<No, no,
no. I don't understand. How are we here? How is
this world here?>
Mariposa was far more vocal than I was but truth be told I think we were both incredibly unsettled by the revelation that we had managed to arrive on an Alternate Earth - a carnival funhouse reflection of the world that I'd been born into and raised on.
Since the villainous Professor Haywire managed to tear open a portal to what would come to be known as Earth Aleph sometime in the mid-1980s, we'd known of the presence of Alternate Earths. Sure, Aleph was the only confirmed one, but I never could quite imagine that there would only be two total possible versions of my planet out there. One made sense, as did 'many,' but two had just somehow felt impossibly unlikely.
And I was right. My Device had eventually shown me the rest of her approach scans taken just before we'd met for the first time, when I'd asked about it as part of my first foray into studying basic dimensional mechanics. I'd seen Aleph, and Bet, and a few dozen other Alternate Earths arrayed inside some sort of cordon I didn't have the words to properly describe or even to fully conceptualize, and so I had elected not to think about it entirely as something that was just too far outside of my ability to process.
But there were a lot of things even in the 'basic' course of study that I was a long ways away from having the ability to process, and so that was hardly unique.
...Regardless of
that irritating reality.
There was such a thing as impossible coincidences. I wasn't far enough in my studies to get past the elementary 'don't worry about why for now' lack of explanation for how dimensions actually form, the same way that elementary schoolers didn't need to learn the theories of galaxy formation in order to learn about the planets of the solar system. As far as I could tell from what I had learned so far between the literature and my travels, though, the Alternate Earths I'd grown up with were something of a dimensional oddity.
Dimensional travel worked far more like the sci-fi concept of FTL travel than the sort of 'moving through alternate timelines' suggested by the evidence of Earth Aleph and Earth Bet having been the same world until the emergence of Scion somehow caused them to split in 1982. Whatever the reality was at a fundamental level I wasn't prepared to understand, the reality on a practical level was that none of the other worlds I'd been to were 'Alternate Earths' so much as 'planets that met the conditions to be hospitable to baseline human life - which tended to be Earth-like,' and whether that was because the timeline had split at some point prior to the formation of the planet or simply because they had never been the same dimension to begin with wasn't a relevant distinction to anybody but the most hardcore of researchers or philosophers.
And it goes without saying that no possible interpretation of divergent timelines allowed for the possibility that two planets - Earth Aleph and this 'Earth-TSAB' - so vastly far apart from each other in the sea of dimensional space should somehow end up basically identical.
It was like stumbling on a perfect doppelganger of me except instead of 'me' it was a planet and the planet wasn't even my planet but the closest next door neighbor to my planet and I was having a hard time coming to terms with that up until I decided that <It doesn't matter.>
That brought my companion up short. <What?>
<I think,> forcing myself through the words and trying to cut the panic off before it really gets going, <it doesn't matter why this world is here. We could sit here all day and freak out about it but that's probably not going to actually make this version of Earth realize it's somehow strayed half a hundred thousand dimensions away from its Alternates. I think I'd rather just accept that somehow a bunch of monkeys bashing on keyboards eventually managed to produce a legible copy of Macbeth and not worry about how many other potential stray copies of Earth are out there.>
<...Okay. Alright. We're getting out of here, then?>
I...
Truth be told, standing here just outside of a version of Times Square, in the middle of one of the largest cities on a version of my homeworld, a little bit of homesickness was flaring up. I grabbed onto that, choosing 'homesick' over 'upset and panicky,' and...
<Soon. As long as we're here, though? I kind of want to take the chance to partake in a couple creature comforts of life on Earth.>
No telling if or when I'd ever be back to another Alternate Earth, after all.
On Fluttering Wings
Episode 4:
Nanoha Takamachi
My wildest cape fantasies had never included travel to other worlds. I'd never imagined being in a situation where I would be doing that so often that I'd end up creating a routine for 'arriving on a new planet.' Nevermind actually holding to that routine!
But the wonderful thing about a routine is how easy it is to keep it going once it's started. And my standard game plan for each new stop on Taylor Hebert's Grand Tour worked just as well for bizarre and incongruous facsimiles of my homeworld as it did for fantastic magical alien places. To say nothing of the fact that for all magic was wonderful and for how much I was enjoying being introduced to the wonders of a reality that went far beyond my wildest dreams, some days, I still just woke up wanting 'normal.'
Like the famous New York Dollar Slice, an entirely too large and entirely too greasy piece of heaven that I was currently enjoying thanks to the lucky find of a five dollar bill on the ground.
