Power Games (Nanoha fanfic)

[Aleph]

Scraped from here.

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! Let it be known to one and all that this be the home and temple of the fanfic Power Games! The successor to Game Theory, a story which can be found here, here and most recently here, and which also has a summer residence on FF.net!

The first step on our journey into the Gamesverse was gripping in its premise, epic in its length, thrilling in its execution and bittersweet in its ending! It also took rather longer to finish than expected due to how it grew in the telling, setting what I suspect might become a trend in this series. And if you haven't read it yet, why on earth are you still reading this one? Seriously, you're about three and a half sentences past the point you should have gone to read Game Theory. Go! Go on, go read it! We'll wait! Honestly, how do you expect to make sense of this story if you haven't read that one?

Okay, right. Now then, with that taken care of, let's get started!

Contents:
Prologue
Recap of Game Theory
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Epilogue
Epilogue Two
Epilogue Three
Final Words

Vesta Takes the Mary Sue Test

Infodumps:
On Game Theory (and sequels):
What it isn't: 1, 2, 3
Characters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Timeline: 1
Locations: 1, 2

On magic, mana and spells
Mana and magic symbols: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Mage rank and linker cores: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Devices: 1
Mana constructs, summons and familiars: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Rare Skills: Carim, Yuuno, Mei (2, 3)
Spells and their construction: 1, 2
Dimensional barriers: 1
Medicine and mana poisoning: 1, 2, 3, 4
Lethality, and kinetic weapons: 1

On historical events and entities
Dimensions and world-templates: 1, 2, 3,
Basic history (and magic systems): 1, 2, 3
Alhazred: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Dawn States: 1, 2, 3, 4
Combat Cyborg Incident: 1

On the TSAB and the present day
TSAB structure: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
The Saint Church: 1
Fashion and Jackets: 1, 2, 3
Technology: 1, 2, 3
First Contact: 1, 2, 3, 4
Cultural elements: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Special treatment: 1, 2, 3
Inhabitants and wildlife: 1

Note: As a standard disclaimer upon which all of my worldbuilding is constructed (and to hopefully stop people PMing me to ask permission to use it), everything in the Gamesverse is free for the taking. Not only am I writing fanfiction, which means I can hardly protest at people taking the stuff I come up with when I'm doing the exact same thing, the entire point of this worldbuilding is to create a reconstructed setting with lots of plot hooks and interesting sci fi stuff for everyone to take as much from as they think is cool.

And lest I seem uncharacteristically generous, it's for partly selfish ends too - if enough of this stuff diffuses into the wider Nanoha fanfiction community, I get more fics of the sort I like to read. Everybody wins. So yeah, feel free to take as much of this stuff as you like, and leave as much of it as you don't. It's all up for grabs if you want it.

Now, on with the thread!

 

[Aleph]

Power Games​

Prologue​

She awoke, gasping.

How long had she been asleep? It felt like forever. The depths of slumber had crept up on her again, tangling her in warm, sinuous fingers and refusing to relinquish their hold on her exhausted body, as they had been doing with increasing frequency in recent memory. She glanced out of the window – the skies were dark. They had been light when she had last looked. Hours, then, at the very least. This hadn't just been a short doze; it had been one of her long sleeps.

But now she was awake again, and raw, visceral energy surged through her with almost painful strength. Normally, after a short nap, she struggled to climb out of the soporific pit and into full wakefulness. Here, though, she was slammed out of it in a way that hadn't happened in a long, long time.

She ached all over. Her mouth felt as dry as a desert; her arms felt like something was jabbing pins and needles into them; her legs were useless lumps of meat. That was familiar. Yes, she thought in bemusement, that was familiar. When she woke up suddenly, it always hurt. Was it the awakening that hurt, or the pain that made her awaken? That she was less sure of.

The room was dark. Shadows shifted in the corners, and a strange glow came from somewhere off to her right. She lay on her back, head to one side, momentarily unable to recall exactly where she was. The ceiling was bare, offering no clues, and there was a strange glow from some source that she couldn't pick out that was dimly illuminating the room, deepening the shadows and shifting oddly where it played off the empty shelves stacked against the wall at the far end of the room.

Despite the torrent of energy that boiled in her chest and flooded down her veins, making her stomach churn and something in the back of her mind slot together in a familiar-yet-alien way, her body was still weak. Crying out softly, she struggled to lift herself up on her elbows and lever herself into a sitting position. When that failed, she simply reached upwards and backwards blindly for a light, any light at all, to see where she was.

A smooth hand closed over hers and gently but firmly pressed it back to her chest. Its owner was still outside her field of vision, and made no noise as they slid an arm under her and helped her up into a sitting position. She coughed harshly, still disoriented from the energy surge and the nausea, and the hands held her chin up and steadied her as the coughing fit wracked her slight body. The blinking glow of tear-blurred lights from a display beside her bed played starkly off her convulsing frame without regard for her misery.

Once the attack had passed, she lifted a limp hand to rub at sleep-encrusted eyes and looked groggily at her helper. No, her helpers.

Four figures knelt before her in front of another tightly packed bookcase, their heads bowed. They wore strange clothing, simple and uniform, and they glowed with the same unearthly light that illuminated the room. She looked at their apparent leader, the woman who had helped her, and rasped something unintelligible.

She looked up, apparently deciphering the attempt at speech, or at least garnering the general meaning. "Worry not, my liege," she said in a cold, clinical voice. The words were an attempt at soothing, but the manner in which they were delivered sounded more like she was reading them off a card. "We are your servants, here to protect you. We are your will made manifest."

The girl blinked, still groggy and confused. She… remembered something about this, didn't she? Some sort of… dream she'd had. Or something. It was hard to think. She was still so very tired. Numbly, she stared at the strange glowing woman as she stood.

"Worry not," the woman repeated. "All will be well, now that we are here. Sleep once more. We will wake you soon."

Sleep. That sounded good. She didn't want to sleep forever. But a little nap, for just a bit longer… yes, that sounded good.

"We will guard you as you rest," intoned one of the other figures, as their leader laid a cold hand on the girl's forehead. "Sleep, and regain your strength."

She slept.

…​

 

[EarthScorpion]

Power Games​

Teatime with Tea​

(The Super Mega Best Bestest Recap of Anything Ever)​

"Hello!" a little girl in a business suit says, sitting bolt upright on a high-backed chair designed for an adult. The desk she is sitting at is similarly sized, and she has to lean upwards to shuffle the papers in front of her. "How nice of you to drop by! It's teatime!" She grins. "You get it? It's a joke! Well, apparently it's a spelling joke. So when I say it out loud, it isn't very funny, but when it's written down, it's meant to be funnier. That's what my brother said, but all in all I don't think his sense of humour is one gazillionth as good as mine! But I still did it anyway because I couldn't fit 'Kaiser Teana's Super Amazing Talk Show Which Is The Best One Ever' onto the cards. Which is sad."

She pauses for breath briefly, then continues.

"Also? The joke only works in Anglish, which is a language which is spoken on some planet somewhere where my brother had to go for work and he had to pretend he was from a country which spoke Anglish and he bought me a guide book as one of my presents. Anglish must be a special language spoken by people who fish, because it's the same word in that language. So maybe it's a language spoken so they can… like, talk to fish. So it's probably like 'Tea, glub glub, bubble, bubble. I am a fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiish. Please eat this worm, tea, bubble bubble glub.' Because that's what I'd say to the fish if I was trying to catch them because that would totally be the most cunningist way of tricking them into being caught."

A faint scratching noise is heard from the earpiece she was wearing. "What? No, I'm not getting distracted actually. I'm talking about something which is super-mega-interesting actually and people who don't like it are wrong and stupid." More scritching comes as the little girl's face twists into a pout. "Fiiiiine," she says sulkily, before turning to face the camera again. "The meanie who is up in the talking box says that I need to keep on doing what I'm meant to be doing, or else they won't let me do it again… which is super-mega-mean, you know? Almost as mean as why I'm still not allowed a pet kitten! Well, anyway. Today, on Teatime with Tea, we have a super-special guest and she's coming to talk about all kinds of big and special stuff which happened recently. Also, me an' her will have tea and biscuits and stuff together along with Sir Wilhemston," she added. "So, everyone, say 'hello' to Alicia Testarossa!"

To applause from the studio audience, a little girl in a blue dress walks on. Her long blonde hair is neatly plaited, and she is smiling broadly.

"Hello!" she sing-songs, waving at the camera. "I'm very happy to be here today on the Interviewing Alicia panel…"

"Teatime with Tea," the redheaded girl host corrects her. Alicia sticks her tongue out and continues as if she hadn't heard as she walks up to the desk and takes a seat. "I'm very happy to be here today, and… I hope you'll all take good care of me! That's what Big Sis Nanoha said when she joined our new school… oh, but that's later."

"Yes it is," nods Tea. "Because what we're doing here is telling you all about what happened in the Scary Jewel Seed Incident of Doom. Which isn't actually what it was called, but it should have been because that's a way more interesting name than just the boring old 'Jewel Seed Incident' or whatever weird long number thingy they gave it which my big brother had to write in his reports." She makes a face. "Bleagh. When I'm a super-awesome TSAB commander-general-captain, I won't have to write any reports. I'll make other people do them, and tell them off if they get anything wrong."

"I wish I could do that with homework," Alicia comments wistfully. She receives a glare from her co-host, along with a hiss of "remember, not till later!", and falls quiet.

"So! The Scary Evil Jewel Seed Incident of Doom and Destruction!" Tea presses a button, and the program switches to a slideshow. The first slide does indeed have the aforementioned title written on it in big letters. It is underlined thrice, and someone has pencilled in another couple of additional exclamation marks.

Tea continues through a voiceover, as the slide switches to a rather childish drawing of the dimensional sea, with a ship flying through it. There is a lot of purple in the background.

"Now," she says, "it all started when a transport carrying the Jewel Seeds…"

"Actually," interrupts Alicia, "it started waaay before that when the Jewel Seeds were made. And you didn't even explain what they are. Dummy."

"I was going to! They're…"

There is an abrupt scuffling sound, and Tea's voice cuts off. "They're Lost Logia," Alicia states with a certain amount of smugness. Loud complaints can be heard in the background, and further scuffling sounds are audible. "Which are really powerful old things that are the technology from ages and ages ago which we don't understand anymore. Some of them are really dangerous li…"

She is abruptly cut off, and silence reigns for a full minute before sound is re-established. Teana has a distinctly sulky tone as she explains. "Okay, we've been told that if we try to steal each other's headset thingies or start fighting again, we won't be allowed to keep doing this, so that won't happen again. Sorry."

"Yeah, sorry," agrees Alicia, despite not sounding particularly apologetic. "Anyway, these Jewel Seeds got dug up by a ferret."

"He's not actually a ferret," Tea confides. "He's really a boy who can turn into a ferret. Or maybe a ferret who can turn into a boy. My brother said he wasn't a familiar though, so it's probably the first way round."

"Oh! Or maybe he wasn't actually a ferret!" suggests Alicia. "Vesta says he's a mousey! Do you think there are girl-ferrets? Maybe they have different names… anyway, he dug up these Jewel Seeds," continues Alicia, "which are powerful dangerous Lost Logia, and put them on a ship that was going to Midchilda. This one!" A purple circle appears around the ship.

"But then the ship exploded!" Tea exclaims. The screen advances to the next slide, showing a scribbled explosion in reds and oranges where the ship was. "Which means it was pretty silly of him to put the Jewel Seeds on there, really. I mean, when I find lots of Lost Logia when I'm grown up, I'm going to put them on ships that won't explode."

"Not if I get them first! Hah!"

"Hmph!" Teana rises above Alicia's challenge, and continues. "So the Jewel Seeds weren't broken by the ship exploding. They just got flung away, and they got sent… to Earth!" The slide changes to a blue-ish green ball, with twenty-one carefully drawn purple blobs moving towards it. "That's what UA-97 is called, apparently. It sounds pretty stupid to me. Why would you call a planet 'Dirt'? Swee-neth-ee-ode is a much prettier name, and it means something about sparkling sunlight that I can't remember, which is way nicer than something about dirt. I was there not long ago, but then I had to move again."

"Oh, oh!" The view switches back to the two girls, and Alicia sticks her hand up. "Actually actually, I asked Nanoha about the name and then she went and found out that quite a few planets are called that in various languages! Like the Galeans named a world 'Terra' which means 'Earth' as well!" She smiles smugly at the other girl, before her tone loses some of the excitement in favour of sympathy. "But yeah, moving sucks. I just had to move around a lot not long ago, and it's mean and unfair. And boring."

"Oh, I know all about moving around," Teana said, twisting to face the camera. "I have to do it all the time. See, my brother gets put all places for his work in the military and that means I have to move too, and go to a new school. I go to special schools which are on military bases and everyone else at school gets moved around a lot. Except recently when I got moved for a few months from Mid, which was a pain because I like Mid because I often spend time there and so I actually know people and I talk to my friends there when I'm in other places, except now I was like ten hours from Mid and so my friends wouldn't be able to get a reply back to me for almost a whole day and that meant that we could only exchange videos."

She sniffed sadly, before brightening. "Oh, but I didn't have to stay in a new military base in the carer bit when my brother was away this time. I was with a family and they had a really loud baby but it was still better than having to be in the carer place. The mummy of the family was the mummy of Miss Rizu and Miss Mei. I like both of them. Miss Rizu is nice and Miss Mei is funny and we played together when my brother got back from his superspecial secret top secret special mission and and and we got to go back to Mid because he was hurt which was really really good because I got to go to my favouritest school again!" She paused. "I mean, the hurting was bad and all," she said awkwardly, "but still the school thing is good!"

Alicia glared at her. "Wasn't this interview meant to be about me and how super-special I am?" she whined.

"… no. But… yeah, the mean guy is saying we should get back on track. So! The ferret-mousey-not-a-familiar boy went hunting the Jewel Seeds to get them back, which I would have done like a thousand times better because I'm awesome, and so I wouldn't have done what he did which was to lose and get hurt. But then…"

"Oh oh oh!" Alicia bounces in excitement. "I get this bit!" The slideshow comes back, this time displaying a carefully drawn figure in a white dress, with brown hair and blue eyes. It's holding a staff, though the head seems to have given the artist some trouble and been not-quite-erased and redrawn several times. "Because this is where Nanoha comes in! She's older than me, because she's nine, but she's really cool and good at magic! She met up with the ferrety boy and agreed to help him get the Jewel Seeds, because he couldn't do it on his own!"

"I could have done it on my own," Tea remarks with an air of superiority. The camera cuts back to them briefly as Alicia nods sagely.

"Yes, so could I. But you have to make allowances for more inconti… incompin… incomep… not-as-awesome-as-us people. Besides, he's only a ferret. He probably couldn't hold a proper Device with his little paws."

"I guess that does make sense," nods Tea. "Poor little ferrets. And you know what?"

"What?"

"I'm going to have a Device one day," Tea declares solemnly, "and it is going to be the bestest Device ever. Even better than the one that the last Priest-King hid away at the end of the Dimensional Sea. In fact, I'm going to find that one, and then I'm going to rebuild it to be even better."

"… nah," Alicia denies. "Nanoha's is still better. Hers is called Raising Heart, and it's a she, and she can talk and everything. And Fate has one called Bardiche which is the same, and…"

"Hmph," Tea sniffs, interrupting. "Well if your Nanoha was so cool and had such a good Device, how come she didn't get all the Jewel Seeds?"

"Ah, well, you see," Alicia said, smirking, "my mama had sent my biglittle sister to find some super ancient magic to save me. And it worked, as you can see, because I'm right here right now."

"Your biglittle sister?" Tea asked.

