Scraped from here.
I refuse to confirm or deny that this only exists so I can maintain my "At...
I refuse to confirm or deny that this only exists so I can maintain my "At...
Three Thousand Four Hundred And Eighteen (MGLN/Hellsing)
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1# - Is This A Mysterious... Oh God It's Eating My Face!
Scraped from here.
I refuse to confirm or deny that this only exists so I can maintain my "At least one chapter of one story a month target".
Formerly Tribble #3418. Number taken because, hey, it's a good title.
WARNING: THIS STORY IS A CRACKFIC. IF YOU EXPECT SANE PLOTTING, DETAILED EXPLANATION OF METAPHYSICAL DETAILS, VERY LONG CHAPTERS AND GRATUITOUS AMOUNTS OF FORESHADOWING, GO READAEON NATUM ENGEL OTHER FINE FICS BY ME. THIS IS NOT IT.
Contents
1# - Is This A Mysterious... Oh God It's Eating My Face!
2# - "Please Stop Hurting Me" are the Magical Words?
3# - "The Town's in a Lot of Danger from Me?"
4# - "A Rival?! No, Silly, That's Just My Ex!"
Three Thousand Four Hundred And Eighteen
1# - Is This A Mysterious... Oh God It's Eating My Face!
The long grass blew in the breeze, the long shadows casting patterns of light and dark which whipped and shifted. The sky was lit with auburn streaks, the reddish-brown holding onto the last vestiges of the sun as it crawled below the horizon.
It looked like it was going to be a pleasant night. Not too cold, but still clear. Certainly no rain; the wisps of cloud still visible were a fluffy white. In the village, on the hill overlooking the valley, the lights were on, spewing forth light and warmth, and portraying a scene which was almost sickening in its rustic nature. One might even use the word "saccharine" without prior provocation. Only the cars parked outside the old houses drew attention away from the scene and locked it in a fixed time period; otherwise, it was almost timeless.
There were no lights in the church, though, as the three police officers approached it, weapons raised. The lead man pushed at the door.
It was unlocked, sliding open with a creak.
Flashlights danced across the walls, as they looked around the interior of the building, eyes darting over the thick wooden pews.
A figure knelt at the end of the aisle, by the altar, in the robes of a priest. It cradled a figure in its arms.
The three lights shone upon it, waiting for it to move.
And so it did, turning to show its twisted face as bright red arterial blood spurted from the rapidly cooling corpse in its arms. The officers recoiled in horror, the blue-haired policewoman raising her hand to her mouth in disgust. The figure grinned at their response, and waved a hand, pale orange triangular diagrams coalescing around its hand for just a second, before disappearing.
That was the cue for the congregation to rise from their seats, jaws twisted impossibly wide, far beyond what the mouth should sustain, and eyes alight with the same orange light which had wrapped around the priest's hand.
The policemen opened fire, of course, their handguns belching forth bullets, but they merely punched through the figures; figures which, as they approached, bought with them the reek of the grave and of stale flesh.
The guns fell silent.
The command van was lit in blue and red as the police lights flashed around and around, overlapping and intersecting. The guards, their ballistic vests and submachine guns a clear sign that they were serious, stood on watch, the coruscating colours lending their flesh a sickly pallor. From within the van, a slightly patronising, male voice could be heard, his tone a blend of confusion and disbelief.
"What? Are you really serious?"
The aide-de-camp, her long white hair hanging loose, carefully removed the jacket from her mistress' shoulders, folding it carefully then retreating to a position in the background. The woman did not even deign to face the senior policeman.
The suited man tried again. "I'm sorry, but could you perhaps please repeat yourself one more time? Hayate Yagami," he said, choosing each word like a marksman does his bullets, "wasn't it?"
The woman, her short brown hair neatly tied, gave a long suffering sigh. "Very well, I'll start again," she said, turning to stare at the man. Despite her youth, there was something slightly disconcerting about her eyes. "They're Ghûls, and the entire village has become a den for them. A Ghûl is what happens to an unsuitable human candidate when they're bitten by a vampire. They're much like zombies, their bodies reanimated by ancient Belkan technology, and they're completely under the control of their vampire master."
Hayate narrowed her eyes.
"And that means there's a vampire loose somewhere near the village." She raised a hand, apparently to accentuate her point.
The senior policeman snorted, scepticism written all over his face. "That's ridiculous," he scoffed. "Vampire? Ghouls? Do you really expect me to believe this occult nonsense?"
Hayate did not respond to his mispronouncing of the word " Ghûl", but instead accepted the cigar offered by her white-haired sub-ordinate. She clamped it between her teeth, then stared at the man again, rich contempt in her voice.
"Why on earth would a cheap bureaucrat like yourself know anything on the matter? How dare you even question my credentials!" she snapped. "The Organisation has been protecting the planet from the dangers of magic since the start of recorded history!"
The policemen before her were now quivering.
She sighed. "I shall illuminate. The Organisation is a special operations agency tasked with the duty of finding, isolating, and eliminating all supernatural and magitechnical threats to the planet."
From outside, a brief rattle of gunfire was heard, the chatter of heavy machine guns cut off too quickly.
"There's a vampire here," Hayate continued, "creating the Ghûls. A powerful, magical being with its origins in the darkest times of recorded history. Send in all the troops you like. You can send in every last man under your command. They'll end up little more than rewritten husks, as the magic of the vampire rebuilds them as slaves." Her voice dropped slightly in pitch. "Or, they may suffer a worse fate. If they're compatible with whatever twisted programming drives the vampires, the reconstruction creates a new vampire, rather then just a Ghûl. If they are lucky, they'll merely become food for the monster and its servants, then join their ranks as another Ghûl."
The policemen stared silently at her. The noise of radio static filled the air.
"Sir," reported the operator, "I've completely lost contact with squads two and three."
The senior policeman opened and closed his mouth a few times, helpless before the young woman, while his subordinates tried to work out exactly what was going on. She took in a deep breath of cigar smoke, which was ruined somewhat by the fact that she almost immediately coughed it back up, dropping the cigar.
"Hayate, I told you that was not a wise idea," muttered her servant.
"Shush, Reinforce," she muttered back. She cleared her throat, coughing several more times as she did, then fixed the senior policeman with a gaze which clearly dared him to say something.
He, wisely, didn't.
"If you are to stop the Ghûls," Hayate continued, with a hint of menace in her tone, "you're going to have to terminate that vampire at the source. Cut off the head of the snake, and the body perishes." She smiled faintly as the policeman's face blanched, when one of his officers whispered into his ear. "And this is where the Organisation comes in. We will take care of your vampire."
"That's... insane," the man ventured, his paradigm sufficiently broken that he was willing to accept anything.
Hayate smiled, widely. "I can assure you, gentlemen, one of our finest anti-Vampire field agents is already in the field. This will be settled in a matter of hours." She paused, as a fundamental bit of honesty raised its head. "There probably won't be much of the village left, though."
"What sort of agent would handle this," he asked incredulously.
"When dealing with monsters... vampires, devils, cloned supersoldiers, giant kittens..."
"... giant kittens,"
"Yes, giant kittens. There is no greater expert walking the earth."
The sun had fully set by now, and the night sky was dark and enveloping, a shroud of darkness layered over the sky. A full moon hung heavy and gravid in the sky above, casting a blueish light which was but a pale imitation of the sunlight. From around the area, the crackle of gunfire could be heard, coughing shots too often silenced.
None of this concerned the figure striding down the road. Her long white skirt blew in the night breeze, flapping gently in synchronisation with her beribboned hair. Her boots made soft noises against the tarmac. Perhaps the figure was incongruous in such an environment, but the self-possession, which could even be read as arrogance in her walk was a sign that she was either very, very foolish, or equally dangerous.
The woman gazed up at the moon, its luminescence reflected in her eyes, a faint grin; not one of malevolence, but of the honest pleasure from doing a job one loves, painted across her face.
"How beautiful," she remarked. "Nights like this... they make me want to make some friends. Yes," and her voice shifted, "I couldn't imagine a more perfect evening."
I refuse to confirm or deny that this only exists so I can maintain my "At least one chapter of one story a month target".
Formerly Tribble #3418. Number taken because, hey, it's a good title.
WARNING: THIS STORY IS A CRACKFIC. IF YOU EXPECT SANE PLOTTING, DETAILED EXPLANATION OF METAPHYSICAL DETAILS, VERY LONG CHAPTERS AND GRATUITOUS AMOUNTS OF FORESHADOWING, GO READ
Contents
1# - Is This A Mysterious... Oh God It's Eating My Face!
2# - "Please Stop Hurting Me" are the Magical Words?
3# - "The Town's in a Lot of Danger from Me?"
4# - "A Rival?! No, Silly, That's Just My Ex!"
Three Thousand Four Hundred And Eighteen
1# - Is This A Mysterious... Oh God It's Eating My Face!
The long grass blew in the breeze, the long shadows casting patterns of light and dark which whipped and shifted. The sky was lit with auburn streaks, the reddish-brown holding onto the last vestiges of the sun as it crawled below the horizon.
It looked like it was going to be a pleasant night. Not too cold, but still clear. Certainly no rain; the wisps of cloud still visible were a fluffy white. In the village, on the hill overlooking the valley, the lights were on, spewing forth light and warmth, and portraying a scene which was almost sickening in its rustic nature. One might even use the word "saccharine" without prior provocation. Only the cars parked outside the old houses drew attention away from the scene and locked it in a fixed time period; otherwise, it was almost timeless.
There were no lights in the church, though, as the three police officers approached it, weapons raised. The lead man pushed at the door.
It was unlocked, sliding open with a creak.
Flashlights danced across the walls, as they looked around the interior of the building, eyes darting over the thick wooden pews.
A figure knelt at the end of the aisle, by the altar, in the robes of a priest. It cradled a figure in its arms.
The three lights shone upon it, waiting for it to move.
And so it did, turning to show its twisted face as bright red arterial blood spurted from the rapidly cooling corpse in its arms. The officers recoiled in horror, the blue-haired policewoman raising her hand to her mouth in disgust. The figure grinned at their response, and waved a hand, pale orange triangular diagrams coalescing around its hand for just a second, before disappearing.
That was the cue for the congregation to rise from their seats, jaws twisted impossibly wide, far beyond what the mouth should sustain, and eyes alight with the same orange light which had wrapped around the priest's hand.