New York itself was a busy city. Some might say it was too busy. Everyone was always hustling to get to somewhere they had to be five minutes ago, do something they had to have done yesterday, nobody had the time or the inclination to pay attention to poorly-kept city girls out from under their parent's foot. Even if that city girl was too old to have a doll, and that doll was acting suspiciously alive, floating close in front of me instead of being held? If that girl happened to wield some minor displays of otherworldly power in the pursuit of "aggressive self defense?" Forget about it, kid, this is New York. Weird things happen here all the time.
Surrounded by millions of people and I was more alone and invisible than ever. I loved it.
It helped that a key component of my routine was not sticking around for long. Two days. Maybe three. So long as I didn't do anything really out there, like rocketing off up past the top of the city's skyline (it had been a stroke of good luck that my panicked emergency teleport put me off to the side of Times Square and not dead in the middle of it, or I'm sure I'd be having a very different day right about now), I just wasn't going to be around for long enough that anything I did that did attract some small amount of attention would catch up to me. Especially if I stayed below that imaginary line of 'interesting enough,' I was basically free and clear to just be me.
Just another girl on the street, enjoying the start of my high school's spring break, on the Monday afternoon of March 18th, 2019.
Good thing I was studiously avoiding thinking about the implications of this world being here or else I might have actually panicked over the thought that I've possibly lost eight years and change on my way over to this part of reality! Nope. Not thinking about that. Not at all. Also not initiating deeper scans of the surrounding dimensions to doubly confirm that this Alternate Earth isn't linked to any other Alternate Earths that I might have been able to follow a chain back to Earth Bet along. None of those things are happening right now.
<These are some awfully intricate scanner constructions for someone committed to not thinking about the implications of landing on an impossible world.>
<I have no idea what you're talking about!> I blithely lied.
Mariposa's sensory suite was incredibly high-performance and I'd recently earned access to all of it. Why ever wouldn't I apply its full power to my own scanning magic? It's not like we were operating under any power constraints, and since I had it, I should use it.
A few weeks worth of training did not an expert make, and I was under no illusions about just how far I still had to go in my studies. I was, essentially, a preschool magician when I should've been halfway through the tenth grade. No matter how hard I pushed myself or how much time I could commit to study, there was only so much I could do to compress the breadth and the depth of the material that needed mastering, only so many different ways I could combine like coursework and divide my own attention to accelerate learning without sacrificing anything in the process. Despite that, I could be - if not exactly proud of - then satisfied with my rate of growth. I'd already promoted my own self-assessment past 'newborn magician' after all. But it'd be unacceptable to get lazy and start the sophomore slump when I hadn't even made it to kindergarten magician yet.
Training and self-study had other benefits as well, even at my current level of ability. I was seeing real physical improvement on the performance charts that my coach was meticulous about keeping. More importantly, I was
feeling real physical improvement, becoming stronger and faster with every passing day. My body and my mind were starting to just generally work better than they'd ever had before. The poetic response to this would be something like 'everything about me is improving through magic,' but really, I knew that magic had very little to do with it.
It had just been the kick I needed to start caring about myself again after I'd largely stopped doing that for the larger part of two years.
And I wasn't about to let up on myself. Not now that I was really starting to see the returns on my investment, not now that working on myself had become a core part of my routine. Keeping the pace up and continuing to build momentum was just worth too much for me to even consider it. Still, a positive attitude and self-determination alone weren't enough for me to overcome my own limits, nor were they enough to overcome the limits of the systems I was working with. Compiling and executing scan magic was high-intensity work, but it was ultimately a very small part of the entire scanning process. Once I fired the scanners off, they'd have to actually conduct the scans for which they'd been built, a process which was extremely lengthy and tended not to benefit from active oversight. Sure, I could spend time and effort on monitoring scans in progress, but why would I want to? The information that these scans would produce was incredibly dense, but it was hardly time sensitive. Reviewing the results could wait until we had all of them. I had better things to do in the meantime.
This was New York, after all.
"I'm home!" Nanoha sang out upon her arrival into the facility that housed the vast majority of all TSAB operations on her birthworld, where some part of her would always think of as her home. She'd long since fully moved out to Midchilda, the world that the rest of her now thought of as home, but familial ties could span even the vast distance between her two homes with ease.
The two guards stationed on Transference did an admirable job of suppressing their awe as they snapped off a textbook salute. "Captain Takamachi! Welcome back to UA-97, ma'am! It's an honor!"
"At ease." She smiled, never quite comfortable with the level of fame that followed her around - it was entirely unbefitting of a humble Captain in the Air Force Instruction Corps. Still, she'd long since made her peace with it. Once you earned a title like 'the Ace of Aces,' it was nearly impossible to get away from it, after all.
