When Baron announced they were nearing a Haos/Darkus patch on the morning of the Fifth and final rotation, Alice had no idea what to expect.
"So, the Haos patches are like mini suns," Alice mused, sitting on the same couch Runo was reclining on, Runo's feet in her lap. It was below one of the trailers many sunroofs, and they had been assured it was one of the best spots to watch the 'show'. "And the Darkus Patches are like mini patches of night time where you can see the stars…"
"I really think you'll like this place, Mistress." Nemus hopped onto Runo's shoulder. "Baron and I would come out here all the time."
Runo said nothing, her eyes still focused on the blue skies beyond the plexiglass. It slowly began to turn orange, then pink, as though the sun was setting on Earth.
The trailer went over what felt like a speed bump, and suddenly they were in the Patch.
Runo gasped and sat up. The stars were twinkling, brighter than she had ever seen them. Not only that, but ribbons of green light snaked across the alien constellations, dappling the trailer inside and out in phosphorescent neon colors.
"Aurora Borealis," Alice breathed, standing up to join Runo in looking out the window.
"You mean the Green Ribbons?" Nemus asked in surprise. "Minlin really do have names for everything."
The dappled light fell on the two Bakugan resting on the table instead of their temporary partner's shoulders. Sylfee was staring up at the twinkling stars, deep in thought.
"You alright?" Hexstar asked gruffly. Sylfee pulled their head out of the clouds and shrugged.
"Look, I know you're here because you want revenge on the Vexos." Hexstar sighed, trying again to get Sylfee to spill anything more than the same stiff formalities over and over. "But I don't know if you're being fair to that not-vestal minlin you're partnered with. She didn't do anything to you, she's actually fighting for your freedom!"
"I'm fighting for my freedom, Hexstar," Sylfee said, softly. "She's going to load cards into a Gauntlet and order me around."
Hexstar stumbled over a few responses, then fell silent for a few moments. "At least these guys are on our side," she finally muttered, too little, too late.
"Oh, Ru~no!" Julie called from the next room. "Get over here, it's your turn!"
"Her...turn?" Baron wondered aloud as Runo got up.
"My turn," she confirmed with a mysterious smile, and left towards Julie's verbal beckoning.
Baron kept his eyes on the road, still confused. Alice scooted to the side as Dan came back, but he shook his head and put a shoosh ing finger to his smiling lips. He walked up to the back of Baron's chair as quietly as he could, and clapped a hand on his shoulder.
"Hey, Baron, mind letting me have a turn behind the wheel?"
"Oh yeah, go ahead master DaaaAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH?!" Baron screamed and slammed the brakes, jolting the entire base and everyone in it as Baron leapt from the controls in shock.
Alice was flung from her chair by the abrupt stop, but she didn't mind. She found herself trying to stifle the giggling that fell from her lips at Baron's mute, wild flailing, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.
"BARON DON'T YOU DARE DO THAT AGAIN, DID YOU HEAR ME?! JULIE ALMOST POKED MY EYE OUT BECAUSE OF YOU!" screams Runo from the other room, and Baron snaps out of his surprise to wilt for a second. But then he bounces back and sits back on the controls.
While the base begins to pick up speed again, Baron asks: "Master Dan, why do you look like a Vestal?!"
"'Cuz we're on a mission Baron! We can't just waltz in looking like aliens into Alpha City, so Julie's helping us to look like you guys!" answers Dan, striking a dramatic pose. "I'm looking pretty good, right?"
Alice has to admit Julie did a pretty good job. Dan's hair no longer looks soft and fluffy, like human hair, instead spiked up in a hundred directions. He's even wearing what looks to be ear prosthetics, to make them look pointed. The most interesting thing, however, are his eyes.
"Does Julie have contact lenses for this?" asks Alice, looking mystified at the dull appearance of Dan's eyes, almost indistinguishable at a glance from a Vestal's eyes.
"Nah. Apparently she can do this thing with eyeshadow colors to make your eyes look different. No contact lenses needed! Took her a few tries though. You should have seen Shun, he was the guinea pig. Ended up looking like one too!"
Dan bursts into snickers and plops himself down on the couch.
"At least I didn't complain the entire time, Dan."
