're a magical girl with a lot of guts who wants to make a good career for yourself."
He spread his hands out toward me as if in presentation.
"How good are you at singing?"
Slightly.
I had four jobs now, four! And I hadn't earned one single coin. I had even technically performed an actual mission for one of them even if it was only a trial run!
And yet I wasn't broke, strictly speaking. Except that sort of even made it worse!
Far from my desk, I swooped down toward the street and plucked the shiny metal circle from the side of the road. The holed silvery coin of a fifty-yen piece stared back at me like a little metal eyeball.
By an infinite margin, I was making more money scavenging for lost change than clandestine gun-running, contract wetwork, fighting to save the world as a magical girl, and whatever it was that my newest friend(s) and associates did. I had 4,855 yen, yay me! ...Now I just had to pretend that one yen wasn't an itty-bitty amount to the point that the last two digits might as well be negligible and that I hadn't put in an entire solid work week in man-hours to do it, trying to race the stupid cleaning bots to my lacklustre prizes.
Just as the oh so amazing and awesome cherry on top (not), the boss guy who never actually told me his name—because of course not, why would anyone ever introduce themselves plainly and explicitly?—did in fact have an assignment that needed done, that being why mister Fried Brain Sans Tentacles had badgered Senpai to rush over before school hours, and apparently it wasn't even something anybody was paying for!
I was still unclear just what kind of work Senpai did, but from what the boss guy and the last girl in the team had complained about, I gathered that this assignment was all about sending a message to a former client who had dealt in bad faith and betrayed the team, so it was starting from a deficit and wasn't being funded by any new client, just needing an example to be made to at least kinda-sorta break even again, so this team might be like my other team, or maybe dealt in image management or something?
I sat in the taxi next to Senpai in the back feeling glum, especially since it was indeed in a taxi in the first place. It seemed kind of lame that some kind of special team of elite operatives working in the shadows like we were the cast of a spy thriller action movie actually flagged down a taxi. The boss guy up in the would-be driver's seat in a manually-driven car managed to actually pull off the maroon suit look surprisingly well, but I couldn't help but think Mugino was cooler.
Mugino had her own ride, with a mobile briefing room in the back.
The boss guy was almost cool, but then he ruined it and it nosedived into totally uncool.
He was so incredibly lame that he got picked for double-crossing and didn't catch it in time, so now nobody got any money, just reputation and status.
I sighed lightly to myself, wishing that Senpai had a better job. I didn't know about the other girl in the front passenger seat ahead of me, but sticking with Senpai might be a real pain. We pulled up onto an entry ramp for the freeway, puttering along at a tepid trundle, and I bemoaned the idea that I'd probably have to get another job just to support myself on this job, and maybe help Senpai too. Or at least, another job might help if I could actually make any money anywhere.
Across the city, deep underground beneath where my tedious coverup of the earlier battle against the murderbots inched over the ground, I sat slumped in one of my office chairs much as I simultaneously did in the car with Senpai.
"Onichaaan?" I drew out, head lolling to regard him where he stood hunched over the long computer table looking away from me to peer at a document that he was sort of helping me interpret but more seemed to be trying to turn into a lesson where I also sat right next to him.
He twitched awkwardly, then straightened and regarded me, eyes flicking between me and me before settling on me.
"Yeah?"
"Oniichan, how do I make money?" I asked with a little bit of a whine slipping in in my exasperation.
He frowned, then quirked an eyebrow, pointing between me and the document up on the screen.
"You... aren't thinking about trying to sell any of this, are you?"
He looked more than faintly disturbed.
Huh?
I just blinked at him.
"Oh, right, uh," I waved in front of me. "Totally different subject for you, I guess."
And I frowned as a realisation struck me, and I looked up at him in front of me while I also looked at the screen in front of me too, thinking back a moment about how Oniichan had just been trying to turn his talk-through about the document into a sort of impromptu tutoring, and seemed to have liked it, too; except now I was interrupting that.
Except except, now I had his attention with this.
Down the hall in one of the four cloning chambers, I heaved a sigh while pondering over the internals of my single unbroken gestation pod that somehow conjuring up some multitude gestalt version of Oniichan so that he could do more than one thing at once too sounded like a terrible idea, and in front of him did my best to accommodate his one train of thought.
"I'm trying to do the whole, y'know, gainful employment thing," I told him with an abstract gesture. "I've got four jobs, four," I complained, holding up my fingers for him to see, just to emphasise the point. "And so far, the best way to get money seems to be flying around looking for spare change. I mean, how dumb is that?"
Oniichan pursed his lips a little giving me a thoughtful look, even as I paused for a moment too, thinking about the stuff I had sort of inherited-slash-conquered from Doctor Kihara and Saten's rescue.
"Wait, five jobs," I corrected. "I... sorta became an emergency disaster relief group thing? Except that's basically volunteer work too!"
I pouted.
"I'm not very good at this," I admitted testily.
Oniichan sat up on the computer table adopting a thinker pose, tapping his chin while eying me consideringly.
"So what brought this on in the first place?" He asked.
I huffed, and waved at... everything.
"I'm trying to do all sorts of stuff, especially getting this place back up and running. I mean, I died, Oniichan, like, kerploosh!" I mimed what happened to a couple of my heads, prompting Oniichan to turn faintly greenish. "And yeah, it's sorta not like it really counts, but I think I'm gonna need to be a lot bigger if I'm going to help everyone who needs it, and that's entirely separate from the fact that other people are set on stopping me, plus there's just the fact that, you know," I shrugged, "lots and lots of bodies, lots and lots of mouths to feed and whatnot; the storerooms downstairs have loads of those nutrition pills and whatnot, but I'm trying to think about longer term, and I could burn through everything pretty quick anyway. It'd also be nice just to have some real clothes, too."
Oniichan's face seemed professionally neutral as he cocked his head a little.
He nodded.
"That's a mature outlook, Best-chan, good job. Not just gutsy, but good thinking ahead."
...I looked away, feeling abruptly inordinately warm inside and trying not to show it on my faces. I didn't think I'd really done anything exactly special per se, b-but Oniichan was free to praise me more if he thought so, so I could hardly stop him.
I still saw him continuing to nod, not having to actually look at him in order to see.
He clapped.
"So, the issue is that you're looking for a part time job—jobs", he corrected. "But you need to find the right ones, that's about how it is?"
I snapped up to stare intently at Oniichan, clenching my fists and nodding. Oniichan was onto something.
"Yeah!"
Oniichan kept bobbing his head, and moved to cross his arms.
"Alright, well, how about you tell Oniichan what you've got going for you so far, and maybe we can sort out what's working well and what you can do better."
"Right!" I smiled energetically, excited that Oniichan had a real plan for this, and dug out a sheet of printer paper from the machine at the end of the computer table, bringing it over to me.
Eagerly, I slapped it down between me and Oniichan and walked back to my own computer as I leaned over the paper I brought for me.
I lasered in writing in lieu of a pencil, printing out my list.
The Best Job Search
—Multi Active Rescue, income: ?? (possible expense?)
—Magical Girl, income: N/A
—Smuggling, income: variable, to be determined
—Assassination, income: pending, to be determined
—?? (Whatever Senpai's job is), income: ?? (possible expense?)
—Finding spare change, income: ¥4,855
—Multi Active Rescue, income: ?? (possible expense?)
—Magical Girl, income: N/A
—Smuggling, income: variable, to be determined
—Assassination, income: pending, to be determined
—?? (Whatever Senpai's job is), income: ?? (possible expense?)
—Finding spare change, income: ¥4,855
Oniichan froze as the pattern charred into the paper, and his face turned plastic.
I paused, suddenly uncertain.
It... I didn't look that bad, did I?
I really had been trying my best to get a good job.
Or should I have worked at it more before asking for help?
...suddenly the paltry list looked almost mocking. And it was. I'd messed up! I should have had at least a couple hundred, maybe arguably a little less since some of me was banged up some from the gunfight, but I had five plus the token extra and that was all I had to show for it!
I was the one who could do so much at once, the one who had just been complaining to myself that it was inconvenient that Oniichan couldn't multitask hundreds of times over.
"I'm sorry," I appologised quietly, for all the good it was worth, not able to bring myself to face Oniichan, for all the good that was.
I swallowed.
I didn't want to disappoint him. I... I just didn't.
But I was disappointing myself, and that wasn't something he could be proud of.
"This isn't my best," I admitted with a voice that felt somehow far too small and too big at once and cringed inside at having to confront the truth that I wasn't living up to what I had promised. "We could... We could get back to what you were talking about earlier. I-I'll keep working hard, I promise! I can do it at the same time!"
Further south in my other base, I switched tasks from trying to work out how the sonic defences of the MAR headquarters worked to rifling through the unlocked cellphone that had been left behind for any potentially useful personal information, simultaneously for getting up from my new desk in my upstairs office and trying to find anything about financial records or similar in any of the filing cabinets. Likewise, on several computers there-here, I simply plugged in searches on the quirky alt-Google, how to make money, how to get a job, local hiring, local jobs available...
Oniichan picked up the paper like it might bite him, eyes flicking back and forth across it, over and over.
"Ah, you know what, Best-chan?" He asked tonelessly. "I, uh, well there's some really important-looking stuff on the computers here," he began to ramble in what grew to an almost spacy voice. "I mean, I'm not an expert, but I definitely have some health concerns about what I've seen already, but... organic chemistry has never been my favourite anyway; why don't we take a break and go over your job search stuff?"
"Okay..." I mumbled, simultaneously still grateful he was helping me anyway but wishing he wasn't anyway.
"Great!" Oniichan brightened enormously in an extreme beaming grin that completely dominated his face in a way that... I wasn't sure what it signified really, but that was nothing new, so I could only pass over it.
I fidgeted in my office chairs.
"So, top of the list!" He began with expression never wavering in the slightest. "Multi Active Rescue? I've seen them around some, the Anti-Skill division for disaster response. You, uh... You put in a job application or something with them? I know Anti-Skill is sometimes pretty tightly knit with Judgment."
I wasn't really sure how to explain it.
I decided that was the best option, actually, so admitted such.
"I'm not sure how to explain," I confessed. "I... It's complicated?" But then I frowned, thinking about it further and my relationship with Doctor Kihara and herself with the group. "Or maybe it's really simple?"
Oniichan shifted on the computer table to sit more directly next to me, almost bumping the monitor I sat in front of.
"Okay," He said evenly. "Let's break it down and start at the beginning, then."
Oniichan leaned forward toward me to rest his elbows on his knees, hands bridged over his chin still grasping the paper.
I nodded slowly. It made sense, I supposed.
"Well, Doctor Kihara—er, Therestina Kihara," I amended. "I think there's more than one Doctor Kihara, actually. But she's the one who was in charge of... all this," I gestured vaguely around. "Project Misaka BEST. But she was also the captain of Multi Active Rescue and head of its research," I pointed over in the direction of my other base and much of the rest of me not around me here-there.
"So... I'm... sort of a MAR employee?" I hedged. "Or at least kind of equipment from a technical standpoint"
Oniichan shook his head slightly.
"I don't think equipment would be a very appropriate term."
I shrugged uncertainly, not really wanting to disagree but making the point on a technical basis as I'd said.
"Anyway, I kinda-sorta make up MAR now, I guess, and I'm the one staffing and operating the building, anyway, and I'm patched into all the stuff getting reports and whatnot. There was an incident automatically forwarded to MAR as the closest law enforcement earlier, for example, so I went and rescued a girl, and... yeah..."
Slight shaking turned to slight nodding.
"Well, that's good, I suppose," Oniichan affirmed. "Maybe unorthodox, but it takes guts to run a whole Anti-Skill department by yourself, and they do good work. None of the other officers are involved with... Doctor Kihara?"
I blinked.
"No, uh, I guess I probably wasn't clear," I corrected with a familiar wish that I could be better with words. "There are no other employees anymore; it's just me and no one else."
It was Oniichan's turn to stare silently for a moment.
"Best-chan, what happened to the other employees?"
"Oh, I, y'know, killed them, and stuff," I answered, glad to have a straight and simple direct question with an answer I could be confident of as a plain fact. "Million-degree cremation properly contained."
Oniichan didn't move. He sat there on the table, motionless, staring at me, staying just staring, as the redder-than-red tones dimmed and his forehead around his headband started to sweat.
And... he just stayed like that.
I started to get weirded out.
Oniichan's eyes weren't even moving. Like, at all.
I exchanged a glance with myself in self-conscious reflex.
"Are you okay?" I asked him, and he jerked violently in a sudden full-body twitch.
"Moving on!" He announced, snapping the paper out in front of him with both arms extended as he rigidly sat bolt upright. "What's this about being a magical girl?!"
I eyed Oniichan from several positions. The way he was acting had to count as at least a little weird, didn't it? With no idea what to actually make of it, though, I could only answer as best I could as the avatar in front of him, nodding.
"Right, I found my mascot. Or he found me, anyway. He's a dog who says he likes robots, and we fought a mechanical worm-wyrm thing on the side of a tower to take out the enemy mascot behind it, or them, depending on how you look at it; they combined into a bigger robot," I explained, holding up my hands to punctuate it framing a miniaturised little illusion of the tilted battlefield of glass and sky against Shundou's combined robo-minions as best as I remembered it.
I animated the image to breathe fire at the itty-bitty Best that was about as dangerous as the real conflagration had been.
"Huh..." Oniichan commented dully, then he focused squarely on me. "Point of order," he said with a raised finger that he then pointed at my illusory display. "One, that is cool, this needs to be acknowledged."
I smiled a little more confidently.
"Two," he added with the inclusion of his other index finger that he waved around me. "Mmmagical girl."
...
"Yes?" I tried.
"You were being absolutely serious and in fact completely literal that you, Misaka Best, are, indeed, a genuine and actual magical girl who uses the power of heart as a real live shoujo manga heroine, not just an esper who figured out how to make a theme help with her ability development and learned something new?"
I have Oniichan my flattest stare. I got up from my adjacent chair to stand by myself and direct attention to me where I sat, as well as weave a solid white backdrop that I decorated with a cartoon rendition of what I dryly deadpanned next as a giant manga page, just in case Oniichan needed pictures to follow.
"Oniichan, channeling the power of heart causes me to transform and it let a magic talking dog find me so that we could go fight an evil orca who empowered another girl who has sparkly eyes. The evidence could be perhaps considered somewhat suggestive, yes."
Oniichan gave me a sage nod.
"Magical girl. I totally walked straight into that one," he declared solemnly.
"Indeed," I nodded back.
"Indeed," was his own reply.
"Indeed." I kept my faces straight.
Oniichan stared back likewise a picture of serenity.
"...indeed."
Oh, Oniichan wasn't going to win this one!
I sprang up as all of me in the room at the same time that I started creeping noiselessly down the hall toward the computer room I was in, then, loudly, pointedly, cleared my throats, waited an unnecessary moment, and somberly declared in low chorus, "Indeeeed!"
Oniichan's upper lip twitched.
I peeked around the open doorframe, sticking my head around.
"Indeed!" I whispered harshly in follow-on into the room, then snapped back out again.
Oniichan snickered at the antics, and it dragged me in too.
But then it started petering out as Oniichan regarded the paper in his hand, head canted to the side.
"It's... just kind of hard to reconcile this," he muttered as if to himself, then more loudly and with an odd underlying tone I couldn't place, "So then what about assassination? I... Maybe you can help me wrap my head around this, Best-chan, because I'm not sure how magical girls and assassination go together very well. Could you help me with that?"
"Uh..."
Once again I could only blink dumbly up at Oniichan from my office chair.
"I... am a magical girl who is also an assassin? I... sorry, I... I don't really understand the question very well," I admitted feeling a lot more dejected than I had a moment ago.
It always came back to this, didn't it? Holding a conversation with someone was hard; it was impossible to really be sure what the other party meant, or what they actually took out of what was said to them.
I thought he wanted to know how being a magical girl and an assassin weren't mutually exclusive, probably, anyway, but... but I just didn't see any way to break that down further or something from ideas that might be perceived as conflicting; it was already simplistic, and... and why would they not be able to go together?
Was that it?
Oniichan seemed to take my moment of trepidation with more of his own, so I tried to insert what I hoped to be a productive question.
"Um, why do you think they don't?"
Oniichan's face smoothed out into something much more neutral, maybe slightly warry instead of a controlled mild bewilderment as he leaned in slightly, turning his head with one eye more forward than the other towards me.
"Best-chan, magical girls save people, right?"
"Of course," I automatically replied.
"Like that girl you mentioned, the one who was in trouble, and you rescued. You saved her, because you're a magical girl and magical girls help and save people."
I nodded slightly uncertainly, sure about the point he was making, at least, but not where it was going.
"And assassins kill people," Oniichan continued pressingly.
I pulled back and straightened from my slight slouch, raising an eyebrow.
"No they don't? I mean, some do," I corrected. "But I don't."
A flicker of confusion passed over Oniichan's face, so briefly that I wasn't actually sure if I had really seen it at all or if I was just imagining my own upon him.
"Best..." Oniichan spoke heavily, almost wearily. "That woman, up on the surface, in the purple armour... She... She wasn't a nice woman, you know that, right?"
I frowned, puzzled, and Oniichan continued.
"But... Maybe..." He looked away for a moment and took a deep breath before looking me straight in the eyes again. "Maybe it's hard to say if it shouldn't have been done, and maybe it's right in a way that you did it or not, but it's okay... But... Best-chan, those employees, a-and I'm guessing all the original staff here... Best, maybe, maybe, killing people isn't necessarily always bad, not if they're trying to hurt you and you're in real trouble, but it isn't good. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
I... just stared at him, completely at a loss... whatever the hell he was on about for what brought this all on.
"...yeah?" I proclaimed, trying to project that sheer bafflement into the single word. "Killing people is bad. That..." I stretched up a hand giving him a slow thumbs up. "I... I'm gonna be completely honest, I have zero idea why you're being so serious about this, but... yes. Killing people is bad," I affirmed slowly, even as my mind started to ramble a little with one of my mouths in tow. "I mean, I guess maybe it's not an unreasonable concern to try to impart morals to young children and in a way I'm kinda-sorta arguable as a day old, but... I am not a conventional and representatively typical human infant? Message acknowledged and unnecessary?"
Oniichan's head slowly rotated as he stared at me in simultaneously piercingly intent and slack-jawed wonder.
"...from my perspective you are being very weird and I don't know why and think it's a perspective and communication thing," I added in something in the vague direction of barely accusatory.
If Oniichan was actually an idiot hero sort of type, we were screwed. I hadn't thought so earlier—he was clearly way smarter than I was about organic chemistry when I didn't really know much more than enough to sympathise with the sentiment that it sucked as a subject to learn—but I was coming up short on ideas why clearly there was some kind of serious fundamental miscommunication here.
"Best-chan, how many people have you killed?" He asked almost conversationally.
I brightened.
"None, my friend's big sister asked me the same thing earlier and I already thought that one over!" I replied with a more confident aimless point of emphasis, then let out a slight chuckle. "Almost gave her a horrifying answer before I realised I'd misinterpreted her and was overthinking it. That would have been awkward."
That utterly plastic semblance locked into place again across Oniichan's face, and just like that, the upswing of confidence that I'd gotten a handle on this conversation started fraying.
"S-So you've done... maybe kind of a lot of killing," Oniichan began speaking in a thready voice, nodding his head back and forth and not really looking at me as he did; I wasn't exactly sure if he was even really talking to me. "But none of them were people? Right...?" A nervous-sounding little breathy laugh escaped him. "Right."
Oniichan was kind of weirding me out, but it was a relief that he was catching on to what I was trying to say.
"Targets aren't people," I corroborated. "That... wouldn't even really make any sense? It's not like you can murder murder a target when it's, well, a target you know?" I grimaced a little in uncertainty. "I'm not really sure how to simplify that more, but I think we're on the same page now?"
Oniichan swallowed visibly, and his jaw clenched hard enough that I almost expected to hear something crack.
"...yeah," Oniichan said in a weak voice, looking straight at me again with what I wanted to call a sad expression that still didn't make sense in context. "I suppose it wouldn't make sense for targets to be people."
I swiveled back and forth slightly in my office chair, and in each of my other chairs in the room tried not to look too much like I was watching instead of working.
"Sooo... we're good?" I hesitantly offered both thumbs up, only to then instead feel it more reflective to aimlessly waggle my thumbs around.
"We will be, Best-chan, we will be," Oniichan replied sounding very tired, and it dawned on me that Oniichan had been up since who knew when, and unlike me he presumably hadn't started what had since become yesterday at almost the end of the day. His fists clenched hard enough that they actually did turn audible with popping from his knuckles as he took a deep breath and continued—and continued making me feel that we really weren't on the same page, "Just gotta find the guts to see it through, but... that parts easy, really, so..."
He gave me a weak smile that seemed hopeful and sad.
"I guess it's just a matter of time since Oniichan has guts, huh?"
I still felt like I didn't properly get what we were talking about, but that wasn't really anything unusual. Whatever it was, Oniichan was confident that it was okay enough, though?
I tried smiling back, but it ended up more a mirror to his own than I really wanted.
"You know," he went on. "I think maybe I might be more interested in some of the other areas you've been asking about; nobody really likes organic chemistry, but what about neurology questions? I think you mentioned a lot of it was under the Testament program you needed to sort out? I bet I could help with that."
I spun around in another of my chairs and raised a hand from the other computer table across the narrow room where I was in the middle of delving into the topic in question.
"Over here, Oniichan, that's what I'm working on here."
He hopped up and stepped over as I rearranged the windows on the screen and brought up one of the frequently referenced files that looked both important and about as comprehensible as Welsh to me.
"This is one of the points I'm struggling with," I explained, gesturing to the screen. "I've found a lot of other documents calling to this one, but I honestly can't make heads or tails of it; I think it's a listing of chemical compounds affected by the Testament direction or that need to be used in conjunction with it?"
Oniichan's long face turned wry.
"Of course," he muttered aloud. "Organic chemistry for neurology."
He sighed, and I felt that one in lots of my bones. Organic chemistry was the worst.
"Doxirix is a name-brand version of alosirox dextronate, though, yeah," he commented as he leaned in to stare at the monitor. "Pretty common in a lot of power development regimens, same with adexetine quixiprosate, supposed to help promote healthy blood vessel growth in the brain. I was on that one for a while."
I huffed a sigh of my own and settled in for the long haul.
Oniichan set his hand on my head at that, which felt very warm.
"Don't sell yourself short, Chibi-chan, you were right with your guess," he encouraged with a smile.
My own felt a little stronger in response.
"So, I recognise most of these," Oniichan announced then as we both regarded the computer screen next to one another and I rolled in another chair for him to sit in and doled out some of the large and tasteless ration pills to the rest of me in the computer room for what passed as an early breakfast. "Now I seem to remember you passing a comment about liking pattern puzzles; a lot of these compounds follow a logic to their naming structure, so how about I start explaining a few, and then you can start telling me what they're good for as we go?"
I raised my eyebrows, looking at the list.
He was right; there were links between a lot of them, an etymological base I wasn't familiar with, but it hinted at being there.
"That actually sounds kind of fun," I acknowledged.
We sort of made a bit of a game of it, then, though Oniichan caught me out when I started looking up some of the names, which wasn't fair in the slightest since he never explicitly made a rule against it first.
"So... if alitresetron rosimicine helps prevent inflammatory responses, and amabrate and amcizyme are both for disinfecting and synthetic immunoboosters, then... aldonalin roxapizole is be... something for alleviating side effects of immunosuppressants and aldacranon triamroban would be one?"
Oniichan's smile turned sunny, even if it didn't quite light up all the shadows in his eyes.
"You catch on pretty quick!"
Oh...
I turned away, face heating up.
"Well, you know..." It wasn't as if I didn't have dozens and dozens of brains working on it and someone helping me.
"Especially for someone trying to be a cheating cheater!" Oniichan quipped on.
"Hey!" I snapped back up toward him in protest, but I couldn't maintain any heat in the scowl I tried to direct at him when it all pooled together in my chest and fed the grin of my own that supplanted it, and was mirrored in turn by Oniichan too, the glow finally taking over fully and suffusing with a more literal one properly in my sight.
"Mm, mm," Oniichan nodded seriously, crossing his arms. "And never let anyone tell you that you don't have a cute smile, so sayeth the Oniichan."
Gawahhh...!
I couldn't take this kind of onslaught and hid behind a glamour, my ears about to combust!
And then Oniichan leaned forward slightly, raising an eyebrow and staring critically at the professionally polite and attentive facade.
...and he raised a finger!
Pop went my glamour like an audible soap bubble and fell apart into glitters as the finger poked and touched my nose.
"I thought so," Oniichan declared.
"You're the cheater!" I wailed as my nose got smushed and I clapped my hands over my face.
"Cheater, cheater, cheater!" I chorused around me.
Oniichan glanced around.
"Hm, nope, nope, still only counts as one, and I say totally fair and square, so there, we're at least even and my vote counts as 1.1 votes because very important and complex reasony reasons."
Red-faced, I rapidly compiled together a construct based on the printer paper and computer table and slammed it down upon said desk.
Oniichan looked down at what lay there.
The Rules, read the large tome-shaped construct cloaked in such an appearance.
His mouth quirked.
"G-Go on, read it," I prodded.
Oniichan accepted the book-like fiction I held together in my mind, and opened the cover to the first page.
No it doesn't.
The semblance of the words stared up starkly on the otherwise blank sheet.
"It's in the rulebook," I insisted. "So there."
Oniichan laughed.
"You know, I think I was right," he chuckled to himself as he immediately held out protesting hands. "Different thing, different thing!"
I squinted at him. Aggressively. I got up and repositioned to stand by myself to squint at him with more eyes, alternating simultaneous lefts and rights for extra measure. And making them flare ominous crimson for extra extra measure!
"Oh gosh, I was right! So, your other concern, the best job for Best-chan?" He got out between gasping breaths. "I was thinking, I mean, I have a manager guy and he has a whole team and staff and everything that handle a lot of my stuff for me, but I remember some of the ideas I was given a while back when merchandising got brought up, and... well you're a magical girl."
I toned down the hyperbolic glaring.
"Go on," I spoke with all my mouths in the room.
Oniichan's smile turned intent, had a strength well up within it revealing his heart in sudden vibrancy.
"Best-chan, you're a magical girl with a lot of guts who wants to make a good career for yourself."
He spread his hands out toward me as if in presentation.
"How good are you at singing?"
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- Pronouns
- SL
I think the implication is people she doesn't like become targets, and she's programmed to dehumanize targets.
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
As of right now it has only been suggested, but given Best is, well, Best, if the suggestion isn't rejected, Idoltheosis will be achieved in short order.
It takes a lot of Guts not to be traumatized by Best, hang in there Gunha.
More like people care about other people so anyone who participates in the likes of Level Six Shift and know what it's about aren't people. And ITEMs targets fall into the same overall category.
At least some of the underlings at MAR had been pulling double duty.
Chapter 25
- Location
- Terra-Luna
The driverless taxi and Mugino's field command truck both rolled smoothly, while my stomachs roiled queasily.
Oniichan's words weighed heavily, not least for his sheer, sincere eagerness, and I looked at my teammates wondering what to maybe ask them.
Because it was impossible to turn Oniichan down.
He... he wanted me to become an idol. Like a magical girl idol kind of idol.
And I could do it.
It still wouldn't actually solve my financial concerns for needing to get money quickly, acquire substantial sums on a scale of hours rather than anything like some bi-monthly salary or something, but I couldn't say no to that incredibly sincere, stark yearning in his eyes for a dream for me, and the unshakable belief in me that I could do it that made a part of me desperate to be worthy of that faith when I knew, indeed, I absolutely could.
That was almost the scarier part, if I was honest with myself.
I knew knew that I could do it, somehow or another; details might need to be worked out about arrangements, but I knew my music.
I knew Misaka Mikoto's music.
If some of the other things in my head really were real, if I actually did have a past that was summoned across worlds or time or something to infuse into the girl I at least thought I was, then I used to not have anything like an aptitude for singing. I used to not even be that good at reading music, just what I remembered from school when I was, well, maybe actually bigger, not little. Except none the less I could run my hands through a phantom pretending knowing with that eerie sourceless certainty exactly how the violin was supposed to feel under my fingers that lacked any corresponding callouses, and almost hear the tunes that weren't there with a total confidence of what melody should follow.
Misaka Mikoto knew a great deal about music. Any student of Tokiwadai ought to when considerable lessons were mandatory, according to what I had uncovered about the school, and the original was no exception.
So, then, neither were those of us formed in her image.
I was not unaware of the irony that the same obsessive meticulousness to exactly duplicate the original down to the very slightest detail—such that I had espied storage drums in my recon of project facilities filled with shampoo and conditioner taken from silly numbers of emptied froggy bottles I recognised as Gekota—could be turned from ushering in a new god born of industrialised atrocity to instead be the enabling foundation of a cute girl dancing up on a stage singing sappily about love and harmony.
Oniichan's heart was set on me becoming an idol, so that was what I was going to do; it was important to him, and that made it important to me. I just had to figure out how on earth to go about making it happen.
Which left me to turn to my friends and allies for help.
What were friends for if not sticking by each other, after all? Except that confidence didn't exactly translate into confidence about actually doing it, however certain I was that it should be done.
But I had to do it if I was going to be my best.
Senpai was easier to talk to than Frenda and Kinuhata as I tentatively tried to aim towards the subject as both avatars with them.
"S-So, uh..." I started quietly in the back seat to be met with Senpai snapping to regard me, punctuating the broken silence in the otherwise quiet car bereft of any meaningful motor noise or even that of the tires in the dampening confines of the interior.
Easier wasn't the same as easy.
I caught the sight of eyes flicking up to look back in the rearview mirror—which, I noted absently with a mind not having to deal with being in the same position I was in here-there, incidentally wasn't actually angled for the driver's convenience when there was no driver, allowing both teammates in the front to regard me.
I cringed inwardly but pressed on.
"Might introductions perhaps be in order?"
Please?
Feel weird, I willed towards the pair up front. You accepted me onto this team without even introductions!
The girl in the seat ahead of me didn't roll her eyes at that. I couldn't call it an eyeroll; the slight shift was as if she was too disinterested and spiritless to even emote that much as her pupils in my encompassing sight sort of vaguely tilted toward the suggestion of up before drooping down and to the side like her eyeballs lost hydraulic pressure.
"Gokusai," she spoke airily.
The boss guy's reaction, however, was almost a study in contrast.
He twisted around after a moment, almost enough to pull himself from his seat as he faced back toward me between the front seats with a hand on the side of the so-dubbed Gokusai's to all but start crawling into the back himself, and his face had stolen all the emotion from Gokusai to stare at me with intend incredulity and something like offence.
"You don't even know who I am?!"
Somewhere in the back of my mind, an image popped into a few of my heads of a cartoon little girl whose teeth started clattering noisily in shivering nervousness. ...I could look however I wanted, though, which totally meant that the image in my heads was in no way representative of me and that I could go ahead and please shut up about myself, and I grabbed my customer service voice and face by the scruff of the neck to hide behind.
"Formalities might be observed, of course," I replied smoothly. "To perhaps use a name one not given might be taken as rude, after all, to say nothing simply of preference."
That seemed to mollify him somewhat. In his defence, it would be somewhat odd if a person just up and joined a team actually without having the slightest idea whom the team was. ...in my defence, he was the one who offered and allowed someone to join his team in fact without the slightest idea who I was—though I supposed that me being Senpai's friend might have been a mark for me, albeit maybe a dubious one when this did not seem at all a team tightly knit by bonds of friendship.
The boss guy raised his chin slightly as he proclaimed, "Dark Matter."
That wasn't a name; that was a title.
I had scant instants to carry this through.
Perhaps, though, barely any time at all was yet time enough for me?
Due diligence and preparation was the key to making would-be problems and the unexpected seem effortless with work put in out of sight. That was why my fingers raced across keyboards and, because I could learn and catch a clue after running face-first into the same problem over and over.
So, I played a readied card and delivered my already planned introduction! I felt nervous, but yet unreasonably smug for my cleverness in having for once thought ahead this time as I bought myself more time.
"Dark Matter, then, a pleasure. For the time being, Michiyo might serve in turn."
