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Premises, premises everywhere... (Omniatrix's Snippet Thread)

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Oof. It says a lot that the only other Willy Wonka crossover I know of involves the Slaughterhouse Nine, and is still less dark than this subdued little horror piece.
 
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Mythoclast (Demigod CYOA - Multicross)
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    • So, because of a weird working schedule, I've been basically running through the top posts of all time in r/makeyourchoice to kill time. The fun thing is, some of the more elaborate CYOAs there provide a mission/quest/story lineup that means once you've filled it all out, you've got a pretty solid outline for a story, and for one of those (so far, who knows what may happen in the future), I thought the result suggested an interesting enough story that I wanted to write it. Of course, my muse is as always flighty, so I decided to just post stuff here so at least I'm doing something with it even if I never get very far in terms of the whole story. In case you want to follow along/track which choices I made, the CYOA in question is here.


    Mythoclast
    or
    The RV Polycule Unfucks What the Gods are Too Dickish to Unfuck Themselves
    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________​


    The hissing sound of snakes and scales on stone fades as does the light, dropping me into total darkness. Slowly, gently, the darkness begins to settle, replaced by the subtle gleam of black feathers. They rustle, move, the shape of something underneath.

    "MY BELOVED DAUGHTER," comes the woman's voice. I can't suppress a thrill of surprise that she addresses me as her daughter instead of her son, despite having no idea who this is. "THE WORLD AS YOU KNOW IT IS ABOUT TO CHANGE. THE VEIL THAT SEPARATES YOUR WORLD FROM THAT OF THE GODS HAS FALLEN. WAR IS COMING, AND ALL MAY BE LOST. I HEREBY NAME YOU AS MY CHILD, MY CHAMPION, AND WAKE IN YOU MY BLOOD. THOUGH YOU BE DOOMED TO ONE DAY WALK THE UNDERWORLD, YOU MUST YET SAVE THIS WORLD FROM DESTRUCTION."

    A soft weight falls over my body and the feathers flutter away, exposing a pale woman with black hair and feathered armor. "THIS I GIVE TO YOU AS YOUR BIRTHRIGHT:" the woman says, her voice consuming my entire hearing. "MINE OWN CLOAK, THAT YOU MAY SURVIVE THE COMING HOURS AND FIND YOUR WAY TO YOUR DESTINY. WAKE NOW, DAUGHTER OF THE MORRIGAN, AND MEET YOUR FATE."

    I gasped and sat up in bed.

    There was sunlight filtering in through the window and the sound of waves and the mobile home's motor underneath me. My bed was empty save myself and my stuffed raven. It wasn't a true dream, just a memory. Hanging on a hook by the door was the black feathered cloak that I had awoken covered in when I had had the original dream, months ago. I flopped back down on my pillow, groaning a little bit. Despite only being a memory, the force of my divine mother's sheer presence was still overwhelming. Making it worse, the dream before that was a vision, and those always gave me headaches.

    There was a knock on the door that pulled me back up out of my bed. "Yeah, gimme a second," I replied groggily. I threw off my covers and swung my legs off the bed, taking a second just sitting there to wake up properly.

    My room was nice, almost a dream room for me. I wasn't sure how the mobile home worked exactly - did it adjust for any needs? Could it have provided furniture I didn't have? Whatever. It was nice, just big enough that I had room for my desk, my PC, and a chest of drawers. One wall was mostly mirrored sliding doors to my closet - a holdout from my first apartment that I had realized I could no longer live without after the Calamity had forced me to move around so much.

    I grabbed one of my tee-shirts off the ground and put it on over my cami, peering into the mirror to check my face. Shapeshifting was one of the abilities I was better at, but sometimes I would shift a little in my sleep. A little less on my jowls, pulling some fat out of my cheeks, making my jaw more defined. There, that was it, I was back in what I considered my "default" form, for whatever that meant these days. Only then did I go to open the door.

    Standing in the hallway on the other side was a pale girl, about a head shorter than me with short hair and big doe-like eyes. She was also wearing what appeared to be an extra large tee-shirt for some punk band and nothing else. I tried to avoid staring at her thighs, but by her amused smile I must have failed.

    "G'morning." I said, blinking at her. I was still feeling a little groggy. "Here for, uh, breakfast?"

    She looked surprised for a second. "No, I was actually going to make sure you were okay. It sounded unpleasant." her smile grew wider and her eyes hooded, "but if you're offering…"

    Feeling awkward under that look she was giving me, I crooked my neck to the side for her. Instead of moving closer, her eyes darted around the hallway. If she were able, I imagined she might have blushed. She huffed and pushed me back into my room. "Not here!" She complained, still smiling. I acceded to her gentle push and took a few steps back into my bedroom. She followed me in, closing the door behind her.

    We stood there for a moment, looking at each other without speaking. I didn't know why I always made such a big deal about this in my head, we did this all the time, but I always got little warm shivers like this. I tilted my head to one side and she moved forward, tentatively putting one hand on my hip and another in my hair, cradling my face. She went up to her toes, glanced at my face to make sure I was okay, and then tenderly sunk her teeth in my neck.

    I nearly collapsed into her, and it was only her arms that held me upright. It wasn't a sensation of pleasure, exactly, it was just - when she fed she was so comfortable and close and it always left me feeling sappy and warm inside. Like coming in from a snowstorm to cuddle by a fire, or the sensation of the perfect hot chocolate. And maybe, okay, a little bit of pleasure too.

    God, was I making it weird? I probably was. This was basically just her eating, there was no need for me to read anything into it. And yeah, I was a little touch-starved and Mavis was pretty and sweet, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. I groaned a little in disappointment when she pulled away, a contented smile on her face. Yeah, I was making this weird. I really needed to talk to her about my little crush - I liked straightforward communication, I needed straightforward communication, I was just bad at it.

    She let me catch my breath and get my feet under me properly before stepping away and opening the door again. "So," she said, her voice a little husky. "You had a nightmare?"

    I shook my head and swallowed, still not quite trusting my voice. "No. A vision."

    "Ah," she responded. "I hope it wasn't as bad as it sounded. Do you want to tell me about it?"

    "Over breakfast."

    She nodded and moved toward the stairway. I, instead, went to the bathroom for my morning ablutions.

    I had finished frying the bacon and was getting started on the eggs when Rachel and Max made it down. Seeing that we were all up, Mavis ran to grab Sigma and Exada, the other two members of our little crew that didn't need sleep. I didn't know what the three of them did with all that extra time, maybe they had a little club going on. Chloe never got up earlier than noon, and her girlfriends would inevitably catch her up anyway, so once we were all gathered I explained what I had seen.

    "So, we should finish passing through the channel and make landfall in a couple of hours. I had a few visions of what's waiting for us at Varrel." I slid the last of the fried eggs off the skillet and onto Rachel's plate before carrying her and Max's over to the dinner table. "I can pretty much confirm that this is Medusa we're dealing with, so that's something."

    I went back to grab my own plate and watched as Max popped another piece of bacon from the serving plate at the table. "What does the book say about her?" she asked.

    I shrugged and sat down, digging into my own eggs. "Basically what the myths do. You know, snake hair, if you look at her you turn to stone, all that. It looks like she's also got, like, a snake tail sometimes? I don't think she would be that dangerous if it weren't for the stone thing."

    Mavis didn't seem entirely happy about my answer, her arms were crossed and she was frowning at me. "Then what were your visions about? You were screaming in your sleep, I heard you. And you know the MH's soundproofing is usually good enough even for my ears."

    I looked away. "Yeah, well, it turns out you, Exada, and Sigma not being technically alive doesn't make you immune to her sight. Me, Max, Chloe, Sigma, we're not really fighters, but the two of you could always take her down...eventually. Not before we lost anyone, though. And it turns out that you can kind of...feel it when you turn into a statue. You stay awake the whole time."

    That had everyone sitting up and paying attention.

    "Holy shit," Rachel said. "That's horrible."

    "Yeah. And I don't really know how to undo the transformation, so I don't think a full out assault is going to work."

    "What are we gonna do, then?" Max asked.

    That was a bit of a harder question. "How much do you guys know about Medusa's origin?"

    "She was a priestess of Athena, was raped by Poseidon, since literally all that pantheon are assholes," Rachel paused to glance up to the ceiling, "- and I'm especially talking about you too, whatever-great granddad - which broke her vows of celibacy. Athena couldn't do anything to Poseidon, so because of the aforementioned assholery, she took it out on her by making her into a monster so ugly she petrifies whoever looks at her. Is that right?"

    "Uh, yeah," I replied, surprised at how succinctly she had managed to summarize the story. "I mean, the Book of Thoth didn't really have that much about before she was a monster, but that's pretty much what I could find. But I was thinking…" I set down my fork and took a drink of water. This was kind of a ridiculous plan, but I was hoping they would go with me for it. "I mean, she's a monster. If we kill her, she'll just come back in a few years or centuries or something, right? But she's not like a, I don't know, a hellhound or a chimera, she used to be a person - I mean she probably still is. So maybe we could… talk to her? Talk her down? It just seems like a more permanent solution than waiting for her to regenerate and take out another town later. And I kinda think that was what my visions were getting at."

    The reception for my plan seemed decidedly mixed. Max seemed to like it, but she was always a sucker for a sad story. Rachel seemed interested. Mavis, though, was giving me the little frown that meant she was worried about me.

    "It's not like we have to rely just on that!" I rushed to explain. "I was thinking we do this like we have for our other quests. We keep Max back here on comms. If anything happens she rewinds. Mavis and Exada can be our main presence out there, and I'll stay on recon. The only difference is...we bring Rachel out with us." Now it was Max that was looking a little concerned. Even Rachel seemed doubtful, so I tried to elaborate on my reasoning. "If anyone has a chance of talking her down, it's her. And we have me and Max on futurewatch. If one of us senses something bad, we can always pull back and retry."

    The two of them seemed mollified by that. "And if I'm out there," Rachel added, "Lily and I could raise a fog. She can sense through it, and we might be able to see shapes, but it would protect us from making out her face and getting petrified."

    It was a good thought. I didn't tell her that I had seen the fog in my own visions and was going to suggest it myself. It was probably her idea in the first place anyway.

    "Rache, Chloe is going to be so mad if you go out there without her…" Max warned.

    Rachel smiled slyly in response. "Don't worry, I can handle Chloe."

    I stood to grab the Book of Thoth off the table in the next room. "Alright," I said, "here's what I've got."

    We spent the next couple hours planning.


