Note: Originally, 6.8, 6.9 and 6.10 were all supposed to be the same chapter, but they just kept growing. I've been struggling with the writing of this part of the story, and I wasn't sure whether to post this chapter as is or to keep working on it. Sheer frustration plus an ever-increasing gulf of time since the posting of the last chapter proved decisive in charting the former course.
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
6.9 - Administration
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
Thanks to
@Cailin for beta-ing!
-------------
I hadn't been expecting to see Chrono, and there were only a few reasons that came to mind for why he would be here; either he was already involved in the investigation into the murders, or Director Piggot was going to use this meeting to involve him in it. Maybe she was hoping that if I thought the investigation was in good hands, I'd stay out of it? Of the two, I figured the first was more likely than the second.
The room was lit mostly by the sun through the windows. Chrono looked the same as ever, but Director Piggot looked different; her hair was cut shorter, and was brown now instead of blonde, and she regarded me calmly from behind her desk.
She didn't stand up when I walked in; Chrono did.
"Hello, Starfall," Director Piggot said. "Have a seat." She indicated the second chair in front of her desk: the one Chrono hadn't been sitting in.
I did, and Chrono sat down beside me.
"Should I assume you already know why I'm here?" I asked.
"I prefer not to assume," Piggot said. "Why are you here, Starfall?"
"Three girls," I said, "three of my lookalikes from Arcadia, are dead." I gave the words a moment to settle before I added, "They were crucified."
Chrono gave Piggot a look as if to say, 'I told you so,' but Director Piggot herself seemed utterly unmoved. "And?" she asked.
I felt a spike of anger, but I forced it back down, forced myself not to show it. "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
"Despite the example set by the Administration Bureau," Piggot said coolly, "the PRT is not in the habit of involving children in murder investigations."
"It isn't the direction I would have chosen if I was investigating this on my own," Chrono said apologetically, "but this is a joint investigation, and the PRT insisted."
[Don't good cop me, Chrono,] I told him telepathically. [I've seen Law and Order.]
Chrono blinked, and a distinct note of confusion came back through the telepathic link as he asked, [What?]
And he had no idea what that was. Maybe it was just as well I hadn't said it out loud. I looked Director Piggot in the eye. "Maybe I would buy that if I weren't so obviously the target. Someone crossed a line, Director. Who was it? Was it the Slaughterhouse Nine?"
"If it was?" Piggot asked.
"Then I'm going to kill them," I said, and I meant it.
Piggot shook her head. "It wasn't them. The Slaughterhouse Nine aren't a factor anymore."
I blinked. Had the Nine been stopped? Killed? Otherwise neutralized? Nothing had been on the news about it, and that was the sort of thing that would definitely make the news. "Who, then?" I asked.
"We're looking at several persons of interest," Chrono said, "but the investigation is still under way."
Inside my strategic planning partition, Lisa spoke the name of the next most likely suspect after the Slaughterhouse Nine, and I echoed her out loud: "The Fallen," I said.
Piggot's eyes narrowed. "I can't comment on that," she said.
[It's them,] Lisa told me. [90% sure.]
Chrono sighed. "We don't know for sure that it's the Fallen, but someone's got you under observation, Taylor."
"Oh?" I asked. The word came out a lot quieter and angrier than I'd meant to say it.
"Even apart from the legal mess of bringing you in on this case, we didn't want you to do anything that would tip them off, whoever they are. We're making every effort to keep you and your family safe; even if the PRT can't use it in court, the Bureau is monitoring the Fallen in the city. If we thought that they were about to move against you, we would intervene regardless of any diplomatic troubles it would cause."
"And in the meantime," I said, "they're free to keep on torturing girls to death as long as those girls aren't me."
Chrono didn't answer. I probably wasn't being fair to him, but right then I didn't care.
"Now that you know, what are you going to do?" Piggot asked.
"I'm going to deal with them."
"And that's exactly why we didn't tell you," Piggot said.
I regarded her coldly. "Three girls are dead for the crime of looking like me. This is my city. Do you really think I can let that slide?"
If my words had been cold, Director Piggot's reply was positively arctic. "This isn't your city, Starfall. No matter what the Administration Bureau might claim, you aren't royalty here. You're a citizen of the United States, of Brockton Bay and an independent hero, not a member of law enforcement and not a parahuman warlord. It isn't your job to bring the perpetrators to justice. It's mine."
"I understand how you feel, Taylor," Chrono interjected, "but these criminals have a long history of kidnapping and brainwashing people like you, and you're too important to us and to this world to risk losing to a mind-controlling parahuman cult that worships broken Lost Logia."
