Companion Chronicles [Jumpchain/Multicross SI] [Currently visiting: INTERMISSION]
- Thread starter Tempestuous
- Start date
- Location
- Sol III, Orion Arm, Milky Way
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Best of luck to you!
Status
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
Oh, what a week.
TMS has been... interesting. Turns out the first step in stimulating someone's brain with magnets is checking your 'aim'; thus, the first 30 minutes of my experience with the treatment consisted of someone walking their shots across my motor cortex and watching me twitch in response. It didn't hurt—it wasn't even as bad as the ol' 'hit the knee' reflex check—but it still felt damned weird, especially when every 'pulse' came with the feeling of someone giving me a brisk tap on the head with their knuckles despite there being no moving parts. The magnetic field is strong enough to feel.
The actual therapy doesn't consist of a single strong pulse but a short burst of rapid-fire pulses between long rests, administered in 30-minute sessions every weekday. The best description I can offer is that it feels like I'm wearing a hard-hat, and someone decided it would be funny to creep up behind me and rub a washboard over the top of the hat. It feels less like someone jostling my head and more like someone jostling a helmet I'm wearing, in other words.
It also causes my jaw to twitch because the nerves that control those muscles pass over the outside of my skull above the part of the brain they're targeting, so now I know what it feels like to have a facial tic I guess.
According to the doctor, it takes about two weeks before patients begin seeing improvement in their symptoms, and I've only just finished week one. Having an imposed schedule every day has been good for my executive function, I think, but the act of going outside for more than an hour every day (~40 minute round-trip + 30 minute session + waiting room time) uses up all the energy my newfound schedule has granted me and then some.
And then I got an ingrown toenail (probably because I went from wearing shoes 2-3 times per week for half an hour to 5-6 times a week for an hour and a half), which then got infected only a few days later and forced me to go to Urgent Care (because the podiatrist couldn't get me in for a week), then to that podiatrist because the doctor at UC called them to get the rushed appointment I'd asked for (not that I blame them; they probably deal with 'self-diagnosed emergencies' all the time), on either side of the TMS appointment I already had yesterday, none of which I could drive myself to because the foot I usually use for the pedals was Out of Order... I had a long fucking day yesterday is what I'm getting at.
The bad news (for you guys) is that the hiatus will continue at the very least until Nov 6. I simply don't have the energy to deal with other stuff right now. I might have a few snippets to share to tide you over, but I can't promise anything but another "Hello" next week.
Thank you for your patience.
TMS has been... interesting. Turns out the first step in stimulating someone's brain with magnets is checking your 'aim'; thus, the first 30 minutes of my experience with the treatment consisted of someone walking their shots across my motor cortex and watching me twitch in response. It didn't hurt—it wasn't even as bad as the ol' 'hit the knee' reflex check—but it still felt damned weird, especially when every 'pulse' came with the feeling of someone giving me a brisk tap on the head with their knuckles despite there being no moving parts. The magnetic field is strong enough to feel.
The actual therapy doesn't consist of a single strong pulse but a short burst of rapid-fire pulses between long rests, administered in 30-minute sessions every weekday. The best description I can offer is that it feels like I'm wearing a hard-hat, and someone decided it would be funny to creep up behind me and rub a washboard over the top of the hat. It feels less like someone jostling my head and more like someone jostling a helmet I'm wearing, in other words.
It also causes my jaw to twitch because the nerves that control those muscles pass over the outside of my skull above the part of the brain they're targeting, so now I know what it feels like to have a facial tic I guess.
According to the doctor, it takes about two weeks before patients begin seeing improvement in their symptoms, and I've only just finished week one. Having an imposed schedule every day has been good for my executive function, I think, but the act of going outside for more than an hour every day (~40 minute round-trip + 30 minute session + waiting room time) uses up all the energy my newfound schedule has granted me and then some.
And then I got an ingrown toenail (probably because I went from wearing shoes 2-3 times per week for half an hour to 5-6 times a week for an hour and a half), which then got infected only a few days later and forced me to go to Urgent Care (because the podiatrist couldn't get me in for a week), then to that podiatrist because the doctor at UC called them to get the rushed appointment I'd asked for (not that I blame them; they probably deal with 'self-diagnosed emergencies' all the time), on either side of the TMS appointment I already had yesterday, none of which I could drive myself to because the foot I usually use for the pedals was Out of Order... I had a long fucking day yesterday is what I'm getting at.
The bad news (for you guys) is that the hiatus will continue at the very least until Nov 6. I simply don't have the energy to deal with other stuff right now. I might have a few snippets to share to tide you over, but I can't promise anything but another "Hello" next week.
Thank you for your patience.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So what you're saying is, there's trouble afoot.
...hope everything is OK now/feel better soon!
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Wow sounds like all this has been more than a little rough for you... Fingers crossed you come out the other side with results worth the effort and don't worry about us oki? You providing us a free story puts you under no obligations to put that over your own wellbeing.
Sharkijism
Bubble noises*
- Location
- Southeast Asia
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Wish you the best! I'm sure you'll nail the rest of your appointments ;D
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
I'm not dead!
Unfortunately I've had a couple truly awful days as far as executive function goes, so I have nothing to show today. The plan remains for the next story update on 11/7.
Unfortunately I've had a couple truly awful days as far as executive function goes, so I have nothing to show today. The plan remains for the next story update on 11/7.
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Take care of yourself! We'll be here when you're ready to get back to this.
Hiatus Extended by Doctor's Orders
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
More or less.
I've entered the phase of treatment where I can expect to see some changes in my mood, and the doctor instructed me to avoid making changes in my life as much as possible (to eliminate other variables and better measure the benefits). Since this project is one of the most stressful parts of my life right now, it only makes sense to keep it on hold, likely until the end of treatment.
Companion Chronicles will return in late November.
I've entered the phase of treatment where I can expect to see some changes in my mood, and the doctor instructed me to avoid making changes in my life as much as possible (to eliminate other variables and better measure the benefits). Since this project is one of the most stressful parts of my life right now, it only makes sense to keep it on hold, likely until the end of treatment.
Companion Chronicles will return in late November.
Take all the time you need! We waited after the BoF jump, and we're all still here. We'll wait again. You're worth it!
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Understandable! Hope that the mood changes are positive!
Chapter 108: Ride of the Valkyries
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.
Oddly enough, another person I ended up talking 'magic' with was Paul.
"I'm looking to do something different for my next book," he told me when we ran into each other at the New Year's Eve party that no one had felt it necessary to disinvite him from. "I've tried 'gaslamp fantasy', 'science fantasy', and 'urban fantasy', and now I'm kinda itching to go full classical 'swords-and-sorcery fantasy'. The problem I'm having right now is with the magic. In my previous books, 'magic' was always in the background, so I never really needed to describe why it did anything it did. But the story I want to tell this time needs it to be more, um, 'in focus'?"
"And you're trying to come up with a cohesive, consistent spellcasting system?" I guessed.
"It's more that I'm trying to limit it."
"Ah."
Paul paused to wave back to someone I didn't know, then turned and led the way towards a less noisy area of the house. "I don't think I need to go too deeply into how it works as long as I'm clear on what it can and cannot do, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to let it do what I want it to do without making doing those things, you know, stupid. For example, if you can create a fireball, why throw it at a person rather than just making fire appear around them?"
"Well, what do you want magic to enable, exactly?"
"Mostly, superhuman-martial-arts sword fights with a lot of flashy magical attacks, leaping and dodging, sword throwing, and stuff. But I also want there to be pure wizards, not just battlemages."
I nodded along.
"The problem," he concluded, "is trying to figure out a single system of magic that lets those two things coexist."
"So, you want both battlemages and pure casters to be useful."
"Not just useful but logical. You know, things that people within the world would have reason to consider good ideas. I also want the pure casters to use certain kinds of attacks: fireballs and lightning bolts and not, I don't know, 'stop person's heart' spells."
"So your super-martial-artist battlemages can dodge," I guessed.
"Yeah." Paul grinned. "Yeah, you get it."
"What kind of magic do the battlemages use, then?"
"Spells to give themselves superhuman strength, speed, and toughness." His grin widened at the invitation to delve deeper into the topic. "That's mostly what I meant by 'superhuman-martial-arts sword fights'. A lot of leaping around, crazy dodging, all sorts of dynamic stuff. They might throw the odd fireball or whatever, but that's more of a utility thing than their main offense."
"So there are a whole lot of spells that give those sorts of physical bonuses."