"Oh yes!" Alicia said cheerfully. "That's Fate. See, Fate is my biglittle sister, and I'm her littlebig sister. Because she's all tall and everything and looks older than me, but really she's much younger. Because I'm like thirty."

"That is very old," Tea said, eyes wide. "That's… like… like almost twice as old as my brother. And he's ancient. He's so old I once found his music from when he was my age, and did you know? I didn't recognise any of the bands."

"I know," Alicia said in an awestruck tone. "Like, all the shows I used to watch aren't being shown any more, and Mama had to get me the boxed sets which were labelled as classics because they were so old. I'm so old, I'm the same age as my biglittle sister's friend's mummy. I'm so old, I could have had babies if I hadn't gotten sick and stuff."

"You could probably even do adult things," Tea said. "Like driving a car or flying."

"Oooh, I can fly!" Alicia chirped. "Already!"

Teana pouted. "Well, clearly it's because you're so old," she said. "No other reason. And I'll be able to fly when I'm old too! Like… really old. Like ten!"

Alicia nodded sagely. "Uh huh," she agreed, "because Nanoha and Fate are nine, and they can fly, so that's flying age. Oh, except Fate isn't really nine, she's just sort of nine, because she's kind of only about three because she was six when she was made except she also had some of my memories only not as good. That's why she's my biglittle sister because for all that she's really big; she's only one tenth as old as me."

She cocks her head, listening to some crackling coming from her earpiece, and affects a put-upon sigh. "Oh, fine," she says, "so anyway, Nanoha and Fate wound up fighting over the Jewel Seeds. Bam, pow, zap!" The slide show returns, and progresses through several enthusiastically illustrated mage battles. Yellow and pink take up large portions of the skyline, as well as bits of red-scribbled-over-with-white and orange where the pink and yellow ran out. "Arf was helping too, she's Fate's familiar, and is a gigantinormous wolf! But she can also be a little girl and a puppy, or a grown-up, and one of the things she was doing was pretending to be Fate's mummy so that they could live by themselves in a big room at the top of a really tall building."

"But!" interrupts Teana, "they did bad stuff! Like, they broke up a hospital a lot, and then they set off a dimensional quake!" The slide show progresses forward to show a pillar of purple light going upwards, with a black dot and a white dot next to it. The words "totally their fault" have been scribbled next to the pillar, with arrows pointing to both dots.

"Hey, you snuck that in there! That wasn't their fault! Meanie!"

"It totally was their fault! They set it off because they were fighting! You're just lying to make them look better!"

"Liar!"

A pause, as silence descends and the screen flicks back to the two girls, who are now glaring at one another and paying no attention to the camera. It is broken by the confrontational tones of Teana, as she turns back. "Anyway," she says challengingly. "They knew that what they'd done was wrong, and that the TSAB would be coming to arrest them for…"

"For not being meanies like the TSAB! They're bad and wanted to unplug me while I was still asleep! That's why Big Sis went to Nanoha after the quake, to make sure they didn't kidnap her and do mean stuff to her for something that wasn't her fault!"

"You're just saying bad stuff about the TSAB because you're jealous or something! Everyone knows that they're the good guys, duh."

"Well not here they weren't!"

"Well maybe you're just saying that because…"

Crackling – loud crackling – bursts out of both earpieces, and the girls stop shouting at one another in surprise. After a few seconds of listening, Teana turns to the camera with a sweet smile.

"Okay, we're just going to switch to the weather now, ladies and gentlemen and people and things, while we work out who's right. By which I mean me."

"Nuh uh…"

…​

The scene changes to another desk, cutting off Alicia's last protest. Behind it sits another six-year old girl, with messy grey-and-black hair and cat ears sticking out of her shaggy mop. Behind her is a large map, which is mostly white. She stares glumly at the camera.

"It's snowing," she says accusingly. "It's always snowing. Except when it stops snowing and then it just blows really cold. Weather for today. Snow. Weather for tomorrow. Wind which picks up the snow and is evil and horrible and tries to blow it down the neck of your school uniform because the wind knows that you're actually a kitten and so it wants to get you. Wind is evil because it doesn't like kittens who are trying to sunbathe somewhere warm but then it finds out about them and wants to ruin your relaxing-time."

Vesta sniffs pitifully.

"And let me tell you what else bad happens," she continued, in a more aggrieved tone. "Then Mistress and Fate and Arf want to go outside in the snow, and it's snow! You know what snow is? It's water that's trying to trick you by pretending to be a solid so you go out in it thinking that the bad water can't get you. And then wham! Suddenly it's lured you onto it and you go up so your belly in snow and you can't move your legs and then everyone laughs at you, but you're secretly cold and wet and it's horrible! We need to destroy all snow everywhere!

She pauses, cocking her head reflectively. "Although I'm not sure how you could do that. See, at first I thought you could destroy it by blasting it with magic, but that means it just turns into water, the great enemy. Sometimes you can even turn it into steam if you blast it hard enough, but steam still turns back into water and then it freezes on the floor and turns into a trap which is all slippery and then you fall over because you've taken Arf's laces and are taking them to your hiding place while being chased by her and then the ice traps you and throws you into the wall by not letting you turn when you meant to. Because ice is water and water is evil.

She nods decisively. "So the moral of this story is, 'Snow is evil, stay inside in the warm.' The end."

…​

Despite a notable absence of papers on the desk, and somewhat ruffled hair and clothes on the parts of both hosts, the studio is remarkably intact when the camera returns there. Teana and Alicia are pointedly not looking at one another, and instead talk to the camera.

"Okay, we've reached a compo… comro… we've agreed that to avoid any more fights, I'll do the stuff with the TSAB and she'll do the stuff with the criminals," Teana explains, earning herself a dirty look from the other side of the desk.

"Nanoha and Fate," Alicia takes over, "who are the bestest and bravest people ever, agreed to join forces cause Fate told her all about me and she saw that it was clearly the right thing to do to revive me, because the TSAB wanted me to die."

"But the TSAB had been alerted by the really dangerous dimensional quake which could have hurt millions and millions of people," Tea interrupts, "so they were coming to see what was going on. And Lindy, who was the captain of the ship only she's actually a general or an admiral or something, I can't remember, sent off a message for help to the real bestest bravest strongest person ever, who was my big brother Tiida! Yay Tiida! Oh, and some other people too."

"So because they showed up – and it was partly because they attacked Nanoha in her house that she joined up with Fate, because anyone who would do that is clearly the baddie – Nanoha had to leave her family behind and go live with Fate. And she came back to the Garden of Time, which is where mama and Fate and Linith and Arf were living." Alicia presses a button, and an enormous, ominous structure is shown on the screen, floating in the dimensional sea and festooned with spikes and colossal jewels. "We're going to talk more about that later, so remember it! Anyway, Nanoha talked to mama who told her lots of stuff about what was going on and me being hurt and needing the Jewel Seeds to fix me. So she said okay to that, and then they went back to Earth."

Tea smirks. "But!" A tap of a button, and the next slide comes up. It shows seven figures, the middle one of which is outlined in a shining aura and meticulously detailed down to the last centimetre. His resemblance is clear, and made plainer by the writing under him that reads 'Tiida, bestest big brother in the history of ever'. To his left stand a girl with a sword and short green hair, a tall blonde woman, and a lady with purple hair and a cloud of dots hovering around her. Their subtexts are titled 'Miss Mei', 'Blonde Girl Whose Name I Can't Remember' and 'Summoner Lady'. To his right, a dark-skinned girl with a book, a heavily-armoured woman on rollerskates and an enormous man with a spear, subtitled 'Miss Rizu', 'Mrs Quint' and "Big Scary Spear Guy'.

Under them are drawn a short boy in dark clothing, holding a staff, and a rough attempt at a ferret, outlined in green, flanking a carefully illustrated and rather taller woman with green hair and a cup of tea, sitting in a big chair. Their labels read 'Captainy-person Lindy's son' and 'Ferret boy' and 'Admirabl Lindy (really cool!)', respectively.

"As you can see," states Tea proudly, "the TSAB group were really cool and awesome! So the criminals couldn't beat them, and had to run away a lot and let them take the Jewel Seeds!" In the background, Alicia can be heard quietly cursing herself for not drawing a similar picture for her side and rummaging around for some paper and a pencil.

"There was a big dragony papery one, and a little-girl glowing one, and even a giant scary one in a shopping place that…"

"Wait wait wait!" Alicia interrupts, "you've gone too far! It's my turn now! Cause, see, because of the mean nasty TSAB people who were fighting unfairly and outnumbering them even though Nanoha and Fate and Arf were braver, mama said that Nanoha should make a familiar too! And that's where Vesta came from!"

A hastily-drawn slide comes up, showing a rough sketch of a grey-and-black kitten. Written next to it, with a few insertions in orange pen here and there, is 'Vesta, (one of) the (two) bestest familiar(s) in the world ever!" Tea hums thoughtfully.

"She is a kitten-familiar," she muses doubtfully. "So… I guess I can agree with you on that. But my kitten-familiar would be even better."

"Yeah yeah. Anyway, Vesta was a kitten who one of the Jewel Seeds was in! She was actually there when Nanoha and Fate first met! And she liked Nanoha, so when she was feeling all lonely, Fate took her to Nanoha as a present and then later she made Vesta her familiar! And that's how she got to be my friend today! She's really cool!"

A brief image flashes on-screen, with Vesta giving the camera an enthusiastic thumbs-up. The subtitle reads 'This opinion carries the Vesta Seal of Approval.'

"Are you done now?" demands Teana. Alicia considers carefully, then shrugs.

"Yeah, I guess. For now."

Tea rolls her eyes, and flicks her hair back. "Okay. So the last Jewel Seed on the land was in a shopping centre, and that was all scary and weird. And… Nanoha," she glances smugly at Alicia, "helped beat it. Because she was almost coming round to the right side! Mrs Quint had a big talk with her, and she nearly decided to help the TSAB like she should have been all along." She speeds up, as Alicia starts hissing at her in barely-suppressed fury. "But even though Mrs Quint had a lot of good points she didn't convince Nanoha so she ended up running back to the others and didn't join the TSAB okay fine it's your turn again, happy?"

Alicia gave her a cool stare. "Just for that," she said haughtily, "I get to say the next TSAB bit. Because you broke the rules by saying the stuff about Nanoha, which you weren't allowed to. Right, Mr Person in the Box?" She listens to her earpiece for a second, then nods smugly. "So there."

"So Nanoha and Fate and Arf and Vesta were better than they had been… oh, I forgot! Yeah, what happened next was, the TSAB cheated. They'd put bugs on all of Nanoha's family and friends so that she couldn't talk to them without being found – real actual bugs, from a summoner lady who summoned bugs! Eww! Bugs are icky! And two of her friends who cared about her were looking for her, and they saw her going into the hotel place where she and Fate were staying! So the TSAB found them, and then they attacked them!" The slide advances again, to show a tall building with the top floor engulfed in an explosion. "In their home! At night, when they were meant to be asleep!" Alicia's tone is one of outrage and horror, and though Teana makes a feeble protest, the blonde girl glares her into submission.

"But even though the TSAB used evil, underhanded tactics like that, Nanoha and Fate were just too awesome to be beaten! Even when they used mean, wicked cheating, they still failed! So Nanoha and Big Sis escaped, but they had to leave behind all their stuff. And now they didn't even have anywhere to live! So that's when they came up with a plan."

"A bad plan," Tea comments idly. Alicia bangs on the table, rising to her feet in outrage.

"Argh, I've had it with you! I already said you're not meant to talk during my bits! And it was not! It was a brilliant plan!"

"Was so!" Tea responds, rising likewise. "Even Arf and Vesta said so! It was a stupid plan!"

"You're lying!" declares Alicia hotly. "It was a great plan, and just because it didn't work…"

"Not working is what makes a plan stupid, stupid!"

"Well… well you're stupid, you meanie!"

"Well you're a meanie, you weirdo!"

The air crackles as the two lock glares. A warning crackle from their earpieces heads things off before the argument can get restarted, however, and they gradually settle down, ruffled feathers settling slowly.

"… see," continues Alicia with a wary glance at Teana, "the rest of the Jewel Seeds – I think there were five of them – were in the sea, down with the fishies and the crabs. I wanted a pet crab once, because then I could pretend to scuttle about sideways everywhere and say I was learning his ways! Hee. But mama said I couldn't have one, so she just got me a toy one instead, and I carried him around on my head for a few months. But he's gone now, like the rest of my toys." She pouts sadly, and Tea leans across to pat her on the shoulder in a rare moment of sympathy.

"You may be wrong about a lot of stuff," she says sympathetically, "but nobody deserves to have their toys taken away like that. I'm sorry for you."

Alicia nods bravely, and continues. "So because they were in the ocean, nobody could find them. Because have you ever tried to look for a bluey-purpley thing in a bluey-purpley-greeny-browny tank of water? It's really hard! And this wasn't just a tank, it was a whole sea! So they couldn't find them easily. And that's why Nanoha thought, 'why not just make them come to us?'!"

She bounces excitedly, warming up to the topic as she explains. "That's because Jewel Seeds sort of wake up when they get magic pushed into them. But if you wake them up early, they're all stunned and fuzzy and slow! Like Big Sis is in the mornings! She's all stumbling around and moaning like a zombie. 'Graaah,' she goes, 'I am zombie Fate! I'm not properly awake until after I've gone out in the cold for a bit and had something to eat or drink!' It's very silly compared to me, because I'm fine as soon as I get up, like Nanoha. But I guess my biglittle sister can't be as good as me in every way. Anyway, this was a good thing with the Jewel Seeds, because it meant that Nanoha and Fate could wake them up early and then get them while they were all staggering about and asking Arf to make them some coco and muttering under their breath about how it was too bright and they were still too tired to be up this early!"

"But it didn't work!" Tea objects. "That's the whole thing about it! It went wrong, because one of the Jewel Seeds was eviller than they thought so it sucked up all the magic and went huge! And then they had a big battle where it pulled up a submarine that they wouldn't have won if my big brother hadn't been there, and the summoner lady had to summon her giantest summon and it made her have a baby!"

She pauses at this, cocking her head. So did Alicia.

"… is that how babies work, then?" ventures the latter after a while. "They come when you summon giant monsters on people?"

"I don't… think so." Teana frowns. "I mean, most of the people I know have mummies, and not many of them can summon giant monsters. I think." She considers this. "Then again," she amended, "I wouldn't be surprised if Aunty Sara could summon a giant monster. She's as scary as one sometimes."

"Maybe the monster left the baby behind when it was beaten?" Alicia ventures. "You know, like how they drop treasure. Oh, or maybe it's not a giant monster specifically, it's just spending loads and loads of magic?" She bit her lip. "And… and you have to be old to have a baby, so Nanoha and Fate don't do it, but old people like the summoner lady do?"

"I guess that could be it," Teana says. "… yeah. Yeah, that sounds kind of right. Maybe the baby is like… a bonus with the magic. Like… spend a lot of magic, get a baby free!" Her eyes widens. "Wow. Aunty Sara has had three babies. She must be really powerful."

Alicia taps her finger to her lips. "Ah!" she says. "But I know there's another place babies come from. See, when your mama wants a new baby, she gets a special tank and then the baby grows in it and when it's done it comes out."

Teana frowns. "Are you sure?" she asks sceptically. "That sounds a little bit like a story, not something real."

"It was a magic tank," Alicia reveals. "Which glowed."

"Ohhh. Right," Tea says, nodding as if that made all the difference.

There is a crackle from the earpieces, and Alicia coughs. "Right right," she says, "the man in the box says that we're almost out of time and so we need to be super quick if we want to meet the submission deadline."

