Authors' notes: The usual "Do you even US Navy" disclaimer applies; there are always a thousand and one things that are dubious. Still looking out for anyone willing and able to advise on these matters.

===[===]===

CHAPTER NINE

===[===]===

Alice was waiting for her after she cleared the security procedures. "Welcome back! Got everything you were supposed to?"

"I hope so," Ayaka said, tugging at her sidelocks with her left hand.

Alice stared, wide-eyed, at the ring on Ayaka's finger that the gesture had inadvertently highlighted. "Wow! Congratulations!"

"Ehhe, thank you," Ayaka said, a little embarrassed.

"When was it? When was it? Did he do anything special?"

"No, not really. Friday was our anniversary. He doesn't do big fancy things, just sprung it on me after dinner."

"Oh," Alice said. "So there won't be any crazy footage of him having rented billboard airtime in Times Square or a squadron of stunt fliers to sky write the proposal for all to see?"

"What?" Ayaka boggled. "No!"

"Aw... Isn't a creative proposal the best part of any wedding video?" Alice was disappointed.

"Seriously!"

Alice shrugged. "Oh well, moving on. Today is going to be mainly housekeeping matters. You're going to take the oath of office first along with the rest of your class. Preliminary briefings, room assignments, collecting your outfit and stuff from the quartermaster, including the security pass."

"Lead on."

===[===]===

There were about 20 shipgirls in the auditorium Alice left her in, the majority of which were unsurprisingly destroyers looking like middle schoolers. Proportionally a few more were cruisers, leaving only a smattering of capships like herself. Most were sitting unflinchingly straight, but a few had confusion or nervousness clear on their faces. Probably fellow Natural Borns. Ayaka wondered if it was due to internal warbooks that she knew who all of them were despite never having set eyes on their human forms before. Apparently there were an average of 60 American shipgirls total returning a month, although divided across the three coasts' bases. Whether this rate would continue remained unknown.

After some waiting, the base commander showed up and gave a speech thanking them for their return to service in the name of the nation and the people.

After that, the CO of Amalgam 111, Construct Nine's training amalgam, showed up to administer the oath of office.

"I, Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai, do solemnly affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…"

A bunch of briefings and assignments followed.

Her outfit, when she got it, felt comfy enough to sleep in, which got grumbling from the fairies about how, back in their day - all the periods in question - the navy could never issue clothing in the right size and quality.

===[===]===

"Hey, Ayachi!" Uileag said when he picked up the phone.

"Hi, Uiui."

"How you finding your reintroduction to the navy?"

"Well…"

{Rise of the Triad (2013) Original Soundtrack - Cccool}

YouTube watch?v=WUlTIJcr9iw

Splash.

Ayaka planted a hand on the waters of Sandy Hook Bay and pushed herself back onto her feet, coughing and spluttering incoherently as she shook water off and wiped her face. A small part of her brain was still amazed and confused at being able to do so.

The training course was essentially a compressed adaptation of Officer Candidate School, such as it were. Physical training and rifle drill were cut down to the minimum - studies were ongoing but short-term results showed there wasn't much exercise could do for the fitness of people who put out thousands of horsepower - but that still left naval history, engineering and weapons, damage control, naval orientation and warfare, leadership, seamanship, navigation and military law.

"Confusing."

Ayaka didn't have much of an edge here compared to her classmates. There were indeed things that were timeless, but others had changed enough even from the 80s that Other Her's memories didn't make much difference. Sometimes, the conflicting doctrines between the ways of the '40s, the '50s and the '80s, swirling in her head, just made things worse.

"There's a lot we're getting rushed through."

You could drill a seaman until he could do his duty purely by rote and reflex, but if that was all one was good for, he was never going anywhere fast. No, office demanded understanding. Knowing what the methods and formulae meant and did and why instead of blindly throwing data into their fire directors and fairies and letting the devices do all the work. One could only know when to deviate from the playbook after knowing what actually was in the playbook, after all, and all the more so when the abyssals were turning so much of established doctrine on its head.

"I finally understand how your father can doze off so easily - because he had to."

For training on the actual shipgirl things, they got trucked out to Naval Weapons Station Earle. Getting used to the tight manoeuvres they now could do at their greatly reduced footprints, target practice, that sort of thing.

Truck rides weren't much of a respite. There wasn't a view worth talking about from the canopied bed except directly behind, and it was pretty jerky.

A nap sounded quite tempting, if not for the fact that the screen mounted on the front end of the truck bed was blaring more educational material, squeezing in every minute of time that could be gotten.

The Sierra Mikes on board just kept sitting ramrod straight, listening unblinkingly.

Just staring straight ahead at the video being played.

"Summons, though…"

"Hmm?"

Ayaka paused, unsure how to put it diplomatically, before eventually deciding to just rip the bandaid off. "Fresh Summons/Manifestations are creepy."

There. She said it.