"Yeah, but only to the caster, so you can't just put them on a bunch of people and have an instant army. In fact, using magic on yourself ought to be a lot easier than on other people. That way, it'd be more effective for most people to focus on making themselves stronger magically rather than learning how to set people on fire. And some people would learn how to set people on fire anyway if only to stay the heck out of range of the guys with swords.
"The thing is," he continued, "I want there to be some underlying reason for why the people in this world do things that way. And why when people do learn purely magical attacks, they learn fireballs and not 'head explosion'. Like, maybe something about one's body is special when it comes to magic?"
"A person's soul rejects magic that isn't their own?"
"Oooh, I like that. How would that work?"
"Hmm." I put a hand to my chin. "What if it was, like, a field around a person?"
Paul raised an eyebrow. "A field? Like a magnetic field?"
"Yeah, something that extends outwards from the body a bit. Say it's really hard to 'start' a magic effect that's not within your own field, so when you want to set someone on fire, you 'start' the fire spell in your hand and then throw it? Or you start one end of the lightning bolt at your fingertips and shoot it?"
"Oh, I like that. But when I said 'lightning bolts' I meant from the sky."
"Hmm…"
I took a pull from my root beer, then suggested, "What if the planet has its own field?"
Paul lit up. "Oh! And it could partially counter out the ease of working in one's own field?"
"Yeah. So for some spells, it's easier to just start the spell up high in the sky where there are no fields, 'friend' or 'foe'. Like lightning, or the classic 'meteor' spell."
"Or maybe it's not necessarily 'easier' to work magic up there, but really high-power spells are dangerous to use in your own field?" He was talking so fast he was almost tripping over his own words, too excited to wait for his mortal mouth. "Like, normally, your field is so strong the planet's doesn't matter, but if you don't want to use all that magic too close to yourself, you need another option. It's really hard to work outside your field, so you wouldn't bother unless there was a good reason, and you'd want to have nothing else interfere or it'd be even harder."
"So the sky-to-ground spells are always the strongest and flashiest?"
"Yeah, that's right! And the most dangerous and hard to aim!"
"And your battlemages jump rather than fly because lifting your body with its own magic field is like trying to lift yourself by pulling up on your shoes," I added.
"Yes, yes! And the field thing solves the ranged magic question, too, because it's really hard to just set a person's clothes on fire when their field extends far enough from their body to protect what they're wearing and carrying."
"That was exactly what I was thinking when I suggested it! Say, would that mean that people with better magical training would be better protected?"
"Like, because they can cast spells on their clothes that are in the field?"
"That's not a bad idea," I said, "but I meant protected by the field in general. You know, a stronger field protects you better from hostile magic because it 'rejects' it harder."
"Hmm… probably?" Paul ventured. "But I'd say that that bit's the easiest to learn. Or, no, not the easiest, necessarily, but the first thing taught. The starting point. You have to be in touch with your own magic field before you do anything with it, and that's what helps block other people's magic."
"Then on to self-targeted magic, with offensive magic taking the most effort to master?"
"Yeah, that sounds right."
"But it doesn't take much training to be effectively immune to Targeted Head Explosion,"
"Yeah, so just about everyone…" he trailed off, then started over. "Actually, no, I changed my mind. If it's something I want everyone to have, I'm going to say everyone's more or less equally well protected. Magic doesn't help because the field isn't, strictly speaking, magic. It's, like, 'soul stuff', right? Soul power, not mana or whatever I call it."
"Can you cast from soul-power?"
"Interesting idea for a special talent, but in general I'll say 'no'."
"It could be a total defense-penetrating thing if you want to have a character who's off the power curve," I suggested.
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking when I said 'special talent'."
"What about healing magic?"
Paul grinned. "Healing magic is hard because you have to work within someone else's field."
"Then what about self-healing magic?"
That brought him up short.
"I'd intended for self-healing to be impossible," he said, "but the way we've made the system, it should be easier than healing other people, shouldn't it?"
"If the field is the thing stopping healing from working, maybe," I said. "Is that a problem, narratively speaking? It just changes the win condition from 'injure enemy' to 'deplete enemy mana bar'. Plus, if you let your mages self-heal, they can land more powerful hits on each other without ending the fight."
"Stormlight Archives already did the 'mana bar as an extra health bar' thing, though."
"So? Gandalf riding Shadowfax doesn't mean no one else can put a wizard on a horse."
"That's true," Paul allowed, "but it's not what I had in mind. I think healing magic ought to be slow and complicated; otherwise, characters can't get 'injured', only 'killed' or 'not killed'."
"Well, biology is complicated."
"Yeah, that's the typical excuse, but that raises the question of how the enhancement magic does its stuff."
"What if healing is just a subtype of self-enhancement magic?" I suggested.
"So there are ways to make your body heal faster, but it's still natural healing at the end of the day? Yeah, that works. And the 'soul' nature of the field is why self-enhancement magic is easy—damn, I need to write this down."
I pulled a small pocket-sized notepad and pen out of my purse and pushed them into Paul's eager hands.
"Thanks!" he said. "Okay, we had, uh, fields…"
The two of us spent a couple minutes running back through the conversation, then onwards into edge cases, exceptions, and special powers. We were so absorbed we'd have missed the ball drop if Homura hadn't interrupted us, and we went right back to the conversation afterwards. By the time we'd finished, the party was over, most people had already left, and Paul had used up the rest of the notepad and scrawled the last couple noteworthy points onto the cardboard backing.
"Wow," he said, "this was a great brainstorming session. Uh, sorry about the notepad."
"No problem. They come in packs of eight 'cause they're so tiny."
"Heh. Makes sense." He returned my ballpoint pen, now missing an appreciable amount of ink. "Thanks a lot."
"Anytime. I can't wait to see what you do with it."
"I'll keep you posted. Goodnight, Cassandra."
"'Night, Paul."
Paul had barely departed before Roxy ambushed me with a backstab of a one-armed hug that was nearly a headlock, an empty wineglass in her other hand.
"So, you and Paul, huh?" Her pronunciation was impressively normal for the amount of alcohol on her breath.
"What?"
"Oh, come on, Cass, you two were huddled together all night. How long've you been dating?"
"We're not dating."
"Riiiight," she drawled. "You were two having a nice, platonic huddle."
"We were brainstorming ideas for his next novel."
"Oh, a romance of the minds, then? Attracted to intelligence?"
"Lay off," I grumbled, finally annoyed enough to push her away. "Not every male/female friendship is about romance."
Roxy gave me a pitying look. "Lots'a women think that, but sooner or later the guy's gonna want more."
"We'll agree to disagree, there."
"I'm just sayin'. Be careful, hon."
"You don't have to worry about me." I gave her a confident smile. "Uh, what's up with you lately? You were going to Loamhill, right?"
"Ages ago. S'only a two year program. Could'a transferred, but I reckoned any money I'd make from having a degree'd just go right back to paying off the loans, so what's even the point? Sides, Raymond's' a pretty good gig, A-T-C."
"ATC?" I repeated.
"All things considered."
"Ah. Pays well, then?"
She started to agree, only to be interrupted by a yawn that turned her 'Yeah' into 'Yeaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwww'.
"Damn," Roxy muttered. "Can't party like I used to."
"Need a ride?"
"Naaaaah. Taxi'd here, taxiing home." She suddenly remembered the wineglass in her hand and put it down on the nearest available surface, which happened to be an end table near the entertainment center. "Goodnight, Cass."
"'Night, Roxy."
Before I knew it, the school year was already coming to a close. Chloe got into UCLA. Megan got into MVU. Ashley was off to Minnesota, Nick to Texas.
We said our goodbyes on the last day of school before graduation. They wouldn't be leaving for weeks or months, but their time using Home Sweet Home as a not-quite-private cafeteria was over.
"I'm gonna miss you guys," I told them—because I would. Maybe June had had a point when she'd referred to them as 'my kids'. "Keep yourselves safe and study hard, okay?"
"Yes, mom," Ashley drawled.
"I wish," Megan muttered.
"We'll be all right," Chloe said. "Thanks for everything."
"Thanks," Nick echoed.
"I can still visit!" Megan reminded me. "I've got a car, now!"
"And a cat," June added.
"And a friend," Megan amended, reaching out to scratch June behind her ears.
The other two girls exchanged a glance while Nick looked on impassively.
"They're giving me diabetes," Ashley complained. "This is assault."