    &&&&&&&​


    "All this fog makes this place look so creepy," Max said, her face pressed up against the window. Looking out the windows of the mobile home was always a strange experience. They looked like big bay windows with screens, the kind of thing you'd see in any normal house, and from inside the MH, you couldn't really feel the movement of the vehicle. But outside, the countryside was rolling and bouncing along, and if you looked the view didn't quite match the size of the window. It was worse from some of the windows upstairs - this was a big house, and the RV exterior wasn't big enough to have windows that corresponded to all the ones inside. The third floor windows always looked out as if you were standing on the roof of the RV, which was particularly weird when going through over passes - you literally passed through overpasses, getting flashes of darkness and concrete out the windows.

    Right now there wasn't much to see, just the blank white of the fog bank Rachel and I had summoned. Neither of our abilities were focused on weather control, but we both had some abilities there. I was usually better at sensing and predicting the weather, she was usually better at summoning rainstorms, but we met in the middle at fogs, and so we had spent the last fifteen minutes calling up a double-powered fog bank. It was so thick that I wouldn't feel comfortable driving through it, if it weren't for Sigma Six's enhanced vision modes that let her cut right through it, which was why she was in the driver's seat now.

    "I still think this plan is shit," Chloe said from the couch beside Max's perch by the window. Her gun was on the coffee table in front of where she was sulking.

    Rachel threw her arm over her shoulder. "Come on, Maxine will be looking after me." She gestured over to the third member of their triad. "It'll be fine. Or do you not trust me to her capable hands?"

    Chloe crossed her arms, but from the way she shifted in place it was clear she couldn't argue with one of her girlfriends.

    With the window consumed mostly with fog and no sense of movement, it was hard to tell when the MH came to a stop, but it was mostly visible in the murky shapes of nearby buildings and one stone figure on the sidewalk nearby. After a moment, Sigma six came out from the cockpit room, paused briefly in front of the coffee table to announce, "We have arrived," and then walked back to the kitchen, towards the stairs. Sigma was never the most talkative girl in the world.

    Max settled back into her chair and Chloe picked up her gun. They would both head up to the game room upstairs once we actually got started, because it had covered windows. I pulled my feathered cloak tighter around my shoulders and directed my gaze outside. It did look creepy out there. Seeing the figure of the statue, knowing what it was and what it was experiencing from my vision terrified me.

    My attention was pulled away by Maven and Exada coming in from the storage room. Mavis was in her full armor, a leather paneled and caped thing that looked like it wouldn't be too out of place in Skyrim, with her sword in its scabbard at her side. Beside her, Exada looked wildly underdressed, just a black tank and some cut-off jean shorts. She was carrying her scythe, though, and it looked dangerous enough for the both of them, all black and spiked bands, seeming too large for the height of the ceiling where it's blade hung over her head.

    Mavis came to stand next to me, holding out a walkie-talkie for me. Exada sat Max and Chloe's down, and the two of them would be carrying one each too, in case they got separated in the middle of the fight. They were just normal walkie-talkies, the kind you could buy at Walmart, though they were the more expensive brand. From what we could figure, one of the few benefits of the veil falling was this kind of thing - before, monsters and magic and the like had a way of interfering with technology. Not necessarily breaking it, but wearing it down and jamming it, especially communications tech. Not so anymore.

    "Ready?" I asked everyone.

    "Ready!" Exada responded with a playful salute. Everyone else simply nodded, various degrees of worry on their face. Rachel usually never let her nerves show, but I could tell she was on edge with this being her first combat mission out.

    "Great," I looked at the trio sitting around the coffee table, "uh, we can give you three a moment, if you want?"

    Rachel pulled herself off the couch quickly. "Nope," she leaned down to meet Chloe's lips, an expression of surprise on the blue-haired girl's face, "we're ready." She stepped around the table to give Max a peck on the cheek as well, then joined us in front of the main door. She turned to her girlfriends. "Be back soon," she said, and headed out into the fog, Exada trailing after her for safety. I exchanged a glance with Mavis before following them out.

    They didn't go far, Rachel was leaning against the side of the RV when I got out. From this side, it looked just like a normal, if expensive, camper, and the door we exited was much smaller than the entryway we had gone through. We grouped up a little for a final pre-mission check.

    "Okay," I started. "I'm going to go on ahead. Any questions, anyone?"

    Mavis and Exada had done this before, so it was mostly Rachel I was asking for. She seemed to be more focused on psyching herself up than what I was asking, though, so she just shook her head. When I got no questions, I turned around, pulled on my cloak and turned into a crow. Then I leaped up, closing my eyes and beating my wings to fly blindly into the mist.
     
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    • Look Again 1.3
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    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________​


    Nunnally was grounded.

    Grounded!

    Her brother who - while she loved and adored him - was only three years older than her had ordered her handmaid to refuse to allow her outside their quarters! She wasn't allowed to even visit the school's grounds!

    The worst part was, he didn't even know about her little misadventure in the ghetto. Sayako had been injured and was briefly unconscious when the truck had skidded off the road, which was the only reason the terrorists had been able to grab Nunnally at all. From what she understood, her handmaid was one of the most capable close-combat specialists in the country, a fact which had been critical to Lelouch trusting Nunnally's care to her.

    Because the maid had been unconscious, she couldn't tell Lelouch about the Japanese rebel who had come out of the truck's cab and kept the bystanders away by threatening Nunnally. And she definitely couldn't tell him about them driving off with her. No, instead Nunnally had had the opportunity to tell her brother about how badly damaged her chair was and how a concerned nobleman who happened by had taken Nunnally to find a new wheelchair, calmed her down, and gotten her back to the Academy.

    Her brother's fear - his "concern," to use his words - had just been from finding out that Nunnally had convinced Sayoko to take her out into the city every so often. Just that - combined with the obvious worry when he returned from his gambling to find them absent, as well as Sayoko's own profound sense of guilt and worry - was enough to get him to revoke her permission to leave their quarters.

    Nunnally's explanation of where she had been was, from a certain perspective, the truth. She had, eventually, met Gottwald, and it was thanks to him that she was in a position to get a new chair. He had even delivered her back to the Academy, once she had snuck her way back out of Clovis's headquarters, or near enough. She didn't want to let him know exactly where she was staying, for fear that he might look into the school and find that Lelouch was alive too. But she had gotten him to take her back into the parts of the city that were familiar to her, and with a little bit of help from the other pedestrians she had managed to find her way back on her own. Though, if she was being completely honest, she wasn't sure "nice" was a proper descriptor for the marquis. "Profoundly concerned with her well-being," perhaps, but in the general sense he seemed to fall a little short.

    Ultimately, getting back to the Academy had not proved that difficult. She had gotten a phone number to contact Gottwald at, so she now at least had a contact. The whole Clovis thing…

    Well, it seemed she had somewhat underestimated how important the straightjacket girl had been to their father. Clovis's court had exploded into chaos, just as she had wanted, but she had partly expected her own name to come up a few times. After all, Clovis was convinced she was being held hostage by traitorous groups within the Britannian Guard. It seemed like the type of thing that would go on news bulletins, if nothing else.

    Instead, after only about three days of political purges from the military and political hierarchy, Area Eleven had been quietly pulled away from Clovis's stewardship. News reports talked about Clovis returning to the homeland for a sabbatical and he just...never came back. In his place had been...nothing really, and the panicked reorganization had continued as the government seemed to flounder, rudderless, in his absence.

    Whatever the girl had been held for, whatever black operation that she had been a part of, she must have been even more important than Nunnally had initially thought, because members of the royal family didn't disappear often. When they did, like they had in the case of Lelouch and herself, it was usually for a political purpose, and only after they had lost a lot of favor from the Throne. That was one of the scariest parts about the disappearance: it implied that their father likely knew something about her powers, if he had been holding and experimenting on the girl who gave them to her.

    That, however, was a concern too dangerous for her to contemplate. Instead, she focused on an easier goal: figuring out her powers. She had noticed while in Clovis's camp that she hadn't been given a perfect understanding of the limits of her power. She understood the basics - she could edit the sight of anyone who saw her, the hearing of anyone who heard her, or the sensations of anyone who touched her. There were some obvious built in limits. She could only affect people who would otherwise be observing her. She only affected them while they were observing her. But there were obvious questions. Gottwald had seen her through a screen and that was enough to receive his vision, and the same had been true over the radio. Would it work with recordings?

    She could also see through many, many different eyes at once - she hadn't noticed a limit. However, every time she had edited senses so far, she had worked in groups, giving everyone she was connected to the same illusions. How would she even go about targeting specific individuals with different images?

    It was lucky for her, then, that she had the advantage of an unusually crowded living space. Since Sayoko had broken her arm and gotten a mild concussion from the crash, she had recommended a reliable maid from the Ashford's staff to work with them and take some of her duties assisting Nunnally until she was healed enough to resume her work. She was still overly protective of her charge, of course, so Sayoko still stayed with them, giving Nunnally a total of three different people to test her ability with. Two, considering she was somewhat leery of using it on Lelouch - it would be too much of a risk to do anything that could even begin to tip him off about her abilities, and she worried that he might notice if she created even the tiniest inconsistency in his view.

    She began her experiments, then, by testing to see if there were any differences between Sayoko and their new maid, Karina's, vision when Nunnally saw through it. There wasn't any reason there should be; Sayoko was pure Japanese while Karina was half Britannian, but that didn't seem likely to cause any obvious differences. This was borne out in her experience - their vision didn't have any distinguishing qualities. What was interesting, however, was that Nunnally could still feel the distinction between the two. It wasn't as though there was a name attached to each viewpoint in her mind, exactly, she just knew that the two viewpoints were different and distinct, and after a few hours with them she felt she would probably be able to identify Karina's vision any time she could see through it, even if she didn't have prior context to identify it with, much like she could identify people by their voices.

    Her next test was giving them different visions. She found, to her chagrin, that this was far more difficult than she had expected it to be. Her power seemed to give her a natural ability to visualize things in detail that made creating the illusions relatively easy as long as she had some bit of experience to draw off of. When she altered peoples' senses, it also gave her a clear picture of what the world looked or sounded like both with the effect of her powers and without them, creating a sort of double-vision anytime she showed someone an illusion where she saw both the illusion and the real world separately. The difficulty with trying to manage two simultaneous visions was that her power provided none of that separation between the illusions. She had tried it a few times, though tests were difficult to design in ways that wouldn't cause problems if they failed. In one, she tried to make each of the maids hear her call their own name. In another, she made the screen of the TV flicker while they were watching it in a different spot for each of them.

    The problem she ran across was that it was nearly impossible to visualize the two different illusions in enough detail while maintaining the separation between the two. Each time she tried, she instead got a garbled combination of the two illusions, which she took to mean she would be unable to create but one illusion of reality at a time. That was a very important, and potentially dangerous, piece of information. She was glad she had gone with the plan she did at Clovis's base - her other plan had involved bringing Gottwald in with her and setting he and her half-brother against each other by showing them different visions of the same event. That would have been impossible if she had actually tried it and she would have been stuck.

