A/N: I'm back! Sorry it took so long to update, my parents grounded me from my computer almost immediately after I posted the prologue. Two side notes today:
1: Do not copy the Cyniclon who shows up around the middle of the chapter. He's different for a reason.
2: At the end of chapters, instead of author's notes I'll post factoids about this AU, particularly stuff about the Cyniclons which may or may not be important later. Some of it will just be trivia, but there might be some important stuff in there later.
Enjoy!
To say that Ichigo was nervous when Shirogane called the team into the Briefing Room that afternoon would have been an understatement. She was scared to death. She knew Berry had told him about their encounter with the rebel Mews, and she knew he knew she knew, so she was understandably anxious. Not for herself, but for her team and her country. Lorem had straight-up told them that Japan was a major target for Project Deep Blue-whatever that was-and that it had to be protected at all costs. That and she was running under the assumption that Kisshu and Taruto, the cooperative members of the group of Cyniclons attacking their base, had been reassigned to a different base to keep them from interfering with the Cyniclons' Project and the Tokyo Mews no longer had any hope at allies on the other side. If Shirogane grounded them all from fighting for 'fraternizing with the enemy', Japan was in deep trouble unless they could get the Korean Mews to come over and help.
Upon entering the room, her anxiety lightened considerably. Shirogane was frowning, sure, but it was a nervous, thinking scowl rather than a wrath-of-the-Coordinator grimace. His eyes were deeply worried.
"Shirogane-san, are you alright?" Lettuce asked hesitantly.
The blond jumped. "Ah, yes. I'm fine, but there are lots of others...less fine right now."
"What happened?" Mint asked.
"Antarctica has fallen," he said.
"That's not possible," Zakuro said. Her usually stoic expression betrayed her, showing the barest hints of her shock and disbelief.
"Impossible or not, it happened. Their AI sent out a final transmission a few minutes ago, before it was destroyed. I have the video right here." He looked Ichigo straight in the eye, clearly asking whether or not she wanted him to play it. Odd. He usually didn't ask her permission first.
"Play it," Ichigo said, uncharacteristically serious.
Shirogane pulled the file up on the computer and pressed play.
The camera that took the video was close to the ground-which made sense, since the rover was a small, tank-like affair built to withstand the climate—and evidently mounted on a periscope, since it swiveled faster than the robot itself could turn on its axis. It gave the Mews a panoramic view of the carnage the aliens had caused.
From the outside, the base didn't look all that bad until you noticed that every door had been ripped off its hinges. The smaller personnel doors lay in splinters and tangled shards of metal, while the bay doors for vehicles had been smashed in, leaving great chimaera-sized holes in the steel. The nearest one had streaks of red along the left side of the hole. The rover rumbled through one of the personnel doors, showcasing snowdrifts already blowing across the cement floor. Frozen puddles of blood, human and chimaera, dotted the floor, ranging from barely more than a few droplets to larger than a man.
The hulking corpse of a chimaera loomed in the semi-darkness of the room, already covered in a fine layer of frost. Its head had been blown off, but the body looked like a shaggy seal-dog hybrid. The body of a Mew lay only a few feet away, her features clearly recognizable as the team's Second. Her long, feathery black-and-white hair fanned out in a halo around her head. Her pitch-black eyes were wide, and her face was frozen in a look of shock. Her throat had been slit, frozen beads of blood glittering along the cut like garnets. The rover trundled past without regard for the dead girl...but then again, it was a robot without even the rudimentary personality Shirogane had programmed into MASHA.
As the rover travelled deeper into the base, it passed more and more corpses. Some were chimaera, but many more were scientists and researchers-the Antarctic base had been a multi-national research center for nearly a century before it was expanded to include the Mews. Only Zakuro noticed something rather disturbing about the methods of death employed. The chimaera had been killed in various ways, likely depending on the Mew who did it, but every researcher the rover passed had been decapitated and the body laid on its front with the head nowhere to be seen. And as they passed the bodies of the Mews, it became evident that each and every one of them had been killed in the same way as the first Mew—with her throat cut, and the only other injuries inflicted during battle.
The rover's directional display indicated that the Mew's bodies had been laid with their heads pointing towards the south magnetic pole.
And then, as the rover approached the central control room, someone reached down and grabbed it, lifting 18 kilograms of freezing steel with one bare hand. The camera swiveled to face its attacker.