"No cookies for you, then," Chloe said, raising a hand to confiscate her friend's half-eaten treat.
"Nevermind everything's fine don't you dare—!"
I ducked back into the kitchen one day in early summer—or maybe the middle of summer; I'd never cared to learn where people defined the cutoff between the two to be—to celebrate a momentous occasion.
"Happy midpoint!"
Homura smiled, not looking up from the dough she was currently portioning out onto a baking sheet. "You timed it down to the minute."
"Of course I did. Hard to believe it's been five years, huh?"
"No comment."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"My subjective measurement of time is perfect," she said. "As such, I know with absolute certainty it has been five years."
"Spoilsport."
Homura rolled her eyes as she displayed an uncanny ability to pick up half a dozen cookie sheets and carry them to the ovens all at once. "Enjoy your half-a-jump?"
"Sure have. You?"
"I as well. Give me a hand while you're back here?"
I stepped fully into the kitchen and over to where Homura was exchanging the freshly-prepared dough for already-baked cookies. It was the work of a minute to swap the baking sheets, and another minute to transfer the cookies to the cooling rack—which required us to first empty the rack, currently holding the previous batch of cookies, onto a wax-paper-lined tray.
"I'm going to miss this," Homura said as we worked.
"Baking?"
"No, the whole… simple life. Relaxing. Laughing at jokes."
I hid a frown and kept my tone as light as I could. "Laughing at jokes is temporary?"
"I am going to be going back to 'normal' sooner or later. Don't misunderstand; I'm happy you convinced me to relax. The last five years have been…"
Homura stopped talking as she thought, though her hands never slowed.
"…healing," she decided.
"I'm glad."
"But I will be returning to my… my mission, I suppose. And my focus."
"Ah."
"But we're not going back to strangers," Homura added. "In the end, you were right: I'm not an insecure little girl, and I don't want to spend the rest of my time on the 'chain alone. But there's still some comfort and safety in keeping apart from the larger crowd."
"I'll support you in doing whatever makes you comfortable, and I'll do anything I can to help."
"I know you will. And right now, 'helping' means taking these"—she handed me the tray loaded with freshly cooled cookies—"out for sale."
"Yes, ma'am!"
My phone chimed only a couple hours later, just as the afternoon rush was due to start.
freaky albino faerie
OMG did you hear???
About Zeke!!
Read 1:54 pm ( . . . )
"Sorry," I told the woman currently browsing the pastries on offer. "I need to take this."
I punched 'Call' as I ducked into the back of the shop, only to nearly run smack into Zero herself. "Gah!"
"Sorry!" Zero yelled over my outburst. "Typing was taking too long."
"Yeah, that's why I was trying to call. What happened to Zeke?"
"He—"
"Wait, hold on." I stuck my head back into the kitchen, but the place was empty (and spotless). "Sorry, nevermind, Homura must have stepped out. What happened to Zeke?"
"He got hit by a truck!"
"What?!"
"Relax," Zero urged me. "It's not like 'he's in the hospital' hit by a truck—"
"That's worse!"
"Not like 'he was injured' hit by a truck, then."
"What other kinds of 'hit by a truck' are there?"
"A goddamn sixteen-wheeler truck went right through his living room and fucking isekai'd him into a another dimension."
I stared at her for a few seconds as I processed the absolute bullshit I'd just heard.
"What."
"Yeah."
"No, hold on. A truck hit his house?"
Zero shook her head. "It didn't hit it, it went through it. Like, burst through a door, went through the living room, right over where he was standing, and disappeared out another door."
"That doesn't make any goddamn sense."
"Which makes it really obvious whose fault it is, doesn't it?"
"Christ."
I pulled my phone back out to dial Max, only for Zero to pluck it out of my hand.
"Don't," she told me. "Max is in a seriously bad mood."
"Of course he is!"
"Yeah, but exposing yourself to it isn't gonna help him." Zero glanced down at my phone, then back up at me. "Cass."
"What?"
"You have me in your contacts as 'Freaky Albino Faerie'."
"Don't go through my phone!" I tried to snatch it back, only for her to float up and out of reach. "Hey! Gimme that!"
"You can have it back when you explain yourself!" she called down, waving the phone at me.
"Ugh, fine. I got a second- or third-hand summary of the park thing and it went something like, 'a freaky albino faerie gave my friend a magic cat.'"
Zero kept her word and returned my phone. "They're not wrong."
"That was my reaction."
"Of course it was. You know, shit like this is why we're friends."
"Our sense of humor?" I ventured.
"Exactly!"
I frowned as I looked down at my phone again. "Should I call Gary?"
"Nah. Give them some space."
"If you say so." I leaned back against the wall and let out a long, weary sigh. "I don't suppose we have any idea where he went?"
"We do, actually."
"Oh?"
Zero nodded. "Management owned up to it. He's in Valkyrie Core. The 'Enhanced Edition' VN continuity, specifically. I'm so fucking mad it's not even funny!"
"Why?"
"Because I would've wanted to go too!" She shrunk down to the form of a petulant little girl to really sell her pout, only to pop back to normal a second later, angst forgotten.
"I've… never heard of it."
"Well, we can fix that easily enough. Start with the anime; it's easier to get into and actually has exposition rather than making you read an entire fucking non-visual novel worth of codex entries if you want to know why these people are learning to fight in the first place."
"I guess I'll do that, then," I muttered. "Eventually. Thanks for the heads-up."
"No problem," Zero said. "Oh, but make sure you get the right one, 'cause the names are a bit confusing. There are a bunch of Valkyrie Core Insert-Subtitle-Here series—Valkyrie Core RAVENZ is my favorite, personally—but the one that best adapts the original VN as a whole is named Valkyrie Drive!, not Core. Fucking dumb, right? See, they used Core without subtitles for an OVA that follows one specific route, but it has the same shitty lack-of-context problem as the original VN and relegates the rest of the cast to background characters, so it's only really for people who were already fans of that pairing. As for the subtitled series you might care about, Skybreaker is very much the Fate/Zero to Drive!'s Stay Night: prequel, better story because it's not pegged to a visual novel, but not representative of said visual novel; Splinter Angle is an OVA collection that crams each route into its own forty-minute short, which makes it better and worse than Core in different ways; and RAVENZ is another continuity altogether. I might like it more than the original timeline, personally, but it's much darker."
I was starting to get the feeling Zero liked the franchise.
"Uh… right," I said. "Will do."
That evening, I grabbed a copy of Valkyrie Drive! Season 1 (of 3) from the Warehouse's Library.
"What've you got there?" Homura asked as I returned to the apartment.
"Valkyrie Drive!. Ever heard of it?"
"I have. Why that one?"
"Zeke got isekai'd by an implausible truck."
Homura frowned as she tried and failed to make my statement make sense. "You are going to have to run that by me again," she declared, which was more or less the same as my reaction to the news after one accounted for her indefatigable Homura-ness, and so I explained, briefly, my earlier conversation with Zero.
"…and Management said he ended up here," I finished, indicating the DVD case I was holding. "Well, the visual novel continuity, but Zero recommended the anime; I don't know anything about it. What's the elevator pitch?"
"Infinite Stratos meets Symphogear." Homura realized I didn't understand either reference and added, "Think Strike Witches by way of Armored Core, but a harem anime," which didn't help much. Still, I understood the last two words well enough.
"Well, curiosity killed the cat," I grumbled. "Care to join me?"
"I may as well."
I popped the disk in and started the show, and god help me, I enjoyed it unironically. The lack of the most egregious harem tropes helped, but there were plenty of things to enjoy besides that. The blend of hard military fiction and outrageous sci-fi martial arts bullshit. The beautifully rendered action sequences. The well-developed, sympathetic characters. The hilarious badassery.
"Did she just parry his sword with her thumb?"
Yet despite the cheery attitude of the show and the relative safety of the action thus far, it was still a story about soldiers barely old enough to be called 'adults' training to fight and possibly die in a war against an existential threat to all of humanity—and as the credits rolled on the final episode of the season early the next morning, I remembered why we were watching the show in the first place.
"I hope Zeke's all right," I said.
"Me too," Homura agreed.
I returned the DVD to the Library and declined to pick up the second season while I was there.
"That motherfucker," Max spat.
I'd given her a few days to cool off before I called. I could have probably waited a few weeks and gotten the same result.