"Yep," Tea says, nodding seriously. "So the TSAB can follow the magical purple lightning that Alicia's mama fired at stuff back to her super-secret lair. And they get more reinforcements because some of them were moving up anyway because admirable Lindy only has a few ships because the silly Earth planet is at the back end of nowhere and despite the fact she's really cool she's not that important for an admirable. So a more important admirable who's also from Earth but…" she shoots a glance at Alicia, "not not-working for the TSAB goes and gets more help and sends his super-powerful cat familiar to replace the summoner lady who has to look after her baby."

"And that's really dangerous," Alicia says, "but luckily Mama still has superiority in the cat field because she has two cats on her side and the TSAB only has one. Still, the TSAB stopped a cat gap from opening and that makes them much, much more dangerous according to Vesta."

"Yes. So the brave heroic TSAB arrive just as Alicia's mama starts her very dangerous ritual and begin the attack because they don't want her to kill a hundred squintillion people which is the biggest number ever."

"And just as the mean horrible TSAB arrive, she's getting started to save me, so she puts Nanoha to protect the outside because Nanoha is very good at blowing things up and Linith says that Nanoha is," Alicia affects an accent, "ahem, 'sometimes a little bit lacking in care' and also where she goes things sometimes blow up even when they're not meant to like landscape and hospitals and stuff and she didn't want things blowing up inside the Garden, while my biglittle sister is inside because she's really fast and so she can go zooooooooooooooooom around!"

Teana folds her arms smugly. "Only Nanoha did still manage to blow things up inside the Garden, despite not having any weapons inside," she says triumphantly. "Lots and lots of things!"

"It wasn't her fault!" Alicia protests

"Yeah, it totally was. She blew up a really important thingie in it."

Alicia splutters. "Well… she did it to save your stupid TSAB people on the ships!"

"That is true," Tea admits, "but she was the one who turned on the thingie which she had to protect them from."

"But saving people from something you accidentally did in the first place has to count for something," Alicia says.

"… okay, so… like, she gets half points for it?" Tea asks, looking up at the clock with narrowed eyes.

"Yeah, let's say that," Alicia says quickly, before grinning. "And then since everything goes wrong and stuff blows up, she also goes and saves your brother and since you say he's the best person ever that means you have to say she gets a billion million trillion points which more than makes up for a few small explosions of things which didn't really matter anyway."

"My brother says the ferret boy wouldn't agree," Tea half-heartedly protests, "but I guess… if she saved my brother from a giant metal ape monster thing, she can't be all that bad and surely if she gave herself in she'd hardly get any punishment at all because she's such a hero." Tea looks sad. "But even when she was given a chance after the TSAB had cornered her and taken out one of the cat-familiars – using their own cat which shows the TSAB cats are better…"

"Are not! She cheated!"

"Are too! And anywayNanohaDidn'tSurrenderWhenSheCouldHave," Teana blurts out all in one breath. "And then they blew up the whole Garden! Which was not the TSAB's fault! At all!"

"It was the bestest most cunningist trap ever ever ever," Alicia cheers. "It fooled everyone in the stupid TSAB so now they think we're all dead and we're safe and I'm going to a new school on a really cold planet and have new names and my Mama teleported everyone away onto a secret ship she had waiting for herself in the Dimensional Sea and so we won and the TSAB lost, but in a good way because no one died."

"They blew up a priceless space station and are all a bunch of lying liars who tricked people," Teana says sulkily. "That was the end of the Super Mega Evil Bad Doom Jewel Doom Incident of Evil Doom."

"So we won," Alicia says sunnily. "The end."

And with that, the screen turned black and the credits began to roll.

Teatime with Tea / Interviewing Alicia

Teana Lanster
– Herself

Alicia Testarossa
– Herself

Vesta Takamachi
– Herself

Camera Work
– Arf Testarossa

Art Design
– Teana Lanster & Alicia Testarossa

Set Design
– Teana Lanster

Food Selection
– Arf Testarossa

Lightning
– Precia & Fate Testarossa

Editors, Directors, & Mean People On The Other Side of The Earpiece
The Beleaguered Authors​

"Oh," Alicia adds, over the credits, "and there was one last thing. See, there was this final bit which no one was allowed to know about where it turned out that the super-important admirable who helped Lindy was actually doing something suspicious with his cat familiars, but no one knew about it. It's all shocking!"

"I know!" Tea agrees sadly. "Who could ever think that a TSAB person could do something bad?"

"Well, I was more thinking about the idea that a cat familiar – let alone two cat familiars – could be bad because Vesta told me that all cats are automatically the good guys, unless they're facing another better cat, like her," Alicia says. "But that's all we have time for and also we ran out of material. So. Tea. You said something about tea and biscuits."

"Mmm hmm!" the little girl nods. "With Sir Wilhemston," she says, recovering a woollen lamb from behind her chair. "He's a Belkan knight and he's a master of big swords you have to hold with both hands which can turn into chains and his sword is made out of magic." Teana hugs him closer. "My daddy knitted him for me before he died," she added softly. "He always keeps me safe."

"He must be really brave," Alicia says, picking up a cup. "More cocoa for you, Mr Wilhemston?"

 

[Aleph]

Power Games​

Chapter One​

The sun of the world called Schzenais was red. Nanoha still wasn't used to it. It was huge, too, though nowhere near as hot as the one she'd grown up with. It made for a cold world under a dark blue sky, where some of the brighter stars were visible even during the daytime. The light was reddish, and cast long, deep shadows across the snow that piled up against buildings in knee-deep droves wherever the heat of the sunlamps didn't melt it.

On one particularly chilly afternoon, it also filtered past the falling snow and in through the windows of a well-insulated building on the outskirts of one of the major sub-arctic cities, where a lesson was underway. Nanoha Takamachi, nine-year old mage and Earth-born native, tore her gaze from the fast-falling snowflakes and dragged her attention back to the classroom, and by extension the teacher at the front of it. The woman was tall and statuesque, and her hair reminded Nanoha of what Yuuno's… no. Shaking her head slightly, she put that thought firmly to one side and tried to refocus on the history lesson.

"This meant that the Praovéan Dynasties were one of the last Dawn State superpowers to develop," the teacher was saying. "And one more prone to in-fighting than the others. Does anyone know what the best example of that is?"

Hands rose. Nanoha's was not among them. Dimensional space history was, for obvious reasons, a subject she knew nothing about. It was also confusing, because there was quite a lot more of it.

The teacher scanned the raised hands and raised here eyebrows at the owner of one of them. "Miss Daytona," she said, and it was a second or so before Nanoha remembered that was the surname Fate and her family were using. She looked around in surprise. Fate had grown up on the Garden, and her education had more been in magic and combat than in history. She was usually no better in this class than Nanoha herself was.

Fate herself seemed unaffected by her friend's stare. "The Benlil Crusades," she offered softly. "When… I think one of the ancestor-hubs attacked the others near to it?"

The teacher nodded approvingly. "Very well done, Miss Daytona. Yes, the Benlil Crusades happened because of in-fighting between the different Dynastic families. At that point, there were eight major families and nine more minor ones. Now, we're going to look at the major ones and how they differed from each other…"

'How did you know that?' asked Nanoha, tuning out of the lesson for a moment to speak silently to Fate. She got a mild look of disapproval in return – they weren't supposed to talk during lessons, even by telepathy. But Fate relented after only a moment, and replied in kind.

'The Praovéan Dynasties were built on Lost Logia they called ancestor-thrones,' she explained. 'Life support mechanisms – that's what the hubs were, dozens of ancient Dynasts all networked together. They didn't die as long as they were connected to their thrones… it was one of the things Mother investigated for Alicia.'

"Ahem. Miss Ceres?" The teacher's eyes were apparently sharp enough to spot those not paying attention, and the girl was half-sure there was something which alerted her to the use of telepathy in-class. This time, luckily, Nanoha did remember that 'Nene Ceres' was her. She hadn't been forgetting as often recently, but she had needed reminders from Raising Heart whenever her name was called for the first month or so.

"If you would care to repeat what I just said?" It was a question the woman was fond of asking students she suspected weren't listening, which Nanoha hadn't been. Luckily, Raising Heart had been. Having not learnt the language yet, Nanoha still needed her Device to translate, and a mental nudge rewound the whisper prompt she had been using in the hopes that hearing both the language and the translation would help her learn faster.

"Uh… the Rochestein House was the second-oldest, and didn't change as much as the others, and they had a lot of territory on Type-2 worlds," she answered, and sweated for a few seconds as the teacher narrowed her eyes at her. The woman's suspicions aside, though, the answer had been correct. With a curt nod, she turned back to the board and continued the lesson, outlining the major Houses and the different cultural practices they had, along with the reasons they came into conflict with each other and the other groups of the time.

History was the last lesson of the day, and so once it was finally over, Fate and Nanoha were free for the rest of the afternoon, albeit with a homework assignment to do by the end of the week. It was already getting dark outside, despite it only being early afternoon. The day on Schzenais was rather shorter than the calendar day – and for that matter the human body clock day – so sunlamps were used to provide light when the sun wasn't in the sky.

The school day drifted a little throughout the year to try and line up with the hours of actual daylight as much as was reasonably possible. At the moment, that meant it started rather early in the morning, which gave them most of the afternoon free after picking up Alicia, Vesta and Arf from their classes. They angled towards the junior portion of the school grounds, mutually adjusting their Jackets to fend off the vicious bite of the cold.

"You really shouldn't do that," Fate accused, once they had got a fair distance away from the crowd of escaping students. "You were running one of your mental simulations during mathematics, too. I could tell."

Nanoha shrugged. "Maths is easy," she defended herself. "And you're still ahead of me in magic, I need all the practice I can get. And history is just confusing." She pouted. "The language doesn't help, either. I thought I would be doing better than this."

Fate gave her a sympathetic look. They still couldn't communicate very well without their Devices translating for them. Nanoha could just about manage slow, simple conversation, but anything in-depth or at normal speed gave her trouble, and complex topics were still impossible.

The walk was a fairly short one, and they arrived to find the younger years still spilling out of the low, insulated building. This far north, all the buildings hunkered close to the ground – aesthetics in architecture came second to keeping the cold out and weathering the blizzards. By the time they got there, the trio they had come to pick up was already waiting for them outside.

"Farina!" called Alicia excitedly, jumping up and down and waving. "Nene! It's home time, home time! Guess what we did today!" She ran over, trailed by Vesta and Arf, both of whom were grinning. Their child-forms were tweaked to look the same age as Alicia herself, with their familiar traits concealed. It was good for them, Nanoha thought. They were both technically younger than Alicia herself, and schooling with children closer to their maturity level, without the pressures of combat and terror, was doing them some real good.

The fact that it put two A-rank combat familiars in the same room as Alicia on bodyguard detail didn't hurt, either. Nanoha had a feeling that might have been part of why Precia had agreed so readily to the suggestion.

Fate returned Alicia's hug with a smile, and offered her left hand to Arf as Alicia claimed her right. Vesta, by contrast, made a beeline straight for Nanoha, hopping up and down in a happy little dance. "Today was fun," she crowed gleefully, as she happily embraced her 'sister'. "We got to…"

"Hey!" warned Alicia. "It's my story, don't steal it!" She turned back to Fate eagerly. "Guess what we did!" she demanded, as they set off back to the home Precia had rented. "I bet you can't!"

Laughing, Fate swung their linked hands back and forth as Alicia skipped to keep up with her longer strides. "Did you do really well on some classwork?" she asked, and was rewarded with a headshake that sent blonde tresses falling into Alicia's face as the younger girl's eyes gleamed mischievously. Nanoha noticed Arf and Vesta both bubbling with suppressed anticipation as they shook their heads in unison. So, it had been something they had all done.

"Did you all do really well in a game?" she ventured. Another giggle of mirth, and another set of headshakes were her reply.

"One more guess!" chimed Arf, drawing further giggles from the trio. Fate shook her head fondly.

"I give up," she conceded. "What did the three of you do?" They were approaching the edge of the school grounds, nearing the tram stop that lay across the street. The snow was starting to die away, too, which was a hopeful sign. Alicia and the familiars might be equally happy out of school as in it, but Fate didn't like having to miss school when the snow piled too high, even if it did mean she got to spend more time with her family. Though fortunately that was rare; they knew how to deal with heavy snow here.

"Well, basically," Alicia began, "we were going to lunch, and looked at the menu, and it said that there was Dokei Stew for pudding!" Nanoha nodded. The sticky-sweet pudding reminded her a bit of toffee cakes, though it had a few spices in it that she didn't recognise. Alicia loved the stuff, it wasn't surprising that she'd be pleased about having it.

The little girl spun around dramatically. "But then," she continued, throwing her hands out dramatically, "I found out something horrible! That our year was in last for lunch! So it would all be gone by the time we got there!"

Nanoha and Fate traded glances. This sounded… ominous. Beside them, Vesta eagerly jumped up onto a low fence and began to pace along it with her arms outstretched – purely for dramatic effect, as her balance was perfect. Arf had found a stick, and was running it along the top bar of Vesta's footing, knocking the snow off just in front of where she was stepping. They looked around eagerly as Alicia went on with her narration, walking backwards to better view her audience.

"And it would be really bad if we didn't get pudding! So that's when I went to get Ami and Vittoria!" Her lips didn't quite match the names she spoke, as her civ-Device caught and changed her words to the aliases that Arf and Vesta were using. It had been agreed that it was a good idea to install that particular function on all three Devices, just in case of slip-ups.

"So Vittoria turned us all invisible, and we snuck into the kitchens! And Ami sniffed out where the Dokei Stew was, and we had some!" Alicia beamed proudly. "It was delicious."

Alicia chattered on in this vein, with Arf and Vesta jumping in to add detail as she described the close call they'd had when one of the kitchen staff had closed door and trapped them in one of the storerooms for an agonising seventy bajillion hours ("Two minutes," Arf interjected dryly) and how they had managed to get a brief look into the office of the head of catering on the way out ("and she had shiny ribbon, look!" said Vesta proudly, displaying her prize). Nanoha and Fate listened, neither willing to show their mild disapproval to the delighted girl – or for that matter able to get a word in edgeways.

'Is it likely they'll get caught?' asked Nanoha privately, voicing her own major concern. Fate sent a light wave of disapproval back, and shrugged.

'I'm more concerned that they did it at all,' she replied. 'But I don't think so, no. Vesta has come a long way with her illusions. We should probably make sure they don't do it again, though.'

'How?'

Rather than explaining, Fate opted to demonstrate. "So," she spoke up, interrupting Alicia's recounting of how the cooking equipment in the catering department was all super-sized and huge, "are you going to tell Mother all of this?"

Alicia froze, as did her partners in crime. "Uh…" she said, suddenly unsure. "Actually, could we… not?"

Fate held her gaze in ominous silence for a long moment, until the little girl began to squirm nervously. Then, as they stopped to wait at the station, she bent down slightly to look Alicia in the eye. "Okay," she agreed, "but only as long as you promise not to do anything like this again, okay? If you want a meal at school that they run out of, we'll make you it at home that night. But sneaking around the kitchens will get you caught and in trouble."

Alicia looked very much like she wanted to protest this point, and Vesta made a muffled indignant sound from somewhere near Nanoha, but neither objected verbally. "... kay," she mumbled sullenly, before brightening as the tram pulled in. "Oh! Can I watch you and Nene practicing today?"

Fate hesitated, and Arf stepped in, a business-like air overtaking her childish happiness at the events of the day. "Sorry Lezi," she apologised. "We're doing paired combat today; so you won't even be able to see most of it. And it's still too dangerous with all the shooting we throw around." She paused. "Well, all the shooting Nene throws around, anyway." She grinned at Nanoha cheekily before turning back to Alicia. "Ask Lilian again – you can ask what puddings she can make at the same time. She said she and Pera would think about it, right?"

"Fine…" pouted Alicia. "But you have to give me flying rides to make up for it! And Vittoria has to give me invisible ones, too!"

