On Fluttering Wings [Taylor Hebert in MGLN]
That sounds like she can dimesionally shift a planet out of phase without its mages on her own while also nuking it from orbit.
If nothing else, her barriers would be terrifying to behold.
Stardust Falcon
Legendary Creature - Bird Wizard
- Location
- The Infinite Sorrow
This is correct; I didn't explicitly mention it, don't worry.
The first part is essentially correct; to expand on the metaphor, she's an artillery officer with a disturbingly good knowledge of certain types of artillery weapon plus a generalized knowledge in any other weapon type she'd be reasonably expected to run into and fully capable of learning how to do other things (e.g. punch a dude) but being as she's a military officer, general education stopped being important right around the time she went in fully on her specialization.
It's not a Worm powers situation where everything has to be somehow related to your one weird trick, but it's also not a Worm powers situation where your power comes packaged with instinctual knowledge of 'this is how you flex this muscle.' Just because everyone is theoretically capable of acquiring mastery over all fields of applied magic doesn't mean that people are doing that, the same way that nothing is stopping you from spending 30 years in college to acquire every single one of the however many Master's Degrees are on offer but in practice that's not workable.
- Location
- Neptune
And like a military officer she's expected to call on other specialists when needed.
Even if they don't have linker cores, you could still hook them up to a mana battery.
What's really terrifying is that you can then use spatial magic to hide away most of their superstructure and mass, so only the business ends and other environmental interaction pokes out into the world.
Hundred thousand ton war machine, convenient human-sized package.
- Location
- The State of Denial
Because usually when you get isekai'd, you end up in a world that doesn't have toilet paper yet. Or running water. Or the internet.
Taylor on the other hand, after a few hiccups, gets to go to places that have toilet paper, libraries, magic, and has a fairy that has wi-fi access,an interdimensional road map and can translate for her. Oh, and doesn't have three active Endbringers mucking up the planet. ...active. ...yet. Knowing Taylor's luck, she'll be riding a Lost Logia wearing a crown of Jewel Seeds by the end of the week.
Editing an extension to my post because I don't want to double post.
If you do that though, you end up with the "It's a trap!" scene from Needless. Robot girls aren't supposed to be packing a gun there. >.>
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- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Very interesting premise. More Nanoha fanfic's also nice to see. Watched.
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
I'm personally less concerned by the fact that she's packing a gun than I am at the size and number of them.
Episode 3: Our World's Infinite Possibilities
Stardust Falcon
Legendary Creature - Bird Wizard
- Location
- The Infinite Sorrow
Global trade had begun declining even before the emergence of Leviathan and it had continued to plummet for as long as I'd been alive. Earth Bet was a constant state of growing ever larger and our grocery suppliers ever sparser. For those without a relevant parahuman ability, it was exceedingly difficult to acquire even something as mundane as out-of-season fruits.
More exotic foods and spices which required climates that simply didn't exist on the North American continent? Essentially unavailable. As such, I'd grown up with a very limited palate not because I was a picky eater or anything but simply because the free exchange of information wasn't enough to put imported foods back on the shelves after the world had taken them away.
Add to that the fact that cooking had become a chore which I had to take on or else nobody in the Hebert house ate, rather than something I had any passion or enthusiasm for, and it wasn't hard to see how the most exotic food I'd eaten since my mom died had been the occasional Americanized Chinese takeout food.
The amount of choice I had before me now was absolutely paralyzing by comparison. There were a plethora of cuisines available to me now that I was suitably armed with some cash cards and access to the network. Every historical region both on and off-world was represented, along with a dizzying array of fusions and derivatives and 'concept restaurants' - things I'd long since resigned myself to only ever reading about in the occasional dispatches of information about life on Earth Aleph - and even this world's supermarkets were close enough to infinitely large to help me reaffirm my decision to not set foot inside of one.
It'd be easy to fall back into old patterns. 'Ground beef and vegetables on bread' is not a hard dish to invent. It might not be called such here, but I could easily get myself a good old-fashioned American hamburger with a little searching.
But...
Could I really say that I wanted to learn and grow if I wasn't willing to be at least a little brave?
Even if I hated the food, I'd be richer for the experience and only out of some petty thief's money.
Searching for 'food for the adventurous' introduced me to the local concept of 'entrusting,' essentially leaving the entire meal up to the mercies of the chef. I thought that if anyone tried that in Brockton Bay, they'd be laughed at or worse, but either the entire network was trying to prank me or more likely this was one of those things that was a cultural difference between home and here. Rather than considered obnoxious, it was generally seen as a polite challenge - an invitation to create truly impressive and delicious spreads and a show of faith that the restaurant knew what it was doing and knew how to take care of its guests.
I thought I might fake it 'til I made it. 'I'm a tourist from some other world, and I'm here seeking once-in-a-lifetime experiences' was a technically valid interpretation of my current situation (even if it was glossing over several things), and clad in my new favorite black-with-white-piping hoodie and matching baggy pants, I even looked the part. Well, I looked more like a person at any rate.
And that was how I ended up walking into what I thought was an upscale restaurant and what I knew would have a fantastic view of the Buranon Rapid River Transport as I had learned the ferry was called. (It had probably sounded better before translation.) I immediately handed the waiter back the offered menu along with my liberated cash card before I could give myself a chance to talk myself out of this, and I told him I wanted to be surprised.
He had a brilliantly enthusiastic smile as he ran off into the kitchen. I wanted to hope that I'd ever be that excited about anything.
On Fluttering Wings
Episode 3:
Our World's Infinite Possibilities
As it happens, there was either more money left on that cash card than I had realized after my quick clothing run, or that restaurant had been extremely appreciative of my request. Dish after dish kept arriving after I'd told the chef that small plates were preferred (an obvious mistake in retrospect) - it was hard to gauge how many meals worth of food I'd actually ended up going through, but I was apparently still pretty hungry and it was all exquisite so I just kept going until we finally made it to the end.
Mariposa had disappeared to... somewhere... early on in the meal and hadn't reappeared until it was time for dessert, towing along a pair of extremely mint-scented drinks that I suppose she must have gotten out of the waiter, one of which she was happily sipping away at, apparently undeterred by the glass being as tall as she was. She'd handed (well, floated) me the other glass and it was just as good as pretty much everything else in the meal had been. Reminded me of a milkshake, except for it being a hot drink. Very sweet. Hints of honey and cinnamon.
We left the restaurant extremely satisfied. Yeah... I could get used to this.
I suppressed the brief flash of guilt that rose up in accordance with that thought, pushed down the specters of the Trio and my father and the people of Brockton Bay and the people of this city they called Buranon as one rising to condemn me for having all this power and not doing more with it. And I knew I could be doing more - that I hadn't come close to earning the privilege to check out for the better part of two hours and be lavished with some of the best-tasting food I'd had in years. Not when there were surely so many other criminals like the two would-be muggers from earlier lurking in the corners of this city, not when we had no way of even knowing how far away from Mariposa's homeworld or any of the other Free States we were, and certainly not when I had fifteen years of education to get caught up on.
But then, it didn't matter that I hadn't earned it, because I deserved the chance to be happy after everything that had happened to me right up until... Well. Until the worst moment of my life, at any rate. I wasn't going to revisit it. That wouldn't be looking forward.
Somebody with very poor knife safety skills who had been eyeing me from where he probably thought I couldn't see him down at the other end of this dark alleyway took five shots to center mass that I pretended were loaded with my aborted feelings of self-recrimination. He could deal with them now that they'd been launched out of my head and into his gut.
<Hey, Mariposa?> I called out to my Device as we wandered over to retrieve the latest volunteer contributions to my room and board fund. <Do you think we should maybe... call this in to somebody?>
I felt more than heard her dismissive shrug. <Something tells me that would cause more problems for us than it would solve.>
She was almost certainly right. I did feel a little bad about just leaving people laid out like this, but on the other hand, they were criminals. Worse than that, they were bullies, the kind of people who would lure or follow people into shadowed alleyways and use their superior might to just take whatever they wanted.
People like Sophia Hess.
They had this coming to them.
I returned a similar shrug, coming up from my cursory inspection one cash card richer and the proud owner of a knife I didn't really need but wasn't comfortable just leaving with the man. He'd probably use it on some other unsuspecting teenager who was substantially less capable of defending herself, and we couldn't have that.
Maybe I could pawn it off on the next world? I decided that I'd look into it.
The list of things that I needed to look into was getting to be quite extensive but I almost preferred it that way. Even when the closest I'd thought I would ever get to being a cape was hanging out on Parahumans Online, that famous hive of internet debauchery dedicated to all things cape, I'd still spent countless hours trawling both the boards and the wiki. I learned everything that there was publicly available to know about my city's top-sixteen-everywhere quantity of capes (we held the dubious distinction of being number one in the world on a per-capita basis, but that wasn't nearly enough to put our cape headcount ahead of the remaining megacities like New York or Second Lagos), spent countless hours participating in the Versus Debates board's habit of pitting capes against each other (despite my best efforts, though, threads always ended up as mindless internet slap fights), I'd even earned a badge for proposing creative powers usage that I was unreasonably proud of.
So I was a cape geek. I wasn't ashamed.
I might have been a little ashamed of how often I found myself following random tangents, falling into a wiki walk that took me everywhere except for where I'd originally set out to go, but who amongst we proud internet dwellers wasn't susceptible to getting lost in the pursuit of random information from time to time?
And thanks to my overzealous pursuit of knowledge on powers, I would've been more than able to hold my own in a cape fight on the off chance I'd managed to discover my own power and it wasn't something super esoteric like bug control. That might have taken me a couple days... weeks... okay, probably a couple of months to work through factoring in my cautious nature. Even without a power, 'run away' might have been the officially endorsed PRT and PHO plan for what normal humans should do when they encountered a hostile cape, but how was anyone expected to successfully run away from someone whose abilities they didn't fully understand?
Those same instincts and that desire to learn as much as I could about the world I'd now found myself plunged into headfirst would serve me well. I saw no reason to try and curb them. Every new fact of life I found myself learning about was one less thing that could serve to be a nasty surprise later.
How many other teenagers would have looked at fifteen years worth of homework and decided that what they needed was more of it?
Didn't matter, I decided. I was who I was, and I was somebody who was going to have fun learning and growing.