The policemen opened fire, of course, their handguns belching forth bullets, but they merely punched through the figures; figures which, as they approached, bought with them the reek of the grave and of stale flesh.
The guns fell silent.
The command van was lit in blue and red as the police lights flashed around and around, overlapping and intersecting. The guards, their ballistic vests and submachine guns a clear sign that they were serious, stood on watch, the coruscating colours lending their flesh a sickly pallor. From within the van, a slightly patronising, male voice could be heard, his tone a blend of confusion and disbelief.
"What? Are you really serious?"
The aide-de-camp, her long white hair hanging loose, carefully removed the jacket from her mistress' shoulders, folding it carefully then retreating to a position in the background. The woman did not even deign to face the senior policeman.
The suited man tried again. "I'm sorry, but could you perhaps please repeat yourself one more time? Hayate Yagami," he said, choosing each word like a marksman does his bullets, "wasn't it?"
The woman, her short brown hair neatly tied, gave a long suffering sigh. "Very well, I'll start again," she said, turning to stare at the man. Despite her youth, there was something slightly disconcerting about her eyes. "They're Ghûls, and the entire village has become a den for them. A Ghûl is what happens to an unsuitable human candidate when they're bitten by a vampire. They're much like zombies, their bodies reanimated by ancient Belkan technology, and they're completely under the control of their vampire master."
Hayate narrowed her eyes.
"And that means there's a vampire loose somewhere near the village." She raised a hand, apparently to accentuate her point.
The senior policeman snorted, scepticism written all over his face. "That's ridiculous," he scoffed. "Vampire? Ghouls? Do you really expect me to believe this occult nonsense?"
Hayate did not respond to his mispronouncing of the word " Ghûl", but instead accepted the cigar offered by her white-haired sub-ordinate. She clamped it between her teeth, then stared at the man again, rich contempt in her voice.
"Why on earth would a cheap bureaucrat like yourself know anything on the matter? How dare you even question my credentials!" she snapped. "The Organisation has been protecting the planet from the dangers of magic since the start of recorded history!"
The policemen before her were now quivering.
She sighed. "I shall illuminate. The Organisation is a special operations agency tasked with the duty of finding, isolating, and eliminating all supernatural and magitechnical threats to the planet."
From outside, a brief rattle of gunfire was heard, the chatter of heavy machine guns cut off too quickly.
"There's a vampire here," Hayate continued, "creating the Ghûls. A powerful, magical being with its origins in the darkest times of recorded history. Send in all the troops you like. You can send in every last man under your command. They'll end up little more than rewritten husks, as the magic of the vampire rebuilds them as slaves." Her voice dropped slightly in pitch. "Or, they may suffer a worse fate. If they're compatible with whatever twisted programming drives the vampires, the reconstruction creates a new vampire, rather then just a Ghûl. If they are lucky, they'll merely become food for the monster and its servants, then join their ranks as another Ghûl."
The policemen stared silently at her. The noise of radio static filled the air.
"Sir," reported the operator, "I've completely lost contact with squads two and three."
The senior policeman opened and closed his mouth a few times, helpless before the young woman, while his subordinates tried to work out exactly what was going on. She took in a deep breath of cigar smoke, which was ruined somewhat by the fact that she almost immediately coughed it back up, dropping the cigar.
"Hayate, I told you that was not a wise idea," muttered her servant.
"Shush, Reinforce," she muttered back. She cleared her throat, coughing several more times as she did, then fixed the senior policeman with a gaze which clearly dared him to say something.
He, wisely, didn't.
"If you are to stop the Ghûls," Hayate continued, with a hint of menace in her tone, "you're going to have to terminate that vampire at the source. Cut off the head of the snake, and the body perishes." She smiled faintly as the policeman's face blanched, when one of his officers whispered into his ear. "And this is where the Organisation comes in. We will take care of your vampire."
"That's... insane," the man ventured, his paradigm sufficiently broken that he was willing to accept anything.
Hayate smiled, widely. "I can assure you, gentlemen, one of our finest anti-Vampire field agents is already in the field. This will be settled in a matter of hours." She paused, as a fundamental bit of honesty raised its head. "There probably won't be much of the village left, though."
"What sort of agent would handle this," he asked incredulously.
"When dealing with monsters... vampires, devils, cloned supersoldiers, giant kittens..."
"... giant kittens,"
"Yes, giant kittens. There is no greater expert walking the earth."
The sun had fully set by now, and the night sky was dark and enveloping, a shroud of darkness layered over the sky. A full moon hung heavy and gravid in the sky above, casting a blueish light which was but a pale imitation of the sunlight. From around the area, the crackle of gunfire could be heard, coughing shots too often silenced.
None of this concerned the figure striding down the road. Her long white skirt blew in the night breeze, flapping gently in synchronisation with her beribboned hair. Her boots made soft noises against the tarmac. Perhaps the figure was incongruous in such an environment, but the self-possession, which could even be read as arrogance in her walk was a sign that she was either very, very foolish, or equally dangerous.
The woman gazed up at the moon, its luminescence reflected in her eyes, a faint grin; not one of malevolence, but of the honest pleasure from doing a job one loves, painted across her face.
"How beautiful," she remarked. "Nights like this... they make me want to make some friends. Yes," and her voice shifted, "I couldn't imagine a more perfect evening."
2# - “Please Stop Hurting Me” are the Magical Words?
2# - "Please Stop Hurting Me" are the Magical Words?
A reddish-pink hue filled the western horizon, as Hayate stepped outside, having announced she was having a smoke. No one really had the courage to point out that all of her attempts to do so inside had lead to her choking on the cigar-fumes, and dropping the cigar. But, nevertheless, if you defined 'eating a chocolate bar as fast as you can' as 'smoking', then, yes she was having a smoke.
"You forgot your coat," Reinforce said, stepping elegantly behind her to drape it over her shoulders, looking in the same direction. "And isn't it a little early for dawn? It's only 3am."
Hayate let out a squeak, and stuffed the wrapper in her pocket. And having done that, and settled her nerves, she sighed. "Reinforce? Dawn happens in the east, not the west."
"Oh." The woman's mouth made a little 'o' shape in the pink half-light. "I see."
"Yes. Nanoha's having fun." Hayate sighed again. "Contact the Ministry and inform them that they may need a cover-up story to explain some rather large craters."
"I'll have them prepare the old one about the crop-circles, mistress."
The fields were ablaze with light. And also ablaze with fire. Magical fire. Constable Subaru Nakajima could not admire the spectacle, of course, because a vampire had a death's grip – ha ha ha – around her throat, and was busy manhandling her around as a human shield.
You might wonder why there are all these characters with Japanese names in a fic nominally set in the United Kingdom. Well, it's a long and complicated story involving marsh gas reflecting off a swamp balloon in orbit around Venus, but as for the root cause... well, it may be the fault of the Nazis.
Just a hunch.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are!" a cheerful young female voice called out, from amidst the fire and the blasted apart bodies. "We need to talk this over! I'm sure that if you talk to me about why you're doing all this, I can help! There's no need to do all this!"
For some reason, the vampire did not believe her. People are so cynical these days.
"You... you can let me go," Subaru choked out. Sweat-soaked blue hair was in her eyes, and she could barely breathe. "Aren't... aren't you a man of God, father? What... what would..." she gasped as he squeezed.
"Stop blabbering," the priest hissed. "And as for a matter of fact, God is really more a symbolic representation of the innate wonders of the universe and Jesus is really more of a metaphor for the sacrifices and travails humanity must go through to confront the meaningless of the universe and so, through caring and hope, impose light and kindness on an amoral cosmos."
Subaru could say nothing with the hand around her throat, but the look in her eyes was one of confusion.
"Church of England," the undead priest explained casually. "Of course, now that I'm a vampire, fuck that! You and me are going to have fun, little girl, and then I'm going to turn you into one of my..."
"That's not very nice!" a voice stridently declared. Through the fire, a white-clad figure emerged, dress billowing in the heat.
"Stay back!" the vampire declared. "Or I'll kill you too!"
The newcomer's mouth twisted up into a little rosebud of annoyance. "Don't be silly," she said. "I just blew apart your entire horde of the living dead in a few minutes, and most of that was trying to practice my shot control at the same time. You're not very good at this whole 'master of the dying' thing, are you?"
The priest began to laugh. "Ah ha ha ha ha ha," he said, after he finished laughing. "That was just a fraction of my true power! Mere pawns! Disposable weaklings! My real forces were disguised as trees!" And indeed, the 'trees' threw aside their disguises. "Fire, my minions." And with a roar, the crackle of automatic fire opened up.
Yes, you might also have questions about how on earth a vampire priest managed to get hold of so many automatic weapons in the United Kingdom, considering its stringent gun control laws and the fact that he's obviously a rank amateur who hasn't been doing it for very long.
Nazis.
Slowly, the gun-smoke cleared. And the white-clad girl was revealed to be standing here. One of her sleeves was very slightly torn. "A very good try!" she said proudly. "I'll have to give you that one! Well done! One point to you."
She raised her staff, levelling it at the gun-wielding foliage.
And a few eventful seconds later, there wasn't very much left of the area of woodland. Or the top layer of soil. Or the stream which had been flowing through it.
"Come on, come on!" the girl – for she only looked to be around nineteen – demanded enthusiastically. "Where's the rest of your men! What's the next thing you're going to try?!"
The priest's mouth worked. "That... that was it..." he managed.
"Oh. Well, you're going to have to try better than that next time," she said sadly.
Subaru forced out a choking sound, which was ignored by all around.
"You're going to let me go?" the priest asked in disbelief.
"No, silly! You're going to just have to be born again! Or do Christians not believe in reincarnation? I don't really know; I just celebrate Christmas for the presents."
She levelled the blood-red gem-tipped staff – wait, was that jewel dripping blood? – at the priest, incidentally pointing straight through his hostage. "I gave you a chance to explain yourself," she said.
"Wait a moment!" the corrupted priest stammered, raising a hand. "You're... you're the Ace of Aces. Y-y-your weapon isn't lethal!"
Nanoha squinted at him, down the shaft of her weapon. "Are you sure?" she asked, her tone dubious. "That doesn't sound like something I'd do, does it, Raging Heart?"