Fellow Natural Borns were perfectly human in behaviour as far as she could tell, probably because they had been born and grew up believing themselves to be such. The Summoned that had been around longer had had enough "humanity" osmose in that they could pass quite convincingly, though like with Vulcan's knife stunt, they sometimes slipped. As for Washington, Ayaka privately wondered how far she had actually grown out of that stage.

The ones that had come back less than a month, though, they creeped her out, even after the one-week acclimatisation course given fresh out the summoning chambers in an attempt to help them get used to the new world they found themselves in. That might not have been a high hurdle, but it still said something.

The eyes that forgot to blink, the lungs that forgot to breath, or did so with inhuman regularity, like on a timer. The microexpressions on the face that, though Ayaka lacked the formal training to interpret, were still conspicuous by their absence. Little tics and twitches that normal humans did unconsciously, almost never paid attention to in daily life, yet somehow starkly obvious when missing even if most couldn't clearly put a finger on it. All contributed to the palpable feeling of wrongness that Sierra Mikes gave off.

Worst, though, was the jerkiness.

The jerkiness.

Snap.

Stop.

Snap.

Stop.

The inhuman, mechanical, sudden start and stop jerkiness.

The class had been shown actual footage of the SEALs in action, and Ayaka herself had occasionally been sent videos of martial arts masters for whom the well-worn clichés of "no wasted motion" or "economy of action" were truth rather than pithy sayings. As frighteningly fast, precise and well-oiled as they had been, there was still a recognisably human smoothness, a flow to their moves. Fresh Summons didn't have that.

Like stop motion done badly, marionettes with unskilled puppeteers. Turrets with the turn speed governors turned off.

Much as she tried to consciously ignore it, the uncanny valley kept gnawing at her.

"It doesn't help that whenever my roommate, a Sierra Mike, wakes, she…"

Well, Ayaka had seen it from Uileag's end. Now she understood why Kagami had always had a peculiar expression on her face whenever walking in on Uileag-in-her.

Seriously, was having a human body that fascinating?

At the end of each day, the class spent time in the repair docks, even if all that was needed was just routine maintenance rather than any serious damage - and yes, there had been the occasional sight of a visibly damaged shipgirl, clothes torn and form bloodied or worse, having to be supported in.

The building, at least from the outside, could pass as an onsen. It looked the part even up to the pre-bath showers, and the first time she had set eyes on it, fairies had grumbled about the deviation from a properly Spartan military aesthetic. The unorthodox look had apparently been tested and shown as necessary to shave a vital few percentage points off of repair time. It was when one got to the "baths" proper that the aberration set in.

It wasn't the slight, pleasant hint of magic the repair fluid gave off.

"The baths are more like pools! Pools!" Ayaka screeched into the phone. "Did Texans design these things, the heretics?"

The majority were Olympic-sized pools with deep centres rather than the traditional shallow small tubs only big enough to immerse a few people. Even taking the larger size of the historical US Navy into account, it seemed like overkill.

The first time Ayaka had walked into the bath area and seen someone doing laps, she had stared disbelievingly, put a foot in to check the water was properly hot, then strode sharply back to the showers to blast her face with a bracing jet of water.

She had returned to find that no, she had unfortunately not been hallucinating the swimming heretics.

To make things worse, a projector and speakers kept the imparting of education going even when they should have been relaxing away their woes and wounds. That was a pity, because Vulcan's shilling appeared to be on the money; the first time Ayaka had emerged from a repair dock, she had found herself rejuvenated in a way that even a week of daily sleeping in couldn't compare to, as if almost 27 years' worth of stress microfractures and other accumulated minor damage had been healed right. Considering all her old scars were gone, that probably was the case.

If there was one silver lining to all this, the teaching of magic was sufficiently offbeat to be distracting.

{The Kingsmen - Louie Louie}

YouTube watch?v=4V1p1dM3snQ

"Welcome to Basics of Magic! I'm Stingray, SS-161, your course instructor."

Stingray was a grey-eyed, ponytailed blonde of average figure, standing in a slight, casual slouch, clad in a short-sleeved khaki shirt and knee-length shorts. It looked like the now-defunct Working Khakis but was somehow off in a way Ayaka couldn't put a finger on. The shirt was open, revealing a T-shirt with "Welcome Aboard" typed on it and an arrow pointing downwards.

Okay, maybe "silver lining" was a little optimistic.

Ayaka blinked, barely managed to suppress an open gawk at the other shipgirl. Stingray had to know what the tee was saying, right?

… Right?

There was a hapless "teaching assistant" shipgirl hovering around her, frantically taking notes. Some distance away, a launch idled, the NAVENSCIWARCOM and BERND personnel on board pointing sensor gear at the class.

"You look familiar, Ma'am, but I can't recall where I've seen you before," someone said.

"Oh, that's alright. We'll have plenty of time to get to know each other. We're not here to talk about me, though. I'm here to get you started on magic. Yes, I know the official term the brass wants used is 'enlightened science', but let's not lie to ourselves! It's magic~"

Stingray snapped her fingers.

"Let's get one thing straight first. This is a basic course. There's so much in the way of uncharted waters that we're learning new things every day. You're not expected to know everything at the end of this month and definitely won't. Pretty much everything else will have to be learnt on the job.