"Zeke decided not to go to college," she said. "It made sense to me. Management was clear that Zeke was to go to high school, and I kind of get that. The social experience was good for him, and it was probably entertaining for them, whatever that means. But Zeke didn't want to spend four years 'learning' knowledge he already had just for a certificate of achievement. Management called and asked him to attend. He said that it hadn't been specified at the beginning of the Jump and refused, and I backed him up."
"So they hit him with a truck to send him back for more school hijinks?"
"This isn't just 'more school hijinks'. He's in a goddamn war zone!"
I was lying on the couch, phone in my lap, buds in my ears. Max was still at work; in theory, she was trying to track down where her son had disappeared to despite officially being off the case. In practice, she knew exactly when and where he was and had no way to do anything about it.
I suspected it had been a very long time since Max had been in a position where she had no way to do something about something.
"This isn't some monkey's paw bullshit, or 'read the fine print', or 'be careful what you wish for'," she growled. "This is straight-up cheating. Changing the rules, altering the deal, whatever. It's a fucking cheat."
"Did you really trust Management in the first place?"
"I never trusted them to be fair, but I thought they'd at least stick to their own goddamn rules, however bullshit they might be. At least they'd be predictable in screwing with us."
"Are you sure they haven't?" I asked. "There's no precedent for this kind of 'rescheduling'?"
"Can you imagine Zeke agreeing to go off alone? That they found something to offer him worth putting up with five or more years in a war-torn post-Apocalypse, cut off from all his friends?"
I had to admit I couldn't; given his insistence on calling me every month, I'd actually been getting a little worried that he was developing some sort of separation-anxiety-adjacent issue.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I don't know. It's not like there's some higher authority I can appeal to. All I can do is complain and refuse to cooperate."
"They're gonna punish you for that."
"If they'd stuck to the rules, I might care," Max snipped. "What do you want me to do, Cass? I have to do something, or they'll think they can get away with whatever they want."
"That's literally the case, though."
There was a long pause.
"Fuuuck," she groaned.
There was a longer pause.
"No matter how rigged the game," I said, slowly, each word weighed and measured, "you can always walk away."
"And if they call my bluff?"
"Would it be a bluff?"
Another pause.
"It would," Max said.
"That's that, then."
"No, it's… yeah. Fuck."
"Fuck," I agreed.
I tempered my anxiety about Zeke's fate with both my confidence in him and my powerlessness to affect the situation. I'd always had an easy time compartmentalizing problems away for later—a talent that had grown into full-blown dissociation by middle school—so it was second nature to push the problem out of mind until I'd functionally forgotten about it.
On the one hand, 'I forgot my friend is trapped in a horrible war' is a pretty terrible thing to say, but on the other, there wasn't really a good alternative. It was out of my hands in every way that mattered, so all dwelling on it would have accomplished is to prevent me from enjoying the good things in life, like enjoying one more magic reveal with the kids before they left Strawfield for the school year. All the kids; last year's college freshmen had come home for the summer, and Natalie had the bright idea to organize a group get-together at the shop to say goodbye.
Of the three senior members, Kaitlyn was the only one to have been read in on the magic 'secret'. Mike and Natalie were thus confused when Megan showed up with a cat on her shoulders. The former decided it was just Megan being weird and didn't comment on it; the latter commented on it immediately.
"Why did you bring your cat?" Natalie asked as the eight of us sat down around a couple of tables just after closing. "Are you even allowed to bring pets in here?"
"June isn't a pet!" Megan shot back, adopting a haughty pose meant to imitate June's delivery of the same objection. "She's my familiar. Say hello, June."
June opted for the comedic response, which was to meow.
Natalie tried to exchange a knowing look with Kaitlyn only to end up confused when the other girl started giggling. Mike had a similar experience with Nick, albeit without the giggling.
"June," Megan whined. "You are making me look ridiculous in front of my friends."
"Yeah!" Ashley agreed. "You talk to us all the time. Don't embarrass Megan."
"Only Ashley gets to embarrass Megan," Chloe added.
"Exactly!"
"No she doesn't!" Megan objected. "No you don't! Don't embarrass me, that's mean!"
"I wasn't even doing anything!" Ashley whined.
"This time!"
Kaitlyn had been hiding a smile behind her hand since we'd sat down, and finally got her mirth under enough control to address the situation. "Come on, June," she said, still audibly holding back laughter. "There's only two people here who haven't heard you talk before. Just say hello."
"I think he did," Mike said. "Unless you want him to speak English—"
"Which I can," June interrupted, rising from her perch on Megan's shoulder and performing a graceful leap onto the table. "I was just having a little fun with those out of the know. Hello, everyone."
There was a pause.
"Ventriloquism," Mike guessed.
"Nope! I am June, the cat-shaped spirit currently looking after Miss Elwick's magical education on behalf of Miss Cassandra—and a she, by the way."
"Don't you start 'Miss Cassandra'-ing me too," I called. "I only just broke the kids of the habit."
"Years ago," Ashley protested.
"That's what I said."
June ignored the banter as she crossed the table, sat down in front of Mike, and extended a paw. "Pleased to meet you, Micheal."
"Likewise?" he ventured, shaking the proffered paw by pure reflex. Introduction complete, June got up and walked back to the center of the table, where she began cleaning her face with one paw.
"So, yeah!" Megan said, beaming. "I can do magic!" She promptly conjured a small tongue of flame and flew it around the center of the table by flicking her fingers like a conductor.
"Is that new?" I asked.
"No—well, I mean, I got it a week ago, so kinda? I'm not sure what it's good for, since it can't even light a candle on its own."
"What about a stove?" Kaitlyn suggested.
"I dunno. Ours is electric." Megan kept the flame dancing for a little while longer before closing her fist to snuff it out. "It's cool though, right?"
Kaitlyn, Nick, and I nodded. The other two seniors were still befuddled, Chloe was paying more attention to them than she was Megan, and Ashley wasn't willing to admit it was 'cool'.
"You're taking this well," Chloe told Natalie.
"I'm not 'taking it well'!" Natalie objected. "I just don't have the words for… any of this! My friend can set things on fire with her mind! There is a talking cat! Have we all gone collectively insane?"
"Cassandra can turn into a fox," June added.
"Sure, why not?" Mike muttered, resting his forehead in one hand.
Ashley reached over and gave Natalie's shoulder a playful shove. "Come on, lighten up, Nat. If anyone was gonna get magic powers, it was gonna be Megan."
"That is not how the world works!" Nat screeched—then added, "and don't call me Nat," in her normal tone and volume.
"I did tell both of you I was learning magic," Megan mumbled.
"I thought you meant the card game!"
"I thought she'd finally snapped," Mike added.
Natalie might have been flummoxed by the talking cat, but she wasn't about to let someone talk about her friend like that. "Mike, that's mean! Apologize!"
"It's true, though! Usually she at least acknowledges that whatever she's on about is nonsense—"
"But half the stuff I was on about wasn't nonsense after all!" Megan said. "Turns out magic was real all along!"
Mike turned to me to restore some sanity to the conversation, which was entirely the wrong place to look. "Have I mentioned I'm part space-alien?" I asked, innocent grin firmly in place.
"What?" he asked. "For real?"
Perhaps it was a sign of how quickly he was adapting that he directed the latter question to the talking cat.
June huffed. "Don't encourage her. Honestly, she says that after you all treated me like I was having too much fun at your expense…"
"Wait," Natalie piped up. "Kaitlyn, you said only two people hadn't heard her talk. If I'm one, and Mike's the other, when did you learn about this?"
Kaitlyn laughed. "Oh, that's a whole story…" She then proceeded to tell said story, during which I learned that while Chloe had called ahead to schedule her first magic-assisted visit, she had not specified (or, Chloe strongly insisted, been warned) that she was about to appear in the middle of Kaitlyn's dorm room in a display of irrefutable magic.
"…and the explanation ended up wasting about twenty minutes of snogging time."
"Snogging time?" Chloe repeated.
"That is what we spent the rest of the visit doing."
"Yeah, but who calls kissing 'snogging'?"
"The British, right?" Ashley piped up.
"I think so," Kaitlyn agreed. "Pretty sure we started using it after the Harry Potter movies came out."
Ashley scoffed. "What do you mean 'we'? You're the only person I know who calls it that!"
"What about the British?"
Natalie turned her back on that conversation and asked Chloe, "What happened to trying to hide your relationship?"
Chloe sighed and rolled her eyes. "Well, since you apparently all knew anyway—"
"Of course we did."
"—what's the point?" she concluded, rolling her eyes in the opposite direction.