    The recording test was the next thing on her list. She already had a number of music players, and she convinced her brother to buy her a simple voice recorder as a consolation for being confined to their rooms. Figuring out how her power might theoretically work with recordings was difficult enough, so she tried different things with each recording - in one she attempted to "preset" what the illusory sound she played would be by imagining herself saying something distinctive and surprising. In others she did nothing in case the power would be triggered upon hearing her voice no matter what the original intention.

    It turned out that she needn't have bothered, as the maids both reported hearing nothing but her hummed songs in all of the recordings. It looked, then, like anything she wanted to effect over a distance would have to be live.

    She made other tests - seeing if either the sensory or the illusions part of her power had time limits outside their obvious trigger limits; seeing if she could project things that didn't exist in reality (she confined this to her edits of the television shows her maids watched, so as to avoid any kind of existential crises in the women). Ultimately, the results she got were about what she would have expected. She had essentially complete control of the illusion she could create, as long as: she could visualize it, she was within the field of the target's sense, and nothing the targets saw contradicted each other.

    Her confinement was only lifted for one important occasion, and after days of speaking with no one except herself, her brother, and the two maids, the prospect of the weekly student council meeting was very exciting. Sayoko brought her down to the meeting room and she spent nearly an hour after the meeting catching up with Milly about what was going on and how the various girls pursuing her brother were doing. It was here when she saw her opportunity.

    Milly Ashford was one of the only people her brother trusted enough to allow Nunally to meet with alone, and he tended to leave them when they got talking about gossip like they were."Miss Milly," she suggested about halfway into the student council president's report, "could we take tea outside? Brother grounded me when he discovered Sayoko sometimes takes me off the grounds." She pouted, just to manipulate Milly and not because she was still sore over the grounding. "I understand he is worried about me, but I still need fresh air."

    Milly laughed and agreed with her, likely seeing right through the attempted manipulation with the pout. Not that there was really much manipulation going on - Nunnally really did just want a chance to visit the tea garden. With the grounding, she had not had the chance to visit the garden, something she was quite looking forward to, with the new possibility of seeing through others eyes. Did the garden look as nice as it smelled? She had trouble imagining it wouldn't, with how much effort the groundskeepers put into it.

    Milly rolled her out of the clubhouse and down the cobbled path to the gardens. Nunnally savored the sensation of the open air and the sight of the grounds. Ashford Academy was a gorgeous estate, large enough and well-maintained enough that there were multiple flower gardens beyond the tea garden. She had taken this path enough before that she recognized each little bump in the paving and the smell of the flowers they passed, but seeing it felt very different. She couldn't help but smile. She could see the sun that she could previously only feel on her face. She could admire the flowers she had only smelled. She took a deep breath, relishing the sense of freedom.

    "...of acting like an invalid," Nunnally caught from beyond a corner ahead of them.The voice made her freeze for a moment, almost causing her to cough. That voice. She would recognize that voice anywhere. She went to a specific effort to memorize it, after all.

    When they actually reached the corner, she spotted a girl with short red, limp red hair standing behind some bushes through Milly's eyes. She was facing away from them, so she obviously wasn't expecting to have been overheard. This was the girl that had helped kidnap Nunally, apparently. Affiliated with Japanese rebels, obviously, but why was she here, in Ashford Academy? Now that she thought about it, was she a danger to the other students? Whatever sect of rebels she had been working with had obviously been aggressive enough to take what they thought was an experimental chemical weapon. Who was to say what she might do in response to the attempted purge of Shinjuku?

    She tilted her head consideringly, her thoughts whirling as she tried to figure out an approach while the opportunity presented itself. "Hmm," she hummed to Milly, "I think I know that voice…"

    At the sound of her words, the red-haired girl spun around, only managing at the last moment to turn it into a false stumble that sent her falling to the ground. Her shock seemed genuine, and she had an expression of a meek sort of surprise. Her entire bearing, from the way she held her head to the position of her shoulders had changed in the instant of that spin. "Oh! I'm sorry," she murmured. Nunally could watch her eyes flicker towards Nunnally through Milly's vision. It was so much easier to read people like this! "I don't…" She trailed off.

    It was a stroke of luck that they had apparently caught her without her persona at first, or she never would have recognized the voice, Nunnally mused. It was quieter and somewhat breathy. The redhead gave a cough. She was pretending to be sickly.

    "It is you!" Nunnally exclaimed. "I am terribly sorry for running into you like that the other day, I never got your name."

    The other girl recognized her, clearly, and the fear of being exposed mixed with the shock of being recognized was apparently too much for her to talk through. Either that, or she was quite good at staying in character, because her pale-faced gaping and stuttered half-response would be entirely in keeping with what Nunnally was seeing so far. Luckily, Milly was able to pick up the slack.

    "Miss Stadtfeld, right?" Milly was using her overly-cheerful ditz voice, so she had clearly picked up that Nunnally was up to something. "Kallen Stadtfeld? It's so good to see you back! I heard you were out for a few days. How do you two know each other?" She had remembered who this was at a glance and knew about a major absence off the top of her head. She could probably do that with any of the hundreds of students on campus. Milly really was scary, Nunnally thought.

    Miss Stadtfeld's eyes were growing wider by the moment, obviously worried that Nunnally would say something, so she did her best to reassure the other girl. "Oh, I ran into her on one of the excursions brother grounded me for. Literally!" Nunnally giggled slightly. "She was so quiet Sayako almost hit her with my chair!"

    Milly's vision was flicking between the girl and Nunnally herself, obviously trying to work out what was going on. She knew enough about the maid to know that a schoolgirl would never get that close to her charge. It didn't help that Kallen was still studying her with obvious confusion and panic.

    Nunnally used the brief lull in conversation to try to piece together a further way forward. The name Stadtfeld was obviously Brittanian, and Milly did her research - it wasn't likely the noble house was fake. Was this girl pretending to be a member? She didn't look particularly Japanese, though Nunnally would be the first to admit she was not the most adept at picking out ethnicities by sight after a decade of blindness.

    She needed a way to keep an eye on this girl, in case she made another dangerous move. It couldn't be personal meetings - though there was likely little danger once Sayako recovered, it was still too likely to expose the events of her kidnapping. Some sort of regular function Nunally would be able to attend with built-in witnesses…

    It was obvious once she thought of it that way.

    "I didn't know you were sick," she started with, "now I feel even more terrible for almost hitting you."

    "I'm sorry, I am often sick," replied Miss Statdfeld. It looked like she was finally pulling herself together, although the suspicion and confusion was still audible in her voice. "Mother says...I was born with poor lungs." She coughed delicately.

    "Oh that is awful! It must make it so hard to join any clubs if you are absent so often." Nunnally shifted in her seat, inclining her face toward Milly. It was a habit she had gotten into when she lost her sight, to only partially turn in a conversation-partner's direction. It wasn't like she needed to see them, and even now that she had a form of vision again, she still did not need to rely on her eyes. "Miss Milly, weren't you just saying you needed to recruit someone for the Student Council?" In point of fact, she had not said that, though from the meetings Nunnally had attended recently they had been considering it.

    "That's right!" responded Milly, continuing to play along. Nunnally made a note to herself: she was going to owe Milly quite a favor after this, especially if she wanted the older girl to accept it without asking any uncomfortable questions. Milly leaned in and lowered her voice. "The Council has a lot of privileges to miss events, if we have to," she said in a conspiratorial whisper. "And we only meet every other week! We're allowed to do all of our paperwork on our own time. It's perfect if you don't know when you'll be absent."

    Miss Stadtfeld was glancing back and forth between Milly and Nunnally, clearly still trying to piece together what was going on. Nunnally smiled at her and tilted her head, looking as guileless as she possibly could. "Ah...that sounds…" she trailed off, appearing to search for the word. "Nice. I will think -"

    Nunnally clapped her hands, interrupting the older girl before she could prevaricate properly. "That's wonderful! We were just on our way back to the student council clubhouse! We can get you signed up right away!"

    Through Miss Stadtfeld's eyes, she could see Milly's smile grow wider. Oh. That was the expression brother described as "Milly's 'scary' smile." She flounced over to the redhead's side, latching onto her arm and pulling her along as she pushed Nunnally's chair back towards the clubhouse. Miss Stadtfeld didn't have the presence of mind to question the fact that that was exactly the way they had come from when they ran into her.

    Behind her, Milly was practically humming with pleasure. It definitely wasn't entirely false; Nunnally knew the student council president really loved complicated schemes, the mystery Nunnally had just presented to her was probably like catnip to her. "Ooh, this is going to be so fun!" she cried. "I can already tell we're going to be best friends!"
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Look Again 1.4
  • Threadmarks
    • Look Again 1.4​
    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________​

    "I am approaching the estate," Gottwalde reported through his headset, distracting Nunnally's attention from her paper swans.​

    The headset was a new development, an idea she was quite proud of. Gottwalde's was big and bulky, something closer to a combat communicator, as it had to have speakers enough to project her voice to him and anyone around him. Hers was more subtle, the types she had seen royal bodyguards wear when she left the estate as a child. She had taken up the habit of humming simple tunes almost subconsciously, allowing her near total access to everything the man heard while wearing the equipment. She had a remote that would change his headset to speaker mode, allowing her to extend her senses even further for brief periods.

    It had worked exceptionally well in the time she had been testing it, even if much of what she overheard was troubling. Clovis's court was in chaos with his disappearance, and everyone had seen a sudden opportunity to gain and seized it. Gottwalde would likely have been in a firm position as interim viceroy, had it not been for Clovis's abrupt turn against much of his own trusted guard. Her half-brother had apparently not told anyone what had happened, he had merely fallen on his court in a paranoid frenzy trying to weed out potential traitors. It left Gottwalde - and the cohort he spoke for - somewhat out in the cold.

    Despite how much good she could have done with Gottwalde firmly in command of Area 11, Nunnally wasn't particularly sorry for the lost opportunity. She had eavesdropped on dozens of meetings between leadership of the Purist faction, and their attitude toward the former Japanese people made it very clear that they could not be trusted with any additional power over the population.

    Despite the court's skepticism toward the Purists, Gottwalde didn't get into his position for nothing. He had managed to get himself involved in the treason and sedition investigation Clovis had set into motion before his disappearance, and in the prince's absence, the investigation had almost unilateral power and authority. The only thing keeping the members of the colloquially named "Inquisition" from becoming de-facto rulers of the region was that nearly every faction within the court and military had thrown their hats into that ring.

    None of that was why Gottwalde was on his mission today.

    "Is everything alright, young miss?"