Smiles came from both familiars, along with a soft giggle from Nanoha. Alicia's pout was probably meant to be sulky or grudging, but the result merely looked adorable on her. Behind her shirt, it was just barely possible to make out a tinge of violet light as the mechanism that kept her alive flared up slightly in response to her emotions, before the illusion over it adjusted to compensate.

"I think we can handle that," agreed Arf, concealing a smirk. "Now, tickets out and let's get home."

…​

Half an hour later, the quartet had dropped Alicia off at home, and were several kilometres outside city limits, flying low and fast. This far from populated areas, as long as they kept their magic use low, they could practice with impunity and not have to worry about being detected. Getting there wasn't hard for them, and they didn't have to worry much about being followed. One of the first things Linith had done upon their arrival had been to hack the perimeter systems around the city to ignore them and to find safe areas away from flight paths, and she had insisted that the girls only wear whites, greys and blues while out practicing. Fate had grumbled, but eventually capitulated and made a temporary shift to her Barrier Jacket's colour, lightening the black to a slate grey.

This time, they had chosen a sparsely wooded ravine that they had used before. A river ran down it on the cityward side, iced over near the banks but still flowing in the middle, and the snow that blanketed it looked fresh and pristine, untouched by the tread of any humans. From her perch on Nanoha's shoulder, Vesta eyed it warily and with good reason. She had learned from harsh experience that the snowfall carpet during winter in this city was often thicker than she was tall. Jumping down would not only make her vanish beneath the surface, it would also make her cold, wet and miserable.

That had not been a pleasant process of discovery.

'Okay,' said Arf, who had grown tired of romping through the snow after only two or three minutes of playful barking and running around like a maniac. She now sat at Fate's feet, her tail wagging contentedly as lumps of slowly-melting snow slid off her thick orange coat. 'We're practicing synchronised fighting this time. Tag-combat sound good?' She waited for the affirming nods, and pawed at Fate's ankle. 'Okay then! Pick me up and let's get started!'

Fate narrowed her eyes at her familiar. "I am not picking you up while you are freezing cold and wet again," she stated flatly. "Come here and hold still."

She didn't give Arf a chance to protest the order, leaning down quickly to grab her by the scruff of the neck with one hand while the other splayed out in front of her, a casting circle forming at her fingertips. It moved forwards, passing over Arf and evaporating the water from her fur. She whined quietly at the tickling sensation, and shook herself as soon as it was over.

"If you didn't get wet, I wouldn't have to do that," Fate told her, entirely unsympathetic. "Now come on, up you get." She glanced at Nanoha as she knelt down to gather Arf up into her arms and stow her in the small rucksack she was wearing. Arf fit quite comfortably into the little bag, which was sized just right for her puppy form and contained within the fields of Fate's Barrier Jacket. Like Vesta's position in Nanoha's hood, the Jacket would keep her safely held there, able to poke her head out and see behind or in front of her mistress.

The kitten had already trotted around Nanoha's shoulder and curled up in her favoured place. Well, one of them. A little grey head with tufted ears poked out of the hood and nodded happily. 'We're good to go!' she announced.

'Right. How many shots shall we go to, then?' asked Arf.

"Can it be just one today?" Nanoha smiled apologetically. "It's been a fortnight again, and I set up a scrying spell yesterday evening… I want to get home early to check up on my family. You know?"

"Of course," Fate agreed smoothly. "One shot it is then. Ready?"

"Ready," Nanoha nodded.

'Ready!' chorused the familiars from their respective nests. Fate scooped up a handful of snow and compacted it down into a snowball.

"When it hits the ground, then," she said, and tossed it high into the air. It sailed high into the air, shedding flakes as it turned over once and began to fall again. A soft puff of snow went up from where it landed.

And before it even began to settle, both girls were gone.

Tag combat was a game and form of practice they had devised to hone their skills while at the same time being relatively low-key. They obviously couldn't go all-out so close to people who would notice, so they needed a more subtle way to spar with one another. It had been Arf who had come up with the idea of limiting themselves to low-level shooting spells, and marking the winner as whoever managed to land the set number of attacks first.

Nanoha went high. It wasn't even a question, she knew from six months of experience that Fate would thrash her in dense or hemmed-in terrain. She often thrashed her anyway. The way the rules were set up favoured Fate's high-speed evasion-focused style, and despite a learning curve that had worried Yuuno and that she'd heard Arf describe as 'freakish', Nanoha was well aware that her friend still outclassed her in straight combat. She could beat the other girl perhaps one bout every six or seven, and those wins were generally down to luck, Fate having a bad day, or pulling out a new trick that the blonde hadn't seen before. None of the three tended to last long.

Reaching what she felt was a safe height; Nanoha looked around, keying her visor to thermal vision. As expected, she couldn't see Fate – they'd both found ways of masking their heat signature without Vesta's illusions some time ago – but it was worth a try. Shrugging, she double-checked with Vesta that her cloak was running at full capacity. Not just light, but heat and a decent fraction of the sound she was making were muffled under the kitten's spell. Which was a good thing, because what she was about to do next would compromise that security.

Keeping her eyes and ears open and prompting Raising Heart to keep an eye out for movement in the open areas she could see, she began to circle. And as she did so, she released a Narrow Area Search spell towards one of the thicker groves of trees.

The first of many.

On the ground, concealed behind a mound that the generous might have described as a smallish hillock, Fate's eyes narrowed as she saw the pink motes begin to drift down from the sky. Pulling back behind cover, she considered her options.

A tap to one of the black earpieces she wore summoned her gold-tinted visor, sleeker and thinner as Nanoha's but identical in function. Another peek over the rise outlined the location of the search spells Nanoha was using, most of them in the wrong direction so far. With a Wide Area Search disallowed by the rules, Nanoha was making do with multiple smaller ones, systematically targeting every patch of cover that Fate could hide in. Their common centre gave Fate a rough idea of where she was, but she wasn't making it easy. She was almost certainly circling even as she cast, so any triangulation of her position from the spells would be approximate at best.

Snow crunched under Fate's hands as she pulled back behind the rise, unmelting under her touch. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead, and she wiped it away, frowning. Configuring her Barrier Jacket to trap heat within the fields stopped her showing up on thermal scanners, but it was a double-edged sword. She was already starting to get uncomfortably warm, and sooner or later her Jacket would start leaking heat anyway. It was another time limit on how long she could stay hidden, and it was counting down.

She wracked her mind for a way to get to Nanoha. Briefly, she considered getting Arf to follow the girl's scent trail, but discarded the idea. Not only would the wind work against her, following the scent trail in circles would leave her totally exposed, and an easy target. No, she needed some way to pinpoint her opponent, and soon. Before any of those search spells found her.

'Any ideas yet?' asked Arf, and received a minute head shake. 'Well then, we could always go with the chain-sweeping,' she suggested. 'I mean, it's a bit of a long shot but it could work.'

'No, she'd see it coming and dodge. We need to narrow down her position more accurately first, then we can try… hmm.' A tiny cascade of snow spilled down over her hand, dislodged by her earlier movement, and the seed of an idea took root. 'Okay, I think I have something. Listen closely, Arf. Here's what I need you to do…'

Forty seconds of quick but careful work later, their preparation time ran out. Bardiche's mental tone alerted her to a search spell converging on her location, and Fate didn't waste any time. Like a golden arrow, she shot out from her hiding place and towards the rough area she thought Nanoha was currently occupying.

Pink light flared, widely spaced enough that it didn't pinpoint any source in particular. It coalesced into balls of light that shot towards her, half a dozen shooting spells in each barrage. She dodged and swerved around most of them, and the football-sized spheres of orange that orbited her darted into the path of those she couldn't avoid. She lost two of them as they were broken by the force behind the shots, scattering their payloads harmlessly. But that was fine; she had brought a dozen for a reason, and ten was still more than enough.

Reaching roughly the right height, she darted left to avoid another wave, and shouted without care to keep her communication private. 'Now!'

The spheres, to a one, exploded. Snow burst out from them in a fine powder, directed outwards and away from her, saturating the air with a fine mist of snowflakes. Fate's head was already turning as Bardiche searched the cloud for any sign of movement, any holes, any motion that disturbed it. Nanoha might be invisible, but she wasn't intangible, and her presence in the cloud from the improvised grenades would show up like a light on Fate's visor…

… there.

Fate flashed in, anticipating Nanoha's next step and meeting the hasty barrage of shooting spells with her own. The flashes from their collisions were briefly blinding – one or two slipped past her, but Arf responded instantly, deflecting them with barriers so that Fate didn't even need to think about them. She couldn't afford to, she knew what was coming next and while she thought she had a way to circumvent it, it was totally untested and would need all her concentration to pull off.

And as expected, as she closed the rest of the distance to Nanoha, she felt the spike of a Flash Move. The other girl was trying to get away, to get distance again, to separate them and return to her optimal range. But she wasn't the only one with mobility spells. And Fate was better at them.

Focusing every mote of processing power she could spare on the mana trace, Fate threw herself into a Blitz Action. But instead of targeting it to an endpoint location, she latched onto the fading mana trail of Nanoha's Flash Move. It was something she'd only come up with recently, following another person's speed spell, and she wasn't entirely sure it would work. But she pushed her mana into the spell – more than usual, to compensate – and blurred.

It was a bumpy ride, rougher than her normal crisp, clean bursts of high-speed movement. The accuracy wasn't that good either, she came out at least two or three metres behind Nanoha, who was still dusted with a fine coat of snow that was falling off her in trickles, giving away her position. But they were forty or more metres from where they had been, and she was still in close range. Nanoha was facing the wrong way, and Fate knew where she was now, and she was moving even as Nanoha's HUD screamed a warning at her, bringing her scythe up to strike.

Vesta saw her coming and leapt, giving up on invisibility and shifting to her War Form as she lunged towards Fate, putting herself in the way of her mistress. But Arf was ready for that, and orange chains snarled her as Fate blurred into another Blitz Action – draining, so soon after the last, but just as quick – and came out of it on the other side of Nanoha even as the girl turned, Raising Heart swinging up to point in the direction Fate had just left…

… and with a blindingly fast whisper of movement, the crackling blade of Bardiche's scythe form gently touched the fields above her neck.

Silence fell, and they hovered there for a moment. Both were breathing hard, Nanoha from shock and panic, Fate from the strain of following Nanoha's Flash Move. Slowly, Fate pulled Bardiche back and shifted it back into its default axe-blade configuration. "I win," she said simply. A blow with Bardiche counted as much as a shooting spell.

Nanoha pouted. "Yes, I know," she grumbled, her pride stung at having lost. But curiosity suppressed it. "How'd you do that? You can't have known where I was going, I picked it at random."

"I followed your Flash Move, actually." Arf released Vesta from the bind spell, and the four of them began to drift down to the ground again. Vesta returned to Nanoha's hood sulkily, muttering to herself in a string of unintelligible little growls and mewls. "Speed moves like that leave a mana trail, I just keyed mine to follow yours. It was harder than I expected, though. I'll need to practice."

'Nanoha can help you practice!' Arf suggested, and Fate raised an eyebrow at her friend. Nanoha wrinkled her nose, still a little sore about her loss, but nodded.

"Fine. But you have to show me how you did it in return!"

Fate tilted her head, thinking about it as they landed near the top of the crevasse and began to head back up the path towards the city. Linith had been very clear that they weren't allowed to fly home, in case they were spotted. "Well…" she said uncertainly, "I'm not sure you'll have the speed to pull it off, but… sure, I'll show you how the spell works. Oh, and Vesta's getting better, too! I couldn't find you at all at first."

'I know!' cheered Vesta smugly. 'Soon I'll be able to cloak mistress even when I'm not right next to her, and then I can do fun stuff!'

"The snow thing was clever," Nanoha admitted. "And using the barriers to block me, too. Well done, Arf."

'I wish I'd got to use my chain idea, though,' Arf grumbled. 'I've been waiting for a chance to use that.'

"Oh?"

'Nuh uh!' Glaring at Nanoha over Fate's shoulder, Arf shook her head stubbornly. 'It's a secret, I'm not giving it away ahead of time. You'll have to wait until we beat you with it!'

'Lies!' objected Vesta, bouncing back out from Nanoha's hood onto her shoulder. 'Next time we'll beat you! And you'll be all humiliated and beaten and be going "why did I say that I would beat the amazing Nanoha and Vesta like that? I feel so silly and foolish!" and everything!'

"Alright, alright, calm down," said Nanoha, giggling. "And let's get home again. I want to see my family."

…​

It was a cold walk back through the streets of the city, pale blue advertising boards and the gold of the sunlamps washing over her face, which gave Nanoha time to think. And yes, gave her time to brood. It was at times like this that she most missed home; the anticipation of seeing her parents.

It wasn't that she was homesick. Not one bit. She was brave and strong and she was really happy here! So what if she couldn't talk to people without Raising Heart to help? So what if when she tried to practice the language outside of the house, people made fun of her accent and the way she could only stumble through basic conversations? So what if she had no real friends, that she was far more of an outsider than Fate – who was like a foreigner to the gaggles of tall blonde girls, while she was like someone who had been raised in some backwoods community? So what if the few sort-of-friends she did have were more Fate's friends than hers, and only hung around her because Fate refused to exclude her? So what if she stood out from all the girls in her year who… who were taller than her and looked a bit like Alicia and Fate in that same vague sort-of-not-quite-Eastern-European-ness?

She… she just wanted to see her parents and her brother and sister and Suzuka and Arisa. And just wanted to be in her home where she knew people and it wasn't cold all the time and… and she still wanted to live near Fate and Alicia but why did it have to be here of all places.

In her more rational moments, she knew why it had to be here. Schzenais was a world in the TSAB core planets, near the centre of where the ancient empires called 'Belka' and 'Galea' from her history lessons had been, and had the high living standards associated with that. But it wasn't a TSAB Administered world; it wasn't even a normal Aligned one. It didn't have standardised extradition treaties. If the Enforcers came for them here, it'd be an act of war.

So Precia had picked out this world, found a city, and chosen a – fairly expensive from what Nanoha understood – private school for her two daughters, her niece – Arf – and two sisters, the daughters of a family friend who had died. They were day students, but Precia had gently hinted to them that when she got too sick they would switch over to being boarding students. It was all neat and planned out; funds and arrangements set up until they were adults. It all made sense.

But Nanoha didn't want it to make sense. Right now, she – oh so selfishly – just wanted to be home.

The scrying spell was getting a feed back when they arrived home. Linith drifted into the room as Nanoha sat down in front of the screen it was anchored to, and tried not to look like she was hovering.

"Remember to be careful," she cautioned. "If you lose the signal, you'll have to wait another day to try again."

Nanoha nodded, not really listening. It was advice she'd heard before, anyway. Even through dimensional space, there was a limit to how fast light could travel. With eleven light-hours between them and Earth, it had taken almost a full day for the spell she had laboriously cast the previous evening to return with what it had seen. Now she just had to decipher the signal to see how her family was doing.

"Raising Heart?" she asked. "I'm going to need you to handle this again, okay?"

[Ready,] chimed the Device. [Just like always, master.]

With Raising Heart's help, the images began to resolve from the signal that had returned. Well, 'help'. Nanoha was aware that her Device was the one handling most of the mathematics in this case, even more than usual. She knew basically what she was doing – Linith had explained it as being like sending lots of video cameras to Earth and then catching what they were sending back – but how it worked was entirely beyond her. She was sure that if she could understand the maths, she could do it better… but when she had tried taking one of the spells apart, it had only looked a tiny bit like the normal search spells she did grasp. Even with Raising Heart's help, she'd made mistakes with one or two of the fortnightly spells she was allowed to see her family with, and Precia only let her retry once each time to avoid the TSAB noticing.

