Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
Interlude 3.X: Precia
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
Once upon a time, in a magical land, a beautiful scientist lived happily with her kind-hearted daughter. The father wasn't a factor; Precia Testarossa had no desire for a husband, and she lived on a world where the traditional limits of human biology were flexible. Between her pay as a scientist and the money and estates she had inherited, neither she nor her daughter knew want. Despite her shyness and her difficulty in social situations, Precia did her best, and she and her daughter - Alicia Testarossa - were happy, and their futures seemed to shine like the sun. Precia had a job that she loved, they had each other, they had friends, they had people who loved them.
The day it all went wrong had seemed so ordinary. Precia had woken up to her alarm; the bed was warm, and her daughter was snuggled up next to her. Alicia hadn't been there when Precia had gone to sleep, but seeing her daughter snoring gently under the blankets in her cute teal pajamas brought a smile to Precia's face. She briefly considered just not going in to work at all, today, but she had responsibilities that couldn't be avoided.
Precia was the lead scientist working on a new type of mana reactor. She'd graduated with a doctorate in mana theory and high levels of expertise in dimensional teleportation and mass waste disposal from Reginleif University: a prestigious private university run by the Saint Church in the Belkan Self-Governed Area of Midchilda North, and her skills were in high demand. Her superiors had been pressuring her lately in an effort to get the reactor ready on time, and she was pretty sure that if she wasn't there to stop it, they'd do something foolish. So she got up and got ready for the day.
Alicia had been awake before it was time to leave, so Precia had been able to hug her daughter goodbye. Then she'd left Alicia in the care of her friend and Familiar, Rinn. The day had been bright and beautiful, and the comfortable warmth had made it the sort of lazy summer day that was meant for picnics in the park and going on adventures to pick blackberries down by the creek. Alicia had always loved going down to that creek when the blackberries were in season, and she'd come back with her fingers juice-stained and torn up by the thorns but with the biggest smile on her face as she showed her mother the spoils of her adventure.
Precia had insisted that the reactor wasn't ready. There were still a hundred different safety tests and checks they needed to do before it could be turned on, and if that meant they finished behind schedule, so be it. Her superiors at the project had been… less than understanding. They had ordered the mana reactor activated on schedule, today.
"I can't do that," she'd said. "If we don't follow safety procedures, there's no way to know what might happen."
"We will take full responsibility," said the man who now, in her memory, was little more than a shadowed figure in a business suit. "Now turn it on or find a new place to work. It's your choice."
She chose. The reactor melted down, and the ensuing explosion had killed every living thing in a ten kilometer radius. The only survivors were Precia herself and the men who had ordered her to activate the reactor; the control room was the one place in the radius that was shielded from energy release.
Precia's home was inside the blast zone.
Once upon a time, in a magical land, there was a beautiful scientist who was driven to madness by grief and guilt. She had chosen, and her daughter, her familiar, and every other living thing in ten kilometers of the reactor had died. Precia couldn't accept it. Life couldn't possibly be this cruel. She was a mage! Surely there was something she could do. Yes, she had been taught that magic had limits, and one of those was that no power could resurrect the dead, but she couldn't accept that. There had to be a way to bring Alicia back. Precia Testarossa began a long search into the forbidden magics, first of Belka, then of Al'Hazard. She sought the secret of bringing life to the dead, bringing her daughter's preserved body with her wherever she moved.
And then, one day, she met Jail Scaglietti: a brilliant scientist, and infamous for his criminal lack of scientific ethics. He was intrigued by her research, and he believed that if they worked together, if they could combine their data with sources from Ancient Belka and Al'Hazard, they could both benefit from it. He promised nothing short of a way to resurrect the dead, and though she knew that she was damning herself in doing so, she agreed to help him.
They called it Project Fate.
Hospitals on Non-Administrated World #97 left something to be desired. The technology was primitive, their understanding of medicine was limited, and the architecture was uninspired. The hospital gown was undignified, and Precia couldn't stand up without exposing her bottom to anyone who cared to see it. And she had no choice but to seek aid here; she had let her lungs go unattended for too long, and the sickness was growing worse every day. Yesterday had been a good day, but today was not; she'd woken herself up coughing so hard she'd thrown up, and the vomit had been full of blood.
She could have been treated at any time prior to her arrival here on this 'Earth Bet,' but Precia had put it off to concentrate on her research. Now she was paying the price. Her translation matrix only gave her one out of every three words when the doctors and nurses were using medical jargon, but she understood enough to know that her prognosis wasn't good.
She'd always been this way. She never noticed things until it was too late. It had honestly just seemed unimportant, and now, here she was, lying on a hospital bed on a primitive world, at the mercy of mere biology.