...okay, so it wasn't a great name, but I was bad with names and I could lay claim to it being something accurate to call me as the Series III clones, depending on the writing for it, and it could be a given name or surname; I hoped Dark Matter—and Gokusai, if she cared—maybe took that as deliberate for the wording I used, or at least entertained the idea that it could be in fact deliberately phrased ambiguously.
And with that, though, in the time it took me to simply say a line I had up on the multiple screens before me all that I needed to know to now, actually, indeed have an idea who—or rather, what—my new team leader was.
I couldn't help but think that maybe this was really convenient in a bad way, though.
Dark Matter.
Ticking fractions of seconds were all I had to spare and all the internet required with no need to actually look at any links for Academy City's second-ranked Level 5. Different links each held a brief blurb of their corresponding sites and images all converging toward the same thing, the pretty-boy here with the power of Dark Matter as a Level 5 like the girl I was based on, like Mental Out, like Accelerator, and he alarm bells went off in my heads at the combination of his attitude and looks as a good-looking blond guy in a suit when apparently he rocked seraph wings or something!
"Charmed to make such lofty acquaintance in person," I continued as if I wasn't freaking out on the inside and a multitude of outsides at the prospect that I was sharing a freaking taxi with a guy who might be some kinda cheap-ass fallen angel fucker!
Wait, no-no-no-no!
Within my lab, I stared in horror at what I was watching elsewhere as it dawned on me that I had just set Dark Matter up as the only guy on a team otherwise comprised only of girls, presumably each of us professional badasses, and... a-and there was even a thing with Senpai and I on opposite ends of a spectrum with Gokusai in the middle, a small-medium-large, young-intermediate-older setup!
Had I just made Dark Matter some kind of cheap-ass harem antagonist?! Were we supposed to be his eye-candy flunkies?! Some kind of thematic thing about Dark Matter being too human to be a proper angel, and maybe an ironic morality anchor to keep him human enough to not fall to total evil?
What the possibly literal hell had I stumbled into? I just wanted to make sure Senpai didn't have a mean coworker!
I could barely even think as I engaged with my new team almost on autopilot while the car drove through the pre-dawn city verging toward full wakefulness, thinking way too much instead somehow.
The only comfort was that Dark Matter seemed to lame to be properly larger-than-life doom, that and Senpai taking the hint to sidestep the awkwardness of our own obviated introductions with the opportunity presented. I made sure to write down "Yumiya Rakko" elsewhere with a burned-on emulation of a portrait picture, because I was sure to forget the name attached to her face.
As I did, I just wished I was wrong about the tasks at hand, because as I screamed internally about the bullshit revelation that had better not get any kind of Revelations-y, I honestly did think it easier than engaging with my other team.
Maybe it wasn't harder, exactly, but it was definitely a lot more complicated, anyway.
I watched myself from two different positions from afar as I started leaving the underground mall with my new friends and what seemed a small nation's GDP in shopping bags that were still only a pittance of the literal pile of garments and accessories that have been considered. They didn't seem to notice me; I wasn't quite sure about Mugino, because the aura of weirdly shifted colours playing over her skin was reminiscent of what I noticed around myself and the other Misaka if I looked closely, as if maybe she too might be able to do something interesting, but if there was any interaction between our abilities, she gave no sign of it as we retraced our steps back in the direction of the surface and I stayed in the sublevels.
Preparation and forethought were indeed important to ensuring interactions ran smoothly. Thus, I thought it prudent to give myself a helping hand; I had plenty, after all.
Perhaps more pertinently, I also had plenty of eyes.
Memories played through several of my heads as I considered what I beheld.
"It's a maid school, 'Ryouran Maid School', in the name."
"I bet she's a Ryouran girl!"
"Not every Ryouran girl is a ninja-maid. ...probably."
In another wing of the mall, on the same level as the clothing store but amidst a congregation around a food court, I eyed what at first glance was a small shop more akin to the size of the stores overhead, but actually a multi-level affair, with a bustling throng of student shoppers of every age uncaring of the hour moving like a river current through a coterie of girls in varied maid uniforms, some buyers efficiently passing in and out of the store with an air of knowing exactly what they were there for, other kids getting caught up along the sides as eddies of the steady crowd to speak with a uniformed girl or gesture between held up small containers or pointing at what lay within glass counters.
Food like the other places around it, I noticed. Bento boxes, premade and made to order, beneath the wordy banner proclaiming it Ryouran Maid School Active Study Advanced Course Home Economics Store, though only the school was written prominently across the sign over the entrance, followed on by the advertisement, Get the Best Bento! You Can Do No Less, And Neither Will We!
My questionably sensible teammates had convinced themselves that I was a Ryouran student. Watching the actual ones, I didn't really see it myself, but I found myself wondering if I could use this.
It would be infinitely easier to follow something with anything to actually go off of for reference in what the rest of ITEM expected of me. As I walked with them further and further from where I observed the de facto restaurant, I held back a mischievous smile. It gave me an idea.
I was in need of finances, sure... but Frenda had been all too happy to, in fact, volunteer to pay, and while I wouldn't steal from her, well, if the expenses were for her, and just happened to be in a way that was very convenient for me, now then, that was indeed convenient, wasn't it?
Elsewhere, in my base where I sat for the moment wearing one of the emulations I had made of the mellow-yellow sundress Komoe had lent me, I peered down at the other reference sample I had preserved in my hands.
It was a little surprising how easy it was to analyse the card Frenda had used to pay for everything, and the interaction with the reader.
Perhaps it had to do with practicality in the user base, I mused to myself as I flipped the argon lattice in my fingers while mentally processing what I had registered. For all that some aspects of Academy City evoked the city of the future, phasing in a standard way for the masses to pay for things couldn't practicably be so cutting edge. There was some kind of optical image security, kind of like with paper money, but it and the magnetic strip were an almost anticlimactic puzzle.
Concealed under veils, I approached the restroom nearest the bento store as another emulation of the card formed between my fingers and I moved in to support myself.
Breakfast would be in order before too long. From the air high above where I entered the unwatched restroom of the underground mall, simultaneously could I even see the first heraldings of dawn reaching into the atmosphere over the horizon.
Empty patches of air walked into the restroom. A girl who had never actually gone in stepped out.
I remembered a video I had seen once, or at least I could be confident that I had the idea of it in my heads, which was enough for my purposes. It was an interview with a former CIA chief of the department in charge of disguise brought in to comment and critique on movie scenes, and what stood out in memory was the woman heaping praise on a particular film that had the character not simply try to hide who they were, but to appear as someone else with an entire persona and live it up as something real and something that the actual person could live as if the real thing, with a lot of importance on image profile and hair, hair, hair.
Normal people couldn't turn completely invisible, after all, and even I could hardly actually interact with people when they couldn't see me, but that didn't mean that anyone had to see me me.
That was why I had picked the punk Usagi look earlier to try to wow the rest of ITEM. Obviously posh schoolgirl and teenage rebel, not the same thing, but the latter could fit for a girl like me, and arguably genuinely important to really being able to sell it, honestly, I did just kinda wanted the opportunity to do it.
Thus, that was also why from the restroom stepped a girl with a palely blue-eyed face a lot like mine, a height and build just a touch more than could normally be the case thanks to judicious construction of open-toed heels with a couple centimeters of platform to them and a touch of ribbon at the outside ankle (they were easy to make and cute, and anyone who disagreed could fight me), and a derivative of Komoe's dress with a lightweight, draping asymmetric skirt to it in glittery whites accented by more work than I would have preferred with a sash about the waist to what I thought an elegant flat-profile silky bow at my left hip, all to pair with the long, svelte gloves buttoned at my wrists and notionally deep black hair that I staticked into ringlets.
Oh, and the large, obvious sunglasses I had mimicked from a store on the floor above, along with a sports jacket since the mall was such a bounty of reference samples, completely clashing with the image.
Or rather, it might be more accurate to say, completing it.
I could do the ice queen idea. Being cold and unapproachable was easy, and it looked less like staggering social ineptitude if someone who was obviously a person to be aloof was the one doing it. Someone like that, though...
Now why would they be out and about at a time like this, doing their own shopping in-person and yet also not indulging in something far more extravagant like Frenda and Mugino had themselves been all for?
I examined myself in my sourceless sight and from behind as I invisibly trailed behind myself holding my spare hospital gown and as I more overtly arrowed through the crowd straight for the Ryouran store, and maybe I was biased for just knowing what I was "supposed" to seem, but I thought it an accurate look for the concept weaving together in a few of my heads.
Ice queen? No, kuudere. Because in a way the ice queen facade really was just that, a front, and I was trying to buy my new friends breakfast to make them like me more and impress them without seeming like it, and the best deceptions were the factual truth seen through a particular perspective.
So, I was not Misak Best about to technically not purloin Frenda's bank account to sneak her and the rest of ITEM an unsubtly branded nice breakfast, but clearly some other girl trying to do more or less that and hide it, because the bad disguise was the hopefully good disguise with another layer to it. That girl had come to the Ryouran store because, indeed, it was apparently the place to maybe just pick up something tasty to eat or, more likely, maybe get it for someone else.
And she certainly wasn't the sort to be plain and direct and half-assed about it!
I even had bludgeoned my brains (and the power of internet) into coming up with another name ahead of time, just in case! It was also arguably unimaginative puns, but nobody was perfect, especially not the parents of Miwa Miyuki the girl with cryomancy powers who was actually a gestalt singularity in disguise.
...a part of me despaired at the thought that I was only good for coming up with names that were ironic shitty puns, but I ignored all those avatars.
Instead, I inserted myself smoothly into the flow of other student shoppers heading into the Ryouran store. I had observed this all carefully, and I had an idea but only a somewhat poor one just what exactly I needed to do here-there, but I could also afford that; Miyuki was someone who could be expected to not know, so it was okay.
I settled into one of the "eddy" zones, finding myself carried almost without conscious input to an indented nook in the wrapping counters seemingly designed for the express purpose, with a girl maybe about my own age or within a year or two eying me brightly from the other side.
This maid had evidently gone all-in on navy blue with a hint of indigo in theme, with a more ordinary-looking maid uniform than some of the other girls like the almost lascivious and very generously endowed older girl in more of a sexy maid costume than an actual uniform cheerfully proselytising Ryouran's excellent bento options to an especially large cluster of attentive shoppers, or an alternatively especially eye-catching maid in a no less stylised tastefully complementary black and yellow dress that matched her own looks and concealed blade with a bumblebee sticker on sheath. Instead, the maid in front of me had an ordinary but no less professional look to her in a white apron with moderately frilly shoulders over an indigo-y navy dress the same shade as her shortly cut hair and eyes alike and accented by white lacy cuffs and similarly white collar and ribbon tie at her throat to go with the cute and rather low-profile frilly headband.
"Ah, good morning, ojou-sama!" The girl greeted earnestly with an absolutely beaming smile that swept over her entire face with it's sincere intensity. "Welcome to Ryouran Maid School's training and outreach restaurant! So, whatcha want?"
I blinked at the momentary mental hitch in form.
"Oh, uh, j-just..." Crap, I was already ruining this! I cleared my throat and tried again. "A bento quartet might not go unwarranted, though as to the specifics..."
I tried not to fidget. I would not fidget!
This was a stupid plan, I didn't even know that anyone liked.
I tried as well not to stare at my new friends as nearby we piled into the team ride on the surface and below it I was glad for the concealment of the large sunglasses I had emulated.
The maid regarded me with a politely even expression, before it transformed into something practically gleeful.
"Mm? Ah~" Her eyes flicked up and down over me and she grinned, then leaned in over the countertop and whispered, with a wink. "Don't worry, we at Ryouran Maid School specialise in a bento for every occasion, especially the only occasion anyone ever comes here for."
"New associates would deserve some token of acknowledgement!" I felt inexplicably pressed to protest.
"Mhmm!" The maid behind the counter agreed, and rubbed her hands in cheery excitement before spreading them wide at the assorted variety of different foods within the glass. "So, what'll it be for 'em, or do you wanna get some of the pre-built box options?"
I really, really wished I had psychic mind-reading powers of my own right now to tell what the other members of ITEM would like. Maybe an already-arranged bento would be for the best? Or the maid might have some idea?
Surely she'd know better than I would.
"Ah, well, one might perhaps have faith in the expertise of the students of Ryouran Maid School to know best," I tried to demure, grateful not to have to look at her.
"Ooh, a challenge," the other girl uttered with a hungry glee, placing her hands atop the counter—albeit not actually smudging prints onto the glass, I couldn't help but somehow notice. "Statistically, our salmon bento is the number one seller by a pretty big margin, but if you want to get four, the standard configuration... no, this calls for special customization for just the right arrangements for a set!"
She threw a thumbs up at me with a gleam in her eyes.
"Just you wait, Tsuchimikado Maika'll have the best bento set you could wish for!"
With that, she snapped on a pair of gloves, produced four different elegantly minimalistic glossy black square boxes emblazoned with embossed crests that she threw across the countertop with what had to be practiced effortlessness as she kicked on a stovetop directly behind her to immediate vibrant heat with the tip of her shoe toe, and then she slid open the back of the glass counter and twin pairs of chopsticks in her hands all but blurred in rapid darting that filled all four boxes in bare moments, all with a somehow manic zen across her face.
"Aaaand, done!" She declared as she set the last dish with a final freshly made tamagoyaki slice. "They're gonna love these, it's a maid's promise!"
All four boxes stacked neatly together, and I couldn't help but be impressed. I gave an appreciative approving look. That was some slick work! She even introduced herself without needing to make a specific point of it!
Then, one of the other maids, the black and yellow girl, leaned sideways a little to call out, "Tsuchimikado-san, your shift is over!"
"Ah, thank you!" Tsuchimikado returned in aside before regarding me once more.
I offered the card construct, not thinking it really appropriate for me to make her have to ask or mention any price—I got the impression that this was the sort of venue where nobody was supposed to actually care about price tags, and honestly the actual numbers themselves wouldn't mean much to me in any case; I had no idea what the buying power of the yen was with a perspective skewed by mad science cloning and allegedly deluxe rice cookers.
"Thank you, dear customer," Tsuchimikado replied, accepting the card.
I felt terribly smug as she ran it and I flexed my influence to feed the machine what it needed, and it processed as flawlessly as Frenda's actual card.
"Sincerest gratitude for excellent service and welcome assistance," I thanked her with a bow.
Tsuchimidako just beamed that same incredibly earnest sunny smile as before.
"Of course! A maid's work is never done!"
And as she held my gaze with what sounded like a tagline as would-be parting, she all but deflated before my eyes, slumping in on herself.
"Ts-Tsuchimikado-san?!"
Alarmed, I... I didn't know what to do as the girl practically turned into a zombie right in front of me, and plodded out from behind the counter.
Slowly, she tracked up to regard me.
"Eh? Oh... Yeah... Shift's over." She started to say something more while waving me off, but an enormous yawn snuck up on her all of a sudden, stealing it away.
"Would Miss be alright?"
The maid girl began shuffling toward the shop entrance with a muted air as I scooped up the bento stack and accompanied her concernedly.
Her eyelids shuttered heavily as she blinked at me.
"Yeah... Just... maid's work's never done, you know," she let out tiredly. "'sa practice thing. Practical exercise. Been up since... Wha'day's today? 's too long, 'swat it is. But..." she proffered me a seriously less chipper thumbs up than only moments ago. "That's what endurance practice is all about, so we..." She broke off in another yawn she covered with the back of her lacy cuff. "So we can always deliver our best, no matter what. 'sa school motto or something, one of 'm, anyway."
Once more her eyelids closed tiredly, and they didn't actually open again as Tsuchimikado swayed slightly just outside the Ryouran store.
"M'what? I'm awake, I'm awake!" She announced suddenly as those eyes snapped open on delay.
I... didn't really feel comfortable leaving this girl alone like this. I needed to get what I had purchased back to the rest of ITEM, but ditching Tsuchimikado right now just didn't seem right, especially right after she had just helped me. Besides, if nothing else, she might plausibly enough be able and willing to lead me right to Tokiwadai later for the low price of being a decent person.
So, as I followed alongside the slowly trudging maid toward the escalator leading up to the first level, I also wove invisibly through the crowd for another, different restroom to pull a similar trick to before.
This time, a maid not too dissimilar to Tsuchimikado with a long side-ponytail hanging over her shoulder in front emerged from a restroom she had never actually entered and began an intercept course.
I handed the bento stack off to myself and hurried as much as practical after my teammates while Tsuchimikado and I made our own separate way to the surface. The real made didn't seem to even notice the pretend one in her state (which was a good thing, because my newest semblance was only barely more developed than my identity with my other teammates with a look that had been interrupted mid-adoption), but I reckoned that people wouldn't pay too much of the wrong sort of attention to a girl in a maid uniform obviously busy with a maid task.
"Would one who has just offered such excellent service perhaps benefit for something of a return of service? A car could be brought along should a ride be of convenience," I offered when we emerged back on the street.
Tsuchimikado's head lolled over to regard me. "Nnnah, bus," she muttered, with a minor gesture toward the closest bus stop just up ahead where a bus was closing in even now. "Schedule."
"Ah."
Now I felt rather out of place for having kind of assumed that Tsuchimikado might need the help, even though I had made a point to phrase it with some ambiguity on that point.
The maid girl boarded with slow tread, myself just behind her. This bus was much the same as the one I had been in previously with Saten, but now was moderately busier, having cleared that low bar.
The bus trundled along, and I had time to myself with little to do while the rest of me was busy.
Busy was perhaps not exactly the best word for what I was doing in the taxi with Senpai and the others, though. More "hurry up and wait" business.
I half wanted to ask where we were actually going or how long it would take, but those questions were far more whiney-sounding than I was ever going to dare under the circumstances.
Thankfully, actually, it wasn't long before the automated taxi rolled to a stop outside an office building and we all got out onto the sidewalk, me following the others' lead.
"Well, we're here," Dark Matter muttered testily.
Great. ...where was here-there?
Everyone just sort of blankly regarded one another, as if everyone expected everyone else to do something first.
I certainly didn't know what we were doing, so I didn't know either why anyone was including me in the uncertain and expectant glances.
Gokusai dropped out first, apparently deciding that we would sort things out ourselves and were wasting her time as she boredly took out her phone. To my sight, she launched straight into a little phone game popping contiguous groups of colours of gems on the screen for points as more came down from the top.
Yeah... Senpai's job... kinda sucked, I thought.
"Right..." Dark Matter finally drew out. "Yobou was the one who knew where to pick up the man's trail."
He turned to look down at me. "Well, that's your job, Michiyo-san, find him if you're any use, then."
I blinked.
Point of order the first: Okay, maybe I actually was atypically suited for searching someone out, so perhaps it was something I could actually do in theory, but, point of order the second, I had no idea what the man actually looked like in the first place!
I suppressed a gulp.
I wasn't actually too worried for myself, honestly, but I still didn't want to screw up and this team seemed like one quick to be very critical and not actually reasonable about its asks.
And I didn't want to abandon Senpai any more than Tsuchimikado.
She stared at me with a hopeful look in her eyes, and I couldn't let her down!
"Would Dark Matter perhaps have a reference of the target in question for tracking down?"
In response, he actually just held up a hand, palm-up, and like sand crumbling in reverse, a figure of an adult who looked more or less a salaryman grew up from his palm, not too unlike some of the illusions I had made.
Nifty.
It also gave me something concrete to work with. The figure was strange—it just didn't look right—but the most important characteristics were still applicable to typical reflection of visible light, and I made an offsite copy for further reference in case Dark Matter-
The figure of the man dissolved away.
...did that.
If I was a less professional person, I might have rolled my eyes at that.
Instead I made a little bit of a show of closing them as I expanded the focus of my attention of my sight and began vectoring in higher up above the buildings by air.
A little surprisingly, I found a man who looked just about exactly like the figure Dark Matter had made, at least close enough to be within margin of error for observable fidelity of the original subject, in an office on the twelfth floor of the building we stood outside and incidentally not some kind of robot or the like whom hypothetically might spoof more mundane eyes.
I faced toward the cubicle up inside the building.
"He's in there," I announced. "Twelfth floor, in from the fourth window from the centerline in an office cubicle."
Dark Matter's face took on a coldly angry, dangerous expression as he looked up as well.
"Is that so?" He whispered. "Then I suppose we should give our old friend a little greeting."
"A consideration," I proffered. "Depending on the particular objectives to be achieved, would a more dramatic elimination of the target perhaps be more suitable, or the inverse, with an understated assassination for the target optionally falling down dead without observable cause?"
Dark Matter's gaze flicked back down toward me, then his eyes narrowed in what might have been suspicion or consideration or maybe suspicious consideration, or considerable suspicion, I couldn't tell.
"Hmm. I think," he began at length, "it would send a louder message actually to not make a message of it. You can kill him from here, just end him without a fuss?"
I nodded.
"Do it then," he himself nodded as we stood on the sidewalk thankfully with no one actually in our vicinity to hear the discussion. "It'll make people think twice about trying to screw us over again if they get the idea that SCHOOL can and will just get them back and there's nothing they can do about it."
If I didn't know better, though, I could swear that Senpai actually seemed disappointed.
As the target's neural architecture dimmed and the man slumped in his cubicle, however, I wondered if Senpai might have more than one possible reason for that.
"So we're done here?" Gokusai spoke up boredly.
"I... guess so," Dark Matter admitted with an acknowledging half shrug to no one in particular.
Gokusai sighed distractedly. "Dunno why you made me go through the whole car ride if it was just for this," she complained, and I kind of had to agree in a way, honestly.
This was... really anticlimactic.
Senpai's job was kinda meh. Even the team name was just sorta lacklustre.
I wasn't sure if it would be better or worse if we'd actually gotten some kind of actual paycheck for this. On the one hand, basically free money, but on the other, I thought it'd just kinda seem wrong to get paid oodles of cash for not even really doing a job at all, and if the fee might be scaled to the trouble, an assassination a nickel also didn't really fit either.
Dark Matter the boring and kind of lame turned around and waved down another self-driving taxi and we piled in once more.
Objectively, Mugino was a way cooler boss. I couldn't wait to see my other team's reactions when the "totally secretly a Ryouran ninja-maid" delivered them a Ryouran bento set despite having been at least supposedly with them the whole time.
Or... Actually...
As I considered what unfolded around me as I sat in the mobile tactical center truck with the rest of ITEM, I had to wonder if maybe it might do me—and possible some or all of my teammates—some good to add to the intrigue at hand. The allegedly simple and straightforward job lining up for ITEM already promised to be far more interesting and "interesting" than my lame SCHOOL assignment that was a bad pun even I couldn't find myself to like.
But also interesting in possibly a bad way, I decided, was Tsuchimikado's apartment. The apartment itself was normal enough, a completely average stock affair that we arrived at more swiftly than I had really expected by the walking distance from the bus stop when the lethargic maid had commandeered one of the mobile trashcans as steed. There was someone inside already, though.
To my clairvoyant gaze, the high-school-aged boy inside seemed... tense.
And he was standing inside Tsuchimikado's apartment, facing the door with the lights off and a pistol at the small of his back. I didn't know how much stock I could put into appearances, but he sure didn't look the slightest bit like he was anyone who should be in Tsuchimikado's place. In fact, he looked like a delinquent, and not like any of the sort I had met with Skill Out.
I didn't like it.
I didn't like it one bit.
Oniichan's words weighed heavily, not least for his sheer, sincere eagerness, and I looked at my teammates wondering what to maybe ask them.
Because it was impossible to turn Oniichan down.
He... he wanted me to become an idol. Like a magical girl idol kind of idol.
And I could do it.
It still wouldn't actually solve my financial concerns for needing to get money quickly, acquire substantial sums on a scale of hours rather than anything like some bi-monthly salary or something, but I couldn't say no to that incredibly sincere, stark yearning in his eyes for a dream for me, and the unshakable belief in me that I could do it that made a part of me desperate to be worthy of that faith when I knew, indeed, I absolutely could.
That was almost the scarier part, if I was honest with myself.
I knew knew that I could do it, somehow or another; details might need to be worked out about arrangements, but I knew my music.
I knew Misaka Mikoto's music.
If some of the other things in my head really were real, if I actually did have a past that was summoned across worlds or time or something to infuse into the girl I at least thought I was, then I used to not have anything like an aptitude for singing. I used to not even be that good at reading music, just what I remembered from school when I was, well, maybe actually bigger, not little. Except none the less I could run my hands through a phantom pretending knowing with that eerie sourceless certainty exactly how the violin was supposed to feel under my fingers that lacked any corresponding callouses, and almost hear the tunes that weren't there with a total confidence of what melody should follow.
Misaka Mikoto knew a great deal about music. Any student of Tokiwadai ought to when considerable lessons were mandatory, according to what I had uncovered about the school, and the original was no exception.
So, then, neither were those of us formed in her image.
I was not unaware of the irony that the same obsessive meticulousness to exactly duplicate the original down to the very slightest detail—such that I had espied storage drums in my recon of project facilities filled with shampoo and conditioner taken from silly numbers of emptied froggy bottles I recognised as Gekota—could be turned from ushering in a new god born of industrialised atrocity to instead be the enabling foundation of a cute girl dancing up on a stage singing sappily about love and harmony.
Oniichan's heart was set on me becoming an idol, so that was what I was going to do; it was important to him, and that made it important to me. I just had to figure out how on earth to go about making it happen.
Which left me to turn to my friends and allies for help.
What were friends for if not sticking by each other, after all? Except that confidence didn't exactly translate into confidence about actually doing it, however certain I was that it should be done.
But I had to do it if I was going to be my best.
Senpai was easier to talk to than Frenda and Kinuhata as I tentatively tried to aim towards the subject as both avatars with them.
"S-So, uh..." I started quietly in the back seat to be met with Senpai snapping to regard me, punctuating the broken silence in the otherwise quiet car bereft of any meaningful motor noise or even that of the tires in the dampening confines of the interior.
Easier wasn't the same as easy.
I caught the sight of eyes flicking up to look back in the rearview mirror—which, I noted absently with a mind not having to deal with being in the same position I was in here-there, incidentally wasn't actually angled for the driver's convenience when there was no driver, allowing both teammates in the front to regard me.
I cringed inwardly but pressed on.
"Might introductions perhaps be in order?"
Please?
Feel weird, I willed towards the pair up front. You accepted me onto this team without even introductions!
The girl in the seat ahead of me didn't roll her eyes at that. I couldn't call it an eyeroll; the slight shift was as if she was too disinterested and spiritless to even emote that much as her pupils in my encompassing sight sort of vaguely tilted toward the suggestion of up before drooping down and to the side like her eyeballs lost hydraulic pressure.
"Gokusai," she spoke airily.
The boss guy's reaction, however, was almost a study in contrast.
He twisted around after a moment, almost enough to pull himself from his seat as he faced back toward me between the front seats with a hand on the side of the so-dubbed Gokusai's to all but start crawling into the back himself, and his face had stolen all the emotion from Gokusai to stare at me with intend incredulity and something like offence.
"You don't even know who I am?!"
Somewhere in the back of my mind, an image popped into a few of my heads of a cartoon little girl whose teeth started clattering noisily in shivering nervousness. ...I could look however I wanted, though, which totally meant that the image in my heads was in no way representative of me and that I could go ahead and please shut up about myself, and I grabbed my customer service voice and face by the scruff of the neck to hide behind.
"Formalities might be observed, of course," I replied smoothly. "To perhaps use a name one not given might be taken as rude, after all, to say nothing simply of preference."
That seemed to mollify him somewhat. In his defence, it would be somewhat odd if a person just up and joined a team actually without having the slightest idea whom the team was. ...in my defence, he was the one who offered and allowed someone to join his team in fact without the slightest idea who I was—though I supposed that me being Senpai's friend might have been a mark for me, albeit maybe a dubious one when this did not seem at all a team tightly knit by bonds of friendship.
The boss guy raised his chin slightly as he proclaimed, "Dark Matter."
That wasn't a name; that was a title.
I had scant instants to carry this through.
Perhaps, though, barely any time at all was yet time enough for me?
Due diligence and preparation was the key to making would-be problems and the unexpected seem effortless with work put in out of sight. That was why my fingers raced across keyboards and, because I could learn and catch a clue after running face-first into the same problem over and over.
So, I played a readied card and delivered my already planned introduction! I felt nervous, but yet unreasonably smug for my cleverness in having for once thought ahead this time as I bought myself more time.
"Dark Matter, then, a pleasure. For the time being, Michiyo might serve in turn."
...okay, so it wasn't a great name, but I was bad with names and I could lay claim to it being something accurate to call me as the Series III clones, depending on the writing for it, and it could be a given name or surname; I hoped Dark Matter—and Gokusai, if she cared—maybe took that as deliberate for the wording I used, or at least entertained the idea that it could be in fact deliberately phrased ambiguously.
And with that, though, in the time it took me to simply say a line I had up on the multiple screens before me all that I needed to know to now, actually, indeed have an idea who—or rather, what—my new team leader was.
I couldn't help but think that maybe this was really convenient in a bad way, though.
Dark Matter.
Ticking fractions of seconds were all I had to spare and all the internet required with no need to actually look at any links for Academy City's second-ranked Level 5. Different links each held a brief blurb of their corresponding sites and images all converging toward the same thing, the pretty-boy here with the power of Dark Matter as a Level 5 like the girl I was based on, like Mental Out, like Accelerator, and he alarm bells went off in my heads at the combination of his attitude and looks as a good-looking blond guy in a suit when apparently he rocked seraph wings or something!
"Charmed to make such lofty acquaintance in person," I continued as if I wasn't freaking out on the inside and a multitude of outsides at the prospect that I was sharing a freaking taxi with a guy who might be some kinda cheap-ass fallen angel fucker!
Wait, no-no-no-no!
Within my lab, I stared in horror at what I was watching elsewhere as it dawned on me that I had just set Dark Matter up as the only guy on a team otherwise comprised only of girls, presumably each of us professional badasses, and... a-and there was even a thing with Senpai and I on opposite ends of a spectrum with Gokusai in the middle, a small-medium-large, young-intermediate-older setup!
Had I just made Dark Matter some kind of cheap-ass harem antagonist?! Were we supposed to be his eye-candy flunkies?! Some kind of thematic thing about Dark Matter being too human to be a proper angel, and maybe an ironic morality anchor to keep him human enough to not fall to total evil?
What the possibly literal hell had I stumbled into? I just wanted to make sure Senpai didn't have a mean coworker!
I could barely even think as I engaged with my new team almost on autopilot while the car drove through the pre-dawn city verging toward full wakefulness, thinking way too much instead somehow.
The only comfort was that Dark Matter seemed to lame to be properly larger-than-life doom, that and Senpai taking the hint to sidestep the awkwardness of our own obviated introductions with the opportunity presented. I made sure to write down "Yumiya Rakko" elsewhere with a burned-on emulation of a portrait picture, because I was sure to forget the name attached to her face.
As I did, I just wished I was wrong about the tasks at hand, because as I screamed internally about the bullshit revelation that had better not get any kind of Revelations-y, I honestly did think it easier than engaging with my other team.
Maybe it wasn't harder, exactly, but it was definitely a lot more complicated, anyway.
I watched myself from two different positions from afar as I started leaving the underground mall with my new friends and what seemed a small nation's GDP in shopping bags that were still only a pittance of the literal pile of garments and accessories that have been considered. They didn't seem to notice me; I wasn't quite sure about Mugino, because the aura of weirdly shifted colours playing over her skin was reminiscent of what I noticed around myself and the other Misaka if I looked closely, as if maybe she too might be able to do something interesting, but if there was any interaction between our abilities, she gave no sign of it as we retraced our steps back in the direction of the surface and I stayed in the sublevels.
Preparation and forethought were indeed important to ensuring interactions ran smoothly. Thus, I thought it prudent to give myself a helping hand; I had plenty, after all.
Perhaps more pertinently, I also had plenty of eyes.
Memories played through several of my heads as I considered what I beheld.
"It's a maid school, 'Ryouran Maid School', in the name."
"I bet she's a Ryouran girl!"
"Not every Ryouran girl is a ninja-maid. ...probably."
In another wing of the mall, on the same level as the clothing store but amidst a congregation around a food court, I eyed what at first glance was a small shop more akin to the size of the stores overhead, but actually a multi-level affair, with a bustling throng of student shoppers of every age uncaring of the hour moving like a river current through a coterie of girls in varied maid uniforms, some buyers efficiently passing in and out of the store with an air of knowing exactly what they were there for, other kids getting caught up along the sides as eddies of the steady crowd to speak with a uniformed girl or gesture between held up small containers or pointing at what lay within glass counters.