The pattern was easy to see. Piggot was blunt and harsh, Chrono was sympathetic and understanding. Bad cop, good cop. It annoyed me that he was still doing it after I'd told him not to, but I didn't comment on that. Instead I asked, "Why haven't the PRT and the Protectorate taken them down before now?"
"Do you think it's that easy?" Piggot asked. "We've tried. Between the PRT, the Protectorate, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies and independent groups like Haven we've destroyed more than a dozen Fallen cells in the American South in the last five years. They're like cockroaches. You never find them all. They always come back."
"And now they're in Brockton Bay," I said.
"And now they're in Brockton Bay," Piggot agreed.
"So we deal with them," I said.
Director Piggot's eyes all but flashed. "It isn't going to…" she began.
I cut her off. "I'm not asking for your permission, Director Piggot," I said, keeping my voice calm and level. "The Fallen have made me their target, and they've crossed the line. I'm taking them down one way or the other."
She eyed me for a moment. "Then what are you asking for?"
"Your cooperation. Your assistance. You don't want to risk the Fallen getting to me? They'll be a lot less likely to get to me if I have the Bureau, the PRT and the Protectorate on my side."
They gave me their answers.
-------------------
When I left the meeting with Emily Piggot, I allowed my nervousness, my terror, and the knowledge that I had just walked and dictated terms to the Director of the PRT ENE flow back into my mind from where I'd kept it in my other partitions; my heart began to race, cold sweat broke out across my brow, and my hands shook. I had to clench them into fists so hard that it hurt to stop the shaking as I flew away from the PRT building.
Being able to shunt my emotions into my other mental partitions was incredibly useful, but it wasn't healthy, and I was pretty sure that it had made everything a lot harder to deal with when I hadn't been able to do it. I'd gotten used to being able to selectively just not experience my own emotions when they'd proven inconvenient, and now... well, now I needed to get to the point where I didn't need the partitions for that. It was inefficient. Entire me's had been devoted to managing what normal people never seemed to have that much trouble with, dumping the emotional output into minds already experiencing those same emotions, and I'd been fine with all those other myselves being practically paralyzed with fear, or insensate with rage, or so embarrassed that other-me wanted to die as long as it didn't affect my body or what I thought of as my main consciousness.
I couldn't do that to myselves anymore. It wasn't fair to me, we, or us.
Maybe that's why I was distracted when I landed at the site Chrono had mentioned telepathically over Director Piggot's refusal. It was a parking garage near the ruins of the Medhall campus, all concrete and asphalt. The place had been abandoned after Behemoth; it was inside the quarantine zone, and thirty or so homeless people had taken up residence, but I didn't see any of them as I entered the building and walked up a metal stairway to the second floor of the garage.
If I'd been thinking clearly, I'd have scouted the whole place with my sensor spheres before I'd gotten within a mile, but I wasn't.
My first indication that something was wrong came in the form of of a low, distorted growl that echoed weirdly off of concrete walls and abandoned cars.
Movement in my peripheral vision. A flicker of something I couldn't quite make out even with my improved senses, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
They moved in the shadows with bodies like smoke, visible as pools of deeper darkness where the ambient light didn't or couldn't touch. And though I could see nothing from those pools of deeper darkness to my left and right and behind me, I knew that my gaze had been met.
Something felt like it was writhing underneath the surface of my brain, and I was afraid. I had no choice. But the fear wasn't inside my body, wasn't mine; it was flowing into me from those pools of shadow, growing stronger every second that I held the gaze of I knew not what.
Red glowing eyes opened like magnesium flares in the darkness, and I would have screamed if I could have. I felt my back hit the concrete wall even thought I didn't remember turning, didn't remember moving.
I didn't want to see what was in those shadows, but I raised my hand nonetheless. The equations for a sensor sphere sprang easily into my thoughts through the interface with my new cestus-style Device. I swallowed, and then I forced the terror down as I joined mana and math to my will.
A sensor sphere snapped into existence above the palm of my hand.
Something shimmered in the air, as if it were resisting the power of my sensor sphere, and then the pools of deeper darkness resolved into the forms of enormous spectral hounds. They were black with glowing red eyes, and each was the size of a horse. The effect was invisible to the naked eye, but through my sensor sphere I could see that each was surrounded by a faint ... light was the wrong word, but each spectral form was bordered in and bound by a hint of a green magic aura.