"Now, some of you might already be familiar with Artillery Spotting or Stepping. What's the difference, you ask? Those are linear sorcery or hedge magic, or Extraordinary Arts if you want the 'proper' term, not the magic of the Spheres. There's only one trick to a path with these, though they have their own store separate from the rest - you can still use them if your store of Spherical procedures is empty."

Stingray paused here and began staring at the class.

Staring.

Ayaka started feeling nervous sweat creep down her back, but she hadn't the foggiest why the instructing shipgirl had suddenly paused.

Eventually, Stingray frowned and disappointedly said, "You know, you lot were supposed to ask me a question."

"Ask you what, Ma'am?" Someone finally asked.

"Think! I left an obvious opening."

"What's a capital-S Sphere, Ma'am?" Someone else asked.

"That is the correct question!" Stingray pointed at the asker with both index fingers. "All magic can be divided into ten domains, formally Spheres or Arcana. Correspondence/Space, Death, Dimensional Science/Spirit, Entropy/Fate, Forces, Life, Matter, Mind, Primal Utility/Prime and Time. No one's expected to know all of them, so don't worry. Your first contact with the supernal and history might predispose you towards certain Spheres, but you can learn more as you go along.

"Any questions right now?"

A hand rose. "Nine of these Spheres are obvious, but what's Prime?"

"Ah, yes! Prime is the Sphere of Truth, the Supernal Fire in its purest form. Everything comes from Prime and everything eventually goes back to it. Other Spheres let you manipulate their respective domains of reality; Prime lets you manipulate magic itself. Altering, dispelling, imbuing supernal effects, the transfer, conversion to and creation of Or Energy, manipulation of supernal uplinks and Infrastructure; Prime governs all that."

Another hand. "Vulcan was telling us when we first came back about the supernal realm. Is that where our energy comes from, why we don't need to actually eat a few hundred men's worth of food to tank up unlike last time?"

"Bingo! Come on, people, applaud the smart cookie!" Stingray started clapping and the class followed. "Or Energy, the mana from Heaven! Make a small inlay as below, get a large output as above! Iteration says we might actually get a perpetual motion machine soon. You should ask the folks in Project Silver Ladder if you want to know more of the nitty-gritty; they're the pan-VALKYRIE bunch in charge of finding out more."

Someone else. "You said we have stores that can run out. What happens if we do, or we flub a procedure?"

"Don't," Stingray said, abruptly straightening up, levity gone. "Seriously, don't. I know you fellow Sierra Mikes obviously weren't at Second Pearl, but any of the November Bravos at or near the attacked bases on the New Date of Infamy?"

"No, Ma'am!" Ayaka and the other Natural Borns replied.

"No, I guess not. You'd probably have Reawakened there and then and joined the fight if you had been. You lot probably haven't seen the full picture then. The New Date of Infamy and the Week of Blood? They earned their capitalisations. No hypertech missile seekers, no repair fluid, none of the little and big conveniences we already have, maybe take for granted. The few of us back then were even more overstretched than we already are now, because apart from a few particularly lucky or tricky bastards, the Navy and the Russkies and the Chinchillas and the Limeys and basically everyone were busy making stormtroopers look good. Ever seen a shipgirl bleeding from internal backlash because she's cannibalising herself to squeeze out more Or Energy than the bandwidth of her supernal uplink normally provides?"

A horrified shudder surged through the class at that.

"So watch your usage, and get UNREP from a sufficiently capable Primeworker if you need. Don't overburden them, though; they have their limits too, and no one's figured out how to flash-forge Infrastructure yet, not even me. Next!" Stingray slouched back down, back to her usual levity like nothing had happened.

"Do a-abyssals have magic too?" Someone asked. Discomfited more by the history lesson or the attitude whiplash, it wasn't easy to tell.

"Magic? Oh, no, no Sphere magic, not that we've seen, only linear tricks."

Ayaka found herself thinking back to the Battle of New York and the Ru hurling shells at her like Izanami's firehose.

"True magic, though? They don't. We hope. You see one doing something new, call in a Case Jotun first and call it in yesterday. Let the analysts decide whether we really have something to panic about. Anything else?"

When no one raised any more hands, Stingray said, "Now, there is one big thing about magic that I need to go into, and it really has the doctrine folks and eggheads - sorry, research staff - in a tizzy.

"Foci.

"You see, magic, stripped down to the fundamentals, is simple. Imagine the effect you want and will it to be, and hey presto!"

She paused.

The pause dragged on.

"I'm hearing a 'but', Ma'am," someone eventually said.

"You can hear my butt? My, my." She raised a finger to her mouth. "Do you know any strapping gentlemanly engineers who can help with a close inspection? Wouldn't do for any abyssals to hear me."

"I-I'll have to check, Ma'am," the shipgirl in question uttered nervously.

"Please do!" Stingray said before turning back to the rest of the class. "Spellcasting sounds straightforward, but it isn't. There are many things one has to consider in forming the imago of a spell. Just a few things: size, complexity, area, targets, desired effect, duration. Think you have the focus and knowledge necessary to juggle all that in your CICs?"