Natalie shrugged. "I don't know. I thought you were embarrassed or something."
"She was," Kaitlyn chimed in. "Christian bullshit, you know?"
"Yeah, gay shame, blah blah blah," Chloe grumbled. "Can we change the topic now?"
"Sure," Megan agreed. "Say, Ashley, didn't you send those pictures to Natalie?"
"Which pictures?" Ashley and Natalie asked over each other.
"The illusion ones."
"Oh. Those?" Ashley shook her head. "No, they didn't come out right. You couldn't tell what it was supposed to be at all."
"What pictures?" Natalie repeated, then dropped her jaw when I recreated the illusory image of the group cosplay on the table.
"Weird," Mike said.
Nick raised an eyebrow.
"It's weird!" Mike insisted. "Why does magic have scan-lines?"
I stifled a self-conscious titter. "Oh, uh, that's on me. They already look so much like Star Wars holograms I decided to add them myself."
"Oh."
"I like it!" Natalie said.
It was Mike's turn to roll his eyes. "Nerds. All of you."
"If you're showing off, I want to see you turn into a fox," Chloe told me. "Assuming June wasn't pulling our leg about that?"
"I want to see whatever it was she wouldn't do with other people around," Ashley said. "Megan wouldn't tell us what it is."
Kaitlyn and Natalie looked at me with interest, and Chloe jumped on the bandwagon with a quick, "Oh, good idea!"
I glanced at the front of the shop to confirm the window shades were down, then shrugged and got to my feet. "All right, sure. I'll need a volunteer—"
Ashley bounced out of her seat before I could even finish the word, so I aimed my palm her way. Everyone at the table reacted with surprise and alarm except Megan… and Ashley herself, who yelled "Awesome!" and offered me a high five, which I accepted.
"This is getting out of hand!" Natalie complained. "Now there are two of them!"
AN: Your assigned reading this week is Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest. Don't ask me how or why it is that the series doesn't exist in this timeline but fanwork does because I have no fucking clue how that happened. Maybe there are also timelines where Valkyrie Core is 'the' wildly successful multimedia VN franchise and the only trace of the Fate/ series is an offbeat, one-update-a-year quest on Sufficient Velocity.
Chapter 108: Ride of the Valkyries
Oddly enough, another person I ended up talking 'magic' with was Paul.
"I'm looking to do something different for my next book," he told me when we ran into each other at the New Year's Eve party that no one had felt it necessary to disinvite him from. "I've tried 'gaslamp fantasy', 'science fantasy', and 'urban fantasy', and now I'm kinda itching to go full classical 'swords-and-sorcery fantasy'. The problem I'm having right now is with the magic. In my previous books, 'magic' was always in the background, so I never really needed to describe why it did anything it did. But the story I want to tell this time needs it to be more, um, 'in focus'?"
"And you're trying to come up with a cohesive, consistent spellcasting system?" I guessed.
"It's more that I'm trying to limit it."
"Ah."
Paul paused to wave back to someone I didn't know, then turned and led the way towards a less noisy area of the house. "I don't think I need to go too deeply into how it works as long as I'm clear on what it can and cannot do, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to let it do what I want it to do without making doing those things, you know, stupid. For example, if you can create a fireball, why throw it at a person rather than just making fire appear around them?"
"Well, what do you want magic to enable, exactly?"
"Mostly, superhuman-martial-arts sword fights with a lot of flashy magical attacks, leaping and dodging, sword throwing, and stuff. But I also want there to be pure wizards, not just battlemages."
I nodded along.
"The problem," he concluded, "is trying to figure out a single system of magic that lets those two things coexist."
"So, you want both battlemages and pure casters to be useful."
"Not just useful but logical. You know, things that people within the world would have reason to consider good ideas. I also want the pure casters to use certain kinds of attacks: fireballs and lightning bolts and not, I don't know, 'stop person's heart' spells."
"So your super-martial-artist battlemages can dodge," I guessed.
"Yeah." Paul grinned. "Yeah, you get it."
"What kind of magic do the battlemages use, then?"
"Spells to give themselves superhuman strength, speed, and toughness." His grin widened at the invitation to delve deeper into the topic. "That's mostly what I meant by 'superhuman-martial-arts sword fights'. A lot of leaping around, crazy dodging, all sorts of dynamic stuff. They might throw the odd fireball or whatever, but that's more of a utility thing than their main offense."
"So there are a whole lot of spells that give those sorts of physical bonuses."
"Yeah, but only to the caster, so you can't just put them on a bunch of people and have an instant army. In fact, using magic on yourself ought to be a lot easier than on other people. That way, it'd be more effective for most people to focus on making themselves stronger magically rather than learning how to set people on fire. And some people would learn how to set people on fire anyway if only to stay the heck out of range of the guys with swords.
"The thing is," he continued, "I want there to be some underlying reason for why the people in this world do things that way. And why when people do learn purely magical attacks, they learn fireballs and not 'head explosion'. Like, maybe something about one's body is special when it comes to magic?"
"A person's soul rejects magic that isn't their own?"
"Oooh, I like that. How would that work?"
"Hmm." I put a hand to my chin. "What if it was, like, a field around a person?"
Paul raised an eyebrow. "A field? Like a magnetic field?"
"Yeah, something that extends outwards from the body a bit. Say it's really hard to 'start' a magic effect that's not within your own field, so when you want to set someone on fire, you 'start' the fire spell in your hand and then throw it? Or you start one end of the lightning bolt at your fingertips and shoot it?"
"Oh, I like that. But when I said 'lightning bolts' I meant from the sky."
"Hmm…"
I took a pull from my root beer, then suggested, "What if the planet has its own field?"
Paul lit up. "Oh! And it could partially counter out the ease of working in one's own field?"
"Yeah. So for some spells, it's easier to just start the spell up high in the sky where there are no fields, 'friend' or 'foe'. Like lightning, or the classic 'meteor' spell."
"Or maybe it's not necessarily 'easier' to work magic up there, but really high-power spells are dangerous to use in your own field?" He was talking so fast he was almost tripping over his own words, too excited to wait for his mortal mouth. "Like, normally, your field is so strong the planet's doesn't matter, but if you don't want to use all that magic too close to yourself, you need another option. It's really hard to work outside your field, so you wouldn't bother unless there was a good reason, and you'd want to have nothing else interfere or it'd be even harder."
"So the sky-to-ground spells are always the strongest and flashiest?"
"Yeah, that's right! And the most dangerous and hard to aim!"
"And your battlemages jump rather than fly because lifting your body with its own magic field is like trying to lift yourself by pulling up on your shoes," I added.
"Yes, yes! And the field thing solves the ranged magic question, too, because it's really hard to just set a person's clothes on fire when their field extends far enough from their body to protect what they're wearing and carrying."
"That was exactly what I was thinking when I suggested it! Say, would that mean that people with better magical training would be better protected?"
"Like, because they can cast spells on their clothes that are in the field?"
"That's not a bad idea," I said, "but I meant protected by the field in general. You know, a stronger field protects you better from hostile magic because it 'rejects' it harder."
"Hmm… probably?" Paul ventured. "But I'd say that that bit's the easiest to learn. Or, no, not the easiest, necessarily, but the first thing taught. The starting point. You have to be in touch with your own magic field before you do anything with it, and that's what helps block other people's magic."
"Then on to self-targeted magic, with offensive magic taking the most effort to master?"
"Yeah, that sounds right."
"But it doesn't take much training to be effectively immune to Targeted Head Explosion,"
"Yeah, so just about everyone…" he trailed off, then started over. "Actually, no, I changed my mind. If it's something I want everyone to have, I'm going to say everyone's more or less equally well protected. Magic doesn't help because the field isn't, strictly speaking, magic. It's, like, 'soul stuff', right? Soul power, not mana or whatever I call it."
"Can you cast from soul-power?"
"Interesting idea for a special talent, but in general I'll say 'no'."
"It could be a total defense-penetrating thing if you want to have a character who's off the power curve," I suggested.
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking when I said 'special talent'."
"What about healing magic?"
Paul grinned. "Healing magic is hard because you have to work within someone else's field."
"Then what about self-healing magic?"
That brought him up short.
"I'd intended for self-healing to be impossible," he said, "but the way we've made the system, it should be easier than healing other people, shouldn't it?"
