Why, I'm Captain Fluffytails, savvy?
I visited my sister often, to the point she'd actually given me a house key so I didn't have to fight the doorbell everytime, or in case no one was home. That last one didn't happen often. Elias had retired out of some sort of special forces spook unit after a long career, so he mostly looked after the house and occupied himself with DIY projects. Big Sis on the other hand still put in some time a couple days a week in some laboratory or another, but again, was almost always home.
I visited almost every day Mama and Father weren't home, and even a few when she was. The contrast between the way my sister and her husband treated their daughter and granddaughter was stark. It reminded me of what Mama had been like at first. Dotting. Affectionate. Now… Now it seemed like she was only halfway here. Like a part of her was off somewhere else, and the part here was only barely holding back from leaving too.
Yeah. That hurt just as much now as it'd hurt in the hospital bed.
At least Big Sis was an amazing mother figure and perfectly willing to stand in as a replacement. She loved to cook, and while I didn't share her passion for it, I was still happy to learn everything she could teach me. Still happy to spend time with her. Elias was, similarly, a great father figure, and a never ending font of practical knowledge and tips and tricks. I wasn't sure what he thought about my desire to learn self-defense, but he'd been eager to teach me when I asked him to.
That's what my life was like. Spending time with my family, practicing magic, practicing runes, diving as deep into the theoretical side of magic as I could manage. I needed to know it all.
So it was that a little over a year and a half after my first visit and the start of my spell viewer project that I inscribed the final runes into the final prototype. It occupied an entire room at the manor by virtue of my being terrible at writing so many runes in a small enough size. The spell capture, containment, and analysis clusters were the size of a bed each. I still practiced a lot to reduce the size though. I was confident I could make the next version small enough to be somewhat portable. Emphasis on somewhat.
I mean, if it worked. The first attempts at almost all of the individual clusters had been disastrous, as had been connecting them. The containment and analysis clusters had exploded several times before I'd managed to get them somewhat stable. I'd taken to using a modular system that let me slot in replacement rune sections to quickly recover from explosive failures. Or the failures that slagged sections of carving stone. Or the ones that did both. There were a few sections of floor that were permanently scorched black. A few of the explosions had even gotten Mama's attention long enough to ask me about it the next morning during breakfast.
Calibrating the display cluster had been annoying, but had been surprisingly simple once I'd nailed down how to get it to read intent and meaning from the casters themselves.
Spells, at least the kind used by wand wizards, were arithmancy shaping magic into coherent effects, tuned to be as efficient and easy to cast as possible. Standardization, fucking somehow, and yet spells could be different enough from one individual to the next and from one casting to the next. Which meant further analysis was needed to be sure said fluctuations couldn't change a spell enough to overcome defenses designed for it.
I still had ideas on what responsible usage of magical power meant and how to go about doing it. Well, that and placating the paranoia about how easy it was to manipulate the mind with magic. By the time I was done, the Memory Charm and all related spells were going to be as effective on me as a fucking Tickling Charm.
"Obliviate!"
The Memory Charm looked textbook perfect, the horrifying bolt of light flew through the air and struck the crystal at the center of the capture array. I'd studied and practiced how to cast it to perfection. I'd studied the theory, I'd studied variations, I'd cast those and tried my own as best I could without a target.
It showed.
A tridimensional representation of the spell hovered over a wooden slab at the center of the room. It was very close to what I'd predicted it to be like, and the secondary readout representing the original arithmancy equation was also very close to textbook. It would work on non magicals, and perhaps work fully on weaker magicals. So I cast more, and more, and more. As perfectly and sloppily cast as I could, and as many different memory and mind altering spells as I could manage.
The display cluster burned out a few times before I was done, as did the ones for capture and containment, but replacing individual sectors was much easier and faster to do than having to redo the whole cluster. It was less durable and reliable, but it was easier to fix quickly.
