By the way, characters that are shown only in a bad light are not based on anyone or any fictional character. Any names that turn up are complete coincidence. I don't like bashing. Well, Harry Potter Umbridge bashing is fine.
I'm not really sure how the Mirror World works. There are only two rooms with both enemies and mirrors in them: one has zombies, and the other is Dario and Aguni's (there's also Paranoia, of course, but that doesn't count because you can't enter mirrors until you kill it). Neither Dario nor the zombies appear in the Mirror World, and they don't have reflections. If real people have reflections, then do they appear? Just like having the Ghoul soul make rotten food taste good, I winged it.
Paranoia
"Soma."
Soma turned around at the sound of his name. Kazuya was sitting at his desk, somehow released from the spell of his computer. "You're going for breakfast?"
"Yeah. Do you want anything?"
"No thanks, I'll go down when I'm hungry," responded the redhead. He paused to type another line of something. "You know Daisuke? The guy with the sideburns who always looks like he wants to kill someone?"
"Works at the coffee shop?" said Soma. "Yeah, I know him."
"Well, watch out. He thinks you were the one who trashed his motorbike last night. I TOLD Naoki to lay off the whiskey, but no, he had to see if having a bug stuck in his eye would help him…"
Kazuya trailed off, typing another dozen lines of code. He did that sometimes. What exactly he was working on, Soma had no idea. "I'll be careful," said Soma.
As he walked down the steps of the dorm, Soma began running simulations of his course of action. Daisuke wasn't really a bad person, he recalled. Just a tad violent and temperamental. Called his mother every day. And even if this guy was just a jerk that kicked puppies, Soma wouldn't actually use any of his dark powers to hurt a normal person.
That rules out all of my weapons and half of my souls, he reflected. He shook that thought out of his mind. No. Most of my problems can be solved without freaky magical powers. I've gotten along well so far, and I shouldn't rely on them all the time. Chances are, I can deal with this by either talking or running…
But, his imagination piqued, Soma began thinking up of various ways to mess with Daisuke as he entered the cafeteria. Throw a cat at him, he thought. Or give him a cat and persuade him to pet it.
All this 'planning' was ruined when Soma, lost in thought, bumped right into Daisuke.
Daisuke dropped his bowls of salt fish and eggplant over rice and pudding (that is to say, he had a bowl of pudding and also a bowl containing salt fish, eggplant and rice. Before he dropped them, of course), and they shattered and splat on the ground.
Soma stared at the mess, and back to Daisuke. "Sorry…?"
Daisuke glared at Soma with the heat of a thousand suns. Then he cleared his throat. "Start running."
Soma gulped, and complied.
"I'M GOING TO KILL YOU AND DANCE ON YOUR GRAVE!" shouted Daisuke as they dashed up the staircase, a threat that Soma's distant memory of being Dracula scoffed at.
While Soma had the Black Panther soul (the one he called 'The one that makes me like The Flash but not'), he found out the hard way that using a flashy soul that made shockwaves wherever he ran to get to class on time was not a good idea. He barely avoided getting caught by the photography club and worse, Arikado. From then on, he vowed not to use that soul if there was the slightest chance of being seen.
Which meant that Soma only had his (admittedly incredible, considering that he often swung swords with giant rocks stuck in them) natural physical ability to get away from a guy rumored to bench-press cars.
Soma pushed and shoved through the crowd of students, taking care to cut as many corners as possible. He was secretly thankful for the superhuman stamina that came with running through two castles full of unearthly horrors; sprinting at breakneck speed up several flights of steps wasn't exactly his normal workout routine. Julius said that the Belmont Clan had a tradition of hating staircases, although the accounts rarely specified why. Apparently, when the Belmont clan became rich enough to afford a house with more than one storey, the builders were specifically told not to install stairs and instead were instructed to make platforms for jumping. The builders were not amused. Julius had also told Soma that it was a rite of passage for everyone in the clan (especially ones who married in) to get to the second floor without help.
Get to the roof, Soma said to himself. Then jump or turn into a bat.
Unfortunately, Soma was not yet completely adjusted to the school. So rather than kicking open the door to the roof, he found himself in a men's bathroom. In other words, a dead end.
Soma looked around wildly. No windows. All three stalls occupied. He could still hear Daisuke's pounding footsteps reaching ever closer. Then he saw himself.
"Of course," he muttered. "Stupid me."
Thirty seconds later, Daisuke crashed into the men's room. "Soma Cruz!" he shouted. "Take your punishment like a man and come out!"
He was met with the sound of someone flushing.
Daisuke ripped open the first stall, breaking the lock.
Kazuya looked up from his computer. "Occupied, jackass," he said in a tone that suggested that this hulking tower of a man was just a mere annoyance to him.
"Kazuya? What are you doing?"
"Isn't it obvious? I'm programming."