"If the field is the thing stopping healing from working, maybe," I said. "Is that a problem, narratively speaking? It just changes the win condition from 'injure enemy' to 'deplete enemy mana bar'. Plus, if you let your mages self-heal, they can land more powerful hits on each other without ending the fight."
"Stormlight Archives already did the 'mana bar as an extra health bar' thing, though."
"So? Gandalf riding Shadowfax doesn't mean no one else can put a wizard on a horse."
"That's true," Paul allowed, "but it's not what I had in mind. I think healing magic ought to be slow and complicated; otherwise, characters can't get 'injured', only 'killed' or 'not killed'."
"Well, biology is complicated."
"Yeah, that's the typical excuse, but that raises the question of how the enhancement magic does its stuff."
"What if healing is just a subtype of self-enhancement magic?" I suggested.
"So there are ways to make your body heal faster, but it's still natural healing at the end of the day? Yeah, that works. And the 'soul' nature of the field is why self-enhancement magic is easy—damn, I need to write this down."
I pulled a small pocket-sized notepad and pen out of my purse and pushed them into Paul's eager hands.
"Thanks!" he said. "Okay, we had, uh, fields…"
The two of us spent a couple minutes running back through the conversation, then onwards into edge cases, exceptions, and special powers. We were so absorbed we'd have missed the ball drop if Homura hadn't interrupted us, and we went right back to the conversation afterwards. By the time we'd finished, the party was over, most people had already left, and Paul had used up the rest of the notepad and scrawled the last couple noteworthy points onto the cardboard backing.
"Wow," he said, "this was a great brainstorming session. Uh, sorry about the notepad."
"No problem. They come in packs of eight 'cause they're so tiny."
"Heh. Makes sense." He returned my ballpoint pen, now missing an appreciable amount of ink. "Thanks a lot."
"Anytime. I can't wait to see what you do with it."
"I'll keep you posted. Goodnight, Cassandra."
"'Night, Paul."
Paul had barely departed before Roxy ambushed me with a backstab of a one-armed hug that was nearly a headlock, an empty wineglass in her other hand.
"So, you and Paul, huh?" Her pronunciation was impressively normal for the amount of alcohol on her breath.
"What?"
"Oh, come on, Cass, you two were huddled together all night. How long've you been dating?"
"We're not dating."
"Riiiight," she drawled. "You were two having a nice, platonic huddle."
"We were brainstorming ideas for his next novel."
"Oh, a romance of the minds, then? Attracted to intelligence?"
"Lay off," I grumbled, finally annoyed enough to push her away. "Not every male/female friendship is about romance."
Roxy gave me a pitying look. "Lots'a women think that, but sooner or later the guy's gonna want more."
"We'll agree to disagree, there."
"I'm just sayin'. Be careful, hon."
"You don't have to worry about me." I gave her a confident smile. "Uh, what's up with you lately? You were going to Loamhill, right?"
"Ages ago. S'only a two year program. Could'a transferred, but I reckoned any money I'd make from having a degree'd just go right back to paying off the loans, so what's even the point? Sides, Raymond's' a pretty good gig, A-T-C."
"ATC?" I repeated.
"All things considered."
"Ah. Pays well, then?"
She started to agree, only to be interrupted by a yawn that turned her 'Yeah' into 'Yeaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwww'.
"Damn," Roxy muttered. "Can't party like I used to."
"Need a ride?"
"Naaaaah. Taxi'd here, taxiing home." She suddenly remembered the wineglass in her hand and put it down on the nearest available surface, which happened to be an end table near the entertainment center. "Goodnight, Cass."
"'Night, Roxy."
———X==X==X———
Before I knew it, the school year was already coming to a close. Chloe got into UCLA. Megan got into MVU. Ashley was off to Minnesota, Nick to Texas.
We said our goodbyes on the last day of school before graduation. They wouldn't be leaving for weeks or months, but their time using Home Sweet Home as a not-quite-private cafeteria was over.
"I'm gonna miss you guys," I told them—because I would. Maybe June had had a point when she'd referred to them as 'my kids'. "Keep yourselves safe and study hard, okay?"
"Yes, mom," Ashley drawled.
"I wish," Megan muttered.
"We'll be all right," Chloe said. "Thanks for everything."
"Thanks," Nick echoed.
"I can still visit!" Megan reminded me. "I've got a car, now!"
"And a cat," June added.
"And a friend," Megan amended, reaching out to scratch June behind her ears.
The other two girls exchanged a glance while Nick looked on impassively.
"They're giving me diabetes," Ashley complained. "This is assault."
"No cookies for you, then," Chloe said, raising a hand to confiscate her friend's half-eaten treat.
"Nevermind everything's fine don't you dare—!"
———X==X==X———
I ducked back into the kitchen one day in early summer—or maybe the middle of summer; I'd never cared to learn where people defined the cutoff between the two to be—to celebrate a momentous occasion.
"Happy midpoint!"
Homura smiled, not looking up from the dough she was currently portioning out onto a baking sheet. "You timed it down to the minute."
"Of course I did. Hard to believe it's been five years, huh?"
"No comment."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"My subjective measurement of time is perfect," she said. "As such, I know with absolute certainty it has been five years."
"Spoilsport."
Homura rolled her eyes as she displayed an uncanny ability to pick up half a dozen cookie sheets and carry them to the ovens all at once. "Enjoy your half-a-jump?"
"Sure have. You?"
"I as well. Give me a hand while you're back here?"
I stepped fully into the kitchen and over to where Homura was exchanging the freshly-prepared dough for already-baked cookies. It was the work of a minute to swap the baking sheets, and another minute to transfer the cookies to the cooling rack—which required us to first empty the rack, currently holding the previous batch of cookies, onto a wax-paper-lined tray.
"I'm going to miss this," Homura said as we worked.
"Baking?"
"No, the whole… simple life. Relaxing. Laughing at jokes."
I hid a frown and kept my tone as light as I could. "Laughing at jokes is temporary?"
"I am going to be going back to 'normal' sooner or later. Don't misunderstand; I'm happy you convinced me to relax. The last five years have been…"
Homura stopped talking as she thought, though her hands never slowed.
"…healing," she decided.
"I'm glad."
"But I will be returning to my… my mission, I suppose. And my focus."
"Ah."
"But we're not going back to strangers," Homura added. "In the end, you were right: I'm not an insecure little girl, and I don't want to spend the rest of my time on the 'chain alone. But there's still some comfort and safety in keeping apart from the larger crowd."
"I'll support you in doing whatever makes you comfortable, and I'll do anything I can to help."
"I know you will. And right now, 'helping' means taking these"—she handed me the tray loaded with freshly cooled cookies—"out for sale."
"Yes, ma'am!"
———X==X==X———
My phone chimed only a couple hours later, just as the afternoon rush was due to start.
Today at 1:52 pm
OMG did you hear???
What?
What about Zeke?
Zero?
Zero?
Read 1:54 pm
"Sorry," I told the woman currently browsing the pastries on offer. "I need to take this."
I punched 'Call' as I ducked into the back of the shop, only to nearly run smack into Zero herself. "Gah!"
"Sorry!" Zero yelled over my outburst. "Typing was taking too long."
"Yeah, that's why I was trying to call. What happened to Zeke?"
"He—"
"Wait, hold on." I stuck my head back into the kitchen, but the place was empty (and spotless). "Sorry, nevermind, Homura must have stepped out. What happened to Zeke?"
"He got hit by a truck!"
"What?!"
"Relax," Zero urged me. "It's not like 'he's in the hospital' hit by a truck—"
"That's worse!"
"Not like 'he was injured' hit by a truck, then."
"What other kinds of 'hit by a truck' are there?"
"A goddamn sixteen-wheeler truck went right through his living room and fucking isekai'd him into a another dimension."
I stared at her for a few seconds as I processed the absolute bullshit I'd just heard.
"What."
"Yeah."
"No, hold on. A truck hit his house?"
Zero shook her head. "It didn't hit it, it went through it. Like, burst through a door, went through the living room, right over where he was standing, and disappeared out another door."
"That doesn't make any goddamn sense."
"Which makes it really obvious whose fault it is, doesn't it?"
"Christ."
I pulled my phone back out to dial Max, only for Zero to pluck it out of my hand.
"Don't," she told me. "Max is in a seriously bad mood."
"Of course he is!"
"Yeah, but exposing yourself to it isn't gonna help him." Zero glanced down at my phone, then back up at me. "Cass."
"What?"
"You have me in your contacts as 'Freaky Albino Faerie'."