"HΐΞΫεβϋ ǽųţaŧūž œġiĵļŏĦ!" profaned the blood-coloured crystal at the end of the staff. Around them, there was a cascade of thuds, as birds fell out of trees. They may have been sleeping; now they were dead.
"See!" Nanoha said, cheerfully. "I'm afraid I'm just going to have to shoot through her with the maximum possible yield to get you!"
"Wait, wha..." both Suburu and the priest managed, before they were interrupted by a "Divine Buster!" And, perhaps unsurprisingly, penetrated, perforated, punctured and pieced as well.
And then everything was silent.
Well, apart from the hiss of steam from the stranger's staff, the crackle of fire, the screams of the damned lesser vampire spawn running around on fire, the crackle of magic as the girl cut them down with casual shots, and of course Subaru Nakajima's moans of pain.
"Oh!" the white-clad girl said after a minute or two of staring casually up at the moon. "You're still alive! That normally never happens! And is that metal in you? Well, I suppose you were wearing a stab-vest, but they normally just get evaporated!"
"Your... big... pink... thing... went... into... me," the blue-haired girl muttered, staring up at the distant figure.
"Oh!" The stranger's hand went to her mouth. "I'm so sorry! You must be in so much pain! And you survived one of my Divine Buster's taking out one lung, your spine, pretty much your entire lower digestive track..."
"ЖЍģĭþõ °īĚkЩЉffi∏," contributed her curséd staff.
"That's right, Raising Heart! Her kidneys are gone for sure!"
"Hurts," rasped Subaru.
She felt the girl – monster, thing, horror, terror – clasp her hand. "I'm so very sorry! I meant to kill you painlessly and quickly!" the girl apologised. "But to survive so much like that... why, it's a sign you've got a rare skill. You really should be dead from shock or haemorrhage by now!"
She paused.
"I can save your life if you want to be my friend," she said, "but you have to make the choice. Because I wouldn't want you to regret it just because you said yes when you were in incredible agony from multiple ruptured organs!"
Subaru breathed deeply, although from certain points of view it wasn't really breathing as she didn't really have a diaphragm and so it was just the psychosomatic illusion caused by the diffusion of air through her ruined windpipe. But it felt like a deep breath to her dying mind, of course. Living. Living sounded good. Yes. And the girl... her strength, her power, her cheery demeanour and optimistic air... she sounded friendly.
It was probably a sign of incipient brain damage from oxygen deprivation which meant the blue-haired girl did not associate her 'saviour' with the person who had put her in this condition in the first place.
"Yes," she mouthed.
The last thing she saw was the white-clad girl leaning over her, head obscuring the full moon. And the last thing she heard was, for some reason, a mobile phone ringtone.
"Hold on, just give me a sec," the girl said, pausing in her descent. "Got to answer this."
A reddish-pink hue filled the western horizon, as Hayate stepped outside, having announced she was having a smoke. No one really had the courage to point out that all of her attempts to do so inside had lead to her choking on the cigar-fumes, and dropping the cigar. But, nevertheless, if you defined 'eating a chocolate bar as fast as you can' as 'smoking', then, yes she was having a smoke.
"You forgot your coat," Reinforce said, stepping elegantly behind her to drape it over her shoulders, looking in the same direction. "And isn't it a little early for dawn? It's only 3am."
Hayate let out a squeak, and stuffed the wrapper in her pocket. And having done that, and settled her nerves, she sighed. "Reinforce? Dawn happens in the east, not the west."
"Oh." The woman's mouth made a little 'o' shape in the pink half-light. "I see."
"Yes. Nanoha's having fun." Hayate sighed again. "Contact the Ministry and inform them that they may need a cover-up story to explain some rather large craters."
"I'll have them prepare the old one about the crop-circles, mistress."
...
The fields were ablaze with light. And also ablaze with fire. Magical fire. Constable Subaru Nakajima could not admire the spectacle, of course, because a vampire had a death's grip – ha ha ha – around her throat, and was busy manhandling her around as a human shield.
You might wonder why there are all these characters with Japanese names in a fic nominally set in the United Kingdom. Well, it's a long and complicated story involving marsh gas reflecting off a swamp balloon in orbit around Venus, but as for the root cause... well, it may be the fault of the Nazis.
Just a hunch.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are!" a cheerful young female voice called out, from amidst the fire and the blasted apart bodies. "We need to talk this over! I'm sure that if you talk to me about why you're doing all this, I can help! There's no need to do all this!"
For some reason, the vampire did not believe her. People are so cynical these days.
"You... you can let me go," Subaru choked out. Sweat-soaked blue hair was in her eyes, and she could barely breathe. "Aren't... aren't you a man of God, father? What... what would..." she gasped as he squeezed.
"Stop blabbering," the priest hissed. "And as for a matter of fact, God is really more a symbolic representation of the innate wonders of the universe and Jesus is really more of a metaphor for the sacrifices and travails humanity must go through to confront the meaningless of the universe and so, through caring and hope, impose light and kindness on an amoral cosmos."
Subaru could say nothing with the hand around her throat, but the look in her eyes was one of confusion.
"Church of England," the undead priest explained casually. "Of course, now that I'm a vampire, fuck that! You and me are going to have fun, little girl, and then I'm going to turn you into one of my..."
"That's not very nice!" a voice stridently declared. Through the fire, a white-clad figure emerged, dress billowing in the heat.
"Stay back!" the vampire declared. "Or I'll kill you too!"
The newcomer's mouth twisted up into a little rosebud of annoyance. "Don't be silly," she said. "I just blew apart your entire horde of the living dead in a few minutes, and most of that was trying to practice my shot control at the same time. You're not very good at this whole 'master of the dying' thing, are you?"
The priest began to laugh. "Ah ha ha ha ha ha," he said, after he finished laughing. "That was just a fraction of my true power! Mere pawns! Disposable weaklings! My real forces were disguised as trees!" And indeed, the 'trees' threw aside their disguises. "Fire, my minions." And with a roar, the crackle of automatic fire opened up.
Yes, you might also have questions about how on earth a vampire priest managed to get hold of so many automatic weapons in the United Kingdom, considering its stringent gun control laws and the fact that he's obviously a rank amateur who hasn't been doing it for very long.
Nazis.
Slowly, the gun-smoke cleared. And the white-clad girl was revealed to be standing here. One of her sleeves was very slightly torn. "A very good try!" she said proudly. "I'll have to give you that one! Well done! One point to you."
She raised her staff, levelling it at the gun-wielding foliage.
And a few eventful seconds later, there wasn't very much left of the area of woodland. Or the top layer of soil. Or the stream which had been flowing through it.
"Come on, come on!" the girl – for she only looked to be around nineteen – demanded enthusiastically. "Where's the rest of your men! What's the next thing you're going to try?!"
The priest's mouth worked. "That... that was it..." he managed.
"Oh. Well, you're going to have to try better than that next time," she said sadly.
Subaru forced out a choking sound, which was ignored by all around.
"You're going to let me go?" the priest asked in disbelief.
"No, silly! You're going to just have to be born again! Or do Christians not believe in reincarnation? I don't really know; I just celebrate Christmas for the presents."
She levelled the blood-red gem-tipped staff – wait, was that jewel dripping blood? – at the priest, incidentally pointing straight through his hostage. "I gave you a chance to explain yourself," she said.
"Wait a moment!" the corrupted priest stammered, raising a hand. "You're... you're the Ace of Aces. Y-y-your weapon isn't lethal!"
Nanoha squinted at him, down the shaft of her weapon. "Are you sure?" she asked, her tone dubious. "That doesn't sound like something I'd do, does it, Raging Heart?"
"HΐΞΫεβϋ ǽųţaŧūž œġiĵļŏĦ!" profaned the blood-coloured crystal at the end of the staff. Around them, there was a cascade of thuds, as birds fell out of trees. They may have been sleeping; now they were dead.
"See!" Nanoha said, cheerfully. "I'm afraid I'm just going to have to shoot through her with the maximum possible yield to get you!"
"Wait, wha..." both Suburu and the priest managed, before they were interrupted by a "Divine Buster!" And, perhaps unsurprisingly, penetrated, perforated, punctured and pieced as well.
And then everything was silent.
Well, apart from the hiss of steam from the stranger's staff, the crackle of fire, the screams of the damned lesser vampire spawn running around on fire, the crackle of magic as the girl cut them down with casual shots, and of course Subaru Nakajima's moans of pain.
"Oh!" the white-clad girl said after a minute or two of staring casually up at the moon. "You're still alive! That normally never happens! And is that metal in you? Well, I suppose you were wearing a stab-vest, but they normally just get evaporated!"
"Your... big... pink... thing... went... into... me," the blue-haired girl muttered, staring up at the distant figure.
"Oh!" The stranger's hand went to her mouth. "I'm so sorry! You must be in so much pain! And you survived one of my Divine Buster's taking out one lung, your spine, pretty much your entire lower digestive track..."
"ЖЍģĭþõ °īĚkЩЉffi∏," contributed her curséd staff.
"That's right, Raising Heart! Her kidneys are gone for sure!"
"Hurts," rasped Subaru.
She felt the girl – monster, thing, horror, terror – clasp her hand. "I'm so very sorry! I meant to kill you painlessly and quickly!" the girl apologised. "But to survive so much like that... why, it's a sign you've got a rare skill. You really should be dead from shock or haemorrhage by now!"
She paused.
"I can save your life if you want to be my friend," she said, "but you have to make the choice. Because I wouldn't want you to regret it just because you said yes when you were in incredible agony from multiple ruptured organs!"
Subaru breathed deeply, although from certain points of view it wasn't really breathing as she didn't really have a diaphragm and so it was just the psychosomatic illusion caused by the diffusion of air through her ruined windpipe. But it felt like a deep breath to her dying mind, of course. Living. Living sounded good. Yes. And the girl... her strength, her power, her cheery demeanour and optimistic air... she sounded friendly.
It was probably a sign of incipient brain damage from oxygen deprivation which meant the blue-haired girl did not associate her 'saviour' with the person who had put her in this condition in the first place.
"Yes," she mouthed.
The last thing she saw was the white-clad girl leaning over her, head obscuring the full moon. And the last thing she heard was, for some reason, a mobile phone ringtone.
"Hold on, just give me a sec," the girl said, pausing in her descent. "Got to answer this."
...
3# - "The Town's in a Lot of Danger from Me?’
3# - "The Town's in a Lot of Danger from Me?'