Alice shrieks and whirls around to see Shun leaning against the back of her chair, arms crossed over his chest. His hair looks absolutely caked with hair gel, trying to make it look pointy instead of its natural flatness. It's pretty lucky he cut his hair before coming to New Vestroia, otherwise they might have run out of gel.
Dan dissolves into laughter, while Shun walks over to sit beside Dan, a smirk of amusement playing in his lips.
"Oh, man Alice! You should have seen your face!" Dan wheezes out. Alice can hear Baron trying to not laugh and keep his eyes on the road, but he isn't having much luck.
"A little warning next time?" meekly asks Alice, trying to calm her racing heart.
"Good luck with that! He's been a sneaky sneak since we were kids. Playing hide and seek with him was a nightmare."
Shun scoffs. "You weren't much better. Every time you got found you tried to fight me, and then pestered me so I would teach you some 'ninja moves'."
"Your ninja moves are cool, dude. But I regret asking you that. You're a terrible teacher."
Shun swats at Dan's head and turns to look out the window, a small, soft smile hidden by his hand.
"Alice!" screeches Runo, coming into the room, her hair set in a high ponytail that looks uncomfortably tight, probably so they didn't have to put hair gel on that part of her hair. "It's your turn now!"
Alice walks out the room, briefly passing by Marucho trying to explain something about his smartphone to Ace. It's only once she enters Julie's room and finds herself surrounded on all sides by beauty products, both human and Vestal alike, that her nerves try to sneak up on her.
Her mind whirls with worst-case scenarios, each one worse than the last, while she feels Julie's precise brushstrokes on her face. Her heart beats like mad in her chest while she puts on the soft, cream-colored jacket Mira lent her for the occasion.
She's part of the team that's going after the Bakugan Containment System. Everything will rest on the shoulders of her and her two teammates.
She hopes everything will be alright.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The dome of the Vestal city loomed overhead, catching the light of a Haos patch that a team of uniformed vestals and their Bakugan were trying to chase away with Darkus abilities. They could see a sweeping cityscape enclosed within, how the buildings leaned and clung to each other, connected by sheer contact or by needle-thin pathways that seemingly ant-sized Vestals traversed to go from one complex to the next, stretching like the spindly strings of spider webs across every structure in the skyline. It was certainly alien in every sense of the word.
"It doesn't feel right," Shun said. "Waltzing into the enemy's stronghold without even trying to sneak in."
"We'll be more suspicious if we sneak in past the guards," Alice reminded him. "Act like Vestals, trust authority, right?"
Shun didn't answer. Eventually the silence got so uncomfortable that she edged into Runo and Julie's conversation.
"Are they gonna ask for like, IDs or something?" Runo babbled, the stress clearly getting to her prematurely. "Or maybe scan our fingerprints? Do Vestals have different fingerprints than humans?"
"I dunno," Julie mused, looking at their resident Vestal's hands. "Ours all wear gloves."
"Shouldn't we have more gloves, then?" Alice cut in. "Maybe we should go back and borrow some–"
"You guys are worrying way too much," Wontu laughed from Marucho's pocket. "There's nothing for you minlin to worry about, you just gotta be friendly!"
"True," Mira comments. "Most guards don't expect organized resistance from the general populace. They're mostly looking for petty thieves and rogue Bakugan in ball form, and none of us act like either," she says, checking her list one last time. "They'll probably think we're a group of friends that got the wild fever."
"Uhh, wild fever?" asks Marucho, looking up from his notes of the Bakugan Containment System. "What's that?"
"Vestal doesn't really have wild places anymore," says Ace, eyeing the city with distrust. "The only few places where there's greenery is in farming fields. So when Vestals came to New Vestroia, we had to deal with nature. Most Vestals don't trust the wild, but a few went absolutely crazy for nature and get out of the cities. Most people think they're weird and some kind of cult."
"Huh," mutters Marucho, tugging his lower lip with his hand. "If just getting out of the city makes you weird, than what would we be?"
"Raving lunatics," answers Ace without missing a beat. "We've spent entire an entire Nectal out there without coming back to any city once. We're extreme, even by wild fever standards."
Silence falls on the group as they pass through the gate, not doing anything more than stand around for a second in front of the guards before being let through the gates.