On that note, Nanoha couldn't really argue with her. Precia was doing an enormous amount for her – Nanoha's skills at magic had improved in leaps and bounds since the elder Testarossa had begun to teach her, and she was swiftly closing ground on Fate in terms of magic, though the blonde would probably always be better than her at the tactical side of combat. There was a small amount of resentment – on one occasion she'd messed up with the second spell as well, and had to wait for another two weeks to see how her family was doing. But she was well aware that everything they'd all worked for would be ruined if the TSAB found out they were still alive. Secrecy was still their best defence.

With Raising Heart's help, the first images began to ripple into view. She went for the ones around her house first, looking fondly at the familiar garden. From the light levels, it looked like it was early evening – it was tricky keeping the relative times straight, given the differing day lengths – but there weren't any lights on inside. Maybe they had gone to sleep already? Nanoha wrinkled her nose in annoyance. She liked seeing them up and about – fast asleep was boring, and felt a bit awkward. Well, maybe her mother would sense the scrying spell and wake up. Would sense – would have sensed, rather. The idea that this was all almost eleven hours ago was still hard to get her head around. She switched to a different image, one from inside.

It was the kitchen, still unlit. But… Nanoha frowned. She could see the clock from here, and it looked like…

"Raising Heart?" she asked. The Device could analyse the fine details of the feed much better than she could. "What time does that say?"

[6:30, master,]

Nanoha frowned again, peeved. That was far too early for them to be in bed. Maybe they were out, then? She huffed irritably. "Raising Heart, can you find Mama's feed, please?" She had been planning to see how Arisa and Suzuka were doing, but she wanted to see her family first.

[Got it,] Raising Heart confirmed. After a short pause as it located and deciphered the correct feed, the image resolved itself for Nanoha to see. For a brief moment, stunned silence filled the air. Then…

"Mama!"

Nanoha's terrified scream brought Fate, Arf and Vesta into the room at a dead run.

"Nanoha? What is i…" Fate's voice cut off in a gasp as she skidded to a halt beside her friend and caught sight of the screen herself. Vesta mewled in distress and Arf sputtered for a moment as she sought for words.

'What happened?' she demanded furiously, finding her voice. 'Why is she… how did she…?'

On the small screen, Momoko lay propped up on a couple of pillows in what was clearly and recognisably a hospital bed. She looked awful, with three large welts covering the left side of her face and an ugly purple black eye swollen enough that it was doubtful whether she could see out of it. The rest of Nanoha's family, as well as Arisa and Suzuka, were in the room with her, in varying states of agitation.

Arisa was the most obviously angry, animatedly waving her arms and shouting something Nanoha could barely catch, apparently directed towards the room at large. Kyouya looked almost as furious as she did. Suzuka and Miyuki looked more concerned and upset than angry, and Shiro's face showed no emotion at all. Only a hard, impassive mask, with only the set of his jaw and his hooded brows giving away the rage it was holding back.

Whatever Arisa was shouting about seemed to tail off, and Shiro said something short and pointed. The sound was fuzzy, and Nanoha didn't quite catch it, but from the reactions of the others, it was evidently a question of some kind. All heads turned to Momoko, and Nanoha raised the volume slightly to hear.

Her mother looked up blearily, considered for a moment, and then shrugged.

"I don't know," she said apologetically. "I didn't see them… I sensed magic nearby, and called out. Nobody answered, so I tried to put up a shield. And then… something hurt, in my chest, and I saw a light. And then everything went black."

Nanoha's lips pressed together thinly. So. Her mother had been hurt by something magical, and she hadn't seen what had done it. More than that, she must be magically exhausted as well – normally, Momoko could sense when Nanoha was scrying on her, and would smile or wave, but she seemed entirely oblivious at the moment. And one shield wasn't anywhere near that strenuous. Whatever had hurt her, it had sucked away her mana. Nanoha turned around to find that Precia had entered the room at some point, and was regarding her gravely.

The young girl looked her mentor of the past six months in the eye. Her voice was almost steady, with only the faintest trace of a quiver. "I have to go back," she said bluntly and somewhat unnecessarily. "My mother is hurt. I need to help her."

…​

Alicia knew how sucky and unfair it was when your mummy was hurt, because her mummy bad been sick or something – nobody had quite explained it in detail – ever since she had woken up again from how she'd been asleep for years and years and years like the magical princess woken from her frozen tomb after her kingdom had been wiped out in that story. Only it had only been twenty five years, instead of a thousand. Which wasn't quite the same.

She was still adjusting to that, to be honest. But even though it was the future and she was technically old – like, thirty years old! – things in the worlds didn't seem too different to what she remembered. The big differences were in the people she knew – her mummy was older and paler and iller, and Linith was huggy and warm but hadn't been there before.

And then there was her sister. She had a big sister! Only technically she was a little sister, just one who was bigger than Alicia, but 'big-little sister' sounded weird. Maybe 'little-big sister' would work better. Anyway, she was called Fate, and was kind of serious, but she was always very intent on making sure Alicia was happy. Linith had told her that Fate and her friend Nanoha had fought and done lots of work to make Alicia better from how she'd been asleep, so she owed them a lot.

And now Nanoha's mummy was hurt! It was like a sign, though exactly what it was a sign of, Alicia wasn't entirely sure. Still, she was certain of one thing. Nanoha had helped her mummy when Alicia was in her hurt-sleep, and the fact that Alicia was awake and able to go to school and play with Arf and Vesta – who were both totally cool because they were super-secretly animals and familiars – today was largely down to that. The older girl had even had to leave her family behind and come with them, and while it was clear she liked magic and Fate and Alicia herself, she still got very homesick sometimes.

She had worked very hard, and given up a whole big lot of things, to help Alicia's family.

So now that her mummy was in trouble, it was only fair that they helped hers. Alicia was not one to stand around when someone she cared about was upset. She burst into the room and drew herself up to her full height, which was admittedly still rather unimpressive.

"We'll help!" she declared forcefully. "Right, mama? And if someone mean did it, you and Big Sis and Arf and Vesta can beat them up and maybe make them say they're very sorry and then they might join our side like you did with Big Sis and then I would have more friends and your mama would be better and everything would be better!"

Silence followed this announcement for a moment, before a watery giggle escaped Nanoha, breaking the pale mask of horror and fear she had been wearing. After a few more sounds somewhere between laughs and sobs, she got up and hugged Alicia gratefully.

"Thank you, Alicia-chan," she mumbled croakily. "That made me feel a bit better. And thank you for offering to help." She looked over uncertainly at Arf and Fate as she said it. Fate nodded firmly, and the wolf rolled her eyes in response.

'Oh, yeah. Like there was any chance whatsoever of us not being right behind you in this.' She huffed. 'I told you, you're family. We'll…'

"We will not be rushing off anywhere," a smooth voice cut her off. Arf's eyes widened and Nanoha's face crumpled as all heads turned to Precia, and silence fell again. It eventually fell to Vesta to break the confused quiet.

'… what?'

Precia sighed tiredly, thoughts moving fast as she rubbed at her temples. With a hand gesture and a command to her Device, she brought up a map of the relevant projection of dimensional space, hanging purple-lit in the air. On one side of the map was where they were, Schzenais , surrounded by trade routes and world details. As they panned, the marked worlds and routes thinned out, until they reached the lonely marker for Unadministered World 97, almost the final world along its chain. Silently she stared at the map, as if commanding it to be different. The children were silent, perhaps grasping the seriousness of the moment.

"I am not forbidding Nanoha from going to her mother's aid, child," she rebuked, after a quiet moment of thought. "Although I must ask her how serious she is. If she is certain that she wishes to travel for the better part of a month to get there and back, for what might just have been a normal accident." She glanced at Nanoha.

"It's not just an accident!" Nanoha said fiercely. "And I'm going and that's fi…"

"As I said, I am not stopping you," Precia said. "Merely… setting limits on how. Think. It has been six months, but the Bureau's attention may still not have faded entirely. I am… reluctant to allow any travel back at all…" she glanced at Alicia, who was staring at her with a stubborn expression that foretold great trouble if she didn't hear a result she liked, and capitulated, "… but under the circumstances, I cannot reasonably deny Miss Takamachi's obvious need to return to her home."

She pursed her lips, considering. "It would be best to keep numbers as low as possible to reduce the teleport signature," she decided. "Nanoha will of course be going, and I would suggest that Linith go with her to deal with any remaining sensors – doubly due to the fact that they are almost certainly not calibrated to detect her signature, and she can therefore get close enough to compromise them. However… I would suggest that everyone else stay behind."

'No way!' Vesta protested. 'You can't ask me to stay behind while Nanoha goes into danger!'

"I can," Precia frowned at her, "and I will. This first trip is for reconnaissance, nothing more. For the purposes of stealth, the party size must be kept as low as possible. Nanoha and Linith are both necessary – they will go in, see what happened and send a message back to us. Unless you can give me a good reason why you are essential to the process, you are staying here."

'But… I mean…' Vesta looked helplessly at Nanoha and Linith. The older cat-familiar smiled reassuringly at her.

"Don't worry," she soothed. "I'll be there with Nanoha to keep her safe, and if we do find trouble, we'll call you in. Okay?"

Vesta didn't look terribly happy about it, but she nodded reluctantly. 'I guess I can trust you to look after her,' she admitted. 'You are a cat, even if you're not me.'

That drew giggles or chuckles from everyone save Precia, and Nanoha fondly ruffled the fur on her kitten's head. "I guess we've never been apart for more than a day before, huh?" she mused. "Don't worry. We'll be back together before you know it, and you can take my place guarding Alicia-chan while I'm away. I trust you to do a good job!"

…​

Despite Nanoha's optimism, however, she and Linith did not get to Earth and back so soon. The trip to Earth took a week.

It wasn't an eventful week. There were many adjectives Nanoha could use to describe it – frustrating, monotonous, exhausting, tense with worry – but 'eventful' was definitely not among them. The days blurred together in what seemed like an endless series of teleports, jumping again and again with short, ten to twenty minute breaks on each world to recharge before another gruelling dimensional shift.

It had been a thing of bitter disappointment to Nanoha to find that magic could only go so fast. Literally. Three hundred thousand kilometres sounded like a really long way to go in a second, but distances in dimensional space were really, really long. It took her spells eleven hours to get to Earth and as long to get back. And spells could travel in a way that she - as a person, not a small packet of mana - couldn't.

A reasonably powerful mage could cover around a light-hour a day via teleport, if they jumped as often and as far as possible for as long as they could, and made use of whatever teleport-boosting stations they could find. It was draining, brutal work that left a mage shattered at the end of every day, and for extended trips it was almost always preferable to take a ship instead. The might be considerably slower, but they also meant that you didn't collapse onto the floor every evening and wake with barely enough mental stamina to manifest a Jacket, let alone face another eight-hour series of jumps.

But Nanoha had no interest in comfort. Speed was her objective, and though her muscles screamed and her bones ached with weariness, she pushed them to go ever faster. And it was working. Her impatience aside, Linith reassured her every night that they were making good progress, half as fast again as most mages would be capable of. Seven days, the cat-familiar told her, was as fast as they could expect to go, and it was unlikely that the situation had worsened too much in that time.

On that last note, Nanoha suspected Linith was lying to spare her feelings – she knew from experience how shockingly quickly a situation could descend into chaos – but there was no way to check, not when they were still hours out and a scrying spell would take more time and power than they had to spare. They couldn't even communicate with Precia and the others, not with Linith masking their presence to the best of her abilities.

And so they came, eventually, to the last camp. A bare three hops from Earth, they reached it in what by the opinion of their body clocks was late evening, and what seemed to be somewhere in the middle of the afternoon by local time. Nanoha had wanted to keep going the tiny hop further to Earth, but Linith had overruled her, setting up their tent in the shade of a large, sprawling rock pile that sheltered them from the wind on three sides.

"No," the cat-familiar said flatly. "We're both exhausted, it's already early evening over there, I don't trust myself to conceal our arrival enough that any potential hostiles might not detect it, and most of all… Nanoha, hold out your hand."

Scowling at her stubbornly, Nanoha did so. It trembled with fatigue, mirroring the low-level shaking of her whole body. Linith gave her a knowing look, apparently able to sense the throbbing headache and lead weights that had apparently replaced Nanoha's bones at some point via some kind of maternal telepathy. Or possibly she was just looking at the shaking and the way she couldn't stop her eyes blearily slipping out of focus every so often. Either way, Nanoha was forced to admit that she might – just might – have a point.

This didn't seem to be enough for the older woman, who decided to make it an easier choice for her. "Look," she said gently. "Nanoha. You know full well you're in no condition to do anything if you arrive on Earth now. If there is any real danger, the only thing you're capable of doing at the moment is to fall over on it. And if there isn't, it won't matter if we wait another few hours to rest up and get some strength back. Besides, I have something I want to give you before we go in. So I'll make this simple, either you go to sleep on your own, or I use a soporific spell to make you. I'm not as tired as you, so you're in no condition to throw it off."

"… can't you go forward, then?" Nanoha asked. It was definitely just asking a simple academic question, and not in any way whining, no matter what kind of raised eyebrow Linith gave her. "Or just scry on them to check they're okay? Please?"

But Linith remained dispassionately uncompromising. "Even if I weren't magically exhausted myself," she declared, "I'm not going to do anything that might alert whatever might be waiting for us. But, if you think you can stay awake long enough, I will show you the surprise I've brought along. For obvious reasons, we don't want to give away who we are. So I brought along a little remodel for your Barrier Jacket – something to conceal your identity. You can load it into Raising Heart and be fairly free to operate without fear of being recognised." She paused. "Just… ah… don't go too overboard with magic. This is a fairly high-end disguise, and the colour-shift it applies to your magic will be relatively secure, but your bigger spells may well break it. And… are also fairly recognisable on their own."

Nanoha cocked her head in interest. "A disguise?" she mused. "What does it look like? Can I see?"

Linith nodded. "Yes… now, bear in mind. Firstly, it won't be able to do much to disguise your height if it's to be at all effective, so you'll still look fairly young. Secondly, the shifting of your magic colour is an illusion worked into all of your spells – that means it'll be overhead on Raising Heart, so it will slow all your other spells down and make them harder. And thirdly, sufficiently advanced equipment will be able to unscramble the alterations, so be sure to just run if someone like the TSAB show up – they can probably identify you from the spectral pattern of your magic, given the amount of footage they have of it."

Nanoha blinked warily at her as she explained, and Linith noticed her eyes slowly sliding closed every few seconds before she tugged them open again with what appeared to be a concentrated effort of will. She quietly resolved to repeat this lecture for the girl tomorrow morning, when they were both rather more awake.

"Now, with all that said," she continued, "the altered Barrier Jacket you'll be wearing looks like this." Pressing her hands together, she drew them apart to reveal a slowly turning three-dimensional image of the proposed disguise. Nanoha examined it quietly for a few moments, scrutinising it from all angles.

"… it looks a bit… bland," she eventually mumbled. The exhaustion was really starting to show, and Linith smiled. "And it covers… it's a… what's the word for the head-covery thing? Like a hood bit but all around?"

"It's a helmet, and it's there to make you generic and hard to identify," Linith teased gently. "And I think now you really need to go to bed. Go on, shoo. I'll wake you up in the morning."

Grumbling something resentfully in her native tongue –which Raising Heart either didn't bother to translate or couldn't understand due to how Nanoha was slurring her words – the girl crawled into the tent, her Jacket dissolving around her as she did. She was out like a light within seconds.

A few minutes later, Linith delicately stepped into the tent in cat form and picked up Raising Heart from where it lay next to its master's pillow. A brief check told her that yes, Nanoha had set an alarm to wake herself up early the next "morning". And pre-set the teleport spells that would take her to Earth, no less. Linith wasn't terribly surprised to see that the girl had only allotted herself four hours of sleep. Nanoha was depressingly easy to predict in some ways, once you got to know her. You just had to imagine wilfully ignoring your limits right up until the point you collapsed.