"o my god that was liek so cool, saod the woman who was dressed in white and it was soa wesome that she was saying nice things about subari becau8se she had liked her for like ages and so her respect was totally worthy it even though she didn't think anyone had ever been paying attention o her and it was so cool and everything because she was now all important but it was also really good how syhe didn't have muych of a personality because it made her an everywoman hero whyo people could idenityf with.
I know right" said the bluenette who was super cool and had all these real cool powers and stuff like that.
"No, really, it was really awesome," the man said. "you're like really cool and good at everything. And the way tghat that you're really important in the backstyoryt of some of the othyer characters means we all like you, because you're just that cool. In fact, the way that because you now have superoowers from the ancient technovirus in you means that you're the one who we should all be paying attention to and that you're fuighting the evil power inj youi and so we know you're on our side."
"Stop, stop," said Subaru, you're all too kind.
"No one could be too kind about you because you're so cool and amazing and..."
Subaru Nakajima woke screaming. The way the narrative style had completely changed! All those typos! The lack of sentence structure, or indeed any narrative structure which one could care to mention! The contrived and poorly written plot!
What a horrifying nightmare!
"By all rights, you should be dead," a voice said, bringing her from her state of abject terror.
Subaru could vaguely sense that the world seemed somewhat fuzzier and harder to understand than it had been before, but she did not put it down to possible brain damage from her 'saviour' answering a phone call rather than saving her life. Possibly because of aforementioned brain damage.
"Chest... hurt?" she tried, before looking down. No, her chest appeared to be whole. And somewhat bigger. But no, it was missing the large hole it had used to have. Chests were not a place for holes. They were not a holy place.
"Maybe, maybe," the woman with brown hair sitting in the corner of the room said. "I am Sir Hayate Yagami. And yes, it's 'Sir'. And no, I'm not a boy. It's a long story. And complicated. Wretched useless trainee midwifes who didn't realise what the umbilical cord was."
That seemed hard to understand, so Subaru stopped thinking about it. Instead, she moved onto a much more interesting topic. "The girl?" Subaru asked. "So pretty. She saved my life."
"Nanoha?" Hayate asked, somewhat warily. "Well, yes, technically, she saved your life. After putting you in that state in the first place."
"She seemed so kind..." Subaru said. "I want to be just like her."
"Stockholm syndrome again?" Hayate said wearily, making a note. "And... well, yes, in a sense you have just got your wish."
"But my hair is still blue," Subaru said, stating the obvious. And indeed, it was very strange how she had blue hair in a universe where most people have hair colours which exist within the normal parameters of plausible hair colours. I mean, to have blue hair without dyeing it, you'd need to have a completely different pigment to the rest of humanity, who produce the entire hair colour spectrum from varying levels of pheomelanin and eumelanin. And I don't think we can even blame this on the Nazis, because they had a thing for blonde hair!
... unless they wanted their super-race to have hair and eyes which matched. And indeed, Subaru had blue eyes too. Hmm. That's very suspicious, because in normal H. sapiens the spectrum of eye colours is rather different from the hair spectrum.
Hayate, of course, saw nothing of this divergence into an examination of the principles of human colouration, and so instead said, "No, not your hair. To save your life, she turned you into a VAMPIRE."
"I'm... I'm a vampire?" gasped Subaru, starting at herself in a convenient handmirror. Her reflection appeared to be fully present, but that didn't tell you much about whether you were a vampire or not. Modern day vampires; so many of them have no respect for tradition and vainly like to show their faces everywhere they can.
Hayate looked momentarily uncomfortable. "Well... technically it's VAMPIRE... it's an acronym. Variant-A Magically Powered Intelligent..."
The blue-haired girl bit on her lip, noting that she didn't actually appear to have any fangs. "Um... what are the other two letters?" she asked, timidly. "You just stopped talking after a while."
"That's classified," Hayate replied, her voice cold. "But it's the result of a Belkan technomagical virus. Which has unpredictable results. In your case, it appears to have... well, cyberised you. That's never happened before, in any of our records. I wonder what Nanoha did that could have caused that?"
"Yes," Subaru said, her eyes darting from side to side. "Of course. A virus caused that." She paused. "Naughty virus."
"Yeah, that's the only explanation," Hayate said with a shrug. "I mean, cyborgs aren't, like, a thing modern Earth science can do. You'd need... like, some kind of super-advanced occult and scientific conspiracy run by the remnants of a defeated empire to do it. Like the Belkans."
"Or the Nazis," said Hayate's white-haired advisor, popping up behind her.
"Shut up, Rein. Go back to your desk."
"But those sorts of things aren't real, right?" Subaru said, sounding confused.
"Not any more, at least."
Subaru frowned. "What happened to them?" she asked timidly.
"Nanoha." Hayate sighed. "Oh dear. Now we've said her name three times in the conversation, it means she's..."
"Divine Buster!"
"↙›ẂјљњќѝιθΦ"
The right-hand wall exploded in a mixture of pink light, explosions, and rubble. A cluster of brickwork the size of a man's head collided with Subaru's head and bounced off.
"Ow," said Subaru, after a few moment's thought.
"Nanoha," Hayate sighed, "could you please use the door in the future?"
"Yep," said the glowing-eyed shadow which stood in the dust-choked hole in the wall.
"... will you use the door in the future?"
"Nope!" Nanoha strode forwards and lifted Subaru's chin, to gaze into her eyes. "I'm sure you're going to try your very best and do what you feel is right," she said.
"Yes! Yes, of course!" the blue-haired girl with brick dust in her hair said.
"Good! Everyone should always do their best and that's all that matters. Or else I'll be upset with how you failed my training and you'll have to start again!"
Hayate coughed, a long and complicated noise which sounded remarkably like "When Nanoha says 'start again' she means 'reincarnation'." But that was probably just because the subtitling team had taken certain liberties with the script. And it was clearly a cough, because the next thing she said was "Awful lot of dust in here, isn't there?"
"There is, isn't there!" Nanoha said. "Why, I think your maids aren't doing their jobs properly! I'll have to have a little chat with them and persuade them to buck their game up!"
"Certainly not," Hayate said. "I prefer the cleaning staff alive and not terrified out of their wits, thank you very much. But Nanoha, I'm glad you're here."
"Oh, you're so kind, Hayate-chan! We're the very best of friends!"
"... yes. Because I have something I need you to do and I want you to take Subaru along with you. You made her, you'll have to train her."
"Do I have unlimited liability insurance?"
"No."
"Awww."
Once again, it was night. Sinister deeds were being committed. And also, in the case of the couple who were making out on top of a dead body, distasteful ones.
Fortunately, Nanoha Takamachi, the guardian of morality and all-round upstanding hero was here to censor such unrighteous behaviour. She started by blowing in the door.
"That's disgusting!" she called out, taking in the blood-splattered room, the bodies scattered over the place, and the couple. "You're been very bad!"
"'Ere, 'oo the 'ell are you!" shouted the man, who was apparently allergic to the letter 'h'.
"I'm Nanoha Takamachi, with the Organisation!"
"... what organisation is that?"
"I ask the questions here!"
"λξЈЉЋ üęąôĄЍЏώ"
"Well, Raising Heart also asks the questions here. But no one understands her and they do silly things like falling over with their eyes bleeding, so I ask most of them! And what I'm asking you is this! You! A man and a woman? Together? How could you?"
The man went immediately for his gun while the woman, being perhaps possessed of more self-preservation, dived out the window. He worked the bolt on his machine pistol, levelling it at the white clad girl. "Count the bullets!" he yelled.
Man, it's amazing where all these petty criminals and obviously inept VAMPIREs are getting these automatic weapons from in the UK, isn't it?"
There was the repeated crack of ionised air and several messy organic sounds. And several exclamations from Raising Heart which cannot be rendered in text.
"... zero? Zero bullets? Is that right?" Nanoha asked the mutilated corpse. "I'm not sure, what was the point of this game again? I don't even see any bullets. Do you mean 'count the gun'? Because that's one. One gun." She paused. "Oh, wait!" she said, realisation dawning. She picked up the gun, shaking off the severed hand which still clung onto the weapon. "Did you mean me to take out the magazine and count how many bullets are in it?" she asked the split-open skull of her victim.
The dead man said nothing.
Nanoha's face fell. "Oh, drat," she said sadly. "I mucked up again and ruined the entire game." She perked up. "I wonder how Subaru's doing?" she said.
Subaru, for her part, was sitting on the roof in the new uniform the boss lady – Hayate, that had been her name! – had picked out for her. It was very nice. She liked the blue and black. She was less sure about why the shorts had to be so very short, and why her top could best be described as a glorified sports bra, but Hayate had said that it was vitally important that she not be weighed down by too much equipment and that she could move quickly.
And so Subaru trusted her.
Even if it was cold up on this roof. And she was carrying a magical staff which looked a bit like Nanoha's – which was really cool and all and so awesome and she could totally be like her one day but even more so – but it did somewhat cause issues with the fact that she had no idea how to use it and had in fact just been handed the magical staff and told she was on overwatch duty.
She wasn't even part of the special firearms unit, which one must be a part of to be an armed police office in the United Kingdom. That did make it a bit of a mystery why she had been carrying a gun when she had first met Nanoha, but that was in the hazy bit of her memory which didn't make much sense and which had ended in a great deal of pain. Which Nanoha had saved her from. And thus she was her saviour.
"Subaru," Nanoha said to her, over the super-cool mental link they now shared, "the female target is getting away. You're on overwatch."
The blue-haired girl nodded. "Uh huh! I'm certainly watching over her! She's running away right now."
There was a pause, as Nanoha drifted up to the roof, her mostly-white-apart-from-the-blood-splatters dress pale in the night.
The pause extended.
"... you don't know what overwatch is, do you?" Nanoha said eventually.
"Um."
"Go teach her not to be a bad person and stop her from hurting anyone else again! Okay! I believe in you! Just take your staff, and aim down at her. Focus for the centre of mass. And then..."
"Subtle Zero Fist!" yelled Subaru, at the top of her voice, as she leapt into the air trailing blue light. In a few heart-beats – well, in what would have been a few heart beats before she became a technomagical vampire cyborg, because in her present state a few heart-beats was an infinite amount of time – she was there.
The main thing that passed through the vampire's head, as she fled, was the back of her skull. But the thing immediately before that was complete and utter shock.