Food like the other places around it, I noticed. Bento boxes, premade and made to order, beneath the wordy banner proclaiming it Ryouran Maid School Active Study Advanced Course Home Economics Store, though only the school was written prominently across the sign over the entrance, followed on by the advertisement, Get the Best Bento! You Can Do No Less, And Neither Will We!
My questionably sensible teammates had convinced themselves that I was a Ryouran student. Watching the actual ones, I didn't really see it myself, but I found myself wondering if I could use this.
It would be infinitely easier to follow something with anything to actually go off of for reference in what the rest of ITEM expected of me. As I walked with them further and further from where I observed the de facto restaurant, I held back a mischievous smile. It gave me an idea.
I was in need of finances, sure... but Frenda had been all too happy to, in fact, volunteer to pay, and while I wouldn't steal from her, well, if the expenses were for her, and just happened to be in a way that was very convenient for me, now then, that was indeed convenient, wasn't it?
Elsewhere, in my base where I sat for the moment wearing one of the emulations I had made of the mellow-yellow sundress Komoe had lent me, I peered down at the other reference sample I had preserved in my hands.
It was a little surprising how easy it was to analyse the card Frenda had used to pay for everything, and the interaction with the reader.
Perhaps it had to do with practicality in the user base, I mused to myself as I flipped the argon lattice in my fingers while mentally processing what I had registered. For all that some aspects of Academy City evoked the city of the future, phasing in a standard way for the masses to pay for things couldn't practicably be so cutting edge. There was some kind of optical image security, kind of like with paper money, but it and the magnetic strip were an almost anticlimactic puzzle.
Concealed under veils, I approached the restroom nearest the bento store as another emulation of the card formed between my fingers and I moved in to support myself.
Breakfast would be in order before too long. From the air high above where I entered the unwatched restroom of the underground mall, simultaneously could I even see the first heraldings of dawn reaching into the atmosphere over the horizon.
Empty patches of air walked into the restroom. A girl who had never actually gone in stepped out.
I remembered a video I had seen once, or at least I could be confident that I had the idea of it in my heads, which was enough for my purposes. It was an interview with a former CIA chief of the department in charge of disguise brought in to comment and critique on movie scenes, and what stood out in memory was the woman heaping praise on a particular film that had the character not simply try to hide who they were, but to appear as someone else with an entire persona and live it up as something real and something that the actual person could live as if the real thing, with a lot of importance on image profile and hair, hair, hair.
Normal people couldn't turn completely invisible, after all, and even I could hardly actually interact with people when they couldn't see me, but that didn't mean that anyone had to see me me.
That was why I had picked the punk Usagi look earlier to try to wow the rest of ITEM. Obviously posh schoolgirl and teenage rebel, not the same thing, but the latter could fit for a girl like me, and arguably genuinely important to really being able to sell it, honestly, I did just kinda wanted the opportunity to do it.
Thus, that was also why from the restroom stepped a girl with a palely blue-eyed face a lot like mine, a height and build just a touch more than could normally be the case thanks to judicious construction of open-toed heels with a couple centimeters of platform to them and a touch of ribbon at the outside ankle (they were easy to make and cute, and anyone who disagreed could fight me), and a derivative of Komoe's dress with a lightweight, draping asymmetric skirt to it in glittery whites accented by more work than I would have preferred with a sash about the waist to what I thought an elegant flat-profile silky bow at my left hip, all to pair with the long, svelte gloves buttoned at my wrists and notionally deep black hair that I staticked into ringlets.
Oh, and the large, obvious sunglasses I had mimicked from a store on the floor above, along with a sports jacket since the mall was such a bounty of reference samples, completely clashing with the image.
Or rather, it might be more accurate to say, completing it.
I could do the ice queen idea. Being cold and unapproachable was easy, and it looked less like staggering social ineptitude if someone who was obviously a person to be aloof was the one doing it. Someone like that, though...
Now why would they be out and about at a time like this, doing their own shopping in-person and yet also not indulging in something far more extravagant like Frenda and Mugino had themselves been all for?
I examined myself in my sourceless sight and from behind as I invisibly trailed behind myself holding my spare hospital gown and as I more overtly arrowed through the crowd straight for the Ryouran store, and maybe I was biased for just knowing what I was "supposed" to seem, but I thought it an accurate look for the concept weaving together in a few of my heads.
Ice queen? No, kuudere. Because in a way the ice queen facade really was just that, a front, and I was trying to buy my new friends breakfast to make them like me more and impress them without seeming like it, and the best deceptions were the factual truth seen through a particular perspective.
So, I was not Misak Best about to technically not purloin Frenda's bank account to sneak her and the rest of ITEM an unsubtly branded nice breakfast, but clearly some other girl trying to do more or less that and hide it, because the bad disguise was the hopefully good disguise with another layer to it. That girl had come to the Ryouran store because, indeed, it was apparently the place to maybe just pick up something tasty to eat or, more likely, maybe get it for someone else.
And she certainly wasn't the sort to be plain and direct and half-assed about it!
I even had bludgeoned my brains (and the power of internet) into coming up with another name ahead of time, just in case! It was also arguably unimaginative puns, but nobody was perfect, especially not the parents of Miwa Miyuki the girl with cryomancy powers who was actually a gestalt singularity in disguise.
...a part of me despaired at the thought that I was only good for coming up with names that were ironic shitty puns, but I ignored all those avatars.
Instead, I inserted myself smoothly into the flow of other student shoppers heading into the Ryouran store. I had observed this all carefully, and I had an idea but only a somewhat poor one just what exactly I needed to do here-there, but I could also afford that; Miyuki was someone who could be expected to not know, so it was okay.
I settled into one of the "eddy" zones, finding myself carried almost without conscious input to an indented nook in the wrapping counters seemingly designed for the express purpose, with a girl maybe about my own age or within a year or two eying me brightly from the other side.
This maid had evidently gone all-in on navy blue with a hint of indigo in theme, with a more ordinary-looking maid uniform than some of the other girls like the almost lascivious and very generously endowed older girl in more of a sexy maid costume than an actual uniform cheerfully proselytising Ryouran's excellent bento options to an especially large cluster of attentive shoppers, or an alternatively especially eye-catching maid in a no less stylised tastefully complementary black and yellow dress that matched her own looks and concealed blade with a bumblebee sticker on sheath. Instead, the maid in front of me had an ordinary but no less professional look to her in a white apron with moderately frilly shoulders over an indigo-y navy dress the same shade as her shortly cut hair and eyes alike and accented by white lacy cuffs and similarly white collar and ribbon tie at her throat to go with the cute and rather low-profile frilly headband.
"Ah, good morning, ojou-sama!" The girl greeted earnestly with an absolutely beaming smile that swept over her entire face with it's sincere intensity. "Welcome to Ryouran Maid School's training and outreach restaurant! So, whatcha want?"
I blinked at the momentary mental hitch in form.
"Oh, uh, j-just..." Crap, I was already ruining this! I cleared my throat and tried again. "A bento quartet might not go unwarranted, though as to the specifics..."
I tried not to fidget. I would not fidget!
This was a stupid plan, I didn't even know that anyone liked.
I tried as well not to stare at my new friends as nearby we piled into the team ride on the surface and below it I was glad for the concealment of the large sunglasses I had emulated.
The maid regarded me with a politely even expression, before it transformed into something practically gleeful.
"Mm? Ah~" Her eyes flicked up and down over me and she grinned, then leaned in over the countertop and whispered, with a wink. "Don't worry, we at Ryouran Maid School specialise in a bento for every occasion, especially the only occasion anyone ever comes here for."
"New associates would deserve some token of acknowledgement!" I felt inexplicably pressed to protest.
"Mhmm!" The maid behind the counter agreed, and rubbed her hands in cheery excitement before spreading them wide at the assorted variety of different foods within the glass. "So, what'll it be for 'em, or do you wanna get some of the pre-built box options?"
I really, really wished I had psychic mind-reading powers of my own right now to tell what the other members of ITEM would like. Maybe an already-arranged bento would be for the best? Or the maid might have some idea?
Surely she'd know better than I would.
"Ah, well, one might perhaps have faith in the expertise of the students of Ryouran Maid School to know best," I tried to demure, grateful not to have to look at her.
"Ooh, a challenge," the other girl uttered with a hungry glee, placing her hands atop the counter—albeit not actually smudging prints onto the glass, I couldn't help but somehow notice. "Statistically, our salmon bento is the number one seller by a pretty big margin, but if you want to get four, the standard configuration... no, this calls for special customization for just the right arrangements for a set!"
She threw a thumbs up at me with a gleam in her eyes.
"Just you wait, Tsuchimikado Maika'll have the best bento set you could wish for!"
With that, she snapped on a pair of gloves, produced four different elegantly minimalistic glossy black square boxes emblazoned with embossed crests that she threw across the countertop with what had to be practiced effortlessness as she kicked on a stovetop directly behind her to immediate vibrant heat with the tip of her shoe toe, and then she slid open the back of the glass counter and twin pairs of chopsticks in her hands all but blurred in rapid darting that filled all four boxes in bare moments, all with a somehow manic zen across her face.
"Aaaand, done!" She declared as she set the last dish with a final freshly made tamagoyaki slice. "They're gonna love these, it's a maid's promise!"
All four boxes stacked neatly together, and I couldn't help but be impressed. I gave an appreciative approving look. That was some slick work! She even introduced herself without needing to make a specific point of it!
Then, one of the other maids, the black and yellow girl, leaned sideways a little to call out, "Tsuchimikado-san, your shift is over!"
"Ah, thank you!" Tsuchimikado returned in aside before regarding me once more.
I offered the card construct, not thinking it really appropriate for me to make her have to ask or mention any price—I got the impression that this was the sort of venue where nobody was supposed to actually care about price tags, and honestly the actual numbers themselves wouldn't mean much to me in any case; I had no idea what the buying power of the yen was with a perspective skewed by mad science cloning and allegedly deluxe rice cookers.
"Thank you, dear customer," Tsuchimikado replied, accepting the card.
I felt terribly smug as she ran it and I flexed my influence to feed the machine what it needed, and it processed as flawlessly as Frenda's actual card.
"Sincerest gratitude for excellent service and welcome assistance," I thanked her with a bow.
Tsuchimidako just beamed that same incredibly earnest sunny smile as before.
"Of course! A maid's work is never done!"
And as she held my gaze with what sounded like a tagline as would-be parting, she all but deflated before my eyes, slumping in on herself.
"Ts-Tsuchimikado-san?!"
Alarmed, I... I didn't know what to do as the girl practically turned into a zombie right in front of me, and plodded out from behind the counter.
Slowly, she tracked up to regard me.
"Eh? Oh... Yeah... Shift's over." She started to say something more while waving me off, but an enormous yawn snuck up on her all of a sudden, stealing it away.
"Would Miss be alright?"
The maid girl began shuffling toward the shop entrance with a muted air as I scooped up the bento stack and accompanied her concernedly.
Her eyelids shuttered heavily as she blinked at me.
"Yeah... Just... maid's work's never done, you know," she let out tiredly. "'sa practice thing. Practical exercise. Been up since... Wha'day's today? 's too long, 'swat it is. But..." she proffered me a seriously less chipper thumbs up than only moments ago. "That's what endurance practice is all about, so we..." She broke off in another yawn she covered with the back of her lacy cuff. "So we can always deliver our best, no matter what. 'sa school motto or something, one of 'm, anyway."
Once more her eyelids closed tiredly, and they didn't actually open again as Tsuchimikado swayed slightly just outside the Ryouran store.
"M'what? I'm awake, I'm awake!" She announced suddenly as those eyes snapped open on delay.
I... didn't really feel comfortable leaving this girl alone like this. I needed to get what I had purchased back to the rest of ITEM, but ditching Tsuchimikado right now just didn't seem right, especially right after she had just helped me. Besides, if nothing else, she might plausibly enough be able and willing to lead me right to Tokiwadai later for the low price of being a decent person.
So, as I followed alongside the slowly trudging maid toward the escalator leading up to the first level, I also wove invisibly through the crowd for another, different restroom to pull a similar trick to before.
This time, a maid not too dissimilar to Tsuchimikado with a long side-ponytail hanging over her shoulder in front emerged from a restroom she had never actually entered and began an intercept course.
I handed the bento stack off to myself and hurried as much as practical after my teammates while Tsuchimikado and I made our own separate way to the surface. The real made didn't seem to even notice the pretend one in her state (which was a good thing, because my newest semblance was only barely more developed than my identity with my other teammates with a look that had been interrupted mid-adoption), but I reckoned that people wouldn't pay too much of the wrong sort of attention to a girl in a maid uniform obviously busy with a maid task.
"Would one who has just offered such excellent service perhaps benefit for something of a return of service? A car could be brought along should a ride be of convenience," I offered when we emerged back on the street.
Tsuchimikado's head lolled over to regard me. "Nnnah, bus," she muttered, with a minor gesture toward the closest bus stop just up ahead where a bus was closing in even now. "Schedule."
"Ah."
Now I felt rather out of place for having kind of assumed that Tsuchimikado might need the help, even though I had made a point to phrase it with some ambiguity on that point.
The maid girl boarded with slow tread, myself just behind her. This bus was much the same as the one I had been in previously with Saten, but now was moderately busier, having cleared that low bar.
The bus trundled along, and I had time to myself with little to do while the rest of me was busy.
Busy was perhaps not exactly the best word for what I was doing in the taxi with Senpai and the others, though. More "hurry up and wait" business.
I half wanted to ask where we were actually going or how long it would take, but those questions were far more whiney-sounding than I was ever going to dare under the circumstances.
Thankfully, actually, it wasn't long before the automated taxi rolled to a stop outside an office building and we all got out onto the sidewalk, me following the others' lead.
"Well, we're here," Dark Matter muttered testily.
Great. ...where was here-there?
Everyone just sort of blankly regarded one another, as if everyone expected everyone else to do something first.
I certainly didn't know what we were doing, so I didn't know either why anyone was including me in the uncertain and expectant glances.
Gokusai dropped out first, apparently deciding that we would sort things out ourselves and were wasting her time as she boredly took out her phone. To my sight, she launched straight into a little phone game popping contiguous groups of colours of gems on the screen for points as more came down from the top.
Yeah... Senpai's job... kinda sucked, I thought.
"Right..." Dark Matter finally drew out. "Yobou was the one who knew where to pick up the man's trail."
He turned to look down at me. "Well, that's your job, Michiyo-san, find him if you're any use, then."
I blinked.
Point of order the first: Okay, maybe I actually was atypically suited for searching someone out, so perhaps it was something I could actually do in theory, but, point of order the second, I had no idea what the man actually looked like in the first place!
I suppressed a gulp.
I wasn't actually too worried for myself, honestly, but I still didn't want to screw up and this team seemed like one quick to be very critical and not actually reasonable about its asks.
And I didn't want to abandon Senpai any more than Tsuchimikado.
She stared at me with a hopeful look in her eyes, and I couldn't let her down!
"Would Dark Matter perhaps have a reference of the target in question for tracking down?"
In response, he actually just held up a hand, palm-up, and like sand crumbling in reverse, a figure of an adult who looked more or less a salaryman grew up from his palm, not too unlike some of the illusions I had made.
Nifty.
It also gave me something concrete to work with. The figure was strange—it just didn't look right—but the most important characteristics were still applicable to typical reflection of visible light, and I made an offsite copy for further reference in case Dark Matter-
The figure of the man dissolved away.
...did that.
If I was a less professional person, I might have rolled my eyes at that.
Instead I made a little bit of a show of closing them as I expanded the focus of my attention of my sight and began vectoring in higher up above the buildings by air.
A little surprisingly, I found a man who looked just about exactly like the figure Dark Matter had made, at least close enough to be within margin of error for observable fidelity of the original subject, in an office on the twelfth floor of the building we stood outside and incidentally not some kind of robot or the like whom hypothetically might spoof more mundane eyes.
I faced toward the cubicle up inside the building.
"He's in there," I announced. "Twelfth floor, in from the fourth window from the centerline in an office cubicle."
Dark Matter's face took on a coldly angry, dangerous expression as he looked up as well.
"Is that so?" He whispered. "Then I suppose we should give our old friend a little greeting."
"A consideration," I proffered. "Depending on the particular objectives to be achieved, would a more dramatic elimination of the target perhaps be more suitable, or the inverse, with an understated assassination for the target optionally falling down dead without observable cause?"
Dark Matter's gaze flicked back down toward me, then his eyes narrowed in what might have been suspicion or consideration or maybe suspicious consideration, or considerable suspicion, I couldn't tell.
"Hmm. I think," he began at length, "it would send a louder message actually to not make a message of it. You can kill him from here, just end him without a fuss?"
I nodded.
"Do it then," he himself nodded as we stood on the sidewalk thankfully with no one actually in our vicinity to hear the discussion. "It'll make people think twice about trying to screw us over again if they get the idea that SCHOOL can and will just get them back and there's nothing they can do about it."
If I didn't know better, though, I could swear that Senpai actually seemed disappointed.
As the target's neural architecture dimmed and the man slumped in his cubicle, however, I wondered if Senpai might have more than one possible reason for that.
"So we're done here?" Gokusai spoke up boredly.
"I... guess so," Dark Matter admitted with an acknowledging half shrug to no one in particular.
Gokusai sighed distractedly. "Dunno why you made me go through the whole car ride if it was just for this," she complained, and I kind of had to agree in a way, honestly.
This was... really anticlimactic.
Senpai's job was kinda meh. Even the team name was just sorta lacklustre.
I wasn't sure if it would be better or worse if we'd actually gotten some kind of actual paycheck for this. On the one hand, basically free money, but on the other, I thought it'd just kinda seem wrong to get paid oodles of cash for not even really doing a job at all, and if the fee might be scaled to the trouble, an assassination a nickel also didn't really fit either.
Dark Matter the boring and kind of lame turned around and waved down another self-driving taxi and we piled in once more.
Objectively, Mugino was a way cooler boss. I couldn't wait to see my other team's reactions when the "totally secretly a Ryouran ninja-maid" delivered them a Ryouran bento set despite having been at least supposedly with them the whole time.
Or... Actually...
As I considered what unfolded around me as I sat in the mobile tactical center truck with the rest of ITEM, I had to wonder if maybe it might do me—and possible some or all of my teammates—some good to add to the intrigue at hand. The allegedly simple and straightforward job lining up for ITEM already promised to be far more interesting and "interesting" than my lame SCHOOL assignment that was a bad pun even I couldn't find myself to like.
But also interesting in possibly a bad way, I decided, was Tsuchimikado's apartment. The apartment itself was normal enough, a completely average stock affair that we arrived at more swiftly than I had really expected by the walking distance from the bus stop when the lethargic maid had commandeered one of the mobile trashcans as steed. There was someone inside already, though.
To my clairvoyant gaze, the high-school-aged boy inside seemed... tense.
And he was standing inside Tsuchimikado's apartment, facing the door with the lights off and a pistol at the small of his back. I didn't know how much stock I could put into appearances, but he sure didn't look the slightest bit like he was anyone who should be in Tsuchimikado's place. In fact, he looked like a delinquent, and not like any of the sort I had met with Skill Out.
I didn't like it.
I didn't like it one bit.
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Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
I suppose there could be worse ways to being introduced to the magic side of Toaru.
Assuming of course - and that is a big ask - she doesn't flub this somehow and leaves the Tsuchimikados thinking she's some kind of rogue Magic side agent loose in the city.
Assuming of course - and that is a big ask - she doesn't flub this somehow and leaves the Tsuchimikados thinking she's some kind of rogue Magic side agent loose in the city.
Chapter 26
- Location
- Terra-Luna
It began with cold.
Down the block from Tsuchimikado's ordinary-seeming apartment where the intruder awaited, I started to reduce my speed as the avatar accompanying her, and reached across in my scrying sight toward the interior to dampen in equal measure the swath of colours corresponding to warmth.
It was slow, at first. I didn't want Tsuchimikado herself to notice my attempts to buy more time, and I wanted her intruder to notice the right way.
This was theatre.
The first and most important step of all to pushing the perspectives of others was framing and setup. So at first, the air barely changed at all. Then only slightly chilled as Tsuchimikado and I continued down the sidewalk lit by streetlights overhead.
This was theatre, and that called for buildup.
Several long seconds had the muting vibrancy of the conjoined kitchen and living room area shift from something merely like as if the air conditioning was running well to actually noticeably cool.
And notice the intruder did.
From outside and down the street, I saw him twitch as the tense anxiety abruptly loosened into something ready to move instead of tightening, and quick eyes darted back and forth in little movements while his shoulder rolled, as if preparing for a grab for the pistol at the small of his back.
Good, I thought coldly as my work. I wanted this guy off-balance and aware that something was wrong. I didn't have to know the weary girl rolling along beside me on her cleaner robot very well; even someone who wasn't at bare minimum simply a decent person still didn't at all deserve to have some ominous intruder lurking with a gun in their own home, and like hell was I blithely turning a blind eye and letting Tsuchimikado deal with it alone!
Now that this jackass knew that something was up, I quelled the temperature of everything around him faster and faster, accelerating beyond the deceleration of my own walking pace, and his breath began to plume out in front of him to join a thin misty fog in unmistakable testament that he was caught up in something real, something that absolutely was not trivial or going to pass on by.
He drew his gun, held at a low ready position as someone who knew how to use it as he backpedaled away from the door toward the bedroom with his head on a swivel searching out his threat.
Nowhere to be seen, I narrowed my eyes at him, and frost began to silently bloom across the walls, the gently whirling and unlit ceiling fan. Pale glittering creeping swept over the refrigerator and Tsuchimikado's stove, the television in one corner and across the countertop around the sink as I dropped the temperature further and guided along the winding tendrils of growing fractals. I made a point of peering deeper into the intruder's pistol and stifling the quivering excitement within so that the gun suddenly throbbed a deep, hungry shade as a cold glaze immediately enveloped it.
He dropped the gun, mouth opening in something I could only see, and I rearranged my formulae to seem to devour the warmth in a pulse of bitter chill that rippled out a rime across the floor.
And as I readied in my mind the figures to project my likeness into the room and weave air into membranes to catch and vibrate for sound, I added the capstone to ready my entrance.
I channeled into my stifling smother the idea of stern, cold, cold vigilance, and the entire apartment interior echoed with the new quality laid upon it as hard crystals of ice hard and at once glassy clear and dark with frigid unyielding inevitability spiked up from every surface in complete defiance of available water.
The blond older boy completely unlike Tsuchimikado standing in her apartment wearing shades inside with the lights off and a dark school jacket over an unbuttoned Hawaiian number sans gun anymore froze as if I had turned my power upon himself as I initiated the arrival sequence.
Thinking back to a book I had read, with a character of not dissimilar theme to that which I now played and herself fond of flashy entrances, I shamelessly ripped it wholesale.
For a single moment of meticulously intensive and repetitive labour, I spun a dense net of derivatives of my speaker formulae that hushed all sound in the room like a bell tone of absolute silence. Then I calculated trajectories for swirling patterns and spiked clashing temperatures in the air to whip up a flurry of illusory and real ice crystal snow that whipped out in a sudden freezing curtain.
He flinched away, shielding his eyes, and in the brief opening, a girl appeared upon the glacial sheet of the floor.
Tsuchimikado was nodding off in a way that was almost cute as she sat in seiza perched on her ambulatory trashcan as we neared the apartment, and I ended up nearly reaching to support her as she leaned before catching herself, even as I fixed the recovering intruder with the most pitiless stare an artificial construct of tailored illusory art could evoke.
To his credit, or possibly against mine, the boy only grit his teeth in a grimacing smile as he regarded my proxy.
"Well, someone certainly knows how to make an entrance," he spoke lowly, seeming either to still think himself to have reason for confidence or otherwise trying to hide the extent of his fear. I noted that he held his would-be gun hand as if ready to move and near his pocket, and focusing on the swimming colours there revealed several sheets of coloured paper, square, too, I noticed.
That was more than a little suspicious.
Was Tsuchimikado being targeted? Or was this perhaps supposed to be some sort of test in throwing an attacker at her when she was tired and unsuspecting, thinking her training already over? The fact that for some reason I couldn't get a solid fix of the inside of his head as if it was somehow there-yet-not in what could only be some kind of obscuring mind shielding certainly pointed toward a covert assailant geared for ambushing special opponents.
More importantly, did the actual details matter in the slightest? No, they didn't, I decided.
If someone was going to try something to this girl right in front of me, I wasn't going to stand for it, because I refused to be that kind of person.
So I realigned the semblance of my construct shoes I wore and called out to her to wait a moment as I knelt down to retie them and buy just a little more time before we would need to start climbing stairs toward her upper-floor residence and at the same time altered my proxy to now be the one narrowing eyes slightly in a clinical, unmoved mien.
"I stand in judgement before one whom I will not tolerate in violation of my will," I decreed indirectly with the sudden inspiration to apply the same qualitative filter to my speaker setup as I had the dramatically frigid scene-setting, and the words rang with an eerie, pervasive tone, not loud, per se, but somehow more, in fact exactly as if the words carried an inherent nature unto themselves that declared a terrible and severe resolve to resonate with the icy crystal dagger-scape of the apartment interior.
In a distant position deep underground and far removed from the action, far removed from the feel of everything, I burst into surprised giggling. I had unlocked gravitas voice! And I could tailor it to tone!
I used it as I continued without pause for my concurrent revelation.
"He is bidden to use the one opportunity allowed to him to justify his continued life if it so pleases him, lest I deem appropriate that he die where he stands with Tsuchimikado-san never to be troubled with his presence or corpse."
As I spoke, I continued to strangle the temperature in the living room-kitchenette until the intruder was shivering with gooseflesh prickling up his arms beneath his school jacket and deeply ironically unapt shirt, while, naturally, it was no discomfort to myself in the slightest as "I" was but an illusion not actually there at all. I had to make a point to see to the plumbing out of normal sight and keep the effects contained.
The boy had guts as Oniichan would say, though, because he took the declaration in stride however much I could see his pulse race away from him.
"Ah, that a fact, huh?" He prodded while his fingers seemed to itch to dive into his pocket, all but explicitly confirming my suspicions that they were probably some sort of talismans or the like, perhaps charms in his hands or otherwise seemingly innocuous material that his power could employ as weapons.
He lifted his chin at me while beginning to shift his weight slightly, as if he might lunge or leap aside.
"And what makes you so sure you can, ice queen?"
I stood unmoved and unconcerned by proxy, and channeled that cold vigilance harder into the transmitted declaration.
"Me."
A nervous, unhinged-sounding little titter escaped him, and I could tell I was getting to the boy, who even now broke out in a cold sweat that almost instantly froze into tiny beads upon his forehead to match the billowing cloud of his rapid breathing and reddened tint of his cheeks and nose past rosy and more looking chafed by the cold.
He almost skittered in a full body flinch to the side as if trying to get around me toward the door, and I applied directed focus to actually build up the glacial sheet over the door like a mental 3D printer grabbing water molecules from the air to snap into place in the rising crystalline matrices instead of simply allowing natural deposition from the ambient atmosphere.
This guy wasn't running out, and if worst came to worst, Tsuchimikado could have a peculiar problem with a stuck door that wouldn't let her in for some reason while I sorted out things inside.
I needed to wrap this up soon, though. Outside, Tsuchimikado and I were about to reach the apartment.
The intruder within though seemed to have the same idea, though, because he suddenly jerked to his right only to just as instantly juke left instead in a fake-out as he tried to plunge a hand into his pocket and slapped the other to an ordinary wooden No. 2-style of pencil on the corner of the small desk against the wall next to him. I didn't know what he intended, but the mouth of his pocket "happened" to be frozen absolutely stiff and unmoving and he jammed his fingers instead, eyes going wide for a brief moment while a snarl overtook him and the pencil shined through his fingers with a clear azure light like its outer paint but that seemed strange somehow.
"Dammit!" He hissed under his breath in another cloudy puff.
In response to the first, however, four other similar glazed-over objects just as seemingly innocuous as the carved tree and the intruder's paper started to shine under the ice themselves, a dark sea shell on a little framing knickknack shelf of its own nailed to the wall to my left that cast a dull greyish pallor like a sourceless shadow, a toy firetruck seemingly negligently lost on the floor under a bookshelf where no one would normally be able to see it where the thing shone out from under its concealment with a sullen ruddy light, and a black-and-white printout taped to the wall to my right with a picture of a dangling kitten and the label "Hang In There", gleaming bright and clear even through the ice.
He had prepared a trap.
And I could feel it, somehow. I couldn't put a finger how or really quite what it felt like, but it was unmistakably akin to the wards I had felt entering Noukan's place.
Rather obviously, it was a magic trap.
If that was the case, I actually wanted him to spring it fully, I decided, and to expend it uselessly rather than have any opportunity to pull such a stunt on an unsuspecting Tsuchimikado.
This changed things.
And took more time, dammit.
I had been going to simply obliterate his body on the spot, but now I'd need to... to banter.
Gulp.
And as I hesitated and thought that, the rictus expression etched on the older boy's face didn't change in the slightest as he drove a clawlike hand at his pocket and simply ripped the material apart with his eyes locked on my proxy's.
"Nah, I think you're the one underestimating me still," he spat venomously, and-
He faltered, and I let him. It actually felt a little odd, the lack of tension, but I couldn't really bring myself to feel like this was any emergency when I knew that if he made it necessary I could simply end him that same moment; it would be a shame to not be so sure about traps, but there was an absent urgency even with Tsuchimikado approaching.
He cocked his head at me suspiciously, eyes never leaving mine as I returned his gaze levelly without making any change of expression in my proxy semblance, and he slid shuffle-footed as much as the ice-crusted floor would let him in continued circling around the edge of the room.
"You're not really here, are you. The room's all wrong for you to be real."
It wasn't a question.
I answered anyway, wondering if I could goad him into playing his hand more as Tsuchimikado and I came to the base of the residence block. We still had to actually get up, and the way to the stairs was slightly meandering from where we were at the back face of the apartment complex, but it wouldn't take long. I half considered rocketing towards my position through the skies with one of my handfuls of change in some vague idea of delaying Tsuchimikado further with an offer to get something from the pair of vending machines in the middle of the ground level on the other side, but I wasn't sure if I could even get to myself that fast without making a serious disturbance.
"That is a matter of perspective, foolish boy."
It was enigmatic enough to maybe provoke questioning, and true enough in a way.
He started laughing, a nervous and angry sound.
"You're just a projection, a sending. But man, it's a damn shame a cold beauty like you is wasted being an arrogant bitch. In a prepared place like this, I can play the reaching game too."
He held up the rigid sheets of paper—the same colours as the objects around us, I noted—fanning them in a raspy spread with a wolfish non-smile.
"Normally I'd be all for chatting you up and maybe seeing whose face to punch in as a courtesy instead of just killing their latest favourite toy, but you picked the wrong business to stick your little nose into and I'm not feeling very polite. If you have any way of reaching out to your masters, spend your final moments telling them that you died to Fallere825."
Huh.
How chuuni.
The red sheet in his hand bloomed into ghostly flame.
If he wouldn't take the bait, though, I'd just have to shove it down his throat, and I wasn't about to let him do something he thought he had reason to be clever about that maybe could somehow follow back to me, so I thought I'd play along a little and maybe take it a different direction than this guy hoped.
I recognised the type of declaration, after all, even if the specifics didn't really mean much to me.
The thing was, though, I really just didn't care enough about him personally.
"Ever foolish," I admonished again dispassionately, then manifested a construct within the illusion enough for a solid foot to negligently kick one of the protruding frigid knives of ice on a calculated trajectory at the older boy's head with unreasonable speed that he still leaned away from anyway, to let it shatter against the encrusted wall behind him.
"Whether I am here or not is a matter of perspective, and here is no one else's space." Then I tilted my proxy's head just slightly, for a more personal delivery. "I simply do not care about you in your own right and have no respect for what you have done or your dedication. To strive against you is meaningless because this is no test of our existences, and so I will not-" Kind of could not. "-return your gesture in kind...
"But if asked for who I am and why I fight, what I have done that defines my identity, perhaps I might describe myself as the legion two-hundred in such a styling for an apt appropriateness, that it is what I believe in, that a unity together is something more than the sum of its parts and idea to champion in the notion of all together as one. Because that is who I am, and you are in my world, not your own," I proclaimed.