Besides, the film company that had taken it upon themselves to begin producing a series of movies about some of the highlights of her career with the TSAB had been very convincing with their arguments of 'inspiration' and 'promoting youth engagement.' More importantly, they'd asked for her and all her friends to personally oversee the scriptwriting, and Fate-chan had fallen in love with the idea of telling her story, so that was that.
"If you'll follow me?" Sergeant... Ford, if her memory served, requested. "You're the last to arrive, so we can get started right away."
The perils of having to depart from a vacation world instead of directly from Headquarters. "Have the others been waiting long?"
"Not at all," her temporary escort shook his head, graciously taking the lead as they began their walk to one of the available video conferencing rooms. "As instructed, we've been holding to observation. And..."
Her smile didn't quite leave her face, but it did shrink somewhat. Hesitation wasn't a good sign. "And?" She pressed.
"Well, see for yourself, ma'am." A video screen was called up and passed over to her without another word.
It depicted the girl they were looking for, apparently in the worrying process of casually looting an unconscious man in a back alleyway for cash. Judging by the positioning and the presence of a handgun tucked into the man's belt, it was at worst an example of a lack of restraint, but...
"There's been a rash of similar incidents that coincides somewhat nicely with what would appear to be the path she took to get here, after she left protective custody." The Sergeant didn't appear to be able to decide between a smirk or a grimace, his face settling on something halfway in between. "Nobody has actually filed a complaint against her. Turns out that local police tend not to be too sympathetic when a mugger finds themselves on the wrong side of their profession."
The veteran air mage nodded. "It helps that her apparent use of the money is entirely on things like hotel rooms and meals. Still..."
Support networks were in place for this sort of thing. Nobody her age should be forced to go this far just to feed themselves. What had happened to this girl?
Further musing would have to wait as the pair arrived at the conference room. Yuuno-kun, who had long needed a vacation of his own from his duties as Head Librarian, had already called into the meeting from the Infinity Library. Nanoha offered her first magical friend another bright smile and a cheerful wave before turning her attention to...
"This feels oddly nostalgic, doesn't it, Nanoha-chan?"
Military propriety went out the window. "Hayate-chan! I wasn't expecting this!"
"I don't get too many opportunities to actually stretch my legs anymore, you know." Hayate offered in a stage whisper. "But I
am one of the foremost experts on Unison Devices that the TSAB has, so I was able to assign myself to her case on that basis."
'Not too many opportunities' was something of an understatement regarding her dear friend, the Last Mistress of the Tome of the Night Sky. Fielding an individual known for her complete command over - and perhaps more importantly, her pacification of - one of the most destructive Lost Logia to ever plague civilization was considered such an overcommitment of force to essentially any routine operation that it never happened. General Yagami's ascension to one of the highest positions on the chain of command had actually resulted in an uptick in her field work simply because of situations like this, in which rare circumstances allowed her and Rein (officially, the Marine Defense Forces Investigation Vice-commander) to justify assigning themselves to a mission and then approving each other's assignments.
Rein herself - rather, Reinforce Zwei, Hayate Yagami's own Unison Device that she had rebuilt from the remains of the Tome of the Night Sky's Master Control Program, waved happily in the door's general direction without looking. Her attention was focused on trying to build an actual report out of a collection of rough observations and guesswork, and she was bouncing a tremendous amount of data back and forth with Yuuno-kun to somewhat limited success.
"And, of course," Doctor Shamal chimed in, "it's a reasonable assumption that our runaway may not have received medical attention in a while. So I came too!"
Before she was a qualified Medical Master in the employ of the Bureau, Shamal had been both the field doctor and support specialist of the Wolkenritter, a team of guardians linked to what was then known as the Book of Darkness. She was as capable on a battlefield as any other Knight, and Hayate's guardians weren't willing to let their Mistress go into the field without the support of at least one of them.
With each of the other Wolkenritter holding military positions of their own, this almost always meant that it was Shamal who would accompany Hayate into the field barring the even less likely scenario that an incident would justify the full deployment of the Wolkenritter in their entirety.
And no matter who she was, or what it would turn out that she could do, before anything else, the girl with the dark hair and the sad eyes was a child in need of help. Deploying the entirety of the Wolkenritter was several steps farther than was necessary for someone who Nanoha sincerely hoped would be persuaded to come home peacefully.
There was the requisite round of hugs with everyone before Captain Takamachi took her seat at the end of the conference table and called the meeting to order. "Then, with everyone here, let's begin. Yuuno-kun?"
"You're actually just in time, Nanoha. We don't have any record of the girl, but we believe we've identified her Device. The spell math they seem to be using seems to match historical records collected by the Saint Kings on some planets that had chosen to rebel against Belka during the Unification Wars, and from that, we believe we can match her to descriptions of a 'living weapon' that they referred to as the Moonlight Butterfly..."