Brockton Bay was what some people might refer to as a 'hard' city. Hometown pride aside, life there wasn't exactly easy. We had two major parahuman-led gangs carving the city to pieces between them, and a third parahuman-led gang trying to assemble relevancy out of whatever scraps of turf they could sneak out from underfoot, all while the city's appointed delegation of heroes struggled to keep some semblance of peace. This gang cold war that was always threatening - but never quite managed - to turn hot played out against the backdrop of a city for which the only remaining value was in the 'industry' of Cape Tourism - Brockton Bay received an outsized portion of travelers for what was ultimately an unremarkable blue collar city deprived of blue collar work, driven by that same number-one-in-the-world-per-capita cape ratio.
Spotting the cape tourists was easy; they were the people whom the weight and pressure of life in Brockton Bay didn't quite reach. People who didn't walk with any sort of edge, who were possessed of the exuberance and curiosity of someone for whom the struggle of living in our city was an interesting bit of hands-on reality TV that they could shut off and check out from whenever they wanted.
For lack of any other options to keep ourselves going, the city had somewhat reluctantly come to embrace its new status as a 'destination' town. New hotels were going up all the time, and they tended to be the nicest buildings on whatever block they were built in; other hospitality businesses of both a legal and illegal nature tended to follow them.
After all, save for being charged a higher rate for being from out of town, why shouldn't the gangs make some of their pleasure services available to the esteemed guests of our city? And why shouldn't someone for whom Brockton Bay was plausibly real but not quite an actual place, some sort of dark reprisal of a Disney World or a Las Vegas where those within its boundaries got to become somebody other than who they were in their regular lives at their regular homes, be able to support the local 'interests' with the money they clearly had no better use for if they were choosing to spend on travel to Brockton Bay?
I'd always resented the tourists somewhat. But I'd also come to accept the reality of my home. And it had taken a journey farther away from that home than I would've ever thought possible to realize that the constant pressure and quiet resignation - the feeling of quiet hopelessness that sank deep into skin and bones and helped contribute to the 'hardness' of the city's locals - wasn't a normal fact of life.
Buranon didn't have that in its atmosphere, not in perceptible quantities. Everything here almost sparkled - not so much in the literal sense but rather in a comparison to the darkness and roughness that permeated my city and which I could now clearly perceive in my memories based on its absence here, in this foreign city on a foreign world that had just enough loose reminders to my home that I couldn't help but compare.
The history of this town was similar to my own based on what I had to assume were sanitized accounts made available to tourists who wanted to know more about their current choice of locale. Blue collar industrial work centered on and powered by the mighty river from which the city took its name that had dried up and become obsoleted by advancing technology, forced to reinvent itself as a destination town powered by the tourism industry. Only there were no gangs here to offer services on the wrong side of legality; the only drug readily available here was the adrenaline produced by participation in one of the region's available adventure tourism activities. What criminals had chosen to operate in this city were all people independently making and sticking with poor choices of their own volition rather than being swept up by the will of a gang. And the riverside inn that I had checked myself into carried the gentle and inviting air of a place doing its best to feel like a home away from home, quite unlike the way Brockton Bay's hotels did everything possible to present themselves as bastions of safety and respite against the harshness of the city around them.
It was both refreshing and maddening. I kind of hated this place for making me confront the reality of the situation back home, a situation that I now found myself quite removed from, without even really doing anything.
...Not enough to change my plan to spend a night here, though. Especially not with how soft and inviting this bed was. I'd be quite happy to collapse into it later tonight, after having managed to thoroughly exhaust myself in the pursuit of a state of physical fitness that could be described as anything at all, instead of my current 'absolute lack thereof.'
Maybe I hadn't quite thought what I was agreeing to through the whole way, when I committed to an exercise plan that included afternoon sessions every other day on top of morning cardio. But I wasn't going to let myself back down at this point.
"Success in a fight requires more than pure strength. It requires grace."
I found myself working through a series of basic stretches on a sandy island in the midst of an endless ocean on a nearby uninhabited world. Mariposa had adopted the tone of voice I tended to associate with teachers. Unlike Winslow's teachers, however, her voice was laced with passion for her work and I found myself drawn in by it. Enthusiasm appeared to be infectious.
"You may or may not be able to outhit the opponent in front of you. You may or may not be able to outlast the opponent in front of you. But there will always be opponents who are stronger than you, who are faster than you, who can last longer than you. Getting into a fight with somebody on these terms should be avoided whenever possible, particularly because we have other options. Even the strongest attack is worthless when it fails to connect. That is the key to your long-term combat success. If your opponent cannot hit you, they cannot harm you. So you will need to develop the grace and flexibility required to ensure that you cannot be hit."
She began to smirk. "Were we members of the Ground Services, this would be the point at which we began working through an introductory gymnastics routine designed to promote dodging around ground-based assaults. We won't be doing that today, because we are members of the Air Services. Our entire martial style revolves around our ability to fly."
My brain skipped for a moment. I could fly?!
I didn't think it possible but her smirk got even wider. "That's right. Starting today, Taylor, the forces of gravity are no longer a rule for you so much as a polite suggestion."
Oh hell yes.
I probably didn't need access to true flight on top of my already hilariously overgeared ability to pick a point in space and just go there, but did that matter? Not in the slightest. There was just something impossibly alluring about the idea of kicking off the ground and taking to the sky; people compared the pure joy found in movement to feeling like flying for a good reason, and I was certain that 'feeling like' would prove to pale in comparison to the real thing.
The necessary calculations for flight began unfolding in my mind at the direction of my Device but I knew that she wasn't going to provide any assistance beyond making me aware of the initial math. I was, objectively, a long way away from doing this on my own at combat speed. Keeping myself from wobbling as I started to lift myself into the air was a frustrating exercise, and I couldn't manage to hold myself up for more than a few seconds before tumbling back to the ground in a heap.
Doesn't matter, I can fly!
My flight instructor cleared her throat. "Good enthusiasm, but you should probably put your Jacket on before you take any falls at height."
I felt my cheeks color. Right, safety first. Always be certain to use life-preserving equipment when engaging in hilariously fun extreme sports activities. And so on.
(I can fly!)
The seafoam green light of my power surrounded me, pressing itself into the shape of a new Barrier Jacket without any fanfare. I'd indeed been able to adjust the Jacket's template without any assistance; the dress skirt had been converted into wide-legged and flowy pants and then the entire outfit had been nicely covered up by a full length duster coat in an unassuming gray with a hood that I left down.
My Device took one look and decided she hated it. "Ugh. Really, Taylor? And a hood of all things. Not even a nice hat?" I pretended not to hear any part of that. I liked this much better and I was comfortable in it. This was far more 'me' than a military gown. She should just be thankful I compromised with myself away from a voluminous black cloak of mystery, because I didn't feel the need for my costume to be quite that cliche.
Now reasonably protected against fall damage, I rallied, working through the liftoff calculations at a slow pace and forcing myself to remain still and focused as I once again came up off the ground. An altimeter helpfully provided itself in holographic display format once it became clear that I wasn't going to immediately fall back into the sand and I was holding myself steady at exactly one foot in the air.
A deep breath to encourage myself. I can go higher than this. Much higher. One foot became two feet became three as I began ascending and stopped maintaining any sense of control over my sheer joy at actually flying.
"Start angling out towards the water!" I heard as I passed five feet and began accelerating. Sure! Adjusting to be flying out as well as up was easy, I just needed to pitch forward and adjust the angles and-
Oh shit I pitched too far gotta correct and now I'm spinning and handling this is way harder than just ascending straight up was oh no I'm losing-
Loud is the splashing noise I make as I crash into the water after falling from around ten feet up.
So that's why we picked the ocean planet for this. I see. At least the water's warm and my Barrier Jacket is as buoyant as an actual life vest. I didn't even feel the impact through the defensive layering.
The holographic display with my altimeter on it (ha ha, negative five feet, thanks for that update) gains another line representing my personal best time in flight: twenty seconds.
I can do better than that.
Calling up the flight magic again, this time taking extra care and paying attention to the entire body of the spell. The lesson here is obvious now, and there are a lot of moving parts involved with self-guided flight. My Device is the type of teacher who is all too happy to help, to take over as much of the processing as she'd need to, if I give up and ask her. Until I ask her though, she'll just float there on the only little island in sight with an expression of silent challenge on her face. Holding off on progressing any farther in this lesson until I've proven to the both of us that I can or can't fly on my own.
As I burst out of the ocean with little more than a stray thought of interest to how the water just falls away from my Barrier Jacket until it looks like I'd never taken a dip to begin with, I decide I'm fine with falling into this ocean over and over and over again until this is as close to second nature for me as it's possible to get. No matter how many tries it's going to take for that.
Five feet up and I stop ascending in order to get comfortable with turning (yawing?), pitching, and rolling. It takes me a few tries but soon I've eliminated any hint of shakiness or instability from my quickly improving flight form and I'm making lazy circuits around the perimeter of the island with the occasional barrel roll or somersault for fun. Simple movements, but a strong foundation is the most important thing to have when building a skill. After a few laps I'm confident enough to resume steadily climbing, making sure to work though every basic motion as I ascend.
Mariposa practically radiates approval when she comes up to meet me thirty feet in the air. It feels... nice. Other than Mrs. Knott, it's been a long time since I've gotten anything approaching approval from a teacher. I can't help but bask in it a little.
"Impressive for your first time flying - but it's only going to get harder from here."
"That's fine," I reply, "I'm ready for it."
She nods, waving her hand out over open sky. It's easy to forget how powerful my Device actually is when all she's doing is floating around offering words of wisdom, but then she'll just pull an entire hard light obstacle course out of nowhere for me. 'Time in flight' on my helpful display disappears, replaced by a course completion time leaderboard. I take a moment to look at the course - little more than a loose circuit of rings and walls, I don't even need the 'level 1' label to know it's incredibly basic - and my hubris gets the better of me.
"I think we can cut past the basic course."
Doubt colors her response. "Are you sure you want to do that?"
"Yeah," I confirm, "I can handle more of a challenge than this."
"Okay then." She still sounds doubtful, but a menu pops up for me anyway. Level 1 Aerial Obstacle Course is selected, with a helpful rendering of the course, expected flight path, and unchecked selectors for 'encouragement.'
"Encouragement...?" I wonder aloud.
"Um. That one's for making the obstacles move around so you have to adapt on the fly, that one's for basically requiring you to stay above a certain speed or you fail, and that one's for making you have to dodge shots while navigating the course."
Makes sense to me. I proceed to check each selector and ignore the attendant sigh that sounds distinctly like the words 'glutton for punishment.'