"Yes, but why are you doing it here?"
Kazuya gave Daisuke another annoyed look. "Well, I've been constipated for the past few da-"
"Never mind," said Daisuke, slamming the stall door shut. Naturally, since bathroom doors are generally not meant to shut without locks, it bounced back.
"And for some reason, chocolate lubricates my-"
"DON'T WANT TO KNOW!"
"Fix the damn door, will you? This is really embarrassing and I can't get up right now."
Daisuke chose to ignore the computer dude and punched out the lock on the next door.
"Hello," said the occupant. "Did you need something?"
Daisuke and the occupant had a brief staring contest. The occupant showed no emotion whatsoever.
Seeing as the person blandly sitting down and relieving himself was clearly not the one he was looking for, Daisuke shut the door and proceeded to the last occupied stall.
"You've got to be right here, asshole!" Daisuke shouted as he prepared to punch out the lock.
However, at that moment, the occupant of the final stall happened to open the door. Rather than metal and plastic, Daisuke's fist met the hand of the last occupant.
"Seriously?" said Naoki, rubbing his forehead with his right hand and crushing Daisuke's fist with this left. "What's this all about?"
"Um… sorry," said Daisuke, cowed by the smaller boy. "I'll just…"
Naoki caught Daisuke in a headlock, something the average bystander would find unimaginable considering Daisuke's mounds of muscle and Naoki's slighter build. "IT'S SEVEN IN THE MORNING AND I HAVE A HANGOVER! PICK A BETTER TIME TO PISS SOMEONE OFF!"
Soma couldn't see what exactly Naoki was doing from without exposing himself and his power to the outside world, but he heard tiles shattering. He sat down in everyone's blind spot: right between the mirrors. The only way anyone could possibly see him was if they could stick their heads in the mirror and look straight down. Entering and exiting the Mirror World was a piece of cake. Doing it without being seen was the hard part. It seemed as if no one was going to leave any time soon. With a sigh, he took out his school books and started reading. Might as well do something productive while he was here.
Ten minutes later, Soma finally got a break. "Naoki, I think that's enough," Soma heard Kazuya say calmly. "He didn't do anything but insult you and break a few locks."
Naoki dropped Daisuke (at least that must have been the sound Soma heard) with a thump, and said, "Yeah, you're right. I'm going for breakfast."
Kazuya sighed. "What is with that guy? I swear in the name of computers that he's…" He trailed off and did more typing.
"Are you all right?" asked a new voice. Since Soma didn't hear the door open since Daisuke came in, it must have been the occupant whose name he didn't know.
"What's it to you?" Daisuke manage to snap.
"Why did you come in here, anyways?" asked the new voice.
"To get that little runt Soma Cruz!" said Daisuke. "He's the one who trashed my motorbike last ni-"
"That was Naoki," said Kazuya. "He tried a few shots last night. Told him it was illegal, but he didn't listen. When we got back, he kept telling me that the Hell Biker was after him again for stealing his candles. That's when he ripped apart your bike."
Kazuya sighed. "And then he fainted after seeing a bullfight poster. Strange, that one is. Now then, how am I going to do this with exactly six hundred and sixty six lines of code?"
Daisuke was suddenly silent, presumably contemplating whether to try to take on the smaller kid who just piledrove him. "But Soma bumped into me, didn't he? He made me drop my pudding."
"Did he?" said the other person. "In that case, I'll treat you to breakfast."
The door to the bathroom (heavier than the stalls, so Soma could clearly tell the difference) opened and shut. Knowing that Kazuya was distracted by his typing, Soma flashed out of the Mirror World.
X
The cafeteria was crowded. REALLY crowded. Maybe it wasn't that much more crowded than it was before Soma returned from Celia's castle, but it seemed worse. I'm on edge, thought Soma. I spent a long time in that place. The slightest mistake could have cost me my life or my sanity. I sharpened my senses to the point where I could hear the slightest scratch of claw on stone or carpet. That doesn't go away that easily.
Around him, students jostled, spat, chewed with their mouths open, spilled and sloshed. Soma tried to eat his miso soup in peace, but there were just too many… distractions. Everything tried to grab his attention like a class full of rowdy children.
"That's it," said Soma after he narrowly dodged someone throwing food at him. He took his food on a tray left the cafeteria.
Anyone who would have observed Soma would have guessed that he would be going to the roof, or to a secret spot somewhere in the building. In a way, that was true. Except this secret spot happened to be inside of a mirror.
Some time ago, Soma had found the abandoned drama dressing room, which was full of mirrors and blankets and junk. Conveniently enough, a large section of the room was not reflected by any mirror. So Soma stole the blankets, took them inside the mirror, and made a blanket fort. He started going there to study when he found that his room and the library were both too loud for him, but then he started storing his video game consoles there, so that they wouldn't get stolen. He also ended up stashing all of his weapons except for his very best there; all the rest went inside of his hammerspace coat.
