Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise

2.1b - Butterflies

Miss Militia led me to the first test chamber. It was a mostly open room with a slightly elevated observation area. There was a copper-colored ring in the middle of the floor, and a whole bunch of tinkertech equipment on the ceiling; I had no idea what any of it did, but I guessed it was probably some kind of sensor system.

"Is all of this really necessary?" I asked.

Miss Militia looked at me. "If we don't have a good idea of your capabilities, we won't be able to coordinate as effectively. If it's a problem, you can sign a waiver saying that you declined power testing." Her scarf made it hard to tell what her expression was, though with her it was the opposite of why it was hard with Armsmaster; with him, all you could see was his mouth; with her, all you could really see was her eyes. You could kind of guess what expression they were making if you really looked, but you never really knew if you were right. Maybe it was something I'd get better at over time, but I wasn't holding my breath.

The technicians paused in their setup, and I shrugged uncomfortably. "I guess it's fine," I said.

This time, I was pretty sure that Miss Militia was actually smiling: you can fake a smile, but faking a smile that touches your eyes is a lot harder. "Good," she said. Then she nodded at one of the technicians. "Whenever you're ready, Mae," she said.

Mae was apparently the lead technician. She was an auburn-haired woman dressed in black with a white lab coat thrown over her outfit. "Thank you, ma'am," she said.

The first thing they wanted me to demonstrate was my transformation. At first I objected, but after Miss Militia assured me my privacy was going to be respected, I just went with it. They let me go back to normal inside a privacy booth; I put on a Protectorate jumpsuit and featureless, full face-covering mask that was surprisingly easy to see out of when you were wearing it. Then they had me walk into the middle of a marked area surrounded by all sorts of sensors and equipment I didn't recognize.

"All right, Starfall," Mae said, "Whenever you're ready, and bear in mind that you can stop this test at any time, and we'll either move on to the next or stop testing entirely; it's your call."

I nodded. I felt a little better knowing that I could just stop the whole thing whenever I wanted. I glanced at Raising Heart and said, "Raising Heart, please."

Raising Heart pulsed with light. "Stand By. Ready. Set Up."

There was a bright flash of pink light, and I was in my costume again, with Raising Heart back in Device Mode.

The technicians spoke in hushed voices for about a minute while they made notes and recorded their observations. One of the men near the back of the room gave Mae a thumbs up; Mae turned back to me. "All right, Starfall. I want you to do it again. This time, would you mind holding this sensor?" She held out a tricorder-looking thing.

I dismissed my transformation, shrugged, and took it from her. "Okay," I said.

"Ready?" she asked.

I nodded. "Raising Heart, please."

Once more, Raising Heart pulsed with light. "Stand By. Ready. Set Up." Once more, there was a flash of pink light. Once more, I was in my costume.

The tricorder-looking thing was gone. I blinked. So did the technicians. This set off another couple minutes of them talking and writing notes before they had me transform again. They did tests on if I could make the transformation take longer (I couldn't). Sometimes I held the probe. Sometimes I didn't. Sometimes they varied which probes I held. I'd already known that Raising Heart could store things in subspace; I hadn't known that my clothes were stored there while my barrier jacket was active, and I hadn't known I could shift things that I held in my hands into storage for the duration of the transformation. I also hadn't known that my barrier jacket wasn't really clothing: it was layers and layers of interwoven forcefields that looked like clothing.

"Wait," I said, totally mortified by the idea, "Does that mean I'm actually naked?"

Mae was quick to shake her head. "Of course not. You're wearing forcefield clothes! And unlike Narwhal's, yours actually look like clothes. Just… watch out for power nullifiers."

I shivered. "Right."

We continued with the tests. Sometimes they asked me to try to focus on not taking the probe into Raising Heart's pocket dimension as I transformed, which I could do. They showed me the camera view of Raising Heart's pocket dimension when the probe came back - active transmissions were cut off, but it turned out you could still record just fine - and it was beautiful; it was geometrically wrong to the point that it made my eyes hurt to look at it, and it took my breath away at the same time; parallel lines should not intersect, but wow. Optical illusions are one thing: this wasn't.

For the last experiment, Mae put a pair of handcuffs on my wrist and clicked them shut. "Once again, please," she said.