Her white-clad superior floated down in front of her, an expression of mild amusement on her face.
"Oh my," Nanoha said, after a moment's thought. "Well... you technically hit the target. And now she's not a threat anymore! Well done! You certainly did your best there!"
"It tastes like nails!" Subaru declared, after testing. "And coins!"
"o my god that was liek so cool, saod the woman who was dressed in white and it was soa wesome that she was saying nice things about subari becau8se she had liked her for like ages and so her respect was totally worthy it even though she didn't think anyone had ever been paying attention o her and it was so cool and everything because she was now all important but it was also really good how syhe didn't have muych of a personality because it made her an everywoman hero whyo people could idenityf with.
I know right" said the bluenette who was super cool and had all these real cool powers and stuff like that.
"No, really, it was really awesome," the man said. "you're like really cool and good at everything. And the way tghat that you're really important in the backstyoryt of some of the othyer characters means we all like you, because you're just that cool. In fact, the way that because you now have superoowers from the ancient technovirus in you means that you're the one who we should all be paying attention to and that you're fuighting the evil power inj youi and so we know you're on our side."
"Stop, stop," said Subaru, you're all too kind.
"No one could be too kind about you because you're so cool and amazing and..."
Subaru Nakajima woke screaming. The way the narrative style had completely changed! All those typos! The lack of sentence structure, or indeed any narrative structure which one could care to mention! The contrived and poorly written plot!
What a horrifying nightmare!
"By all rights, you should be dead," a voice said, bringing her from her state of abject terror.
Subaru could vaguely sense that the world seemed somewhat fuzzier and harder to understand than it had been before, but she did not put it down to possible brain damage from her 'saviour' answering a phone call rather than saving her life. Possibly because of aforementioned brain damage.
"Chest... hurt?" she tried, before looking down. No, her chest appeared to be whole. And somewhat bigger. But no, it was missing the large hole it had used to have. Chests were not a place for holes. They were not a holy place.
"Maybe, maybe," the woman with brown hair sitting in the corner of the room said. "I am Sir Hayate Yagami. And yes, it's 'Sir'. And no, I'm not a boy. It's a long story. And complicated. Wretched useless trainee midwifes who didn't realise what the umbilical cord was."
That seemed hard to understand, so Subaru stopped thinking about it. Instead, she moved onto a much more interesting topic. "The girl?" Subaru asked. "So pretty. She saved my life."
"Nanoha?" Hayate asked, somewhat warily. "Well, yes, technically, she saved your life. After putting you in that state in the first place."
"She seemed so kind..." Subaru said. "I want to be just like her."
"Stockholm syndrome again?" Hayate said wearily, making a note. "And... well, yes, in a sense you have just got your wish."
"But my hair is still blue," Subaru said, stating the obvious. And indeed, it was very strange how she had blue hair in a universe where most people have hair colours which exist within the normal parameters of plausible hair colours. I mean, to have blue hair without dyeing it, you'd need to have a completely different pigment to the rest of humanity, who produce the entire hair colour spectrum from varying levels of pheomelanin and eumelanin. And I don't think we can even blame this on the Nazis, because they had a thing for blonde hair!
... unless they wanted their super-race to have hair and eyes which matched. And indeed, Subaru had blue eyes too. Hmm. That's very suspicious, because in normal H. sapiens the spectrum of eye colours is rather different from the hair spectrum.
Hayate, of course, saw nothing of this divergence into an examination of the principles of human colouration, and so instead said, "No, not your hair. To save your life, she turned you into a VAMPIRE."
"I'm... I'm a vampire?" gasped Subaru, starting at herself in a convenient handmirror. Her reflection appeared to be fully present, but that didn't tell you much about whether you were a vampire or not. Modern day vampires; so many of them have no respect for tradition and vainly like to show their faces everywhere they can.
Hayate looked momentarily uncomfortable. "Well... technically it's VAMPIRE... it's an acronym. Variant-A Magically Powered Intelligent..."
The blue-haired girl bit on her lip, noting that she didn't actually appear to have any fangs. "Um... what are the other two letters?" she asked, timidly. "You just stopped talking after a while."
"That's classified," Hayate replied, her voice cold. "But it's the result of a Belkan technomagical virus. Which has unpredictable results. In your case, it appears to have... well, cyberised you. That's never happened before, in any of our records. I wonder what Nanoha did that could have caused that?"
"Yes," Subaru said, her eyes darting from side to side. "Of course. A virus caused that." She paused. "Naughty virus."
"Yeah, that's the only explanation," Hayate said with a shrug. "I mean, cyborgs aren't, like, a thing modern Earth science can do. You'd need... like, some kind of super-advanced occult and scientific conspiracy run by the remnants of a defeated empire to do it. Like the Belkans."
"Or the Nazis," said Hayate's white-haired advisor, popping up behind her.
"Shut up, Rein. Go back to your desk."
"But those sorts of things aren't real, right?" Subaru said, sounding confused.
"Not any more, at least."
Subaru frowned. "What happened to them?" she asked timidly.
"Nanoha." Hayate sighed. "Oh dear. Now we've said her name three times in the conversation, it means she's..."
"Divine Buster!"
"↙›ẂјљњќѝιθΦ"
The right-hand wall exploded in a mixture of pink light, explosions, and rubble. A cluster of brickwork the size of a man's head collided with Subaru's head and bounced off.
"Ow," said Subaru, after a few moment's thought.
"Nanoha," Hayate sighed, "could you please use the door in the future?"
"Yep," said the glowing-eyed shadow which stood in the dust-choked hole in the wall.
"... will you use the door in the future?"
"Nope!" Nanoha strode forwards and lifted Subaru's chin, to gaze into her eyes. "I'm sure you're going to try your very best and do what you feel is right," she said.
"Yes! Yes, of course!" the blue-haired girl with brick dust in her hair said.
"Good! Everyone should always do their best and that's all that matters. Or else I'll be upset with how you failed my training and you'll have to start again!"
Hayate coughed, a long and complicated noise which sounded remarkably like "When Nanoha says 'start again' she means 'reincarnation'." But that was probably just because the subtitling team had taken certain liberties with the script. And it was clearly a cough, because the next thing she said was "Awful lot of dust in here, isn't there?"
"There is, isn't there!" Nanoha said. "Why, I think your maids aren't doing their jobs properly! I'll have to have a little chat with them and persuade them to buck their game up!"
"Certainly not," Hayate said. "I prefer the cleaning staff alive and not terrified out of their wits, thank you very much. But Nanoha, I'm glad you're here."
"Oh, you're so kind, Hayate-chan! We're the very best of friends!"
"... yes. Because I have something I need you to do and I want you to take Subaru along with you. You made her, you'll have to train her."
"Do I have unlimited liability insurance?"
"No."
"Awww."
...
Once again, it was night. Sinister deeds were being committed. And also, in the case of the couple who were making out on top of a dead body, distasteful ones.
Fortunately, Nanoha Takamachi, the guardian of morality and all-round upstanding hero was here to censor such unrighteous behaviour. She started by blowing in the door.
"That's disgusting!" she called out, taking in the blood-splattered room, the bodies scattered over the place, and the couple. "You're been very bad!"
"'Ere, 'oo the 'ell are you!" shouted the man, who was apparently allergic to the letter 'h'.
"I'm Nanoha Takamachi, with the Organisation!"
"... what organisation is that?"
"I ask the questions here!"
"λξЈЉЋ üęąôĄЍЏώ"
"Well, Raising Heart also asks the questions here. But no one understands her and they do silly things like falling over with their eyes bleeding, so I ask most of them! And what I'm asking you is this! You! A man and a woman? Together? How could you?"
The man went immediately for his gun while the woman, being perhaps possessed of more self-preservation, dived out the window. He worked the bolt on his machine pistol, levelling it at the white clad girl. "Count the bullets!" he yelled.
Man, it's amazing where all these petty criminals and obviously inept VAMPIREs are getting these automatic weapons from in the UK, isn't it?"
There was the repeated crack of ionised air and several messy organic sounds. And several exclamations from Raising Heart which cannot be rendered in text.
"... zero? Zero bullets? Is that right?" Nanoha asked the mutilated corpse. "I'm not sure, what was the point of this game again? I don't even see any bullets. Do you mean 'count the gun'? Because that's one. One gun." She paused. "Oh, wait!" she said, realisation dawning. She picked up the gun, shaking off the severed hand which still clung onto the weapon. "Did you mean me to take out the magazine and count how many bullets are in it?" she asked the split-open skull of her victim.
The dead man said nothing.
Nanoha's face fell. "Oh, drat," she said sadly. "I mucked up again and ruined the entire game." She perked up. "I wonder how Subaru's doing?" she said.
Subaru, for her part, was sitting on the roof in the new uniform the boss lady – Hayate, that had been her name! – had picked out for her. It was very nice. She liked the blue and black. She was less sure about why the shorts had to be so very short, and why her top could best be described as a glorified sports bra, but Hayate had said that it was vitally important that she not be weighed down by too much equipment and that she could move quickly.
And so Subaru trusted her.
Even if it was cold up on this roof. And she was carrying a magical staff which looked a bit like Nanoha's – which was really cool and all and so awesome and she could totally be like her one day but even more so – but it did somewhat cause issues with the fact that she had no idea how to use it and had in fact just been handed the magical staff and told she was on overwatch duty.
She wasn't even part of the special firearms unit, which one must be a part of to be an armed police office in the United Kingdom. That did make it a bit of a mystery why she had been carrying a gun when she had first met Nanoha, but that was in the hazy bit of her memory which didn't make much sense and which had ended in a great deal of pain. Which Nanoha had saved her from. And thus she was her saviour.
"Subaru," Nanoha said to her, over the super-cool mental link they now shared, "the female target is getting away. You're on overwatch."
The blue-haired girl nodded. "Uh huh! I'm certainly watching over her! She's running away right now."
There was a pause, as Nanoha drifted up to the roof, her mostly-white-apart-from-the-blood-splatters dress pale in the night.
The pause extended.
"... you don't know what overwatch is, do you?" Nanoha said eventually.
"Um."
"Go teach her not to be a bad person and stop her from hurting anyone else again! Okay! I believe in you! Just take your staff, and aim down at her. Focus for the centre of mass. And then..."