And, for now, it was the spot where Soma ate his breakfast.
X
Despite the risks of being seen, Soma still used his Paranoia soul almost every day.
The school baths were clean, but got crowded very easily. After being pushed around and jostled for way too long, Soma took to going through the mirror in the locker room and bathing in the Mirror World.
The Mirror World was weird but made some amount of sense. Incorporeal living things like Aguni became real in the Mirror World. While real people were reflected by mirrors, on the Mirror side they only appeared like paintings or window drawings on the mirror itself (Soma found that kind of confusing). Even when mirrors showed a room full of people, the Mirror World was completely empty. Soma took this as his chance to soak in lots of hot water in peace.
He almost got caught a couple of times. His roommates were surprisingly sharp; Naoki noticed that he never saw Soma in the baths, but he always smelled clean. Kazuya saw some of Soma's scars, but wondered why he never got a chance to see all of them. Soma decided that once a week would be bearable, and resolved to spend at least one day in a real bath to alleviate suspicion.
Also, Soma was still clearly visible in mirrors when he was in the Mirror World. One night, as he was soaking in one of the tubs, he heard a shriek.
"Gh-ghost!" screamed someone bathing in the real world. Soma looked into the mirror, and saw that it was one of the boys bathing in the same bathtub as him. That is to say, the real world counterpart to the bath he was in. While it did not reflect reality, the mirror showed him bathing with two other boys.
"Calm down," said the other boy. Soma recognized his voice as the same guy who got barged in on by Daisuke in the bathroom.
"But Yu!" (Soma only later learned that this guy's name was Yu, and his friend was not calling him 'You.') "Look in the mirror! Ach! He's looking at me!"
Yu looked into the mirror, and then turned to where Soma should have been. "Hello," he said. "Are you enjoying the bath?"
Soma was speechless. "Um… yes?"
"Okay then," said Yu. "Do you want to kill us or wish harm on anyone?"
"No," said Soma.
"Okay," said Yu.
The other boy in the bath shivered despite the warmth. "Seriously, Yu. You have nerves of titanium."
The boys left him alone after that. They didn't pursue him or exorcise him, which was lucky because Soma wasn't sure if an exorcism would hurt him or not.
X
"Say, Mina?" said Soma one day while they were out on yet another walk. "You know how I can go into mirrors?"
Mina sighed and licked her ice cream that did not contain any nuts at all. "Not this all over again. Is it really a good idea for you to be messing around with your souls like this?"
"It's better to experiment with them now under controlled conditions than to try them out when I'm in dire straits," said Soma. "If anything goes wrong, you're here."
"Shouldn't you get someone who knows a bit more about creepy black soul magic, like Yoko or Arikado?" asked Mina.
Soma shrugged. "They'd never let me try. Besides, since you're here, you can call them if I can't make it back."
Mina gave Soma a grudging look of agreement. "Okay, but don't say that I never said this might be a bad idea."
"It's not that bad of an idea," said Soma. "It's the same principle."
"Last time, you almost passed out from shock," Mina pointed out. "You said that since nuts were practically poison to you and the Ghoul soul processed poison, you wouldn't die from it."
"Yes, but it just turned out that it didn't work on stuff that wasn't already poisonous," said Soma. "Speaking of which, do you think it'll stop me from getting drunk? Know any good places where I can get cheap drugs? For that matter, would I die from drinking snake poison or anthrax? Would I be immune to diseases that involve ingesting an infected person's fluids?"
"Soma!" said Mina.
"Fine. Not until I'm twenty," said Soma. "Besides, disease catching is too complex to experiment with just one subject. Anyways, the Paranoia soul allows me to enter the Mirror World from any mirror that I could reasonably crawl through. Do you think it works with any reflective surface, or just mirrors? Would distorted images make it harder?"
Mina gave Soma the look of the long suffering childhood friend who always got roped into this sort of thing. "First off, I doubt that every mirror is so perfect that there are absolutely no distortions, or that every single mirror has exactly the same distortions. So don't bother trying funhouse mirrors, because they would work just as well. Second…. Actually, I am kind of curious. Would windows work? What about water or oil, or mercury? Does it have to do with the percentage of light that gets reflected? Lots of things reflect, so what can and can't you use?"
Soma grinned. "I was just thinking about windows, but you're right about water. Next time someone tries to drown me, I can just escape through the Mirror World. Let's not try mercury, though."
"Yeah. I'd probably get put on a watchlist if I tried."
Soma and Mina ducked into yet another alleyway, this one with a reasonably sized window facing outwards. The shutter was down, so there wasn't much chance of being seen.
"All right, here goes," said Soma, and he flashed through the window.
Thirty seconds later, he came back with a box of fried chicken. "Interesting," he said. "I ended up on the other side of the mirror. Want a leg?"