    Karina was sitting at the table next to her, keeping careful track of the finished swans and passing Nunnally paper when she needed to begin a new one. Thanks to Sayako, sitting in the corner with her arm in a sling, Nunnally was able to make out the look of concern on the younger maid's face. "Of course," she assured the woman as she resumed folding the paper she was on. "I'm just worried about my brother," she made the two of them hear from her. Her actual vocal chords were preoccupied keeping up a steady hum to hear what Gottwalde did.

    The two maids exchanged a glance. Obviously, they were aware that Lelouch was away gambling again, and they seemed to have concerns as well. If it had not been for her magical new ability to see, Nunnally might not have been able to catch that Sayako's reassuring tone was an affectation. "Master Lelouch will be fine, Miss."

    She focused back on her swans as the sound of a doorbell came from Gottwalde's senses.

    A few moments later came the sound of a door opening.

    "Good afternoon sir. Are you expected?"

    "I am looking to speak with the lady of the house," Gottwalde responded gruffly. "I am empowered by the special investigation into seditious activity by the hand of his Highness Prince Clovis."​

    Nunnally was somewhat disappointed that she didn't get to see the woman's reaction; she would have to find a way to put together some sort of video equivalent to her headset setup. It had been on her list since she came up with the idea, but the technology for that kind of arrangement was far more expensive than what little allowance she could get out of her brother.

    "Their head maid is an Eleven," Gottwalde growled into his headset.

    "That's wonderful," she sent through his earpiece in a more generous tone than she thought that comment really deserved, "that they are so open-minded."​

    This was the real benefit of this kind of setup. While her power didn't let her hold two separate conversations with people in the same room, the distance of the communications device removed that limit. She imagined, were she connected to an army of agents, she could speak to all of them individually just by talking or humming into one radio. She wasn't sure if she could actually focus on that many different things at once, but that was more of a limit of attention than her superpower.

    "I still don't understand the purpose of this assignment, your highness," Gottwalde said quietly. "They are nobodies. A noble family too weak for the court and more interested in land speculation than politics."

    "I need to know if I can trust you. And them."​

    To his credit, he didn't protest her suspicion or plead his total obedience. He did huff a little in irritation, but he had no way to know she could hear that when he hadn't intended to transmit it through the radio.

    Nunnally was able to finish another two and a half swans before anything more interesting happened. Origami had become a hobby after they had found shelter with the Ashfords. It was in rare company as a craft she could do with her hands even while unable to see the result, feeling through spoken instruction the whole time. Being able to see again made it much easier to understand the resemblance between her products and what they were supposed to represent, though

    The clicking of heels against marble or tile flooring came from Gottwalde's hearing. "Margrave Gottwalde, to what do I owe the pleasure?" It was a woman's voice, with an almost comically strong Britannian accent.

    "My lady," he said, his tone suddenly much more considerate. "I don't mean to inconvenience you in the middle of the afternoon. However, there has been some concern over your husband's business in the homeland. I was hoping to speak with you to resolve any potential problems that might arise."

    The woman seemed somewhat shocked at his words, because she didn't speak for another few moments. When she did respond, her voice was slightly tremulous. Nunnally imagined she was nervous. "Of course, I wouldn't want to stand in the way of an investigation."

    "Of course," Gottwalde replied. "Would here be alright, or would you prefer to move to somewhere more comfortable?"

    There was more hesitance on the woman's end. Presumably, because she did in fact have something to hide. When she spoke again, it was with a veneer of self-assurance that she didn't have before. "The foyer, I should think. Maid!" There was a flurry of footsteps and rustling cloth. "Prepare tea in the foyer. I promise, I can make…any assurances you need." Oh ew, was that what adult women sounded like when they were trying to be seductive?

    There was more rustling clothing, footsteps, and a "right this way, sir," as Gottwalde was led somewhere else in the building. It was another opportunity to focus primarily on her swan folding.​

    She had heard the legend from Sayako and couldn't resist the excuse to make more swans. Now that she could see them through her maids' eyes, she thought they were quite pretty, even if they weren't the most complicated fold she had ever done before.

    There was a clinking of porcelain and the creaking of a door, then the sound of upholstery. The door creaked and closed again.

    "So, Margrave, we are alone."​

    Gross. Maybe this whole plan wasn't a good idea. She couldn't even say for sure that Gottwalde wouldn't take her up on the implied offer. Adults were weird.

    "Your husband spends months at a time in the homeland, correct?" He asked, his businesslike voice reassuring Nunnally in her choice of agent.

    "That's right. He isn't due back for another week." Was her voice closer to Gottwalde? She was not very good at being subtle about this.

    "His primary investments are in land in the Britannian Basin, but I believe he has purchased shares in a number of businesses based in Area 6. Has he had any dealings with the Pescadores?"

    "No! I did not marry a criminal!" That at least got her to drop the whole seductress routine. "My husband is close friends with the commissioner for Area 6. It was a personal favor to invest in his businesses."

    "I see. So your husband exchanged capital for favorable business deals from Area 6, then? Are you aware that this could qualify as corruption under homeland-Area trade regulations?"​

    Nunnally heard the other woman's gasp, and then stutter, as if trying to start a sentence. After eight years of blindness, she was used to listening to a conversation more than seeing it, but the last few weeks of her vision being restored had spoiled her, and now she couldn't help but imagine a foppish Britannian woman gaping like a fish. She didn't bother stifling her giggles, she merely projected an illusion of her earlier calm in the visions of her two maids.

    "Madam, there is a sickness in the heart of this area's elite that his Highness Prince Clovis warned us of before his sabbatical. It is my duty to investigate even the faintest trail before me. Your loyalty to your husband is admirable, but I must insist you tell me what you know of his business. Surely, if he has left you for his trips to the homeland, you can not be held accountable for his indiscretions."

    Now Gottwalde was being overly obvious. There was a long moment of silent tension, and Nunnally imagined the woman had just opened her mouth to speak again, when there was the banging sound of a door being slammed open.

    It was a familiar voice that interrupted the two. "Mother, there's a -"

    Kallen Stadtfeld stopped mid-sentence, presumably noticing the man her mother was speaking with.

    "Ah, Kallen." Lady Stadtfeld's voice was strained. "This is Margrave Jeremiah Gottwalde. He is with Prince Clovis's special investigation into seditious activity. There are…some concerns about your father. Margrave Gottwalde, this is my step-daughter and heir, Kallen. The child of some…affair of my husband's before we were married, but as I am unable to conceive, we agreed to have her legitimized. She is quite sickly." The words were pointed, and provoked a delicate cough from the girl.

    "I see." Gottwalde said neutrally. "Miss Stadtfeld. You look quite familiar. Have I met you before?"

    "I spend most of my time in the estate," Kallen demurred.

    "Perhaps your natural mother, then?"

    There was a moment of silence and rustled cloth. Perhaps a shake of her head or some other non-verbal denial. Whatever it was, Lady Stadtfeld followed it up with, "She is not in the picture, Margrave."

    "I see. I am sorry for your loss, Miss." He paused a moment, as though a thought had just occurred to him. "Perhaps, if you feel up to it l, you could show me to your father's study? If you don't mind, Mrs. Stadtfeld. I don't want to continue wasting your time."

    There was another long silence filled with the sound of rustling cloth, presumably much of the conversation going unspoken., before Mrs. Statdtfeld said, "yes, of course."

    "I would be honored to assist the inquisition," Kallen added meekly, provoking a hiss from her step-mother.

    "Kallen! The special investigation into seditious activity. Do not use that crass nickname. I apologize, Margrave."

    Gottwalde chuckled good-naturedly. "It is alright. It is quite a mouthful. Now, young lady, if you would lead on?"

    There was a long stretch of footsteps and doors and rustling cloth. It was enough that Nunnally almost didn't notice that one of the doors came from her own and the maids' hearing instead of Gottwalde's.​

    "Sorry I'm late," came her brother's voice. Were it not for the other conversation she was listening in on, she likely would have heard him in the hallway before he got in.

    "Brother!"

    "Welcome home, sir."

    Nunnally watched his vision pan over the room, while through the eyes of her maids she could see him examine the three of them. "Nunnally, Sayako, Karina, I'm home."

    "Welcome home," Nunnally repeated. It was apparently a Japanese set phrase that the two of them had picked up after years with Sayako.

    Her brother's vision focused in on the colored squares of paper on the table that Nunnally, Sayako, and Karina had been folding. "What were you doing here?"

    "Sayako was teaching us more origami!" Nunnally explained. "She told me about an old Japanese superstition."

    "Oh?"

    Karina was fidgeting with the papers in front of her, obviously nervous about being revealed as having taught a young, helpless, impressionable Britannian girl about a very non-Britannian craft. Nunnally hurried to answer her brother's questioning tone, hoping to soothe the new maid's fears. Brother knew that she enjoyed learning about Japanese traditions and culture, and he certainly knew she practiced origami sometimes. "They say that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true. Do you have any wishes you want granted?"

    Even without being able to see through the eyes of the two maids, Nunnally would have been able to imagine the affectionate smile on his face just by the tone of his voice. "Oh no, not me. If you are the one folding them, surely it should be your wish they grant. What will you wish for?"

    She took a second to consider that.

    "I believe I recognize that uniform," Gottwalde said to his guide, startling Nunnally briefly out of her moment of contemplation. She had almost forgotten that she was invested in an entirely different conversation right now. "It is for Ashford Academy, correct? Run by the Ashford family? You are a student there?"​

    "I wish...the world were a more gentle place," she answered her brother. That was a safe answer, and it had the benefit of being true, too.

    "When my condition allows me to attend," Kallen replied. She was still maintaining her sickly tone.

    "Hm." Gottwalde seemed to take some meaning from that response that Nunnally couldn't figure out.​

    She was distracted enough following the other conversation, that she let slip something from her thoughts that she hadn't meant to voice, forgetting to replace it with silence in her brother and the maids' ears with her powers. "I also wish you weren't always running off to gamble."

    "Ashford Academy has an associated middle school, doesn't it?" Gottwalde asked conversationally. This was not in the plan, and right in the middle of another conversation with her brother was not the time for Nunnally to figure out what her agent here was doing.​

    "Nunnally," her brother tried to console her. "You don't need to worry about me. It's just enough to maintain our safe houses." He had the nerve to smile at her like that while he was lying to her face. Not that he realized she could see it, of course.

    Gottwalde added on, as if an afterthought to his previous comment, "they have very similar neckties." It came to Nunnally like hot lead settling in her stomach. She had been wearing her uniform when he had found her, and she hadn't been thinking to hide it from him. He could have, conceivably, searched the information of every school in the city to find one whose uniforms matched what he had seen.