He was distinctly Cyniclon, with the characteristic high cheekbones, angular features, and long pointed ears. And yet, there was something distinctly wrong about him. His eyes were the same shade of blue Ichigo remembered Lorem's being, but the hair that framed them was blond. Blond. No Cyniclon on record was blond-that was a distinctly human color.
The Cyniclon smirked at the camera, pointed eyeteeth flashing in a display of triumph. His right cheek was smeared with bright red—human blood.
"A human recording device," he remarked, studying the rover coldly, almost as if he were looking through the camera at them. He had the musical Cyniclon accent, but his made minor chords that sounded like icicles jangling together and set shivers down Ichigo's spine. He turned his head and said something in his own tongue to someone standing behind him, then turned back to the camera.
"I bring a message from the Council," he said. "Your Southern Pole is now under Cyniclon control, and will continue to be so until our Project has run its course. Other locations will not be long to follow; as we have developed methods for dealing with your...how do you say it in English...your biological weapons." He glared death at the camera. "And we know you harbor one of our own among your number. Return him, and your deaths will be honorable. Fail to do so, and you will live long enough to regret it with every molecule in your bodies."
He had been holding the rover with his right hand, and at that point in the clip he raised his left hand into view of the camera. Something silvery and metallic stirred at his wrist—it looked almost like mercury, except it flowed upwards, curling around his long, slim fingers. A tendril of it lifted delicately, turned toward the camera, and shot straight at it. The screen went dark, and the audio cut out a second later. The last thing it captured was the Cyniclon's cold, jangling laugh.
Ichigo shuddered. She couldn't believe it. Antarctica was well-known for having the strongest Mews on the planet—they had to be, to survive on the bottom of the world. And now they were dead. She turned to her team and found them in various expressions of shock and horror. Zakuro's stoic façade had cracked, her violet eyes huge and disbelieving. Mint looked absolutely horrified and disgusted. Lettuce had buried her face in her hands, her slim shoulders shaking with sobs. Pudding trembled, brown eyes wide as saucers. Unlike the others, Berry just looked pissed.
"Those monsters! You see, Ichigo, this is why we can't trust anything those traitors said! They're running around, spreading alien propaganda while their allies go and murder our people! I suggested we stop them while we had the chance, but no, our 'wonderful Leader' insisted on playing nice, and now look what's—"
"Enough, Berry," Shirogane cut in. "I doubt this is somehow Ichigo's fault. But at any rate, the Cyniclons have showed their hand. They're moving in, which means we have to be on our guard, particularly if that Cyniclon you girls encountered was telling the truth about their plans." His blue eyes focused on Ichigo. "Mew Ichigo, I'll be relying on you more than ever now. Can I trust you?"
"Of course! What kind of a question is that, you jerk?!"
"A valid one. Berry has told me you're acting like you're planning to abandon the Project, and I'm inclined to believe her."
Ichigo's eyes narrowed. "After what Calliope and Lorem said, I'm not going anywhere. Japan needs me, my team needs me—Shirogane, if I leave the Cyniclons will take Japan like they took Antarctica! I can't let them do that, even if I don't agree with killing them all just because the government is paranoid!"
Shirogane nodded. "That's all I needed to hear." He redirected his attentions to the team. "Be alert, all of you. They've taken Antarctica, but that's one low-importance area and they won't get anywhere else."
"Shirogane-san," Zakuro interrupted. "They only need to take over two other locations before they win. They've changed tactics. We, however, have to keep our same tactics, because if we abandon them they can revert to their original plan. We're fighting a defensive war."
Shirogane made a shoo-ing gesture, indicating that everyone except Zakuro should leave. Ichigo and the others filed out reluctantly, and the Coordinator and Tactician stood silent, face-to-face.
"You know how rarely defensive wars are won, Shirogane," Zakuro said. "We're playing a losing game."
The blond's shoulders slumped, and he seemed to age decades in mere moments. "I know. But we have to keep fighting and acting like we know we'll win in the end, because if we give up people will panic. You know enough about history to know what that causes."
Zakuro nodded, studying the human's face. They were so different—mindset, worldview, psychology—but somehow they still managed to find the same page. She like that—it meant he thought like a wolf.
Factoid: The Cyniclon spoken language is impossible to translate to English because of the sheer variety and complexity of words and interpretations-that and it's impossible for humans to speak, since it requires a second set of vocal cords. Instead, they translate their alphabet directly to the English one and vice-versa, putting their own terms into English sounds where there isn't a word that means the same thing.