"Just so we're clear on this, you're asking to be shot down. I want to hear you say that you're okay with being shot down as a training exercise."
I take a moment to think about that. As I get more and more comfortable in the air, I'd need to learn those skills anyway. There's no sense putting that off and risking having to relearn things when the additional difficulty is introduced, it's better to make sure my foundation is as strong as it can be.
...Honestly, it's somewhat incredible. If I'd been asked a few days ago, I wouldn't have possibly been able to come up with a situation where I would find myself saying these words. And yet...
"I'm okay with being shot down as a training exercise." I confirm again, sealing my own fate.
This ocean and I are going to be seeing a lot more of each other.
Another sigh and I get the distinct feeling that she's trying to talk me out of this, which isn't going to work, because the more she tries to get me to back off, the more I want to dig my heels in. "Okay, then here's what we're going to do. I'm going to shoot you down now, and you're going to fly back up here, and if you tell me you still want hard mode, we'll run the course in hard mode. Ready?"
"Bring-" I start to say, but she just cuts me off. The shots don't even really hurt, but they sting just enough to break my concentration and I feel somehow sapped of energy. The combined effect doesn't last long but it lasts for long enough to ruin my flight control; I find myself completely unable to restart the magic before breaking the waterline.
Splashing down into the ocean again feels oddly relaxing with the warmth of the water more than making up for whatever impact discomfort manages to make it through my Jacket's defenses. I'd kind of been wondering what getting shot by magic felt like, actually.
My return flight up to the course is brief and I spend it wondering what she was so worried about. That wasn't even that bad. I can take this level of 'encouragement.'
"Still want hard mode," I preempt her asking for yet another confirmation. She frowns but nods, waving her hand again and modifying the course accordingly. I roll my shoulders for effect and drift over to the starting line.
"Course starts as soon as you cross the line and will reset itself any time you fall out of bounds. We're doing this for an hour, and then you're doing cooldowns, and I'm not going to listen if you claim you can keep going."
I can live with that. An hour is plenty of time to set a course pace that I can be happy with.
Wow, did this bed somehow become even softer during the time that we were out?
It certainly feels more comfortable than it did earlier today. We barely finish arriving back in the hotel room before I fall into the bed like a puppet with strings cut. Ahhh. Some muscles that I didn't even know I had before today are sore.
This is not evidence that Mariposa was right to stop me after an hour. Neither is the way my pace of improvement leveled off around the end and then started dipping slightly. I could've kept going and set a better personal record with a few more attempts. Anyone claiming otherwise is a liar.
Maybe I was setting an overly aggressive pace for myself, but I had a lot of ground to cover. And it made all the difference that it was my choice and my pace to set. Nobody else got to push me around any more, but it'd be doing myself and my parents (and my Device) a disservice not to push myself a little. There was so much I needed to learn and so many areas still to improve in.
(And I could fly. Just like Alexandria. Like hell I wasn't going to give 120% to get as good at that as I could, as fast as I possibly could.)
Sure, I've only just gotten started. One day does not a routine make. But even with just one day's worth of before and after marks I can see the improvement, even if it's just numbers on a chart for now. In time I'm sure I'll see it everywhere else, too.
I'd given up on trying to better myself back at home, but now? Now 'bettering myself' doesn't mean I'd become Taylor Hebert, more enduring punching bag. Now I could become... whatever I wanted to be. Taylor Hebert, Wandering Hero had a nice ring to it. But then again, so did Taylor Hebert, Acclaimed Scholar. There were no expectations, no limitations, and I had no baggage.
The prospect of that was a little scary, but it was also very exciting. I thought that even if each new day took me a little bit farther away from who Taylor Hebert was the morning she walked through those doors of Winslow High School for the very last time, it'd be fine, because truth be told... I just didn't like her very much. So it was exciting to start to see who and what Taylor Hebert might be when she wasn't that person.
Despite everything, I was looking forward to it.
Sleep slowly claimed me as my head filled with thoughts of my new tomorrow, the second full day of my new life, and of who I wanted to be.
Crushing pressure. Darkness.
Angry buzzing and chittering and scratching all blending together into a harsh cacophony surrounding me. Drowning me.
Laughter. Disappointment. That smell.
"You're nothing. Pathetic. You-"
"-need to wake up-"
I try to scream but the noise just gets drowned out.
The walls are there, invisible but I can feel them and they're closing in and I'm all alone and I try to focus on my power to get out of this place but the numbers just keep swimming out of reach and there's too much and noise and I-
<Taylor! Please! WAKE UP!>
-wake up with a start, my Device's broadcast jackhammering right through the awful noise and images and stench.
My first fully conscious thought is that I've managed to make a mess for housekeeping. Sheets pulled and thrown about by my unconscious thrashing, soaked through with sweat. At some point I'd managed to nearly roll myself off of the bed entirely in the throes of my nightmare. Luckily, I'd managed to come to a stop before actually going over the edge, but I was still dangerously close to having my head dangling off the side. I spun around as I dragged myself upright to put my legs over the edge of the bed instead.
My second fully conscious thought is that I should've done a better job exhausting myself so that I would have gone to bed far too tired to dream up more of... that. The contents of the nightmare are already melting into an indistinct malaise but I definitely did not want to go through anything like it again and the best way to avoid that was probably to make sure that my overactive mind was far too drained to be able to manage creating any more nightmares for me.
My third fully conscious thought was spent on the hilarity of the fact that this is the third distinct planet I've woken up on in as many days and how I was already planning on going four for four.
"What time is it...?" I wondered aloud, not expecting an answer, momentarily forgetting that I wasn't actually alone in this room.
"It's time for a hot breakfast." Mariposa said, her tone leaving no room for argument, as she peered down at me with a worried expression on her face. Why's she worried? It was just a bad dream. Not a big deal.
Breakfast did sound good, though, and I wasn't ready to start my morning run just yet. So it was good that my traveling companion had already managed to locate the room service information for me, and it was good that I had nothing standing in the way of splurging a little on overpriced hotel food delivered right to the room.
...Nothing other than still not recognizing what half of these foods are actually supposed to be and therefore not having any better way of determining what to order for breakfast beyond just picking the item with the biggest numbers, but that's why they call it splurging, right?
The expected amount of time to fulfill my room service order was more than enough to get through my morning post-nightmare ablutions and I was already feeling close enough to normal again long before the platter of assorted sweet and savory pastries that was probably meant to feed five people instead of one plus a Unison Device arrived outside the door.
I couldn't tell you what any of them were, really, other than 'delicious' - in hindsight, most of what I could remember eating back home seemed somewhat muted and flavorless by comparison to anything I'd had since leaving - but by the time I was done, I was more than ready to face the morning run and then the day's work of figuring out where we'd go next.
Fully independent teleportation was an uncommon talent amongst mages due both to the natural complexities of the math involved as well as to the sheer scale of the power drain involved. Assisted teleportation had a much lower barrier to entry, and varying degrees of assistance had been devised, focus tested, refined and made available over the centuries. The modern travel industry had services at every conceivable level of assistance allowing the prospective interplanetary traveler to balance accessibility, convenience, comfort, and speed against each other to select which method of travel best suited them. There were passenger flights aplenty, multiple styles of relay system (including something called a Star Door - which I swore I'd seen before on the poster for a movie), even consumable teleportation beacons and personal spell boosters available for purchase.
Naturally, the purveyors of these varied services all tended to end up lumped together in centralized buildings under the authority of something referred to as the Time-Space Administration Bureau, an interdimensional policing organization that I'd learned about in my research, whose purview included the control and regulation of dimensional travel. I didn't like the idea of my movements being controlled or regulated, and so I resolved to do my best to avoid running into any agents of the TSAB for as long as I was in Administered Space.
Avoiding contact with the TSAB wasn't necessarily mutually exclusive with taking advantage of their hard work, of course. Bureau travel facilities were open to the public in the same way that any airport on Earth Bet was; as long as I didn't loiter for too long and avoided making a scene, nobody would look twice at a teenager perusing the scheduled departure boards or investigating (fantasizing about) booking some relay slot or chartering other assistance for hypothetical trips to anywhere.
If nothing else, it was worth it to stop by for long enough that Mariposa could figure out how to bootstrap her way around the alien protocols and lock on to similarly-styled buildings on other worlds in a way that probably wasn't authorized, hopefully bypassing all future instances of landing somewhere outside a city and having to trek in on foot. This also spelled the end of analyzing network traffic and following it to find new worlds. Now we'd know exactly where we were going before we got there.
This was made somewhat less useful by the sheer volume of worlds that were listed and catalogued as possible travel destinations on the TSAB's index of Administered Worlds, none of which looked or sounded like any world that my companion was aware of or familiar with. That had been somewhat expected - if they'd had a working relationship of any kind with the Free States, then the attempts at network access using the standard protocols which my Unison Device had on file should've gotten her much farther than they'd had, even if the unknown amount of time since her becoming MIA might have resulted in her specific access codes being revoked or flagged.
But it was still something of a shock to see more than seventy Administered Worlds and a couple dozen more 'Uninhabited Worlds' (a category that seemed to include planet-sized preserves and nature retreats as well as amusement parks and resort planets) all lined up and waiting for the teenage dreamer I was only half-pretending to be to book vacations to.
My mind boggled at the thought. Objectively, I'd known space was huge, and I'd experienced its vastness firsthand just in the sheer number of empty places I'd stumbled over between the world I first arrived on and this world - Administered World Number 65, apparently, which only meant that it was the 65th planet to join the TSAB. But there was 'we as a society have a lot of room to grow, and we're maybe not making the best use of our territories' and then there was 'Carnaaji, Uninhabited World Number 92, is home to the brand-new and instant favorite Hotel Alpine resort and absolutely nothing else.' I struggled to put together a metaphor that would let me get my head around that and I completely failed to do so.
Culture shock didn't even begin to describe it. I just couldn't imagine anyone owning an entire planet. More than that, I couldn't imagine anyone putting a single complex down on a planet and deciding that there wasn't any need to use any of the entire rest of the planet's available space.
Morbid fascination gripped me. I was almost tempted to go there immediately just because I had to see for myself the absurdity of a planet whose entire existence was reduced down to a collection of resort facilities. Only the length of the trip from here to there stopped me. Barely.
In any event, we had a problem in that we didn't really have a good source of direction from here.