    "Right." Kallen responded, clearly confused by the man.​

    "And besides," Lelouch after a moment's pause. Had he been considering what he was going to tell her? Hiding something? "I think I will have faced all the nobles in Tokyo soon. I'll probably have to quit after the next few games." He said it lightly, as though it were a joke, but Nunnally knew her brother. If he said anything like that, he meant it. He wouldn't be out gambling much longer then. Somehow, despite knowing he would be safer, it didn't make her feel any better.

    "I don't suppose you are familiar with any of the Ashford middle schoolers?" Oh no, this was not part of the plan at all. She had even worked with Kallen on the student council, so there wasn't enough distance to keep her cover from being blown. At least she could edit any revelations out of his hearing, though without affecting both him and Kallen it might become noticeable in their conversation.

    "Ashford middle school is on a segregated part of the campus, and my attendance means I rarely get a chance to meet even my own peers."

    "A shame. What did you say you suffered from?"

    Kallen was quiet for a moment. Nunnally thought she might respond with something cutting, based on what she had observed of her in the student council so far, but was surprised to find her response still demure and polite. "I was born with anemia and had a blood illness when I was three that exacerbated it. My father said it runs in my birth mother's family."​

    Yes. This was good. Kallen was far better at playing a cover role than Nunnaly would have given her credit for when she had been listening in on her back in the truck. All she had to do was keep deflecting Gottwalde's questions and avoid tipping him off.

    She was caught a little off guard when her brother sat down at the table across from where she was working.

    "Have you already eaten?" he asked as she finished another swan, this one in a fun purple color.

    "We were waiting for you to return, Master Lelouch," Sayako responded.

    "Then why don't we eat now? I'm sure there's something left over from last night's meal." It was so odd to be able to see his expressions again. He put on a show of acting more delicate than he ever had been growing up. It was bizarre to see so little passion in her brother.

    "I wonder if you could find some information on a student at Ashford middle school for me," said Gottwalde, his voice light.

    "I apologize, but giving information on a child to a grown man I do not know seems improper." Kallen was doing a very good job matching his tone, when Nunnally would be willing to bet her thoughts were far more heated.

    Gottwalde did not respond right away, and when he did it was with an air of false cheer. "A shame. I do apologize for having your house's assets seized, but you understand why we would have suspicions about your father."

    One set of footsteps stopped.

    As skilled as Kallen was at playing her role, her anger was palpable from the tone of her voice. "Pardon?"

    "His dalliance with that Eleven maid you have is too much of a risk, given the recent terrorist action in Shinjuku." Wait, was that the connection that Kallen had to the rebels? She was half Japanese but had been legitimized by her Britannian father?

    There was a sudden cacophony of sound and a series of heavy thuds, with shoes scuffling against tiled floor. There were grunts and the sound of flesh on flesh. Had Kallen just tried to attack Gottwalde? Despite her own experiences with the girl, Nunnaly was shocked at the thought that she might be able to assault someone, even if they had just been threatening her.​

    Nunnally's heart was in her throat at how badly this had gone off track. Gottwalde was supposed to plant the hidden mic/speakers so she could figure out what Kallen's deal was, not threaten her until she attacked him! And now she might be responsible for the death of a classmate - not to mention her only lead on information about the strange woman who had given her her superpowers.

    She couldn't stop him directly, not without outing her powers to him. If anything, this sudden turn was a perfect illustration why she couldn't trust the man with this sort of information. But what she could do was try to interrupt.

    "Margrave Gottwalde, are you there?" she made him hear through his earpiece. By the time she had acted, though, the sounds of struggle had quieted.

    "Blood will out, indeed," Gottwalde said, audibly breathing more heavily, ignoring Nunnaly's attempt to stop him. "I would prefer to cut your throat here and now, but your base cunning and political unimportance make you useful to me."

    "What do you want?" Kallen's voice was far worse off, and she was no longer making any attempt to hide her anger behind a false front.

    "Exactly what I said before. I want information on a student at Ashford Middle School. She is a crippled and blind girl. Does that sound familiar to you?"

    Even having broken character, Kallen was apparently capable of obfuscating effectively. "I told you, I don't know most of the people my own age. Why do you think I would know some little girl?"

    "Then find her. I will leave you information for a drop. If you do not find the girl and keep an eye on her within the week, I will have your father's entire estate audited. Once your halfbreed status is uncovered, you will wish you had been simply executed. Do you understand me?"

    There was a tense moment, and Nunnally decided to try to pull him away from this course of action again. "Margrave Gottwalde, please report."

    "Fine," Kallen spat.

    "Repeat your orders back to me."

    There was another moment, and Nunnally had time to realize stopping this was a lost cause. "You want me to find this girl for your sick fetishes and describe her to you."

    "No." There was a sound of flesh meeting flesh. "Once you find her, you tell me everything about her. Her name, her interests, her star sign. Everywhere she goes and everyone she talks to. And the Stadtfeld family might just continue."​

    "Cornelia will probably be arriving in the area in the next month," Lelouch commented.

    The words pulled Nunnally's attention to their apartment, where she was surprised to find that food had already been set for them. She had been so caught up with what was going on in the Stadtfeld estate that she had missed the intervening time. Hopefully if her brother had said anything important she would have caught it.

    Only a moment later did her mind catch up to the actual words he had said. "Oh?" she managed to project neutrally.

    "Prince Clovis returned to Britannia more than two weeks ago, and Area 11 cannot be without a regent for much longer. Cornelia's campaign in Area 18 just concluded, so she is the most likely candidate for the position. Unless they select outside the royal family, of course." Brother was being circumspect because the new maid was present and sitting right at Nunnally's elbow, ready to feed her her portions if needed.

    "Fine," Kallen acceded. "But if I find this girl and give you the information, how do I know that you won't kill me anyway?"

    "You don't," Gottwalde replied. "You will simply have to trust in the honor of my word."

    Kallen made a sound akin to spitting.​

    "I hope Princess Cornelia can prevent any tensions from the Shinjuku incidents," she projected to her brother and their maids. With what the official report had been on the Shinjuku massacre, Cornelia's sometimes black-and-white mentality could spark genuine conflict in Area 11. Nunnally still wished she could see her sister again but perhaps this was not the best time for her to come to the island. At least her presence would likely mean Euphimia would come too, who Nunnally could hope might restrain her older sister.

    She took the knife and fork the maid placed in her hand and tapped lightly until she reached the slice of beef on the plate. Even though she had to some degree recovered her vision, she couldn't change her behavior lest her brother notice something different.

    "Margrave Jerimiah Gottwalde, in the name of your princess, report immediately," she projected into his ear.

    "I'll do it. Not like I have a choice."

    There was a rustling of clothes and a few more footsteps. "Good," Gottwalde confirmed. "I assume this is the study? Then I will deliver the drop information this evening and hear from you within the week."

    A door creaked open and slammed closed amidst the sound of more motion.

    "Apologies, ma'am," he whispered into his earpiece a few moments later. "The bugs have been placed in common areas of the estate. I am placing the ones in the study now. I was unable to respond because I was attempting to avoid suspicion while placing them on the person of the lady of the house and her daughter."​

    Gottwalde was lying to her. If he was bold enough to blackmail one of her brother's classmates to check up on her, could he be trusted as her agent?

    "You didn't need to go that far," she reprimanded lightly. As much unease she was feeling at the moment toward the man, she couldn't let on that she had caught him going behind her back, not without potentially giving away more information on her abilities than she could trust him with. "I don't want the family disturbed."

    "Apologies for overstepping my bounds, your highness. It will not happen again." The nerve he had to say that while actively making plans to track her down.​

    "Princess Cornelia is a renowned military strategist. I'm sure she can handle any tensions that flare up." Her brother's tone was mild, but Nunnally didn't miss the tightly restrained sense of tension in his words. They were talking past each other somehow but with another conversation going on at the same time, she couldn't devote enough energy to figuring it out. "In case anything does happen, though, you'll need to stay safe, okay? For the next little while, I don't want Sayako taking you off the Academy grounds. You can have your classmates visit you here."

    Her grounding was permanent?

    "See that it doesn't," she managed to send into Gottwalde's senses.​

    She needed to figure Gottwalde out before she could work on getting her brother to lighten up; her punishment a little. He professed loyalty, but then started working behind her back. Did that mean he needed to be dropped as an agent entirely, or could he still be a valuable resource as long as she managed him carefully?

    He certainly seemed like his devotion was genuine, and perhaps from his perspective his actions made sense. A lone princess, blind and confined to a wheelchair, did not a picture of self-sufficience make. Maybe she should have given him some believable lie to throw him off the trail. It was too late now, though, so she needed to focus on what she could still do. How could she intercept his efforts to use Kallen against her?

    "In the next few months, I might be out more nights," her brother said, drawing her attention again. She responded with a curious noise. "I have a…project planned."

    "Brother, you promised you were almost done gambling!"

    He chuckled at her concern and gave her a serene smile. "Don't worry, it's nothing like that. It's just a surprise I'm planning for someone. I promise, no showing my face in front of big-shot nobles. Cross my heart."

    She hummed noncommittally, frowning at his words. Something about them put her on edge, even though they were perfectly innocuous.
    When there was no response from her brother, Nunnally turned her attention to cutting up her meat and getting the little bite-sized pieces into her mouth. Her thoughts were back to the dilemma with Gottwaldel, trying to fit the pieces together into a plan that would get him to stop searching for her.

    As she schemed, she hummed lightly into the microphone in her earpiece and into the air of the kitchen, spreading her control to all who heard her voice. She listened to Gottwalde as he planted the hidden microphone speakers around the Stadtfeld estate, following her original plan to figure out what kind of contacts Kallen had. She altered the hearing of her maids and brother to insert her side of the idle conversation about her brother's day at school.

    And through the entire evening the sense of foreboding never left her.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Quiet Wind (A:tLA)
  • Threadmarks
    • In an effort to make a practice of putting more of what I write out there, here is a little bit of what I did for this year's NaNoWriMo.

    Quiet Wind (A:tLA)​
    Aang pulled against the chains holding him, but they didn't budge. Maybe if he had learned earthbending, he would be strong enough to pull them out of the big metal pillars on either side of him.

    He let his arms go limp and let the tension on the chains hold him up for a minute. He needed to get out of here, Katara and Sokka were counting on him. Zhao had left him in the prison alone for who knows how long, so he had to use this opportunity to get free and get the frogs in his pocket back to his friends.

    He took a deep breath and did the only bending available to him while pinned in place like this: he blew a gale force wind from his mouth, forcing himself back and pulling the chains tight. It almost wrenched his shoulders out of their sockets and he could feel the manacles dig into his wrists, so he stopped almost immediately. He still had his bending, surely there was something he could do. Maybe he could go into the Avatar state. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on getting out really hard.