Mina accepted the chicken. "Maybe it's because the glass is transparent, and light passes more than it reflects?"
"Heck if I know," said Soma.
"Are there any reflective translucent materials out there?"
"Probably," said Soma. "But I don't know any off the top of my head. If I find one, I'll give it a try."
"What happens if we use a two-way mirror? Even on the reflective side, if you look closely you can see the other side."
"Do you know where we can get a two-way mirror?"
Neither of them knew any place that had or sold them, so they proceeded to the next experiment.
"So you're experimenting with your souls, eh?" said Julius when the couple arrived on the door to his apartment.
"Yeah," said Soma, not really sure how else to respond. "I'm trying out the one that puts me in mirrors. Please don't tell Arikado."
"Don't worry, I won't," said Julius. "Just as long as you don't mess up too badly. Why did you call me, anyways?"
"Several reasons, actually," said Mina. "We need a bathtub and privacy. Both the public bathhouse and the school baths are gender segregated, so I can't be there if anything goes wrong. And even if we didn't have to worry about that, there's still the chance that other people might see. Neither of us live around here, and even if we did, we'd have to explain to our parents why we're both going to take a bath at the same time at our age. You know about Soma's powers and that we're not doing anything, so there's no danger of exposure."
Julius nodded. "Good reasons. But Soma, what do you plan on doing with this?"
Soma shrugged. "Mostly to satisfy my curiosity. But I was thinking that it could come in handy some day."
Julius sighed. "You know, Juste Belmont wrote in his diary that even after the Belmonts became rich enough to afford horses, they never used whips. My ancestors were way too good at using the Vampire Killer to kill the creatures of the night, so they found it hard to be gentle with the horses. After Juste killed his pony by accident when he picked up the Vampire Killer instead of an ordinary whip, the family decided to either not whip horses anymore or just walk everywhere."
"Your point being?" asked Soma.
"My point is, don't use your souls for anything but fighting. I don't mind you experimenting, but whatever it is you're planning, you had better stop."
"But what if I'm using souls with no combat purposes?" asked Soma. "I can't hurt anyone with the Paranoia soul. All right, I did technically hurt Dario and Aguni, but that doesn't count."
"Fine then," said Julius. "Just don't use up the hot water."
"Your ancestor really wrote that?" asked Mina.
Julius nodded. "My family has been keeping all of its paper records for centuries, including journals and diaries. They have lots of useful stuff in there; Trevor Belmont drew a map of Castlevania in his diary, along with ways to kill all of its monsters. Of course, he also put in a lot of other stuff… How he managed to court Great-times-whatever-Grandma Sypha, I'll never know."
Julius proceeded to fill the bath with cold water. Soma stripped down to a swimsuit and equipped the Undine soul, and Mina got towels. [1]
"Should we wait until the surface clears up a bit?" said Soma, standing on the surface of the water.
"Let's try it twice," said Mina. "If it works when it's clear, try going when it's turbulent."
Soma nodded and lay down on the water. "If I go into the Mirror World and end up in the water, I don't want to hit my head."
"Fair point," said Mina.
Soma flashed into the Mirror World. As he predicted, he landed under the water. He walked around the bathroom for a bit, shivered, dried himself off on the reflections of Julius's towels, and then lay down on the water. He flashed back into the Real World.
"You know, I still have no idea how I can take items from the two worlds without messing with the fabric of the universe," said Soma as he checked Julius's real towels for wetness.
"Magic, I guess," said Mina. "Let's try it standing up."
"What? No!" said Soma. "I just said that I didn't want to hit my head!"
"I'll treat you to ice cream," said Mina.
"Sure," said Soma.
As it turned out, doing it when there wasn't enough room on the other side just resulted in the soul working as if the water was a mirror; Soma emerged in the Mirror World on top of the water.
"Interesting," said Mina. "Now let's try turbulence."
Lying on water while it was being splashed around him was not pleasant, but it was manageable. Soma emerged on top of the water, and came back.
"Can we get ice cream now?" he asked.
"Not yet," said Mina. "Now let's try doing it while the bath is draining…"
X
Years later, the experiments did come in handy when someone tried to forcibly baptize him in a blessed toilet. He thanked Mina for keeping him at Julius's apartment well into the night, even if Kazuya and Naoki teased him incessantly the next day.
TO BE CONTIUNED!
Yeah, I really didn't have much of an idea on what could be done with the mirror world soul. I think that in Lyrics of Sorrow, a crossover with Magical Girl Lyrical Nahona, Soma used the mirror soul to get around without being detected. He would go into the Mirror World where no one else was, and then use his Black Panther soul to run very fast from point A to point B without anyone seeing. That's a really cool idea and I wish I could have come up with it.
[1] Soma's Undine soul: Yes, I know that's an Aria only soul. Let's say he ran into another one.