Nostalgia slams into Mira as all of them pass through the first few buildings, made to look like arches over the main road. She'd walked this path every time she got back from practicing brawling with her brother, and both of them would play a silly game where if they were under an arch, they would stop talking, then resume as if nothing happened after passing it.
Mira dips her hand into her pocket, holding on to Wilda for comfort. Wilda uncurls from his ball form and hugs her finger as best he can.
The weight of her sadness lifts for a second and lets her breathe. She whispers a thank you, and straightens her shoulders. A small plaza comes into view, with a statue of the Prince in the middle of it, sitting gracefully on a throne, one finger curled around his hair.
Mira bows to the statue as she passes by out of habit, and thankfully sees the rest of the Resistance, even the humans, follow suit, though their bows are clumsy and unpracticed compared to a Vestal's.
"Alright, we're on a time limit," begins Mira, turning around to face the rest of the Resistance and thankfully noting that nobody in the plaza is paying attention to them. "Does everybody have their lists?"
There's a chorus of affirmation, and Baron and Dan go so far as to raise their own lists and wave them in the air like little children.
"We have three Gittiks-or, uh one and a half hours?" She glances to Marucho for a nod of confirmation. "Yeah okay, an hour and a half to get everything on every list. Humans, please remember to use the directions in your Gauntlets. Once we finish the supply run, meet back up here and we'll carry the supplies into the trailer. Then it's showtime. We can't afford to be late so hurry up!"
Mira is met with scattered cheers, and Dan goes off like a shot, dragging a protesting Runo and resigned Shun behind him. Baron speedwalks with Alice, while Ace and Marucho walk calmly, discussing something about the control panels.
"So? Where are we going?" Julie asks as she hooks her arm around Mira's. Mira jumped at the contact, but quickly relaxed when they didn't get as many stares as she was afraid of.
"We'll be picking up a few repair tools and materials." She said, pointing down the main street. "It shouldn't be too far."
"Oh, fantastic! They aren't too heavy, are they?."
"Not at all." Mira smiled as Julie took a moment to match their paces. "They're small, and I know where to get the best in town."
The streets got busier the further into town they walked. Julie was surprised to notice that the sidewalks were almost twice as wide as the roads with the floating cars, and the farther they went the thicker the crowds got. In no time they were in the shopping district, with advertising storefronts seeming to jostle each other for attention with brightly colored messages and logos and mascots that Julie couldn't read but already knew what they said.
Mira had meant to unhook Julie's arm from hers by the time they came to the parts shop she had been looking for (and she did untangle them before they came up to the window) but for some reason she found their proximity...comforting. She had almost forgotten they were basically holding hands until someone had stepped out of the store and given her and Julie a confused look that her self-consciousness caught up with her.
Julie takes in the parts shop, gushing about how "futuristic" it looks, and then brings up the shopping list on the Gauntlet.
"Alright~" she sings. "What's first on this little list~?"
Mira doesn't answer, instead heading in and gesturing Julie to follow her to a section she knows well. She passes by expensive hoverbike equipment and sidesteps another shopper with a worrying amount of ignition baubles, until she stops on the cheaper part of the store.
Julie stops beside her, and squints with a focused gaze at the packet Mira grabs off the shelf.
"... That says 'material kit', right?" asks Julie, pointing at the metallic writing on the packet.
"Close enough to that anyways," answers Mira, her shoulders tensing up sharply.
"What's next in the list?" Julie bounces in place, looking around the room and sometimes oohing and aahing at anything she finds interesting.
"Basic metal cartridges." Mira begins to fiddle with her necklace, a nervous habit she could never kick despite how many times Keith told her to knock it off.
"Where do we get them?" Julie spins around to face Mira, an excited smile on her face, her blue eyes sparkling.
"Here," says Mira, and takes another one of the packets.
"Lucky! And what's that?" asks Julie, stepping right into Mira's personal space to point at the next item on the list. Mira doesn't mind it much.
"Repair fundamentals."
"And where are they?"
"Right here," she says, taking yet another one of the packets.
Julie blinks, her eyes getting comically wide, before pulling up the list in her Gauntlet, and reading it carefully.
"Wait… is everything on our list just the same thing with a different name?" Julie waves away the list and puts her hands on her hips, her mouth already open to demand answers.