    He didn't seem to be getting his glow on by the time he heard the door creak open again. He took a moment to collect himself before facing Zhao again, but when he opened his eyes, it wasn't the admiral that greeted him.

    The intruder in his room moved with unnatural silence, her feet making no sound on the floor. She was focused on Aang intently as she closed the door slowly behind her. He recognized her uniform - it was the same reds and browns of the Fire Nation army, but it was leather and flowy, and her hair was pulled up in a topknot. She wore a headband and the same sort of face paint that he had seen in the archers that had captured him.

    As he watched, she stepped further into the room, her focus never wavering from him. She stopped, still silent, halfway between Aang and the door.

    "What do you want from me?" Aang asked. Admiral Zhao had made it pretty clear that they were just going to keep him here until…he didn't know what. Until they got bored? Until they thought there was a way to kill him without him reincarnating? Until he died?

    The woman's face abruptly twisted into a scowl of disdain. When she finally spoke, her voice was softer than Aang had expected. "I came to meet a real Airbender of old. I don't know what I expected."

    Aang didn't miss the mocking tone in her voice, and tried to fight his exhaustion and square himself up. "Yeah? Why don't you let me free and I'll show you what I can do!"

    The woman, as if in response, slid her feet apart and settled into a strange stance Aang had never seen before. He tried to figure out how to deflect a fireball without his arms, even as her hands began moving.

    "Too afraid to fight me in - " As she completed her move with a sharp hand motion, Aang's voice cut out unexpectedly.

    "No, it's not your turn to talk now," the woman said as she slid back out of her stance. "I have questions."

    Aang opened his mouth and tried to answer her, but he couldn't make a sound. His face was screwing up in confusion, his thoughts thrown entirely off track. He took a deep breath, just to be sure he still could and found nothing blocking his throat. He had never heard of a firebending technique like this before. How could there be a firebending ability like this? If anything, messing with is voice like this would be -

    His eyes widened and he let out his breath, filling it with his own chi, prodding fearfully at the air around him and eyeing the woman with shock at what he found.

    The woman ignored the squall of emotions going in his chest and moved closer to him, stepping onto the dais he was being held on. She was only a little taller than Aang up close, and her body was similarly slight and wiry. She turned her attention almost contemplatively to the braiser on the pillar that held his right arm captive. "Do you know how you earn your tattoos in the Yuyan?" she asked, gesturing at the marks on her face.

    Aang knew - he could feel - that he could still breath just fine, but he was feeling dizzy anyway. He didn't know what his face looked like, but he was torn between so many emotions that he almost felt numb. At the mention of tattoos, he couldn't help but feel a little bit of pride. She had tattoos. She had kept…

    "You have to kill an airbender." The words probably would have been a hammer blow of horror or despair or something, if Aang weren't in some sort of emotional shock right now. "Not individually. They send a squad of recruits ready for graduation on a hunt whenever there are rumors of prohibited bending. I think they make things up, more often than not. There aren't many real ones left, these days. My team, it turned out, was hunting a rogue sandbender that was bothering one of the colonies. The officers don't care one way or the other. The rumors say airbending, the Yuyan were dispatched, the problem is gone. Congratulations, you've earned your tattoos."

    It felt like there was something rising in Aang's throat, bile maybe, and he wanted to say something, to do something to get her to stop talking. Any pride he had felt had melted away. The most he felt was a sort of pressure behind his eyes that he thought might be the Avatar state building up in him. Or maybe it was just whatever emotion it was that he was having trouble putting a name to.

    The woman was still talking, still into the fire instead of at him. "Ever since, I've wondered: who could be that stupid? To know the fire nation destroyed your kind and still let others see your bending?"

    Now that he realized what it was, it was easy enough for Aang to focus a little bit and on an exhale disrupt the bubble of stilled air around his mouth. When he spoke again, he actually made a sound again. "You're -"

    "It's arrogance," the Yuyan archer cut him off, slipping back into her stance and silencing him again. "The hubris of the old monks, that they could sit atop their mountains and the world would ignore them. Ignore the threat they posed by their very nature. How could they be so proud? So complacent?"

    "That's not true!" Aang said, dispelling the silence again. "The air nomads lived in harmony with the world! It was the Fire Nation that wanted to conquer everything!"

    "Of course they did. It is in fire's nature to burn. If the monks had seen that and taken action, we would not be where we are today."

    Aang was having trouble keeping up with the conversation, his thoughts were reeling so much. Why did she hate the air nomads so much? How could she be working for the Fire Nation army? None of this made sense and Aang was tired and he just wanted to go back to his friends with the frogs. He still tried to muster up a response, even though he thought maybe this woman was really upset about something else and was just taking it out on him. "The air nomads were pacifists!"

    "Well maybe they shouldn't have been so selfish!" The last word came out as a literal rush of air which threw Aang back against his chains and set the flames on either side of him flickering wildly. When he had recovered, Aang examined the woman closer and realized she was shaking. In the one word, she had lost all her poise and was examining her hands like there was something wrong.

    "You're an airbender," Aang said, finally voicing his realization now that he had incontrovertible proof.

    The woman's voice was small and held none of the self assurance she had before. "No." Looking at her now, she looked younger than he thought she had before. If it weren't for her tattoos, he would place her at no older than Sokka. "The airbenders are all dead," she said. "I'm nothing."

    But he had seen what she had done a moment ago, he knew what his senses told him. He couldn't suppress a smile that was growing. There was another airbender! He wasn't the only one! "I saw you bend the air! And you did it before, to stop my voice! That was a really cool trick you'll have to teach me. And you can let me out."

    She looked up sharply at that. "No, I can't. I can't - I'm Yuyan. I have to listen to my superiors."

    "Yes you can! I'm the Avatar! If you let me go I can defeat the Fire Lord! If there's one airbender still alive, there might be more!"

    "Where was the Avatar a hundred years ago?" she asked, silencing Aang with just her words this time. "When the temples fell?"

    Aang didn't have an answer.

    "Where was the Avatar when my people had to scatter to the winds? When your people had to scatter to the winds or become ash? How can you come to us now, a century too late, and expect my help? Because we can both move the air? That is nothing to me. No matter what, my people will survive. Like we did the purge, like we did these last hundred years. As long as the Fire Nation doesn't know our secret, we will survive."

    Aang looked back up at that. The Fire Nation didn't know? Were the Yuyan archers all airbenders? How was that possible?

    "Even now, you are arrogant," the woman continued. "You think that the fall of the temples was the end of all airbenders. Do you not know the meaning of the word nomad? Even if the Fire Nation learned of the Yuyan's deception, they could not rid the world of everyone with the ability."

    "There are more airbenders," Aang said, trying to hold onto the hope she was giving him.

    She rolled her eyes. "Of course there are more airbenders. How can you kill the sky? The ones who survived learned the true nature of air."

    "Then let me go," Aang insisted. "We can find the rest of them, together. We could -"

    "And what of my mother?" she asked, interrupting him. "She is still in the Yuyan. Or Auntie Jin? She is eighty-three and is too weak to flee the Fire Nation. What of Naijo, my squadmate, who would kill you for the mistakes your temples made that forced us to hide in the grasp of our hunters? Or the hundreds of Yuyan archers like my squadmate Ysona, who were raised pure Fire Nation and would kill us in a heartbeat if they knew what we were?"

    She began to pace, walking around the circle of the dais, forcing Aang to twist around uncomfortably to try to keep her in sight.

    "Even if I were to free you," she said, "you could not escape alone. Even now, you don't truly understand your element if you think it is naught but gale winds and funnel clouds. You would be caught the instant you stepped out those doors."

    The room was quiet for a long minute. Aang thought she was looking for a response, but he had been so thrown off by revelation after revelation that he wasn't able to think through anything she was saying. "What do you want?" he eventually asked.

    She didn't respond immediately, instead continuing to pace until she had come around the other side and Aang could see her again. "I don't know," she admitted. "When I heard the Avatar had been captured, I had to see you. To know the truth of the benders my ancestors came from. Now that you know, the elders would say you are a risk. You should be killed to ensure the secret cannot get out. If you were killed, your spirit would be reborn in the Water Tribe. Killing you would be the most prudent choice."

    Aang's eyes widened, but he didn't have a response to that. As far as he could tell she did have all the power here, and unless he actually did end up going all glowy Avatar-state, there was nothing he could do to stop her. He had to hope that something - their shared element, his work against the Fire Nation, something would be enough to sway her in his favor.

    The weighty silence was broken by a small papping noise and a quiet croak. Both airbenders looked down to see something small and half-frozen that had fallen out of Aang's tunic.

    "My frogs," he said, numbly. He looked up and met the grey eyes of another airbender. "I have to get them to my friends."

    From the emotions on her face, she looked confused and irritated and possibly also frustrated. He thought maybe there were more hopeful emotions in there too, but that might just be wishful thinking.

    Any answer she had for him was cut short by the door opening again.

    Almost faster than Aang, could blink, the Yuyan archer spun on her heel and drew her bow off her back, nocking an arrow and drawing all within the span of an eyeblink. The figure that had entered froze.

    It was not, as Aang might have expected, a Fire Nation guard. The figure wore all black and wielded a heavy sword in each hand. His face was covered by a fearsome mask painted in blue and white. He was frozen half a step away from the door, and from the slight movement in his mask, he was judging the distance between himself and the Yuyan archer.

    "Stop," she said cooly, all trace of her previous emotional conflict vanished. "Not another step. You are here for the Avatar." Despite the words, the last did not sound like a question.

    The blue mask inclined slightly, but the figure didn't speak or give any other indication of hearing. He merely stood, sharing a long and tense stare with the archer. Neither moved, though Aang saw the archer's fingers twitch from where they were holding back the string. In turn, the masked figure's fingers were clenched tight around the the hilts of his swords. Their eyes never left each other.

    Aang looked between them as they faced off. He didn't know the masked man at all, and couldn't imagine what he wanted. He thought he knew the Yuyan girl pretty well now, but he still couldn't figure out what she actually wanted. He didn't think she knew either. He was just tired and worried about Sokka and Katara. Had they realized he was gone by now? Were they trying to look for him despite their sicknesses? He was supposed to save them and he was letting them down.

    The girl looked as surprised as either of them when her bow lowered and she eased the string back into place. The blue guy didn't seem to believe it, taking one tentative step after the other.

    The Yuyan archer girl, however, hung her bow back on her back and turned back around to face Aang. She marched closer to him, but instead of looming over him, she was examining the cuffs of the chains that were holding him in place. After a moment, she glanced back at the masked figure.

    "Well?" she asked, "are you helping me with this?" For a fleeting moment, grey eyes met Aangs before she looked away again. "The Avatar is not going to free himself."

