The Garden of Time, Imaginary Space
Shamal laid on a small maintenance creeper and pushed herself underneath on of the large computer terminals sticking up through the general mess of her workstation. The mess bothered her, but she couldn't be bothered to clean it up. Her deceased friends would have found that funny, but she didn't care. They were dead and she had more important things to do.
Like fix the thrice blasted remote drone control terminal so she could finally implement her plan. Shamal pressed her hand against the terminal and commanded, "Klarwind, Diagnostics Mode." Her device fizzled with green light, barely enough to activate the required mode, but all she could manage now.
Her rings pulsed with light for a moment then announced, Diagnoseform. The rings shifted into a small green glove and began to feed her information on the internal structure of the terminal. A mental command to scan for errors brought an abrupt end to the information flow. A sudden horrible fear assaulted Shamal. Had her device had finally given out?
She felt her throat knot up and wanted to do nothing more than curl up and cry. But she couldn't, doing that would be abandoning the last mission Hay... The last mission her former mistress had given her.
Then Klarwind spoke and Shamal's heart jumped. Scan beenden. The flow of data into her mind resumed. Each error inside the solid block of molecular circuitry that composed the medical drone control terminal glowed a bright red in her head. There were hundreds of thousands of them, until the entire terminal seemed red hued, but most of them were irrelevant for her purposes.
After a moment, Shamal determined that she only needed to reroute the main data buses and redistribute the tasks normally performed by the core processors to working secondary systems. It would cut out ninety percent of the terminal's functionality, and reduce the number of medical drones that could be managed by the system from fifty to around four. Which was exactly four more than the garden's systems could currently handle.
Shamal scooted the crawler back out from under the terminal and released Klarwind back into its storage form. She needed to find another non-vital system to take materials from, and would have to rewrite the drone control programs in order to proceed. But first she needed to pay a visit to the garden's hydroponics system to find dinner.
The garden's hydroponics system was a marvel of magical and technological engineering. Three hundred self-sustaining plots of farm land that were tended by a set of drones that had remained functional well past their retirement dates. Shamal guessed that made them sort of like her.
In the past the garden's hydroponics system had been easily capable of feeding the garden's nominal crew of one hundred and eighty. Now it only had to supply one and a half people. Shamal took a few apples and filled a bag with rice before leaving.
She left most of the supplies on a shelf in the garden's processing center which also served as her makeshift kitchen. Shamal tucked an apple into her pocket before grabbing one of the heavy green rubber nutrient bags off of the rack and walking towards the garden's barely functional medical bay.
Unlike most of the garden, the medical bay wasn't cluttered with anything. It was almost absolutely bare except a large, slightly glowing cylinder in the center of the room. The cylinder was the legacy of Precia's brief period of ownership over the garden. She had called it the resurrection chamber in her notes, but it wasn't really. It was more of a life suspension system than anything. If the smallest spark of life remained inside of someone then the chamber would keep them alive.
Shamal tried to not look at the half torso of an old women which floated in the tank. She replaced the old nutrient bag with a new one, and then calmly folded the old one up for sterilization. Once Shamal had completed her tasks for the day she collapsed against the wall of the room and pulled out her apple. She spent a moment staring into the tank where her new mistress and only remaining friend floated. The she took a bit of her apple. Between bites Shamal talked to the figure. She explained how her day went; how she had feared when Klarwind had fallen silent, and everything else. She told her mistress every important or trivial thing she could think of.
Shamal reflected that she probably wasn't sane anymore, but the time for worrying over such things had long passed. During the first days of their exile Shamal had considered making a clone of her mistress, but had rejected the idea because the parallels between her and Precia scared Shamal. Now she regretted that fear deeply. But she didn't have the power left to walk down that road anymore; the small trickle from her mistress' linker core was barely enough to keep them alive.
Shamal ended up spending the night in the medical bay. The fake companionship of her silently sleeping mistress was better than sleeping alone again.
It took Shamal the better part of three weeks to cannibalize the parts needed from other unnecessary systems and rewrite the drone control programs, but at the end she was rewarded with three fully functional medical drones.