I stepped toward the older boy as lower down Tsuchimikado and I began ascending the steps, her robotic steed disagreeably adept at handling the stairs despite its rolling nature on wheels that extended on telescopic hydraulic buffers.
"Here, I make the rules," I continued as I stalked my proxy image forward as lightly as a shadow over the crystal frost while outside Tsuchimikado and I neared the top of the stairs. "Rules like armed intruders laying concealed in wait for my friends becoming remarkably realistic ice sculptures. If you have any way to convey a message to whatever superiors you would consider your own, do kindly inform them that Tsuchimikado Maika is under my protection and I will not tolerate threats against her no matter what misguided ideas of training or pressing mandate they may be."
With that, I simply turned everything but the inside of the target's head that I could reach to an instantaneous solid, frozen block in a puff of thin mist that trailed down toward the floor even in the frigid atmosphere, and it cracked, loudly, with a hairline split over his left cheekbone and a similar break fracture emerging from the center of left thigh to plink out a small chip from the wandering spiderweb.
Ew.
I stared down at the fragment.
I hadn't expected the target to break like that, actually; uniformly chilled, I would have thought that he'd have just turned into a popsicle, not scatter bits of body. It was a good think it was frozen, or this thing here would have turned disgusting.
No matter.
Tsuchimikado and I were only a few dozen paces away now.
I turned, regarding the quartet of still shining assorted little objects casting the apartment in a nearly earie light with my actual eyes, just in case there was some odd interaction.
I didn't know what they were, but the implication seemed fairly obvious that they were anchors or channels for a magical working of some sort or another, maybe establishing a zone of effect by what had been said. I decided that the safest thing to do was probably to incinerate all four simultaneously, lest there perhaps be some kind of instability or something; I certainly couldn't just leave them here.
With a thought, I designated the regions around the four objects, and with no one to observe an arguably quite uncharacteristic power, a million degrees blinked them out of existence in contained obliteration, and the room turned dark once more.
That brought up another consideration as I worked to clean up the apartment, actually. Whoever or whatever he had been, Tsuchimikado's intruder hadn't cared about the dark any more than I did. It wasn't exactly odd, I decided, given his apparent line of work, but it was something to keep in mind.
As I neared the door from the outside along the balcony with Tsuchimikado next to me atop her disagreeably murderbot-y and kleptomanic steed, I moved through the room on the other side setting about carefully isolating and melting the ice in a rotating sweep. It actually made me kind of want to snort at the image, like there was some giant invisible squeegee wiping everything.
There was a crack behind me.
I whirled with reflexive guidance channels streaming from my fingers slewing sparks through the air, and beheld the frozen statue by the wall distort as I watched.
A ripple of icy solid flesh turned back to normal in a snaking trail from the center of one palm and haphazardly wandering up the elbow and down the fingers, flakes and chips popping off with crunchy crinkling and snapping noises. Even as I stared, a reddened nose blinked into existence in place of the frozen one, and part of the hair sagged slightly as the cold grip upon it disappeared.
I narrowed my eyes at the recovering target as one of his own eyes thawed but stayed unfocussed and the facial crack turned softer but only barely oozed, yet then started sheeting out warm, vibrant blood.
So he could heal, huh?
I mentally designated a box all around the target.
It would take the really good kind of immortality to recover from matter-to-energy conversion cancelled into nothing by imposition from another reality.
The intruder collapsed in a limp flop with a breathless wheeze ending hunched over on hands and knees with bright blood streaming from scores of tiny wounds and two severe rents through his body.
I stood over him, ready to destroy the entire body outright this time and what I thought just out of reach should he lunge and have some way to attack me through my semblance.
"Fuck, that hurt!" He complained with a discordant strangled laugh.
He didn't actually sound terribly upset, and I got a sinking feeling hoping that he wasn't some battle-obsessed nut who regenerated and couldn't get enough of needing such a quality.
Those kinds of people were... No thanks.
And that unhinged not-quite-giggling bubbled up and grew stronger as he seemed to regain his strength bent over on the partially-rimed and bloody floor and healing before my eyes.
"Kinda surprised I survived that one..."
His head came up.
"So, you're my cute little sister's adorably violently protective friend, nya?"
Oh no...
I so, so wanted to burninate that smiling face out of existence! He was smiling! Why was he smiling?!
H-Had I...
I took an involuntary step back- Stopped walking with Tsuchimikado.
Move! I screamed at myself!
He started laughing. The maybe-not-actually-an-intruder started laughing as he picked himself up.
Tsuchimikado didn't even notice my faltering as she rolled on by as if on half-asleep autopilot.
The proxy illusion winked out of existence in panicked loss of focus and I panicked all the more to reestablish it, then screamed and flailed my hands at nothing from within my underground base as I realised my mistake in picking up my slack at making it actually look like me me, and threw it back into form only to realise that I'd grabbed the wrong false semblance to copy!
I stood frozen in front of the older boy, heads suddenly profoundly empty of anything but loud static while I refused to reconfigure the proxy to show anything, then I just got rid of the hopeless, useless thing!
I lurched into a sprint to catch up to the oblivious Tsuchimikado while her maybe-brother who didn't look anything like her—and for which that was a completely unhelpful metric!—began snickering to himself as from his perspective the room began cleaning up of its own accord.
My face burned under the glamour while I tried to force unmoving thoughts together to see if I could fit them into place to determine if they really were brother and sister or if he was just lying and I could erase the entire apartment block from existence, even as with less hyperbole that a jabbering part of me screamed couldn't possibly be hyperbole, I swept through actually so erasing the blood that would otherwise be embedded staining the floor, continued wiping away all the encrusted ice, zapped stray bits of body, and otherwise tried to stabilise the place and render it as if I had in fact never set foot there.
"Nice trick, there!" I saw him plainly mouth, and I absolutely did not feel like assembling a speaker setup to reply.
Tsuchimikado unlocked the door as I caught up to her, and I had no idea how to act!
I settled for keeping a sharp lookout on the older boy, just in case he really did try something, and stood at the door as Tsuchimikado slipped smoothly down from the mobile garbage bin—it had to be a practiced maneuver, definitely—straight in the now unfrozen door with her alleged brother "happening" to be coming out of the bedroom that he'd just hurried inside.
"Wah, what a sight to wake up to, nya!" He threw up his arms and called out as I did my not very good at all level best not to lurk awkwardly at the doorway.
Tsuchimikado's response was to blearily rub her eyes while kicking off her shoes, and what probably wasn't for her really an only halfhearted, "Thanks for walking with... ... yeah."
There was a soft inquisitive mumble sound, then, as her head drifted to regard her supposed brother, and I thought she might not have even actually noticed his greeting.
"You're here... Seventeen minutes 'till gotta get to Tokiwadai, morning... something..." She pushed past the older boy she didn't freak out over with a limp arm to his chest, and shuffled into the bedroom he'd just pretended to vacate.
Unceremoniously, she pitched over and flopped face-first onto the futon.
"...air conditioning," I heard her breathe out contentedly from the far room, before a quiet snoring was all the further sound she made.
...I had balanced the temperature back to normal, hadn't I?
Nervously, I checked all the surrounding residences, only to find that they were all subtly different and Tsuchimikado's was within standard deviation; the apartment below with a sleeping high school girl was marginally warmer; the place next door with three people was somewhat more warm but explainable with a nun merrily chowing down in all too animesque fashion making an early breakfast vanish while another high school-aged girl still in pyjamas gathered up the rest of the food off the still brilliant stove and a dead-eyed, kind of beaten-up boy with a weird hand went through zombie motions with a toothbrush in the bathroom; the other adjacent residence, with only one inhabitant and no active stove, was a bit cooler. The others in the complex, and the five nearest apartment buildings, were all similar fare.
So... So I hadn't completely fucked up somehow?
But then why did Tsuchimikado say that?!
The robot next to me not sophisticated enough to realise that it itself was trash beeped twice cheerily and rotated in place to roll away.
The older boy looked over at that, because of course the murderbot-y machine had to pipe up and get his attention!
"Well, are you just gonna stand there, or come inside?"
...I was good with staying out here!
Except I could hardly say something like that.
But I didn't want to go in!
So... a girl looking like I looked stepped through the still open doorway and closed it behind her, and I put my back against the wall next to it under a veil.
The response was a flat look, and then the door opened again as he strode straight through the illusion.
"Go away!" I whispered from within my protective shell of locked air without transmitting my voice.
Instead, he waved a hand out in a broad arc and I flinched against the inside of my Adamant Air Armour as a pinkie tried to sweep through my right eyeball.
Before I could think to move, the rest of its friends ganged up and latched onto my frozen face.
"There you are."
He tugged.
I did not move in the slightest with the contours of my air shell rooted onto the spot.
"Um..." He said.
"W-Would it perhaps be possible to maybe please let go of my face?"
The older boy blinked behind his sunglasses.
He bent down, brow furrowing and eyes unfocused, then he tugged slightly again. Then he peeled his hand off leaving a bit of skin behind before I directed it to slip away, and oriented on that to press both his palms on either side of my face.
His arms flexed, to again zero result.
"Eh?!" His eyes went wide, and suddenly the older boy looked distraught. "How are cheeks supposed to be smushed if you're an unyielding invisible statue?!"
...was this a situation in which I was supposed to inflict violence upon him for the way he was acting? Or was this actually a normal version of an alternative sort of normal?
This time, I settled for simply voicing such with no better idea what to do, and decided to try leveraging the discovered capacity to lace words with feeling, plugging in the theme of matter-of-fact honesty to my speaker setup.
"I am considering if I should kill you are spare you," I stated.
Was it right? Who could possibly know? I tried not to talk much because at least then I probably wouldn't make a fool of myself and upset others much, but sometimes you just had to open up and hope for the best!
And... maybe it was the right track?
He ripped his hands back and straightened while I shed the adhered debris again and dropped the veil.
"Ah, haaa... Yeah, Frosty-sama," the older boy voiced in a tone I simply couldn't place.
He nodded.
"We should talk."
Hesitantly, I followed him in.
He retrieved a pair of cans from the refrigerator, some kind of berry blend soda, CuteTurtlesCorp Olallieberry, Lingonberry, Chokeberry Punch Surprise that sounded like someone with more money than sense had just thrown together whatever weird berry names they could find and tried to make a drink out of it. The labeling was just plastered over an actual picture of a turtle.
By unspoken agreement, we sat down at the small table of the combined kitchenette and living room, and he slid one of the cans over to me.
I regarded the drink with extreme skepticism.
I was less than overwhelmingly confident about this guy here, and what I could actually safely consume, and whether Academy City actually had anything not made from scratch that anyone with any sense would want to consume...
The boy in the only other chair raised an eyebrow, cracked his can open, and slurped noisily.
Reluctantly and trying to hide it, I acquiesced as far as pretending to drink what was actually obliterated by a contained million-degree screen over the mouth of the can. Refusing outright under such circumstances would be very pointedly rude.
"So," he broke into the silence. "Glad my precious little sister made a friend..."
That was a cue for me to say something, I was pretty sure.
Unfortunately for him (and me), I had no idea what, so he was out of luck!
Luckily, "Frosty-sama" was cool and aloof so it-
"You're one of those uptight girls who are actually just socially hopeless and latch on hard to friendly people, aren't you, nya?"
I did not choke on my drink, because I had outmaneuvered my conversational opponent by not even drinking at all to avoid the murder-stroke straight through the heart. I also had to actually deliberately and manually adjust my glamour, so I didn't convey my actual reaction!
Instead I looked towards him without daring/deigning to actually offer eye contact, and the contents of his can just so happened to suddenly turn into a solid chunk of ice for very inscrutable and mysterious reasons.
He snorted.
"Well, just keep in mind that she's your friend and I think we'll get along just fine," he mused.
But then his eyes narrowed.
"But don't you forget it," he added not quite coldly, almost conversationally. "Because if you do, if you do wrong by Maika-chan, I'll kill you, don't forget that either."
Maybe it said something about me, but this was actually more reassuring than normal conversation. Even I knew that this wasn't normal, and yet ironically enough it was pretty familiar; I kind of wanted to see what would happen if Tsuchimikado's brother and Frenda got put next to one another. His threat kind of just slid off of me the same as hers and sort of simply emphasised the point that the issuer was someone who cared about someone to care about.
And maybe it said something more about me, too, but also I both didn't much mind the threat in and of itself and bristled against the principle when, unlike with Frenda, I had a harder time feeling his defensiveness justified from his perspective; heck, walking with Tsuchimikado under the circumstances was practically the opposite of being with Fremea unbeknownst to her sister, with me actually having pretty much been in the same as his own position just now as far as Frenda had probably seen it and me in the equivalent to hers this time.
So, I sat straight, and leveled a direct stare through his sunglasses, and applied the same qualitative tone of truthful honesty, save this time trying to put a subtly different inflection on it with the idea of not just open sincerity but a pointed sincerity, sharper than matter-of-fact.
"Fear not for your sister's sake, for I have already died, more than once, and yet still I am here."
Then I let go of the additional element to my words, no longer seeking to use them as the proverbial silk hiding edged steel, and made a point to adopt a more open and personable posture with attention to small facial expressions and how I held my head.
"In point of fact," I continued as quite a few ideas started going through even more heads about Tsuchimikado's line of work, implications of himself, and the bullet points on my own agenda. "Perhaps we might find one another possibly somewhat useful."
He raised an eyebrow. Not dubious, not accepting, just a neutral acknowledgement.
"I can think of a few ways ITEM might be handy, nya," he offered too casually to be anything but openly deliberate.
It seemed like a probing attack in words. He had—and wanted me to know he had—very good, very up to date information.
On the one hand, I couldn't deny that it was a little intimidating, not least of which for how many secrets I held (or a least thought I did, anyway). On the other, he was the elder brother of a ninja-maid and all but screamed that he was himself some kind of magic-slinging super-spy kind of guy, to the point that I could only think it a double-bluff taking refuge in audacity because he just really was that good, and moreover, that was precisely why I thought he might be of help to me.
After all, I was very curious about ITEM myself now and the nature of our new job, and I also imagined it really didn't hurt to have an ally versed in magic committed to helping me for personal reasons, on top of simply having more allies in general.
And if I could stay firmly on his good side, be an element he was invested in keeping on his good side to help me help himself, then, well...
"Tsuchimikado-san could be reasonably said to perhaps make befriending her easy, yes," I acknowledged.
The two of them together could be a potent duo for me.
It was also, I thought, an unironically very apt example of the entirely serious power of friendship in no way something to be scoffed at, because people sincerely wanting to help one another was just plain hard to overestimate.
Tsuchimikado could be my easy ticket for pinpointing Tokiwadai within the hour, the way things were looking—and... maybe getting into Tokiwadai, too, I considered as I followed that line of thought—and I couldn't help but think that she might be able to offer advice on the prospective idol business; it was still a rather meandering and indirect point to get to with my other friends.
Her brother, meanwhile...
I wondered if perhaps he might be able to help me get into Tokiwadai in a different sense, and that it might be very interesting to see him and Noukan maybe each approach the same goal from their own directions if I brought up straightforwardly mascot-aligned business with the mascot as well.
And so, we started to talk.
Both of us ended up leaning forward over the table slightly as we planned.
When Tsuchimikado burst out of the bedroom in a bound of energy, neither of us were smiling, exactly—I wasn't good at it in any case and tried not to on principle if I didn't have an easy way to just fall into it without trying—but I felt that both of us definitely weren't not smiling.
"Ah! You're still here!" Tsuchimikado chirruped, recharged. "I gotta get to work! You wanna come with if you're not busy?"
This time, I thought, a smile did come rather easily, actually.
"Sure!"
Down the block from Tsuchimikado's ordinary-seeming apartment where the intruder awaited, I started to reduce my speed as the avatar accompanying her, and reached across in my scrying sight toward the interior to dampen in equal measure the swath of colours corresponding to warmth.
It was slow, at first. I didn't want Tsuchimikado herself to notice my attempts to buy more time, and I wanted her intruder to notice the right way.
This was theatre.
The first and most important step of all to pushing the perspectives of others was framing and setup. So at first, the air barely changed at all. Then only slightly chilled as Tsuchimikado and I continued down the sidewalk lit by streetlights overhead.
This was theatre, and that called for buildup.
Several long seconds had the muting vibrancy of the conjoined kitchen and living room area shift from something merely like as if the air conditioning was running well to actually noticeably cool.
And notice the intruder did.
From outside and down the street, I saw him twitch as the tense anxiety abruptly loosened into something ready to move instead of tightening, and quick eyes darted back and forth in little movements while his shoulder rolled, as if preparing for a grab for the pistol at the small of his back.
Good, I thought coldly as my work. I wanted this guy off-balance and aware that something was wrong. I didn't have to know the weary girl rolling along beside me on her cleaner robot very well; even someone who wasn't at bare minimum simply a decent person still didn't at all deserve to have some ominous intruder lurking with a gun in their own home, and like hell was I blithely turning a blind eye and letting Tsuchimikado deal with it alone!
Now that this jackass knew that something was up, I quelled the temperature of everything around him faster and faster, accelerating beyond the deceleration of my own walking pace, and his breath began to plume out in front of him to join a thin misty fog in unmistakable testament that he was caught up in something real, something that absolutely was not trivial or going to pass on by.
He drew his gun, held at a low ready position as someone who knew how to use it as he backpedaled away from the door toward the bedroom with his head on a swivel searching out his threat.
Nowhere to be seen, I narrowed my eyes at him, and frost began to silently bloom across the walls, the gently whirling and unlit ceiling fan. Pale glittering creeping swept over the refrigerator and Tsuchimikado's stove, the television in one corner and across the countertop around the sink as I dropped the temperature further and guided along the winding tendrils of growing fractals. I made a point of peering deeper into the intruder's pistol and stifling the quivering excitement within so that the gun suddenly throbbed a deep, hungry shade as a cold glaze immediately enveloped it.
He dropped the gun, mouth opening in something I could only see, and I rearranged my formulae to seem to devour the warmth in a pulse of bitter chill that rippled out a rime across the floor.
And as I readied in my mind the figures to project my likeness into the room and weave air into membranes to catch and vibrate for sound, I added the capstone to ready my entrance.
I channeled into my stifling smother the idea of stern, cold, cold vigilance, and the entire apartment interior echoed with the new quality laid upon it as hard crystals of ice hard and at once glassy clear and dark with frigid unyielding inevitability spiked up from every surface in complete defiance of available water.
The blond older boy completely unlike Tsuchimikado standing in her apartment wearing shades inside with the lights off and a dark school jacket over an unbuttoned Hawaiian number sans gun anymore froze as if I had turned my power upon himself as I initiated the arrival sequence.
Thinking back to a book I had read, with a character of not dissimilar theme to that which I now played and herself fond of flashy entrances, I shamelessly ripped it wholesale.
For a single moment of meticulously intensive and repetitive labour, I spun a dense net of derivatives of my speaker formulae that hushed all sound in the room like a bell tone of absolute silence. Then I calculated trajectories for swirling patterns and spiked clashing temperatures in the air to whip up a flurry of illusory and real ice crystal snow that whipped out in a sudden freezing curtain.
He flinched away, shielding his eyes, and in the brief opening, a girl appeared upon the glacial sheet of the floor.
Tsuchimikado was nodding off in a way that was almost cute as she sat in seiza perched on her ambulatory trashcan as we neared the apartment, and I ended up nearly reaching to support her as she leaned before catching herself, even as I fixed the recovering intruder with the most pitiless stare an artificial construct of tailored illusory art could evoke.
To his credit, or possibly against mine, the boy only grit his teeth in a grimacing smile as he regarded my proxy.
"Well, someone certainly knows how to make an entrance," he spoke lowly, seeming either to still think himself to have reason for confidence or otherwise trying to hide the extent of his fear. I noted that he held his would-be gun hand as if ready to move and near his pocket, and focusing on the swimming colours there revealed several sheets of coloured paper, square, too, I noticed.
That was more than a little suspicious.
Was Tsuchimikado being targeted? Or was this perhaps supposed to be some sort of test in throwing an attacker at her when she was tired and unsuspecting, thinking her training already over? The fact that for some reason I couldn't get a solid fix of the inside of his head as if it was somehow there-yet-not in what could only be some kind of obscuring mind shielding certainly pointed toward a covert assailant geared for ambushing special opponents.
More importantly, did the actual details matter in the slightest? No, they didn't, I decided.
If someone was going to try something to this girl right in front of me, I wasn't going to stand for it, because I refused to be that kind of person.
So I realigned the semblance of my construct shoes I wore and called out to her to wait a moment as I knelt down to retie them and buy just a little more time before we would need to start climbing stairs toward her upper-floor residence and at the same time altered my proxy to now be the one narrowing eyes slightly in a clinical, unmoved mien.
"I stand in judgement before one whom I will not tolerate in violation of my will," I decreed indirectly with the sudden inspiration to apply the same qualitative filter to my speaker setup as I had the dramatically frigid scene-setting, and the words rang with an eerie, pervasive tone, not loud, per se, but somehow more, in fact exactly as if the words carried an inherent nature unto themselves that declared a terrible and severe resolve to resonate with the icy crystal dagger-scape of the apartment interior.
In a distant position deep underground and far removed from the action, far removed from the feel of everything, I burst into surprised giggling. I had unlocked gravitas voice! And I could tailor it to tone!
I used it as I continued without pause for my concurrent revelation.
"He is bidden to use the one opportunity allowed to him to justify his continued life if it so pleases him, lest I deem appropriate that he die where he stands with Tsuchimikado-san never to be troubled with his presence or corpse."
As I spoke, I continued to strangle the temperature in the living room-kitchenette until the intruder was shivering with gooseflesh prickling up his arms beneath his school jacket and deeply ironically unapt shirt, while, naturally, it was no discomfort to myself in the slightest as "I" was but an illusion not actually there at all. I had to make a point to see to the plumbing out of normal sight and keep the effects contained.
The boy had guts as Oniichan would say, though, because he took the declaration in stride however much I could see his pulse race away from him.
"Ah, that a fact, huh?" He prodded while his fingers seemed to itch to dive into his pocket, all but explicitly confirming my suspicions that they were probably some sort of talismans or the like, perhaps charms in his hands or otherwise seemingly innocuous material that his power could employ as weapons.
He lifted his chin at me while beginning to shift his weight slightly, as if he might lunge or leap aside.
"And what makes you so sure you can, ice queen?"
I stood unmoved and unconcerned by proxy, and channeled that cold vigilance harder into the transmitted declaration.
"Me."
A nervous, unhinged-sounding little titter escaped him, and I could tell I was getting to the boy, who even now broke out in a cold sweat that almost instantly froze into tiny beads upon his forehead to match the billowing cloud of his rapid breathing and reddened tint of his cheeks and nose past rosy and more looking chafed by the cold.
He almost skittered in a full body flinch to the side as if trying to get around me toward the door, and I applied directed focus to actually build up the glacial sheet over the door like a mental 3D printer grabbing water molecules from the air to snap into place in the rising crystalline matrices instead of simply allowing natural deposition from the ambient atmosphere.
This guy wasn't running out, and if worst came to worst, Tsuchimikado could have a peculiar problem with a stuck door that wouldn't let her in for some reason while I sorted out things inside.
I needed to wrap this up soon, though. Outside, Tsuchimikado and I were about to reach the apartment.
The intruder within though seemed to have the same idea, though, because he suddenly jerked to his right only to just as instantly juke left instead in a fake-out as he tried to plunge a hand into his pocket and slapped the other to an ordinary wooden No. 2-style of pencil on the corner of the small desk against the wall next to him. I didn't know what he intended, but the mouth of his pocket "happened" to be frozen absolutely stiff and unmoving and he jammed his fingers instead, eyes going wide for a brief moment while a snarl overtook him and the pencil shined through his fingers with a clear azure light like its outer paint but that seemed strange somehow.
"Dammit!" He hissed under his breath in another cloudy puff.
In response to the first, however, four other similar glazed-over objects just as seemingly innocuous as the carved tree and the intruder's paper started to shine under the ice themselves, a dark sea shell on a little framing knickknack shelf of its own nailed to the wall to my left that cast a dull greyish pallor like a sourceless shadow, a toy firetruck seemingly negligently lost on the floor under a bookshelf where no one would normally be able to see it where the thing shone out from under its concealment with a sullen ruddy light, and a black-and-white printout taped to the wall to my right with a picture of a dangling kitten and the label "Hang In There", gleaming bright and clear even through the ice.
He had prepared a trap.
And I could feel it, somehow. I couldn't put a finger how or really quite what it felt like, but it was unmistakably akin to the wards I had felt entering Noukan's place.
Rather obviously, it was a magic trap.
If that was the case, I actually wanted him to spring it fully, I decided, and to expend it uselessly rather than have any opportunity to pull such a stunt on an unsuspecting Tsuchimikado.
This changed things.
And took more time, dammit.
I had been going to simply obliterate his body on the spot, but now I'd need to... to banter.
Gulp.
And as I hesitated and thought that, the rictus expression etched on the older boy's face didn't change in the slightest as he drove a clawlike hand at his pocket and simply ripped the material apart with his eyes locked on my proxy's.
"Nah, I think you're the one underestimating me still," he spat venomously, and-
He faltered, and I let him. It actually felt a little odd, the lack of tension, but I couldn't really bring myself to feel like this was any emergency when I knew that if he made it necessary I could simply end him that same moment; it would be a shame to not be so sure about traps, but there was an absent urgency even with Tsuchimikado approaching.
He cocked his head at me suspiciously, eyes never leaving mine as I returned his gaze levelly without making any change of expression in my proxy semblance, and he slid shuffle-footed as much as the ice-crusted floor would let him in continued circling around the edge of the room.
"You're not really here, are you. The room's all wrong for you to be real."
It wasn't a question.
I answered anyway, wondering if I could goad him into playing his hand more as Tsuchimikado and I came to the base of the residence block. We still had to actually get up, and the way to the stairs was slightly meandering from where we were at the back face of the apartment complex, but it wouldn't take long. I half considered rocketing towards my position through the skies with one of my handfuls of change in some vague idea of delaying Tsuchimikado further with an offer to get something from the pair of vending machines in the middle of the ground level on the other side, but I wasn't sure if I could even get to myself that fast without making a serious disturbance.
"That is a matter of perspective, foolish boy."
It was enigmatic enough to maybe provoke questioning, and true enough in a way.
He started laughing, a nervous and angry sound.
"You're just a projection, a sending. But man, it's a damn shame a cold beauty like you is wasted being an arrogant bitch. In a prepared place like this, I can play the reaching game too."
He held up the rigid sheets of paper—the same colours as the objects around us, I noted—fanning them in a raspy spread with a wolfish non-smile.
"Normally I'd be all for chatting you up and maybe seeing whose face to punch in as a courtesy instead of just killing their latest favourite toy, but you picked the wrong business to stick your little nose into and I'm not feeling very polite. If you have any way of reaching out to your masters, spend your final moments telling them that you died to Fallere825."
Huh.
How chuuni.
The red sheet in his hand bloomed into ghostly flame.
If he wouldn't take the bait, though, I'd just have to shove it down his throat, and I wasn't about to let him do something he thought he had reason to be clever about that maybe could somehow follow back to me, so I thought I'd play along a little and maybe take it a different direction than this guy hoped.
I recognised the type of declaration, after all, even if the specifics didn't really mean much to me.
The thing was, though, I really just didn't care enough about him personally.
"Ever foolish," I admonished again dispassionately, then manifested a construct within the illusion enough for a solid foot to negligently kick one of the protruding frigid knives of ice on a calculated trajectory at the older boy's head with unreasonable speed that he still leaned away from anyway, to let it shatter against the encrusted wall behind him.
"Whether I am here or not is a matter of perspective, and here is no one else's space." Then I tilted my proxy's head just slightly, for a more personal delivery. "I simply do not care about you in your own right and have no respect for what you have done or your dedication. To strive against you is meaningless because this is no test of our existences, and so I will not-" Kind of could not. "-return your gesture in kind...
"But if asked for who I am and why I fight, what I have done that defines my identity, perhaps I might describe myself as the legion two-hundred in such a styling for an apt appropriateness, that it is what I believe in, that a unity together is something more than the sum of its parts and idea to champion in the notion of all together as one. Because that is who I am, and you are in my world, not your own," I proclaimed.
I stepped toward the older boy as lower down Tsuchimikado and I began ascending the steps, her robotic steed disagreeably adept at handling the stairs despite its rolling nature on wheels that extended on telescopic hydraulic buffers.
"Here, I make the rules," I continued as I stalked my proxy image forward as lightly as a shadow over the crystal frost while outside Tsuchimikado and I neared the top of the stairs. "Rules like armed intruders laying concealed in wait for my friends becoming remarkably realistic ice sculptures. If you have any way to convey a message to whatever superiors you would consider your own, do kindly inform them that Tsuchimikado Maika is under my protection and I will not tolerate threats against her no matter what misguided ideas of training or pressing mandate they may be."
With that, I simply turned everything but the inside of the target's head that I could reach to an instantaneous solid, frozen block in a puff of thin mist that trailed down toward the floor even in the frigid atmosphere, and it cracked, loudly, with a hairline split over his left cheekbone and a similar break fracture emerging from the center of left thigh to plink out a small chip from the wandering spiderweb.
Ew.
I stared down at the fragment.
I hadn't expected the target to break like that, actually; uniformly chilled, I would have thought that he'd have just turned into a popsicle, not scatter bits of body. It was a good think it was frozen, or this thing here would have turned disgusting.
No matter.
Tsuchimikado and I were only a few dozen paces away now.
I turned, regarding the quartet of still shining assorted little objects casting the apartment in a nearly earie light with my actual eyes, just in case there was some odd interaction.
I didn't know what they were, but the implication seemed fairly obvious that they were anchors or channels for a magical working of some sort or another, maybe establishing a zone of effect by what had been said. I decided that the safest thing to do was probably to incinerate all four simultaneously, lest there perhaps be some kind of instability or something; I certainly couldn't just leave them here.
With a thought, I designated the regions around the four objects, and with no one to observe an arguably quite uncharacteristic power, a million degrees blinked them out of existence in contained obliteration, and the room turned dark once more.
That brought up another consideration as I worked to clean up the apartment, actually. Whoever or whatever he had been, Tsuchimikado's intruder hadn't cared about the dark any more than I did. It wasn't exactly odd, I decided, given his apparent line of work, but it was something to keep in mind.
As I neared the door from the outside along the balcony with Tsuchimikado next to me atop her disagreeably murderbot-y and kleptomanic steed, I moved through the room on the other side setting about carefully isolating and melting the ice in a rotating sweep. It actually made me kind of want to snort at the image, like there was some giant invisible squeegee wiping everything.
There was a crack behind me.
I whirled with reflexive guidance channels streaming from my fingers slewing sparks through the air, and beheld the frozen statue by the wall distort as I watched.
A ripple of icy solid flesh turned back to normal in a snaking trail from the center of one palm and haphazardly wandering up the elbow and down the fingers, flakes and chips popping off with crunchy crinkling and snapping noises. Even as I stared, a reddened nose blinked into existence in place of the frozen one, and part of the hair sagged slightly as the cold grip upon it disappeared.
I narrowed my eyes at the recovering target as one of his own eyes thawed but stayed unfocussed and the facial crack turned softer but only barely oozed, yet then started sheeting out warm, vibrant blood.
So he could heal, huh?
I mentally designated a box all around the target.
It would take the really good kind of immortality to recover from matter-to-energy conversion cancelled into nothing by imposition from another reality.
The intruder collapsed in a limp flop with a breathless wheeze ending hunched over on hands and knees with bright blood streaming from scores of tiny wounds and two severe rents through his body.
I stood over him, ready to destroy the entire body outright this time and what I thought just out of reach should he lunge and have some way to attack me through my semblance.
"Fuck, that hurt!" He complained with a discordant strangled laugh.
He didn't actually sound terribly upset, and I got a sinking feeling hoping that he wasn't some battle-obsessed nut who regenerated and couldn't get enough of needing such a quality.
Those kinds of people were... No thanks.
And that unhinged not-quite-giggling bubbled up and grew stronger as he seemed to regain his strength bent over on the partially-rimed and bloody floor and healing before my eyes.
"Kinda surprised I survived that one..."
His head came up.
"So, you're my cute little sister's adorably violently protective friend, nya?"