Quietly removing the alarm and dropping the Device back next to its owners head, Linith curled up on top of her. The familiar feeling of a cat in her bed might help her sleep better. And besides, it was cold. She wasn't worried about Nanoha waking up before her. The girl was so exhausted that left to herself, she probably wouldn't wake up until next morning local time, for all that it was the middle of the afternoon at the moment. And Linith wanted her to sleep for as long as possible. Both of them were tired from the gruelling race to get here so fast, and for all that she had stayed optimistic about the situation being benign for Nanoha's sake, the cat-familiar had a sinking feeling that it wasn't.

Twelve hours of sleep wouldn't put Nanoha back up to peak condition. Not by a long shot.

But it might be enough to stop her from getting hurt if things turned as sour as Linith feared.

…​

"Big siiiiiis!" A percussion in Fist minor hammered out its symphony on the door. "Big sis! Help!"

Fate blinked, startled from her reverie. She looked up at the window reflexively, but it was no use; it was a blizzard outside from what she could see in the sunlamp-lit darkness. How long had she been sitting here, staring at a static palm-sized picture? Never mind. She shook herself, gesturing the door open and swivelling round in the slightly-oversized chair her room's desk came with. A mental nudge flipped off the name-replacement subroutine in Bardiche – they were at home, after all, and the false names began to grate after a while. She was willing to use them at school, but for a little sister in distress they were most definitely not appropriate.

"Alicia?" she asked concernedly. "What's- oh."

Her little sister had her arms around another little girl, grey-haired and blue-eyed, swathed in her trademark black frock. She was currently red-rimmed from crying, and her lips held a definite wobble to them.

"Vesta is all upset and crying and I don't know what to do!" explained Alicia frantically. "I tried hugging her and saying things would be alright and it didn't work! It just got my dress all wet! And you're really smart and good at crying stuff and thinking and things so I brought her to you so make her stop because it's bad when people are crying and she's sad!"

"Um," said Fate, caught off-guard and trying to adjust to this sudden torrent of babble. Even after six months, Alicia could still sometimes throw her into a mental tailspin. She was sure she didn't remember being like this when she was at that age. Mind you, at her age she had only been 'her' for six months, and was still learning from Linith and her mother who 'she' really was, this strange not-Alicia they called Fate.

"And Nanoha isn't here and I would have taken her to Linith but she's not here either and," Alicia's voice dropped conspiratorially out of her rapid-fire chatter for a moment, "maybe it's cat business!"

Fate looked at her sister in confusion for a second. Then at Vesta. She sighed, and motioned for the kitten-familiar to come closer. Miserably, the little girl did so, her face set in a sullen scowl. She was in her child-form, and looked to be about Alicia's age.

Sensing that she was no longer needed, Alicia backed out of the room and headed off to play with Arf. Behind her retreating form, Fate patted the padded seat of the swivel chair, pushing it further out from the desk.

"I think there's some space on here," she offered. "If you want."

Vesta didn't move. She stayed where she was, scuffing an undersized boot against the ground and playing with the hemline of her frock, her eyes glued to the floor. Fate tried another tack.

"You know…" she remarked quietly, "I've been missing Nanoha a bit." She noted Vesta's ears perk slightly, and continued. "I mean, since I met her we haven't been apart for very often. I'm feeling a bit lonely without her. I could use a hug to comfort me."

That got her a glance. "… well," muttered Vesta grudgingly, "I s'pose if you need comforting…"

Fate hid her smile and nodded seriously, and Vesta trotted over to climb awkwardly up onto the swivel chair, shedding her boots as she did so. Red light glowed for a moment as the shoes dissolved back into mana. It was a little cramped with both of them in the seat – which was large, but not that large – and Vesta wound up half-sitting rather heavily in Fate's lap with the older girl's arms around her in a loose hug. But she seemed rather less upset, and that was the important thing.

They sat in companionable silence for a while, Fate idly half-stroking, half attempting to pat down the mad tangle of spiky locks that stuck up in every direction from Vesta's head, before the catgirl began to speak out of the blue into the crook of Fate's neck. It was a little hard to make out what she was saying, but Fate listened patiently.

"S'not that I'm worried or anything," Vesta mumbled. "I mean, mistress is… is Nanoha, she's not gonna be… be hurt or anything." Her voice hitched slightly as she finished. Fate declined to comment, and just squeezed her softly. "It's just… it's… I haven't seen her for a whole week."

She squirmed around, turning to look up at Fate miserably. "You know? A-and… and it'll be another whole week before I can see her again! Or more, even! And if there's something there then I won't be able to guard her or shield her and I know Linith is there but she's not me and she doesn't know Nanoha like I do and what if she expects me to be there like how we were training to fight together and does something that needs me as well because she forgets and then she gets hurt and it's…"

She stopped abruptly, blinking and going cross-eyed as she tried to focus on the finger covering her lips.

"Hey now," Fate soothed her. "No Mistress or Master wants to leave their familiar alone for any length of time. I'm sure Nanoha misses you as much as you're missing her, and you'll be back together soon. And Linith will take good care of her in the meantime." She tickled under Vesta's chin, producing a surprised purr and a giggle. "Maybe," she suggested, "you could work on making a surprise of some sort for when Nanoha comes back. That might make the time go a bit faster, right?"

"I guess…" Vesta frowned, a trace of animation coming back to her despondent features. "What kind of thing should I make her, though?"

"Use your imagination! Though…" Fate grimaced, "it might be an idea to check with me before starting once you have an idea. Arf once decided to make me a giant mud pie… I mean, the thought was nice, but the end product wasn't." She tilted her head in remembrance. "Especially since she seemed to have entirely the wrong idea about what a mud pie was. Anyway." She ruffled Vesta's hair. "The other thing I'd suggest is – Nanoha left you to guard Alicia, didn't she?"

"Uh huh." Spiky grey hair bounced wildly as Vesta nodded, and shifted again slightly. Fate tried not to wince. Her leg was going to sleep with Vesta sitting on it like that – for a light-looking little thing, she was certainly heavy enough. Not to mention pointy and hard – all elbows and shoulderblades.

"Well, it's been getting colder lately. Maybe you should sleep in Alicia's bed to keep her warm and stop her catching anything. Arf could, too. I'm sure the three of you could play some fun games in your room before going to sleep, too."

"Yay!" In a flash of light, the girl was gone and a rather-less-upset kitten was eagerly licking her hand and purring up a storm. 'That's a great idea! she sang excitedly . 'Alicia was right, you're smart! Thank you!'

While Fate appreciated the sudden lack of weight on her leg, she tapped the kitten on the head with a frown. "Vesta," she reprimanded warningly. "You know you're meant to stay a little girl. No kitten-form except in practice. Even in the house."

Another flash of light, and the little girl returned. Fate winced again. Well, at least this time she was on the other leg.

"Sorry," apologised Vesta in a tone that made it fairly clear that she didn't really mean it. "I'll remember next time. But now I need to go and ask Alicia and Arf for ideas on what to make for Nanoha's coming-back present which will be super-duper-awesome and the best thing ever so thank you again and bye!"

She scurried off. Fate watched her go with an odd smile – Vesta's rapid twists and turns of emotion were often baffling, but always amusing – and turned back to her desk. She picked up the picture she had been staring at, fingers tapping restlessly against the frame. Her own flushed, laughing face stared back at her, along with Nanoha's. Her friend had an arm hooked around her neck, with Vesta riding on her head and Arf balancing precariously on their touching shoulders. Fate vaguely recalled that they had all gone tumbling to the floor in a big pile seconds after Linith had snapped the shot. It had taken them nearly ten minutes to get untangled again, mostly because they were laughing so hard.

She couldn't even remember what they had been laughing at, now.

She had lied to Vesta. Despite the confidence she had displayed for the kitten-girl's benefit, she was worried. She couldn't help it. The last time Nanoha had investigated something strange on Earth, it had been… well, her. The Jewel Seeds, at least. And that had sucked them into a month of tense, terrifying and often-painful stress, struggle and strife. It had all turned out for the best – at least for Fate's family – but Nanoha hadn't come off so lightly.

And now she was back there again. Investigating something strange and possibly hostile, again. And Fate wasn't there to help her.

She couldn't shake a horrible feeling that this wasn't going to be as simple as a quick reconnaissance and reunion.

…​

The transition from mid-morning sun to the middle of the night was a rather jarring one, Linith reflected. But then, sudden shifts in local time were one of the many oddities of world-hopping between Types.

Still, despite the starry night sky above her, Linith was wide awake and refreshed from a good eight or nine hours. So was Nanoha, though the younger girl was waiting behind as Linith disabled the TSAB sensors, quietly wiping their memories of the mana signatures they'd been designed to look for.

'Don't tell me you're still sulking,' she remarked conversationally. 'Honestly, Nanoha. Can you really tell me that you don't feel much better now?'

Sullen silence answered her. Linith sighed, and rolled her eyes, carefully starting to piece the football-sized sensor back together. She could have just shut it down entirely, but didn't want to risk the TSAB noticing its removal. No, simply wiping its memory was enough. With no orders to look for any mana signature in particular, it was effectively nullified as a threat. And even if the TSAB came back, they wouldn't know to check it!

'So, does your mother look well?' she enquired cheerfully. 'Or did something terrible happen to her while you were catching up on sleep?' Nanoha had elected to wait at the hospital while Linith disabled the sensors around her family's house, floating outside her mother's window with a simple illusion wrapped around her to mask her from view. It wasn't nearly as elaborate as what Vesta could have done had she been there, cloaking her imperfectly as a heat shimmer and only in the visible wavelengths, but it was enough.

More sulky silence. Then, grudgingly…

'It's the principle of the thing,' Nanoha complained. 'And you hacked Raising Heart! Traitor!' It was hard to tell whether that last was directed at the cat-familiar or the Device in question.

Linith rolled her eyes, fed up. 'Would this be the principle of overworking yourself until you collapse?' she reprimanded her young charge sharply. 'Or the principle making your mother worry about you being exhausted and barely able to stand at your reunion? Her voice softened affectionately. 'Honestly… you're as bad as Precia, sometimes. Poor Vesta is really going to have her hands full, looking after you.'

'… I guess you kind of have a point…' Nanoha's voice was shaded with embarrassment, and Linith guessed that she was blushing. The girl had a tendency to take any comparison to Precia as a compliment, even when it wasn't intended as one. Still, if it got her to listen and stop sulking, Linith supposed she could let it slide this time.

'Mama looks… well, not okay, obviously. But not bad, either,' continued Nanoha, answering Linith's earlier question. 'She's asleep, though, and I don't want to wake her. She doesn't seem to have her Device on her, either. I wonder where it is?' She paused for a moment. 'Oh. Huh. Raising Heart says it's… I think that's Arisa-chan's house, from the direction. Maybe she's using it to practice?'

'Mmm. Maybe,' replied Linith distractedly, focusing on the last tweak of reprogramming the sensor. 'Aaaand… there we go, done. Alright, your house is clear. Where should I tackle next, your shop? Hmm…'

'Well, I…' started Nanoha, before stopping abruptly. '… did you feel that?'

Linith frowned, swivelling. 'Feel what? Wait…'

'It's from over near Arisa-chan's house… I only felt it because I was already looking there…'

Shedding her illusion, Nanoha rose up onto the roof of the hospital, tuning Raising Heart to ping Arisa's Device again. The result that came back made her pale, for more reasons than one.

'… barrier. It's a barrier. Linith, there's a barrier! Why is there a barrier around… Arisa's…'

The question answered itself before she even finished asking it, and she trailed off in horror. 'I need to…'

'No!' Linith shouted. 'There's still a sensor there, I need to disable it first! Nanoha! If it picks you up, the TSAB will know! You have to wait! I'll disable it as quickly as possible, but promise me you won't go charging in!'

Furious silence met her as she threw herself into flight, hoping she would reach the location before Nanoha did. The girl's previous resentment paled in comparison to this. When the answer finally came, it was tinged with sullen acceptance of Linith's logic, but she could hear the anger and frustration bubbling below the surface.

'Fine. But if she gets hurt, Linith… if it looks like she's going to be hurt, I'm going in anyway.'

Snarling into the rushing wind, Linith forbore to reply, and tried to squeeze a few more drops of speed out of her flight spell.

…​

Arisa woke up in a cold sweat, wrenched from slumber by something she couldn't put a name to immediately. She instinctively grabbed for the card that hung from a cord around her neck. She hadn't taken it off since Momoko had given it to her after Suzuka's attack, not even in the shower.
Her form flickered and blurred, resolving in the middle of the room as she activated the spell pre-loaded on it and Ghost Stepped out of bed, stumbling slightly on the carpet and falling over with a clatter.

It wasn't a comfortable way to wake up. Arisa had called her movement spell 'Ghost Step' – which she had invented by combining two of the ones from the book together – because it brought to mind things like 'cool' and 'elusive' and 'inexplicable'. It probably was, from the point of view of a normal person watching it, because you just vanished and then appeared somewhere else. From the viewpoint of the person doing it, though, it was more like 'temporarily going blind because the Device is transmitting all the light around you, get hurled in roughly the direction you wanted, and try to do the numbers in your head which make you brake before landing'.

She was in a position to know. She'd been doing it a lot, recently. Ever since Momoko-sensei had been attacked, she'd been jumpy, nervous. Suzuka-chan being hurt the same way had only elevated it to full-blown paranoia. She had at least managed to get a glimpse of her attacker – a tall, dark figure in strange clothes, carrying a malevolently glowing tome.

Both of them were recovering, albeit slowly. But Arisa knew she was next. It had got to the point where she was Ghost Stepping whenever something startled her and face-planting in the floor whenever she failed to brake properly coming out of it. Which was about two spells in every five. Thankfully, she hadn't done it in front of anyone other than a few puppies yet, but if the situation continued to fray on her nerves, it was only a matter of time.

And her nerves were certainly frayed now. Blinking in annoyance at the dark room – the glowing numerals of her bedside alarm clock told her it was something like three in the morning – she groped her way over to the door and flicked on the lights.

Nothing happened.

Okay, she told herself, squashing down the fast, shallow flutterings of panic and forcing herself to breathe slowly and normally. So the bulb was blown, or they'd had a power cut. No problem, she'd just open the curtains. Everything was still fine. She wasn't in any danger, it was just another nightmare or something.

She pulled aside the curtains, letting silvery moonlight fall in through the double-glazed window to flood the room.

And her heart caught in her throat. For the light that shone down on her wasn't the pale light of the moon. No, it was dark and tinted, a deep violet-grey that bleached the colour of the landscape and lent an eerie sense of wrongness to the familiar lines and curves of her garden. Under the strange colour-shifted sky, every bush seemed to conceal lurking terrors; every hedge was an entry point for sneaking monsters. Arisa choked out a terrified squeak of fright as panic consumed her.

It was the same as that time before.

It was them. The government people that had been fighting Nanoha, who had driven her away – she was sure of it. They had come back and attacked Momoko for helping her, and then Suzuka, and now it was her turn. She trembled like a leaf, eyes wide, breath coming fast and shallow as her pupils shrank down and her vision tunnelled. She tried desperately to cling to rational thought, to force herself to move or run or hide or something other than just stand there like a mouse caught in the eyes of a snake.

Out in the garden, something shifted.

The next minute or so was a series of blurred, tear-stained, panic-ridden jolts as adrenaline flooded into her system and her body took over from her brain. Operating on a mixture of shock and fear, it made full use of the Storage Device around her neck and the spell she had spent the last six months practicing in every spare moment. Rational thought only returned when the latest one in the chain failed – as her spells still often did, even after so much practice – and left her sprawled out on a hard surface, panting like she had just run a marathon.