The TSAB did not appear to have serious contact with anybody outside of the purview of its administration. At least, not in the capacity of peer governments nor in the capacity of any great enemies. For as expansive as the TSAB's reach appeared to be, they were horribly alone in the universe, almost impossibly so to my mind. There were no counterpart organizations from other interplanetary bodies arranging treaties for travel to Unadministered Worlds, the index for which was largely not available here in the combination spaceport and travel agency that I was presently using for research.
Somewhat curious was the fact that it wasn't even available in a 'worlds restricted to travel' type format, which I would have thought would be readily available to a society in which I was far from the only person with free and independent access to a high-level Mover ability and therefore a society with a clear and present interest in telling people like me where we weren't supposed to travel to. Instead, the TSAB seemed to curtail travel to places it didn't want you to go by not making the addresses of those places available, or more simply by not publicizing the existence of those places at all.
Annoyingly enough, that strategy actually worked. It had certainly stopped me from picking whichever Unadministered World happened to be closest to us and going there right now.
What few planets were open to investigation on the Unadministered Worlds index were mostly categorizable as 'civilizations just starting to reach out to their neighbors and well on their way to joining the TSAB,' and therefore the kind of unproblematic and safe place that brought to mind comparable trips between the US and Puerto Rico. There weren't, by contrast, any worlds that brought to mind a Europe or a less-isolationist Earth Aleph to the TSAB's metaphorical US.
And since my plan for ultimately locating the Free States had been moving from polity to polity until we landed somewhere that was either in talks with or at war with them, the lack of other polities to go to was something of an issue. We'd learned of hundreds of other planets to explore and that was great from the perspective of my desire to learn but horrible from the perspective that we had a destination we were at least nominally trying to work towards.
...I was appreciative of Mariposa for being surprisingly not pushy about that. I wasn't going to ask, but if I was guessing, I'd have thought that the fact that she'd gotten me to buy into being trained meant that she felt it was a higher priority to make sure that I arrived into what was ultimately a war on an incomprehensible scale eminently able to defend myself. (Wars weren't contained to pleasantly drawn battle lines, after all.) Or maybe she simply wasn't highly ranked enough to guarantee that she'd get to stick with me simply because she seemed to feel that we were potentially a good fit for each other, and she was therefore hedging her bets in case I did decide to formalize a partnership with her and march off to war.
Either way, it didn't matter, especially considering that we were - if not in terms of absolute distance, then in emotional terms - farther away from that goal than ever.
Regardless of how many TSAB-affiliated worlds there were to potentially explore, I knew we wouldn't get anywhere simply working down the list.
Fortunately, the concepts of border contiguity and distance still held true even in the vastness of the Dimensional Sea. The TSAB had a definable zone of control and a larger zone of influence; there were the core worlds that held more risk than reward, and there was the great frontier that I had been lucky enough to land on.
On further review, we didn't think it impossible that the TSAB was in fact in communication with peer agencies from governments outside its purview. Absence of evidence wasn't evidence of absence, after all. I felt that the best route for us to possibly take was to stick to the edge worlds, slowly making our way around the outskirts of the Dimensional Sea as the TSAB knew it and scanning on arrival. By paying close attention to which worlds were both in Mariposa's scanning range and sending or receiving network traffic, the theory went that after eliminating all of the worlds on the approved for travel lists, whatever was left would have to be an occupied world that wasn't approved for travel. In other words, the Unadministered Worlds that might turn out to be under the purview of somebody not affiliated with the TSAB.
Just had to hope that we ended up hitting on some other government's planet rather than some sort of secret military site or other reason for us to end up at risk of being 'disappeared.'
We established a course of planets to work through not too long after arriving at that plan, and it was easy to then fall into our new routine. Arrive on a world, liberate some funding, check in to a nice place to spend a couple nights, scan for the presence of a nearby Unadministered World, meet interesting people, do interesting things, move on after a couple of days. Roll the uplifting montage background music.
...There was something sad about how easily I managed to make my own interdimensional adventure sound so very paint by numbers.
I was having fun, though, as the days blended together into weeks and the count of planets I'd been to kept ticking up at a steady rate. Sure, we hadn't found anything interesting, and sure we weren't any closer to... anywhere in particular, really. But that didn't matter to me. I wasn't even really keeping track of the passage of time anymore. It was nice to just get lost in the joy of the journey.
Until the day we actually found an Unadministered World, at any rate.
"I've got a fix on something that doesn't match the list. Not a lot of traffic, but enough. Might be an Unadministered World? It's close, actually. We could make it in a single jump."
My range hadn't really improved with all the successive Dimensional Transferences, but that might have just been down to the vast distances at play. My control, on the other hand, improved by leaps and bounds and I no longer needed assistance to manage a Transference on my own.
And with it only being one jump away, I'd thought the worst thing that could possibly happen was that we'd be out half an hour of wasted time for the trip.
"Let's go take a look, then."
We set our coordinates and made the jump and I was proven instantly wrong about the worst thing that could have possibly happened almost as soon as my vision cleared to reveal the inside of a futuristic room that brought to mind visions of Star Trek transporters.
The two men guarding this room were not the least bit happy to see me.
"TSAB! Halt-"
I panicked and slammed through a secondary Dimensional Transference, aimed roughly at 'on the other side of this planet,' before they had a chance to do anything more substantial than yell.
Something told me the TSAB was probably far better at locking down teleportation than I was at executing it. I'd rather not test that theory.
"Okay. This is not a winning planet. I just need to catch my breath and then we..." My voice died as I properly took in just where I had warped myself to. I was standing in the middle of a too-brightly-lit street looking out towards a scene that was unmistakable to anybody with a passing exposure to Earth Aleph pop culture.
The lights, the sounds, the throngs of people, all of it a perfect replica of a memory pulled from some TV show or another. Only the slightest of differences, in which brands were on advertisement, which celebrities were displayed on larger-than-life screens. I knew this place.
I'd arrived in a side street just off of Times Square.
New York City, USA.
<...this isn't possible.>
"Earth...?"
Next On Fluttering Wings...
"Mou," a casually-dressed redhead whines from her spot on a couch, swatting at the alert as though the action might have somehow prevented it from being sent in the first place. "This is really bad timing!"
The tall blonde lounging next to her frowns in agreement. "I'd think that with how difficult it is to actually get you to take a vacation, people would think more before sending you priority alerts."
The pair of wives decided there was nothing for it, though. Might as well look at what the alert is.
"Ah," they chorused in the perfect timing of two people committed to spending their lives together as they opened the alert for a more detailed look.
On prominent display was a still frame depicting a lonely-seeming girl, with beautiful curls of long black hair, arriving at the TSAB's quasi-permanent outpost on UA-97 in the characteristic light show of a personally powered Dimensional Transference alongside a distinctive floating fairy. The blonde reached across to start the video, and the lovers watched two sets of eyes widening in brief panic, and immediately departing again - all but skating out underneath the dropping barrier as it resolved.
This sort of thing definitely qualified as a good reason to send highly important dispatches to people who were supposed to be enjoying their vacation.
"I wonder who she is...?" The blonde mused.
The redhead frowned. Even if it was just a matter of a powerful young mage in the company of a Unison Device turning up on her homeworld without notice or authorization, she'd have taken an interest in this case. But the notification that an illegal transference to UA-97 had been executed came packaged with some interesting context.
Whoever she was, she was already in the TSAB's systems - there was a case file with the girl under 'persons of interest.' A runaway, although that word felt somehow inadequate when considering her apparent propensity for long-distance teleportation.
The pair watched an edited summary video showing the girl and her Unison Device spending a night in the care of Aurelia's local authorities, deciding that it wasn't to her liking and leaving by way of an offworld Dimensional Transference. Jurisdiction had been claimed by the TSAB within hours of the event, as local authorities tended not to be well equipped to handle teenage girls whose idea of running away spanned multiple planets.
And her eyes were so sad...
The redhead nodded to herself, then turned to face her partner fully. "I think I'd like to meet her."
The blonde smiled ruefully, already knowing that the Ace of Aces would be returning to duty and their little vacation was coming to a premature end. Oh well. This was one of the reasons she loved her wife.
"I'll ask General Yagami to take care of the paperwork," she said, switching to formal addresses now that they were going back to work.
It wouldn't do to accidentally refer to the TSAB Marine Defense Forces Investigation Commander as Hayate-chan in an official correspondence, after all.
"Thanks, Fate-chan! See you soon!"
Episode 4: Nanoha Takamachi!
More exotic foods and spices which required climates that simply didn't exist on the North American continent? Essentially unavailable. As such, I'd grown up with a very limited palate not because I was a picky eater or anything but simply because the free exchange of information wasn't enough to put imported foods back on the shelves after the world had taken them away.
Add to that the fact that cooking had become a chore which I had to take on or else nobody in the Hebert house ate, rather than something I had any passion or enthusiasm for, and it wasn't hard to see how the most exotic food I'd eaten since my mom died had been the occasional Americanized Chinese takeout food.
The amount of choice I had before me now was absolutely paralyzing by comparison. There were a plethora of cuisines available to me now that I was suitably armed with some cash cards and access to the network. Every historical region both on and off-world was represented, along with a dizzying array of fusions and derivatives and 'concept restaurants' - things I'd long since resigned myself to only ever reading about in the occasional dispatches of information about life on Earth Aleph - and even this world's supermarkets were close enough to infinitely large to help me reaffirm my decision to not set foot inside of one.
It'd be easy to fall back into old patterns. 'Ground beef and vegetables on bread' is not a hard dish to invent. It might not be called such here, but I could easily get myself a good old-fashioned American hamburger with a little searching.
But...
Could I really say that I wanted to learn and grow if I wasn't willing to be at least a little brave?
Even if I hated the food, I'd be richer for the experience and only out of some petty thief's money.
Searching for 'food for the adventurous' introduced me to the local concept of 'entrusting,' essentially leaving the entire meal up to the mercies of the chef. I thought that if anyone tried that in Brockton Bay, they'd be laughed at or worse, but either the entire network was trying to prank me or more likely this was one of those things that was a cultural difference between home and here. Rather than considered obnoxious, it was generally seen as a polite challenge - an invitation to create truly impressive and delicious spreads and a show of faith that the restaurant knew what it was doing and knew how to take care of its guests.
I thought I might fake it 'til I made it. 'I'm a tourist from some other world, and I'm here seeking once-in-a-lifetime experiences' was a technically valid interpretation of my current situation (even if it was glossing over several things), and clad in my new favorite black-with-white-piping hoodie and matching baggy pants, I even looked the part. Well, I looked more like a person at any rate.