"Subtle Zero Fist!" yelled Subaru, at the top of her voice, as she leapt into the air trailing blue light. In a few heart-beats – well, in what would have been a few heart beats before she became a technomagical vampire cyborg, because in her present state a few heart-beats was an infinite amount of time – she was there.
The main thing that passed through the vampire's head, as she fled, was the back of her skull. But the thing immediately before that was complete and utter shock.
Her white-clad superior floated down in front of her, an expression of mild amusement on her face.
"Oh my," Nanoha said, after a moment's thought. "Well... you technically hit the target. And now she's not a threat anymore! Well done! You certainly did your best there!"
"It tastes like nails!" Subaru declared, after testing. "And coins!"
...
4# - “A Rival?! No, Silly, That’s Just My Ex!”
4# - "A Rival?! No, Silly, That's Just My Ex!"
It was early afternoon. The sun streamed through the windows of the estate, and Hayate Yagami poured herself a third of a cup of tea.
Then she added a splash of brandy, approximately half the cup's volume in sugar, and then whiskey.
Hayate always said that she had got into that habit after meeting a green-haired little fairy who had taught her wisely, but Hayate was somewhat infamous for her fondness for absinthe, and so such statements should always be taken with a pinch of salt. It was possibly true that she thought she had met a little green-haired fairy, but many other things were also possible – and indeed probable – when she was doing shots because of the stress of handling Nanoha.
"Isn't it a little early in the afternoon to be drinking that?" Reinforce said, staring with horror at the waste of sugar.
"Shut up, Rein," Hayate responded, with utmost grace and poise. "Nanoha is in Northern Ireland, hunting a VAMPIRE infestation. At least until she gets bored and decides to go and pick up cute girls from a nearby town. I need some fortification." She shuddered. "Let's hope this time she waits until after she's destroyed the entire complex in nuclear fire."
"Uh, don't you mean 'hope this time she doesn't destroy everything in nuclear fire'?" Rein asked.
"No, of course not. I don't hope for things which don't come true," Hayate said. "We'll just pin her actions on terrorists, or possibly UFOs. Depends if she decides to burn target markers into crop fields so she can practice again."
"I believe she has expressed the idea that large explosions are romantic," Rein observed.
"No, she's observed that pink is romantic," Hayate sighed, drinking her abominable tea-sugar-brandy-whiskey mix. "I personally think that explains a lot about her psychology."
There was a bleep from the fax machine in front of her, and Hayate leant forwards and checked the printout. She paled.
"Rein," she said slowly. "We may have a problem."
"Oh?"
"Yes. The Church is getting involved."
"Oh my."
How many divisions has the pope got, Stalin once asked. He was then rather surprised to discover that the answer was that he had seven active divisions, with extensive mechanised forces and magic-using specialists capable of, in extreme cases, nuclear-level firepower. And was, in fact, the unchallenged overlord of Italy. And had he turned his eyes on the Holy Land, which is like catnip for militant popes.
It was pretty surprising how no one else had noticed that the papal states had reformed in the aftermath of the Second World War, honestly.
"That's not the worst news," Hayate said, though. "According to this very convenient fax, the Church has sent one of its top agents to… oh. Oh no. That can't be right."
"What?"
Hayate shook her head. "We're just going to hope that Nanoha is on her top game," she said. "Oh. And the new one, as well. Suberry or something. Whatever. Nanoha needs to stop bringing girls home."
Over in Ireland, it was late evening. The last traces of bloody hued light had faded from the sky, and now inky blackness consumed all light.
Some might have questioned how there was this strange temporal disparity between two locations in the same time zone. And indeed, it was most peculiar. And the fault of the Nazis.
"Okay!" Nanoha said, smiling widely at Subaru. "So I'm just going to Dublin to see if there are any cute girls with sad eyes there who I need to save from giant kittens. You can go punish everything in this creepy old abandoned manor house. It's like training! Remember, if you don't do this well, I'll have to mark you down in my report!"
Subaru frowned. "Aren't… we in Northern Ireland?" she asked. She wasn't sure. She hadn't really been paying much attention in the briefing.
"Yes!"
"… isn't Dublin quite far away?"
"Yep! But you're forgetting two things," Nanoha said, counting on her fingers. "One, I can fly. And two, I'm a ninja."
"You are?" Subaru frowned. "But you don't dress in black."
Nanoha nodded. It was a very good point. "Yes. That's because I'm such a good ninja that no one suspects it. Real ninjas don't dress up in black pyjamas, except sometimes when we're going to bed."
Subaru's jaw dropped wide open. "Ninjas are so clever," she said in awe. "How do I become one?"
"If I told you, I'd have to kill you," Nanoha said, and frowned. "Again," she added, because she was an honest girl.
Subaru was left on her own. She frowned, as her somewhat dented intellect tried its best to interpret her orders
There was a house full of undead. Which was a silly name, really, in her opinion, because they were dead and then reanimated by what Hayate had said was Belkan superscience-magic-stuff. So they were really more like… she tried to think of a name. Corpsebots! Yeah!
So, she had to kill them all. So it just made sense she would charge in through the window on roller skates and kill everyone inside. Or unkill them. Whatever the term was for killing the undead. Or nonalive.
"Zero Fist!"
"Zero Kick!"
"Zero Grabbing You By The Head And Beating Someone Else With Your Flailing Body!"
Subaru wasn't sure why she was shouting out all her attack names, but it made her feel better.
She paused for a moment. She was covered in blood, oil, and nothing was moving any more. So that probably meant she had done well and Nanoha would be pleased with her and say nice things about her. Nanoha was so cool and so awesome and…
Subaru's torso fell off her body, sparking.
"Ow," she said, after a few moment's thought. She was only half the woman she'd been.
An excessively sinister figure was standing in front of her legs. With their long black cape, glowing yellow scythe which sparked lightning, similarly glowing eyes, and perfunctory grasp of 'clothes are meant to cover things', she was either an evil force the world had never seen, or a goth.
'Or' was being used here in the computational sense, by the way. If it wasn't, I would have used 'xor'. And I don't mean xor.
"Hello," the sinister figure said politely. "I was worried for a moment, but then I realised you were a horrific abomination of magic and or science, and therefore it was fine for me to cut you in half." She paused. "I'm very sorry for the inconvenience," she apologised.
"Why did you cut me in half?" Subaru wheezed.
"Because you're a VAMPIRE?" the stranger said. "You are, right? Please don't say I made another mistake and Carim is going to shout at me again! It wasn't my fault I got that report on Halloween! Oh dear, I've made a mistake and it's all gone wrong and…"
"I am a VAMPIRE," Subaru said, because she felt bad for the stranger and how distressed they sounded. "Do you know what the last two letters in the acronym stand for?"
"That's classified. I'm Fate, by the way?"
"Well, Nanoha is going to be angry with me and…"
Fate gasped. "Did you say 'Nanoha'?"
"Yes, I said Nanoha. She's my new…"
Fate frowned. "Oh darn," she said. "We said her name three ti-"
The wall exploded.
"Oh, hiya Subaru!" Nanoha said, smiling contentedly down at the bisected Subaru as she floated through the hole in the wall. "Are you done yet? Because I found a cute girl with sad eyes who was having real problems with a giant kitten, and trust me on this, it's… ohmigod! Fate-chan! It's so good to see you again!"
"Nanoha, she cut me in half," Subaru complained.
"Oh, don't you know?" Nanoha said happily. "Well, you probably don't know, because you've never met her before, so I should introduce you! Subaru, this is Fate! We went out for a while! She has the saddest eyes of anyone I ever met! Fate, this is Subaru. She has a rare talent for surviving when she gets blown up! Or cut in half, it seems! Well done, Subaru-chan!"
Nanoha paused.
"Oh, don't you know?" she repeated. "Subaru has a rare talent for surviving when she gets blown up! Silly, silly Fate-chan! How could you not know that? Especially when I'd already told you!"
"So… romantic," Subaru wheezed, her heart melting from the romance. And the after-effects of being cut in half from a lightning-scythe. But mostly the romance, apart from the bits from the scythe. Slowly, she began to drag herself over the ground, to where her bottom half was.
"How dare you show up!" Fate protested, pointing her scythe at Nanoha.
"Hey, you're the person who said my name one of the three times," Nanoha said, crossing her arms. "Why'd you do that if you didn't want me around, hmm?"
"You left me!"
"I didn't leave you, Fate-chan," Nanoha said reassuringly. "I just wasn't where you were for quite a long time and found some new girlfriends in the mean time."
"You broke my heart!"
"I didn't!" Nanoha protested. "Fate-chan! How could you say that! That's totally untrue. If I'd broken your heart, you'd have been all argh-argh-argh-Nanoha-chan-why-have-you-stabbed-me-in-the-chest-with-your-Device! And when I tried that, I couldn't get past your ribcage! And I only did that because you tried to hurt Raising Heart!"
"It tried to eat my soul!"
"That's only how it shows it's friendly," Nanoha said, stroking the red gem on her staff. "There, there. She didn't mean it."
Feeling very embarrassed, Subaru crawled over to her legs and got to work reattaching them.
"You've changed! You're not the woman I fell in love with! You're a monster!" Fate accused.
Nanoha stared at her in confusion. "I don't follow," she said.
"Follow this!" Fate shouted and cut her head off.
Subaru blinked. That was very fast. She hadn't even seen Fate's arms move. And then Nanoha's head hit the ground with a noise sort of like a bowling ball dropped from a height, and she realised she was screaming. With her newly reattached legs, she pulled herself up.
"Please don't kill me," she begged of Fate.
"I'm afraid you have to die," Fate told her seriously.
"But… but what if I don't want to die?" Subaru protested weakly, backing away from the deranged killer.
Fate's eyes widened. "I… I didn't think of that," she said, turning paler. "It would be very rude for me to cut you apart if you didn't want to be cut apart. But I already did that… but you fixed yourself, so no hard feelings there. I… I don't know. What if it's the wrong thing to do? What if I'm not meant to do it? What if I'm being a bad girl by doing it and," Fate slapped herself around the face, "No! Bad Fate! You mustn't do bad things! Be a good girl!"
Subaru stood there in confusion, waiting for the next thought to come along. There was something she had been meaning to do.
"I know!" Fate declared, eyes darting around nervously. "I will call Carim. She's a bishop and she always knows what to do when I have this sort of question."
