Loft peeked out of her bedroom window, towards the woman standing next to the front gate. With how serious Clancy sounded when she made that secret call, she was expecting someone more...terrifying. Someone like Aktivis. The mere mention of her name would make Viven's face scrunch up in an ugly scowl.
But Elizabeth just waited patiently for the automated gate to slide open and let the guards lead her into the building.
She turned away from the window before the maids could come knocking on her doors. Be careful. Don't talk to her any longer than necessary. Run away if you don't feel safe.
She doubted that Viven would let her. The mayor's kid couldn't be rude, regardless of the reputation of their guest, and Viven wasn't nearly as nice as her sisters when it came to chewing out her misbehaviors. But Viven wasn't back yet, so she took the liberty of running in the hallway as she hurried towards the guest room.
She halted her steps behind a statue, peeking at their guest. Elizabeth had taken off her baseball cap, and was sitting straighter than she could ever manage. She must've noticed the maids glancing at the little kid in hiding, but didn't say anything.
If people didn't spit out Elizabeth's name with the same venom they usually reserved for that mouse governor, Loft would not have considered sneaking back into her room and pretending that she didn't realize there was a guest. But they said equally nasty things about her other sister, too, after that city-wide power outage, and one of these just gave her more sad feelings than the other.
"Hello." After hesitating for a long time, she finally stepped into the room and greeted the woman.
If this was a cartoon, there would be cricket noises. Elizabeth didn't even turn in her direction, and after some pondering, she concluded that she must have been speaking too quietly for the woman to hear.
"Hello." She moved closer and made a small wave.
More imaginary cricket noises. She felt her cheeks heating up at the silence. Viven would surely give her a scolding if she ran away from their guest now, even if Elizabeth wasn't interested in talking to her in the first place. So she inched her way to the tea table and decided to recite one last bit of polite talk before leaving.
"My name is Loft. Miss Viven has left for..." She paused. "Important stuff, but she'll come back later. I hope you enjoy your stay. Do you need anything?"
Elizabeth looked up from the decorated tablecloth. Her intense, ice-cold gaze was sending out very conflicting signals from the small smile on her face. She seemed to simultaneously regard Loft as a pest and a fascinating curiosity, something she didn't know was possible until she saw it.
"Give me one reason why you think you are worth my time," she said, still smiling. "That you are anything like your sister."
Not even Viven could blame her for leaving at this point. Yet running away felt...wrong, like leaving your back to a scary beast, and people who did that in documentaries usually ended up as pixelated corpse photos. So she just stood there, frozen, until footsteps came from behind her, and the old woman's regal purple dress appeared at the corner of her eyes.
"How very nice of you, to greet our guest on your own," Viven put a hand on her shoulder, before turning to Elizabeth. "I hope her manners haven't offended you too terribly. You know how unruly these Mobile Colony children are, and the education she had received is...insufficient, to say the least."
"Is that so?" Elizabeth's voice suddenly gained a warm curiosity. "She's a delight to chat with, really. Told me that she loves you as much as her sisters." A sigh. "I couldn't bring myself to deliver the bad news to such a happy kid."
Viven was smiling too, but her tight grip on Loft's shoulder was starting to hurt. "I'm glad to hear that. Perhaps we should start our talk on the second floor? I'll ask the maids to take the tea to my study, too."
Upon receiving a nod, Viven let go of her. "Go back to your room. We'll have a talk after dinner, once our guest has departed."
The bad news. She wrote the same three words over and over again on her notepad, before crossing them out. Viven was so going to chide her for wasting paper. As well as grounding her for missing her sisters' bad influences. Loft could almost imagine the old woman brushing her concerns off with her usual sweet condescension, and Viven had a point, perhaps.
The Resonance warning alarm would've gone off long ago, if Ubi was in mortal danger.
Loft almost wanted her to be in some kind of trouble. Nothing serious, but enough to make her feel bad about running away to have a holiday after screwing up so many times. Then she started feeling awful about even wishing for something like that, as well as parroting everything Viven had said to the people around her.
A hero follows their gut feelings and charges towards danger, while everyone else just stands there, frozen.
That gut feeling clearly hadn't led her sister to a good place, and, despite her best attempt at fighting it off, it was making the stupid choice much more tempting.
If Elizabeth didn't even think she was worth anything, if she was plotting something sinister (because of course, she'd be), then maybe acting like her sister wasn't a bad thing, after all.
She took a deep breath and pushed open the room door. Slowly but surely, she tiptoed up the stairs to the third floor.
Ubi made climbing look so easy. She'd taught Loft a few tricks, too, when Clancy wasn't looking.
It wasn't enough.
She couldn't see the open window she had climbed out of anymore, now that she was hanging on the iron frames that suspended multiple flower pots in front of the window ledge. But there was a small ridge below. Inch by inch, she moved towards the wall and stepped on it, giving her arms a well-needed break.
Then she realized she wouldn't be able to get down from here.
"...Simply outrageous." Even with a glass pane between them, she could still feel Viven's seething anger. "You said she had assaulted you prior to this incident?"
"It's only a bruise. Since I was trying to warn her about a stalker, who attacked both of us, she must've thought I had led them to her." A pause. "But what concerns me is her behavior during said stalker's attack. She was...losing control of herself, and not responding to anything I said."
"I understand what you mean." Viven's voice gained an edge that was usually reserved for her...previous foster kid. "I wouldn't be surprised if her loss of control had led directly to this incident in the news."
"Oh, I assure you, it's not even close to what Blizz could unleash. I'm more worried about her hurting herself, which was why I made a call to check on her, while she was still in the hospital. How could I have known her reaction?"
"You couldn't. Such a walking hazard shouldn't have been tolerated by the Capitoline Council in the first place."