The fourth lay unmoving in pieces on Shamal's work bench. She was carefully modifying the internal structure of the drone to accommodate a belkan type cartridge system. If her simulations were correct the drone would be able to use its healing interface to deliver the cartridge's energy directly to her mistress' linker core.
The surge of power would hopefully jump start what the computer was seventy six percent certain were regeneration circuits somehow engraved into her mistress' neural pathways. How they had gotten there was anyone's guess. They had never shown up on any scan before her mistress' 'death'. Of course, her mistress hadn't had an intelligent device somehow fused into her chest before then either.
Shamal tried to not think about what would happen if her calculations were wrong. Shamal was tempted to rerun her simulations at the thought, but brushed it aside. The unknowns were still unknown and the number's wouldn't change. In the end all she could do was pull the trigger and hope.
The internal systems of the drone she was working on left Shamal wishing that she had studied Dr. Scaglietti's notes better when she had the chance. In the end her 'upgrades' to the device left it far to large to fit into its normal case; which unfortunately held the drones lift system. Shamal ended up cutting the case in half and tapping the damn thing around the misshapen thing that had once been the internal components of a medical drone.
Any expert who saw it would have cried if they weren't so busy laughing. Shamal felt a bit like crying herself. The drone carried the three remaining cartridges in her possession, which meant that all of her hopes were being carried by something that looked like an abstract art project. She tittered to herself, "I'll call it 'Never Send a Doctor to do an Engineer's Job."
The thing wobbled through the air drunkenly behind her towards the medical bay, where the other three drones were already floating in a circular pattern around the tank, projecting a multidimensional array for healing and stabilization. Shamal took a final dirty look at the modified drone before deciding there was no point in delaying further.
Klarwind helped her send a mental command to the drone control terminal and the procedure began. The drones forming the circle dumped all of their remaining power into the circle while the modified drone ambled up the tank and interfaced with her mistress' silent device to locate her linker core.
Their was a sharp bang, Then another, Then another. The three spent casings echoed loudly on the hard floor. And absolutely nothing happened. Her mistress' lower torso was still just a blasted stub, and the deep gashes running along her chest were still the same garish shade of purple. The device embedded in her chest was still as dark as ever.
Shamal collapsed against the side of the tank and did something she hadn't since her Hayate had vanished along with Mid-Childa. She buried her head in her hands and bawled. She kept crying until she at last fell into a fitful sleep.
Shamal woke up to someone poking her shoulder. Shamal opened her eyes at the annoying pokes. Blinked at the impossible sight in front of her, then full out gaped at the young girl standing in front of her. She was wrapped up in a sheet that she had gotten from heaven only knows, and she was much, much younger than she was only hours ago. But more important than that, Shamal could feel the girl's powerful linker core surging into her own. This was her queen.
The girl wilted back under Shamal's stare and ran her fingers together before asking, "Umm...I'm sorry, but do you know who I am?"
Shamal smoothly rose from her sitting position and knelled in front of her queen. If she had been less shocked she would have noted that the aches that had constantly bothered her during her time aboard he garden of time were gone. But every thought was overridden by the words of contract surging through her. Head bowed, Shamal spoke, "You are the white devil, the breaker of gates and the second queen of the night sky. Nanoha Takamachi. I am the knight of the lake and the healing wind, Shamal. I pledge my fealty to you my queen."
Her queen tittered, "Nice to meet you?"
A/N:
Not sure what what I will do with this now that I finished what I want to write. Right now its going to stay as a one shot, but in the future I might expand it a bit.
This started out as me wondering what a SSS class mage would actually be like. Then ended up getting changed because just starting the story at SSS isn't that interesting. So I decided to write about a Nanoha who was once SSS and will be SSS again eventually if I choose to continue the story.
Also this seems like it could either go a crossover route or stay in the Nanoha universe. I could have a bit of fun developing a back story for how everything reached the point where Nanoha and Shamal are stowed away on the Garden of Time.
For those of you who would rather be reading a new chapter of Danzo's team instead: Sorry I got distracted, its only at about 4k right now.