"Don't go through my phone!" I tried to snatch it back, only for her to float up and out of reach. "Hey! Gimme that!"
"You can have it back when you explain yourself!" she called down, waving the phone at me.
"Ugh, fine. I got a second- or third-hand summary of the park thing and it went something like, 'a freaky albino faerie gave my friend a magic cat.'"
Zero kept her word and returned my phone. "They're not wrong."
"That was my reaction."
"Of course it was. You know, shit like this is why we're friends."
"Our sense of humor?" I ventured.
"Exactly!"
I frowned as I looked down at my phone again. "Should I call Gary?"
"Nah. Give them some space."
"If you say so." I leaned back against the wall and let out a long, weary sigh. "I don't suppose we have any idea where he went?"
"We do, actually."
"Oh?"
Zero nodded. "Management owned up to it. He's in Valkyrie Core. The 'Enhanced Edition' VN continuity, specifically. I'm so fucking mad it's not even funny!"
"Why?"
"Because I would've wanted to go too!" She shrunk down to the form of a petulant little girl to really sell her pout, only to pop back to normal a second later, angst forgotten.
"I've… never heard of it."
"Well, we can fix that easily enough. Start with the anime; it's easier to get into and actually has exposition rather than making you read an entire fucking non-visual novel worth of codex entries if you want to know why these people are learning to fight in the first place."
"I guess I'll do that, then," I muttered. "Eventually. Thanks for the heads-up."
"No problem," Zero said. "Oh, but make sure you get the right one, 'cause the names are a bit confusing. There are a bunch of Valkyrie Core Insert-Subtitle-Here series—Valkyrie Core RAVENZ is my favorite, personally—but the one that best adapts the original VN as a whole is named Valkyrie Drive!, not Core. Fucking dumb, right? See, they used Core without subtitles for an OVA that follows one specific route, but it has the same shitty lack-of-context problem as the original VN and relegates the rest of the cast to background characters, so it's only really for people who were already fans of that pairing. As for the subtitled series you might care about, Skybreaker is very much the Fate/Zero to Drive!'s Stay Night: prequel, better story because it's not pegged to a visual novel, but not representative of said visual novel; Splinter Angle is an OVA collection that crams each route into its own forty-minute short, which makes it better and worse than Core in different ways; and RAVENZ is another continuity altogether. I might like it more than the original timeline, personally, but it's much darker."
I was starting to get the feeling Zero liked the franchise.
"Uh… right," I said. "Will do."
———X==X==X———
That evening, I grabbed a copy of Valkyrie Drive! Season 1 (of 3) from the Warehouse's Library.
"What've you got there?" Homura asked as I returned to the apartment.
"Valkyrie Drive!. Ever heard of it?"
"I have. Why that one?"
"Zeke got isekai'd by an implausible truck."
Homura frowned as she tried and failed to make my statement make sense. "You are going to have to run that by me again," she declared, which was more or less the same as my reaction to the news after one accounted for her indefatigable Homura-ness, and so I explained, briefly, my earlier conversation with Zero.
"…and Management said he ended up here," I finished, indicating the DVD case I was holding. "Well, the visual novel continuity, but Zero recommended the anime; I don't know anything about it. What's the elevator pitch?"
"Infinite Stratos meets Symphogear." Homura realized I didn't understand either reference and added, "Think Strike Witches by way of Armored Core, but a harem anime," which didn't help much. Still, I understood the last two words well enough.
"Well, curiosity killed the cat," I grumbled. "Care to join me?"
"I may as well."
I popped the disk in and started the show, and god help me, I enjoyed it unironically. The lack of the most egregious harem tropes helped, but there were plenty of things to enjoy besides that. The blend of hard military fiction and outrageous sci-fi martial arts bullshit. The beautifully rendered action sequences. The well-developed, sympathetic characters. The hilarious badassery.
"Did she just parry his sword with her thumb?"
Yet despite the cheery attitude of the show and the relative safety of the action thus far, it was still a story about soldiers barely old enough to be called 'adults' training to fight and possibly die in a war against an existential threat to all of humanity—and as the credits rolled on the final episode of the season early the next morning, I remembered why we were watching the show in the first place.
"I hope Zeke's all right," I said.
"Me too," Homura agreed.
I returned the DVD to the Library and declined to pick up the second season while I was there.
———X==X==X———
"That motherfucker," Max spat.
I'd given her a few days to cool off before I called. I could have probably waited a few weeks and gotten the same result.
"Zeke decided not to go to college," she said. "It made sense to me. Management was clear that Zeke was to go to high school, and I kind of get that. The social experience was good for him, and it was probably entertaining for them, whatever that means. But Zeke didn't want to spend four years 'learning' knowledge he already had just for a certificate of achievement. Management called and asked him to attend. He said that it hadn't been specified at the beginning of the Jump and refused, and I backed him up."
"So they hit him with a truck to send him back for more school hijinks?"
"This isn't just 'more school hijinks'. He's in a goddamn war zone!"
I was lying on the couch, phone in my lap, buds in my ears. Max was still at work; in theory, she was trying to track down where her son had disappeared to despite officially being off the case. In practice, she knew exactly when and where he was and had no way to do anything about it.
I suspected it had been a very long time since Max had been in a position where she had no way to do something about something.
"This isn't some monkey's paw bullshit, or 'read the fine print', or 'be careful what you wish for'," she growled. "This is straight-up cheating. Changing the rules, altering the deal, whatever. It's a fucking cheat."
"Did you really trust Management in the first place?"
"I never trusted them to be fair, but I thought they'd at least stick to their own goddamn rules, however bullshit they might be. At least they'd be predictable in screwing with us."
"Are you sure they haven't?" I asked. "There's no precedent for this kind of 'rescheduling'?"
"Can you imagine Zeke agreeing to go off alone? That they found something to offer him worth putting up with five or more years in a war-torn post-Apocalypse, cut off from all his friends?"
I had to admit I couldn't; given his insistence on calling me every month, I'd actually been getting a little worried that he was developing some sort of separation-anxiety-adjacent issue.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I don't know. It's not like there's some higher authority I can appeal to. All I can do is complain and refuse to cooperate."
"They're gonna punish you for that."
"If they'd stuck to the rules, I might care," Max snipped. "What do you want me to do, Cass? I have to do something, or they'll think they can get away with whatever they want."
"That's literally the case, though."
There was a long pause.
"Fuuuck," she groaned.
There was a longer pause.
"No matter how rigged the game," I said, slowly, each word weighed and measured, "you can always walk away."
"And if they call my bluff?"
"Would it be a bluff?"
Another pause.
"It would," Max said.
"That's that, then."
"No, it's… yeah. Fuck."
"Fuck," I agreed.
———X==X==X———
I tempered my anxiety about Zeke's fate with both my confidence in him and my powerlessness to affect the situation. I'd always had an easy time compartmentalizing problems away for later—a talent that had grown into full-blown dissociation by middle school—so it was second nature to push the problem out of mind until I'd functionally forgotten about it.
On the one hand, 'I forgot my friend is trapped in a horrible war' is a pretty terrible thing to say, but on the other, there wasn't really a good alternative. It was out of my hands in every way that mattered, so all dwelling on it would have accomplished is to prevent me from enjoying the good things in life, like enjoying one more magic reveal with the kids before they left Strawfield for the school year. All the kids; last year's college freshmen had come home for the summer, and Natalie had the bright idea to organize a group get-together at the shop to say goodbye.
Of the three senior members, Kaitlyn was the only one to have been read in on the magic 'secret'. Mike and Natalie were thus confused when Megan showed up with a cat on her shoulders. The former decided it was just Megan being weird and didn't comment on it; the latter commented on it immediately.
"Why did you bring your cat?" Natalie asked as the eight of us sat down around a couple of tables just after closing. "Are you even allowed to bring pets in here?"
"June isn't a pet!" Megan shot back, adopting a haughty pose meant to imitate June's delivery of the same objection. "She's my familiar. Say hello, June."
June opted for the comedic response, which was to meow.
Natalie tried to exchange a knowing look with Kaitlyn only to end up confused when the other girl started giggling. Mike had a similar experience with Nick, albeit without the giggling.
"June," Megan whined. "You are making me look ridiculous in front of my friends."
"Yeah!" Ashley agreed. "You talk to us all the time. Don't embarrass Megan."
"Only Ashley gets to embarrass Megan," Chloe added.
"Exactly!"
"No she doesn't!" Megan objected. "No you don't! Don't embarrass me, that's mean!"