"I won't comment on the last part. But honestly, she was responsible for most of her own misfortune, yet I got blamed for it by folks who barely knew who I was." A slight annoyance crawled into Elizabeth's voice. "Man. There is reasonable suspicion, and then there is paranoia. I only wished they hadn't bothered Respella."
"Considering how impossible to please these Console Continent people are? I'm glad that they haven't detained your employee any longer."
"Right. These CPUs, they really think it's all about them," Elizabeth said. "Jumping straight to conclusions, thinking I must have bad intentions. Were they more concerned about catching the real criminals than pestering innocent foreigners, maybe there wouldn't be so many world-ending disasters that only get averted at the last second!"
Her arms were getting sore. Panting, she released her left hand's hold on the bar for a brief rest.
"I love this world, you know? I'm a hero, just like every other person chosen by the crystal." A sigh. "But, as you can see, having your heart in the right place is not enough. You need money, support, and a lot of luck."
The metal frame rattled slightly. If she kept hanging onto it, would the entire thing just fall off after a while?
"Unlike Gertie—no offense to her, she's lovely—my agency doesn't have the backing of the entire Azure State, and requires more profit to keep it running. It's business, plain and simple, but according to some people, raising the charge rate during a crisis is enough to make me worse than the criminals."
"As sympathetic as I am to your circumstances, I doubt I'd be able to change the charge rate of the Capitoline Triad Division during our temporary contract."
"Oh, no worries," Elizabeth replied. "After drawing Governor Dis-chu's ire with my recent misstep, I'm grateful enough to have a chance to make up for my losses. Man, that mouse is more terrifying than the villains. Even a misunderstood hero like me could only tremble beneath his tiny paws. You, Madam Viven d'Eau, are an absolute angel in comparison."
Loft tried to raise her left arm again, but the strength just wasn't there anymore. Panic surged through her when she tried to command her sore muscles to move, to no avail.
"Oh, you flatter me. Thank you for providing me with such valuable information. If I may ask—"
The heat outside was making her palms sweaty. Her grip on the metal was slipping, despite her best efforts. She didn't dare to look down now, to see the surface she'd be falling onto. She'd lose her grip a lot quicker.
"—Would your agency be interested in taking over the defense of the province, once the Council succeeded in barring her from duty?"
"Oh, I'd love to, but we don't have the manpower. In the meantime, perhaps an expansion of O-Wings' operation zone would be—?"
Her right arm felt like it was being dosed in hot water. Their words were turning into white noise.
"Agent Massy's contact? Of course." A pause. "Prepared for all the possibilities. You are a shrewd one."
"Shrewd? I always see farther, that's all."
Her fingers went numb. The moment she released her hold on the metal bars, the tips of her shoes slipped off the narrow ridge. Her mind was a complete blank as she tumbled through the air, her vision fading to a blur of colors—
Something caught the back of her shirt and stopped her fall, just when she was seconds away from slamming into the lawn. Before she could let out the breath she was holding, it sped up to a dizzying speed, dragging her up through the air and right into the open window above, before dropping her onto the carpet. She was about to utter a hushed "thanks", until she saw her mysterious rescuer.
It was a giant hammerhead shark. And it was floating in midair.
"Yo, Tibu caught a naughty kid, Tibu!" The shark flipped to its side, revealing rows of sharp teeth. Almost immediately, she scrambled up and backed away from the talking fish.
"Don't be scared. Tibu is a good shark, and Tibu hosts sports matches for kids! Is naughty kid a fan of Miss E.A., Tibu?"
The shark's cheerful voice came from behind her, just as she flung the door open and bolted into the corridor. Her footsteps would've alerted all the maids on this floor, but she couldn't care less about being discovered at this point—
"You are making my job a lot harder than it already is."
A silhouette materialized right in front of her and grabbed her by the shoulders. Were those hands not as cold and hard as plastic, she could have mistaken it for a real person. It didn't take her too long to recognize the hologram's black tank top and the red tattoo around her right eye.
The woman who always stood behind Elizabeth in silence, whenever they appeared on the television screen. O-Wings' second-in-command. The Digital Illusionist.
"Miss Dice," she mumbled. The hologram didn't say a word after letting go of her, and only gestured for her to follow her down the stairs.
"Are you going to tell them?" She finally mustered enough courage to speak, after they reached the second-floor corridor.
"My boss's time is too valuable for this," Dice—no, Holo-Dice replied. "In retrospect, I shouldn't have assigned Tiburon to guard duty. He isn't the brightest fish, but still, you should've thanked him for saving you."
"Sorry. I thought he was..."
"Going to eat you?"
"Villains always feed witnesses to sharks in the movies."
"You have an overactive imagination. That's what you nearly broke your legs for? A chance to learn about my boss's plans to abduct you and use you for blood sacrifice?" Holo-Dice gave her an amused look. "Whatever you heard, I doubt it's worth the risks you had put yourself through."
She wanted to point a finger at the hologram and blurt out everything she heard, but only managed to utter a weak protest in the end. "You can't think she's a...good person?"
"And you just know she's a bad person, after talking to her for two minutes?" Holo-Dice raised an eyebrow. "She doesn't seem like the caring type, yes. But she has her reasons. It takes more than money for me to stay with her for the past eleven years."
"Why do you stay with her, then?"
Holo-Dice fell silent. There was a distant look in her eyes when she started speaking again. "Have you ever met someone who makes you feel special?"
"Special...how?"
"You haven't." Holo-Dice shook her head. "Perhaps you will, when you grow up."
She wanted to ask more questions, but the next second, the hologram dissolved into a bunch of pixels, leaving her alone in the empty hallway.