Oh no...
I so, so wanted to burninate that smiling face out of existence! He was smiling! Why was he smiling?!
H-Had I...
I took an involuntary step back- Stopped walking with Tsuchimikado.
Move! I screamed at myself!
He started laughing. The maybe-not-actually-an-intruder started laughing as he picked himself up.
Tsuchimikado didn't even notice my faltering as she rolled on by as if on half-asleep autopilot.
The proxy illusion winked out of existence in panicked loss of focus and I panicked all the more to reestablish it, then screamed and flailed my hands at nothing from within my underground base as I realised my mistake in picking up my slack at making it actually look like me me, and threw it back into form only to realise that I'd grabbed the wrong false semblance to copy!
I stood frozen in front of the older boy, heads suddenly profoundly empty of anything but loud static while I refused to reconfigure the proxy to show anything, then I just got rid of the hopeless, useless thing!
I lurched into a sprint to catch up to the oblivious Tsuchimikado while her maybe-brother who didn't look anything like her—and for which that was a completely unhelpful metric!—began snickering to himself as from his perspective the room began cleaning up of its own accord.
My face burned under the glamour while I tried to force unmoving thoughts together to see if I could fit them into place to determine if they really were brother and sister or if he was just lying and I could erase the entire apartment block from existence, even as with less hyperbole that a jabbering part of me screamed couldn't possibly be hyperbole, I swept through actually so erasing the blood that would otherwise be embedded staining the floor, continued wiping away all the encrusted ice, zapped stray bits of body, and otherwise tried to stabilise the place and render it as if I had in fact never set foot there.
"Nice trick, there!" I saw him plainly mouth, and I absolutely did not feel like assembling a speaker setup to reply.
Tsuchimikado unlocked the door as I caught up to her, and I had no idea how to act!
I settled for keeping a sharp lookout on the older boy, just in case he really did try something, and stood at the door as Tsuchimikado slipped smoothly down from the mobile garbage bin—it had to be a practiced maneuver, definitely—straight in the now unfrozen door with her alleged brother "happening" to be coming out of the bedroom that he'd just hurried inside.
"Wah, what a sight to wake up to, nya!" He threw up his arms and called out as I did my not very good at all level best not to lurk awkwardly at the doorway.
Tsuchimikado's response was to blearily rub her eyes while kicking off her shoes, and what probably wasn't for her really an only halfhearted, "Thanks for walking with... ... yeah."
There was a soft inquisitive mumble sound, then, as her head drifted to regard her supposed brother, and I thought she might not have even actually noticed his greeting.
"You're here... Seventeen minutes 'till gotta get to Tokiwadai, morning... something..." She pushed past the older boy she didn't freak out over with a limp arm to his chest, and shuffled into the bedroom he'd just pretended to vacate.
Unceremoniously, she pitched over and flopped face-first onto the futon.
"...air conditioning," I heard her breathe out contentedly from the far room, before a quiet snoring was all the further sound she made.
...I had balanced the temperature back to normal, hadn't I?
Nervously, I checked all the surrounding residences, only to find that they were all subtly different and Tsuchimikado's was within standard deviation; the apartment below with a sleeping high school girl was marginally warmer; the place next door with three people was somewhat more warm but explainable with a nun merrily chowing down in all too animesque fashion making an early breakfast vanish while another high school-aged girl still in pyjamas gathered up the rest of the food off the still brilliant stove and a dead-eyed, kind of beaten-up boy with a weird hand went through zombie motions with a toothbrush in the bathroom; the other adjacent residence, with only one inhabitant and no active stove, was a bit cooler. The others in the complex, and the five nearest apartment buildings, were all similar fare.
So... So I hadn't completely fucked up somehow?
But then why did Tsuchimikado say that?!
The robot next to me not sophisticated enough to realise that it itself was trash beeped twice cheerily and rotated in place to roll away.
The older boy looked over at that, because of course the murderbot-y machine had to pipe up and get his attention!
"Well, are you just gonna stand there, or come inside?"
...I was good with staying out here!
Except I could hardly say something like that.
But I didn't want to go in!
So... a girl looking like I looked stepped through the still open doorway and closed it behind her, and I put my back against the wall next to it under a veil.
The response was a flat look, and then the door opened again as he strode straight through the illusion.
"Go away!" I whispered from within my protective shell of locked air without transmitting my voice.
Instead, he waved a hand out in a broad arc and I flinched against the inside of my Adamant Air Armour as a pinkie tried to sweep through my right eyeball.
Before I could think to move, the rest of its friends ganged up and latched onto my frozen face.
"There you are."
He tugged.
I did not move in the slightest with the contours of my air shell rooted onto the spot.
"Um..." He said.
"W-Would it perhaps be possible to maybe please let go of my face?"
The older boy blinked behind his sunglasses.
He bent down, brow furrowing and eyes unfocused, then he tugged slightly again. Then he peeled his hand off leaving a bit of skin behind before I directed it to slip away, and oriented on that to press both his palms on either side of my face.
His arms flexed, to again zero result.
"Eh?!" His eyes went wide, and suddenly the older boy looked distraught. "How are cheeks supposed to be smushed if you're an unyielding invisible statue?!"
...was this a situation in which I was supposed to inflict violence upon him for the way he was acting? Or was this actually a normal version of an alternative sort of normal?
This time, I settled for simply voicing such with no better idea what to do, and decided to try leveraging the discovered capacity to lace words with feeling, plugging in the theme of matter-of-fact honesty to my speaker setup.
"I am considering if I should kill you are spare you," I stated.
Was it right? Who could possibly know? I tried not to talk much because at least then I probably wouldn't make a fool of myself and upset others much, but sometimes you just had to open up and hope for the best!
And... maybe it was the right track?
He ripped his hands back and straightened while I shed the adhered debris again and dropped the veil.
"Ah, haaa... Yeah, Frosty-sama," the older boy voiced in a tone I simply couldn't place.
He nodded.
"We should talk."
Hesitantly, I followed him in.
He retrieved a pair of cans from the refrigerator, some kind of berry blend soda, CuteTurtlesCorp Olallieberry, Lingonberry, Chokeberry Punch Surprise that sounded like someone with more money than sense had just thrown together whatever weird berry names they could find and tried to make a drink out of it. The labeling was just plastered over an actual picture of a turtle.
By unspoken agreement, we sat down at the small table of the combined kitchenette and living room, and he slid one of the cans over to me.
I regarded the drink with extreme skepticism.
I was less than overwhelmingly confident about this guy here, and what I could actually safely consume, and whether Academy City actually had anything not made from scratch that anyone with any sense would want to consume...
The boy in the only other chair raised an eyebrow, cracked his can open, and slurped noisily.
Reluctantly and trying to hide it, I acquiesced as far as pretending to drink what was actually obliterated by a contained million-degree screen over the mouth of the can. Refusing outright under such circumstances would be very pointedly rude.
"So," he broke into the silence. "Glad my precious little sister made a friend..."
That was a cue for me to say something, I was pretty sure.
Unfortunately for him (and me), I had no idea what, so he was out of luck!
Luckily, "Frosty-sama" was cool and aloof so it-
"You're one of those uptight girls who are actually just socially hopeless and latch on hard to friendly people, aren't you, nya?"
I did not choke on my drink, because I had outmaneuvered my conversational opponent by not even drinking at all to avoid the murder-stroke straight through the heart. I also had to actually deliberately and manually adjust my glamour, so I didn't convey my actual reaction!
Instead I looked towards him without daring/deigning to actually offer eye contact, and the contents of his can just so happened to suddenly turn into a solid chunk of ice for very inscrutable and mysterious reasons.
He snorted.
"Well, just keep in mind that she's your friend and I think we'll get along just fine," he mused.
But then his eyes narrowed.
"But don't you forget it," he added not quite coldly, almost conversationally. "Because if you do, if you do wrong by Maika-chan, I'll kill you, don't forget that either."
Maybe it said something about me, but this was actually more reassuring than normal conversation. Even I knew that this wasn't normal, and yet ironically enough it was pretty familiar; I kind of wanted to see what would happen if Tsuchimikado's brother and Frenda got put next to one another. His threat kind of just slid off of me the same as hers and sort of simply emphasised the point that the issuer was someone who cared about someone to care about.
And maybe it said something more about me, too, but also I both didn't much mind the threat in and of itself and bristled against the principle when, unlike with Frenda, I had a harder time feeling his defensiveness justified from his perspective; heck, walking with Tsuchimikado under the circumstances was practically the opposite of being with Fremea unbeknownst to her sister, with me actually having pretty much been in the same as his own position just now as far as Frenda had probably seen it and me in the equivalent to hers this time.
So, I sat straight, and leveled a direct stare through his sunglasses, and applied the same qualitative tone of truthful honesty, save this time trying to put a subtly different inflection on it with the idea of not just open sincerity but a pointed sincerity, sharper than matter-of-fact.
"Fear not for your sister's sake, for I have already died, more than once, and yet still I am here."
Then I let go of the additional element to my words, no longer seeking to use them as the proverbial silk hiding edged steel, and made a point to adopt a more open and personable posture with attention to small facial expressions and how I held my head.
"In point of fact," I continued as quite a few ideas started going through even more heads about Tsuchimikado's line of work, implications of himself, and the bullet points on my own agenda. "Perhaps we might find one another possibly somewhat useful."
He raised an eyebrow. Not dubious, not accepting, just a neutral acknowledgement.
"I can think of a few ways ITEM might be handy, nya," he offered too casually to be anything but openly deliberate.
It seemed like a probing attack in words. He had—and wanted me to know he had—very good, very up to date information.
On the one hand, I couldn't deny that it was a little intimidating, not least of which for how many secrets I held (or a least thought I did, anyway). On the other, he was the elder brother of a ninja-maid and all but screamed that he was himself some kind of magic-slinging super-spy kind of guy, to the point that I could only think it a double-bluff taking refuge in audacity because he just really was that good, and moreover, that was precisely why I thought he might be of help to me.
After all, I was very curious about ITEM myself now and the nature of our new job, and I also imagined it really didn't hurt to have an ally versed in magic committed to helping me for personal reasons, on top of simply having more allies in general.
And if I could stay firmly on his good side, be an element he was invested in keeping on his good side to help me help himself, then, well...
"Tsuchimikado-san could be reasonably said to perhaps make befriending her easy, yes," I acknowledged.
The two of them together could be a potent duo for me.
It was also, I thought, an unironically very apt example of the entirely serious power of friendship in no way something to be scoffed at, because people sincerely wanting to help one another was just plain hard to overestimate.
Tsuchimikado could be my easy ticket for pinpointing Tokiwadai within the hour, the way things were looking—and... maybe getting into Tokiwadai, too, I considered as I followed that line of thought—and I couldn't help but think that she might be able to offer advice on the prospective idol business; it was still a rather meandering and indirect point to get to with my other friends.
Her brother, meanwhile...
I wondered if perhaps he might be able to help me get into Tokiwadai in a different sense, and that it might be very interesting to see him and Noukan maybe each approach the same goal from their own directions if I brought up straightforwardly mascot-aligned business with the mascot as well.
And so, we started to talk.
Both of us ended up leaning forward over the table slightly as we planned.
When Tsuchimikado burst out of the bedroom in a bound of energy, neither of us were smiling, exactly—I wasn't good at it in any case and tried not to on principle if I didn't have an easy way to just fall into it without trying—but I felt that both of us definitely weren't not smiling.
"Ah! You're still here!" Tsuchimikado chirruped, recharged. "I gotta get to work! You wanna come with if you're not busy?"
This time, I thought, a smile did come rather easily, actually.
"Sure!"
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thanks for the chapter.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/They
Well. Somebody's a tough cookie to survive that.
Lucky, too. Brosicles are not commonly recognized as gestures of friendship.
Lucky, too. Brosicles are not commonly recognized as gestures of friendship.
Chapter 27
New
- Location
- Terra-Luna
I crouched atop the lip of a high tower in my best Batman impression watching myself as I returned toward School Garden from two different directions.
Well, actually it wasn't my best Batman impression, per se, but only because I could be too good at being Batman and all I really needed to do was silently lurk like a gargoyle while down one street I rode in a now changed cab with just Senpai and along a converging route I sat next to Tsuchimikado, trying not to show my nervousness at the other passengers we shared the bus with.
There were quite a few ninja-maids aboard with us.
They hid it well by conventional standards, but to my encompassing sight, it was a little hard to miss the thin slender knives hidden in clothing, the three sub-compact little hand-sized semiautomatics tucked away concealed in an ankle holster and a poofy apron bow and in the false lining of a bag, to miss the extra-pointy-looking chopsticks one girl had pinning up her hair that looked more like low-profile stilettos, or to miss the grenade one girl carried hidden inside a clear water bottle that completely concealed the equally optically transparent exotic materials used.
A girl kinda tended to notice these things.
It was enough to actually make me a little concerned for Tsuchimikado; unless she had something even more sophisticated and sneaky—which I couldn't entirely rule out, honestly—she was looked rather under-armed sitting innocent-looking in the aisle seat next to me. I had to wonder if she was some deceptively dainty-seeming master of unarmed combat or, more like myself and probably several of the other girls distinctly in assorted maid outfits, had little need for weapons in a different way.
Collectively, though, even uneasy though I was, I also had to admit to myself that it actually lent a rather amusing air to an ostensibly perfectly normal bus ride for some of the other passengers, though, because with several slightly anxious-looking girls Tokiwadai uniforms aboard too to go with a handful of others in other uniforms I recognised from School Garden—people on the way to school for extra-early business, I presumed—it was like the maids were a secret security detail.
And it probably absolutely was in fact exactly like that, really.
That part kind of made me want to smile at my good fortune. If Tokiwadai was swarming with ninja-maids, there was no guarantee that even my talents would necessarily suffice to stay hidden sneaking through the campus, and yet for making friends with Tsuchimikado, I could be hidden in plain sight, plainly acknowledged but as a known, unsuspicious person.
I wasn't sure how long I'd be able to keep this up, exactly, but even if the pretext cut off at accompanying Tsuchimikado on her morning commute as a friend before going off to do whatever else, this would still at the very least show me where to go and give me an inside view of part of Tokiwadai's security and procedure.
And since I was also heading more or less that same direction with Senpai as I provided overwatch for myself, I might very well be able to make use of that even if I did separate from Tsuchimikado after seeing her off, I considered.
I rubbed my chin from my high perch while I watched, distractedly wondering if I could and maybe should actually come up with some glider construct like a Batman cape to go with the lurking; it would mitigate the violent downdraft of just throwing air down my body as propellant, and it'd definitely be pretty cool, too... but it'd also be large, unfortunately, because the human body, even one as compact as all of mine compared to full-grown adult standards, really weighed a lot compared to simple air, actually, requiring an enormous amount of lift for its size for a flying thingy.
That was why butterflies got away with very lazily flapping every now and then with some of the best wing loading of insects when dragonflies could go fast but also had to beat fast and fuel it with a voracious metabolism, and it was why I always thought most depictions of angels or other winged humanoids honestly looked goofy with itty-bitty wings that'd demand awkwardly buzzing like hummingbirds to slowly bob about with buffeting gusts making it impossible to talk or keep hair under control.
I dismissed the idea with an invisible shrug. Glider wings large enough to be practical for slow controlled flight would be too large to be practical with all the air traffic.
...unless I went with lots of wings, or combined wings with some thrust still not nearly so much. From the pictures I'd seen online about Dark Matter—or Kakine Teitoku as his actual name apparently was—I suspected more than a little that he had discovered the problem himself for the multiplicity of wings if they weren't what passed as natural for him, and it was only the fact that he was subtly-yet-obviously too weird to be normal that kept me from wanting to roll my eyes as the possible angel dude or possible ignominious try-hard.
I settled cross-legged atop the edge of the skyscraper to ponder that while the taxi and bus rolled closer to each other and the outer wall of School Garden.
Within the autonomous car, I tried not to bite my lip nervously with thoughts rolling around in a couple spare heads how to best approach furthering the pursuit of the idol topic. I hadn't gotten very far before Senpai and I split ways with Kakine and Kaibi back at the hangout tower—though to be fair to myself, I hadn't had much time since the make-up job was so quick. Unfortunately, I was kind of stumped how to progress it any further.
We sat in silence as the car rolled on.
I didn't want to just give up, but...
I held back a sigh, and elsewhere switched tasks at one of my desks with a yawn to just put "idol academy city" into the search engine; maybe I could look up something to talk about and back-engineer from there?
How the hell did people without my kind of resources do this?
If anything, that was a real superpower, I decided.
While perusing the results list, I also considered the question of how I might tackle data-processing speed. I had a lot of hands and a fair few computers with internet access, now, and I'd gotten a lot of very specific work done data mining the files in my first base when I'd daisy-chained together all the monitors I could, but there was still simply so much more to go through in both bases and the internet at large. I imagined it ought to be entirely possible in theory to use my power much more directly and basically jack into systems myself, rather than relying on any user interface at all... but a few years of high-school and university-level computer science courses weren't exactly enough to wholesale build a computer in my head, and if the original Misaka Mikoto could do it, evidently the project staff hadn't considered it important enough to dying just right.
...I needed a lot more clones just for thinking, let alone taking on another clone army.
Far more sluggishly than I would have preferred, I put together priority tasks and orders in my heads while the busful of ninja-maids and other girls rolled in through a larger vehicle-accessible checkpoint in School Garden's wall.
I did my best not to fidget and maintained a calm and patiently attentive posture with Tsuchimikado happily babbling between my is that so?'s and indeed's and how interesting's how much she looked forward to today's work as a diverse suite of emissions and back-and-forth communications painted an optically-invisible riot through the brief tunnel. Once again, School Garden's security was impressive, particularly for the sheer unintrusiveness of the walled enclave's vigilance, but it was absolutely not up to contending with Misaka, just the dead wrong approach to dealing with our talents.
As far as the bus knew, it had one less occupant than in truth—and just in case, I even fudged things a little to help the vehicle along in case the smooth suspension measured load distribution or the drive system kept track of performance—and the oh so generously low-profile scanners and cameras that passed by saw only what they expected.
So we rolled right on through.
Inwardly, I smirked to myself, and no one could judge a dumb little laugh.
The bus ride also, too, though, gave me an ample head start over my other self as the autonomous taxi wouldn't or couldn't enter School Garden's grounds, and Senpai and I took the sidewalk to another train station-esque pedestrian entrance like before; assuming all went as expected, I'd have a fix on Tokiwadai by the time I needed to see Senpai off at her own school. That itself was a time limit for talking, though...
And... somehow, I found myself inexplicably engaged with Tsuchimikado on the very topic I wanted to bring up with Senpai?
"Ah... well, personally, an admission could be made to an interest in idol music."
"I know, right!" Tsuchimikado leaned in animatedly. "There's just an excitement to idol music. Any favourites? My friend introduced me to an up-and-comer she really likes." And then the girl next to me began fishing out her phone and sweeping through menus with an effervescent enthusiasm.
...
?!
How did this happen?
H-How did we get here?
I mentally traced back out mostly one-sided chatter... I knew every step we took, and I didn't know how we got here! Something about what she looked forward to, to likes, to music?
Was this the power of an extrovert?
I could only stare dumbly at the earbud that had appeared in my hand as Tsuchimikado plugged the jack into her phone with an easy grin, the other one in her own ear and a stylised imaged of a pink-haired girl winking out from her phone screen's music menu.
ARISA: Gloria
"-shines in the sky afar, Gloriaaaa~"
I leaned in.
There was something about this melody as it played, the emotion in it, as the girl sang of a pegasus, no, of the idea of the pegasus as a symbol and taking flight after faltering and soaring high buoyed by a lingering strength to strive anew...
"...I think I may have a new favourite," I finally answered Tsuchimikado's original question softly as the music played on.
"Your footsteps slowly disappeared in the long, long rain,
Your kindness and voice I've lost will remain in the sky as a star,
The time in the summer ticks with my heartbeat,
Now, I am born.
I'm a pegasus~"
"Mmhmm! She's pretty good, and her music's really inspiring, makes you feel, you know?"
I nodded fervently.
And it struck me then.
This was why Oniichan wanted me to be an idol.
It... Maybe it was the song, or the moment with the realisation, but I found wetness tickling a few of my cheeks, thankfully nowhere that mattered across my multiplicity.
Oniichan understood what I hadn't quite realised about myself, hadn't managed to crystalise into words yet. Far from School Garden, I stood up from my computer desk and reached over to squeeze him into a hug without preamble, and the older boy... somehow understood that too, with a squeeze back mid-lecture about protein chains.
With Tsuchimikado, I stared unfocused at the back of the seat in front of me despite beholding all around as the bus trundled its way down the picturesque pseudo-European boulevard.
"It is why I want to be an idol myself," I admitted solemly as much to myself as to Tsuchimikado. "It is a music that deserves to be shared. I want to inspire like this and reach out to the hearts of all with a connection that resonates between everyone."
Tsuchimikado's unassuming gentle smile was soul-strikingly radiant.
"Then I look forward to hearing your music too, Miyuki! Maybe you can make it big streaming your own performances too!"
Inwardly, I cursed the horrible, terrible, no-good fortune of being able to see myself from an external perspective impossibly unable to miss how my face pinked at that as I turned away feeling like someone had put a lava lamp in my tummy. "Miwa Miyuki" was supposed to be some aloof kuudere girl, wasn't she?! But Tsuchimikado Maika... Maika, was... not.
(When had she decided that we were past even any semblance of formalities?!)
A step removed from the immediate ground zero as all of myself trying to put together future plans in my headquarters base, I still felt like I was reeling dozens of times over, but retained the wherewithal to metaphorically perk up and start rubbing my hands with anticipation at the shared little tidbit of information of Arisa's career style.
A livestream, huh? ...maybe I could work with that idea, and maybe soon at that.
What did Academy City's internet have to say about Arisa and Gloria? A few moments further searching across so many terminals actually caught something in my idol-focused data dredging. I'd fallen down a momentary rabbit hole with a few papers blathering high-level generalities about sympathetic magic because tab browsing was dangerous business even for a collaborative legion, but I hit an article talking about the street performer Meigo Arisa, and blew through that section of the internet with videos drawn up to watch cellphone recordings and clips of her online performances.
Further searching revealed that she wasn't entirely alone in this, just a pretty big hit in a relatively small crowd seemingly mostly populated by music school students.
I couldn't help smiling to myself with the welling can-do confidence it inspired as I imagined a real path forward that I could grasp.
This could work.
That same upswing gave me what I needed to just... bull through my indecision with Senpai as we silently strolled down not quite familiar sidewalks toward her school. Maybe it actually wasn't for the best, I told myself, but taking initiative instead of trying for an ineffectual "least bad" of hopefully unpressuring silence... just didn't seem right anymore.
The whole premise of etiquette was to ensure that others were comfortable in one's presence, Maika herself was a welcome stability with her... her-ness.
So I tried to channel that.
"S-So..." I broke into the silence next to Senpai.
"Eh?!"
I gulped, but screwed up my eyes and tried again.
I would do this!
"S-So, um, ...what, uh, what-kind-of-music-do-you-like?" I all but squeaked in a compacted rush.
Completely unhelpfully, in my bases and flying invisibly across the city, I crossed my fingers, equally completely unable to stop myself from hoping it somehow helped anyway as I tried to follow Maika's lead.
Senpai's face steadily grew brighter and brighter in super-red shades while also simply turning super red.
The highschooler seemed to find the sidewalk intensely interesting as she brought her fingers together distractedly under her chin.
"W-w-w-welll..."
"I like Meigo Arisa; Gloria is my favourite," I blurted honestly at a crosswalk.
Simultaneously, I saw the campus of Senpai's school up ahead and her throat bob nervously.
Please let this work, please let this work...
"...I like Arisa too. I like Tomorrow," Senpai uttered, referencing one of the idol's other songs presently playing on one of my egregiously many browser tabs.
"And when I see you, tomorrow, tomorrow,
I'll reach for you, tomorrow, tomorrow,
Ever for tomorrow, I live for today!~"
I nodded as I distantly noticed the soft clack of hard leather shoe soles on cobble from the loose crowd of girls converging on Shidarezakura's wrought iron gate with us, and how Senpai and I subtly stood out for the lack.
"That is a good one too," I admitted.
We were actually attracting some mild attention from the assorted other girls, at least by the standards of my broad vision able to take everything in all at once. ...yeah, School Garden absolutely was totally upscale gang territory and Senpai and I had inadvertently flaunted some kind of power shift. A curious Shidarezakura girl to my left and a few other girls across the street and behind us started pulling out phones to send flashes across the sky, one looking like she took a "mysteriously sun-glared" picture of us walking next to each other, but that was a problem for later.
Being a friend for Senpai was important now.
"Music like hers is why I decided I am going to become an idol," I continued in my haphazard attempt at conversation as we neared the open twisting iron fencing.
That was still on topic, right?
Senpai rounded on me, though.
"Just like that?"
I blinked back in surprise at her intent look, eyes positively huge with wonder and naked incomprehension at my statement with no trace of reservation in the timid older girl.
"Well... yes," I tried to justify as other girls passed around us. I nodded. "Exactly just like that, because that's what being an idol means to me, to stand up and inspire, to be a beacon of hope for the dreams of everyone."
Goodness, what did I just say?
I turned away, cheeks heating up a little.
"W-Well, Arisa did it," I muttered on, "so... so why not be like her if I want to be like her?"
Standing in front of the campus gate to the school, Senpai's eyes lost focus as she slowly went slack, staring at nothing. Her mouth fell open slightly, and Senpai fell into the picture of dumbfoundedness with her hands limp at her sides.
"Just... like that..." She breathed.
Oh crap oh crap!
"I-Is Senpai alright?"
"...I've always wanted to be an idol," the older girl spoke in a daze.
What would Maika or Oniichan or Saten do?!
They wouldn't stand here frozen!
"And... just like that," Senpai proceeded oblivious to my internal predicament at her own. "Just like that," she said more firmly, blinking almost as if waking up, and her expression shifted into something of awed wonder. "Meigo Arisa... did it. And you decided to too," her eyes turned sharper on me, before just as rapidly transforming yet again to light up with a smile bright with unshed tears.
"All you have to do to be an idol, is be an idol," Senpai declared, and undiluted joy suffused her. "Oh! Let's do it together!" She cried, and threw her arms around me in a tight, fleeting hug before all but throwing herself away with a bubbling keening squeal escaping the other girl as she bounded off toward the school. "This is the best day ever!"
I couldn't look away as I watched her go. It... This felt right!
I gave a satisfied nod with a lightness in my chest, and turned to depart, somehow missing the small crowd of Shidarezakura onlookers.
"Yumiya-sama?" One girl whispered, not looking at me.
So that was Senpai's name...
A lot of the others were staring my way, though.
"Senpai is my friend," I offered by way of explanation, and without further ado, scampered off toward Tokiwadai through them.
I knew where to go now, after all.
In the time it had taken to walk to Shidarezakura, I had altogether lost track of time as the avatar with Maika and the bus rolled up to another sprawling campus with a smart and spiffy encircling wall of brick and white stone topped by an upper third of understated wrought iron awaiting students; the wall so divided somehow managed to look private without being standoffish with the well-kept greenery visible through the iron posts just above a more conventional eye level.
Showtime, then.
I wondered how this would go as the many maids and other early Tokiwadai students began to rise. I was here to see Maika to work, true and honest... but would that end at the bus door, the gate, the front entrance of the building beyond the grand gate, inside those doors?
With my entirely legitimate justification at the ready, I just... followed the other girls on.
"You new?" One Tokiwadai girl spoke up amiably as we all walked up to the gate, over the lip of the subtle statement of the curb that designated what otherwise looked a route for a bus to drive straight to the front building as strictly the domain of students (and staff).
Cue legitimate justification.
"Accompanying a friend to work," I answered easily with a smiling nod to Maika, perfectly truthfully and altogether ambiguously.
The other girl nodded understandingly.
'Twas hardly the fault of Misaka Best if a concise and exactly accurate explanation in direct response to a question oh just so happened to be able to be interpreted in more than one way~
"Mm, saw you on the bus together. Good friend, Tsuchimikado-san."
"Indeed."
Maika herself didn't notice the momentary byplay—or possibly just pretended to ignore it as a covert ninja-maid in training—and collectively, we...
Just.
Walked in.
I was not the only girl in neither Tokiwadai nor maid uniform, a few others in our group likewise like another girl who accelerated a few steps ahead with one of the overt maids to hold open the doors for us. Apparently I still fit in well enough for well enough. Mostly, though, I figured it was just the act that lent to things.
A clipboard or tablet and polo with complementing hat could let a person walk around half of everywhere without confrontation so long as it was done with an air of assumed confidence of normalcy. It seemed that accompanying Maika as if I was supposed to, and just keeping accompanying her that way was enough to slip into assumptions when everyone simply assumed that anyone who shouldn't do such a thing wouldn't or couldn't.
Admittedly, getting past School Garden's considerable but too-considerate security would be a tall order for most people, but still, no amount of cautious mindfulness could detract from the bemusement I felt as early-arrival students and staff went their separate ways and I simply kept with my latter group before we further split, Maika and the other already-uniformed maids heading further afield toward a dining hall as the rest of us took to a changing room.
It took some not inconsiderable sleight of hand with twisting light around to look the part amidst all the automatic scrutiny, but I "changed" along with everybody else despite ostensibly having no means to do so, and less than three minutes later, another wave of uniformed maids followed the first with one "Miwa Miyuki" in a simple but severe understated ensemble inspired by Maika's own maid uniform altered to more preferable (sleek instead of poofy) lines and tones of Prussian and glacial blues paired with satiny silver-white that complemented my disguised pale complexion and dark ringlets. I didn't take the lead in this second group, but made sure that I wasn't far from it, ahead of the middle as if—truthfully, when minor things like "walls exist" didn't matter—I knew perfectly well where I was going.
And it continued in that fashion as we all fell in and I helped ready Tokiwadai Middle School for morning breakfast.
A breakfast, anyway; I gathered from commentary and inescapable observation that "we" catered to two different dining halls, one local and another at an off-campus but affiliated dorm.
But I had a new job here!
I smiled to myself at the ironic still lack of any monetary payment to speak of, made up in intelligence and access thus far as I bustled about the dining hall and equally massive serving pantry helping set the many tables.
I was finding this entire affair endlessly amusing, to be honest, as I likewise found that I perfectly well could keep up with this. Maybe I was a little defensive about people seemingly dismissive or somehow offended at conscientiousness and wanting to avoid offence, but I took a wry satisfaction in my mindfulness of etiquette was to worthwhile.
Very pretty decorative charger plates went centered in front of seats on already-ready tablecloth, inlaid silverware to either side, disregard rule of thumb to "eyeball" two-centimeter spacing with hilarious overkill of exacting precision with absurd epic superpowers to align at median atomic scale relative to the conveniently straightish edge of the table and apart from one another (because I wasn't one of the girls sporting a nifty looking two-centimeter laser grid overlay emitter thing built into her glove's thumb and had to compensate somehow while doing a better job with less apparent effort)... Dinner fork apparently was to be on its lonesome on the left before the napkin because that was how things were done here, dinner knife and per what others were doing butter knife to the right instead of on the bread plate itself all the way on the left, with the only normal spoon in use accompanying the knives since it seemed we weren't serving soup and a cereal today... Smaller dessert cutlery set at the top with salt and pepper, next to just the lone water glass—no alcoholic beverages for a table exclusively for young girls here—and then coasters for tea cup and, it seemed, smaller than normal demitasse coffee cups with their accompanying little bitty spoons.
I did notice a couple of interesting things working at such a small scale, though. For one, Tokiwadai apparently had nanite security, actually, so in fact perhaps better and still unobtrusive safeguards than I had first imagined despite the miniature robots having no better luck than light at interfering with me for my filtering air shell. Also present on the silverware before I brushed away a few nanites, though there was something curious, a layer that was different on the outside.
And the dessert knife, often used for fruit, was atypically itself silver too with that same odd shell, now that I considered it, even as the little bowls for the salts were likewise silver too but featured that shell especially thick—relatively speaking, anyway. As I thought about it as I helped the other girls lay everything out across the many seats, I figured it likely some kind of Academy City science silver coating; molten salt could leave a beautiful glossy black finish to steels whilst leaving silver accenting fine if quick, but salt wasn't kind even to silver with prolonged contact, and really high-end fruit knives—especially historically—tended to go for gold gilding or such like for the acidic juice.