Yes, some of you may be wondering how the Catholic Church has female bishops, when it has always stood firmly against the ordination of female clergy, claiming that it would break the apostolic succession. Well, yes. However, in the dark days of WW2, one thing led to another, and… well, ta-da! Female clergy!
Fucking Nazis.
… uh, that was two separate clauses. Even though if you read it out loud, you'd say "female clergy fucking Nazis" and then probably titter. Well, no Just as their male predecessors, female members of the clergy were required to be celibate.
But Nanoha and Fate, I hear you say. Well, yes. In many ways, Fate was a very bad priest. Certain exceptions were made for her, on the grounds of her extreme lethality when not worried by moral questions and her steadfast opposition to public displays of affection between gay couples, which meant that the many observers in the Vatican never got actual confirmation of her relationship. Plus, to be honest, at least with her there was no fear that she might act improperly towards young boys, and that could be appreciated in a priest.
Fortunately, this extended authorial diversion was enough time for Fate to dig through the short skirt, cape, leotard and collection of belts which passed for her clothing and find her phone – where, we shall never know – and remember how to turn it on, and then how to find numbers on this new-fangled gadgetry. And enough time for Subaru to try and fail to remember the really really important thing she had been meaning to do.
"Carim," Fate said, frowning, "I have a question." A pause. "No, not that one. You still haven't explained to me how it's all right for me to be a priest who is into other… oh, yes! Yes, I have a female VAMPIRE here who is also a cyborg. I'm not sure how that works. But she doesn't want me to kill her. I did cut her in half already, but she fixed herself. My question is, is it okay for me to kill her even if she doesn't want to be killed?"
What was that she had been meaning to do, Subaru asked herself.
"Damned soul, you say?"
Buy milk?
"Infectious, you say?"
No, she was lactose intolerant.
"A mercy to exterminate each and every last one of those things from the world, you say?"
Oh yes, Subaru thought slowly. She had been meaning to escape.
"Thank you very much," Fate told the phone earnestly. "I'll be sure to call you if I have any more moral dilemmas." Pause. "Uh, you did increase the hours I got on my contract, yes? Last month, I ran out again. Oh, thank you!"
Fate stared at her phone, searching for a button, and eventually managed to hang up. She tucked her phone away, somehow managing to conceal exactly where she was keeping it, and then turned to face Subaru again.
She noticed that Subaru was no longer there.
Fate blinked. "She's trying to run!" she said in an outraged tone of voice. "That is not acceptable!"
The homicidal female priest was in fact wrong there. Subaru was attempting to roller-blade off. Through a house. Which meant that her escape was being accompanied by a lot of smashing and breaking noises, and it was very easy for Fate to catch up with her.
"Stop running away. It'll be quick," Fate reassured Subaru. "Nanoha didn't even notice."
"Didn't notice what?" asked Nanoha, standing behind Fate.
"That I cut your head off, Nanoha," the blonde said. There was a pause. "How is your head still attached?" Fate whimpered. "And why are you not dead?"
"Because I'm a ninja. Stop being so silly, Fate-chan," Nanoha said, in a tone of voice which implied that Fate was perhaps being a tiny bit obtuse. "I just dropped a smoke bomb."
"Nanoha, I cut your head off," Fate told her weakly.
"Nin. Ja."
"That explains nothing. There wasn't even any smoke."
Nanoha stared at her blankly in confusion. "Fate-chan," she said, sounding worried, "have you hit yourself in the head? It's not like you to be like this. Oooh! I know! You're sick and I'm going to have to dress up as a nurse and make you all better! Raising Heart, prepare the surgery kit!"
"ąĐčĔ÷ç❹ⱤⱢⱣffiṁ ϯϰϭϠϣƔ ƝƯƫƇḴḲḄḸḿǿdz," blasphemed her device. Subaru screamed at the sound, her earwax melting, and all around them the rats in the walls sang until their breath gave out.
There was the sound of a crack and a large explosion, and Fate was mysteriously gone, along with most of the ceiling.
"… is she a ninja too?" Subaru breathed in awe, once she could hear again. "I should have known all along. She was wearing black." Subaru turned around, as if the priest had somehow managed to hide behind her, but the terrible stealth of the black-clad woman defied her skills of investigation. "Where did she go?"
Nanoha raised a finger, pointing upwards.
Subaru stared at it. "Ah. Ninja hand magic. Of course." She thought hard. "Fate has issues, doesn't she?" she asked hesitantly.
"That's not very nice," Nanoha said, wagging her finger at her apprentice. "It's not very nice to say that she has confidence issues, that she's got a whole raft of phobias, that she was treated very badly by her mother and that she's a failed attempt to resurrect her long-dead sister merged with a supersoldier project. But yes, she has some problems. Not like perfectly sane people like me."
Subaru blinked. Those were some very long words. She thought about them. Had she even said all those things? She tried to remember if she had.
No, too much work.
"She has such sad eyes," Nanoha sighed happily.
"Nanoha!" Hayate managed, panting as she dropped in through the hole in the roof. "Watch out! Fate is around and…"
"Already dealt with her!" Nanoha said with a dreamy smile, which shifted into a frown. "She has trust issues, I think. She just can't settle down."
"What did you do?" Hayate asked warily.
"I just asked her if she wanted me to see to her injuries," Nanoha said, sounding hurt. "I'm a very good doctor, you know! I help people! With Raising Heart!" She pouted. "Why do so many of my exes try to kill me? I think I'm just unlucky in love."
"I'll never kill you," Subaru said loyally.
"I know you won't, but I said 'try'," Nanoha said, shaking her head.
"… oh." Hayate sighed. "I need a drink."
It was early afternoon. The sun streamed through the windows of the estate, and Hayate Yagami poured herself a third of a cup of tea.
Then she added a splash of brandy, approximately half the cup's volume in sugar, and then whiskey.
Hayate always said that she had got into that habit after meeting a green-haired little fairy who had taught her wisely, but Hayate was somewhat infamous for her fondness for absinthe, and so such statements should always be taken with a pinch of salt. It was possibly true that she thought she had met a little green-haired fairy, but many other things were also possible – and indeed probable – when she was doing shots because of the stress of handling Nanoha.
"Isn't it a little early in the afternoon to be drinking that?" Reinforce said, staring with horror at the waste of sugar.
"Shut up, Rein," Hayate responded, with utmost grace and poise. "Nanoha is in Northern Ireland, hunting a VAMPIRE infestation. At least until she gets bored and decides to go and pick up cute girls from a nearby town. I need some fortification." She shuddered. "Let's hope this time she waits until after she's destroyed the entire complex in nuclear fire."
"Uh, don't you mean 'hope this time she doesn't destroy everything in nuclear fire'?" Rein asked.
"No, of course not. I don't hope for things which don't come true," Hayate said. "We'll just pin her actions on terrorists, or possibly UFOs. Depends if she decides to burn target markers into crop fields so she can practice again."
"I believe she has expressed the idea that large explosions are romantic," Rein observed.
"No, she's observed that pink is romantic," Hayate sighed, drinking her abominable tea-sugar-brandy-whiskey mix. "I personally think that explains a lot about her psychology."
There was a bleep from the fax machine in front of her, and Hayate leant forwards and checked the printout. She paled.
"Rein," she said slowly. "We may have a problem."
"Oh?"
"Yes. The Church is getting involved."
"Oh my."
How many divisions has the pope got, Stalin once asked. He was then rather surprised to discover that the answer was that he had seven active divisions, with extensive mechanised forces and magic-using specialists capable of, in extreme cases, nuclear-level firepower. And was, in fact, the unchallenged overlord of Italy. And had he turned his eyes on the Holy Land, which is like catnip for militant popes.
It was pretty surprising how no one else had noticed that the papal states had reformed in the aftermath of the Second World War, honestly.
"That's not the worst news," Hayate said, though. "According to this very convenient fax, the Church has sent one of its top agents to… oh. Oh no. That can't be right."
"What?"
Hayate shook her head. "We're just going to hope that Nanoha is on her top game," she said. "Oh. And the new one, as well. Suberry or something. Whatever. Nanoha needs to stop bringing girls home."
…
Over in Ireland, it was late evening. The last traces of bloody hued light had faded from the sky, and now inky blackness consumed all light.
Some might have questioned how there was this strange temporal disparity between two locations in the same time zone. And indeed, it was most peculiar. And the fault of the Nazis.
"Okay!" Nanoha said, smiling widely at Subaru. "So I'm just going to Dublin to see if there are any cute girls with sad eyes there who I need to save from giant kittens. You can go punish everything in this creepy old abandoned manor house. It's like training! Remember, if you don't do this well, I'll have to mark you down in my report!"
Subaru frowned. "Aren't… we in Northern Ireland?" she asked. She wasn't sure. She hadn't really been paying much attention in the briefing.
"Yes!"
"… isn't Dublin quite far away?"
"Yep! But you're forgetting two things," Nanoha said, counting on her fingers. "One, I can fly. And two, I'm a ninja."
"You are?" Subaru frowned. "But you don't dress in black."
Nanoha nodded. It was a very good point. "Yes. That's because I'm such a good ninja that no one suspects it. Real ninjas don't dress up in black pyjamas, except sometimes when we're going to bed."
Subaru's jaw dropped wide open. "Ninjas are so clever," she said in awe. "How do I become one?"
"If I told you, I'd have to kill you," Nanoha said, and frowned. "Again," she added, because she was an honest girl.
Subaru was left on her own. She frowned, as her somewhat dented intellect tried its best to interpret her orders
There was a house full of undead. Which was a silly name, really, in her opinion, because they were dead and then reanimated by what Hayate had said was Belkan superscience-magic-stuff. So they were really more like… she tried to think of a name. Corpsebots! Yeah!
So, she had to kill them all. So it just made sense she would charge in through the window on roller skates and kill everyone inside. Or unkill them. Whatever the term was for killing the undead. Or nonalive.
"Zero Fist!"
"Zero Kick!"
"Zero Grabbing You By The Head And Beating Someone Else With Your Flailing Body!"
Subaru wasn't sure why she was shouting out all her attack names, but it made her feel better.
She paused for a moment. She was covered in blood, oil, and nothing was moving any more. So that probably meant she had done well and Nanoha would be pleased with her and say nice things about her. Nanoha was so cool and so awesome and…
Subaru's torso fell off her body, sparking.