Ghostly claws curled as the hounds noticed what I had done. Their hackles went up, and the one in front of me and the others on either side of me prepared to pounce.
I didn't know what they were exactly, but I wasn't going to let a trio of ghost-dogs beat me.
"Set Up," I said, and my clothes reset to the form of my barrier jacket in a flash of iridescent light.
The legs of the lead hound tensed as it prepared to spring. I had seconds. Less than a second. I could see the coiled tension of spectral muscles, its claws ripping into the pavement as it did so.
And then, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, a man in an immaculate white suit appeared beside the lead hound, his hand on the enormous creature's ghostly hide. "Easy, now," he said in Midchildan. "She's a friend."
The hound froze. And then, ever so slowly, the tension drained from its body, and it whined at the man. The other two hounds followed suit.
"Go watch the approaches," he told them, and after they had given me a long, considering look, as if they were deciding whether it was worth it to attack me after all, the horse-sized ghost-dogs turned and padded silently away.
I stared at the man in white, my pulse still racing, my heart still pounding in my ears. He was shorter than me, like almost everyone from the Bureau. He had long green hair and a delicate -- almost pretty -- face that would have left me unsure of his gender if I hadn't heard him speak.
"Who..." I began. I took a breath, forcing myself to calm down, to release the fear. "Who are you? What are those things?"
He smiled apologetically. "I'm sorry, miss. The hounds of the Unendliche Jagd don't like it here. Something about this world makes them uneasy. Maybe because there aren't many local spirits."
Spirits? I looked in the direction the hounds had gone. "Those things are spirits?" I asked.
He nodded. "I don't normally let them manifest at anything close to their full size, but Earth-Bet is a dangerous place. I apologize if they startled you."
"They didn't," I lied, and I instantly regretted it; he knew I was lying. Spirits? Those were real? I didn't ask the question aloud: I had more pressing business than satisfying my own curiosity. "Are you Chrono's friend?" I asked. "The one I'm supposed to meet?"
"That's me," he said with a smile. "It's an honor to meet you, Ms. Sägebrecht."
"Does Chrono's friend have a name?" I asked, trying not to let my annoyance show, and probably failing.
He laughed, and it transformed him. Laughing, he wasn't just 'almost pretty': he was beautiful. "It's better if he doesn't," he replied amiably. "I wasn't here, after all, and I definitely didn't give you this." He produced a tiny white gem about the size of a bead between his index and middle fingers and offered it to me with an outstretched hand. It vanished as soon as it touched my hand.
My Device gave me a telepathic notification that I had an incoming data packet. I authorized it, and the case files on the investigation into the deaths of my lookalikes downloaded into my Device's data storage.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what?" the man in white asked innocently. Then he turned and walked off after his ghost-hounds of the Unendliche Jagd.
Spirits. Did that make the man a summoner? ... I'd known that spirits existed on a theoretical level, but actually seeing them, interacting with them…
Unendliche Jagd. My Belkan wasn't very good, but I was pretty sure that meant something like 'Endless Hunt.'
Was there a spirit world? Were there ghosts and demons to go along with ghost-hounds? What had been that resistance to my sensor sphere, and that fear aura that had vanished with the resistance?
I'd gotten the information I'd gone to the PRT for, but it looked like I wasn't going to run out of questions any time soon.
----------------
I handed off the data to Lisa and she took it without a word. The next day, we met up for training with the Wolkenritter. All of us showed up again: me, Vicky, Amy, Lisa, Missy. Fate had come to watch, but wasn't participating, and there was an uneasy sort of tension between her and the Wolkenritter. Min was supposed to have been back in time to train with Rein, but she'd told me she was going to be late.
"How late?" I asked.
"Moderately late," she answered.
"Is everything okay?"
Min laughed over the telepathic link. "Everything's fine! Awesome! I'm fine. We're all fine here. How are you?"
Sometimes, I really wished that facial expressions were easier to convey telepathically. Min wasn't there for me to regard dubiously, so I gave the look to a passing bird.
The bird was not impressed.
"Do I need to come up there to help you, Min?" I asked.
"Oh no you don't..." Min hissed. Then there was a sense of pure, radiant joy through the link as she said: "Oh my God, they explode when they die!" A beat passed. "Everything's fine, Taylor. I'm just... bonding with Aunt Dragon."
Uh huh.
I opened a channel to talk to Dragon. "Dragon?" I asked. "Is Min okay?"
Dragon's response was almost instantaneous: "Min's fine, Starfall, but we're busy. Can we call you later?"
"Fine," I said, and that was the end of the conversation.
... they explode when they die?