Struggling to her feet, she tried to get her bearings. She was… she was outside. On the patio behind the house. How had she got all the way down here? She couldn't remember. She also knew that there was no point in looking for her parents. This was a dimensional barrier – like the one she and Suzuka had been trapped in six months ago, when the sky had caught fire and shattered like glass under a rose-tinted blowtorch.

She had no chance of putting out that much power. And she rather doubted that she could get out of the barrier by trying to Ghost Step through the edge. But her chances of fighting whatever had done this were even closer to zero, and she could only hide for so long – it wasn't as though they were going to give up and leave. No, the only option she had left was to run for the edge of the barrier and pray that she could slip through somehow. And if she couldn't…

… well, she'd handle that when she got there. Right now she was pathetically grateful just to have a plan. Clutching the card-form of the Device in a clammy hand, she dithered for a second on which way to go. How far did the barrier extend? Which edge was closest? There was probably a spell to find out, but if so she didn't know it. She'd have to…

Clink.

The sound came from above and behind. Her nerves already scraped raw, Arisa Ghost Stepped instantly, her image fading as the movement spell caught her up and she shot forward. She landed running, heard a crunch behind her and Stepped again, and again, scrambling and skidding to turn every time she came out to break line of sight. The third left her round the back of the house, and she flung herself into an alcove in the wall and huddled in it, shaking like a leaf.

"Tch…"

Arisa's trembling ceased. More than that, she froze, petrified. The voice had to have come from less than five metres away. If she poked her head out or made a sound, she was dead.

"This one is good for a rank amateur," the voice said. It was… strangely light. Female, but more than that, the tone spoke almost of a child, someone her age. There was the slight buzz in her ears which told her the Device was translating for her, that whatever they were speaking, it wasn't Japanese. But despite its seeming youth, the chilling edge to the voice swamped any hope of mercy. Arisa tried to muffle her gasps for air, wishing she had more mana– she'd already used up half her reserves, and wouldn't be up to another Ghost Step for several more seconds.

"I've lost her. Moving to reacquire." Footsteps sounded for a second, then a rustling noise and a rush of air. Wonderful. Whoever the girl was, she could fly. Like Nanoha could. Arisa felt an uncharacteristic pinprick of resentful jealousy towards her friend as she began to shake again, the paralysing terror gone for the moment with the girl's departure.

But it released the paralysis on her thoughts, as well. Bringing her fist up to her mouth and biting down hard on a knuckle to help her focus, Arisa desperately began to think.

Okay, she thought to herself. Okay. Right. Her plan hadn't changed. She needed to get to the edge of the barrier. That meant she had to move. Had to get going again. Move. She had to move. She had to stop trembling and breathing hard and imagining whatever that crunching sound behind her had been hitting her head or her legs. She had to move.

She didn't. Couldn't. Despite yelling at herself internally, she was frozen to the spot, unwilling to set foot outside the tiny alcove of security that had protected her from her attacker once. She knew it was absurd, but she just couldn't bring herself to venture out away from the three walls enclosing her like solid guardians.

Something flickered at the edge of her vision. Something red, and glowing. It moved out of her line of sight, then back into view; a golf-ball sized ball of red light that moved purposefully a couple of feet above the ground in a circuit around the house. Even as she registered this, it paused in its searching pattern, and despite the lack of any features, she got the distinct impression it was turning to look at her.

"…!" Arisa squeaked. She knew what the thing was. A search spell. Suzuka could pull off a small one – had done, only a few weeks ago, to find a little origami figure Momoko-sensei had hidden in her living room. Except this wasn't a small search spell covering one room. This was part of something that probably covered the whole house. And now that it had seen her…

Stumbling out of the alcove, Arisa began to run. A whistling sound behind her alerted her to an incoming threat, and she Ghost Stepped forward with so little space to spare that she felt her hair ruffled by the blow as it passed. The sound of splintering wood came as it continued on to hit an ornamental tree, and then something locked up around Arisa's ankle and send her sprawling.

As she'd half known the second it latched around her foot, it wasn't anything natural. Her ankle was encased in a red cube that held it firmly in place, no matter how hard she tugged. Scowling, she called up a training shot, resolving to fight. The decision didn't have much to do with courage – rather, it was more down to the fact that she was immobile, caught in the open and only had enough mana left for two or three more spells. But it was a decision nonetheless.

"Go away!" she shouted. Not the most original battle cry ever devised, but she honestly didn't care what she sounded like as long as she got out of this alive. She fired even before she finished taking in her assailant's appearance – a young girl with red hair and sharp blue eyes, wearing an archaic red dress and wielding a vicious-looking hammer. It looked like a Device, too. Whether it was or not, Arisa wasn't going to stick around to find out.

She didn't wait to see the amber ball burst against the other girl's face, making her flinch backwards in annoyance. Even as it struck, she threw half her remaining mana into another Ghost Step, praying that it would work to get her out of the lock on her leg. She felt it slacken as the shot struck home, more from surprise than pain, and combined with the paltry mana she was able to pump into the movement spell it gave, letting her flee back towards the house. Her ankle wrenched as it burst free, but the important thing was that she was free, not sprawled out on the ground and waiting for death.

Limping as fast as she could around a corner and out of sight, she sighted upwards, found an open window and pumped the last dregs of her mana into one last Step, and materialised on the first floor landing outside a row of guest rooms. Still moving. She slammed into the wall, bounced off, hit the ground and lay dazed for a moment before shaking herself awake again. From outside, she caught an angry yell of frustration, but she was too tired to pay attention to that. Panting, she dragged herself into one of the guest rooms and took stock.

Her mana was essentially gone. She might have enough left for another training shot, but even with the Storage Device helping, another Ghost Step was beyond her. She'd need a full night's sleep before even half her reserves came back, and she wasn't going to get that.

Physically she was a little better. There was some stinging pain on various parts of her back – when had that happened? A couple of loose splinters answered that question; shrapnel from the impacts of that hammer. And the girl had been swinging that thing at her? Other than that… she was tired, her arms hurt, her legs were burning in a way that told her she wouldn't be doing much more running around even if she had the energy, her ankle was starting to swell and probably sprained, and she felt sick, light-headed and freezing cold all at once.

But her hands were fine, and her arms weren't too tired. And she refused to just lie down and die. And... oh yes, her Device had a staff form, didn't it? Even if she couldn't use it, that was still a long metal pole. The corners of Arisa's mouth pulled back in what could charitably be called a grin, and realistically be called a grimace. No, she was not going to go down passively. She would resist. She would fight back. She would…

… scream, as the wall exploded.

Bits of rubble and plaster rained down on the room as Arisa cowered. When she felt it safe to look up, she found the red girl floating where the wall had been, scowling angrily.

"Stop moving, dammit!" she yelled angrily. "Urgh, and you don't even have a Jacket! I swear, what kind of maniac doesn't use a Barrier Jacket just so they can dodge more? Do you know how careful I'm having to be not to break you? Stay still or I swear I'll snap your legs, even if you don't have a Jacket!"

Arisa ignored this tirade, levelled the staff-form of her Device at the girl and fired.

Or tried to, anyway. But even with the Device's help, the training shot snarled and dissolved, falling apart. Eyes wide as she watched the last of her mana dissipate away into the air, Arisa made a high, wordless sound of protest at the unfairness of the universe making her screw up now, of all times. But whatever else she might be, she wasn't a quitter. Gathering herself, she growled and launched herself at her enemy in as fast a run as her injured ankle could take her, bringing the staff round in a wild swing.

With a bland expression of annoyance and a total lack of concern, the red-clad girl floated backwards less than ten centimetres, letting the tip of the staff pass a hairsbreadth in front of her nose. And then she swung the hammer, one-handed, a red bubble appearing around its head as time seemed to slow in a way that left Arisa mired in treacle but still able to see what was happening.

The blow was almost beautiful, in a horrible sort of way. It started high, arcing down from Arisa's left as she brought her staff up in a futile block, and continued clean through the metal pole without impediment before terminating in Arisa's ribcage. Even through the faintly stunned, briefly painless daze, she noticed that it didn't feel like a hammer-blow should. It felt… squishy. Like the bubble was made of bubble-wrap, muting the force of the impact to something survivable.

Then time sped up again, and she was sent sprawling backwards into the side of the bed as the two halves of the Storage Device went clattering away into the far corners of the room. Colours dripped and swam across her vision. A high-pitched ringing sound echoed around her head. The air in her lungs seemed to have gone on holiday, and had apparently been replaced in the meantime by a blunt pain that felt a bit like a cymbal must after a particularly hard whack. She was fairly sure she could feel her bones vibrating.

"… ugh…" Arisa wheezed, trying to focus on one of the five girls approaching her. She feebly lifted a hand halfway before the effort got too much for her and it fell limply back to her side.

In response, the red-clad girl stooped down and pulled out her heart.

The mote of light hung in the air like a weak, twinkling star, cradled in the gauntleted hand of the girl in red. Arisa forced out a choked rasp, gaping wide-eyed at the point of light and trying not to faint. There was an aching hollowness in her chest, and it felt like someone had their fingers around all of her internal organs and was squeezing – not enough to hurt yet, just enough to be terrifyingly uncomfortable.

With her other hand, her attacker reached behind her back and produced a book. It glowed with an evil violet light, and Arisa's eyes widened further. A horrid glowing tome… just like Suzuka had said. She tried to gather the energy to protest, to struggle. Nothing came.

The feeling of her mana being ripped out of her was mercifully brief. That was the only silver lining to it. It felt horrible, nightmarish, like being bled dry from the inside out through a wound that couldn't be plugged or bandaged. The book drank it in hungrily, devouring every last drop of mana she had in her in seconds – and she could tell that everything she had to offer barely dented its hunger. Writing appeared on its pages as it drank, fading into view as if the ink were rising to the surface of a deep pond, and Arisa's world began to turn hazy. Words reached her faintly, through the odd buzzing sound that was taking over her hearing.

"… one line? One measly line? Argh! Do you know how much time I wasted on this? I could have got more by hunting wild animals! You! Do you know what you've done! You made me waste my time because you just couldn't sit still like a good girl and went and drained yourself running away! Argh!" She jabbed a finger at Arisa. "Don't tell anyone else to do this, you hear me! Stupid cowards who spend more energy running than they would fighting back and making it hard for them and me!"

There were more words. But she didn't really listen to them. She watched the hammer as it rose again, waving wildly as the girl ranted. If it fell again… she wasn't sure what would happen if it fell again. Her head was all muzzy. But she remembered it would be bad. And then…

… and then…

… and then a ring of amber closed around the hammer, just underneath its head, and stopped it. Even as the girl's tug on it met resistance, a ball of brilliantly glowing orange smashed into the back of the her head. Arisa blinked.

Had she done that?

No.

There was a figure hovering just outside the ruined wall. Grey-clad, in a uniform that sort of looked like a soldier's ballistic vest and obscured its figures. It had a helmet, too, a sleek, smooth thing of matte grey that covered its whole head with no openings, and it held a staff with a two-tined steel head. As darkness closed in around the edges of her vision, Arisa groggily wondered how it could see to point the thing.

The figure spoke, in a voice modulated and made as featureless as its appearance by the same technology that disguised its face.

"Get away from my friend," it said.

And Arisa had just enough breath left to whisper "… -ha?" before everything turned black.

…​

Nanoha hovered in the air, her face hidden behind the opaque face-shield of the helmet. Even though she knew her opponent couldn't see her expression, she glared. Some things didn't need eye contact. The red girl glared back, blue eyes narrowing in a way that made her seem almost feral.

"What are you doing?" she demanded, keeping her guard up and Raising Heart levelled in case the girl tried something. "Why are you attacking her?"

The girl didn't respond. Just glared at Nanoha, her expression both unconcerned and evaluative. The corners of her lips slowly turned up, in a predatory grin.

'Nanoha?' Linith asked. She sounded concerned.

'No, stay back,' Nanoha thought back quickly. 'I've got this. And it's best if we stay as secret as possible until we know more about what's going on, right? If she doesn't know about you, we should keep it that way for as long as we can.'

'… alright,' Linith agreed reluctantly. 'But I'm still stepping in if I think it's needed.'

'Don't worry.' The girl's tone was confident. 'She hurt my friend. I'm not going to lose this.'

[Beschleunigen!] the girl's Device barked, dragging her back to reality. It pulsed an angry red as the girl shifted her grip with an ease that spoke of long practice.

With a contemptuous sniff, she wrenched on the Device. The bind Nanoha had placed around it… shattered. She actually felt it break, like fine china under a mallet. Belatedly, she realised that she might be in rather more trouble than she'd anticipated. Shifting into a more tactical mindset, she readied a volley of Divine Shooters, ready to fire at a moment's notice.

Except she didn't get a moment's notice. She didn't even get a second's.

[Tödlicher Schlag!]

With a barked command – even her Device sounded angry, a harsh metallic voice that sounded like iron and fury – the girl shot forward. Nanoha silently thanked the countless hours Fate and Linith had spent building on what Miyuki had taught her. Her arms shot into a guard position, bringing Raising Heart around to block and reinforcing it with mana without her even needing to think about it.

Despite the textbook-perfect block and the half-formed barrier she snapped up in the split-second she had, the blow sent her rocketing backwards. The girl was monstrously strong, whoever she was. But the increased distance between them worked to Nanoha's advantage. As her opponent shot out of the hole in the side of the house, she let fly with the shooting spells she had readied, six bolts of light flashing out as she gained altitude.

But the other girl was evidently almost as fast as she was strong. The hammer whipped out in precise, measured strikes, somehow tracking the blurred paths of the projectiles and snuffing them out one by one. The last three homed in together, and broke against a glowing triangular shield she conjured to meet them. She paused for a second, and the glowing red aura around the head of the hammer spread to the rest of her body, covering her in what looked almost like a fine red mist that clung to her skin and Barrier Jacket.

Then swirls of light appeared around her feet, and she shot towards Nanoha once again – far faster this time, clearly using some kind of movement spell. She wasn't even trying to dodge, though. Sighting down the length of Raising Heart, Nanoha threw a bind at her, her mind racing. The triangular casting sigil, the emphasis on physical combat… she recognised this from what she'd been taught, both in school and by Precia. This was no Midchildan mage. This was a Belkan knight.

The bind formed… and shattered, almost before it had finished solidifying. The girl's charge barely even stuttered.

Remembering all too well how formidable the Belkan style was at close range, Nanoha abandoned her offence in favour of putting more distance between them. She turned tail and fled, firing behind her whenever she could get a clear shot. But nothing seemed to work. Binds disintegrated so fast that they barely appeared before breaking. The streams of amber bullets bounced off the scarlet aura. She zigzagged and pinwheeled, trying to shake the girl off, but nothing seemed to deter her.

And she was gaining, metre by metre. Twice already Nanoha had been forced to turn through ninety degrees to avoid the edge of the barrier, allowing her pursuer to cut the corner and gain valuable distance on her – at these speeds, the battlefield was just too small. She stayed alert for a barrier blocking her path or a bind – either would need to be broken immediately if she wanted any chance of staying out of the range of that hammer.

But the end came not from a bind or a barrier. It came from an attack.

The red ball came out of nowhere. The girl must have fired it at some point during the chase, but Nanoha couldn't say when. The only warning she got was a faint whistle before it came shrilling out of the sky towards her.

"Ahh!"

Nanoha threw herself into a desperate spin to avoid it, pushing herself into a Flash Move to get far enough out of the way. Even with such a rapid response, it missed her by bare centimetres. But the intent had never been to hit her, she knew. The interruption had cost her crucial seconds – crucial seconds that the knight had used to catch up. Spinning around, she brought Raising Heart up to block the attack she knew was coming.

It came alright. But not from where she had been expecting it.