    Finally, after a terrible, wonderful evening full of ambushes and shocking discoveries, Aang felt like he could breathe again.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Rust and Ruin (Naruto/Mistborn)
  • Threadmarks
    • ​
    Rust and Ruin​
    Sakura left the academy grounds feeling confident in her exam.

    She had studied hard, and she had always had a good head for the book stuff, so she was pretty sure she had aced the written section of the tests. The only thing that held her back from getting perfect scores was the rumors she had heard about geniuses. She didn't need that kind of attention on her, thanks!

    The physical section she was less sure on. She was a good fighter, but her physical size and the limits of a teenage girl's body mass meant she would never be a hand-to-hand powerhouse. She was better with throwing weapons, and she was hoping that her talents there were enough to make up for the limits of taijutsu. Plus, senbon were quintessential kunoichi weapons, so she could cover some of her bases there, too. Altogether, she thought she came out to "well above average" in terms of the combat portion.

    The ninjutsu…well, she was never going to be great at ninjutsu anyway, was she? She had focused most of her studying on that, practicing the academy three over and over again until she could be sure she could do everything without any unexpected errors. She thought she had surprised Iruka-sensei with it, even if it was a little slow. He had grown used to some of her more spectacular failures in class, so the fact that she hadn't accidentally swapped her limbs or something while transforming must have been enough of an improvement. Regardless, she had passed, even if it was just barely.

    That meant she was a genin! Tomorrow would be all about team assignments and meeting her Jounin-sensei, but tonight was about celebration!

    Her first stop was Ino, who she met with as they were leaving the grounds. "I passed my test!" She informed the blond.

    Instead of looking suitably impressed, Ino just rolled her eyes. "Of close you did, teacher's pet. You were the top kunoichi in our class. They weren't going to flunk me, so there's no way they would have thrown you out."

    Sakura had not been as confident in passing as Ino was, but then, she didn't have the backing of one of the founding clans behind her. "Yeah, but you have your clan jutsu, and I…" She trailed off, knowing she had already cried to Ino enough about that.

    Luckily, her friend took the complaint in stride. "I worked hard to teach you the academy three, and that's all they tested us on. You had to pass that! And now we're both genin." Her statement was definitive.

    Sakura nodded, taking heart in her friend's faith in her. "Right. I wish I could be on your team." She knew that Ino was already spoken for in the team assignments - the Ino-Shika-Cho trio was practically a sacred institution in Kanoha. Even if it weren't, it was rare for two kunoichi to be on one team.

    "Well, maybe you'll get to be on Sasuke's team," Ino offered. Sakura appreciated the attempt, but she didn't think eye-candy was enough to make up for not having her best friend on her team. "Besides," Ino continued, "no worrying about teams today! Today, we're celebrating!"

    Sakura considered Ino's words and decided she was right. She nodded. "Okay." She even had an idea for this. Graduating and becoming a genin was a big deal! It deserved a big reward, right? "We should get matching necklaces!"

    Ino actually rolled her ear back and groaned at that. "Sakuraaaa! We're real ninja now! All your necklaces and bracelets are going to be a liability on real missions."

    She understood Ino's point, but she crossed her arms in a way calculated to send all her bangles and charm bracelets on each arm clattering against each other anyway. Pretty jewelry was important for a kunoichi! She could use it for distractions! Or as holdout weapons!

    "She's gonna get suspicious," Inner's voice said in her head.

    "You're suspicious," Sakura silently responded with as much maturity as she could muster. "Jewelry is important!"

    "Being suspicious is my job. And jewelry is important, but you can't keep making a big deal about it without someone figuring out something's up. Just steal something if you want it that bad!"

    Sakura pointedly ignored that, instead turning her nose up and speaking to Ino. "Well, maybe I'll just be good enough to protect my jewelry in a fight. Come on!"

    She stomped off in the direction of the jewelry shop closest to the school, knowing that for all her protests Ino would follow her. She kept making irritated noises the whole way there, but Sakura wasn't fooled - she had converted Ino to the value of shiny things long before.

    The jewelry store nearest to them, the one Sakura had visited the most often, was actually marketed to shinobi. Many of their designs were small and discreet, so she thought Ino was blowing the danger out of proportion. When they stepped through the door, the clerk at the front counter recognized her.

    "Haruno-chan, Yamanaka-san! Our favorite customers! What are you in for today?" Her eyes sparkled with amusement. And probably opportunity. Sakura wasn't rich and Ino didn't get her parents to buy them things all that often, but they had made many small purchases over the years.

    Sakura immediately made her way up to the front counter. "I want to see your rings! We just graduated and we're celebrating being real ninja!"

    "Well congratulations!" The clerk ducked down and pulled a tray out from under the counter. "It sounds like you two are due something nice. These were your favorite last time you came in, right?"

    The cushioned display tray she set on the countertop had a dozen rings and pendants on them, and Sakura immediately went to touch them and feel the craftsmanship. She had gotten told off for doing that the first few times she came, but by now they knew her well enough to trust her. She looked through the selection, getting the sinking feeling that something was missing.

    While she was looking, the clerk pulled Ino over to another display. It was mostly earrings. They were Ino's favorite, even if Sakura steered well clear of them.

    Having catalogued everything that was in the collection, she finally realized what the problem was. She called to the clerk, "Wainabi-san, where's the seal ring?" It was her favorite, the one she had sighed over for the past four months. It was big and flashy and gold and even had a small storage seal engraved in the head. It was also the most expensive thing in the collection she regularly looked at.

    The clerk gave her an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid it was purchased by another customer just a few days ago."

    Sakura tried to hide how crushing this news was by going back to the other pieces. They were all gorgeous, some with colored stones and some with shining faces of metal. Because she was a teenager, she knew, they were mostly pretty without being actually expensive; they were brass or aluminum, and the stones that were there were mostly glass. The seal ring was different. It was a slightly unusual design, with a storage seal so tiny as to be almost useless, the kind of thing very few shinobi would actually need for anything except, perhaps, poisonings. It was also pure gold, making it exorbitantly expensive for a mission tool. Anyone who needed one wouldn't need to invest in something as high-quality as that, and anyone who was looking for fine jewelry would find the seal to be an ugly and strange alternative to more traditional settings.

    Sakura had loved it from the moment she had seen it. Maybe she could figure out who bought it and track them down? And maybe see how well they were taking care of it?

    She shook the thought off as Inner Sakura's influence and looked over the pieces that were still available. If there was one upside to this, it was that she could buy a lot more of the lesser pieces with the money she had been saving up for the seal ring. She was barely halfway to the price Wainabi-san had quoted her originally, and she could still probably afford a dozen of the costume jewelry pieces.

    As Ino fretted over new piercings. Sakura carefully portioned out her saving to get the maximum bling for her buck.
    Sakura was happily swinging her arms back and forth, enjoying the 'click click' sounds of her new bangles as they entered into the Yamanaka estate. She had managed to get fourteen new pieces today, almost doubling her collection in one fell sweep.

    Ino was chattering on about her plans for additional piercings in her ear; she wanted to get her cartilage pierced, which made Sakura shutter just at the thought. She ignored Ino's accusations that she was a baby for not getting her own ears pierced. They had had this discussion before and nothing Ino said was going to convince Sakura.

    They stepped through the door of the main building to find it was full with a small crowd of people. There was Ino's mom and dad and a bunch of her more distant family members, but there was also Sakura's mother and father, their nice neighbor who let Sakura use her much larger garden for practice, the blacksmith who had given Sakura a lot of her equipment for cheap and helped indulge Sakura's interest in metalworking, and even the old retired kunoichi who lived in their neighborhood and sometimes gave Sakura advice.

    They were looking at the two of them expectantly. Ino stepped forward, puffed up with pride, and announced "We're both genin now!"

    They were both met with congratulations and it became clear that their families had organized a small party for their graduation. It was a good thing one of them hadn't failed - Sakura thought that would have been impossibly embarrassing.

    So, as a small group, they went out to the Akimichi restaurant for dinner. They were met with another small gathering that they immediately joined, seeing as it was being held by the family of Ino's future teammates and the owners of the restaurant. Sakura ended up fading somewhat into the background in the face of three of the founding clans, and many of the guests that had come for her were looking a little shell shocked to be eating dinner with such important members of the village.

    Nevertheless, Sakura was one of the four that the party was centered on, and she was given a graduation gift with the rest them. She was worried when the others opened their presents; Choji had been given some of his clan's special pills, Shikamaru an expensive-looking travel shoji board, and Ino was given a guide from the Yamanaka library on field flower identification and uses, as well as what she suspected was coded instructions for some of their clan techniques. In the face of such practical and priceless gifts, what could her own family afford to give her that would compare?

    It was clearly smaller than the gifts the others have been given. She was hesitant in opening it, and was a little conflicted when it was clear it was by a jewelry box. It was certainly the kind of thing she wanted, but it would make her look frivolous. She knew better, but it wasn't like -

    All her worries were silenced when she opened up the box. Her people must have pooled their money, or her parents had put an entire month's worth of sales towards the gift. Because there, in the box, was her golden seal ring.

    In retrospect, she probably looked even more frivolous as a result of her response. She was pretty sure she squealed loudly in happiness, and she put it on immediately. She's was distracted the whole rest of the party as she admired her new ring, enjoying the weight of actual gold and sealing and unsealing thimblefuls of water the whole time. She would feel more embarrassed by that if she weren't overwhelmed with excitement that she had the ring.

    The party eventually dispersed and Sakura's parents and neighbors led her home. They all lingered in the front of their house and wished her well on missions and with the teammate selection for what felt like hours before they let her go.

    Only when her parents were done with their own congratulations did she let some of her own anxiousness overtake her. Maybe she should wait for tomorrow morning, when she could go somewhere she would be absolutely sure she wouldn't be caught. But she couldn't wait; her Inner voice was already urging her "come on, come on, come on -"

    She pulled her jewelry file out from her hiding space and got her plastic filing catch. The seal ring was so perfect because the huge setting the seal was on left a lot of metal that would be safe to be removed without damaging the structural integrity of the ring. And given it's somewhat unwieldy size, no one would question why she had altered it.

    She used the file's edge to cut a tiny sliver off the edge of the setting, catching the tiny bits of dust from the file in the plastic. She set the tiny sliver of gold down and tilted the plastic to get all of the fine dust into her hand and began focusing as much of her chakra as would be safe on them.

    She had never tried this before, and she realized immediately that she should have been sitting down, because her knees began to buckle and her vision began to grow faint. Luckily, the powder was not an optimal storage solution and so filled up almost immediately, giving her time to recover. When she did, she brought the chakra-infused gold dust up to her mouth and swallowed it all, grabbing the ring and the sliver she had cut and sitting cross-legged on the floor after.