The Queendom of Espiria had once been known as the shimmering land of gold and sapphires, and famous for its unique contributions to the efforts of the Free States. Where they lacked for the overall might of the Belkan Empire, the general technical prowess of the Ossian Federation, or the sheer numbers of the United Republics, they had in their specialization something which made them invaluable to their allies and most hated by their enemies.
It was the power of Espirian Science that unlocked the secrets of Unison Device creation for the Free States, and every single one of the many Unison Devices that had stood up against the tyranny of the Saint Kings owed their creation to that long-lost planet. The Moonlight Butterfly came into existence there, originally but one of many Siege-class Devices born in the earliest days of the war.
She'd ascended to considerable fame on all sides of the conflict for her sheer tenacity as much as anything else. Born to what was likely the fifth generation of Espirian Unison Devices, she'd managed to outlast her entire generation of peer Devices as well as the two generations that had followed her, said to have refused every honorable discharge offered at the end of each tour of duty and demanded to be allowed to continue serving 'until the day that the Cradle sank back into the hell it was dug out from.' Even as the ninth generation of combat Devices took the field, a combination of continual upgrades and the weight of her experiences allowed that stubborn girl to overshadow her younger siblings, until the day she was finally assumed slain in the Sacking of Emmeria when she'd been caught in the dimensional quake that had been set off deliberately with the goal of destroying the planet.
Nobody knew who actually triggered the quake as all combatants on both sides had been lost along with the planet itself.
"And now," Yuuno-kun had concluded, "she's returned from her hundred years adrift, almost certainly unaware that her long conflict has already ended."
"Yet another girl chained up by the past..." Hayate-chan had muttered. More and more, living legacies of a time best left forgotten were beginning to make themselves known - Ancient Belkan bloodlines resurging, and now the opposition's war legacy was becoming uncovered.
But for Nanoha herself, this was excellent news. The Moonlight Butterfly wasn't a Lost Logia, not really. Her powers could be dealt with if they had to be, but the Device herself was alive. And she could make the choice to stop fighting. A choice that she'd hopefully find much easier to make now that she'd arrived into a future where her wish had already been granted.
And as for the girl to whom that Device was now bound in partnership...
Rein spoke softly. "Once upon a time, a confused and lonely girl sought a friend to join hands with, and found that friend in the remains of a war machine washed up on her world that knew nothing of magic?"
It was an all too common story in Administered Space, told far too many times in reports of Lost Logia buried on Unadministered Worlds and activated by the careless wishes of children born with power on a world unable to teach them of its uses or its dangers. Here and now, though, that story could have a happy ending. That girl hadn't woken up a mindless tool of destruction. She'd get to keep her friend.
With any luck, they wouldn't even need to fight first.
"That's the most likely explanation," Yuuno-kun agreed.
"I don't suppose we found her home?" Nanoha asked, and they indeed hadn't. By the time that they'd managed to trace the remnants of the girl's transference signature as far back as Uninhabited World 225, the natural ebb and flow of the Dimensional Sea had washed away the traces of the girl's approach vector, leaving only a scar on the planet's surface indicative of an uncontrolled and untargeted jump that had carried her from somewhere likely far outside of Administered Space.
Whatever the girl's home had been like, the road back to it had long since been all but lost.
She'd need a new home, now. A comfortable place where she could grow into her own in safety, somewhere that she wouldn't need to do such unreasonable things as partake in street fighting to feed herself. Where she'd be wanted and appreciated for who she was instead of simply for the legacy she'd found herself connected to.
"You've got that look in your eye again, Nanoha-chan." Hayate-chan sang, a knowing smile on her face.
"It can't be helped." Nanoha sang back. That was just her nature.
This version of Earth was peaceful.
It had its problems just the same as any other place. There was crime and there were parts of the City that were run-down. Some people had it easier than others did. But overall? It was an Earth without despair. Without Endbringers. Without parahumanity.
My father would be right at home here. He'd grown up in a world that didn't even have Scion until late in his childhood. Capes hadn't really been a thing until he was in college and the world hadn't truly gotten bad until his late 20s. Would this Earth remind him of his youth? Of those better days he was always trying to get back to?
Would I ever get the chance to find out?
I wondered what Dad was doing right now. I hoped that he was okay, that he somehow knew that I was okay. Missing, not dead. We'd drifted apart somewhat after Mom... but things hadn't yet gotten so bad that they were irreconcilable. Just because I was resolved to move out didn't mean I didn't want the option to visit. Especially when - if - I could arrange it so that I'd be visiting my father on an Earth like this one.