Not a concern in Academy City, apparently.
I pointedly didn't snort to myself as I surveyed the dining hall, thinking of Academy City's priorities. It was all well and good to churn out a bunch of cloned girls for ritualised murder, but only if they had a well-balanced breakfast mindful of caffeine for a growing girl, but but, she needn't worry about her silver looking less than its best no matter what.
It all had a quirky sort of charm to it, this formal layout for breakfast, but indeed so specifically for young girls.
It also was truthfully no trouble to follow. True, one might argue the assortment of items and their order a lot, but, for one, this was only breakfast rather than dinner, and moreover, the design of it really was perfectly straightforward, to be honest. The purpose of etiquette was to put people at ease, and the setting of the table was made with convenience in mind: to actually use everything, it was laid out to be as easy as possible and natural for the diner—or at least a diner with a butler or maid on hand to be an active participant at the right time—so that the person eating could simply pick up the most convenient utensils right when they were needed for what was needed, before extraneous items were taken away as the meal progressed; thus, the setting itself just went in reverse order from usage, out instead of in, everything to be right perfectly at hand.
I appreciated the serving pantry being laid out with a similar conscientiousness, too. It wasn't just some ordinary room full of cupboards but a breezy experience of efficiency as I went back and forth; true, there were many assorted dishes and utensils at the ready, but the storage of them all was laid out with user-friendly utility in mind, and it was fancy in this "city of the future". Tokiwadai's serving pantry was far larger than it appeared inside, with whole assembly lines and machinery built into the walls and flooring that turned the sinks into starting points for what I took as autonomous dishwashing and drying—replete with a lot of quality control cameras and factory-like robo grabby arms at the ready everywhere—that could carry items to any of several stations built almost like hidden vending machines for full ensembles of maximalist state dinner layouts with all accoutrements near each of the doors to the dining hall in offset islands by the main walkways, and I witnessed other girls keying numbers into the interface to bring up stacks (or down from the ceiling, actually, for the glasses).
Really, I half thought that anyone could walk in and lend a hand well enough.
And I had everyone else as reference as well, importantly.
Table etiquette varied from place to place, with different people having persnickety ideas about the "proper" way for such like as where and how these napkins or butter knives ought be presented, but I simply emulated the other maids because it was just what the diners here would be used to and find their version of comfortable normalcy. I left the placement of butter dishes to some of the other girls as I handed more plates to another maid; they seemed to know the invisible unspoken social territories of how who would sit where and what positioning would be convenient when everyone was actually sitting down. Formal dining or not, merely breakfast or not, there were clear territorial boundaries waiting to be filled when this was a school for children in their own camps of friends, and undoubtedly a very... anime school school with veritable guilds and formal associations if the incident with the flag-toting bunch of clowns in the fountain square earlier was any measure.
I did help set more plates within the butter-defined boundaries after that, though, as more maids began bringing out dainty little pots of whatever bread spreads; I didn't actually know what jams they were or what was maybe cream cheese or clotted cream despite being able to see inside, though the small army of tasty additions sure looked yummy!
...actually, when was the last time this avatar ate?
Elsewhere, in my underground base and across my brainstorming selves, I made designs on getting some of the food pills to distribute around to myself.
I gave Maika a smile as I passed her helping a couple others carry more dishes out when she emerged from the kitchens further in—checking on the dining hall's readiness for the head chef directing everything in there, I gathered from my pervasive snooping. She blinked in surprise, but shot a big smile back with a happy excitement in her eyes before she briskly returned to the chef's domain for her report. Apparently somehow totally and definitely completely inexplicably, it was news to Maika that I worked here too!
I enjoyed this sort of game I was doing as we all finished setting everything. I half expected some kind of confrontation from the "other" ninja-maids, especially now, and imagined an attitude in all the other girls with them secretly aware all along and just not caring, because, hey, the imposter girl has been lending a hand!
It didn't come, though.
Instead, we all kept about our business as instead came first a trickle, then a steady stream of arrivals into the dining hall in Tokiwadai uniforms.
Breakfast time!
I inserted myself into the flow of other maids bustling back and forth while a kindly-looking lady stepped in and began taking roll call of the assembled students, about a hundred girls or so by the seating. Mentally, I coordinated with myself in my computer rooms to burn-print faces and names to keep track of who was who, only to realise part way through that, surprisingly, I had no trouble.
That stood out to me as I crossed paths with Maika again readying toast. I tried to put it out of mind—now wasn't a time to be distracted—but... but it really just stood out; the more I thought about it, the more I couldn't not think about what I thought I remembered and the gnawing uncertainty of... of what was real or not when I remembered or ...at least thought I did, when before all of... this, how I had a terrible time matching names to faces. Not at all the case with this clumsily-yet-artfully designed neural architecture, though...
Not the time, not the time!
I drew a veil about myself simply forcing a semblance of perfectly amiable welcomeness as Tokiwadai girls took their seats in clusters and I helped carry freshly brewed tea out. I had noticed that Mental Out wasn't present for some reason, even though her name had been called, which I found somehow disappointing and a relief at once; from within the serving pantry, I'd witnessed a tall and athletically built girl shimmering with a tightly leashed aura of odd colours offer some explanation, but I hadn't been able to read her lips as I'd had to exit the dining hall, and hadn't wanted to risk extending speaker feelers.
Instead I again just fell into place matching what other maids were doing as breakfast was served, and took pains to sort of "thicken" my veil in growing complexity of more and more layers to hopefully spoof whatever potentially enhanced sight other girls might have that may pick up on side effects of my own work. I remembered the Judgment girl with the red jacket whom had simply seen straight through; with Tokiwadai catering to exceptional students and several girls looking suspiciously like they did light or light-adjacent things without even trying, I was more than a little on edge.
In fact, I was so keyed for something, anything to happen, that when one of the maids heading the opposite way back towards the tables stumbled suddenly just in front of me, I didn't even hesitate or think as the water pitcher on her tray tilted and plunged.
My brains fired into overdrive, and I lasered in with sudden unrelenting focus on the tumbling, shifting spread of whirling attracting and repelling clouds dancing in the void. I automatically drew connections and recognised plottable trajectories and patterns, calculated possible reactions and mental models morphing between one instant and the next to more and more refined assessments of what could and otherwise would happen. And I directed my Adamant Air Armour around myself to move my body on the most optimum course for least disruptiveness economy of motion weighted against the deciding decent of the pitcher and spilling water.
In one mechanically perfectly smooth action, I leaned low as I stepped and caught at the base of the pitcher pushed by my fingertips into a rocking roll that brought its throat upward through the falling stretched globules of water. I brought my opposite heel around, applying just enough augmented traction to the floor to maintain a confident margin of error without displaying distinct unexplainable balance as I induced a rotation of my body around my extended leading foot to maintain forward direction, then swayed back up to normal with pitcher in hand to pass along to the next maid in line heading to the tables. A blink was all she betrayed as she took it from my grasp and we exchanged silent nods of recognition and appreciation.
Phew!
That was close!
It was only as I slid into place with some of the other girls lining the wall observing the diners that the thought struck me.
Was it... a little odd that the maid had caught her foot on the floor like that?
I analysed the maids roving everywhere in this part of the campus, not needing to look at anyone to see everyone. There were degrees of variation, no maid didn't have some measure of noticeable poise. For all that each girl was squarely in an age bracket when she might be less comfortable and coordinated with herself, everyone projected a sense of, if not necessarily always grace, a control of her own body.
It made me suspicious.
On the one hand, a place like Tokiwadai could be expected to impose enormous demands that might be taxing for even the best, but, well, it would also have the best. And I was pretty sure that every single maid here was a ninja-maid whom could lay out waif-fu on any unwelcome guests three times her size.
The thought troubled me as I zeroed in on a Tokiwadai girl in my unofficial official sector of responsibility who set her knife and fork down in line together as she chatted with the next girl over.
That was my cue.
Table etiquette was all about everyone doing their part to see that everything ran smoothly and easily for a likewise easy and comfortable experience for all. Patterns varied a little, but—and I checked online as other avatars to verify expectations—there were two main sets of silent signaling, American and European or Continental or whatever one wanted to call it, and there wasn't really a "wrong" one from a functional standpoint—I did see one girl in a different area apparently an American student using her fork differently and switching back and forth between hands—so long as it was simply consistent and got across what it needed to.
Knife and fork side by side on the plate, vertically or canted a little or a lot or whatever? Away with it all!
I stepped in and relieved the girl of her plate and no longer necessary utensils, just as Maika brought a banana half on its own small plate. Yes, it was a little bit silly, I could admit to myself, but hey, breakfast was breakfast, and these were middle-schoolers.
I still smiled inwardly as the dining Tokiwadai girl took the dessert fork and small, finely sharp fruit knife to nip off the remaining end and slice along the inner curve to turn up the skin before cutting off individual bites.
This whole experience, though, also made me wonder just how on earth all the other maids managed to actually keep up with everything as I brought in more tea for the tables. I had the advantage of being able to see everything all at once, even how much tea was left in a pot, but everyone else wasn't so fortunate, and it didn't seem to slow them down!
Still, it was rather satisfying trying my hand to leverage my abilities on the fly to fit in with whatever insane skill and training the rest of the serving staff possessed, and as subtly as possible apply slight forces here and there just generally making things work better. A girl slow to sip her tea simply never happened to notice it cool despite my sight revealing her defective cup to lack the internal activity might sight showed in others with hidden built-in thermoregulation; a few toast crumbs just barely managed to land on the rim of a plate instead of the tablecloth below where they had begun to fall; one girl anxiously trying to surreptitiously dab up a blot of jam from the tablecloth found it came off readily without stain to the immaculate white cloth.
It was like a big game of pretend, omnipresent through the dining hall and concurrent with what I did that could actually be seen.
Satisfying, and, dare I think it, kind of fun!
And since the girl I was pretending to be totally definitely had whatever ambiguous ice powers contrivance needed, I even got to make a point to single out that defective cup once its user was through with it and things began to wind down.
"This cup isn't as warm as it should be?" I muttered aloud ostensibly to myself with an adopted mildly perplexed expression back in the serving pantry as I "discovered" its defectiveness.
"Eh? Another one?" The maid right behind me obligingly interjected, then sighed, shifting her own armload of dishes ready for the wash. "If you please, just set it over there, thank you," she nodded to one of the counters where sat a pair of forks, one with a bent tine and another sporting a scratch.
"Very good, Senpai," I answered with what I hoped a safe label and promptly did so amidst setting the others in the sink-slash-cleaner-machine-factory-thingy that led all over the place out of sight. It was kinda cool to watch in action, honestly.
I caught a few looks from her and the handful of other maids still helping out here with the morning meal finished. One of which was girl who had tripped or "tripped".
Was this the moment of confrontation? All five of the other girls here were armed, but I didn't rate purely conventional weaponry as a concern, whatever other abilities they might have notwithstanding.
A question repeated, and this time I had a different answer.
"You new?" The allegedly clumsy girl asked as I withdrew my palmed silverware for the wash—it was apparently a thing, I'd noticed; every girl had picked up spare utensils, and it incidentally conveniently doubled as a reason to specifically carry sharp and pointy things.
"Miwa Miyuki," I pronounced with readied violence and mathematically optimised deep curtsey, here apparently a place catering to more European styling. "Truly a pleasure to make introductions at last."
I met their collective gazes with a genuine smile and confidence, reserved though it was.
This was going very well today.
As my fellow maids congratulated me on my new position working at Ryouran's most demanding and rewarding posting and promised to guide me throughout the day... As across the city I girded myself in that same confidence like armour when my new friends or "friends" in ITEM pulled up to our suite, even as I vectored in from the sky with a smirk and calculation in my heart and more breakfast courtesy of Ryouran ready to bestow... As elsewhere I shared a glance with myself and shrugged before turning my power upon the earth at my feet and burrowing down next to Noukan's own place where my senses told me nothing awaited but my intuition beckoned of interesting promise... As Oniichan ruffled my hair and I pretended to protest vehemently... As I stood before my new office's wall-spanning window watching the dawn contemplating readiness for a coordinated series of strikes...
Yes, as the sun began to climb into the sky on my second day of life, this was all going very well indeed.
Check, Academy City. Your move. You can't hold me down.
Well, actually it wasn't my best Batman impression, per se, but only because I could be too good at being Batman and all I really needed to do was silently lurk like a gargoyle while down one street I rode in a now changed cab with just Senpai and along a converging route I sat next to Tsuchimikado, trying not to show my nervousness at the other passengers we shared the bus with.
There were quite a few ninja-maids aboard with us.
They hid it well by conventional standards, but to my encompassing sight, it was a little hard to miss the thin slender knives hidden in clothing, the three sub-compact little hand-sized semiautomatics tucked away concealed in an ankle holster and a poofy apron bow and in the false lining of a bag, to miss the extra-pointy-looking chopsticks one girl had pinning up her hair that looked more like low-profile stilettos, or to miss the grenade one girl carried hidden inside a clear water bottle that completely concealed the equally optically transparent exotic materials used.
A girl kinda tended to notice these things.
It was enough to actually make me a little concerned for Tsuchimikado; unless she had something even more sophisticated and sneaky—which I couldn't entirely rule out, honestly—she was looked rather under-armed sitting innocent-looking in the aisle seat next to me. I had to wonder if she was some deceptively dainty-seeming master of unarmed combat or, more like myself and probably several of the other girls distinctly in assorted maid outfits, had little need for weapons in a different way.
Collectively, though, even uneasy though I was, I also had to admit to myself that it actually lent a rather amusing air to an ostensibly perfectly normal bus ride for some of the other passengers, though, because with several slightly anxious-looking girls Tokiwadai uniforms aboard too to go with a handful of others in other uniforms I recognised from School Garden—people on the way to school for extra-early business, I presumed—it was like the maids were a secret security detail.
And it probably absolutely was in fact exactly like that, really.
That part kind of made me want to smile at my good fortune. If Tokiwadai was swarming with ninja-maids, there was no guarantee that even my talents would necessarily suffice to stay hidden sneaking through the campus, and yet for making friends with Tsuchimikado, I could be hidden in plain sight, plainly acknowledged but as a known, unsuspicious person.
I wasn't sure how long I'd be able to keep this up, exactly, but even if the pretext cut off at accompanying Tsuchimikado on her morning commute as a friend before going off to do whatever else, this would still at the very least show me where to go and give me an inside view of part of Tokiwadai's security and procedure.
And since I was also heading more or less that same direction with Senpai as I provided overwatch for myself, I might very well be able to make use of that even if I did separate from Tsuchimikado after seeing her off, I considered.
I rubbed my chin from my high perch while I watched, distractedly wondering if I could and maybe should actually come up with some glider construct like a Batman cape to go with the lurking; it would mitigate the violent downdraft of just throwing air down my body as propellant, and it'd definitely be pretty cool, too... but it'd also be large, unfortunately, because the human body, even one as compact as all of mine compared to full-grown adult standards, really weighed a lot compared to simple air, actually, requiring an enormous amount of lift for its size for a flying thingy.
That was why butterflies got away with very lazily flapping every now and then with some of the best wing loading of insects when dragonflies could go fast but also had to beat fast and fuel it with a voracious metabolism, and it was why I always thought most depictions of angels or other winged humanoids honestly looked goofy with itty-bitty wings that'd demand awkwardly buzzing like hummingbirds to slowly bob about with buffeting gusts making it impossible to talk or keep hair under control.
I dismissed the idea with an invisible shrug. Glider wings large enough to be practical for slow controlled flight would be too large to be practical with all the air traffic.
...unless I went with lots of wings, or combined wings with some thrust still not nearly so much. From the pictures I'd seen online about Dark Matter—or Kakine Teitoku as his actual name apparently was—I suspected more than a little that he had discovered the problem himself for the multiplicity of wings if they weren't what passed as natural for him, and it was only the fact that he was subtly-yet-obviously too weird to be normal that kept me from wanting to roll my eyes as the possible angel dude or possible ignominious try-hard.
I settled cross-legged atop the edge of the skyscraper to ponder that while the taxi and bus rolled closer to each other and the outer wall of School Garden.
Within the autonomous car, I tried not to bite my lip nervously with thoughts rolling around in a couple spare heads how to best approach furthering the pursuit of the idol topic. I hadn't gotten very far before Senpai and I split ways with Kakine and Kaibi back at the hangout tower—though to be fair to myself, I hadn't had much time since the make-up job was so quick. Unfortunately, I was kind of stumped how to progress it any further.
We sat in silence as the car rolled on.
I didn't want to just give up, but...
I held back a sigh, and elsewhere switched tasks at one of my desks with a yawn to just put "idol academy city" into the search engine; maybe I could look up something to talk about and back-engineer from there?
How the hell did people without my kind of resources do this?
If anything, that was a real superpower, I decided.
While perusing the results list, I also considered the question of how I might tackle data-processing speed. I had a lot of hands and a fair few computers with internet access, now, and I'd gotten a lot of very specific work done data mining the files in my first base when I'd daisy-chained together all the monitors I could, but there was still simply so much more to go through in both bases and the internet at large. I imagined it ought to be entirely possible in theory to use my power much more directly and basically jack into systems myself, rather than relying on any user interface at all... but a few years of high-school and university-level computer science courses weren't exactly enough to wholesale build a computer in my head, and if the original Misaka Mikoto could do it, evidently the project staff hadn't considered it important enough to dying just right.
...I needed a lot more clones just for thinking, let alone taking on another clone army.
Far more sluggishly than I would have preferred, I put together priority tasks and orders in my heads while the busful of ninja-maids and other girls rolled in through a larger vehicle-accessible checkpoint in School Garden's wall.
I did my best not to fidget and maintained a calm and patiently attentive posture with Tsuchimikado happily babbling between my is that so?'s and indeed's and how interesting's how much she looked forward to today's work as a diverse suite of emissions and back-and-forth communications painted an optically-invisible riot through the brief tunnel. Once again, School Garden's security was impressive, particularly for the sheer unintrusiveness of the walled enclave's vigilance, but it was absolutely not up to contending with Misaka, just the dead wrong approach to dealing with our talents.
As far as the bus knew, it had one less occupant than in truth—and just in case, I even fudged things a little to help the vehicle along in case the smooth suspension measured load distribution or the drive system kept track of performance—and the oh so generously low-profile scanners and cameras that passed by saw only what they expected.
So we rolled right on through.
Inwardly, I smirked to myself, and no one could judge a dumb little laugh.
The bus ride also, too, though, gave me an ample head start over my other self as the autonomous taxi wouldn't or couldn't enter School Garden's grounds, and Senpai and I took the sidewalk to another train station-esque pedestrian entrance like before; assuming all went as expected, I'd have a fix on Tokiwadai by the time I needed to see Senpai off at her own school. That itself was a time limit for talking, though...
And... somehow, I found myself inexplicably engaged with Tsuchimikado on the very topic I wanted to bring up with Senpai?
"Ah... well, personally, an admission could be made to an interest in idol music."
"I know, right!" Tsuchimikado leaned in animatedly. "There's just an excitement to idol music. Any favourites? My friend introduced me to an up-and-comer she really likes." And then the girl next to me began fishing out her phone and sweeping through menus with an effervescent enthusiasm.
...
?!
How did this happen?
H-How did we get here?
I mentally traced back out mostly one-sided chatter... I knew every step we took, and I didn't know how we got here! Something about what she looked forward to, to likes, to music?
Was this the power of an extrovert?
I could only stare dumbly at the earbud that had appeared in my hand as Tsuchimikado plugged the jack into her phone with an easy grin, the other one in her own ear and a stylised imaged of a pink-haired girl winking out from her phone screen's music menu.
ARISA: Gloria
"-shines in the sky afar, Gloriaaaa~"
I leaned in.
There was something about this melody as it played, the emotion in it, as the girl sang of a pegasus, no, of the idea of the pegasus as a symbol and taking flight after faltering and soaring high buoyed by a lingering strength to strive anew...
"...I think I may have a new favourite," I finally answered Tsuchimikado's original question softly as the music played on.
"Your footsteps slowly disappeared in the long, long rain,
Your kindness and voice I've lost will remain in the sky as a star,
The time in the summer ticks with my heartbeat,
Now, I am born.
I'm a pegasus~"
"Mmhmm! She's pretty good, and her music's really inspiring, makes you feel, you know?"
I nodded fervently.
And it struck me then.
This was why Oniichan wanted me to be an idol.
It... Maybe it was the song, or the moment with the realisation, but I found wetness tickling a few of my cheeks, thankfully nowhere that mattered across my multiplicity.
Oniichan understood what I hadn't quite realised about myself, hadn't managed to crystalise into words yet. Far from School Garden, I stood up from my computer desk and reached over to squeeze him into a hug without preamble, and the older boy... somehow understood that too, with a squeeze back mid-lecture about protein chains.
With Tsuchimikado, I stared unfocused at the back of the seat in front of me despite beholding all around as the bus trundled its way down the picturesque pseudo-European boulevard.
"It is why I want to be an idol myself," I admitted solemly as much to myself as to Tsuchimikado. "It is a music that deserves to be shared. I want to inspire like this and reach out to the hearts of all with a connection that resonates between everyone."
Tsuchimikado's unassuming gentle smile was soul-strikingly radiant.
"Then I look forward to hearing your music too, Miyuki! Maybe you can make it big streaming your own performances too!"
Inwardly, I cursed the horrible, terrible, no-good fortune of being able to see myself from an external perspective impossibly unable to miss how my face pinked at that as I turned away feeling like someone had put a lava lamp in my tummy. "Miwa Miyuki" was supposed to be some aloof kuudere girl, wasn't she?! But Tsuchimikado Maika... Maika, was... not.
(When had she decided that we were past even any semblance of formalities?!)
A step removed from the immediate ground zero as all of myself trying to put together future plans in my headquarters base, I still felt like I was reeling dozens of times over, but retained the wherewithal to metaphorically perk up and start rubbing my hands with anticipation at the shared little tidbit of information of Arisa's career style.
A livestream, huh? ...maybe I could work with that idea, and maybe soon at that.
What did Academy City's internet have to say about Arisa and Gloria? A few moments further searching across so many terminals actually caught something in my idol-focused data dredging. I'd fallen down a momentary rabbit hole with a few papers blathering high-level generalities about sympathetic magic because tab browsing was dangerous business even for a collaborative legion, but I hit an article talking about the street performer Meigo Arisa, and blew through that section of the internet with videos drawn up to watch cellphone recordings and clips of her online performances.
Further searching revealed that she wasn't entirely alone in this, just a pretty big hit in a relatively small crowd seemingly mostly populated by music school students.
I couldn't help smiling to myself with the welling can-do confidence it inspired as I imagined a real path forward that I could grasp.
This could work.
That same upswing gave me what I needed to just... bull through my indecision with Senpai as we silently strolled down not quite familiar sidewalks toward her school. Maybe it actually wasn't for the best, I told myself, but taking initiative instead of trying for an ineffectual "least bad" of hopefully unpressuring silence... just didn't seem right anymore.
The whole premise of etiquette was to ensure that others were comfortable in one's presence, Maika herself was a welcome stability with her... her-ness.
So I tried to channel that.
"S-So..." I broke into the silence next to Senpai.
"Eh?!"
I gulped, but screwed up my eyes and tried again.
I would do this!
"S-So, um, ...what, uh, what-kind-of-music-do-you-like?" I all but squeaked in a compacted rush.
Completely unhelpfully, in my bases and flying invisibly across the city, I crossed my fingers, equally completely unable to stop myself from hoping it somehow helped anyway as I tried to follow Maika's lead.
Senpai's face steadily grew brighter and brighter in super-red shades while also simply turning super red.
The highschooler seemed to find the sidewalk intensely interesting as she brought her fingers together distractedly under her chin.
"W-w-w-welll..."
"I like Meigo Arisa; Gloria is my favourite," I blurted honestly at a crosswalk.
Simultaneously, I saw the campus of Senpai's school up ahead and her throat bob nervously.
Please let this work, please let this work...
"...I like Arisa too. I like Tomorrow," Senpai uttered, referencing one of the idol's other songs presently playing on one of my egregiously many browser tabs.
"And when I see you, tomorrow, tomorrow,
I'll reach for you, tomorrow, tomorrow,
Ever for tomorrow, I live for today!~"
I nodded as I distantly noticed the soft clack of hard leather shoe soles on cobble from the loose crowd of girls converging on Shidarezakura's wrought iron gate with us, and how Senpai and I subtly stood out for the lack.
"That is a good one too," I admitted.
We were actually attracting some mild attention from the assorted other girls, at least by the standards of my broad vision able to take everything in all at once. ...yeah, School Garden absolutely was totally upscale gang territory and Senpai and I had inadvertently flaunted some kind of power shift. A curious Shidarezakura girl to my left and a few other girls across the street and behind us started pulling out phones to send flashes across the sky, one looking like she took a "mysteriously sun-glared" picture of us walking next to each other, but that was a problem for later.
Being a friend for Senpai was important now.
"Music like hers is why I decided I am going to become an idol," I continued in my haphazard attempt at conversation as we neared the open twisting iron fencing.
That was still on topic, right?
Senpai rounded on me, though.
"Just like that?"
I blinked back in surprise at her intent look, eyes positively huge with wonder and naked incomprehension at my statement with no trace of reservation in the timid older girl.
"Well... yes," I tried to justify as other girls passed around us. I nodded. "Exactly just like that, because that's what being an idol means to me, to stand up and inspire, to be a beacon of hope for the dreams of everyone."
Goodness, what did I just say?
I turned away, cheeks heating up a little.
"W-Well, Arisa did it," I muttered on, "so... so why not be like her if I want to be like her?"
Standing in front of the campus gate to the school, Senpai's eyes lost focus as she slowly went slack, staring at nothing. Her mouth fell open slightly, and Senpai fell into the picture of dumbfoundedness with her hands limp at her sides.
"Just... like that..." She breathed.
Oh crap oh crap!
"I-Is Senpai alright?"
"...I've always wanted to be an idol," the older girl spoke in a daze.
What would Maika or Oniichan or Saten do?!
They wouldn't stand here frozen!
"And... just like that," Senpai proceeded oblivious to my internal predicament at her own. "Just like that," she said more firmly, blinking almost as if waking up, and her expression shifted into something of awed wonder. "Meigo Arisa... did it. And you decided to too," her eyes turned sharper on me, before just as rapidly transforming yet again to light up with a smile bright with unshed tears.
"All you have to do to be an idol, is be an idol," Senpai declared, and undiluted joy suffused her. "Oh! Let's do it together!" She cried, and threw her arms around me in a tight, fleeting hug before all but throwing herself away with a bubbling keening squeal escaping the other girl as she bounded off toward the school. "This is the best day ever!"
I couldn't look away as I watched her go. It... This felt right!
I gave a satisfied nod with a lightness in my chest, and turned to depart, somehow missing the small crowd of Shidarezakura onlookers.
"Yumiya-sama?" One girl whispered, not looking at me.
So that was Senpai's name...
A lot of the others were staring my way, though.
"Senpai is my friend," I offered by way of explanation, and without further ado, scampered off toward Tokiwadai through them.
I knew where to go now, after all.
In the time it had taken to walk to Shidarezakura, I had altogether lost track of time as the avatar with Maika and the bus rolled up to another sprawling campus with a smart and spiffy encircling wall of brick and white stone topped by an upper third of understated wrought iron awaiting students; the wall so divided somehow managed to look private without being standoffish with the well-kept greenery visible through the iron posts just above a more conventional eye level.
Showtime, then.
I wondered how this would go as the many maids and other early Tokiwadai students began to rise. I was here to see Maika to work, true and honest... but would that end at the bus door, the gate, the front entrance of the building beyond the grand gate, inside those doors?
With my entirely legitimate justification at the ready, I just... followed the other girls on.
"You new?" One Tokiwadai girl spoke up amiably as we all walked up to the gate, over the lip of the subtle statement of the curb that designated what otherwise looked a route for a bus to drive straight to the front building as strictly the domain of students (and staff).
Cue legitimate justification.
"Accompanying a friend to work," I answered easily with a smiling nod to Maika, perfectly truthfully and altogether ambiguously.
The other girl nodded understandingly.
'Twas hardly the fault of Misaka Best if a concise and exactly accurate explanation in direct response to a question oh just so happened to be able to be interpreted in more than one way~
"Mm, saw you on the bus together. Good friend, Tsuchimikado-san."
"Indeed."
Maika herself didn't notice the momentary byplay—or possibly just pretended to ignore it as a covert ninja-maid in training—and collectively, we...
Just.
Walked in.
I was not the only girl in neither Tokiwadai nor maid uniform, a few others in our group likewise like another girl who accelerated a few steps ahead with one of the overt maids to hold open the doors for us. Apparently I still fit in well enough for well enough. Mostly, though, I figured it was just the act that lent to things.
A clipboard or tablet and polo with complementing hat could let a person walk around half of everywhere without confrontation so long as it was done with an air of assumed confidence of normalcy. It seemed that accompanying Maika as if I was supposed to, and just keeping accompanying her that way was enough to slip into assumptions when everyone simply assumed that anyone who shouldn't do such a thing wouldn't or couldn't.
Admittedly, getting past School Garden's considerable but too-considerate security would be a tall order for most people, but still, no amount of cautious mindfulness could detract from the bemusement I felt as early-arrival students and staff went their separate ways and I simply kept with my latter group before we further split, Maika and the other already-uniformed maids heading further afield toward a dining hall as the rest of us took to a changing room.
It took some not inconsiderable sleight of hand with twisting light around to look the part amidst all the automatic scrutiny, but I "changed" along with everybody else despite ostensibly having no means to do so, and less than three minutes later, another wave of uniformed maids followed the first with one "Miwa Miyuki" in a simple but severe understated ensemble inspired by Maika's own maid uniform altered to more preferable (sleek instead of poofy) lines and tones of Prussian and glacial blues paired with satiny silver-white that complemented my disguised pale complexion and dark ringlets. I didn't take the lead in this second group, but made sure that I wasn't far from it, ahead of the middle as if—truthfully, when minor things like "walls exist" didn't matter—I knew perfectly well where I was going.
And it continued in that fashion as we all fell in and I helped ready Tokiwadai Middle School for morning breakfast.
A breakfast, anyway; I gathered from commentary and inescapable observation that "we" catered to two different dining halls, one local and another at an off-campus but affiliated dorm.
But I had a new job here!
I smiled to myself at the ironic still lack of any monetary payment to speak of, made up in intelligence and access thus far as I bustled about the dining hall and equally massive serving pantry helping set the many tables.
I was finding this entire affair endlessly amusing, to be honest, as I likewise found that I perfectly well could keep up with this. Maybe I was a little defensive about people seemingly dismissive or somehow offended at conscientiousness and wanting to avoid offence, but I took a wry satisfaction in my mindfulness of etiquette was to worthwhile.
Very pretty decorative charger plates went centered in front of seats on already-ready tablecloth, inlaid silverware to either side, disregard rule of thumb to "eyeball" two-centimeter spacing with hilarious overkill of exacting precision with absurd epic superpowers to align at median atomic scale relative to the conveniently straightish edge of the table and apart from one another (because I wasn't one of the girls sporting a nifty looking two-centimeter laser grid overlay emitter thing built into her glove's thumb and had to compensate somehow while doing a better job with less apparent effort)... Dinner fork apparently was to be on its lonesome on the left before the napkin because that was how things were done here, dinner knife and per what others were doing butter knife to the right instead of on the bread plate itself all the way on the left, with the only normal spoon in use accompanying the knives since it seemed we weren't serving soup and a cereal today... Smaller dessert cutlery set at the top with salt and pepper, next to just the lone water glass—no alcoholic beverages for a table exclusively for young girls here—and then coasters for tea cup and, it seemed, smaller than normal demitasse coffee cups with their accompanying little bitty spoons.
I did notice a couple of interesting things working at such a small scale, though. For one, Tokiwadai apparently had nanite security, actually, so in fact perhaps better and still unobtrusive safeguards than I had first imagined despite the miniature robots having no better luck than light at interfering with me for my filtering air shell. Also present on the silverware before I brushed away a few nanites, though there was something curious, a layer that was different on the outside.