    She felt the gold inside, in one of the twists in her chakra coils that had led the medic nin to diagnose her with a malformed chakra network. As easy as breathing, she let the chakra consume the gold dust. At the same moment, she began infusing the sliver in her hand, filling it up far beyond what her capacity could have in a moment's burning. When the energy of the gold flakes was used up, she swallowed the sliver and began channeling the now-overwhelming energy into the ring, infusing it with what felt like a lifetime's worth of chakra in only a few minutes.

    When she was done, her hands were shaking, not with fear or weakness but with excitement and relief. She opened her jewelry box and examined her personal armory.

    Iron, steel, zinc, brass, tin, pewter, copper, aluminum, bendalloy. Weight, speed, acuity, heat, senses, strength, memories, self, and nutrients respectively. She had managed to get her hands on them throughout her academy years, through her interests in jewelry or metalworking or just basic shinobi outfitting. She had tried to vary up her arsenal - she had steel kunai and bracers and iron nails and aluminum cans and costume jewelry of all different types of metals. Many of the things that were called "brass" or "pewter" didn't work, only barely taking her chakra at all. It was why she had gotten so into metalworking in the first place, to make sure she knew what she was getting. She didn't have very clear memories from her last life, but she couldn't imagine what it would have been like trying to figure out what metals worked and didn't without it as a guide. Even now, she knew there were more metals - alloys for aluminum, copper, and gold, at least - but she didn't know for sure how to get them, just what they looked like and what they did. She could tell when she held a metal if it would take her chakra, so she knew to be on the lookout.

    They weren't all as full as her new ring, either. The copper she had mostly used for studying and tests, though she thought that maybe it could be used to foil interrogation ninjutsu like the Yamanaka clan techniques if she ever had the misfortune to be on the recieving end. Storing her self in aluminum didn't seem to have much purpose, but it was easy enough to get the metal from soda cans and cooking foil that she had filled up a few emergency stores using her bootstrapping trick. She never knew; she might discover a use for it someday and need it urgently.

    She hadn't been able to bootstrap like this with all of her metals. She was trying to be circumspect about it, because who knew what her chakra signature might look like to sensors when she got that huge inflow of power. Best to not risk it and just fill her stashes up gradually. She was lucky that suffusing equipment with chakra was a common enough control exercise that no one had paid much attention to the ones she had been filling.

    She gingerly removed the gold ring - her new healing metalmind - and went to place it with the rest in her jewelry box before thinking better of it. She slipped it back onto her finger, closed her box, and got ready for bed. It wouldn't be safe to go without it, now that she finally had some healing stored. After all, you never knew when you could recover from an otherwise fatal wound. Best to have it at all times and surprise someone who thought they had killed her in ambush than not have it when she needed it.

    She went to bed with a smile, knowing now that she could handle whatever the coming day could throw at her.
    And another! I figure, what settings but anime can handle a full compounder? Frankly, a full compounder would still only rate at the level of "top tier, but not entirely worldbreaking" for shinobi in the Naruto world.​
     
  • Threadmarks
    • The Gate in the Reef (original sci-fi ghost story thing)
  • Threadmarks
    • The Gate in the Reef​
    "Don't mind Bil, they're just rolling you over. Bil took one too many loops around the Seti sector. It ain't a ghost ship you need to be worrying about 'round here. This orbit, what you should be worried about is the Reef.

    "Drink your bottle, Bil! You got to tell your story, e'en though everyone's heard about your run-in with the Christian a dozen times already. Hush up and let me talk. 'Sides, greenie here ain't a loop-hauler like you. He's a proper marine, right? Won't be leaving the system till his service is up or he gets promoted out of this backwater.

    "Like I said, ignore them. This system really is a nowhere, don't worry. Only thing you'll need to worry about most times is staying off the bad levels and knowing who'll roll you for a roll, if you catch my drift. Other marines should be able to handle you for that shit.

    "But Braum's star's got one claim to fame. It was way back, most people won't remember it anymore, but used to be, there was another proper station here. Not nearby, no, it was hanging in Brauma's lagrange two.

    "Shut up, I'm getting to that. Yeah, those rings would be a problem now, but there weren't no rings then, y'see?

    "Now, this station had no name. It weren't official on any records. It was an open secret here, of course, cause you could see it with your eyes if you passed by. There're a couple of old-timers pass through that remember the place, but no one who'd ever been on board. Never radioed here, and if it got traffic, no one saw. Most folks thought it was one of those real secret fleet bases. That or some pirate queen's fallback.

    "But then came the war of '82. Union fleet passed through here to get up to Polis, and someone must've said something, or else they caught a signal no one else could hear, cause they turned for Brauma. They were there for a week, half the Union Blue Fleet in orbit for one station. I've heard it lost 'em the battle of Serpent's Run, the delay they took here. Whatever they found, they were real keen on destroying that station. Dunno what happened, but when they left the system, they were battered, Brauma was down a station, and there were a brand new set of rings where a moon had been before.

    "I ain't lying! Check the old charts for Brauma. No rings before the war, 'n' five full moons. After, it's four and the rings. They're what you'll want to watch out for, greenie. There's a spot in the rings, right where the L2 for Bruama used to be, where you can still find a couple Blue Fleet wrecks. That's what they call the Reef, and it's haunted all to hell.

    "Hey, hey! Gimme another one of these, I'm all out of mine. No, put it on my tab - what do you mean I ain't good for it? When have I ever skipped out for -"

    "Now, that ain't fair. You know that was an emergency. It was just that once, right? Look, I'll give you one of my switches if you need collateral. No? Thank you. Now fill me up again, you know what I like.

    "Hm? Oh, the story, right. Where was I? That's right, Brauma station. Union Fleet hit it, now it's the Reef. What do I mean it's haunted? Well that's the story, ain't it? D'you think I was just gonna spout history at you? That was just pre- pro- shit, why can't I remember the word, it's on the tip of my tongue. Not prequel. Pre- something. Prologue?

    "Preamble, thank you. That's it, all that was just preamble. Here's the real story.

    "My first trip in Braum's Star was before I owned my ship. Was copilot for a loop-hauler like Bil, went all the way around settled space trading out deliveries. It's a lot of risk for big rewards, so long as you can find the next trade and make your deliveries on time, but the ship weren't the most reliable. Jump drive crapped out on us and plopped us halfway out of the system, so we were already two days late getting here.

    "Say one good thing about the captain of that ship: he always knew how to make up time. So instead of driving us straight on for here, he turned halfway around and plotted us a route for Brauma instead. We'd slingshot around the planet and take the extra Gs; we were just hauling rice and our suits could handle it. This was maybe six years after the war, so the rings were a real danger, but we'd come in above the elliptic and come out below and we'd keep mostly clean from them.

    "You spotting the problem yet? No? Well, guess that's why you're a marine and not a pilot or navigator. We'd have to cross the elliptic and punch through the rings somewhere, and the captain's route had us cross right through the Reef. Dunno how many times he had been through this system, but he never kept a crew longer than a full loop, so the four of us onboard never knew better.

    "Yeah, now I know that's SOP, Bil. Hell, you probably trade out your crew more often than your cargo. But I didn't know it then, did I? And I bet you don't pick up greenies who've never run the loops before to co-pilot, do you? Captain was a right bastard in ways you better hope you can't match. That ain't the point though, is it?

    "The point is, captain's maneuver was on track for the first couple hours. Thrusters burned at full acceleration, Brauma's gravity was beginning to pull us around. The planet began to eclipse the star as we slipped into Brauma's shadow. Then, our sensors began picking up the wreckage.

    "It was mostly scrap metal, and the parts that were still holding together'd been burned out by lasfire. Could almost recognize a couple of the ships as Union standard. But the sensors caught something else too: there in the rings were a dozen Union ships, as small as a frigate and as big as a light cruiser. They'd pop up on the feed only to disappear. Ghosts.

    "We tried to turn back, but the captain wouldn't have it. Said something was bouncing the sensors halfway through the rings and back, making it look like things were there when it was just noise, but I I know what I saw. None of 'em responded to comms, but they were there. And the closer we got to the intersection point, the closer they got to us.

    "Then ol' cap thought he saw something in the ring. Told us to adjust the trajectory. We were hurtling right into a debris field, wrenching around with the gravity of a gas giant, and he wanted us to change the course! Wanted to get a better look at what was making the sensor's go mad. Tried to tell him it weren't worth our lives, but he just gave the order again. So we got closer. Not like we could see it with our eyes, in the shadow of the planet. Just pitch dark and stars out there, and the ghosts closing in. Then, right as we reached the midpoint of the maneuver, something obscured the stars. Something massive and pitch black, fast, just a hole in the night like nothing I've ever seen. And we were on a collision course right for it.

    "Now, I pleaded with the captain to turn away, but he had the controls. By now, all four of us were on board, telling the captain to leave the ghosts be, but he just said 'it's my ship, we'll be going where I say.' And so his eyes were turned full to the viewscreen when something flashed.

    "I dunno what he saw then. We were all turned to him at his station and saw just the light on the bridge. I don't know where the flash came from neither, 'cept from the dark thing in front of us. Braum's Star was straight through the core of Brauma from there. But it was bright, bright enough to leave us blinking, and for the captain to just sit there stunned for a little while. When we turned to look again it was gone, but I saw 'em then: the ghosts of the Union ships lost there had reached visual range.

    "We all went for battle stations, but the captain said not a word. He just sat in his chair slack-jawed, like whatever he saw had burned his mind clean out. Maybe it was a bulkhead left unsealed to the heavens for just a moment. Or maybe to some place a little fierier. I just know that when he stood up and stepped away from the controls, I leapt to take his place. I pulled us away from whatever gate to the netherworld it was we were on course for, pulled us out of the ring, and the signatures began to back off again. They clearly didn't like us getting near it.

    "I should have paid closer attention to the captain, though. Cause while we were distracted, he had made his way to the bridge's airlock. We only realized when the comp started the alert for the cycling. I tried to hit the override, but it was too late. Whatever the old bastard had seen, it had called him out to join it. Or maybe it showed him something he couldn't live with. EIther way, the void took him."

    "Not one of us said a word till we were back aboard this station. And we pushed engines so hard to get out of that accursed place, we made our delivery a full half-hour early.

    "So that's it. You want my advice for where to avoid, kid? Don't go near the Reef. 'Less you need a shortcut to the beyond, cause for my money, that's what floats out there."
    This was heavily inspired by my recent obsession with sci-fi filk (fictional folk music). In particular, it's essentially a fanfic of the wonderful Dawson's Christian, as that is the story I imagine Bil told enough times that it irritated the narrator here.​
     
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