"I wasn't even doing anything!" Ashley whined.
"This time!"
Kaitlyn had been hiding a smile behind her hand since we'd sat down, and finally got her mirth under enough control to address the situation. "Come on, June," she said, still audibly holding back laughter. "There's only two people here who haven't heard you talk before. Just say hello."
"I think he did," Mike said. "Unless you want him to speak English—"
"Which I can," June interrupted, rising from her perch on Megan's shoulder and performing a graceful leap onto the table. "I was just having a little fun with those out of the know. Hello, everyone."
There was a pause.
"Ventriloquism," Mike guessed.
"Nope! I am June, the cat-shaped spirit currently looking after Miss Elwick's magical education on behalf of Miss Cassandra—and a she, by the way."
"Don't you start 'Miss Cassandra'-ing me too," I called. "I only just broke the kids of the habit."
"Years ago," Ashley protested.
"That's what I said."
June ignored the banter as she crossed the table, sat down in front of Mike, and extended a paw. "Pleased to meet you, Micheal."
"Likewise?" he ventured, shaking the proffered paw by pure reflex. Introduction complete, June got up and walked back to the center of the table, where she began cleaning her face with one paw.
"So, yeah!" Megan said, beaming. "I can do magic!" She promptly conjured a small tongue of flame and flew it around the center of the table by flicking her fingers like a conductor.
"Is that new?" I asked.
"No—well, I mean, I got it a week ago, so kinda? I'm not sure what it's good for, since it can't even light a candle on its own."
"What about a stove?" Kaitlyn suggested.
"I dunno. Ours is electric." Megan kept the flame dancing for a little while longer before closing her fist to snuff it out. "It's cool though, right?"
Kaitlyn, Nick, and I nodded. The other two seniors were still befuddled, Chloe was paying more attention to them than she was Megan, and Ashley wasn't willing to admit it was 'cool'.
"You're taking this well," Chloe told Natalie.
"I'm not 'taking it well'!" Natalie objected. "I just don't have the words for… any of this! My friend can set things on fire with her mind! There is a talking cat! Have we all gone collectively insane?"
"Cassandra can turn into a fox," June added.
"Sure, why not?" Mike muttered, resting his forehead in one hand.
Ashley reached over and gave Natalie's shoulder a playful shove. "Come on, lighten up, Nat. If anyone was gonna get magic powers, it was gonna be Megan."
"That is not how the world works!" Nat screeched—then added, "and don't call me Nat," in her normal tone and volume.
"I did tell both of you I was learning magic," Megan mumbled.
"I thought you meant the card game!"
"I thought she'd finally snapped," Mike added.
Natalie might have been flummoxed by the talking cat, but she wasn't about to let someone talk about her friend like that. "Mike, that's mean! Apologize!"
"It's true, though! Usually she at least acknowledges that whatever she's on about is nonsense—"
"But half the stuff I was on about wasn't nonsense after all!" Megan said. "Turns out magic was real all along!"
Mike turned to me to restore some sanity to the conversation, which was entirely the wrong place to look. "Have I mentioned I'm part space-alien?" I asked, innocent grin firmly in place.
"What?" he asked. "For real?"
Perhaps it was a sign of how quickly he was adapting that he directed the latter question to the talking cat.
June huffed. "Don't encourage her. Honestly, she says that after you all treated me like I was having too much fun at your expense…"
"Wait," Natalie piped up. "Kaitlyn, you said only two people hadn't heard her talk. If I'm one, and Mike's the other, when did you learn about this?"
Kaitlyn laughed. "Oh, that's a whole story…" She then proceeded to tell said story, during which I learned that while Chloe had called ahead to schedule her first magic-assisted visit, she had not specified (or, Chloe strongly insisted, been warned) that she was about to appear in the middle of Kaitlyn's dorm room in a display of irrefutable magic.
"…and the explanation ended up wasting about twenty minutes of snogging time."
"Snogging time?" Chloe repeated.
"That is what we spent the rest of the visit doing."
"Yeah, but who calls kissing 'snogging'?"
"The British, right?" Ashley piped up.
"I think so," Kaitlyn agreed. "Pretty sure we started using it after the Harry Potter movies came out."
Ashley scoffed. "What do you mean 'we'? You're the only person I know who calls it that!"
"What about the British?"
Natalie turned her back on that conversation and asked Chloe, "What happened to trying to hide your relationship?"
Chloe sighed and rolled her eyes. "Well, since you apparently all knew anyway—"
"Of course we did."
"—what's the point?" she concluded, rolling her eyes in the opposite direction.
Natalie shrugged. "I don't know. I thought you were embarrassed or something."
"She was," Kaitlyn chimed in. "Christian bullshit, you know?"
"Yeah, gay shame, blah blah blah," Chloe grumbled. "Can we change the topic now?"
"Sure," Megan agreed. "Say, Ashley, didn't you send those pictures to Natalie?"
"Which pictures?" Ashley and Natalie asked over each other.
"The illusion ones."
"Oh. Those?" Ashley shook her head. "No, they didn't come out right. You couldn't tell what it was supposed to be at all."
"What pictures?" Natalie repeated, then dropped her jaw when I recreated the illusory image of the group cosplay on the table.
"Weird," Mike said.
Nick raised an eyebrow.
"It's weird!" Mike insisted. "Why does magic have scan-lines?"
I stifled a self-conscious titter. "Oh, uh, that's on me. They already look so much like Star Wars holograms I decided to add them myself."
"Oh."
"I like it!" Natalie said.
It was Mike's turn to roll his eyes. "Nerds. All of you."
"If you're showing off, I want to see you turn into a fox," Chloe told me. "Assuming June wasn't pulling our leg about that?"
"I want to see whatever it was she wouldn't do with other people around," Ashley said. "Megan wouldn't tell us what it is."
Kaitlyn and Natalie looked at me with interest, and Chloe jumped on the bandwagon with a quick, "Oh, good idea!"
I glanced at the front of the shop to confirm the window shades were down, then shrugged and got to my feet. "All right, sure. I'll need a volunteer—"
Ashley bounced out of her seat before I could even finish the word, so I aimed my palm her way. Everyone at the table reacted with surprise and alarm except Megan… and Ashley herself, who yelled "Awesome!" and offered me a high five, which I accepted.
"This is getting out of hand!" Natalie complained. "Now there are two of them!"
———X==X==X———
AN: Your assigned reading this week is Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest. Don't ask me how or why it is that the series doesn't exist in this timeline but fanwork does because I have no fucking clue how that happened. Maybe there are also timelines where Valkyrie Core is 'the' wildly successful multimedia VN franchise and the only trace of the Fate/ series is an offbeat, one-update-a-year quest on Sufficient Velocity.
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Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
AN: Your assigned reading this week is Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest. Don't ask me how or why it is that the series doesn't exist in this timeline but fanwork does because I have no fucking clue how that happened. Maybe there are also timelines where Valkyrie Core is 'the' wildly successful multimedia VN franchise and the only trace of the Fate/ series is an offbeat, one-update-a-year quest on Sufficient Velocity.
- Location
- Academy City
- Pronouns
- They
Wow, someone's optimistic.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
tfw you're not in the timeline/world where BAHHSCQ exists as a multimedia franchise
why live
ExNihilo
SPACE!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Damn, I hope not. That would be a can of worms.
/s
Wait, BAHHSCQ, really? Or is it some other anime, named similar?
It is! Neat. Anna + Zeke interactions are bound to be interesting.
C'mon have faith in your friends.
She'd probably pick an Anime one like Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The triumphant return of Best Jumpchain!
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
Of course the question now is, is Zeke replacing Coke Zero, or an extra character? I somehow doubt that he has any knowledge of the VC franchise, and even if he does VC presents Anna as a side-character with weird quirks, not the absurd powerhouse she it.
- Location
- Elsewhere
"Truck Fight Club?"
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Argument with Optimus Prime is always a possibility I suppose
Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
With popularity, longevity, and multimedia spinoffs comes reduction to the lowest common denominator and the slow decay of anything that made a franchise interesting, unique, or desireable. Far better for a "franchise" to remain as one or two works, a trilogy at most if you have really big confidence in the creative team, than for it to explode in multiple senses of the word. Even Fate/, which literally started as porn, is decaying into lowest common denominator sex appeal over storytelling and characterization as compared to its early years (and that isn't easy to do!).p sure that makes us the darkest timeline, ngl
Less is more.
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