And that was how I ended up walking into what I thought was an upscale restaurant and what I knew would have a fantastic view of the Buranon Rapid River Transport as I had learned the ferry was called. (It had probably sounded better before translation.) I immediately handed the waiter back the offered menu along with my liberated cash card before I could give myself a chance to talk myself out of this, and I told him I wanted to be surprised.
He had a brilliantly enthusiastic smile as he ran off into the kitchen. I wanted to hope that I'd ever be that excited about anything.
On Fluttering Wings
Episode 3:
Our World's Infinite Possibilities
As it happens, there was either more money left on that cash card than I had realized after my quick clothing run, or that restaurant had been extremely appreciative of my request. Dish after dish kept arriving after I'd told the chef that small plates were preferred (an obvious mistake in retrospect) - it was hard to gauge how many meals worth of food I'd actually ended up going through, but I was apparently still pretty hungry and it was all exquisite so I just kept going until we finally made it to the end.
Mariposa had disappeared to... somewhere... early on in the meal and hadn't reappeared until it was time for dessert, towing along a pair of extremely mint-scented drinks that I suppose she must have gotten out of the waiter, one of which she was happily sipping away at, apparently undeterred by the glass being as tall as she was. She'd handed (well, floated) me the other glass and it was just as good as pretty much everything else in the meal had been. Reminded me of a milkshake, except for it being a hot drink. Very sweet. Hints of honey and cinnamon.
We left the restaurant extremely satisfied. Yeah... I could get used to this.
I suppressed the brief flash of guilt that rose up in accordance with that thought, pushed down the specters of the Trio and my father and the people of Brockton Bay and the people of this city they called Buranon as one rising to condemn me for having all this power and not doing more with it. And I knew I could be doing more - that I hadn't come close to earning the privilege to check out for the better part of two hours and be lavished with some of the best-tasting food I'd had in years. Not when there were surely so many other criminals like the two would-be muggers from earlier lurking in the corners of this city, not when we had no way of even knowing how far away from Mariposa's homeworld or any of the other Free States we were, and certainly not when I had fifteen years of education to get caught up on.
But then, it didn't matter that I hadn't earned it, because I deserved the chance to be happy after everything that had happened to me right up until... Well. Until the worst moment of my life, at any rate. I wasn't going to revisit it. That wouldn't be looking forward.
Somebody with very poor knife safety skills who had been eyeing me from where he probably thought I couldn't see him down at the other end of this dark alleyway took five shots to center mass that I pretended were loaded with my aborted feelings of self-recrimination. He could deal with them now that they'd been launched out of my head and into his gut.
<Hey, Mariposa?> I called out to my Device as we wandered over to retrieve the latest volunteer contributions to my room and board fund. <Do you think we should maybe... call this in to somebody?>
I felt more than heard her dismissive shrug. <Something tells me that would cause more problems for us than it would solve.>
She was almost certainly right. I did feel a little bad about just leaving people laid out like this, but on the other hand, they were criminals. Worse than that, they were bullies, the kind of people who would lure or follow people into shadowed alleyways and use their superior might to just take whatever they wanted.
People like Sophia Hess.
They had this coming to them.
I returned a similar shrug, coming up from my cursory inspection one cash card richer and the proud owner of a knife I didn't really need but wasn't comfortable just leaving with the man. He'd probably use it on some other unsuspecting teenager who was substantially less capable of defending herself, and we couldn't have that.
Maybe I could pawn it off on the next world? I decided that I'd look into it.
The list of things that I needed to look into was getting to be quite extensive but I almost preferred it that way. Even when the closest I'd thought I would ever get to being a cape was hanging out on Parahumans Online, that famous hive of internet debauchery dedicated to all things cape, I'd still spent countless hours trawling both the boards and the wiki. I learned everything that there was publicly available to know about my city's top-sixteen-everywhere quantity of capes (we held the dubious distinction of being number one in the world on a per-capita basis, but that wasn't nearly enough to put our cape headcount ahead of the remaining megacities like New York or Second Lagos), spent countless hours participating in the Versus Debates board's habit of pitting capes against each other (despite my best efforts, though, threads always ended up as mindless internet slap fights), I'd even earned a badge for proposing creative powers usage that I was unreasonably proud of.
So I was a cape geek. I wasn't ashamed.
I might have been a little ashamed of how often I found myself following random tangents, falling into a wiki walk that took me everywhere except for where I'd originally set out to go, but who amongst we proud internet dwellers wasn't susceptible to getting lost in the pursuit of random information from time to time?
And thanks to my overzealous pursuit of knowledge on powers, I would've been more than able to hold my own in a cape fight on the off chance I'd managed to discover my own power and it wasn't something super esoteric like bug control. That might have taken me a couple days... weeks... okay, probably a couple of months to work through factoring in my cautious nature. Even without a power, 'run away' might have been the officially endorsed PRT and PHO plan for what normal humans should do when they encountered a hostile cape, but how was anyone expected to successfully run away from someone whose abilities they didn't fully understand?
Those same instincts and that desire to learn as much as I could about the world I'd now found myself plunged into headfirst would serve me well. I saw no reason to try and curb them. Every new fact of life I found myself learning about was one less thing that could serve to be a nasty surprise later.
How many other teenagers would have looked at fifteen years worth of homework and decided that what they needed was more of it?
Didn't matter, I decided. I was who I was, and I was somebody who was going to have fun learning and growing.
Brockton Bay was what some people might refer to as a 'hard' city. Hometown pride aside, life there wasn't exactly easy. We had two major parahuman-led gangs carving the city to pieces between them, and a third parahuman-led gang trying to assemble relevancy out of whatever scraps of turf they could sneak out from underfoot, all while the city's appointed delegation of heroes struggled to keep some semblance of peace. This gang cold war that was always threatening - but never quite managed - to turn hot played out against the backdrop of a city for which the only remaining value was in the 'industry' of Cape Tourism - Brockton Bay received an outsized portion of travelers for what was ultimately an unremarkable blue collar city deprived of blue collar work, driven by that same number-one-in-the-world-per-capita cape ratio.
Spotting the cape tourists was easy; they were the people whom the weight and pressure of life in Brockton Bay didn't quite reach. People who didn't walk with any sort of edge, who were possessed of the exuberance and curiosity of someone for whom the struggle of living in our city was an interesting bit of hands-on reality TV that they could shut off and check out from whenever they wanted.
For lack of any other options to keep ourselves going, the city had somewhat reluctantly come to embrace its new status as a 'destination' town. New hotels were going up all the time, and they tended to be the nicest buildings on whatever block they were built in; other hospitality businesses of both a legal and illegal nature tended to follow them.
After all, save for being charged a higher rate for being from out of town, why shouldn't the gangs make some of their pleasure services available to the esteemed guests of our city? And why shouldn't someone for whom Brockton Bay was plausibly real but not quite an actual place, some sort of dark reprisal of a Disney World or a Las Vegas where those within its boundaries got to become somebody other than who they were in their regular lives at their regular homes, be able to support the local 'interests' with the money they clearly had no better use for if they were choosing to spend on travel to Brockton Bay?
I'd always resented the tourists somewhat. But I'd also come to accept the reality of my home. And it had taken a journey farther away from that home than I would've ever thought possible to realize that the constant pressure and quiet resignation - the feeling of quiet hopelessness that sank deep into skin and bones and helped contribute to the 'hardness' of the city's locals - wasn't a normal fact of life.
Buranon didn't have that in its atmosphere, not in perceptible quantities. Everything here almost sparkled - not so much in the literal sense but rather in a comparison to the darkness and roughness that permeated my city and which I could now clearly perceive in my memories based on its absence here, in this foreign city on a foreign world that had just enough loose reminders to my home that I couldn't help but compare.
The history of this town was similar to my own based on what I had to assume were sanitized accounts made available to tourists who wanted to know more about their current choice of locale. Blue collar industrial work centered on and powered by the mighty river from which the city took its name that had dried up and become obsoleted by advancing technology, forced to reinvent itself as a destination town powered by the tourism industry. Only there were no gangs here to offer services on the wrong side of legality; the only drug readily available here was the adrenaline produced by participation in one of the region's available adventure tourism activities. What criminals had chosen to operate in this city were all people independently making and sticking with poor choices of their own volition rather than being swept up by the will of a gang. And the riverside inn that I had checked myself into carried the gentle and inviting air of a place doing its best to feel like a home away from home, quite unlike the way Brockton Bay's hotels did everything possible to present themselves as bastions of safety and respite against the harshness of the city around them.
It was both refreshing and maddening. I kind of hated this place for making me confront the reality of the situation back home, a situation that I now found myself quite removed from, without even really doing anything.
...Not enough to change my plan to spend a night here, though. Especially not with how soft and inviting this bed was. I'd be quite happy to collapse into it later tonight, after having managed to thoroughly exhaust myself in the pursuit of a state of physical fitness that could be described as anything at all, instead of my current 'absolute lack thereof.'
Maybe I hadn't quite thought what I was agreeing to through the whole way, when I committed to an exercise plan that included afternoon sessions every other day on top of morning cardio. But I wasn't going to let myself back down at this point.
"Success in a fight requires more than pure strength. It requires grace."
I found myself working through a series of basic stretches on a sandy island in the midst of an endless ocean on a nearby uninhabited world. Mariposa had adopted the tone of voice I tended to associate with teachers. Unlike Winslow's teachers, however, her voice was laced with passion for her work and I found myself drawn in by it. Enthusiasm appeared to be infectious.
"You may or may not be able to outhit the opponent in front of you. You may or may not be able to outlast the opponent in front of you. But there will always be opponents who are stronger than you, who are faster than you, who can last longer than you. Getting into a fight with somebody on these terms should be avoided whenever possible, particularly because we have other options. Even the strongest attack is worthless when it fails to connect. That is the key to your long-term combat success. If your opponent cannot hit you, they cannot harm you. So you will need to develop the grace and flexibility required to ensure that you cannot be hit."
She began to smirk. "Were we members of the Ground Services, this would be the point at which we began working through an introductory gymnastics routine designed to promote dodging around ground-based assaults. We won't be doing that today, because we are members of the Air Services. Our entire martial style revolves around our ability to fly."
My brain skipped for a moment. I could fly?!
I didn't think it possible but her smirk got even wider. "That's right. Starting today, Taylor, the forces of gravity are no longer a rule for you so much as a polite suggestion."
Oh hell yes.