A few hands rose.

"How about in the heat of combat?"

The hands dropped and there was silence.

"Well, at least this batch is honest! Most of us can't work magic purely and solely through willpower, ironic though it may be that ours is the Art of Willworking. That's where foci come in. Think of them as mnemonics for the imagination, crutches or shortcuts if you must, to make spellcasting easier. The problem is that there's little standardisation. What you saw when you touched the supernal during your summoning or Reawakening, established your supernal uplink for the first time, is immensely personal and hard to explain to others in material plane terms, and that influences how you perceive and work magic. Everyone has their own individual approach that clicks best, and trying to force a square peg into a round hole rarely works well, demanding personalised teaching more akin to a master-apprentice relationship than the industrialised mass production that is our historical strength. That's why Iteration is kicking up such a fuss about hypertech.

"For some of us, we work with what we already have. Using Forces or Space to make your shells fly faster and further, Life or Matter to supercharge damage control and repair processes. For others, it's not so straightforward. Signs, seals and symbols of occult or personal significance. Martial arts forms. Faith, meditation and prayer. Stimulants and substances.

"Hopefully legal," she added in a stage whisper.

Aloud, she went on. "Communion with spirits. Runes and rituals. Weird and wonderful devices. Code and data. Instinct and intuition. Value financial or otherwise. There are countless ways one can perceive the influence of the supernal on the material, and thus our ability to reshape the world, more than I could hope to limit by naming.

"Tango-Lima-Delta-Romeo: All this can be boiled down into three key aspects." Stingray counted on her fingers. "Paradigm: How do you perceive supernal workings? Practice: How do you turn that perception into action? Instruments: What do you use in that practice?"

She turned back to the class and was met with another wall of silence, broken only by discreet, confused murmurings.

"I know it's a lot to take in, even for the November Bravos who come from a mystical or religious background, to say nothing of mechanistic Sierra Mikes like most of us who have difficulty thinking beyond our previous lives as ships. That's fine! If there's a capital-T Truth to all this, it's both more complex and more transcendent than can be easily explained. We all have a lot to learn, even old seabitches like yours truly.

"Not to fear, though. Everyone might have individual foci, but there is still common ground that can be taught. We call them rotes, spells that have been refined and distilled through widespread use across many differing foci into a classroom-teachable checklist or recipe, if you will. Maybe you'll help develop some yourself? We'll start with the Practice of Knowing, a simple thing which directly downloads information from the selected Spheres into your head, things you wouldn't be able to pick up by optics, radar or sonar alone. In principle, I disagree with anything that makes me work harder to hide, but whatever keeps you lot afloat against enemy subs. It's straightforward enough almost everyone can do even before you know what foci you use. Here's what you need to do…"

===[===]===

"How's everything?" Alice asked one dinnertime later that week.

Ayaka made to chew and swallow the mouthful she was working on before answering. "There's a lot going on. Need to rush off to night lessons after this."

"Ugh, don't remind me," Alice replied. "No liberty this first weekend either, right?"

"No. Where's everyone else, though?"

"Sara is doing planning. I think. I think, because I caught her blushing to herself and murmuring dreamily a couple of times. Wash… the last I saw, she was reciting the UCMJ aloud."

"Makes just as much sense as anything," Ayaka uttered.

"Quincy…"

As if on cue, the base PA rang out with idol pop that started with "1 2 3 Hi! Quinciquin Quinciquin Quinciquin oh oh oh oh", followed shortly by an irate "How is Quincy doing that?! The PA says it's not in use!"

"Well, there you have it."

Despite the saccharine idol pop continuing to play, Ayaka's eyes were drawn to a familiar sullen dyed redhead shuffling into the mess hall, a larger shipgirl close on her heels.

"O'Bannon?"

"Yep. Bannie got a week's brig time. For the month afterward, she's confined to quarters outside of standby, deployment or mealtime, with an escort in the last case. Sensitivity classes too."

Ayaka noted an ankle tracker bracelet on her.

"Albacore? No, wait, let me guess. I don't know why, but... stealing pants?"

Alice winced and very carefully did not take a look at a nearby table where a bunch of giggling, lip-biting shipgirls were playing telekinetic smack dat with any men in sight. "More like getting in them."

===[===]===

"I see some of you lot have melee weapons," Stingray asked a few sessions later. "What's your opinion on close range?"

"CLOSE RANGE?" A few members of the class sputtered simultaneously, then turned to look at all the kindred spirits who had spoken out of turn as well. Quite a few of those were the sharp snaps of the Summoned; it didn't take much effort on Ayaka's part to imagine that, for all the great stories both within and without their navy of Davids sticking it to Goliaths from within their reach, deliberately getting close and personal with the enemy usually didn't come as a first resort.

She glanced meaningfully at her umbrella. Stingray had brought them through meditative priming exercises to help discover what their foci were.

Listen to the thread. As you keep twining, emotions will start running between you and the thread.