The handcuffs vanished when I transformed. I'd known it would happen, but there is a difference between an intellectual appreciation of something and having the full implications hit you all at once; my subspace pocket had some extraordinarily useful applications, and I could suddenly see hundreds more that we hadn't tested for. ...It was just annoying that most of them were criminal. As I dismissed the transformation one more time, I forced myself not to swallow nervously, instead doing my best to seem like a bored teenager. "Can we move on to something else?" I asked.

Mae nodded. I couldn't tell if she bought the act. "Absolutely," she said, removing the cuffs.

"What's next?" I asked.

"Next we test your ranged attacks," Mae said.

I smiled.

We moved into another testing chamber; this one looked a lot like a shooting range; it was a long, rectangular room with a dozen large plexiglass stalls in front of a yellow line on the floor. Downrange from the line was empty, and the range was impossibly long: longer than could have fit in the rig. A notification popped up on my HUD: spacial distortion detected. There were cameras placed around the room, and what I assumed were tinkertech sensors dotted the ceiling and walls. Miss Militia, Mae, and the technicians took up positions around the room.

I walked into the first booth and stepped up to the yellow line. "What do you want to see first?" I asked.

Mae consulted her notes. "It says here that you have different ways of using your Blaster power; we've got reports of a single beam attack, of a handful of guided spheres, and of a swarm-type attack. Can you show us the swarm?"

"Sure," I said. "Do you want me to hit anything in particular with it?"

"How many targets can you hit with it?" she asked.

I thought about it. "Um. Probably 1,200? But each shot won't do much damage."

Mae blinked. A few of the other researchers exchanged looks. "Let's try five targets to start," Mae said. She hit a button, and five metal targets lowered down from the ceiling; each one looked a bit like an archery target. "Whenever you're ready."

"Okay!" I said, trying for cheerful; it didn't quite come out as cheerful. I extended my hand and pointed my palm downrange. Raising Heart's targeting systems locked on to the targets and they lit up on my HUD. I felt the familiar sensation of mana flowing through my body as I cast the spell: "Divine Stinger," I said. The Midchildan spell circle flashed only briefly into existence, there and gone in the blink of an eye. And then a swarm of 1,200 firefly-sized motes of pink light sprang into existence around me, so thick in the firing stall that I wouldn't have been able to see without Raising Heart's help. Then I spoke the firing trigger: "Shoot."

The sound was a little like a swarm of supersonic bees taking flight; the little motes shot out like bullets and made the metal targets shudder with the impact, and every single one exploded in a burst of light pink about a foot across when it hit its target. I'd divided them evenly; exactly 240 motes hit each of the five targets.

"Jesus, fuck!" one of the researchers swore.

I blushed.

Divine Shooter was probably a better attack overall, but in comparison to the spectacle of Divine Stinger, it was almost disappointing. I destroyed twelve targets with it and hit dead center on each, but that was all. The researchers took careful notes after each demonstration, had me repeat each attack twice with slightly different targeting scenarios and movement paths for the attack to follow, and then it was time for the raw power test.

"Okay, Starfall," Mae said. "We have the beginnings of a power graph, but we'll need a full power shot. What we have so far says we don't need to move this to an outdoor range. We're also going to test your attack's effectiveness at various ranges just like we did with the others. We'll start at whatever you think is your maximum."

[Raising Heart,] I asked telepathically, [What kind of range does Divine Buster have?]

[At your current linker-core output, the attack will lose effectiveness after a kilometer.]

"Um," I said, "About a kilometer." I paused. "What's behind that wall?"

Miss Militia nodded with approval at the question.

Mae glanced at one of her coworkers. The other technician raised an eyebrow. "Just a maintenance access for the force field and open water beyond it," Mae said. "The far wall is armored, and we're going to put some additional tinkertech armored plates in front of it that are specifically designed to be as durable as possible, just in case."

"Okay," I said. Then I frowned. "...I better shoot it on stun mode."

"Why's that?" one of the technicians asked.

"Just in case," I said.

A few technicians rolled their eyes.

Mae pushed a few buttons on her console, and the distance between me and the far wall expanded in a way that reminded me of Vista's power. Then six armored plates lowered into place in front of the far wall. "We're set," she said.