I probably didn't need access to true flight on top of my already hilariously overgeared ability to pick a point in space and just go there, but did that matter? Not in the slightest. There was just something impossibly alluring about the idea of kicking off the ground and taking to the sky; people compared the pure joy found in movement to feeling like flying for a good reason, and I was certain that 'feeling like' would prove to pale in comparison to the real thing.
The necessary calculations for flight began unfolding in my mind at the direction of my Device but I knew that she wasn't going to provide any assistance beyond making me aware of the initial math. I was, objectively, a long way away from doing this on my own at combat speed. Keeping myself from wobbling as I started to lift myself into the air was a frustrating exercise, and I couldn't manage to hold myself up for more than a few seconds before tumbling back to the ground in a heap.
Doesn't matter, I can fly!
My flight instructor cleared her throat. "Good enthusiasm, but you should probably put your Jacket on before you take any falls at height."
I felt my cheeks color. Right, safety first. Always be certain to use life-preserving equipment when engaging in hilariously fun extreme sports activities. And so on.
(I can fly!)
The seafoam green light of my power surrounded me, pressing itself into the shape of a new Barrier Jacket without any fanfare. I'd indeed been able to adjust the Jacket's template without any assistance; the dress skirt had been converted into wide-legged and flowy pants and then the entire outfit had been nicely covered up by a full length duster coat in an unassuming gray with a hood that I left down.
My Device took one look and decided she hated it. "Ugh. Really, Taylor? And a hood of all things. Not even a nice hat?" I pretended not to hear any part of that. I liked this much better and I was comfortable in it. This was far more 'me' than a military gown. She should just be thankful I compromised with myself away from a voluminous black cloak of mystery, because I didn't feel the need for my costume to be quite that cliche.
Now reasonably protected against fall damage, I rallied, working through the liftoff calculations at a slow pace and forcing myself to remain still and focused as I once again came up off the ground. An altimeter helpfully provided itself in holographic display format once it became clear that I wasn't going to immediately fall back into the sand and I was holding myself steady at exactly one foot in the air.
A deep breath to encourage myself. I can go higher than this. Much higher. One foot became two feet became three as I began ascending and stopped maintaining any sense of control over my sheer joy at actually flying.
"Start angling out towards the water!" I heard as I passed five feet and began accelerating. Sure! Adjusting to be flying out as well as up was easy, I just needed to pitch forward and adjust the angles and-
Oh shit I pitched too far gotta correct and now I'm spinning and handling this is way harder than just ascending straight up was oh no I'm losing-
Loud is the splashing noise I make as I crash into the water after falling from around ten feet up.
So that's why we picked the ocean planet for this. I see. At least the water's warm and my Barrier Jacket is as buoyant as an actual life vest. I didn't even feel the impact through the defensive layering.
The holographic display with my altimeter on it (ha ha, negative five feet, thanks for that update) gains another line representing my personal best time in flight: twenty seconds.
I can do better than that.
Calling up the flight magic again, this time taking extra care and paying attention to the entire body of the spell. The lesson here is obvious now, and there are a lot of moving parts involved with self-guided flight. My Device is the type of teacher who is all too happy to help, to take over as much of the processing as she'd need to, if I give up and ask her. Until I ask her though, she'll just float there on the only little island in sight with an expression of silent challenge on her face. Holding off on progressing any farther in this lesson until I've proven to the both of us that I can or can't fly on my own.
As I burst out of the ocean with little more than a stray thought of interest to how the water just falls away from my Barrier Jacket until it looks like I'd never taken a dip to begin with, I decide I'm fine with falling into this ocean over and over and over again until this is as close to second nature for me as it's possible to get. No matter how many tries it's going to take for that.
Five feet up and I stop ascending in order to get comfortable with turning (yawing?), pitching, and rolling. It takes me a few tries but soon I've eliminated any hint of shakiness or instability from my quickly improving flight form and I'm making lazy circuits around the perimeter of the island with the occasional barrel roll or somersault for fun. Simple movements, but a strong foundation is the most important thing to have when building a skill. After a few laps I'm confident enough to resume steadily climbing, making sure to work though every basic motion as I ascend.
Mariposa practically radiates approval when she comes up to meet me thirty feet in the air. It feels... nice. Other than Mrs. Knott, it's been a long time since I've gotten anything approaching approval from a teacher. I can't help but bask in it a little.
"Impressive for your first time flying - but it's only going to get harder from here."
"That's fine," I reply, "I'm ready for it."
She nods, waving her hand out over open sky. It's easy to forget how powerful my Device actually is when all she's doing is floating around offering words of wisdom, but then she'll just pull an entire hard light obstacle course out of nowhere for me. 'Time in flight' on my helpful display disappears, replaced by a course completion time leaderboard. I take a moment to look at the course - little more than a loose circuit of rings and walls, I don't even need the 'level 1' label to know it's incredibly basic - and my hubris gets the better of me.
"I think we can cut past the basic course."
Doubt colors her response. "Are you sure you want to do that?"
"Yeah," I confirm, "I can handle more of a challenge than this."
"Okay then." She still sounds doubtful, but a menu pops up for me anyway. Level 1 Aerial Obstacle Course is selected, with a helpful rendering of the course, expected flight path, and unchecked selectors for 'encouragement.'
"Encouragement...?" I wonder aloud.
"Um. That one's for making the obstacles move around so you have to adapt on the fly, that one's for basically requiring you to stay above a certain speed or you fail, and that one's for making you have to dodge shots while navigating the course."
Makes sense to me. I proceed to check each selector and ignore the attendant sigh that sounds distinctly like the words 'glutton for punishment.'
"Just so we're clear on this, you're asking to be shot down. I want to hear you say that you're okay with being shot down as a training exercise."
I take a moment to think about that. As I get more and more comfortable in the air, I'd need to learn those skills anyway. There's no sense putting that off and risking having to relearn things when the additional difficulty is introduced, it's better to make sure my foundation is as strong as it can be.
...Honestly, it's somewhat incredible. If I'd been asked a few days ago, I wouldn't have possibly been able to come up with a situation where I would find myself saying these words. And yet...
"I'm okay with being shot down as a training exercise." I confirm again, sealing my own fate.
This ocean and I are going to be seeing a lot more of each other.
Another sigh and I get the distinct feeling that she's trying to talk me out of this, which isn't going to work, because the more she tries to get me to back off, the more I want to dig my heels in. "Okay, then here's what we're going to do. I'm going to shoot you down now, and you're going to fly back up here, and if you tell me you still want hard mode, we'll run the course in hard mode. Ready?"
"Bring-" I start to say, but she just cuts me off. The shots don't even really hurt, but they sting just enough to break my concentration and I feel somehow sapped of energy. The combined effect doesn't last long but it lasts for long enough to ruin my flight control; I find myself completely unable to restart the magic before breaking the waterline.
Splashing down into the ocean again feels oddly relaxing with the warmth of the water more than making up for whatever impact discomfort manages to make it through my Jacket's defenses. I'd kind of been wondering what getting shot by magic felt like, actually.
My return flight up to the course is brief and I spend it wondering what she was so worried about. That wasn't even that bad. I can take this level of 'encouragement.'
"Still want hard mode," I preempt her asking for yet another confirmation. She frowns but nods, waving her hand again and modifying the course accordingly. I roll my shoulders for effect and drift over to the starting line.
"Course starts as soon as you cross the line and will reset itself any time you fall out of bounds. We're doing this for an hour, and then you're doing cooldowns, and I'm not going to listen if you claim you can keep going."
I can live with that. An hour is plenty of time to set a course pace that I can be happy with.
Wow, did this bed somehow become even softer during the time that we were out?
It certainly feels more comfortable than it did earlier today. We barely finish arriving back in the hotel room before I fall into the bed like a puppet with strings cut. Ahhh. Some muscles that I didn't even know I had before today are sore.
This is not evidence that Mariposa was right to stop me after an hour. Neither is the way my pace of improvement leveled off around the end and then started dipping slightly. I could've kept going and set a better personal record with a few more attempts. Anyone claiming otherwise is a liar.
Maybe I was setting an overly aggressive pace for myself, but I had a lot of ground to cover. And it made all the difference that it was my choice and my pace to set. Nobody else got to push me around any more, but it'd be doing myself and my parents (and my Device) a disservice not to push myself a little. There was so much I needed to learn and so many areas still to improve in.
(And I could fly. Just like Alexandria. Like hell I wasn't going to give 120% to get as good at that as I could, as fast as I possibly could.)
Sure, I've only just gotten started. One day does not a routine make. But even with just one day's worth of before and after marks I can see the improvement, even if it's just numbers on a chart for now. In time I'm sure I'll see it everywhere else, too.
I'd given up on trying to better myself back at home, but now? Now 'bettering myself' doesn't mean I'd become Taylor Hebert, more enduring punching bag. Now I could become... whatever I wanted to be. Taylor Hebert, Wandering Hero had a nice ring to it. But then again, so did Taylor Hebert, Acclaimed Scholar. There were no expectations, no limitations, and I had no baggage.
The prospect of that was a little scary, but it was also very exciting. I thought that even if each new day took me a little bit farther away from who Taylor Hebert was the morning she walked through those doors of Winslow High School for the very last time, it'd be fine, because truth be told... I just didn't like her very much. So it was exciting to start to see who and what Taylor Hebert might be when she wasn't that person.
Despite everything, I was looking forward to it.
Sleep slowly claimed me as my head filled with thoughts of my new tomorrow, the second full day of my new life, and of who I wanted to be.
Crushing pressure. Darkness.
Angry buzzing and chittering and scratching all blending together into a harsh cacophony surrounding me. Drowning me.
Laughter. Disappointment. That smell.
"You're nothing. Pathetic. You-"
"-need to wake up-"
I try to scream but the noise just gets drowned out.
The walls are there, invisible but I can feel them and they're closing in and I'm all alone and I try to focus on my power to get out of this place but the numbers just keep swimming out of reach and there's too much and noise and I-
<Taylor! Please! WAKE UP!>
-wake up with a start, my Device's broadcast jackhammering right through the awful noise and images and stench.
My first fully conscious thought is that I've managed to make a mess for housekeeping. Sheets pulled and thrown about by my unconscious thrashing, soaked through with sweat. At some point I'd managed to nearly roll myself off of the bed entirely in the throes of my nightmare. Luckily, I'd managed to come to a stop before actually going over the edge, but I was still dangerously close to having my head dangling off the side. I spun around as I dragged myself upright to put my legs over the edge of the bed instead.