And that was the problem. No matter how many times I looked them over, the results of deeper scanning refused to change. The dimensions closest to this one didn't match Earth. Different landmasses, different land quantities, no signs of life. If this truly was an Alternate Earth in the way that I understood them, it had become totally disconnected from its siblings. I hadn't held out a great deal of hope for any other result when I'd started scanning but I still had to know. Now I knew but I only had more questions because of it. How many other stray copies of Earth were out there? I could claim to be from
an Earth but not from
this one. I could go looking for my Earths and have no guarantee that I'd ever find them. Stumble upon any number of other not-quite-right duplicates without ever getting any closer to my home. No guarantee that even if Mariposa had been wrong in her assessment of my world's remaining time to live back when we started that by the time I returned I wouldn't be returning to the shattered remains of a planet instead or even just to a widower who'd had too many years to come to terms with the fact that neither of the two most important women in his life were ever coming home again.
...Sticking around on Earth-TSAB was a terrible idea in hindsight. American comfort food and the tourist tour of New York must-sees wasn't at all worth having the things I was trying not to think about stubbornly asserting themselves in my mind.
I decided it was time to put all of these feelings back into a little box and then put that box on the side of the road and then
just leave and not look back. <Mariposa? Let's->
<We're being hailed.> I froze.
<What?!>
<Someone's trying to send us a communication. Broadcasting on somewhat incomplete protocols but what is there matches the Free States, as well as what I'm just going to assume is TSAB standard.>
Okay, Taylor. Deep breaths. No need to freak out over this. You haven't really done anything all that wrong and the fact that someone's calling doesn't mean anything on its own. <Let's... let's see what it says and then we can decide what to do about it.>
The communication signal unfolded itself into a message in my mind without any further fanfare. I got a set of planetary coordinates for back on the other side of the world - and the impression that it was a café of some sort. Not that I'd trust that without a quick stopover to my friendly neighborhood branch of the New York Public Library so that I could plug the translated coordinates into Google Earth. More concerning to me were the words in that message beneath those coordinates.
The Cradle Has Fallen. It's Time To Come Home.
"It's time to come home?" Nanoha frowned. "Isn't that a little too..."
"Direct?" Yuuno-kun chuckled. "Perhaps, but our records of the Free States are even less organized than those of Ancient Belka and its successors. They didn't have a comparable organization to the Saint Church to manage anything, so we're stuck paging through the Infinity Library and trying to piece together a dialog based on whatever we can find. Direct is much better than trying to guess at the right military codes and possibly guaranteeing hostilities."
As far as anybody could tell based on the observed behavior, the girl (and it was frustrating for Nanoha that said girl hadn't done anything to reveal her name yet - it just felt so hostile not to call her by her name!) was the one ultimately driving the pace and direction of her travels with the Moonlight Butterfly. For what was still a Unison Device presumably on a war footing, she'd been remarkably passive; and neither of the pair had seemed particularly inclined to try and hide or sneak around, like they probably would have if they felt they were behind enemy lines.
She very much did not want to miscommunicate an impression that would change that.
They were somewhat lucky in the fact that the Saint's Cradle was indeed sunk four years ago, not merely downed or returned to slumber. Such a weapon had truly earned the designation of Lost Logia and whatever value it may have had was not worth more than the threat its mere existence had posed to the worlds or to her daughter, who deserved the chance to be a normal girl and not a living key to that ship's ignition.
No. They'd sunk the Cradle, and then gone back and torn its remains apart plate by plate until what was left of its ashes couldn't do so much as cause a bad cough, never mind harm anybody. And Riot Force 6 had enjoyed every moment of its demolition.
It was far from the last weapon of Ancient Belka that the TSAB would have to deal with, but it was the largest and most prominent symbol of the Unification War - the central link around which the Moonlight Butterfly's great enemy had been arrayed. With it banished forever to the realm of bad memories, convincing her that her war was finally over should be even easier then it might have been before the JS Incident. Ideally, the Cradle's permanent destruction would also take the edge off of the bad news that the true end of the Saint King Unification War had occurred a century ago, and that
everybody involved with it had lost in the end.
Nobody was particularly looking forward to breaking that news to what was likely one of the only remaining living legacies of Espiria and the Free States in general - one of the best sources of information on just who the Unification War had been waged against, by virtue of being one of the few things with a consciousness that had emerged on the other side of the apocalypse that had ended that war, the Sankt Kaisers, the Free States, and a great many other things as well.
That fact cast a pallor over what would've otherwise been quite the exciting moment for historians and anthropologists everywhere.
"Still..." Nanoha had began, before shaking her head as though to clear the thought away.