A thousand years of Shirokaze history is etched in these braided cords.

Connecting thread and people is musubi.

Making braided cords is the god's art and represents the flow of time itself.

The lessons of yore had come to her, and it hadn't been hard to figure out that she could use the motions of weaving braided cords as an instrument. Yet something else eluded her still, as if there was a resource yet untapped.

Arm from in to out. Sharp without being jerky. Flowing without being slack.

Slide the foot to the side, smooth and with purpose.

A pause, calculated and accurate.

Pirouette.

A strangely familiar tingle.

Fleeting impressions across her mind.

Another swiping motion.

Simultaneously unexpected and foreseen, her umbrella forms itself in her hand.

It was in dancing the kagura as part of her prayers that night that a supernal spark had hit her, something that the her of 10 years ago would probably not have appreciated.

It had felt a bit weird using the umbrella as a stand-in for a nusa, though, and she was in no hurry to tell her grandmother. It probably wasn't right to use the umbrella as a substitute for the ceremonial Shinto wand, even if it was spawned from the supernal… Was it? She tried to imagine what that conversation would be like.

{Gran, ano… will the gods mind if I use my shipgirl umbrella as a substitute nusa to dance the kagura as a focus?}

Imagined-Ichiyo turned from the newspaper she was reading to stare over her glasses at her very pointedly.

Ayaka hurriedly shook away the thought.

"Indeed," Stingray went on while she had been agonising. "You never know when you might need it. Same reason why all our human comrades have MCMAP or MAC training. You'll have to see the operational requirements and preferences of the amalgam you get assigned to. Now, let's begin with a simple lunging rote to charge and punch. Our Japanese friends call it something starting with a 'ga', I think, but that's not important right now.

"First, visualise yourself rapidly lunging towards a target. Now, put your hands together. Pull your left hand back like you're winding up for a punch. If you have a melee weapon, hold it in your left hand, even if you're right handed. Form your right hand into a V and slide it forward like you're wiping your weapon or arm. Slide your left leg back and put your weight on it." Stingray demonstrated the parts one at a time.

"Got all that? Good. Now do them simultaneously. You will know when you've gotten the form right. It will just click, and an aura will spring to life around you." She combined the parts into one motion, and as promised, a khaki aura trimmed with gold appeared around her.

It did, surprisingly. Ayaka's was mainly blue with a border of black; from what she saw, it seemed the aura colours used the shipgirl's main clothing colour as the body with hair colour as trim.

"Make sure your firing lines dead ahead are clear."

There was some shuffling around at this.

"Now, you," Stingray pointed at one of the class once they were ready, "punch."

The shipgirl in question punched forward.

For a brief moment, she crackled with blue lightning.

Water exploded out from her starting point, accompanied by the crack of a sonic boom. Water flew violently everywhere along the path she had targeted, and when she reappeared some distance away, blue lightning continuing to flow over her briefly, the water blasting forth ahead of her.

Stingray broke out the applause; after a pause, the rest of the class joined in. "Great work! You'd notice that, unlike a Step, you actually have to move through space and will thus smash into obstacles. Now, this is just the most basic rote. There are many different ways to expand or improve on it and I'm sure those who want to or whose assigned amalgams specialise in CQC will want to work on it. First, though, we need to get the fundamentals down. The rest of you, your turn!"

===[===]===

Sometime fourth week of training

===[===]===

{Perturbator - Electric Dreams}

Soundcloud /devolverdigital/perturbator-electricdreams

Ayaka looked at the food before her and sighed.

"What's wrong?"

She looked up to see Alice standing before her with her own trayful of food.

"Ah, er… Ah! Sorry, where are my manners. Please sit."

Alice dubiously took the offered space, but continued to look at her with a raised eyebrow.

Ayaka squirmed under the attention. "I…"

Fortunately, Alice eventually turned her attention to the food, and Ayaka took to her own meal while trying to decide what to say. The second week had finally deigned to spare their weekends, but kept the late lessons going. It was only in the third that the instructors had relented and let them have sensible night hours.

"I-"

Ayaka thought about it. Pretty much everyone who wasn't completely hopeless at Fate and Time could do a simple futurecast, running a hyperstat entropic/temporal projection to Know whether a given course of action might turn out beneficial or baneful in the near future. She had discovered after some experimentation, though, that she could get a longer-term check or a few seconds' worth of detailed, proper precognition, rather than a mere momentary flux, if she built on the rote the right way.

Something drove her to do the last now, and her surroundings took on a fuzzy quality, somewhere between a watercolour painting and an old VHS tape.

"I think Quincy was right."

Alice jerked in the seat, choked on her food.

Could shipgirls even choke? Ayaka wondered frantically even as the nearest fellow occupants of the mess hall turned to look. No, no, no, she didn't want to know. Weaving the threads, an effort of will-

Her surroundings returned to normal, a quick check confirming that, as before, the vision itself hadn't taken any real time.

"You might want to swallow first."

Confused, Alice nevertheless complied.

"I think Quincy was right."