My second fully conscious thought is that I should've done a better job exhausting myself so that I would have gone to bed far too tired to dream up more of... that. The contents of the nightmare are already melting into an indistinct malaise but I definitely did not want to go through anything like it again and the best way to avoid that was probably to make sure that my overactive mind was far too drained to be able to manage creating any more nightmares for me.
My third fully conscious thought was spent on the hilarity of the fact that this is the third distinct planet I've woken up on in as many days and how I was already planning on going four for four.
"What time is it...?" I wondered aloud, not expecting an answer, momentarily forgetting that I wasn't actually alone in this room.
"It's time for a hot breakfast." Mariposa said, her tone leaving no room for argument, as she peered down at me with a worried expression on her face. Why's she worried? It was just a bad dream. Not a big deal.
Breakfast did sound good, though, and I wasn't ready to start my morning run just yet. So it was good that my traveling companion had already managed to locate the room service information for me, and it was good that I had nothing standing in the way of splurging a little on overpriced hotel food delivered right to the room.
...Nothing other than still not recognizing what half of these foods are actually supposed to be and therefore not having any better way of determining what to order for breakfast beyond just picking the item with the biggest numbers, but that's why they call it splurging, right?
The expected amount of time to fulfill my room service order was more than enough to get through my morning post-nightmare ablutions and I was already feeling close enough to normal again long before the platter of assorted sweet and savory pastries that was probably meant to feed five people instead of one plus a Unison Device arrived outside the door.
I couldn't tell you what any of them were, really, other than 'delicious' - in hindsight, most of what I could remember eating back home seemed somewhat muted and flavorless by comparison to anything I'd had since leaving - but by the time I was done, I was more than ready to face the morning run and then the day's work of figuring out where we'd go next.
Fully independent teleportation was an uncommon talent amongst mages due both to the natural complexities of the math involved as well as to the sheer scale of the power drain involved. Assisted teleportation had a much lower barrier to entry, and varying degrees of assistance had been devised, focus tested, refined and made available over the centuries. The modern travel industry had services at every conceivable level of assistance allowing the prospective interplanetary traveler to balance accessibility, convenience, comfort, and speed against each other to select which method of travel best suited them. There were passenger flights aplenty, multiple styles of relay system (including something called a Star Door - which I swore I'd seen before on the poster for a movie), even consumable teleportation beacons and personal spell boosters available for purchase.
Naturally, the purveyors of these varied services all tended to end up lumped together in centralized buildings under the authority of something referred to as the Time-Space Administration Bureau, an interdimensional policing organization that I'd learned about in my research, whose purview included the control and regulation of dimensional travel. I didn't like the idea of my movements being controlled or regulated, and so I resolved to do my best to avoid running into any agents of the TSAB for as long as I was in Administered Space.
Avoiding contact with the TSAB wasn't necessarily mutually exclusive with taking advantage of their hard work, of course. Bureau travel facilities were open to the public in the same way that any airport on Earth Bet was; as long as I didn't loiter for too long and avoided making a scene, nobody would look twice at a teenager perusing the scheduled departure boards or investigating (fantasizing about) booking some relay slot or chartering other assistance for hypothetical trips to anywhere.
If nothing else, it was worth it to stop by for long enough that Mariposa could figure out how to bootstrap her way around the alien protocols and lock on to similarly-styled buildings on other worlds in a way that probably wasn't authorized, hopefully bypassing all future instances of landing somewhere outside a city and having to trek in on foot. This also spelled the end of analyzing network traffic and following it to find new worlds. Now we'd know exactly where we were going before we got there.
This was made somewhat less useful by the sheer volume of worlds that were listed and catalogued as possible travel destinations on the TSAB's index of Administered Worlds, none of which looked or sounded like any world that my companion was aware of or familiar with. That had been somewhat expected - if they'd had a working relationship of any kind with the Free States, then the attempts at network access using the standard protocols which my Unison Device had on file should've gotten her much farther than they'd had, even if the unknown amount of time since her becoming MIA might have resulted in her specific access codes being revoked or flagged.
But it was still something of a shock to see more than seventy Administered Worlds and a couple dozen more 'Uninhabited Worlds' (a category that seemed to include planet-sized preserves and nature retreats as well as amusement parks and resort planets) all lined up and waiting for the teenage dreamer I was only half-pretending to be to book vacations to.
My mind boggled at the thought. Objectively, I'd known space was huge, and I'd experienced its vastness firsthand just in the sheer number of empty places I'd stumbled over between the world I first arrived on and this world - Administered World Number 65, apparently, which only meant that it was the 65th planet to join the TSAB. But there was 'we as a society have a lot of room to grow, and we're maybe not making the best use of our territories' and then there was 'Carnaaji, Uninhabited World Number 92, is home to the brand-new and instant favorite Hotel Alpine resort and absolutely nothing else.' I struggled to put together a metaphor that would let me get my head around that and I completely failed to do so.
Culture shock didn't even begin to describe it. I just couldn't imagine anyone owning an entire planet. More than that, I couldn't imagine anyone putting a single complex down on a planet and deciding that there wasn't any need to use any of the entire rest of the planet's available space.
Morbid fascination gripped me. I was almost tempted to go there immediately just because I had to see for myself the absurdity of a planet whose entire existence was reduced down to a collection of resort facilities. Only the length of the trip from here to there stopped me. Barely.
In any event, we had a problem in that we didn't really have a good source of direction from here.
The TSAB did not appear to have serious contact with anybody outside of the purview of its administration. At least, not in the capacity of peer governments nor in the capacity of any great enemies. For as expansive as the TSAB's reach appeared to be, they were horribly alone in the universe, almost impossibly so to my mind. There were no counterpart organizations from other interplanetary bodies arranging treaties for travel to Unadministered Worlds, the index for which was largely not available here in the combination spaceport and travel agency that I was presently using for research.
Somewhat curious was the fact that it wasn't even available in a 'worlds restricted to travel' type format, which I would have thought would be readily available to a society in which I was far from the only person with free and independent access to a high-level Mover ability and therefore a society with a clear and present interest in telling people like me where we weren't supposed to travel to. Instead, the TSAB seemed to curtail travel to places it didn't want you to go by not making the addresses of those places available, or more simply by not publicizing the existence of those places at all.
Annoyingly enough, that strategy actually worked. It had certainly stopped me from picking whichever Unadministered World happened to be closest to us and going there right now.
What few planets were open to investigation on the Unadministered Worlds index were mostly categorizable as 'civilizations just starting to reach out to their neighbors and well on their way to joining the TSAB,' and therefore the kind of unproblematic and safe place that brought to mind comparable trips between the US and Puerto Rico. There weren't, by contrast, any worlds that brought to mind a Europe or a less-isolationist Earth Aleph to the TSAB's metaphorical US.
And since my plan for ultimately locating the Free States had been moving from polity to polity until we landed somewhere that was either in talks with or at war with them, the lack of other polities to go to was something of an issue. We'd learned of hundreds of other planets to explore and that was great from the perspective of my desire to learn but horrible from the perspective that we had a destination we were at least nominally trying to work towards.
...I was appreciative of Mariposa for being surprisingly not pushy about that. I wasn't going to ask, but if I was guessing, I'd have thought that the fact that she'd gotten me to buy into being trained meant that she felt it was a higher priority to make sure that I arrived into what was ultimately a war on an incomprehensible scale eminently able to defend myself. (Wars weren't contained to pleasantly drawn battle lines, after all.) Or maybe she simply wasn't highly ranked enough to guarantee that she'd get to stick with me simply because she seemed to feel that we were potentially a good fit for each other, and she was therefore hedging her bets in case I did decide to formalize a partnership with her and march off to war.
Either way, it didn't matter, especially considering that we were - if not in terms of absolute distance, then in emotional terms - farther away from that goal than ever.
Regardless of how many TSAB-affiliated worlds there were to potentially explore, I knew we wouldn't get anywhere simply working down the list.
Fortunately, the concepts of border contiguity and distance still held true even in the vastness of the Dimensional Sea. The TSAB had a definable zone of control and a larger zone of influence; there were the core worlds that held more risk than reward, and there was the great frontier that I had been lucky enough to land on.
On further review, we didn't think it impossible that the TSAB was in fact in communication with peer agencies from governments outside its purview. Absence of evidence wasn't evidence of absence, after all. I felt that the best route for us to possibly take was to stick to the edge worlds, slowly making our way around the outskirts of the Dimensional Sea as the TSAB knew it and scanning on arrival. By paying close attention to which worlds were both in Mariposa's scanning range and sending or receiving network traffic, the theory went that after eliminating all of the worlds on the approved for travel lists, whatever was left would have to be an occupied world that wasn't approved for travel. In other words, the Unadministered Worlds that might turn out to be under the purview of somebody not affiliated with the TSAB.
Just had to hope that we ended up hitting on some other government's planet rather than some sort of secret military site or other reason for us to end up at risk of being 'disappeared.'
We established a course of planets to work through not too long after arriving at that plan, and it was easy to then fall into our new routine. Arrive on a world, liberate some funding, check in to a nice place to spend a couple nights, scan for the presence of a nearby Unadministered World, meet interesting people, do interesting things, move on after a couple of days. Roll the uplifting montage background music.
...There was something sad about how easily I managed to make my own interdimensional adventure sound so very paint by numbers.
I was having fun, though, as the days blended together into weeks and the count of planets I'd been to kept ticking up at a steady rate. Sure, we hadn't found anything interesting, and sure we weren't any closer to... anywhere in particular, really. But that didn't matter to me. I wasn't even really keeping track of the passage of time anymore. It was nice to just get lost in the joy of the journey.
Until the day we actually found an Unadministered World, at any rate.
"I've got a fix on something that doesn't match the list. Not a lot of traffic, but enough. Might be an Unadministered World? It's close, actually. We could make it in a single jump."
My range hadn't really improved with all the successive Dimensional Transferences, but that might have just been down to the vast distances at play. My control, on the other hand, improved by leaps and bounds and I no longer needed assistance to manage a Transference on my own.
And with it only being one jump away, I'd thought the worst thing that could possibly happen was that we'd be out half an hour of wasted time for the trip.
"Let's go take a look, then."
We set our coordinates and made the jump and I was proven instantly wrong about the worst thing that could have possibly happened almost as soon as my vision cleared to reveal the inside of a futuristic room that brought to mind visions of Star Trek transporters.
The two men guarding this room were not the least bit happy to see me.