"Julie, I have something to ask of you, and please, don't tell anyone ,"
Julie was taken aback by Mira's change in demeanor. It wasn't sudden, she realised, she just wasn't paying attention to the change. "O...kay?" She said carefully. "What's this about?"
"I need to go to my house. There are some things I need to check." Mira is very aware that not giving specifics is going to make her sound sketchy, but if she wants to pull this off she needs Julie to not know much at all about this.
"Why couldn't you tell everybody? I'm sure a trip to your house would be super fun!"
"Julie," Mira breathes in and steadies herself. "I'm going to steal classified information from the lead Royal Scientist. If we get caught, we wouldn't go to jail. We would get executed," Julie's eyebrows rise sharply, and she gestures so Mira keeps explaining.
"Stealing that is ten times worse than attacking the Dimension Controller and freeing the Bakugan! And any "accomplices" to the theft would also get executed! I can't do that to you or the rest of the Resistance. So please, Julie, just stay here and wait for me, okay?" Mira pleads.
Julie looks at her, face unreadable for a second, before she smiles and says: "Mira you're a dummy."
Mira opens her mouth to argue back, except Julie puts one finger over her mouth and shushes her.
"We'd only get in trouble if we're caught! Plus, you just brought the best actress with you!
"My father thinks I'm just being a stupid teenager and using the Bakugan as an excuse to rebel! He might not report me for class-info theft, but he would report you in a second!" Mira tries to transmit as much worry into her voice as she can.
"Just trust me, ok? I have a plan," says Julie, still smiling and completely unfazed. "Do you have anything you left in your house that you would love to get back?"
"My first pair of brawling gloves. But they're absolutely ripped, so it just would–"
"Ok let's go!" Julie takes MIra's hand and drags her to the door. Three beeps come from Mira's Gauntlet once they step out of it, notifying her of her purchase. "Where's your house?"
"Right there," Mira points towards a building two blocks away. The gleaming metal building is one of the few not connected to other buildings at all, and with a security system composed of both people and machines.
"Oooh, you chose the store on purpose! Sneaky." Julie winks and doesn't let Mira say anything before she's pulled into her old house's direction.
Entering it is far too easy. She simply waves towards one of the patrolling guards, who nods, before waving her Gauntlet over the elevator. Mira doesn't know if to thank her father he didn't register as missing, or be bitter because knowing him, he simply forgot to do that.
The elevator dings, the silver doors opening right into her apartment.
The living room is almost the same as she left it. The stylized glass and metal table sits in the middle of it, always squeaky clean, with four chairs none of them ever used. A collection of sofa chairs sits near the window, which Mira has to consciously remind herself that, unlike the windows in the trailer, it isn't a window at all, just a camera feed projected onto the wall to simulate one.
"It's a lot smaller than I thought! With you being the daughter of the main mad scientist and all," Julie said, her voice echoing in the empty room.
Mira snorts, clapping her hand over her mouth, before she shakes her head. "It isn't small." Mira assured her, putting a hand on one of the chair's headrests. "It's actually pretty big compared to the rest of houses out there."
Mira made a disgusted noise, glaring down at a dead potted plant in one of the cup holders in the armrests.
"He couldn't even be bothered to refill the tank," she grumbled to herself.
"Hey, so," Julie said, trying more to break the awkward silence than anything else. "What should I search for?" says Julie, doing an exaggerated pantomime of someone searching around.
"Anything that looks important that either belongs to my father or my brother," answers Mira without missing a beat. "I'm just going to look at the files in here."
"I'll look around and keep watch, then!"
Mira nods, making a beeline for her father's room, that is for all intents and purposes an office with a bed in it. She hooks her Gauntlet into the terminal, which lights up, recognizing familiar and already-approved software. From there, it's easy to force the protection around her father's and brother's files, quickly pulling up a keyword searcher she'd made up in secret in hopes of finding the files without having to read each one.
There's not much luck. She downloads the blueprints for the Bakugan Containment Center, along with those of the Arena, and the latest procedures on Bakugan Trap synthesizing, but that's about it for useful things.