Alice coughed, but fortunately didn't have anything to choke on this time around. "What? Say again?"

"I think Quincy was right."

"About?"

"What I should have come back as."

"Why?"

"Stingray spoke to me after class recently, said that there's talk of putting me through further leadership classes after I'm done here. Word is that with how rare a more than minimal grasp of the Sphere currently is, as well as the utility it offers, the brass has an eye on where I could go."

"What's wrong then?"

"I don't believe I'm leadership material, someone who should be trusted with that kind of power. There are actual lives at stake, not just grades or honour. Trying to see that far is useless, but I'm scared I'll make the wrong call and get people hurt or worse."

Alice made contemplative sounds. "What does that have to do with Quincy's delusions?"

"Somehow, I have this feeling that if Other Me had come back as, well, not me but the Quincy Delusion," Ayaka said softly, "we wouldn't be having this conversation, this confession of doubt. You'd instead have a Wonder Woman who knows no fear or shame, who would have just laughed off Number Two or any mistakes made. I haven't had any questions from the media yet, so I guess Admiral Adams was right about not pushing me into any PR matters, but surely my namesake's governor and the journalists would prefer the Quincy Delusion. An inspirational figure who could shrug off getting her armour and clothing, what little of it, shredded with a smile and a dojikko pose." She placed a balled-up fist on her head for emphasis, though not a smile. "Not me."

Other Her didn't say anything to that.

"I wish I understood how that feels," Alice said.

"You don't want to have to."

"No, I do. I really do. Not being a nutcase? Not all it's cracked up to be."

Ayaka blinked, looked confusedly at Alice. The analytical part of her mind noticed the slightest hint of quiet desperation in her friend's voice, which otherwise hadn't wavered from its usual cheer.

"Look, don't think this is some glorification of mental illness nonsense like with those Dumblr idiots of the late 2010s. No one should ever romanticise being trapped in her own head. My hometown, my namesake, it wasn't small enough to go ignored by Terror, and I myself was personally affected."

"Oh. I'm sorry. My-"

"Don't be."

Ayaka gave her an odd look.

"I bounced back just fine. Can't say the same for my family and friends, and I wish I could understand why. I sort of knew I was supposed to stay sad just a little longer, not just let go like that, but all there was was calm acceptance." Alice shrugged. "I just couldn't see why the people around me couldn't move on and I wish I could understand. Even Other Me's feeling on sudden bright light doesn't last; I don't spend every nighttime moment fearing a sudden flash shattering the dark or keeping everywhere lit up."

"Must be nice. Wish I were you."

That kind of peace was rather alluring. Alice might think the inability to empathise with a depressive to be a curse, but if you asked Ayaka, after these years of having a looming, clinging spectre of longing and regrets that no amount of therapy or medication had managed to totally purge, it sounded like a good idea.

Alice pursed her lips. "Is it? The grass must be pretty yellow on your side."

They finished dinner without saying more. Afterwards, Alice asked, "Any plans for later?"

"No, why?"

"It's my turn to provide for movie night and I thought I'd get you in on it." She started walking off in the direction of the light cruiser dorms, Ayaka following behind.

"Oh. What're you planning?"

"Have you heard of Makoto Shinkai?"

"Who?" Ayaka felt something strange on hearing the name, as if she should know it.

Alice blinked. "Oh, right! Sometimes I forget he's not quite a household name, persistently undying talk about him being the New Miyazaki aside. He's an anime director, among other roles, with a focus on romantic drama, sometimes with sci fi elements. His last film currently holds the international record for highest-grossing anime film, though it still hasn't dethroned the first place in Japan proper."

"So, what's so special about him?"

"He's just got this way about him, you know? This je ne sais quoi." Alice began gesturing excitedly in the air. "Just knows how to put a film together - narrative, visuals, sound design - in a way that lets you savour all the little emotions. Just seems to know how to depict the alienation, the loneliness that lies at the heart of man, the sorrowful gust of wind that blows between you and me. Put it out there in a way that touches you where you can believe in it." She jabbed herself in the chest in illustration.

"Sounds rather depressing," Ayaka said as they reached the dorms, took off their footwear and passed through a common area towards the rooms proper.

"Oh, he's got nothing on Anohana or Grave of the Fireflies, don't worry. Still, he must have gotten the message, because his latest is a lot more cheery. The new composer probably helped. It worked out quite well despite our misgivings that some J-rock band could match Tenmon's work. That said, a good cry every now and then is a good thing, isn't it?"

"You don't-"

One of the rooms they passed had a young lady watching something on a monitor. Gunfire and a mess of voices sounded; Ayaka caught a glimpse of some colourful FPS. Before they got far, though, the lass turned to them. "Hullo. Friend of yours, Lanty?" she said in a resonant voice that sounded North English.

"Yup!" Gesturing at Ayaka, Alice said, "This is Iowa."

"Blimey! You're a big girl." She craned her neck up; eyes blue flecked with white, like foaming sea, met brown. "Charybdis of the Dido-class light cruisers, pennant number 88, here with the liaison detachment from across the pond at the request of the EDA and Chaldea."