The truth was the truth, no matter how painful. And while it was hard to dwell on such painful things, it was vastly preferable to someone fighting a war that had already ended, trying to fulfill a promise long since completed by somebody else. So before things came to an unnecessary fight, before anyone did something that couldn't be taken back, the TSAB was going to try and open a peaceful dialog. They'd put together a little package with the TSAB's mission statement of containing the dangerous legacies of past wars, a summary of their current policies, the location of Espiria's ruins, and records of the Cradle's initial sinking and follow-up demolition, along with the invitation to come and talk.
Her Mom had been gracious enough to lend them the Midori-ya as a (mostly) neutral meeting site and they'd done the best they could to put together a message that hopefully wouldn't be perceived as hostile. All that was left now was to hope that the girl showed up as requested and was agreeable to an actual conversation without needing to have her head cooled first.
If it came to a fight, Hayate-chan was standing by, but the hope was that she wouldn't have to do anything more than drink her tea and enjoy some of Mom's famous cakes.
"Think she'll come by?" Yuuno-kun asked over video call. Unfortunately, he was still holed up in his Library. Not only did they probably not have enough time to get him to Earth on short notice, but they needed somebody back at the Infinity Library in case more information needed to be located or verified.
...Forget gift-wrapping a cake for him, she was going to drag her long-time friend out here for a vacation the second this entire incident had been resolved.
"Ah. We're being scanned. Rather aggressively scanned, at that. Impressive that she doesn't seem to have left New York first." Shamal reported. How mistrustful... Not for the first time, Nanoha wondered about this girl's past. There was 'reasonably checking out a meeting place before going over there' and then there was this level of paranoia.
When the girl's response came back in the form of another offworld Transference, it was not entirely unexpected. Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.
The Last Mistress of the Tome of the Night Sky shook her head sadly. "I suppose this bunch might be a little too intimidating to outsiders... eh heh..."
"Where do you suppose she's going?"
"Too early to say with certainty, Nanoha-chan. But..."
If any of them had been in the girl's shoes, never mind the Moonlight Butterfly's, it would be entirely reasonable to demand proof of their claims. Proof such as might be found at the location of what was once a thriving world of scientific research and technological development and what had now been reduced to a lifeless husk.
"I've got a pretty good guess."
The dimensional address for Espiria, and from it, a way for the Moonlight Butterfly to realign her current dimensional maps with the ones that predated the end of the War, had been included on that package for a reason. Nanoha had hoped that the girl would've come by for a talk first, perhaps even accepted an escort, but even her simply tearing off for that place directly wasn't nearly the worst possible outcome.
Nobody had opened fire yet, after all.
Flash. We arrived in the open skies surrounded by a chain of floating islands.
Flash. We arrived in the middle of a blue grass prairie with snow-capped mountains barely visible on the horizon.
Flash. We arrived on top of a thick tree branch halfway into the canopy of an untamed jungle.
<Think any part of what they sent us was the truth?> I asked my companion as we flipped through the dimensions at an impressive clip.
Being more than the sum of our parts when in Unison... I hadn't really understood what that would mean, since up until now we hadn't had a reason to Unite ever since I got enough of a handle on Transference to handle it solo. A few weeks of hard work had gotten me to the point where, without assistance, I was capable of the level of performance that I'd been at on day one with Mariposa's help. To be fair, she'd been holding back at the time out of a consideration not to overwhelm me, but I'd still thought that I had a pretty good handle on how much Unison would amplify my own capabilities.
I'd been dramatically wrong. The effect wasn't additive, it was exponential. Another few weeks of practice wouldn't get me anywhere near what we were capable of right in this moment. Maybe another few decades would. In the meantime? Well, I could forgive a lot riding the rush of how quickly we were able to move with the both of us going all-out.
Specifically, I could forgive that my stubborn little Device had gone out of her way to undo my modifications to my Jacket, deleting my comfortable coat and putting us back in the dress.
<I don't know, but we're going to find out.>
We'd been given an address that the TSAB claimed was Espiria, the Free State which she'd called her homeworld. They might have been lying, just as they might have been lying about actually having destroyed the Saint's Cradle.
The fact that the TSAB had somehow managed to leash what scans had identified as the Book of Darkness, a Belkan legacy weapon whose body count was actually a planet count, and then proceeded to give it any kind of position which allowed it to stake out small Earth cafés in the hopes of meeting people like me lent credence to the idea that they had indeed done what they'd claimed but more importantly it had made it very clear that if they actually wanted us dead or imprisoned that would have long since already happened.
I could be forgiven for not finding that a particularly reassuring sentiment.
Neither of us were entirely certain what we even hoped to find waiting for us at the address we'd been given. And even with our Unison-boosted range and speed, it'd be a while before we got there - an uncomfortable amount of time in which to think about the possibilities, most of which were even less encouraging than the thought that an unstoppable and infinitely recurring planet killing nightmare weapon currently enjoyed snacking on chocolate pastries and took its coffee with cream and two sugars.