I pointed Raising Heart downrange. "Shooting mode," I said, and Raising Heart reconfigured from staff to spear; wings of light flared out from behind the spear-head as the spell circle whirled into existence around my feet; secondary and tertiary spell circles appeared along the length of Raising Heart as motes of pink light condensed into a bright sphere directly in front of me. "Divine…" I began. The power grew. The sphere expanded until once again I would not have been able to see my target if not for Raising Heart. The lights in the room flickered. "BUSTER!" And then the word 'EXTENSION' flashed onto the surface of Raising Heart's red crystal sphere. I didn't have time to blink; the beam of magical energy erupted into being, instantly crossing the space between me and the armored panels. There was a roar like cannon fire as the beam ate through each panel, and the armored wall, and the wall of the maintenance corridor, and the outer wall of the rig. I actually felt the power drain as I fired the blast; that had never happened before. I felt a wave of tiredness sweep over me. There was a crackling, roaring, tearing sound as it hit the rig's force field; the whole rig shook violently, then the lights went out.

Red emergency lights came on a second later, and alarms began to wail. Dust was drifting down from the ceiling.

Mae and the technicians stared at me in total, opened-mouthed shock.

"... That was the stun setting?" Miss Militia asked.

Raising Heart looked smug. Somehow, she managed it., I, on the other hand, laughed nervously, and my cheeks burned with mortified embarrassment. "Nyahahahaha! Um… I guess I overdid it."

It turns out that accidentally blowing a hole in the side of the Rig, taking down the force field, and sending the whole facility to emergency backup power is something that makes your stay at the local Protectorate headquarters a little uncomfortable. Nobody was hurt, so that was lucky. It also turns out that I'm lucky the firing range was facing away from the city and not towards it, because with the angle the shot would have been following, it would have blasted a hole right through the Medhall building. I…I don't really want to think about how bad that would have been, and it made me a little uncomfortable about the idea of firing full power Divine Busters in the city. I was also lucky Miss Militia had been right there when it had happened and was able to clear me of any wrongdoing. It did put an end to the power testing, though, at least for today. After the security lockdown was lifted, they took me to an unused meeting room so I could fill out the paperwork Mrs. Dallon had given me, and I made sure to read it all before I signed it; that was something dad had drilled into me over and over: never sign anything you haven't read. It was a huge pain, but I got through it, and it helped that I could do it twice as fast by splitting the work between the me in the meeting room and the me in the Image Training partition.

By the time I left the Rig, the rain had finally tapered off and the clouds were breaking up. I found a spot out of anyone's line of sight near the boardwalk to detransform, and then I started the run I hadn't been able to do earlier today or yesterday.

It was good. It made me feel human, and I quickly got lost in the rhythm of my own body in motion. It was easier than it had been even two days ago, so I went faster until I felt like I was pushing. The streets weren't too crowded yet, and I had a good stretch of about a mile and a half where I caught the traffic lights just right and had nothing but walk signals from the crosswalks.

About two thirds of the way back to my house, I had some bad luck and got to a crosswalk just as the traffic light was changing, and I had to bring myself up short.

I saw a girl with dark blonde hair tied back into a braid on the other side of the crosswalk from me. She was maybe a year older than me, and there was a scattering of freckles across her nose that took her right to the tipping point on the line that divided cute from pretty. And there was a heavily bandaged light-brown colored ferret sitting on her shoulder, its tail wrapped around behind her neck.

The light changed. The walk signal appeared. We both crossed the street in opposite directions, and as we passed, I felt something that was a little like a static shock, if you could slow down a static shock and extend it over the course of a couple seconds. It wasn't painful, but I stopped running, and I couldn't stop myself from turning to look at her.

Both she and her green-eyed ferret were looking right back. Then she grinned a very vulpine grin, and it was probably my imagination, but I could have sworn the ferret narrowed its eyes at me.

"Sorry," I said, and kept running, quickly picking up speed as I left the girl and her ferret behind.

I got home at a quarter to four, and dad was already in the living room in a melancholic mood. "Hey," I called as I walked in.

"Hey, kiddo," he said. "How'd it go?"

I remembered the alarms, the power failure, and the hole in the wall and blushed. "Um," I began, and then didn't continue.