Precia was a woman of ageless beauty; no one who looked at her could ever have guessed that she was 60 years old. She was no mere girl, but her face was utterly unlined, her skin smooth and without flaw. She was a woman in the fullest flower of her beauty, and she even managed to make a hospital gown look flattering. Her purple eyes and her startlingly grey hair - not grey as in greying, not salt and pepper or a mix of white and dark, but actual grey - only added to her sheer physical presence. She didn't look like a dying woman, but there it was.
With only the sound of the heart monitor to keep her company, her thoughts drifted back to yesterday - a good day, all things considered. A better day than she could have hoped for.
Precia came out of her basement lab, carefully closed and locked the door behind her, and walked up the stairs and into the kitchen of the home she had rented in Brockton Bay. Dinner was here; she paid the delivery woman at the door and then made her way to the dining room to set the table. They were having chicken curry tonight, and there was something comforting in the ritual of setting places. She hadn't been so domestic for a long time, but with Linith still overseeing the relocation of the Garden of Time, she had little choice.
Her daughter appeared suddenly in the living room with Arf at her side accompanied by the distinctive sound of teleportation.
The girl - Fate - was 15 years old, with long blonde hair and red eyes and dressed mostly in black and red. She was short, maybe 5'4" at most, and her expression was dreadfully somber and serious. "Hello, mother," she said politely. She held up a small blue gem. "I've recovered the Jewel Seed from Baltimore."
Precia smiled proudly. "Well done, Alicia."
Fate flinched at the name, and her expression flickered for just a second. Neither was obvious; she had good control over her body language, but Precia saw it even though she pretended not to notice.
"Will you be eating?" Precia asked. "We're having chicken curry tonight."
"Yes, mother," Fate replied, and she couldn't quite keep the melancholy out of her voice.
"Good," Precia said, and continued setting the table, setting a place for Fate and another for Arf. Fate and Arf both had a seat, and Precia dished up their dinners onto their plates with a sad smile. None of them spoke.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs interrupted the uncomfortable silence; a girl - a teenager about Fate's age - came into the dining room a few moments later, looking almost painfully cute with her glasses and with her brown hair in pigtails. "Oh!" she said cheerfully, "Big sister Fate is back! Welcome back, Fate!"
Fate looked up at the girl with uncertainty in her eyes; Arf looked annoyed.
Precia felt an irrational urge to murder the newcomer. She ignored it; Jail wouldn't appreciate having his liaison to her operation killed. She even managed not to let her hands curl into fists. "Hello, Quattro," she said politely. "To what do we owe this pleasure?"
"Oh," Quattro said, "I just wanted to go over a few teensie little details in this report on that local Mage. Starfall was her name, right? But that curry smells delicious! I'm sure the report can wait until after dinner."
The tension at the table grew. Precia very carefully didn't react, and neither did Fate, but Arf glared at the girl.
"My, my, such an unpleasant and hostile atmosphere. But I come bearing gifts!" Quattro produced a holographic screen from the air and tossed it in Precia's direction.
Arf caught it before it could hit her, looked it over, and then handed it off to Fate. "Building schematics?" she asked.
Quattro held up her fingers in a V for victory. "Correct!" she chirped. "As a sign of good faith, I went ahead and scouted out the lair of that Tinker in Boston with the giant cat. You and Fate won't have any problems playing fetch, will you?"
Fate looked mortified, and Arf's eyes narrowed dangerously.
Quattro seemed to realize how that sounded, though, and she looked embarrassed, and waved her hands in front of her in a gesture of negation. "Oh, sorry! That came out wrong. I didn't mean that the way it sounded."
Precia's eyes narrowed. "Don't overstep your bounds, Quattro," she said. "You are here as a courtesy, nothing more."
Quattro nodded to Precia. "Of course, Ms. Testarossa," she said.
Despite Quattro's presence, it had been a good evening. Even if her Alicia reborn still insisted she call her Fate, and flinched whenever she slipped.
Precia's thoughts were brought back to the here and now by the sound of the door opening.
She was dying, yes, but it wasn't the end.
The moment had been prepared for.
The local healer - Panacea - walked into the hospital room in her white robe with its medic's red cross on her chest and back. She didn't look like much - a mousy looking girl with frizzy brown hair and freckles, but Precia's device noted her active Linker Core the moment she came into the room. No device. Likely untrained, but awake. Strong. Were there possibilities here, perhaps? It was worth considering. Panacea stopped at the foot of Precia's bed, looked over her chart, and then looked up.
The girl froze; her jaw dropped open slightly, and she stared.
A slight smile teased the corner of Precia's lips; it was good to know she still had it, even in this state. Then she covered her mouth and coughed - not so much to get the healer's attention as because she had to cough - and her hand came away bloody. "Are you the healer?" she asked. Despite her infirmity, her voice was rich and confident.
"Yes," Panacea squeaked. She took a breath to steady herself, and she looked Precia in the eye. "Do I have your permission to heal you?"
Precia smiled. "You have my permission."