The rest are lab reports chock-full of technical words that she wished she didn't understand, just so she could forget what happened to the first Bakugan used as power-sources. Mira grit her teeth in frustration, skipping by her brother's xenobiology notes, starting up the keyword searcher again, while carefully deleting traces of her downloads–
"Mira?" Her blood runs cold, instinctively closing the files that would have given away just how far deep in the system she was. "What are you doing here?"
She turns to face her father. He hasn't changed at all. Still the same barely-combed hair and pristine lab coat, under which are comfortable, casual, too simple clothes for someone of his rank.
Mira angles herself to hide her Gauntlet, instead pretending to pick up something from the floor to give her Gauntlet time to unsynch. When she stands straight, her father is frowning at her, as if she's a particularly hard to understand equation.
"Father! I just, I wanted to–" Mira stammers, looking for some kind of excuse, anything at all–
"Miraaaa! I found them!" Julie bursts through the door, her jacket bunched up in one hand and Mira's old gloves dangling from the other, waving the old, worn out pair of gloves like they were a prize."If we hurry up, you can still show me around the Arena! I can't wait to see–"
Julie stops and starts at seeing her father, surprised to see him. If Mira hadn't known Julie at all, she would have thought her surprise and sudden shyness were genuine. Dr. Clay's cutting stare finally broke away from Mira, letting her unhook her gauntlet and stuff it into her jacket.
"Who are you?" He demanded curtly.
"Ju-Jewels…" Julie barely remembered her alias in time. "Mira's friend. Who...might you….be…?"
"...Dr. Clay Fermin," he said finally, sounding no less tired.
"Oh! Well, hello sir. I, uhm, it's a pleasure to meet you," Julie started to say just as Mira power walked past her father and hooked Julie's arm to drag her away.
"Come on Julie," Mira says, quickly shutting the terminal down. She doesn't even glance at her father, instead passing beside him as if nothing happened. "Thank you for helping me."
"What were you doing in the com– terminal?" Julie asks, and Mira winces at her near slip of calling the terminal a "computer". Mira is about to remark that her father is still within earshot, when Julie's wink clues her in to the situation.
Julie's pretending to not know what Mira was doing. Her father can still hear them. She's taking the blame off of her and putting it all on Mira, the person her father won't do anything against.
Mira distractedly says: "Nothing, really. Hurry up or we'll miss the start of the Tournament!", but in her mind she's seeing Julie for the first time. She had underestimated her gravely.
She's too distracted by her revelation to notice that Julie took her hand once again, dragging her out of the apartment.
"What a waste of time," Mira says, once their out of the building and she's finally snapped out of her stupor.
"I don't know about that." Julie grins, passing her bunched up jacket to Mira. "I found this in your brother's room hidden under the mattress. Please don't tell me I found his secret porn collection, or something."
Mira takes it, finding a binder full of paper. She doesn't know how much it cost her brother to buy something so expensive, but she doesn't care. She knows her brother. The only reason he would write something on paper would be to make sure nobody would find it, since you can't exactly hack paper.
It was only because of Julie following human logic that she found it.
Mira quickly ducked into an alley, dragging Julie behind her, and began to read.
She wished she hadn't.
Each word was like a knife to the heart, each comment by her brother twisted it deeper. She didn't know if she wanted to burn the files, tear them apart or keep them as a memento of how blind she had been.
"...Mira, are you ok?"
Mira furiously wiped her tears with the back of her hand. "No," she said, her voice cracking under the pressure of the knot in her throat.
"Keith, my brother, he– He helped my father! He was my father's assistant all this time! He's the one that captured Hydranoid!"
Mira releases the wordless shout of frustration that has been building in her throat.
" Him?" Gorem jumps out of Julie's pocket, landing on her shoulder with a bit more force than necessary. " He was the disgraceful Vestal that lostthe battle against Hydranoid and instead of accepting his defeat, used one of those damned contraptions to capture him?!"
Mira nods wordlessly.
"That, that–!" Julie stomps her foot on the ground, her fists clenched tight.
"Guys!" Wilda peeks out from Mira's pocket. "Remember what we're here for!"
Mira struggles to calm her temper, to let her mind do its job, but she can't help the mess of emotions buzzing under her skin.
"Thank you, Wilda," Mira says, squeezing him softly in their version of a hug.
She catches Julie's eyes, and in that instant they both make a promise:
They're going to make them pay , even if it's the last thing they do.