Dad raised an eyebrow. "That doesn't sound good."

"I… kindofblewuptheirshootingrangeonaccident."

"You blew up…"

"Their shooting range," I repeated more slowly. It did nothing to decrease my embarrassment. "On accident."

Dad laughed, and I soon joined in. Then I told him the full story, and he only laughed louder. But it was good. He wasn't making fun, and it felt good to laugh.

We went up to the attic after dinner. It was small and cramped, more like a glorified crawlspace than a real attic. The ceiling was about six feet up at the roof's peak, and it got much lower the further towards the sides you got. It smelled musty up here, like old wood and insulating foam, and there were cobwebs everywhere. It was cold, and the floor was closely spaced planks with pink insulating foam between the cracks and underneath.

Mom's boxes took up the entire back half of the attic. I could still remember the day we moved them up here; it had taken hours to pack everything away, and another hour to get all the boxes up here, and the entire time, neither one of us had said a word. Opening them up now felt like picking at a scab that wasn't quite ready to come off.

We did it anyways.

It took hours. Every box we opened brought with it memories of mom, and even the best ones had an aftertaste of loss, of grief. Photos of us, together and happy, me sitting in mom's lap at Grandma Sägebrecht's house, dad so much younger, his arm around mom, with the big window that overlooked their yard in the background. Vacations taken to the Grand Canyon and Disney World. Another was full of mom's books from when she was an English professor. There were books by second-wave feminist writers, books by famous fantasy writers, and a couple of books by mom that I hadn't thought about in years. And there was a picture of mom as a young woman with a bunch of her friends at a restaurant, all of them with big grins on their faces; one of them was a cape, but I didn't recognize her costume.

It was all here, though: Mom's whole life reduced to two dozen bankers boxes packed into the back half of a little attic. But that's all I had of her anymore. Just this. This and Raising Heart.

… Raising Heart.

"Raising Heart?"

"I'm here," she said, and her voice was uncharacteristically gentle.

"Do you know if mom had any… any other devices? Anything else that ran on magic?"

"Yes," she said. "I will show it to you." My HUD appeared, and something glowed with a gentle light inside of a box we had already checked, and suddenly I felt very foolish for not having asked for Raising Heart's help at the start. I mean, yes, I would have missed that photo of mom and dad on rollerblades at the skating rink in identical salmon-pink shirts with checkered shorts and yellow shoes, but I think I would have lived.

We dug into the box again, moving aside a bunch of mom's old clothes to get at what I'd previously dismissed as a blank diary.

Dad recognized it. I could see it in his eyes. He'd been looking through another box when I'd found it before, but now, he saw it and he recognized it. "Oh my God," he said, "That… that brings back memories."

I picked up the blank diary and opened it. "How to I use it?" I asked.

"Place your fingers on the page and let your mana flow into it," Raising Heart said.

I did, and the diary spoke in a totally uninflected man's voice, saying, "Biometrics recognized. Active linker core detected. Access granted, Taylor Hebert."

The diary came to life, projecting a holographic screen into the air above it. Words filled the page in a language I didn't recognize, but felt like maybe I should. It tugged at my memory, somehow, but the meaning wouldn't come.

"Can Raising Heart translate this?" Dad asked.

"Yes. It is Belkan. I will translate."

The script shifted first into what looked like German, and then into English, and it said, 'I'm worried about Raising Heart. She's been active for almost 20 years now without any real maintenance, and I can't do much stuck with guest user access. Her personality matrix is much more complex than it used to be, too: more developed. It's like talking to a person, now, instead of just a Device, intelligent or otherwise. A Device Meister would probably have a fit at seeing an Intelligent Device in her state, but I guess I'm just glad I have someone I can talk to without having to lie about anything. I hope she can keep Taylor safe. I hope Danny can forgive me. I haven't prayed in a long time, but I'll pray now: Sankt Kaiser be with them, protect and keep them.'

Okay. That was… something. Sankt Kaiser? And Raising Heart needed maintenance? I looked at dad, and he was just as wide-eyed and confused as I was. "Sankt Kaiser?" I asked, and dad just shook his head. We needed to spend some time reading through this, but…

"Raising Heart," I said, "Did mom leave any messages for me? Or for dad?"