Obliviate, it turned out, would be the most difficult to defend against. Shaping my magic to defend me against most spells that simply twisted a person's mind, regardless of how slight or extensive, would be somewhat easy, if complex. Spells like those sank into the target, some faded over time, others locked into place and would never fade unless countered, feeding off the magic and life they were attached to.
Obliviate didn't do anything like that. No, it simply went into a mind and wiped out memories, permanently. An instantaneous effect. Theoretically, anyway. Magical beings in general seemed to have varying degrees of natural resistance, and required more power and greater amount of skill and experience to be made truly permanent and render the memories unrecoverable. When the spell took fully, and erased memories though, it was without regards to how those memories were connected to the rest of the mind and what damages it might cause in taking out a piece of the whole. A truly skilled and experienced caster could try to minimize the damage and compensate for the absences, but I figured few people were aware of the necessity, much less had the level of ability required. It hit and it was done.
Incidentally, memory storage is affected by Obliviate and the Memory Modification charm. It'd taken me embarrassingly long to realize that comparing spell results would be impossible without a way to record previous results. I'd solved that issue by adapting a common recording ward rune cluster to interact with my own clusters. It worked great until I cycled back to memory spells and they started erasing and corrupting the stored memory. So I'd added layers to the memory and copied everything to all layers until the effect stopped affecting the lower layers.
Perhaps a half cast inverted spell pattern, kept permanently in place over my magic? Or perhaps infusing my body and magic with the very concept of an opposite that of Obliviate? Destructive interference was a thing, and seemed to me the best way of dealing with the problem. Or maybe that and storage spells linked to the defensive clusters filled with junk information, acting as ablative armor.
Hm. Thoughts for later.
Thoughts for now were figuring out how to get to the top of Big Sis' house. I had painted a kitsune pirate flag that was, if I did say so myself, quite amazing. A white fox head on a field of black, with two tails crossing under it and curling around the head. So yeah, perfect. It just needed to be planted, and what better place than the tower-looking thingy on her house?
Maybe I could climb out of the attic window, then climb the chimney and try to jump up to the railings of the roof of the tower thingy.
That's how I found myself going out into the chilly air of late October. Getting out through the attic window had only been possible thanks to my small size. Not because it was small enough that only my size let me fit through it, but because the ledge was so small that if I'd been any bigger, I'd have had issues not falling off it. Armed with a shrunken flag pole and my rolled up flag attached to my back, I held onto the house with as many limbs as I could lay on it.
I crawled my way around the front of the attic to the side through which the chimney protruded. It was exhilarating. Every trembling step, every shuddering breath, every gust of wind, until I could finally rest in the nook formed by the roof and the chimney. I giggled and giggled and giggled until I was so out of breath I felt faint. I climbed the chimney and jumped. My hands and tails curled around the bars of the railing lining the top. Then the rest of my body slammed into the roof and I almost let go. I was going to be bruised all over.
Ow.
I pulled myself upwards and pretended that it wasn't my tails doing all the work and that my arms were really capable of pulling my own weight. I giggled some more. My heart felt like it was trying to jump out of my chest. I climbed over the railing and spilled onto the attic's dirty roof, and laughed long and hard.
Getting down was going to be amazing. I wiped some sweat I felt on the side of my head and felt way too much liquid. What? Oh. I was bleeding. I ran my knuckles through the left side of my head, and winced when I touched the edge of my eyebrow. Ow.
This was great. My first adventure wound and as a bonus I could consecrate the flag of the Fluffy Pirates with the sacred blood of their founder. I couldn't stop grinning and giggling if I tried, so I set about claiming the house in the name of the Fluffy Pirates. Five minutes later I was crawling back inside the attic.
I had so much energy. I had to move. I had to… I had to lie down and relax. I was starting to feel the pain from smacking into a wall with my full weight, and sleeping was starting to seem like a great idea. Maybe a bath? Yeah. A bath seemed like a marvelous idea. I dragged my exhausted ass to the bathroom and after washing of the grime and blood with a shower, I drew the hottest bath I could stand. It may not be the swimming pool sized tub at the manor, but it was just as delicious. The heat soothed the pain from the impact and the pain in my joints. Not to mention that my blood smelled really nice and I was kinda loving the whole thing.