The knight must have risen slightly from where Nanoha had been mentally tracking her, because she was a good metre or so higher than expected. Too late, too slow, she lifted Raising Heart to block. Her Device added its own efforts, activating the auto-defence with a snapped-out [Protection!]

But in the end, even that wasn't enough.

The blow was slowed by the block, as it swatted Raising Heart aside with such strength that she was barely able to hang onto it with one hand. Cracking the hastily-raised barrier robbed it of yet more force. But though it was slowed and weakened, it wasn't stopped. The hammer struck dead centre on the brow of Nanoha's helmet, and stars burst in her eyes in time with an explosion of pain behind them. She reeled backwards, dimly aware of her helmet fracturing and falling away to bare her face. There was a blur of red in front of her, starting to move again…

"Flash… Impact," she choked out.

She would usually use the melee spell to attack with Raising Heart. But her staff had been knocked aside, held only loosely in her left hand, and bringing it back up again would take too long. So instead, she flooded mana into her fist, and lashed out with every ounce of magically-boosted force she could summon.

The punch caught the other girl full in the jaw with a cringe-worthy sound of breaking bone. It wasn't just from the knight, either. Both girls reeled for a moment in pain as Nanoha instinctively flew backwards, cradling her hand. Trying to open it only caused it to hurt worse, and she hissed in pain.

[Pain Reduce,] Raising Heart offered, and the throbbing of what were probably broken fingers lessened considerably. [We need to defend, master.]

"I know, I know," Nanoha muttered, testing her hand. She could move it… barely. But the spell hadn't healed the damage, only dulled the pain – it still hurt, and she could only manage a weak grip on the staff. She would have to compensate for that in the next round of attacks. The knight looked like she had recovered from the impact as well, so Nanoha started backing off again, while dredging her arsenal for something to finish the fight with. Binds wouldn't hold her, ordinary shots weren't enough, there was nowhere near enough time to charge up a bombardment attack…

… ah. Yes. That would do nicely.

Raising Heart sped through the calculations as Nanoha drew to a halt and threw an alarmingly large chunk of her flagging reserves into the spell. She was tired – tired from travelling, tired from the week of teleporting, tired enough that it was sapping at her reflexes and draining her strength. Even the full night's sleep she had got wasn't enough to offset it, though without that she would probably be dead already. She knew she couldn't hold out much longer. If this didn't finish things, she would need to call for Linith or flee.

So it would have to finish things. She wouldn't allow it not to. The scarlet knight seemed to have the same thought. She swooped in low, her Device shifting forms as she did. A vicious looking spike slid out from one face of the hammer, even as the other one opened up to reveal a rocket booster. She charged with frightening speed, showing the same casual disregard for evasion or caution that she had for the whole fight, the rocket spitting fire as she hefted it aloft.

Nanoha stood her ground above a blazing circle, as she deployed the reactive barrier that Precia had taught her. It shimmered into view, draining her reserves to manifest as a tessellated shield of woven light. Just in case, she layered another barrier beneath it, twice as strong as the hasty one the girl had shattered earlier. Even if she managed to break the reactive overlayer and survive the blast, this one would stop her cold.

But as the girl drew up, something happened. An explosion partway down her Device, like a shell slamming home in the barrel of an artillery piece. The mana pouring off the thing spiked – Nanoha could feel it, even behind her barriers. The sudden surge of power was incredible. The hammer swung down…

And a blast of amber fire engulfed the girl, even as the reactive barrier shattered. Nanoha screamed at the feedback – that blow was far, far too strong. Horrifyingly strong. Whether it was the explosion or the rocket-form, the girl's piercing power had risen exponentially. The second barrier wouldn't be enough. Helplessly, she lifted Raising Heart and pushed herself backwards in a futile attempt to deflect the blow.

The spiked head of hammer, still wreathed in amber fire but undamaged, broke the second barrier with a scream like tearing metal. It struck Raising Heart on one of the two tines of its shooting form, snapping it off cleanly and taking a chunk out of the ruby-red core as it continued down towards Nanoha herself…

Impact.

Pain.

… warmth?

Nanoha forced her eyes open. Someone had snatched her away. Linith? It had to be. They were retreating, at speeds that she hadn't known the cat-familiar was capable of, but she could still see her opponent. There was something hurtling towards her, something huge… it looked like a tree.

It was, in fact, a tree.

The girl wrenched free of the tan binds that had cocooned her, and brought her hammer round in a furious slash, defending against the huge mass at the last second. It struck the falling log with a crack that Nanoha heard even from a distance, splitting it in clean in two.

It was a mistake. Linith was good at trap spells, and that log must have had at least half a dozen on it. An opaque, bubble-shaped barrier surrounded the girl's head the second her hammer hit wood, and a binding ring of the same colour flashed into being around her throat and began to constrict. The two halves separated just enough to pass her by on either side as she flailed briefly.

Then they exploded.

Even that wasn't enough to put her down, Nanoha saw. As the smoke cleared, she remained standing. Her Barrier Jacket was scorched and damaged, far more than it had been by the blast from Nanoha's barrier, but it hadn't been broken. But Linith hadn't stopped there, it seemed, either. Though her vision was blurry, Nanoha could see a swarm of tiny shapes whirling around the beleaguered form, hammering at the knight relentlessly as she brought her hands up towards her neck.

And then there was a wrenching shift, and they were outside the barrier again, still accelerating. Another jolt, almost before the first had faded, and this time Nanoha recognised the distinctive flavour of a teleport spell, taking them far, far away from the girl. Despite the humiliation of her loss, Nanoha had to breathe a sigh of relief at that.

She didn't get to see where they had teleported to, though. Her eyes fluttered closed as they arrived, as the slap-dash anaesthetic spell wore off and raw agony from her hand assaulted her again. Not just her hand, either. Her ribs, her head… it seemed like there wasn't any part of her that didn't hurt, ache or burn.

A spark of magic entered her system, telling it to sleep. Linith again, lowering her onto a bed. Thank goodness.

Fleeing from the pain and the sting of her defeat, Nanoha yielded to the spell gratefully. She was unconscious before her head hit the pillow.

…​

 

[Revlid]

(Oh, Hey, Oh, Hey, Oh, Hey, Hey, Hey)

I'm living in dimensional space, making a disturbance
Stealing Lost Logia and learning magic science
Fate is my waifu, we've both got an alliance
Guess every mahou shoujo needs a henshin sequence!

No one girl should have all that magic
Fate's mum's dying, this tale's pretty tragic
Alicia's breathing, it's all so sapphic
(21st century magical girl)

My friends in danger, the Knights out, the Book opens
Wolkenritter stealing cores, Vita mad, Hayate rolling
Huh? Is that Charlotte, is Aleph trolling?
With my Starlight Breaker, I'll blow a hole in!

97's my world, better step up
Gonna befriend you kid, Raising Heart set up
My cat's convinced she deserves worship
Hand me some cartridges, she needs a wallop

No one girl should have all that magic
Reviews flooding in, they say "instant classic"
White Devil, kinda psychopathic
(21st century magical girl)

 

[jwolfe_beta]

And so Aleph and EarthScorpion did bring forth the sequel to Game Theory and we saw that it was awesome.

So Arisa, Suzuka and Momoko have all met the happy fun Wolkenritter and Nanoha got herself into a debate of Midchildan vs Ancient Belkan magic styles.
'looks at Nanoha at the end of combat, looks at Vita at the end of combat' I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Belka got round one.

What is interesting is that Nanoha's friends and mother all seem to be doing basic magic training and she sent them storage devices. Though its not really surprising the Wolkenritter got all three of them. It would have been like a Tiger tank going up against a lame puppy. Though pro-tips to Vita-chan and the others for not doing irreparable damage to them for as Aleph said their style is based around destroying things and people.

 

[75% Certain]

And thus my day (and week, and month!) is made.

 

[Shanejayell]

You know, ES, for a guy who primarilly writes cosmic horrors, you have a real gift for writing kids. You could do the ongoing tales of Tea and I'd read 'em always.

Aleph, LOVING the first few chapters. Can't wait to see where this goes. The divergence is already heavy from canon, I see.....

 

[Mortifer]

I would comment, but I'm too busy thanking the gods and trying to figure out what I did to be worthy of this.

 

[Vehrec]

And that's just one Storm Knight, unsupported, caught off-guard, burning a grand total of... ONE cartridge? And there are three more-all vastly more subtle and complex in their powersets than Vita Smash-and we know well from experience that in this universe, Aleph loves subtle and cunning powersets and shames those who simply use MOAR POWAH.

That being said, cunning can loop around and come back to the direct approach given time, and when an ambush is sprung, the correct action is to drive forward and smash your way out of it. Vita is no weakling, no chump, and nobody's fool. This was a very lucky encounter.

 

[jwolfe_beta]

Yeah, the Knights are made of awesome and how many decades-centuries of combat experience?

In any case question for Aleph and ES.
Vita seemed shocked/disgusted that Arisa was trying to fight/run without putting up a barrier jacket of any kind. I presume that Hayate has told them that her world's knowledge of magic is non-existent at some point. So is she assuming Arisa is from off-world or is a Barrier Jacket so commonplace in magic systems that she honestly can't see anybody learning magic without knowing how to make one?

 

[universalperson]

*checked e-mail*

*saw fanfiction.net message*

*squealed with glee*

*ran to forum*

*squealed with glee again*

*began reading*

I gotta say, I was hoping you would do a Teana Omake theatre - or else I would have to do one myself. Except I would add young Subaru as her co-host. Please appear Subaru. With guests appearances by ferret-Yuuno-in-a-tux,Tea and Subaru's future selves, and not-Plushbey.

Incidentally, the "little girl glowing" Jewel Seed was the one that took Alicia's form, right?

So the story itself!

Schzenais! *Chekhovs Gun goes off* What inspired Nanoha and co's cover identities? I can guess what Daytona refers to...

Ghost step! *Mythology Gag goes off* Poor 97-ers.

I was hoping for a somewhat greater divergence from canon, but I guess Nanoha fighting Vita is inevitable.

As always, the writing itself is top notch! Eager to see what happens next. EVEN IF I HAVE T WAIT FOREVER!

What is interesting is that Nanoha's friends and mother all seem to be doing basic magic training and she sent them storage devices.

Click to shrink...

Actually, Aleph made a critical change in the Epilogue where Yuuno gave Momoko the Device he was given by the TSAB.

 

[spacemonkey37]

Yes! It's here!

Very promising start. I particularly liked Arisa's scene. Her magic is interesting (I love that you've made all those characters who got sidelined actually relevant, by the way), and the chase with Vita as the implacable pursuer was very well done.

And Precia is still dying, I see. I expected it, but I was kind of hoping to be wrong. And I'm still a bit amazed that I actually care about her, so kudos.

Though I noticed that the worldbuilding on Schzenais doesn't seem to match ES' infodump, which stated it was an Aligned World. Is there a reason for the change?

 

[75% Certain]

"Nothing unmasks a man like his use of power." Ominous tagline ahoy. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Admiral Gil Graham is going to jump right the fuck off the slippery slope later on.

 

[universalperson]

I'm going to stick to my "Hayate is commanding the Wolkenritter to save Chikaze" theory. (I mean she does technically command them already, but...you know what I mean). The Prologue is something of a decoy.

 

[beleester]

And that's just one Storm Knight, unsupported, caught off-guard, burning a grand total of... ONE cartridge? And there are three more-all vastly more subtle and complex in their powersets than Vita Smash-and we know well from experience that in this universe, Aleph loves subtle and cunning powersets and shames those who simply use MOAR POWAH.

That being said, cunning can loop around and come back to the direct approach given time, and when an ambush is sprung, the correct action is to drive forward and smash your way out of it. Vita is no weakling, no chump, and nobody's fool. This was a very lucky encounter.

Click to shrink...

Well, Nanoha's doing about as well as in canon, where one Storm Knight, burning a total of one cartridge, managed to injure Nanoha to the point that she couldn't escape. And Nanoha's doing this while half-asleep.

I'm a little disappointed that Vita's hat survived the battle intact, since that was one of the more amusing scenes from canon. Oh well, I suppose we can save that for the next battle when Fate and Co. get called in.

 

[75% Certain]

Well, Nanoha's doing about as well as in canon, where one Storm Knight, burning a total of one cartridge, managed to injure Nanoha to the point that she couldn't escape. And Nanoha's doing this while half-asleep.

I'm a little disappointed that Vita's hat survived the battle intact, since that was one of the more amusing scenes from canon. Oh well, I suppose we can save that for the next battle when Fate and Co. get called in.

Click to shrink...

Not sure about 'intact'; she has one hell of a broken jaw and even magic won't insta-heal that.

 

[The Sandman]

I wonder if Precia knows enough about the Book of Darkness to be able to piece together what's going on from the info Nanoha and Linith currently have available.

I also wonder what effect, if any, it would have on Precia if/when Linith gets core-ripped.

And calling it now, the way that Nanoha and Friends' hiding place gets rumbled is that Heidi (from Tiida's team) spots them while visiting home for some sort of unavoidable "spend time with the family" function. Because it's the one variable that Precia couldn't possibly have predicted.

Assuming that the TSAB doesn't find out in the course of the Book of Darkness incident.

...come to think of it, the TSAB probably already knows the Wolkenritter are around, seeing as how they were still keeping an eye on Nanoha's friends and family and Linith wasn't there to screw with the sensors when Momoka and Suzuka got core-ripped.

 

[spacemonkey37]

I also wonder what effect, if any, it would have on Precia if/when Linith gets core-ripped.

Click to shrink...

Familiars don't have a linker core, at least according to Arf in chapter four of Game Theory.

Edit:

...hmm.

In canon, did Fate ever get core-ripped? Because if not...

What happens to a familiar if the Linker Core powering it gets harvested?

Click to shrink...

Yep. That did happen. And the canon answer is... absolutely nothing. The writers completely forgot that Arf was dependent on Fate for mana.

 

[The Sandman]

Familiars don't have a linker core, at least according to Arf in chapter four of Game Theory.

Click to shrink...

I completely forgot about that.

I suppose that would make them the most irritating possible opponents for the Wolkenritter right now; nothing to steal to add pages to the book as compensation for the trouble of fighting them, and can't be killed or maimed because that would make Hayate sad.

I also just realized that Suzuka getting core-ripped is going to make her and Hayate's friendship even more hilariously awkward than in canon.

 

[Lexica]

I'm SO glad that I caught this before going to sleep! It's just as awesome as I expected it to be, and the only disappointing part is that I'll probably have to wait a month for more.

 

[75% Certain]

Sadly. I know what I'll be scheduling my life around the next year-and-a-half.

 

[Mortifer]

Sadly. I know what I'll be scheduling my life around the next year-and-a-half.

Click to shrink...

You Are Not Alone

 

[Faraway-R]

First things first: SQUEEEEEE!

Meaningful things to follow in edits...

Edit the first: Wow, ES, awesome recap! I can see what you did here *nods sagely*. You've practiced on Overlady's minions for the entire lexicon speech patterns of Alicia and Teana!

 

[Shockz]

Though I noticed that the worldbuilding on Schzenais doesn't seem to match ES' infodump, which stated it was an Aligned World. Is there a reason for the change?

Click to shrink...

IIRC Schzenais is aligned, but not administrated.

That aside...hoo boy. I mean, dayum. Besides my usual complaint about the use of the non-word and crime against the English language that is "alright", which I expect to be dismissed and/or ignored as usual, I can't really find anything to criticize here. Nanoha and Fate are spot-on, Alicia and Vesta are adorable, and Vita is appropriately threatening. Writing is (as usual) a tad dense but really makes the world feel alive without sacrificing pacing too much.

I'm not sure whether or not to be disappointed that Nanoha's disguise wasn't more Material-S-ish.