And the dessert knife, often used for fruit, was atypically itself silver too with that same odd shell, now that I considered it, even as the little bowls for the salts were likewise silver too but featured that shell especially thick—relatively speaking, anyway. As I thought about it as I helped the other girls lay everything out across the many seats, I figured it likely some kind of Academy City science silver coating; molten salt could leave a beautiful glossy black finish to steels whilst leaving silver accenting fine if quick, but salt wasn't kind even to silver with prolonged contact, and really high-end fruit knives—especially historically—tended to go for gold gilding or such like for the acidic juice.
Not a concern in Academy City, apparently.
I pointedly didn't snort to myself as I surveyed the dining hall, thinking of Academy City's priorities. It was all well and good to churn out a bunch of cloned girls for ritualised murder, but only if they had a well-balanced breakfast mindful of caffeine for a growing girl, but but, she needn't worry about her silver looking less than its best no matter what.
It all had a quirky sort of charm to it, this formal layout for breakfast, but indeed so specifically for young girls.
It also was truthfully no trouble to follow. True, one might argue the assortment of items and their order a lot, but, for one, this was only breakfast rather than dinner, and moreover, the design of it really was perfectly straightforward, to be honest. The purpose of etiquette was to put people at ease, and the setting of the table was made with convenience in mind: to actually use everything, it was laid out to be as easy as possible and natural for the diner—or at least a diner with a butler or maid on hand to be an active participant at the right time—so that the person eating could simply pick up the most convenient utensils right when they were needed for what was needed, before extraneous items were taken away as the meal progressed; thus, the setting itself just went in reverse order from usage, out instead of in, everything to be right perfectly at hand.
I appreciated the serving pantry being laid out with a similar conscientiousness, too. It wasn't just some ordinary room full of cupboards but a breezy experience of efficiency as I went back and forth; true, there were many assorted dishes and utensils at the ready, but the storage of them all was laid out with user-friendly utility in mind, and it was fancy in this "city of the future". Tokiwadai's serving pantry was far larger than it appeared inside, with whole assembly lines and machinery built into the walls and flooring that turned the sinks into starting points for what I took as autonomous dishwashing and drying—replete with a lot of quality control cameras and factory-like robo grabby arms at the ready everywhere—that could carry items to any of several stations built almost like hidden vending machines for full ensembles of maximalist state dinner layouts with all accoutrements near each of the doors to the dining hall in offset islands by the main walkways, and I witnessed other girls keying numbers into the interface to bring up stacks (or down from the ceiling, actually, for the glasses).
Really, I half thought that anyone could walk in and lend a hand well enough.
And I had everyone else as reference as well, importantly.
Table etiquette varied from place to place, with different people having persnickety ideas about the "proper" way for such like as where and how these napkins or butter knives ought be presented, but I simply emulated the other maids because it was just what the diners here would be used to and find their version of comfortable normalcy. I left the placement of butter dishes to some of the other girls as I handed more plates to another maid; they seemed to know the invisible unspoken social territories of how who would sit where and what positioning would be convenient when everyone was actually sitting down. Formal dining or not, merely breakfast or not, there were clear territorial boundaries waiting to be filled when this was a school for children in their own camps of friends, and undoubtedly a very... anime school school with veritable guilds and formal associations if the incident with the flag-toting bunch of clowns in the fountain square earlier was any measure.
I did help set more plates within the butter-defined boundaries after that, though, as more maids began bringing out dainty little pots of whatever bread spreads; I didn't actually know what jams they were or what was maybe cream cheese or clotted cream despite being able to see inside, though the small army of tasty additions sure looked yummy!
...actually, when was the last time this avatar ate?
Elsewhere, in my underground base and across my brainstorming selves, I made designs on getting some of the food pills to distribute around to myself.
I gave Maika a smile as I passed her helping a couple others carry more dishes out when she emerged from the kitchens further in—checking on the dining hall's readiness for the head chef directing everything in there, I gathered from my pervasive snooping. She blinked in surprise, but shot a big smile back with a happy excitement in her eyes before she briskly returned to the chef's domain for her report. Apparently somehow totally and definitely completely inexplicably, it was news to Maika that I worked here too!
I enjoyed this sort of game I was doing as we all finished setting everything. I half expected some kind of confrontation from the "other" ninja-maids, especially now, and imagined an attitude in all the other girls with them secretly aware all along and just not caring, because, hey, the imposter girl has been lending a hand!
It didn't come, though.
Instead, we all kept about our business as instead came first a trickle, then a steady stream of arrivals into the dining hall in Tokiwadai uniforms.
Breakfast time!
I inserted myself into the flow of other maids bustling back and forth while a kindly-looking lady stepped in and began taking roll call of the assembled students, about a hundred girls or so by the seating. Mentally, I coordinated with myself in my computer rooms to burn-print faces and names to keep track of who was who, only to realise part way through that, surprisingly, I had no trouble.
That stood out to me as I crossed paths with Maika again readying toast. I tried to put it out of mind—now wasn't a time to be distracted—but... but it really just stood out; the more I thought about it, the more I couldn't not think about what I thought I remembered and the gnawing uncertainty of... of what was real or not when I remembered or ...at least thought I did, when before all of... this, how I had a terrible time matching names to faces. Not at all the case with this clumsily-yet-artfully designed neural architecture, though...
Not the time, not the time!
I drew a veil about myself simply forcing a semblance of perfectly amiable welcomeness as Tokiwadai girls took their seats in clusters and I helped carry freshly brewed tea out. I had noticed that Mental Out wasn't present for some reason, even though her name had been called, which I found somehow disappointing and a relief at once; from within the serving pantry, I'd witnessed a tall and athletically built girl shimmering with a tightly leashed aura of odd colours offer some explanation, but I hadn't been able to read her lips as I'd had to exit the dining hall, and hadn't wanted to risk extending speaker feelers.
Instead I again just fell into place matching what other maids were doing as breakfast was served, and took pains to sort of "thicken" my veil in growing complexity of more and more layers to hopefully spoof whatever potentially enhanced sight other girls might have that may pick up on side effects of my own work. I remembered the Judgment girl with the red jacket whom had simply seen straight through; with Tokiwadai catering to exceptional students and several girls looking suspiciously like they did light or light-adjacent things without even trying, I was more than a little on edge.
In fact, I was so keyed for something, anything to happen, that when one of the maids heading the opposite way back towards the tables stumbled suddenly just in front of me, I didn't even hesitate or think as the water pitcher on her tray tilted and plunged.
My brains fired into overdrive, and I lasered in with sudden unrelenting focus on the tumbling, shifting spread of whirling attracting and repelling clouds dancing in the void. I automatically drew connections and recognised plottable trajectories and patterns, calculated possible reactions and mental models morphing between one instant and the next to more and more refined assessments of what could and otherwise would happen. And I directed my Adamant Air Armour around myself to move my body on the most optimum course for least disruptiveness economy of motion weighted against the deciding decent of the pitcher and spilling water.
In one mechanically perfectly smooth action, I leaned low as I stepped and caught at the base of the pitcher pushed by my fingertips into a rocking roll that brought its throat upward through the falling stretched globules of water. I brought my opposite heel around, applying just enough augmented traction to the floor to maintain a confident margin of error without displaying distinct unexplainable balance as I induced a rotation of my body around my extended leading foot to maintain forward direction, then swayed back up to normal with pitcher in hand to pass along to the next maid in line heading to the tables. A blink was all she betrayed as she took it from my grasp and we exchanged silent nods of recognition and appreciation.
Phew!
That was close!
It was only as I slid into place with some of the other girls lining the wall observing the diners that the thought struck me.
Was it... a little odd that the maid had caught her foot on the floor like that?
I analysed the maids roving everywhere in this part of the campus, not needing to look at anyone to see everyone. There were degrees of variation, no maid didn't have some measure of noticeable poise. For all that each girl was squarely in an age bracket when she might be less comfortable and coordinated with herself, everyone projected a sense of, if not necessarily always grace, a control of her own body.
It made me suspicious.
On the one hand, a place like Tokiwadai could be expected to impose enormous demands that might be taxing for even the best, but, well, it would also have the best. And I was pretty sure that every single maid here was a ninja-maid whom could lay out waif-fu on any unwelcome guests three times her size.
The thought troubled me as I zeroed in on a Tokiwadai girl in my unofficial official sector of responsibility who set her knife and fork down in line together as she chatted with the next girl over.
That was my cue.
Table etiquette was all about everyone doing their part to see that everything ran smoothly and easily for a likewise easy and comfortable experience for all. Patterns varied a little, but—and I checked online as other avatars to verify expectations—there were two main sets of silent signaling, American and European or Continental or whatever one wanted to call it, and there wasn't really a "wrong" one from a functional standpoint—I did see one girl in a different area apparently an American student using her fork differently and switching back and forth between hands—so long as it was simply consistent and got across what it needed to.
Knife and fork side by side on the plate, vertically or canted a little or a lot or whatever? Away with it all!
I stepped in and relieved the girl of her plate and no longer necessary utensils, just as Maika brought a banana half on its own small plate. Yes, it was a little bit silly, I could admit to myself, but hey, breakfast was breakfast, and these were middle-schoolers.
I still smiled inwardly as the dining Tokiwadai girl took the dessert fork and small, finely sharp fruit knife to nip off the remaining end and slice along the inner curve to turn up the skin before cutting off individual bites.
This whole experience, though, also made me wonder just how on earth all the other maids managed to actually keep up with everything as I brought in more tea for the tables. I had the advantage of being able to see everything all at once, even how much tea was left in a pot, but everyone else wasn't so fortunate, and it didn't seem to slow them down!
Still, it was rather satisfying trying my hand to leverage my abilities on the fly to fit in with whatever insane skill and training the rest of the serving staff possessed, and as subtly as possible apply slight forces here and there just generally making things work better. A girl slow to sip her tea simply never happened to notice it cool despite my sight revealing her defective cup to lack the internal activity might sight showed in others with hidden built-in thermoregulation; a few toast crumbs just barely managed to land on the rim of a plate instead of the tablecloth below where they had begun to fall; one girl anxiously trying to surreptitiously dab up a blot of jam from the tablecloth found it came off readily without stain to the immaculate white cloth.
It was like a big game of pretend, omnipresent through the dining hall and concurrent with what I did that could actually be seen.
Satisfying, and, dare I think it, kind of fun!
And since the girl I was pretending to be totally definitely had whatever ambiguous ice powers contrivance needed, I even got to make a point to single out that defective cup once its user was through with it and things began to wind down.
"This cup isn't as warm as it should be?" I muttered aloud ostensibly to myself with an adopted mildly perplexed expression back in the serving pantry as I "discovered" its defectiveness.
"Eh? Another one?" The maid right behind me obligingly interjected, then sighed, shifting her own armload of dishes ready for the wash. "If you please, just set it over there, thank you," she nodded to one of the counters where sat a pair of forks, one with a bent tine and another sporting a scratch.
"Very good, Senpai," I answered with what I hoped a safe label and promptly did so amidst setting the others in the sink-slash-cleaner-machine-factory-thingy that led all over the place out of sight. It was kinda cool to watch in action, honestly.
I caught a few looks from her and the handful of other maids still helping out here with the morning meal finished. One of which was girl who had tripped or "tripped".
Was this the moment of confrontation? All five of the other girls here were armed, but I didn't rate purely conventional weaponry as a concern, whatever other abilities they might have notwithstanding.
A question repeated, and this time I had a different answer.
"You new?" The allegedly clumsy girl asked as I withdrew my palmed silverware for the wash—it was apparently a thing, I'd noticed; every girl had picked up spare utensils, and it incidentally conveniently doubled as a reason to specifically carry sharp and pointy things.
"Miwa Miyuki," I pronounced with readied violence and mathematically optimised deep curtsey, here apparently a place catering to more European styling. "Truly a pleasure to make introductions at last."
I met their collective gazes with a genuine smile and confidence, reserved though it was.
This was going very well today.
As my fellow maids congratulated me on my new position working at Ryouran's most demanding and rewarding posting and promised to guide me throughout the day... As across the city I girded myself in that same confidence like armour when my new friends or "friends" in ITEM pulled up to our suite, even as I vectored in from the sky with a smirk and calculation in my heart and more breakfast courtesy of Ryouran ready to bestow... As elsewhere I shared a glance with myself and shrugged before turning my power upon the earth at my feet and burrowing down next to Noukan's own place where my senses told me nothing awaited but my intuition beckoned of interesting promise... As Oniichan ruffled my hair and I pretended to protest vehemently... As I stood before my new office's wall-spanning window watching the dawn contemplating readiness for a coordinated series of strikes...
Yes, as the sun began to climb into the sky on my second day of life, this was all going very well indeed.
Check, Academy City. Your move. You can't hold me down.
you have no idea how happy you just made me thank you for the chapter and for the promise of idol shenanigans.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/They
Well this is amazingly entertaining and I'm absolutely delighted to see it continue.
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
Her stat for Bluff is "Yes, please, and thank you."
Thank goodness you're here, Academy City edition.
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
Probably not before she's already been sent to spy on an organization she has already infiltrated or subsumed.
... but given that could happen basically now if she gets sent to find out what's up with MAR... Give it a month, two tops?
Alan975
Creative wannabe
- Location
- The north
Or before she's sent to recruit herself
Chapter 28
New
- Location
- Terra-Luna
The concrete wall in front of me wasn't there.
I stared at the rough surface slanting across the small void I had made in the earth. The ground was more crumbly rock than claylike here as my projected construct held everything back from a pair of avatars, and the concrete illuminated by glowing ball of light flattened the face of it. I couldn't actually see it, though, which was why I had the light at all; it was only visible to my actual eyes, not my sight, and staring at the barrier in front of my noses almost felt disorienting, like I was somehow off balance or moving without moving.
I could make out the faint, silvery tracery shimmering and shifting like a gridline across the concrete, though.
Noukan's apartment had a magically concealed secret basement below the already big and fancy-looking normal one, and my physical eyeballs were the only thing that said it existed at all...
Neat!
I poked the flat wall.
Nothing happened.
"Aw..."
I didn't really expect the concrete to ripple and swirl open in an aperture in front of me or something, but I'd kinda been hoping...
The possibility that it might be violently warded and react aggressively didn't seem likely; what if some burrowing critter or bugs or plant roots came in contact? My newly refined argon sheath integrated into complementing hospital gown-turned sundress composite construct wasn't as liable to provoke a reaction as that, I figured, barring some presumable overly-complicated qualifiers.
I exchanged a shrug with myself, then took some inspiration from what I had done earlier to get into the skyscraper aquarium with a bit of a twist and streamlining. I couldn't see into the concrete, but I could make relative references from outside of it. So, I formulated a circular delineation with two different parts interwoven, some reaction bits to the figures to weave around electron clouds, and an annulment denying the attractive bridging between them. Forward it went, to describe a frictionless meter-wide tube also a meter long.
Nothing happened, again.
I put a hand on the exposed face of the concrete and gave it a gentle push, still to no reaction.
Ten-meter tube, then?
I redefined the region, and my wrapped two-dimensional plane suddenly slid in under gravity.
Woo-hoo!
Abruptly, everything snapped into place, and I beheld a veritable labyrinth stretching beneath Noukan's place, even as the big golden retriever snapped up to attention from his run before the television with his ears pricked forward.
"Weee!" I cheered in stereo as I slid down the opened chute to bonk into the suspended plug held in my mental grasp. I giggled as I pinwheeled twin momentary falls within the protection of my Adamant Air Armour.
That was fun!
And wow, Noukan was one fast doggo when the dog wanted to go.
I watched from below as he sprinted down the hallway of his apartment with impossible speed, bounding down a short stairwell like a ping-pong ball while I turned my focus back up to the borehole and my sleeping self still outside.
I probably shouldn't leave me alone, I supposed, and simultaneously clambered back up the wall with pseudo-sticky hands whilst momentarily awaiting Noukan and marveling at the interior of what could only be described with the words "secret base".
Standing at the top of a stair, I counted thirty-two sublevels, and so much of it was taken up by spaghetti-sprawl factory stuff and a big chamber section with a launch rail to a movable building several streets over straight out of Evangelion!
Cool!
I grinned, just... just looking at it all while I also slid the cylindrical plug back into place and outside restructured the ground back the way it had been on my surface return. I was almost jealous of myself, because I was stuck on self-babysitting duty while I got to watch a conveyor line a few floors beneath me levitate spindly mechanical limbs off toward some kind of spray treatment.
Noukan had a basement that was like a big workshop garage beneath his apartment, but below that, he had an entire gigantic factory!
I mentally leveraged the cylinder of reinforced concrete fused to some kind of foam-like lining between thick metallic plating and wood paneling back into the wall as I marveled at a truly enormous spool of something like a fiber optic line feeding through a portal on a wheeled stand to emerge past cramped machinery before needle-like arms wove it into different shapes to be sent off elsewhere, as if haphazard add-ons had improvised where there was no more room to work with. The instant the plug slid back into place, though, and I dropped the wrapping barrier of my power to allow the shifting electromagnetic clouds to stich themselves back together, it all vanished.
...except I could still see it anyway. Just only from within.
I stared back from outside.
It was weird with multiple perspectives that weren't really "from" anywhere in the first place yet overlapped but differed.
"This place is so cool!" I said aloud to Noukan from within as the big dog plunged from a ceiling hatch to swarm down on robo-arms. And it really was! It wasn't just that there was a bustling super-secret factory concealed a step beyond his already warded apartment that bent perceptions, but that the whole thing somehow also managed to take a bespoke look with lots of that rich wood paneling across all the walls and polished brass fittings around everything jutting from them, carpeting across the floors, carved balustrades girding all the stairs and sprawling catwalks—dogwalks—throughout the facility...
Noukan had a classy secret base!
The dapper dog himself came up short as he landed, ears back and tail still.
That was bad, wasn't it? That meant angry or scared or sad, negative.
"...oh, uh." I cleared my throat, less certain than a moment ago. "My complements to the decor, and apologies if surprise was caused. ...but this place is very neat," I had to add.
Noukan gave me a doggy stare.
It... was a very long stare.
"...Dawn-chan?" He stated, and I had no idea how he managed to say it so flatly and still inflect it as a question.
"Yes?"
"...what are you doing here?"
I, uh... I got the distinct impression that "I was bored" wasn't the right answer...
"I was really, really bored," an idiot defended. "I-I mean, well, just... just watching myself sleeping, laying there," I spluttered, and oh look, would you look at that, the railing's finial cap next to me was terribly fascinating...
Noukan's body swelled up like a balloon... and then he sighed, long and loud and profoundly human-like. Again.
"...sorry?" I tried, fidgeting.
"Are you hungry?" The oversized golden retriever replied apropos of nothing.
I blinked.
"What? Oh, um..." I thought a moment, wondering, because I definitely wouldn't say no to something to eat—probably; I didn't even actually know what I did or didn't like very much, or could eat, but Noukan clearly had doggy tastes personally even if he was also a smart dog—except would that be rude? But it also might be rude to decline? Noukan seemed like he might be the sort to think it a point of hospitality.
"Only if it's not too much trouble," I hedged, straightening up.
Noukan nodded in his very deliberate doggy way.
"Very good, then, let us be off to the kitchens. Right this way, if you please," he turned, and padded away from the stair landing toward a lift down a connecting few paces of hall with a small framed picture as if someone hand simply printed out a plain cartoony bone. "It is a joke," the dog explained, noticing me looking out of habit.
I made a vague neutral hum, trying to be diplomatic without knowing if it was supposed to be ironic or offensive or what.
Awaiting us in the rather roomy lift, though—which, a part of me realised idly, was probably because Noukan had a bigger quadruped footprint—was an intriguing contraption.
Noukan had built himself a completely clockwork lift operator.
That was a dog.
I smiled to myself, observing all the tiny little interlocking gears and drives and small chains, many of which seeming to serve no purpose at all but to add more moving bits, as with a flash of wiggly colour from Noukan's backpack splashing out, the statue art piece smoothly raised its snout up and pushed in the button for the ground floor with its metal nose... because this wasn't even the type of lift to need an operator and the whole thing was entirely superfluous, and evidently Noukan had just wanted to do it anyway.
"How long did it take to make this?" I wondered aloud, as much in directed question as not.
Beside me, Noukan seemed quite chuffed as he chuffed the verb way.
"Like it, do you?"
"It's very intricate," I nodded in admission with the smooth rise upward.
Ding went the little bell in sharp silvery chime.
"Mm, you might be surprised how quickly it came together, then," Noukan continued as he led me back through his slightly cluttered workshop-like apartment. "Once I had the design ready, the setup downstairs managed to fabricate it over breakfast some years ago, actually. What might you care to have for breakfast now, Dawn-chan?"
Speedily, I surveyed the interior of the upcoming kitchen refrigerator. Uh... And bread was over there.
"A sandwich would sound lovely, thank you. I've not had breakfast as this avatar this morning," I answered as we entered a somewhat surprisingly rather ordinary-looking kitchen/dining room, all but identical to what I beheld in all the nearby apartment units with a typical stove and countertop and the like to one side with a not-quite separated away table, though this table was low, the sort at place in a more traditional Japanese residence.
Did Noukan perk up a bit as he opened the refrigerator door, though?
"Avatar?" The golden retriever queried, and his eyes flicked toward where I lay sprawled on the couch, visible from here without needing sight like mine.
I took a seat.
"It seems an appropriate word?" I gave a shrug with my hands. "I mean, I'm me, this is me," I held my hands out. "But this isn't me me, because, well..." I gestured vaguely back at the living room. "I want to say, 'I'm over there too', but grammatically it seems as though it should be 'I'm over here too', except that still isn't right when I'm not saying it from there... here... whatever."
I pursed my lips as Noukan rooted around in the refrigerator with his spindly mechanical appendages, seeming to grab up half the contents, including a great big roasting pot with a hunk of marinading raw meat that looked like, well, as if it had been half eaten by an animal.
"I don't think the Japanese language was developed with bilocation in mind," I added frankly, mulling over the fact that with confusing context it was actually worse than English which still had awkward grammar.
"Mm, no," the dog mused, trotting back with his hands full and snagging the bread on his way over, another arm stretching way out to pluck a plate from the cupboard. "Leftovers, I don't feel like making anything... Help yourself, however you like it," he added more loudly than his muttering with a diverse spread taking the table courtesy of his dozen and more robo-hands reeling back in. "That one's not specifically intended for humans, though, and the hot sauce is hot," he added with a pointing nose to a jar of some kind of spread, and the adjacent bottle sporting a manga-fied face with literal burning eyes of determination and All The Degrees! emblazoned across the label.
...I wasn't a betting mad science creation, but I was pretty sure I didn't wanna test my dietary requirements with that.
"Much appreciated," I quipped, imagining as I slid the bread and plate over that I'd either melt into a corrosive puddle or spew actual fire.
Though... actually, I could go dragon-girl, now that I thought of it. I made sure I had nothing clinging to my shell of restrained argon as I took a couple pieces of bread and carefully analysed them, trying to dial in my focus between something less than extreme precision looking at the pervasive emptiness around everything and more conventional resolution, then with a spark of interest at the puzzle I'd given myself tried to slightly toast one of the slices without actually subjecting it to heat.
Results started to get mixed as I didn't really know what I was actually trying to do in rearranging the slice's bitty bread bits, and I resorted to a gentle infrared wash over the other slice while paying attention to what it did.
Behold, incredible amazing superpowers may yield slightly toasted sandwich bread!
...and then my stomach voiced its recognition of the feat.
I flushed. Betrayal! ...why did I have to make my speaker formulae work so seamlessly transmitting sound back and forth?
Noukan graciously declined to comment, and snaked an extending mechanical arm to the countertop where the bread had been, grabbing up one of the many pouches of doggy treats scattered about the place.
Studiously, I just quickly flash-seared a slight warming toasting to the other slice and mentally tugged on a few slices of cold cuts to likewise slap between the bread before focusing across the city where I tended to my new maidly duties around Tokiwadai and could assess a knife for emulation, pulling together its temporary construct likeness to triangle my sandwich and jam it in my mouth.
Misaka Best had a perfectly good excuse not to say anything!
...it was a good sandwich, though. Kind of plain when I wanted to keep food simple until I figured out what I could handle, but yummy.
Actually it was very yummy...
"This is really good," I felt compelled to say between bites, staring at the sandwich as if it might reveal its tasty secrets.
"Thank you, I do try to get the good stuff," Noukan commented from his padded seat across from me where he gnawed on his raw roast, occasionally popping another doggy treat in his mouth.
From the couch, I abruptly let out a muffled grunting snore-like noise in my sleep and unconsciously tried to shift within the air shell I maintained in place around my other self. I promptly resolved to let go of the transmitting membranes of air carrying sound through, and seized on the first topic I could think of.
"So, you mentioned an immortal earlier?" I raised more insistently than I'd meant. Meal time was time for conversation, let's talk about that, right now!
Somehow the golden retriever took on a very serious mien.
"Yes. Ladylee Tangleroad she calls herself. A young girl, one centuries upon centuries old, perhaps a thousand years or more."
My eyebrows rose a little. That didn't sound good.
"And she is problematic, I take it?"
I took another nibble of my sandwich, and Noukan put a paw upon the table, though I wasn't sure how the gesture was supposed to translate as he answered somberly, almost wary in tone.
"She is brilliant, materially wealthy as a result, obsessed with death from what I have gathered, definitively connected with at least instigating the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and locally a sabotage that nearly killed an entire crew of the Orion spaceplane three years ago, and extremely well versed in magic. Moreover, I have yet to be able to get the slightest whiff of her actually actively using magic despite my best efforts whilst maintaining keeping a paws-off approach, and between good and bad, that is what I consider the worst in what concerns me. She has the experience of her age, for all that she looks possibly younger than yourself."
I winced. That really, really didn't sound good...
"She isn't a vampire, is she? She sounds like maybe the thousand-year-old loli-vampire type, and not in a good way."
Noukan shook his head, more of a slow slewing motion that faster would have fit playing with a rope.
"No, arrangements were made after she came to attention, and the Deep Blood ability had no effect on her."
I chewed my lip, decidedly less tasty than my however-plain sandwich.
"I want to say that befriending her would be the smarter and right thing to do," I began, looking down at my plate thoughtfully. "Making a friend who doesn't need to be fought in the first place would be better and more reliable long-term, and I just don't like the idea of not trying to make a friend out of a could-be enemy on principle. ...but Ladylee Tangleroad doesn't sound like a very nice girl."
Noukan loosed a doggy chuff, and pulled out an already-lit cigar.
Hm...
"Do we know how good her immortality is, or... what kind of immortal she is?" I ventured. I simultaneously examined the sink faucet in my encompassing sight and within Tokiwadai analysed a glass for reference, emulating it across the city while mentally nudging the tap to pour into it with a screening filter. Despite the slightly dour atmosphere, I was lowkey proud of my little trick as I induced the glass to move over to where I sat.
"I should very much like to hear your thoughts on that free of any bias on my part, actually," Noukan demurred, eying the water glass as I took it up. "She has thus far survived a simple car bomb that I can personally verify."
Fair enough, I supposed as I took a sip. The water tasted funny, but then molecularly pure dihydrogen oxide was like that, and I didn't know what was supposed to be in water besides that.
"Well," I began. "If she is not a vampire, then she could potentially be some hypothetical other human-like non-human entity of the ageless sort, but just 'not dying of old age' is a lot less significant than being resilient to violence; plain biological immortality doesn't even require being special, like that little swimming creature with the tendrils that can live forever if it isn't killed, but being hard to kill is a pretty big step up from that.
"If we know where she's from or at least what part of the world she seems to fit, that may at least narrow it down," I continued aloud, finishing my first sandwich half. "Maybe pin down or exclude whether she's some kind of spirit or other supernatural entity, a former mortal who cultivated immortality, or a god or a fixture of how the world is that happens to also be a person..."
Hm, hmm, and hmm again...
"The kind of magic she knows might also be a clue, too," I muttered aloud in addition before taking another bite.
"She appears to be Greek," the big dog offered with a puff of his cigar, and I winced again. "Though that is with the caveat that I cannot guarantee she didn't fox the testing the way she has soundly redirected divinations aimed at herself. I find I do actually consider it more on the like end of things, though; I do not dislike the challenge, even if it bodes ill. Still, the mystery of life is that nothing is certain."
Greek...
"Hoo boy," I said lightly. "If she is Greek, then, uh... Yeah, that could definitely open up some possibilities," I had to admit between tasty nibbles. "I don't know if an eternally young child fits with the image of some kind of more-than-mortal offspring of a god the way something like nereids or cyclopes are sometimes portrayed if they're not just monsters or whatever, but it's hard to rule out a god with a screwy perspective and a bad attitude or someone cursed by just that."
Noukan gave a doggy nod.
"I thought much the same," he admitted at length, then crunched down on the awaiting meat bone.
I poked the problem around in my head as I finished my sandwich.
"This sounds like a classical mythology problem looking for someone to happen to," I considered aloud. "...at least it's maybe better than from further east? A prodigal child immortal with an agenda from anywhere Asian sounds like a good reason to start panicking, but if Ladylee Tangleroad is 'just' a divine jerk she might be beatable without it being a huge problem, assuming she isn't actually a victim herself; just because she's immortal doesn't mean she can't be fought."
Noukan turned a look at me, and somehow he managed to raise an eyebrow exactly like a human. How did he even do that?
"I mean, not being able to actually kill her and not being able to stop her aren't necessarily the same thing," I pressed, uncomfortably conscious of the fact that Noukan doubting me just... I didn't want that. "Sealing away or banishing that which can't be killed is the classic solution, and simply burying something in concrete might actually do a pretty good job of keeping something that doesn't die from being able to do anything that matters anyway, especially if it's at the bottom of the ocean or chucked into space or something, just away. And if magic is a problem, stasis by definition would require preventative or external action, assuming a conventionally temporal nature, anyway.
"Besides which," I added, carefully cleaning my plate with contained obliteration of the little crumbs. "'Immortal' is an unhelpfully broad term that kind of just means that simply poking a hole or smacking with a stick won't do the job, just 'not mortal', literally. Ladylee Tangleroad may not necessarily even be the more significant kind of non-mortal and just unaging and really tough, or she might be an immortal immortal which is sort of just the same thing but a lot more, super-duper tough and requiring a whole lot of force or particular application of it."
I swept a hand at myself.
"An argument could be made that I am immortal, but there's the question of what it actually means, how far it goes, because I got shot in the head earlier—kerploosh, insides outside everywhere," I mimed with my hands as I had the last time I'd described my messiest death, "—but... here I am anyway still... but I still got shot in the head, and I didn't like it. If Ladylee Tangleroad can survive a car bomb, it may have still cost her something, even if it wasn't her life in totality, and a really big bomb that blasts her to scattered bitty bits or a more involved one that converts her body to ash or radiation, or something altogether different like some special god-slaying spear or a perfectly ordinary pointy stick in just the right spot or whatever... Well that might be a different story. She is harder to kill than normal, but how well can she survive more than normal efforts to kill?
"...moreover," I thought aloud, not just thinking of Ladylee Tangleroad as I regarded the clean plate. "How safe is her mind?"
Crack went fracturing bone, and I flinched in uncomfortable momentary press failing to move within my air shell.
Noukan licked at the exposed marrow before speaking again into the spreading silence.
"Perhaps not the best conversation for breakfast," he commented. It sounded like he was trying to be diplomatic.
I... had to agree. A part of me—parts, really—kind of thought it a little awkward for him to make such a remark while noisily gnawing on a bone at breakfast, but then, he was literally a dog, acting like a normal dog, so perhaps it was in fact normal enough. And I didn't want to bring myself down; on the whole, I was rather enjoying this morning across my entirety thus far, especially at Tokiwadai.
And that raised another point.
"Onto a different topic," I attempted in segue. "So, um... a-about... school?"
How was I supposed to actually ask?
By planning the conversation ahead of time, you idiot! I lamented.
Uh... Uh...
I swallowed.
Noukan was in a position to want me to go to school, wasn't he?
"S-So, um..."
Curses and fiddlesticks!
There was a major excavation right beneath me; maybe it could spontaneously fail and swallow me up?!
"Education is important," Noukan broke in with an agreeing tone.
"Yes!" I followed on a little too quickly, jerking up straight on my seat pad and almost bumping the low table. "Pursuant to that, uh, well, some degree of curiosity could be admitted as to how an individual might navigate society if... if perhaps something of a statistical outlier." Was that rude? Oh, you're a dog! How do you dog when you aren't human? "And expectation would be that Sir may have no small relevant expertise; in light of that," I swallowed, thoughts racing and a queasy uneasiness snaking through me as I held my hands flat on the table. I didn't want to screw this up! "...any assistance that might be deigned to perhaps be offered in enrollment into a good school would be most sincerely appreciated? Particularly... Tokiwadai...?"