I finally got out when the water started getting cold and towelled off. The skirt and tunic I'd been wearing were nasty and covered in blood, so I was going to need to dig into the emergency stash I'd brought over. I strapped on my thigh holster, wrapped myself in a towel, walked out of the bathroom, and got dressed in Big Sis' room. I grabbed a pain relieving potion from the satchel I'd brought and took a gulp. Healer Ted had given me a few to be used for bad days, and sometimes for the really bad days. I crawled into Sis' and Elias' bed, letting the magic of the potion soothe me into lassitude. I fell asleep moments later.
I woke up to light snoring and delicious warmth. I was being held against what seemed to be fleshy steel and had a super warm body pressed against my back too. The result was a fluffy kitsune family sandwich. 'Cause it could only be Sis and Brother-in-law around me. Most likely, Elias was the one hugging me to his chest, what with the consistency of tank armor under a layer of skin. The man was still fit as hell even after a few years of retirement.
This…
I'd really missed this.
Mama was away so often nowadays.
I really hated sleeping alone.
I may have cried a little before I got around to wiggling out of the position of delicious kitsune sandwich filling I'd been made into. I was achy all over, both from how tense I'd been during my first expedition as Pirate Captai- no, wait. Pirate Empress! Oh, oh, Pirate Goddess! Captain Fluffytails as my name was de rigueur of course, regardless of my actual title. Anyhow, My muscles ached from exertion and my front from blunt force trauma. My face actually felt a little swollen.
Hm.
I would cook breakfast.
Yes.
I made my way to the kitchen, went directly to the fridge, and contemplated my options. There were eggs, but not enough, there was enough bacon though, but no orange juice. Maybe I could walk to the store?
Nah, some other day.
I scavenged the freezer for extra protein and before long I had a very cheesy omelette with hamburger patty chunks and bacon cooking. It smelled delicious. I heard movement from the bedroom, and started setting the kitchen island/bar.
Sis walked in just as I put the skillet in the center of the island.
"That smells amazing, little sis."
I looked up at her with a shining smile and saw shock cross her face before she was in my face, kneeling before me, hands holding my head in place and gently prodding at the swollen left side of my face. She drew a whine from me when she touched near my split open eyebrow.
"Owww."
"Baby, how did this happen?!" She sounded so worried and upset that I was talking before I even realized what I was doing.
"It's okay! I'm okay! I hit my head a little when I was planting my flag, but I'm okay and my flag looks even cooler now, so don't worry. Like, yeah, it's a bit painful, but I'm used to that, and so there's no need for you to worry so please don't worry and, and please don't be angry or scared and please don't leave me too, please don't leave, please please-"
My hands had moved to her arms and my tails around one of her legs, grabbing her as if in hopes of keeping her from leaving by holding her in place. I hadn't even thought of the possibility that I might become enough of a problem for her to kick me out until she'd looked so upset at me, so cared. I couldn't let that happen. I had to convince her-
She hugged me hard and rocked me against her.
"I promise I'll be g-"
"Oh, little sis. Shh. I'm so sorry, my baby. I'm never, ever leaving you, alright? Shh. Don't cry, okay? I love you, and as long as I live I will always be here for you, okay? Shh, shh."
She kissed the top of my head and kept rocking me against her, humming the same melody she'd been humming to me that first time I'd woken up in her arms. I calmed down eventually, and when I did she wasted no time in engaging me.
"So you made breakfast. I have to say, little sis, you're very creative. This looks really good. Come on, let's eat," She served us and we ate while I did my best to keep as close to her as possible. "We are taking you to the doctor, though. That cut looks infected and I want to make sure you didn't break anything else."
I hugged her and nodded into her side.
"Okay."