"That's the Chaldea Enlightened Science and Security Organisation, the pan-European equivalent to BERND?" Ayaka asked, recalling her studies.

"The same. Ah, come in, come in!"

So they backpedalled and did. The now-identified light cruiser was clad in something that superimposed Carthaginian influences on a World War Two Royal Navy uniform. Her blue hair was messily splayed in a manner that reminded Ayaka of a whirlpool.

Her face, though…

"You look a bit like…"

"Emma Watson?" Charybdis asked.

Ayaka nodded.

"Ho! Don't worry, I'm used to people saying that. All us Didos are. We're a bunch of…" she turned to Alice. "What's the term, Lanty, from that Japanese game thing? Entropy Venti something?"

"Japanese… oh, you mean Saberface?"

"Yes, that! We lot are a bunch of Grangerfaces, have been ever since Hermione came back first looking like Ms Granger." She took a long swig out of a water bottle. "No Overwatch tonight? Maya's dominating again. I was planning on joining after she finished this round."

A Texan-drawled "It's High Noon" emanated from the computer's speakers, and Ayaka looked at the screen in time to see a bunch of kill notifications pop up courtesy of [Bokukan]MayaSama1930, followed by some very loud victorious crowing in Japanese.

"Sorry, Char, it's my turn to run movie night. Another day."

"Pity. Another time then! Cheerio!"

They left the room and continued on to Alice's.

"Bokukan? Doesn't that mean…"

"Yup! Maya started a clan for us anti-aircraft ships. She mains McCree. I run with Dad 76. Do you play too?"

"'fraid not, no."

"Pity… oh yeah! There's another thing about Shinkai you've got to know about, the main selling point that even those who dislike his storytelling still rave about."

"Which is?"

Alice led the way into her room, her roommate out at the moment, and pointed at some giant photos of cityscape and environment shots, surrounded by posters of hunks both 2D and 3D. "That."

"Isn't that a photo-"

Ayaka realised what she was looking at.

"Eh? Eh? Ehhhhh?! That's not a photo?!"

"Nope." Alice grinned broadly. "Accurate depiction of environments, be they his current residence of Tokyo, countrysides or even individual interiors, has always been his trademark."

"Wow…"

Alice giggled. "Yeah, that's the standard reaction to seeing his art direction." She padded over to a row of disc cases and began skimming through them. "Sorry, I only brought my 4Ks. Didn't want to risk my 8Ks, and there isn't a 8K player or projector here anyway. The tech upgrade cycles may have finally gotten to the point that 4K players and projectors are finally reasonably-priced, but 8K is still no casual purchase, and I guess we don't really see a need to pool together the money for one. Not like there's much 8K content yet, whether on Netflix or Crunchyroll or something."

"That's fine." A part of Ayaka noted to herself that her late hometown had been rather far behind the curve on tech matters. The Shirokaze home had only been on its first HD TV when Fafnir had struck, and not for want of money.

"Oh, wait!" Alice paused, looked up from her search. "Shouldn't leave you standing around." She walked over to an extensive collection of books and pulled one out. "Here."

It was an artbook with a lush vista for a front cover image.

Somehow, a sense of aching desolation struck Ayaka on seeing it.

A Sea of Yearning: The Art of Makoto Shinkai, Volume 2.

"I'll be quick!" Alice shouted as she went back to searching through her collection.

Curious.

Flipping through the book and admiring the beautiful backgrounds on display, Ayaka eventually reached a section on miscellaneous and unfinished concepts.

A few entries in, what she saw there made her freeze.

The rough sketch of a half-done key visual loomed before her. The background was an oddly muted blue sky with wispy grey clouds, a small full moon near the top.

There were a pair of curved strokes over the sky, and though the colours were wrong-

A chill ran down Ayaka's spine as she saw Fafnir split in two, one piece leaving a glowing red tail and the other blue shot through with purple.

"Found it!" Alice's voice rang out, startling her out of the fugue. The younger girl was grinning brightly, a still substantial pile of disc cases in hand.

Ayaka took her eyes off the sky and studied the rest of the sketch. The bottom part of the image was split in twain by a diffraction spike. On the left, a cityscape reminiscent of photos she had seen of Tokyo; given the director's love of his city, which he had repeatedly depicted in photorealistic detail, it probably was meant to be just that. A messy-haired schoolboy in a grey blazer and a loose red necktie took up the foreground.

Ayaka wasn't sure if her eyes were playing tricks on her, but he looked vaguely familiar, and in his right hand… was that a pistol?

The right side of the sketch showed a grassy plain leading to hills in the background. There was a torii at the top of some stairs in the distance.

That wasn't what caught her attention, though.

What caught her attention was the schoolgirl in the right foreground. Short black hair with a red ribbon, a brown blazer and skirt for her uniform, but what was it that bothered her about-

Ayaka gasped once it finally clicked.

"What's wrong?" Alice asked, and Ayaka tore her eyes away from the sketch to realise that the younger girl had been regarding her with obvious concern, seeing Ayaka staring at the book so intently.