"I will perform a search through the device's memory," she said. "Stand by. Confirmed. Message found. Is playback desired?"

I nodded. "Please," I said, my voice a near whisper.

There was a slight crackling buzz. And then the holoscreen was gone, and mom stood in its place, and my breath caught in my throat. Everything about her was right. Was her. Every detail. She was just as tall and willowy as I remembered, she had the same thin-lipped, wide, expressive mouth, the dark curly hair, the mismatched eyes, the same physical presence, everything.

And then she looked me in the eye with a sad smile. "Hello, Little Owl," she said.

"Mom?" I asked, barely daring to breathe.

"If you're watching this, then I'm probably dead. There's a lot I need to tell you, but I don't have a lot of time to tell it, so I'll just stick to what's important. By now you probably know that your grandma and grandpa - my parents - aren't from Earth Bet. We came here when I was just a little girl, and we've been hiding from…" the message flickered. "There's a group of very dangerous people after us, Taylor. We left Midchilda because it wasn't safe for us there, and when Scion came a few years later, and the Dimensional Sea around Earth Bet got really unstable, we thought we'd be safe here. But they've found me, and I know it's only a matter of time before they come for me, and for you. I don't know what they want me for, but the people behind Project Fate are ruthless, and they don't care about the law. They..." the playback flickered. There was a brief pause before mom's image came back.

"Your grandmother and I..." the recording flickered and then derezzed into static.

"Stand by," Raising Heart said. "Some sectors of the data are corrupted. I will recover them. Recovery in progress. Recovery complete. Warning: some sectors of the data are unrecoverable."

Mom's image snapped back into place. "Your grandmother and I," she said, "did what we could when you were born; we put protections in place to hide you, to disguise you from anyone who would recognize you. But if you're seeing this, it means you've become a mage. The spells we put on you have probably already begun to break down; you'll start going through the physical changes, soon, but I want you to know that they're nothing to be afraid of. It's something that comes with being who we are, from the choices our ancestors made a long time ago. Remember that no matter what happens, you are still you, you are still my Little Owl, and I will always love you."

Mom's eyes were wet with unshed tears as she went on, but she seemed to take a breath to steady herself, and then made herself keep talking. "Danny, if you're watching this, too," she began to cry as she spoke, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have told you. I wanted to keep you and Taylor safe, and I thought keeping this a secret would do that; mom and dad had drilled it into me over and over that I couldn't tell anyone about where we had come from, or about magic, or about any of it, and I was so sure that if you knew, you wouldn't want anything to do with me, but now I think I may have put you in even more danger by not telling you, and I'm sorry. But whatever you think of me, I want you to know that you and Taylor are the best things that ever happened to me." Her holographic image looked directly at him, then. "I love you, Danny Hebert. You're the bravest and best man I've ever known. And I should have told you."

Mom's image took a few breaths as she got her composure back together. "What else," she said. "Okay. Taylor, one more thing: I've left contact information in Raising Heart for some of my old friends: other capes who used to run with Lustrum." She held up a hand, "Yes, I worked for Lustrum. Yes, I was a cape. Well, a mage who specialized in the Strike Arts, but who's keeping track? Villain or not, she was a good woman before things went wrong, and a lot of good people worked with her. You're probably shocked. Maybe you're thinking that you would never ask for help from a bunch of supervillains. And I hope you never have to. But if it ever comes to it, if it's a choice between that and you being taken by Project Fate? Call them. Tell them Nova sent you, and she's calling in her last favor."

"Last thing..." the recording flickered and derezzed again. Raising Heart glowed pink for a second, and then the image reformed. "Last thing: I don't know if you'll find it useful or not, but this diary should have my old Strike Arts manual. Learn what you can. Use what's useful. Stay alive, and stay out of their hands." She glanced to her left and right. "I'm out of time," mom said. "I have to go now. Whatever happens, I'm not going to let them take me. Don't trust the Number…" the playback flickered. "...I love you Taylor."

"I love you too, mom," I whispered to the empty air.

Dad was crying. He wiped stubbornly at his eyes, but he was crying. I went over to him, and he hugged me fiercely, and I cried, and he cried, and I wished all my love to long ago and days that would never come again.