Aaahh!
Please work, please work, please work!
Anyone in the magical girl mascot business could be expected to have opinions about school, but Noukan wasn't necessarily the only option for getting in—I was still walking that direction down the neatly kept sidewalks of School Garden far from here-there now that I knew where to go—but sneaking about even with a solid cover and actually getting enrolled were very different things, and I couldn't guarantee that I would actually manage somehow genuinely getting enrolled with Ryouran... plus I kind of secretly really, really liked the fantasy of the most elite academy for well-to-do young girls in the world that also specifically specialised in refining magical superpowers to their utmost.
I didn't know what I felt about the girl I had been templated from, the words just... just didn't work when I tried to spell it out to myself, but somehow I wanted to... show her how good I was? Make her have to acknowledge me or like me? Show her up and prove something to everyone else?
And accompanying another maid walking through Tokiwadai's somehow energetically over the top ostentatiousness—it was like a happily bombastic person except a building—I liked it here-there. Even just what I could see, even with almost nothing of consequence actually written down for convenient clairvoyant snooping, there was just so much to learn, to watch! First morning classes were in full swing throughout the campus, and each classroom was so vibrantly alive with engagement between the students and the professors, and even only vicariously present by sight, I could tell, really feel, that every single person here within Tokiwadai's walls and all who contributed to it carried a determination and passion to deliver their utmost, "Plus Ultra" taken up as privilege and principle.
It was a living monument to a dream to be best.
I couldn't imagine myself anywhere else now...
W-Well, I could, just... not not at Tokiwadai also while I was everywhere else too.
I thought Noukan might see something of what I held in my heart as he stared at me, nodding his doggy nod.
"Yes, it is a good school for young girls, I suppose," the big golden retriever admitted, before taking a draw from his cigar to blow a smoke ring overhead. How he did it with dog lips, I had no idea, but he did; he seemed like someone with lots of practice. "And you are right, I do have... some measure of 'relevant expertise' making things work out in a city meant more for the convenience of humans than a dog, no matter how shiny his coat or how good his nose. Arrangements... might be able to be made. As I recall, though," Noukan added, "it is also the school of the Number Three."
I looked down again, nodding while everything turned loudly silent in most of my heads and my hands suddenly felt clammy. I swallowed, unsure what to say, what to feel.
"Onee-sama..." I began quietly, and had no idea at all where I was going with this.
My fingers began to ache unable to clench within the rigid confines of my argon layer. I didn't let them, shouldn't.
"There are of course certain minimum standards of esper ability expected at Tokiwadai," Noukan said lightly from across the low table. Last I checked, Unabara-chan had a policy about Level 3 and up."
I jerked rigidly straight, a sudden sharp fire flooding through me.
"I can do that!" I protested without aim. "I can do that easily!"
The dog with the cultured tone of an older gentleman chuckled. "I believe you just might!"
I pouted pointedly, certain he was somehow making fun of me a little.
"Misaka Best will do her best!" I professed, hand to my chest in sincerity as I stood. "That's the honestest truth of all!"
Noukan quirked his head at me over his empty pot.
"Misaka Best..." he repeated. "Not Magical Girl Thundering Dawn?"
I blinked.
"Not right now? That's... how it works?"
Was this a human-dog thing?
"I think?"
Or a Noukan or mascot thing? I hadn't actually introduced myself both ways; I might have misstepped a propriety expectation thing.
"I can transform again if you like, wanna see? I've got some new ideas for how to really do it in style, because I'm definitely going to succeed as Academy City's biggest idol; it's hard to pick a better complementary skillset than being a one-girl lightshow! ...well, sort of one girl, I guess," I amended, hand on chin thoughtfully. "Do need to sort that out for performance marketing..."
I looked back up distractedly though as I noticed Noukan waving a paw in stilted motion as his stretching robo-hands began returning all the footstuff to the refrigerator. "Oh, no, no, that's quite alright, you needn't trouble yourself on this old man's account, Best-chan; it would probably be best to only use such power when the situation calls for it—you handled the machines at the aquarium well without needing to unleash it, after all." Then he cocked his head, musing more to himself than me, "Mental Out, Railgun, and... Thundering Dawn, mm, between like and dislike, that woman just might go for it."
Oh? I... I liked the sound of that! Maybe? Maybe not the idea of sharing a school with Mental Out, but that wouldn't be a problem anyway.
Then, "It sounds as though you've put some thought into this, though," Noukan continued.
I smiled, clenching my hands in excitement.
"Yeah! Oniichan gave me the idea, and it's just perfect, you know? It just fits!" I gave a little twirl, and spun a swirly streamer of glowing light around me as I did before giving Noukan a pose, winking between my fingers. "See? Really, Oniichan is probably the brightest person I've ever met... which isn't a whole lot, but still! He's the only one who seems to actually grasp what should be obvious in Personal Reality theory from what I've read from researchers' own work, and he's just really insightful, about everything!"
"...Oniichan?"
My smile bloomed into a full-on grin just thinking about introducing the two of them. We'd be amazing together!
I put on an enthusiastic announcer voice as I ran the figures for a posed silhouette likeness to colourify and twinkling sparkles, entirely uncaring how poorly a young girl's voice fit for it while I dimmed the kitchen-dining room and played roving spotlight cones from on high.
"The hero-est of heroes, bane of all burning buildings and surprising soup specialist, gutsiest Gemstone of Academy City, Sogiiiitaa GUNHA!"
Flash went the true-black silhouette with the sound of a screaming guitar note, and Oniichan stood proudly in Noukan's apartment, arms crossed over his chest to let his jacket-cape billow dramatically as a played up added glint effect shined out from his brilliant dazzly-white grin.
...that was so cool!
I matched my illusion's own grin, beaming at the big dog with bubbling excitement. I was going to rock being an idol!
Noukan didn't react.
He sat there at his cushion in front of the low table.
Staring.
The light and fluffy mane-like fur around his neck swayed faintly in the building's air conditioning.
"...ah," he finally uttered in a faint voice. "So... it's like that. We... are doing this," the golden retriever spoke as if to himself. "We're actually doing this, all the way."
I couldn't wait for Oniichan and Noukan to meet!
In fact, I didn't need to!
From the couch, I stirred, blinking blearily but unable to help the infectious giddiness.
Yes, this was gonna be a great morning!
"Hey, Noukan-san!" I called over, then from across the table from him, "Have you ever wanted to fly?"
I stared at the rough surface slanting across the small void I had made in the earth. The ground was more crumbly rock than claylike here as my projected construct held everything back from a pair of avatars, and the concrete illuminated by glowing ball of light flattened the face of it. I couldn't actually see it, though, which was why I had the light at all; it was only visible to my actual eyes, not my sight, and staring at the barrier in front of my noses almost felt disorienting, like I was somehow off balance or moving without moving.
I could make out the faint, silvery tracery shimmering and shifting like a gridline across the concrete, though.
Noukan's apartment had a magically concealed secret basement below the already big and fancy-looking normal one, and my physical eyeballs were the only thing that said it existed at all...
Neat!
I poked the flat wall.
Nothing happened.
"Aw..."
I didn't really expect the concrete to ripple and swirl open in an aperture in front of me or something, but I'd kinda been hoping...
The possibility that it might be violently warded and react aggressively didn't seem likely; what if some burrowing critter or bugs or plant roots came in contact? My newly refined argon sheath integrated into complementing hospital gown-turned sundress composite construct wasn't as liable to provoke a reaction as that, I figured, barring some presumable overly-complicated qualifiers.
I exchanged a shrug with myself, then took some inspiration from what I had done earlier to get into the skyscraper aquarium with a bit of a twist and streamlining. I couldn't see into the concrete, but I could make relative references from outside of it. So, I formulated a circular delineation with two different parts interwoven, some reaction bits to the figures to weave around electron clouds, and an annulment denying the attractive bridging between them. Forward it went, to describe a frictionless meter-wide tube also a meter long.
Nothing happened, again.
I put a hand on the exposed face of the concrete and gave it a gentle push, still to no reaction.
Ten-meter tube, then?
I redefined the region, and my wrapped two-dimensional plane suddenly slid in under gravity.
Woo-hoo!
Abruptly, everything snapped into place, and I beheld a veritable labyrinth stretching beneath Noukan's place, even as the big golden retriever snapped up to attention from his run before the television with his ears pricked forward.
"Weee!" I cheered in stereo as I slid down the opened chute to bonk into the suspended plug held in my mental grasp. I giggled as I pinwheeled twin momentary falls within the protection of my Adamant Air Armour.
That was fun!
And wow, Noukan was one fast doggo when the dog wanted to go.
I watched from below as he sprinted down the hallway of his apartment with impossible speed, bounding down a short stairwell like a ping-pong ball while I turned my focus back up to the borehole and my sleeping self still outside.
I probably shouldn't leave me alone, I supposed, and simultaneously clambered back up the wall with pseudo-sticky hands whilst momentarily awaiting Noukan and marveling at the interior of what could only be described with the words "secret base".
Standing at the top of a stair, I counted thirty-two sublevels, and so much of it was taken up by spaghetti-sprawl factory stuff and a big chamber section with a launch rail to a movable building several streets over straight out of Evangelion!
Cool!
I grinned, just... just looking at it all while I also slid the cylindrical plug back into place and outside restructured the ground back the way it had been on my surface return. I was almost jealous of myself, because I was stuck on self-babysitting duty while I got to watch a conveyor line a few floors beneath me levitate spindly mechanical limbs off toward some kind of spray treatment.
Noukan had a basement that was like a big workshop garage beneath his apartment, but below that, he had an entire gigantic factory!
I mentally leveraged the cylinder of reinforced concrete fused to some kind of foam-like lining between thick metallic plating and wood paneling back into the wall as I marveled at a truly enormous spool of something like a fiber optic line feeding through a portal on a wheeled stand to emerge past cramped machinery before needle-like arms wove it into different shapes to be sent off elsewhere, as if haphazard add-ons had improvised where there was no more room to work with. The instant the plug slid back into place, though, and I dropped the wrapping barrier of my power to allow the shifting electromagnetic clouds to stich themselves back together, it all vanished.
...except I could still see it anyway. Just only from within.
I stared back from outside.
It was weird with multiple perspectives that weren't really "from" anywhere in the first place yet overlapped but differed.
"This place is so cool!" I said aloud to Noukan from within as the big dog plunged from a ceiling hatch to swarm down on robo-arms. And it really was! It wasn't just that there was a bustling super-secret factory concealed a step beyond his already warded apartment that bent perceptions, but that the whole thing somehow also managed to take a bespoke look with lots of that rich wood paneling across all the walls and polished brass fittings around everything jutting from them, carpeting across the floors, carved balustrades girding all the stairs and sprawling catwalks—dogwalks—throughout the facility...
Noukan had a classy secret base!
The dapper dog himself came up short as he landed, ears back and tail still.
That was bad, wasn't it? That meant angry or scared or sad, negative.
"...oh, uh." I cleared my throat, less certain than a moment ago. "My complements to the decor, and apologies if surprise was caused. ...but this place is very neat," I had to add.
Noukan gave me a doggy stare.
It... was a very long stare.
"...Dawn-chan?" He stated, and I had no idea how he managed to say it so flatly and still inflect it as a question.
"Yes?"
"...what are you doing here?"
I, uh... I got the distinct impression that "I was bored" wasn't the right answer...
"I was really, really bored," an idiot defended. "I-I mean, well, just... just watching myself sleeping, laying there," I spluttered, and oh look, would you look at that, the railing's finial cap next to me was terribly fascinating...
Noukan's body swelled up like a balloon... and then he sighed, long and loud and profoundly human-like. Again.
"...sorry?" I tried, fidgeting.
"Are you hungry?" The oversized golden retriever replied apropos of nothing.
I blinked.
"What? Oh, um..." I thought a moment, wondering, because I definitely wouldn't say no to something to eat—probably; I didn't even actually know what I did or didn't like very much, or could eat, but Noukan clearly had doggy tastes personally even if he was also a smart dog—except would that be rude? But it also might be rude to decline? Noukan seemed like he might be the sort to think it a point of hospitality.
"Only if it's not too much trouble," I hedged, straightening up.
Noukan nodded in his very deliberate doggy way.
"Very good, then, let us be off to the kitchens. Right this way, if you please," he turned, and padded away from the stair landing toward a lift down a connecting few paces of hall with a small framed picture as if someone hand simply printed out a plain cartoony bone. "It is a joke," the dog explained, noticing me looking out of habit.
I made a vague neutral hum, trying to be diplomatic without knowing if it was supposed to be ironic or offensive or what.
Awaiting us in the rather roomy lift, though—which, a part of me realised idly, was probably because Noukan had a bigger quadruped footprint—was an intriguing contraption.
Noukan had built himself a completely clockwork lift operator.
That was a dog.
I smiled to myself, observing all the tiny little interlocking gears and drives and small chains, many of which seeming to serve no purpose at all but to add more moving bits, as with a flash of wiggly colour from Noukan's backpack splashing out, the statue art piece smoothly raised its snout up and pushed in the button for the ground floor with its metal nose... because this wasn't even the type of lift to need an operator and the whole thing was entirely superfluous, and evidently Noukan had just wanted to do it anyway.
"How long did it take to make this?" I wondered aloud, as much in directed question as not.
Beside me, Noukan seemed quite chuffed as he chuffed the verb way.
"Like it, do you?"
"It's very intricate," I nodded in admission with the smooth rise upward.
Ding went the little bell in sharp silvery chime.
"Mm, you might be surprised how quickly it came together, then," Noukan continued as he led me back through his slightly cluttered workshop-like apartment. "Once I had the design ready, the setup downstairs managed to fabricate it over breakfast some years ago, actually. What might you care to have for breakfast now, Dawn-chan?"
Speedily, I surveyed the interior of the upcoming kitchen refrigerator. Uh... And bread was over there.
"A sandwich would sound lovely, thank you. I've not had breakfast as this avatar this morning," I answered as we entered a somewhat surprisingly rather ordinary-looking kitchen/dining room, all but identical to what I beheld in all the nearby apartment units with a typical stove and countertop and the like to one side with a not-quite separated away table, though this table was low, the sort at place in a more traditional Japanese residence.
Did Noukan perk up a bit as he opened the refrigerator door, though?
"Avatar?" The golden retriever queried, and his eyes flicked toward where I lay sprawled on the couch, visible from here without needing sight like mine.
I took a seat.
"It seems an appropriate word?" I gave a shrug with my hands. "I mean, I'm me, this is me," I held my hands out. "But this isn't me me, because, well..." I gestured vaguely back at the living room. "I want to say, 'I'm over there too', but grammatically it seems as though it should be 'I'm over here too', except that still isn't right when I'm not saying it from there... here... whatever."
I pursed my lips as Noukan rooted around in the refrigerator with his spindly mechanical appendages, seeming to grab up half the contents, including a great big roasting pot with a hunk of marinading raw meat that looked like, well, as if it had been half eaten by an animal.
"I don't think the Japanese language was developed with bilocation in mind," I added frankly, mulling over the fact that with confusing context it was actually worse than English which still had awkward grammar.
"Mm, no," the dog mused, trotting back with his hands full and snagging the bread on his way over, another arm stretching way out to pluck a plate from the cupboard. "Leftovers, I don't feel like making anything... Help yourself, however you like it," he added more loudly than his muttering with a diverse spread taking the table courtesy of his dozen and more robo-hands reeling back in. "That one's not specifically intended for humans, though, and the hot sauce is hot," he added with a pointing nose to a jar of some kind of spread, and the adjacent bottle sporting a manga-fied face with literal burning eyes of determination and All The Degrees! emblazoned across the label.
...I wasn't a betting mad science creation, but I was pretty sure I didn't wanna test my dietary requirements with that.
"Much appreciated," I quipped, imagining as I slid the bread and plate over that I'd either melt into a corrosive puddle or spew actual fire.
Though... actually, I could go dragon-girl, now that I thought of it. I made sure I had nothing clinging to my shell of restrained argon as I took a couple pieces of bread and carefully analysed them, trying to dial in my focus between something less than extreme precision looking at the pervasive emptiness around everything and more conventional resolution, then with a spark of interest at the puzzle I'd given myself tried to slightly toast one of the slices without actually subjecting it to heat.
Results started to get mixed as I didn't really know what I was actually trying to do in rearranging the slice's bitty bread bits, and I resorted to a gentle infrared wash over the other slice while paying attention to what it did.
Behold, incredible amazing superpowers may yield slightly toasted sandwich bread!
...and then my stomach voiced its recognition of the feat.
I flushed. Betrayal! ...why did I have to make my speaker formulae work so seamlessly transmitting sound back and forth?
Noukan graciously declined to comment, and snaked an extending mechanical arm to the countertop where the bread had been, grabbing up one of the many pouches of doggy treats scattered about the place.
Studiously, I just quickly flash-seared a slight warming toasting to the other slice and mentally tugged on a few slices of cold cuts to likewise slap between the bread before focusing across the city where I tended to my new maidly duties around Tokiwadai and could assess a knife for emulation, pulling together its temporary construct likeness to triangle my sandwich and jam it in my mouth.
Misaka Best had a perfectly good excuse not to say anything!
...it was a good sandwich, though. Kind of plain when I wanted to keep food simple until I figured out what I could handle, but yummy.
Actually it was very yummy...
"This is really good," I felt compelled to say between bites, staring at the sandwich as if it might reveal its tasty secrets.
"Thank you, I do try to get the good stuff," Noukan commented from his padded seat across from me where he gnawed on his raw roast, occasionally popping another doggy treat in his mouth.
From the couch, I abruptly let out a muffled grunting snore-like noise in my sleep and unconsciously tried to shift within the air shell I maintained in place around my other self. I promptly resolved to let go of the transmitting membranes of air carrying sound through, and seized on the first topic I could think of.
"So, you mentioned an immortal earlier?" I raised more insistently than I'd meant. Meal time was time for conversation, let's talk about that, right now!
Somehow the golden retriever took on a very serious mien.
"Yes. Ladylee Tangleroad she calls herself. A young girl, one centuries upon centuries old, perhaps a thousand years or more."
My eyebrows rose a little. That didn't sound good.
"And she is problematic, I take it?"
I took another nibble of my sandwich, and Noukan put a paw upon the table, though I wasn't sure how the gesture was supposed to translate as he answered somberly, almost wary in tone.
"She is brilliant, materially wealthy as a result, obsessed with death from what I have gathered, definitively connected with at least instigating the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and locally a sabotage that nearly killed an entire crew of the Orion spaceplane three years ago, and extremely well versed in magic. Moreover, I have yet to be able to get the slightest whiff of her actually actively using magic despite my best efforts whilst maintaining keeping a paws-off approach, and between good and bad, that is what I consider the worst in what concerns me. She has the experience of her age, for all that she looks possibly younger than yourself."
I winced. That really, really didn't sound good...
"She isn't a vampire, is she? She sounds like maybe the thousand-year-old loli-vampire type, and not in a good way."
Noukan shook his head, more of a slow slewing motion that faster would have fit playing with a rope.
"No, arrangements were made after she came to attention, and the Deep Blood ability had no effect on her."
I chewed my lip, decidedly less tasty than my however-plain sandwich.
"I want to say that befriending her would be the smarter and right thing to do," I began, looking down at my plate thoughtfully. "Making a friend who doesn't need to be fought in the first place would be better and more reliable long-term, and I just don't like the idea of not trying to make a friend out of a could-be enemy on principle. ...but Ladylee Tangleroad doesn't sound like a very nice girl."
Noukan loosed a doggy chuff, and pulled out an already-lit cigar.
Hm...
"Do we know how good her immortality is, or... what kind of immortal she is?" I ventured. I simultaneously examined the sink faucet in my encompassing sight and within Tokiwadai analysed a glass for reference, emulating it across the city while mentally nudging the tap to pour into it with a screening filter. Despite the slightly dour atmosphere, I was lowkey proud of my little trick as I induced the glass to move over to where I sat.
"I should very much like to hear your thoughts on that free of any bias on my part, actually," Noukan demurred, eying the water glass as I took it up. "She has thus far survived a simple car bomb that I can personally verify."
Fair enough, I supposed as I took a sip. The water tasted funny, but then molecularly pure dihydrogen oxide was like that, and I didn't know what was supposed to be in water besides that.
"Well," I began. "If she is not a vampire, then she could potentially be some hypothetical other human-like non-human entity of the ageless sort, but just 'not dying of old age' is a lot less significant than being resilient to violence; plain biological immortality doesn't even require being special, like that little swimming creature with the tendrils that can live forever if it isn't killed, but being hard to kill is a pretty big step up from that.
"If we know where she's from or at least what part of the world she seems to fit, that may at least narrow it down," I continued aloud, finishing my first sandwich half. "Maybe pin down or exclude whether she's some kind of spirit or other supernatural entity, a former mortal who cultivated immortality, or a god or a fixture of how the world is that happens to also be a person..."
Hm, hmm, and hmm again...
"The kind of magic she knows might also be a clue, too," I muttered aloud in addition before taking another bite.
"She appears to be Greek," the big dog offered with a puff of his cigar, and I winced again. "Though that is with the caveat that I cannot guarantee she didn't fox the testing the way she has soundly redirected divinations aimed at herself. I find I do actually consider it more on the like end of things, though; I do not dislike the challenge, even if it bodes ill. Still, the mystery of life is that nothing is certain."
Greek...
"Hoo boy," I said lightly. "If she is Greek, then, uh... Yeah, that could definitely open up some possibilities," I had to admit between tasty nibbles. "I don't know if an eternally young child fits with the image of some kind of more-than-mortal offspring of a god the way something like nereids or cyclopes are sometimes portrayed if they're not just monsters or whatever, but it's hard to rule out a god with a screwy perspective and a bad attitude or someone cursed by just that."
Noukan gave a doggy nod.
"I thought much the same," he admitted at length, then crunched down on the awaiting meat bone.
I poked the problem around in my head as I finished my sandwich.
"This sounds like a classical mythology problem looking for someone to happen to," I considered aloud. "...at least it's maybe better than from further east? A prodigal child immortal with an agenda from anywhere Asian sounds like a good reason to start panicking, but if Ladylee Tangleroad is 'just' a divine jerk she might be beatable without it being a huge problem, assuming she isn't actually a victim herself; just because she's immortal doesn't mean she can't be fought."
Noukan turned a look at me, and somehow he managed to raise an eyebrow exactly like a human. How did he even do that?
"I mean, not being able to actually kill her and not being able to stop her aren't necessarily the same thing," I pressed, uncomfortably conscious of the fact that Noukan doubting me just... I didn't want that. "Sealing away or banishing that which can't be killed is the classic solution, and simply burying something in concrete might actually do a pretty good job of keeping something that doesn't die from being able to do anything that matters anyway, especially if it's at the bottom of the ocean or chucked into space or something, just away. And if magic is a problem, stasis by definition would require preventative or external action, assuming a conventionally temporal nature, anyway.
"Besides which," I added, carefully cleaning my plate with contained obliteration of the little crumbs. "'Immortal' is an unhelpfully broad term that kind of just means that simply poking a hole or smacking with a stick won't do the job, just 'not mortal', literally. Ladylee Tangleroad may not necessarily even be the more significant kind of non-mortal and just unaging and really tough, or she might be an immortal immortal which is sort of just the same thing but a lot more, super-duper tough and requiring a whole lot of force or particular application of it."
I swept a hand at myself.
"An argument could be made that I am immortal, but there's the question of what it actually means, how far it goes, because I got shot in the head earlier—kerploosh, insides outside everywhere," I mimed with my hands as I had the last time I'd described my messiest death, "—but... here I am anyway still... but I still got shot in the head, and I didn't like it. If Ladylee Tangleroad can survive a car bomb, it may have still cost her something, even if it wasn't her life in totality, and a really big bomb that blasts her to scattered bitty bits or a more involved one that converts her body to ash or radiation, or something altogether different like some special god-slaying spear or a perfectly ordinary pointy stick in just the right spot or whatever... Well that might be a different story. She is harder to kill than normal, but how well can she survive more than normal efforts to kill?
"...moreover," I thought aloud, not just thinking of Ladylee Tangleroad as I regarded the clean plate. "How safe is her mind?"
Crack went fracturing bone, and I flinched in uncomfortable momentary press failing to move within my air shell.
Noukan licked at the exposed marrow before speaking again into the spreading silence.
"Perhaps not the best conversation for breakfast," he commented. It sounded like he was trying to be diplomatic.
I... had to agree. A part of me—parts, really—kind of thought it a little awkward for him to make such a remark while noisily gnawing on a bone at breakfast, but then, he was literally a dog, acting like a normal dog, so perhaps it was in fact normal enough. And I didn't want to bring myself down; on the whole, I was rather enjoying this morning across my entirety thus far, especially at Tokiwadai.
And that raised another point.
"Onto a different topic," I attempted in segue. "So, um... a-about... school?"
How was I supposed to actually ask?
By planning the conversation ahead of time, you idiot! I lamented.
Uh... Uh...
I swallowed.
Noukan was in a position to want me to go to school, wasn't he?
"S-So, um..."
Curses and fiddlesticks!
There was a major excavation right beneath me; maybe it could spontaneously fail and swallow me up?!
"Education is important," Noukan broke in with an agreeing tone.
"Yes!" I followed on a little too quickly, jerking up straight on my seat pad and almost bumping the low table. "Pursuant to that, uh, well, some degree of curiosity could be admitted as to how an individual might navigate society if... if perhaps something of a statistical outlier." Was that rude? Oh, you're a dog! How do you dog when you aren't human? "And expectation would be that Sir may have no small relevant expertise; in light of that," I swallowed, thoughts racing and a queasy uneasiness snaking through me as I held my hands flat on the table. I didn't want to screw this up! "...any assistance that might be deigned to perhaps be offered in enrollment into a good school would be most sincerely appreciated? Particularly... Tokiwadai...?"
Aaahh!
Please work, please work, please work!
Anyone in the magical girl mascot business could be expected to have opinions about school, but Noukan wasn't necessarily the only option for getting in—I was still walking that direction down the neatly kept sidewalks of School Garden far from here-there now that I knew where to go—but sneaking about even with a solid cover and actually getting enrolled were very different things, and I couldn't guarantee that I would actually manage somehow genuinely getting enrolled with Ryouran... plus I kind of secretly really, really liked the fantasy of the most elite academy for well-to-do young girls in the world that also specifically specialised in refining magical superpowers to their utmost.
I didn't know what I felt about the girl I had been templated from, the words just... just didn't work when I tried to spell it out to myself, but somehow I wanted to... show her how good I was? Make her have to acknowledge me or like me? Show her up and prove something to everyone else?
And accompanying another maid walking through Tokiwadai's somehow energetically over the top ostentatiousness—it was like a happily bombastic person except a building—I liked it here-there. Even just what I could see, even with almost nothing of consequence actually written down for convenient clairvoyant snooping, there was just so much to learn, to watch! First morning classes were in full swing throughout the campus, and each classroom was so vibrantly alive with engagement between the students and the professors, and even only vicariously present by sight, I could tell, really feel, that every single person here within Tokiwadai's walls and all who contributed to it carried a determination and passion to deliver their utmost, "Plus Ultra" taken up as privilege and principle.
It was a living monument to a dream to be best.
I couldn't imagine myself anywhere else now...
W-Well, I could, just... not not at Tokiwadai also while I was everywhere else too.
I thought Noukan might see something of what I held in my heart as he stared at me, nodding his doggy nod.
"Yes, it is a good school for young girls, I suppose," the big golden retriever admitted, before taking a draw from his cigar to blow a smoke ring overhead. How he did it with dog lips, I had no idea, but he did; he seemed like someone with lots of practice. "And you are right, I do have... some measure of 'relevant expertise' making things work out in a city meant more for the convenience of humans than a dog, no matter how shiny his coat or how good his nose. Arrangements... might be able to be made. As I recall, though," Noukan added, "it is also the school of the Number Three."
I looked down again, nodding while everything turned loudly silent in most of my heads and my hands suddenly felt clammy. I swallowed, unsure what to say, what to feel.
"Onee-sama..." I began quietly, and had no idea at all where I was going with this.
My fingers began to ache unable to clench within the rigid confines of my argon layer. I didn't let them, shouldn't.
"There are of course certain minimum standards of esper ability expected at Tokiwadai," Noukan said lightly from across the low table. Last I checked, Unabara-chan had a policy about Level 3 and up."
I jerked rigidly straight, a sudden sharp fire flooding through me.
"I can do that!" I protested without aim. "I can do that easily!"
The dog with the cultured tone of an older gentleman chuckled. "I believe you just might!"
I pouted pointedly, certain he was somehow making fun of me a little.
"Misaka Best will do her best!" I professed, hand to my chest in sincerity as I stood. "That's the honestest truth of all!"
Noukan quirked his head at me over his empty pot.
"Misaka Best..." he repeated. "Not Magical Girl Thundering Dawn?"
I blinked.
"Not right now? That's... how it works?"
Was this a human-dog thing?
"I think?"
Or a Noukan or mascot thing? I hadn't actually introduced myself both ways; I might have misstepped a propriety expectation thing.
"I can transform again if you like, wanna see? I've got some new ideas for how to really do it in style, because I'm definitely going to succeed as Academy City's biggest idol; it's hard to pick a better complementary skillset than being a one-girl lightshow! ...well, sort of one girl, I guess," I amended, hand on chin thoughtfully. "Do need to sort that out for performance marketing..."
I looked back up distractedly though as I noticed Noukan waving a paw in stilted motion as his stretching robo-hands began returning all the footstuff to the refrigerator. "Oh, no, no, that's quite alright, you needn't trouble yourself on this old man's account, Best-chan; it would probably be best to only use such power when the situation calls for it—you handled the machines at the aquarium well without needing to unleash it, after all." Then he cocked his head, musing more to himself than me, "Mental Out, Railgun, and... Thundering Dawn, mm, between like and dislike, that woman just might go for it."
Oh? I... I liked the sound of that! Maybe? Maybe not the idea of sharing a school with Mental Out, but that wouldn't be a problem anyway.
Then, "It sounds as though you've put some thought into this, though," Noukan continued.
I smiled, clenching my hands in excitement.
"Yeah! Oniichan gave me the idea, and it's just perfect, you know? It just fits!" I gave a little twirl, and spun a swirly streamer of glowing light around me as I did before giving Noukan a pose, winking between my fingers. "See? Really, Oniichan is probably the brightest person I've ever met... which isn't a whole lot, but still! He's the only one who seems to actually grasp what should be obvious in Personal Reality theory from what I've read from researchers' own work, and he's just really insightful, about everything!"
"...Oniichan?"
My smile bloomed into a full-on grin just thinking about introducing the two of them. We'd be amazing together!
I put on an enthusiastic announcer voice as I ran the figures for a posed silhouette likeness to colourify and twinkling sparkles, entirely uncaring how poorly a young girl's voice fit for it while I dimmed the kitchen-dining room and played roving spotlight cones from on high.
"The hero-est of heroes, bane of all burning buildings and surprising soup specialist, gutsiest Gemstone of Academy City, Sogiiiitaa GUNHA!"
Flash went the true-black silhouette with the sound of a screaming guitar note, and Oniichan stood proudly in Noukan's apartment, arms crossed over his chest to let his jacket-cape billow dramatically as a played up added glint effect shined out from his brilliant dazzly-white grin.
...that was so cool!
I matched my illusion's own grin, beaming at the big dog with bubbling excitement. I was going to rock being an idol!
Noukan didn't react.
He sat there at his cushion in front of the low table.
Staring.
The light and fluffy mane-like fur around his neck swayed faintly in the building's air conditioning.
"...ah," he finally uttered in a faint voice. "So... it's like that. We... are doing this," the golden retriever spoke as if to himself. "We're actually doing this, all the way."
I couldn't wait for Oniichan and Noukan to meet!
In fact, I didn't need to!
From the couch, I stirred, blinking blearily but unable to help the infectious giddiness.
Yes, this was gonna be a great morning!
"Hey, Noukan-san!" I called over, then from across the table from him, "Have you ever wanted to fly?"