"TSAB! Halt-"
I panicked and slammed through a secondary Dimensional Transference, aimed roughly at 'on the other side of this planet,' before they had a chance to do anything more substantial than yell.
Something told me the TSAB was probably far better at locking down teleportation than I was at executing it. I'd rather not test that theory.
"Okay. This is not a winning planet. I just need to catch my breath and then we..." My voice died as I properly took in just where I had warped myself to. I was standing in the middle of a too-brightly-lit street looking out towards a scene that was unmistakable to anybody with a passing exposure to Earth Aleph pop culture.
The lights, the sounds, the throngs of people, all of it a perfect replica of a memory pulled from some TV show or another. Only the slightest of differences, in which brands were on advertisement, which celebrities were displayed on larger-than-life screens. I knew this place.
I'd arrived in a side street just off of Times Square.
New York City, USA.
<...this isn't possible.>
"Earth...?"
Next On Fluttering Wings...
"Mou," a casually-dressed redhead whines from her spot on a couch, swatting at the alert as though the action might have somehow prevented it from being sent in the first place. "This is really bad timing!"
The tall blonde lounging next to her frowns in agreement. "I'd think that with how difficult it is to actually get you to take a vacation, people would think more before sending you priority alerts."
The pair of wives decided there was nothing for it, though. Might as well look at what the alert is.
"Ah," they chorused in the perfect timing of two people committed to spending their lives together as they opened the alert for a more detailed look.
On prominent display was a still frame depicting a lonely-seeming girl, with beautiful curls of long black hair, arriving at the TSAB's quasi-permanent outpost on UA-97 in the characteristic light show of a personally powered Dimensional Transference alongside a distinctive floating fairy. The blonde reached across to start the video, and the lovers watched two sets of eyes widening in brief panic, and immediately departing again - all but skating out underneath the dropping barrier as it resolved.
This sort of thing definitely qualified as a good reason to send highly important dispatches to people who were supposed to be enjoying their vacation.
"I wonder who she is...?" The blonde mused.
The redhead frowned. Even if it was just a matter of a powerful young mage in the company of a Unison Device turning up on her homeworld without notice or authorization, she'd have taken an interest in this case. But the notification that an illegal transference to UA-97 had been executed came packaged with some interesting context.
Whoever she was, she was already in the TSAB's systems - there was a case file with the girl under 'persons of interest.' A runaway, although that word felt somehow inadequate when considering her apparent propensity for long-distance teleportation.
The pair watched an edited summary video showing the girl and her Unison Device spending a night in the care of Aurelia's local authorities, deciding that it wasn't to her liking and leaving by way of an offworld Dimensional Transference. Jurisdiction had been claimed by the TSAB within hours of the event, as local authorities tended not to be well equipped to handle teenage girls whose idea of running away spanned multiple planets.
And her eyes were so sad...
The redhead nodded to herself, then turned to face her partner fully. "I think I'd like to meet her."
The blonde smiled ruefully, already knowing that the Ace of Aces would be returning to duty and their little vacation was coming to a premature end. Oh well. This was one of the reasons she loved her wife.
"I'll ask General Yagami to take care of the paperwork," she said, switching to formal addresses now that they were going back to work.
It wouldn't do to accidentally refer to the TSAB Marine Defense Forces Investigation Commander as Hayate-chan in an official correspondence, after all.
"Thanks, Fate-chan! See you soon!"
Episode 4: Nanoha Takamachi!
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Frozen Flame
Fragment of the Devourer
- Location
- The Darkness Beyond Time
Taylor meeting Nanoha? This is going to end in explosions and tears. And given Nanoha's penchant for 'befriending' and Taylor's general reaction to people trying to force her to do things, I'm betting they won't be the fun kind either.
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jwolfe_beta
Semi Genre-Savvy Overlord
- Location
- Canada
Nanoha is perfectly willing to be peaceful as long as people don't start shooting.
Unfortunately Taylor is very likely to shoot first and the White Devil is an officer of the law. Sure she'll try to handle a scared/lost individual with kid gloves, but mages with Unison Devices can be weapons of mass destruction (just take a look at what Hayate can pull off). And that's not exactly something you want rampaging around at random.
Soon Taylor will face the might of a Friendship Beam straight to the face like person needing water in the middle of a desert.
Frozen Flame
Fragment of the Devourer
- Location
- The Darkness Beyond Time
I'm not arguing that Nanoha isn't reasonable or that she'll shoot first and ask questions later, but she does have a history of strong-arming people, often for their own good, when they're in opposition to her and unwilling to do what she asks. Taylor has issues with authority and Nanoha would set off a lot of those problems if/when she tries to make her do anything. Given their respective tendencies to escalate, I can easily see things hitting the point where Taylor mentally equates Nanoha with a gang enforcer after she tries to incapacitate her.
Remember, Taylor might know the magic can be non-lethal, but if someone's shooting giant energy beams at her, she'll probably be thinking of the Bet variant. Add in how her current image of the TSAB seems to be 'shady multidimensional government' and her thoughts on being disappeared, and it's apparent that she isn't going to be inclined to treat someone trying to force her into listening to them 'for her own good' any differently than she would a Brockton gang.
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jwolfe_beta
Semi Genre-Savvy Overlord
- Location
- Canada
Hopefully Mariposa might be able to de-escalate the mess.
Because I'm pretty sure Nanoha can escalate further and faster than Taylor can.
BB-Leviathan
Verified Battleship Verified Monster Hunter
- Location
- Somewhere beyond the sea
Hate/fear detected, target in sight, firing orbital friendship canon in 5...4...3...2..1
- Location
- United States
I suspect there will be some misunderstanding now that also opens up whatever other plot threads are planned, and that misunderstanding will be resolved in the future. Oen of the best sources of dramatic tension could be conflict between Taylor and Nanoha, and Taylor's personality makes it easy for her to react negatively to a perceived threat even if one doesn't exist.
Frozen Flame
Fragment of the Devourer
- Location
- The Darkness Beyond Time
That's the issue. Nanoha will win any fight with Taylor right now, but if Taylor can get away, and she might well, then she'll probably treat Nanoha as some enemy she has to take out if she wants to be safe. And though Nanoha has a lot of edges on Taylor, there isn't much suggesting that she has experience fighting a ruthlessly pragmatic and creative guerrilla fighter. A straight-up fight she'd win hands down, a protracted chase with someone who's constantly hopping worlds and leaving traps is a bit iffier.
TheWonko
Forgot to set a title
- Location
- Earth
As my brother has said "Air Force is Best Force"
So... Fate's already prepared the adoption papers, right?
- Location
- The State of Denial
Taylor has barely managed to figure out flight without assistance, and hasn't even learned how to properly dodge. And can pop out a few tiny bullets to make muggers have a bad day. Mariposa, little miss "Siege-type Unison Device", however might be able to help her reach levels of escalation that shouldn't be physically possible. If even the tiniest little nudge of escalation starts, Taylor is going to go from zero to Unison in an instant.
Also, Taylor finding out she's on the wrong Earth won't be too soul searing, because she KNOWS about Earth Aleph. But being on an Earth that doesn't even have a hebrew letter designation is going to bother her immensely. "Wait, there are HOW MANY Earths?"
jwolfe_beta
Semi Genre-Savvy Overlord
- Location
- Canada
It'll be fun to see if and when Taylor finds out that vast majority of all her suspicions/paranoia about the TSAB, the people she meets etc were baseless.
That she might have been able to go home/gotten help if she had just been honest and asked/explained the situation.
At that point Nanoha wouldn't be trying to subdue Taylor alone. She'd have called in reinforcements with an emphasis on people who could keep Taylor from porting away etc.
- Location
- Wales
Indeed, Hayate Yagumi, the happiest little WMD.
Approximate time of Story Start
Stardust Falcon
Legendary Creature - Bird Wizard
- Location
- The Infinite Sorrow
I think at this point I've communicated where we're at in the timeline without making somebody look at a TSAB calendar and see that it's early Year 80 but as this discussion begins to kick off I'll just double confirm that this story is set after the conclusion of Vivid but prior to the beginning of Vivid Strike (a series which may or may not be relevant).
Nanoha has just turned 24 and our intrepid heroines caught her attention in the middle of her birthday celebration mini-vacation with Fate (who doesn't appear to have an official birthday so I'm going with the cute choice of 'she picked Nanoha's birthday for the sake of the paperwork' unless someone contradicts me on this). Hayate's about three months younger, but whereas Nanoha is content to refuse promotions and hang out at the bottom of the org chart as an Almighty Instructor, Hayate is an overachiever and one of the highest ranked officers in the TSABthanks in part to how many other people at the top got caught up in the JS Incident...
Nanoha's UA-97 isn't synched in any way with the Worm Alternate Earths and so its date and time have no bearing either on how much time it's been since Taylor left Bet, nor on her actual age, which is currently 15 (and some sizable but indeterminable fraction that she'll probably end up cheated out of by the paperwork). This is important to clarify as based on the assumption that TOS happened in the year of its release, which would make Year 65 be 2004 AD on the UA-97 calendar and therefore it's currently 2019. (Ain't that convenient?) As such, Taylor's official birthday would be adjusted accordingly in the same way that Fate and Vivio's birthdays are both representative of their biological ages rather than dates of activation. This is... a surprisingly common occurrence in TSAB space.
Nanoha has just turned 24 and our intrepid heroines caught her attention in the middle of her birthday celebration mini-vacation with Fate (who doesn't appear to have an official birthday so I'm going with the cute choice of 'she picked Nanoha's birthday for the sake of the paperwork' unless someone contradicts me on this). Hayate's about three months younger, but whereas Nanoha is content to refuse promotions and hang out at the bottom of the org chart as an Almighty Instructor, Hayate is an overachiever and one of the highest ranked officers in the TSAB
Nanoha's UA-97 isn't synched in any way with the Worm Alternate Earths and so its date and time have no bearing either on how much time it's been since Taylor left Bet, nor on her actual age, which is currently 15 (and some sizable but indeterminable fraction that she'll probably end up cheated out of by the paperwork). This is important to clarify as based on the assumption that TOS happened in the year of its release, which would make Year 65 be 2004 AD on the UA-97 calendar and therefore it's currently 2019. (Ain't that convenient?) As such, Taylor's official birthday would be adjusted accordingly in the same way that Fate and Vivio's birthdays are both representative of their biological ages rather than dates of activation. This is... a surprisingly common occurrence in TSAB space.
- Location
- Israel
I kind of hope Nanoha manages to 'befriend' without using 'friendship' beams.