Wordlessly, Ayaka turned the artbook around to show her.

Alice looked at the sketch.

Looked at her.

Back at the sketch, then back to her again.

Confusion and shock played over her face. "What."

Ayaka didn't know what to say.

Owlishly, Alice said, "That looks a bit like you."

"I know!"

"Strange."

Her frown still present, Ayaka began reading out the text on the facing page. "Yume to Shiriseba."

"Ah, yes, If I'd Known It Was a Dream," Alice said a touch wistfully, her prior confusion now nowhere to be seen. "One of the What Ifs of his career."

"That title sounds vaguely familiar... from an old poem, isn't it?"

"I'm not sure. I'm not a classical Japanophile, so I'd only heard of it here." Alice gestured at the book. "It was to have been an exploration of questions of identity and empathy, literally walking in someone else's shoes via body-swapping. Going beyond cheap comedy and seeking to examine how these dreams would affect the environment and people around them."

Ayaka froze in place.

This was hitting a little too close to home. There were too many things she wanted to say about the whole shebang, and she wasn't sure what she could actually say.

Eventually, she managed to utter a noncommittal "Sounds like it would have been quite interesting."

"Eh…" Alice sounded hesitant. "I'm a big fan of Shinkai's, but frankly, if you want intellectual rigour, you'd be better off looking elsewhere."

"If you say so. What happened?"

"Who knows?" Alice shrugged. "The official word is that he couldn't figure out how to make it work, conjure a vital spark to make it come to life in a satisfactory way, transcend the cliches that come up whenever Freaky Friday enters the picture. There was allegedly something always at the back of his mind that kept slipping away when he tried to put it down in writing, so he eventually was forced to let it lie fallow and move on."

Ayaka looked at the strokes which put her in mind of Fafnir. "Maybe what he needed was a natural disaster angle."

"Huh?" Alice stared at her funny.

"2014, the Great Tohoku Earthquake would still have been fresh on the minds of the Japanese," Ayaka said, her voice small and distant. "Maybe what he needed was a quest to avert a disaster, come out of nowhere as a twist. Maybe one of the protagonists had, unknown to audience and the other alike, already been killed in the disaster and the other has to find a way to make things right rather than simply accept the loss and walk away."

After all, if Uileag had simply been content to let things be back then, things would have been very different now, wouldn't they?

"I guess that could work? It certainly sounds like something he might come up with." Alice turned back to the pile of cases and picked up a steelbook, which she passed to Ayaka before heading to the fridge in the room. "Anyway, Cel-Love! Keit-Ai in the original Japanese, if you prefer."

Ayaka studied the front cover, which depicted a boy and girl looking at each other, separated by some kind of fuzzy, glowing break in reality.

"Shinkai's seventh film, the one that finally made him an international mainstream figure with an Oscar nomination rather than just an otaku darling," Alice said as she pulled a bag of ice cream tubs out of the fridge, retrieved the rest of the pile of disc cases, and led Ayaka off. "A boy is given the phone number of his crush and she accepts his confession. When he sees her the next day, though, she apparently doesn't know what he's talking about. As he later learns from 'her', neither did 'he'. They find out that they're talking across universes and start trying to help each other become an item with their own universe's selves."

"... Huh."

"Yeah, almost everyone says that when they first hear about it. It's easier to follow than it sounds, though. He's got a knack for making things understandable. Too bad the JSDF has dragooned him and CoMix Wave Films into doing propaganda and public service films right now; we were waiting for his eighth proper film, which was on track for this year before all this nastiness started. Next year, hopefully." She pushed open the door to a briefing room which already had a few occupants, then paused abruptly, a look of dawning comprehension on her face. "Oh, so that's what it was!"

"Eh?"

"I've been wondering ever since we first met why you sounded a bit familiar, and it finally clicked. You sound like one of the voice actresses in Shinkai's body of work."

Ayaka could only stare confusedly as Alice went in, and hurried to follow before the door closed.

"Make yourself at home! I need to set everything up first. Help yourself to the ice cream. Someone else will bring drinks and more solid snacks if you'd prefer something with bite to it instead."

Ayaka handed the steelbook back, took a tub and a spoon for herself, then headed to pick a seat before pausing at a sight. "Why the tissue boxes?"

"You're going to need them," Alice said enigmatically.

===[===]===

The only thing that could be heard as the credits rolled was a roomful of openly weeping viewers.

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: "Stingray" design, including her theme, courtesy of GBscientist, who also made a number of valuable suggestions for this chapter. Many thanks, mate!

This is not an actual Mage crossover; the magic system is flavoured by such, but purists will clearly see that it's a fluffy mash of Ascension and Awakening rather than using the full crunch of either system - hard and fast dot ratings for one - and is not meant to have calc-friendly, playable rigour.

Who would the Ducks main in Overwatch?

Forgot to mention it earlier, but Ayaka's boss is a NBA reference - Charles (Barkley) S(haq) (Michael) Jordan.