Dimensional addressing was more like a multiversal phone book than anything else. Everything was relative to something else; whether that was the TSAB's standardized encoding that addressed everything with a function based off of the location of their headquarters at the 'center' of the Dimensional Sea, the Free States standard of regional encoding which had a different 'area code' for each of the primary worlds in the Alliance, or even just the way I had previously been 'dialing locally' by establishing destinations relative to my point of origin.
This had meant that whatever portions of Mariposa's navigation charts had survived her ordeal prior to meeting me were all but useless without the location of any of the Free States. Assuming the place we were rushing to was in fact Espiria, we'd get the locations of some thirty other worlds that were at one point thriving members of a multidimensional alliance. To tell the truth, I was afraid of what the current state of those worlds would turn out to be.
I wanted to hope that I'd been lied to, that we'd pull up on an uninhabitable world as far away as we could safely scan from and this whole thing would turn out to be some kind of trap or something. That what appeared to be a steadily growing pile of evidence that Mariposa and I had entered TSAB space from different sides of a recent apocalypse had a much happier explanation and that I was just allowing too many old post-apocalyptic novels to bias my conclusions.
That we weren't barreling down on my Device's own personal Planet of the Apes moment.
Somewhere along the way I realized that I hadn't exactly been the most compassionate of friends. It was easy for me to compartmentalize away my own complicated feelings about my homeworld, easy to get swept up in the journey I was undertaking now, and easy to forget that whatever my feelings were about my own home - she'd had a homeworld too, a homeworld which she spoke about with far more love and fondness than I'd had for my own home. A place she wanted to return to, war and all, and yet she'd readily deprioritized that for me. I'd barely given our nominal goal any real consideration before its possible location was outright handed to us, and there was a very real chance now that we'd be finding the ruins of a civilization instead of a thriving world.
I wasn't really sure what to do in this situation. Should I say something? I couldn't really find the words. 'Hope your planet isn't actually destroyed, sorry if it is' wasn't even close to adequate.
...No sense worrying about it before reality forced me to.
Flash. We arrived in the middle of a desert and I tried not to think about what this desert might have been once upon a time.
Flash.
Really, I don't know why I had ever expected any other outcome than this.
Either somebody had gone out of their way to mock up an entire planet to look exactly like how I'd expect the bombed out remains of a society that had thoroughly lost a war in their recent past (unlikely), or this was in fact all that was left of Espiria.
War was something that up until now had only existed to me in books or in other places or as an assembly of scary-sounding statistics. I could read about it and imagine it and look at the evidence of it on the long-range scans we'd taken just to make sure this place was real before we set foot on it but until I actually touched down here the enormity of war hadn't really affected me. I didn't have the proper context for actually standing in a place that had once been a thriving capital city and that now required me to keep my Jacket on because the air was no longer breathable and I needed the life support functionality.
Mariposa had gone very, very silent - I could feel her running scans, feel her borrowing my strength to boost her performance, perhaps holding out hope for any kind of silver lining or evidence that this wasn't what it appeared to be, but she wasn't talking and I couldn't blame her in the slightest for that.
I still didn't have the words to express what this was. I'd never known this place and the enormity of loss here was still overwhelming. How bad would it have been if I'd grown up here?
How hard would it have been to accept this? Could I ever have accepted this?
Thoughts of continuing my travels, of carrying on the way I had been before we arrived here, rang hollow in my mind. I wasn't really close to this place and most of what it meant to me was packaged up in what it meant to my companion but even so I felt like I'd need some time to actually come to terms with the fact that we'd never actually make it back to her home. She'd never get to actually show me around her favorite cities or argue with me over what we were going to do after we'd reached that goal of our journey.
I tried again for the right words or any words and once again I couldn't find any.
Someone else found some words for me. "It never really gets any easier."
Bookish, was the first word that came to mind for the man that had arrived on this planet-sized graveyard with us. His Jacket was an open duster over a tunic and sensible pants and his Device was a smart-looking pair of glasses. I could easily imagine him running around with a stack of books or notes or holed up inside of a library for hours on end. They probably sent him to be the nice and approachable cop after showing me the powerful and intimidating bad cops.
Volume didn't really have an impact on broadcasting in the traditional sense, but Mariposa's voice was more muted than I could ever remember it being as she broadcast to both myself and our somewhat unwanted company. <We... we lost, then?>
"Ah. It's more accurate to say that everybody lost, in the end." The man paused, as though considering something, and then introduced himself with a polite bow. "Chief Librarian Yuuno Scrya of the Infinity Library at your service."