The training simulator had given us an old, weather-beaten shipping warehouse today, and I was pretty sure Dad had worked here once, before he'd taken the job with the Union. The warehouse had a ponderously high ceiling; exposed girders lined the walls, and towards the back a line of office windows overlooked the main warehouse floor. It was full of boxes and crates of all kinds, and row after row of standard intermodal freight containers surrounded the warehouse on three sides. It smelled like rust and brine and metal, with just a hint of that stale sweat odor lingering in the background, and all of it was fake.
The Bureau's holograms were damned impressive. As long as the mana generator kept the emitters powered, this place was as good as real.
Today's exercise was all about teamwork. The challenges were designed to require us to work together to overcome them. And that was how I was formally introduced to power limiters.
It started just after Lisa and I had been paired up for the exercise. Vita tossed a set of bracelets my way and told me, "Put those on."
I did, and it interfaced with my Device, and I realized something was wrong almost immediately. It felt like I was breathing just as deeply as normal but barely getting a tenth as much air with each breath. But it wasn't about my lungs, and it wasn't oxygen intake that was limited now: it was about respiring Mana. The normal flow of power between my body and my Linker Core was instantly reduced to a flow that seemed barely more than a trickle.
My eyes went wide, and I took the bracelets off; everything went back to normal. I looked up at Vita questioningly.
"They're called Limiters," Vita said. The corner of her lips quirked upwards in a smirk. "Guess what they do."
"Irritate anyone who has to wear them?" Lisa asked brightly. "Cause cancer? Natural male enhancement?"
Vita turned her head and focused her complete and undivided attention on Lisa, and Lisa's answering smile was less smile and more baring of teeth.
I spoke up before Lisa could say anything else that I would regret. "They limit how much Mana I can use," I said.
Vita let it go. She nodded at me. "Wearing those, you're at her level." She gestured to Lisa.
"And you're doing it to make sure I can't just power through the exercises," I surmised.
"Obviously," Lisa said.
I eyed Vita. "I guess they'll let anyone be the Handicapper General these days."
Lisa's smile widened incrementally; Vita didn't get it. "It's fine," I said. "What do we have to do?"
"Today is team tactics day," Vita said. "We're going to test you at the end. But for now, start your warm-ups."
We did. Warm-ups involved a series of basic magical and physical exercises. We started with stretches and water cutting -- this time without the benefit of actual water to do it with -- and expanded from there.
It wasn't fine. I knew Lisa wasn't weak magically speaking, but operating at her level with the limiter bracelets on my wrists felt like trying to walk with concrete shoes. I couldn't draw power like I normally could: if my normal flow of power was like having a fire hose that I could point at whatever I wanted, this was more like a sad little flow of water coming out of a garden hose at half pressure. My body seemed to get tired more quickly, I could barely fly, and my attack spells left holes in the targets instead of completely destroying them. There was a sense of increasing pressure against the limiters the more I tried to draw in mana, but I didn't push it.
It was frustrating and exhausting, but I took some comfort in the knowledge that I could burn out the limiters if I really wanted to. ... Or turn them off. I could also do that. There was even an icon on my new Device's HUD that would do just that. But burning them out sounded a lot more satisfying.
I realized what Vita and the Wolkenritter were doing pretty quickly.
Chrono must have told them. If they wore me out with the limiters, I wouldn't be able to go after the Fallen until I'd had some time to recover. It wasn't going to stop me in the long term, but it might delay me from acting, depending on how exhausted I got. The fact that it was also good training helped to sell it. Hell, it was probably something they'd planned to introduce anyway, and this just made it doubly useful.
... I think I liked it better when the people standing in my way weren't that clever or resourceful.
But I played into it. I acted more tired than I was, like the level of physical activity being demanded of me exhausted me more than it did. I've never played poker so I don't know what my poker face looks like, but they seemed to buy it. It helped that I was only exaggerating what I really felt. And the whole exercise confirmed something I'd only suspected: my body needed Mana to operate at superhuman levels for any length of time. Deprived of that Mana, it resorted to burning calories for fuel like everyone else's.
It took a lot of calories to power better-than-human muscles and reflexes, and by the time we were done for the day my hunger felt like it was starting to wear a hole in my stomach.
When I removed the limiter, I drew in power, mostly just to reassure myself that I could, and then I released it again.
We ate out, and Fate looked lonely by herself off to the side, so I invited her to come with us to the restaurant, and there we ate and drank our fill as we plotted our next move.
-----------------
Next: 6.10, in which a plan comes together.