"Ow," she said, after a few moment's thought. She was only half the woman she'd been.
An excessively sinister figure was standing in front of her legs. With their long black cape, glowing yellow scythe which sparked lightning, similarly glowing eyes, and perfunctory grasp of 'clothes are meant to cover things', she was either an evil force the world had never seen, or a goth.
'Or' was being used here in the computational sense, by the way. If it wasn't, I would have used 'xor'. And I don't mean xor.
"Hello," the sinister figure said politely. "I was worried for a moment, but then I realised you were a horrific abomination of magic and or science, and therefore it was fine for me to cut you in half." She paused. "I'm very sorry for the inconvenience," she apologised.
"Why did you cut me in half?" Subaru wheezed.
"Because you're a VAMPIRE?" the stranger said. "You are, right? Please don't say I made another mistake and Carim is going to shout at me again! It wasn't my fault I got that report on Halloween! Oh dear, I've made a mistake and it's all gone wrong and…"
"I am a VAMPIRE," Subaru said, because she felt bad for the stranger and how distressed they sounded. "Do you know what the last two letters in the acronym stand for?"
"That's classified. I'm Fate, by the way?"
"Well, Nanoha is going to be angry with me and…"
Fate gasped. "Did you say 'Nanoha'?"
"Yes, I said Nanoha. She's my new…"
Fate frowned. "Oh darn," she said. "We said her name three ti-"
The wall exploded.
"Oh, hiya Subaru!" Nanoha said, smiling contentedly down at the bisected Subaru as she floated through the hole in the wall. "Are you done yet? Because I found a cute girl with sad eyes who was having real problems with a giant kitten, and trust me on this, it's… ohmigod! Fate-chan! It's so good to see you again!"
"Nanoha, she cut me in half," Subaru complained.
"Oh, don't you know?" Nanoha said happily. "Well, you probably don't know, because you've never met her before, so I should introduce you! Subaru, this is Fate! We went out for a while! She has the saddest eyes of anyone I ever met! Fate, this is Subaru. She has a rare talent for surviving when she gets blown up! Or cut in half, it seems! Well done, Subaru-chan!"
Nanoha paused.
"Oh, don't you know?" she repeated. "Subaru has a rare talent for surviving when she gets blown up! Silly, silly Fate-chan! How could you not know that? Especially when I'd already told you!"
"So… romantic," Subaru wheezed, her heart melting from the romance. And the after-effects of being cut in half from a lightning-scythe. But mostly the romance, apart from the bits from the scythe. Slowly, she began to drag herself over the ground, to where her bottom half was.
"How dare you show up!" Fate protested, pointing her scythe at Nanoha.
"Hey, you're the person who said my name one of the three times," Nanoha said, crossing her arms. "Why'd you do that if you didn't want me around, hmm?"
"You left me!"
"I didn't leave you, Fate-chan," Nanoha said reassuringly. "I just wasn't where you were for quite a long time and found some new girlfriends in the mean time."
"You broke my heart!"
"I didn't!" Nanoha protested. "Fate-chan! How could you say that! That's totally untrue. If I'd broken your heart, you'd have been all argh-argh-argh-Nanoha-chan-why-have-you-stabbed-me-in-the-chest-with-your-Device! And when I tried that, I couldn't get past your ribcage! And I only did that because you tried to hurt Raising Heart!"
"It tried to eat my soul!"
"That's only how it shows it's friendly," Nanoha said, stroking the red gem on her staff. "There, there. She didn't mean it."
Feeling very embarrassed, Subaru crawled over to her legs and got to work reattaching them.
"You've changed! You're not the woman I fell in love with! You're a monster!" Fate accused.
Nanoha stared at her in confusion. "I don't follow," she said.
"Follow this!" Fate shouted and cut her head off.
Subaru blinked. That was very fast. She hadn't even seen Fate's arms move. And then Nanoha's head hit the ground with a noise sort of like a bowling ball dropped from a height, and she realised she was screaming. With her newly reattached legs, she pulled herself up.
"Please don't kill me," she begged of Fate.
"I'm afraid you have to die," Fate told her seriously.
"But… but what if I don't want to die?" Subaru protested weakly, backing away from the deranged killer.
Fate's eyes widened. "I… I didn't think of that," she said, turning paler. "It would be very rude for me to cut you apart if you didn't want to be cut apart. But I already did that… but you fixed yourself, so no hard feelings there. I… I don't know. What if it's the wrong thing to do? What if I'm not meant to do it? What if I'm being a bad girl by doing it and," Fate slapped herself around the face, "No! Bad Fate! You mustn't do bad things! Be a good girl!"
Subaru stood there in confusion, waiting for the next thought to come along. There was something she had been meaning to do.
"I know!" Fate declared, eyes darting around nervously. "I will call Carim. She's a bishop and she always knows what to do when I have this sort of question."
Yes, some of you may be wondering how the Catholic Church has female bishops, when it has always stood firmly against the ordination of female clergy, claiming that it would break the apostolic succession. Well, yes. However, in the dark days of WW2, one thing led to another, and… well, ta-da! Female clergy!
Fucking Nazis.
… uh, that was two separate clauses. Even though if you read it out loud, you'd say "female clergy fucking Nazis" and then probably titter. Well, no Just as their male predecessors, female members of the clergy were required to be celibate.
But Nanoha and Fate, I hear you say. Well, yes. In many ways, Fate was a very bad priest. Certain exceptions were made for her, on the grounds of her extreme lethality when not worried by moral questions and her steadfast opposition to public displays of affection between gay couples, which meant that the many observers in the Vatican never got actual confirmation of her relationship. Plus, to be honest, at least with her there was no fear that she might act improperly towards young boys, and that could be appreciated in a priest.
Fortunately, this extended authorial diversion was enough time for Fate to dig through the short skirt, cape, leotard and collection of belts which passed for her clothing and find her phone – where, we shall never know – and remember how to turn it on, and then how to find numbers on this new-fangled gadgetry. And enough time for Subaru to try and fail to remember the really really important thing she had been meaning to do.
"Carim," Fate said, frowning, "I have a question." A pause. "No, not that one. You still haven't explained to me how it's all right for me to be a priest who is into other… oh, yes! Yes, I have a female VAMPIRE here who is also a cyborg. I'm not sure how that works. But she doesn't want me to kill her. I did cut her in half already, but she fixed herself. My question is, is it okay for me to kill her even if she doesn't want to be killed?"
What was that she had been meaning to do, Subaru asked herself.
"Damned soul, you say?"
Buy milk?
"Infectious, you say?"
No, she was lactose intolerant.
"A mercy to exterminate each and every last one of those things from the world, you say?"
Oh yes, Subaru thought slowly. She had been meaning to escape.
"Thank you very much," Fate told the phone earnestly. "I'll be sure to call you if I have any more moral dilemmas." Pause. "Uh, you did increase the hours I got on my contract, yes? Last month, I ran out again. Oh, thank you!"
Fate stared at her phone, searching for a button, and eventually managed to hang up. She tucked her phone away, somehow managing to conceal exactly where she was keeping it, and then turned to face Subaru again.
She noticed that Subaru was no longer there.
Fate blinked. "She's trying to run!" she said in an outraged tone of voice. "That is not acceptable!"
The homicidal female priest was in fact wrong there. Subaru was attempting to roller-blade off. Through a house. Which meant that her escape was being accompanied by a lot of smashing and breaking noises, and it was very easy for Fate to catch up with her.
"Stop running away. It'll be quick," Fate reassured Subaru. "Nanoha didn't even notice."
"Didn't notice what?" asked Nanoha, standing behind Fate.
"That I cut your head off, Nanoha," the blonde said. There was a pause. "How is your head still attached?" Fate whimpered. "And why are you not dead?"
"Because I'm a ninja. Stop being so silly, Fate-chan," Nanoha said, in a tone of voice which implied that Fate was perhaps being a tiny bit obtuse. "I just dropped a smoke bomb."
"Nanoha, I cut your head off," Fate told her weakly.
"Nin. Ja."
"That explains nothing. There wasn't even any smoke."
Nanoha stared at her blankly in confusion. "Fate-chan," she said, sounding worried, "have you hit yourself in the head? It's not like you to be like this. Oooh! I know! You're sick and I'm going to have to dress up as a nurse and make you all better! Raising Heart, prepare the surgery kit!"
"ąĐčĔ÷ç❹ⱤⱢⱣffiṁ ϯϰϭϠϣƔ ƝƯƫƇḴḲḄḸḿǿdz," blasphemed her device. Subaru screamed at the sound, her earwax melting, and all around them the rats in the walls sang until their breath gave out.
There was the sound of a crack and a large explosion, and Fate was mysteriously gone, along with most of the ceiling.
"… is she a ninja too?" Subaru breathed in awe, once she could hear again. "I should have known all along. She was wearing black." Subaru turned around, as if the priest had somehow managed to hide behind her, but the terrible stealth of the black-clad woman defied her skills of investigation. "Where did she go?"
Nanoha raised a finger, pointing upwards.
Subaru stared at it. "Ah. Ninja hand magic. Of course." She thought hard. "Fate has issues, doesn't she?" she asked hesitantly.
"That's not very nice," Nanoha said, wagging her finger at her apprentice. "It's not very nice to say that she has confidence issues, that she's got a whole raft of phobias, that she was treated very badly by her mother and that she's a failed attempt to resurrect her long-dead sister merged with a supersoldier project. But yes, she has some problems. Not like perfectly sane people like me."
Subaru blinked. Those were some very long words. She thought about them. Had she even said all those things? She tried to remember if she had.
No, too much work.
"She has such sad eyes," Nanoha sighed happily.
"Nanoha!" Hayate managed, panting as she dropped in through the hole in the roof. "Watch out! Fate is around and…"
"Already dealt with her!" Nanoha said with a dreamy smile, which shifted into a frown. "She has trust issues, I think. She just can't settle down."
"What did you do?" Hayate asked warily.
"I just asked her if she wanted me to see to her injuries," Nanoha said, sounding hurt. "I'm a very good doctor, you know! I help people! With Raising Heart!" She pouted. "Why do so many of my exes try to kill me? I think I'm just unlucky in love."
"I'll never kill you," Subaru said loyally.
"I know you won't, but I said 'try'," Nanoha said, shaking her head.
"… oh." Hayate sighed. "I need a drink."