I wasn't sure if I was supposed to find that title substantially more impressive or substantially less impressive than I actually did.
"This is hardly any condolence, but I am sorry that we're meeting in a place like this." How's that for understatements? "We had hoped to first meet with you in a somewhat more pleasant location." Which I suppose made this person the one who had been remotely connected to the café, since he obviously wasn't any of the women who had actually been inside of it at the time.
He paused again. I suppose this was where I was supposed to introduce myself, but he hadn't asked, so I wouldn't volunteer. I was still kind of reeling from where I was and the stress of rushing over here was starting to catch up to me.
After a moment more of awkward silence, Yuuno started a more comprehensive explanation.
"I'm afraid our records of what actually happened are somewhat disjointed and incomplete, but, this place... well, this place actually fared better than most of the combatants on either side of the conflict. As a center of technology development it was considered a priority location to take relatively intact if at all possible, even in those final days when the definition of 'take' and 'intact' began to lose all meaning with the unrestrained deployment of strategic ordnance."
I heard a despair-laden scoff that I was certain wasn't broadcast over to the Librarian, and I tried not to think about how many other Mariposas were lost and drifting after being on the wrong side of some incomprehensible superweapon.
Nor was I going to think about what the state of Espiria meant for places that weren't considered priorities to take 'relatively intact.'
"Where does that leave us...?" I had to ask the question even if I already knew that I wasn't going to like the answer.
So long as we weren't planning to stay in TSAB space forever I could've just kept going the way I had been for the entirety of my time there. I was a tourist on an extended vacation and therefore didn't need to worry about immigration. My father was ... elsewhere, but he could still be legally responsible for me just the same. No need to bother with compulsory education requirements when I was doing just fine with self-study. All of those things I would've had to deal with once I got back to the Free States and became nominally more settled - but the Free States were gone, meaning I didn't have a conveniently packaged 'I'll deal with it when I get there' excuse for not worrying about my legal status.
"That's actually what my friends wanted to talk to you about back on Earth." Oh, I already hate where this answer is going. "Hayate... that is, General Yagami, wanted me to pass along an apology for scaring you off."
"General Hayate Yagami being the Book of Darkness?"
"Its Mistress, she's more than that power. And she prefers it be called by its true name: the Tome of the Night Sky." Of course she does.
"Right. ...Thanks." I guess. The planet killer assuming (correctly) that we weren't interested in joining her for tea and cake and apologizing for it was nice enough I suppose. Better than being informed I'd caused offense, anyway.
"In any case, you're not in any kind of trouble," I'd beg to differ since I'd apparently caught the attention of extremely high-powered government officials, "but it's important that somebody talk to you and explain your current situation better than I can. Would I be correct in assuming that you'd prefer that person not be General Yagami?"
"Do I get a choice?"
"Of course."
"Then, yes, anybody but her."
Yuuno offered me a sad smile at that, but carried on regardless. "I'll let Nanoha know that you'd prefer to talk to her, then."
"Sure." I thought about it for another moment, sighed, and decided that I might as well get all of the bad news out of the way at once. "Let's just get this over with as quickly as possible."
"Certainly. Would you be comfortable accompanying me?"
No, not really. "Alright."
"Please follow me, then."
Coordinates were presented, and then we were off.
Next On Fluttering Wings...
A bluenette woman with golden eyes marvels at the interior of the first spaceship she's ever gotten to set foot on.
She marveled that the TSAB hadn't even asked her to disengage Unison, but then again, she probably wasn't actually that threatening to them compared to some of the people on their payroll.
And she appreciated the added feeling of security from having her Device close to her, even if she wasn't ready to admit that to anyone.
The walk over to the conference room from the room they'd transferred into seemed as though it was maximized to show off as much of the spaceship's interior and amenities as was possible without blatantly calling it a tour of the ship. She wasn't sure how she felt about that, just yet.
She wasn't sure how she felt about a lot of things, just yet. And she felt like she wouldn't be enjoying this upcoming conversation, even if none of the doors were locked and she could theoretically leave at any time.
Something told her that 'fifteen' probably wasn't considered a legal age of independence. Nevermind that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself.
Eventually, the blond man escorting her through the spaceship nods to a redheaded woman already seated in the conference room. Surprisingly, the room was in fact otherwise empty.
"We haven't been introduced yet." The woman says, rising to her feet. "My name's Nanoha Takamachi. It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss...?"
There's a momentary pause, but the bluenette responds in kind. "Taylor. Taylor Hebert."
"Miss Taylor," Nanoha Takamachi agrees. "Please, make yourself comfortable. We have a lot to talk about."
Episode 5: New Days, New Me!
