Because so much of Ciel's vomit had hit Penny, it took longer to clean up this time.
This time. Potent words. There was no avoiding them. Ciel couldn't pretend any more. She couldn't imagine this was a hallucination or something unreal. She'd lived through this day twice already, died twice, and come back to the same point.
It was all so impossible, so unbearable, she could hardly think of anything else. She couldn't even begin to ask how; just the fact that it was happening overwhelmed all other thoughts. She kept missing words when Penny tried to talk to her. Luckily, Penny seemed content with vague or general responses from Ciel. Her standards for human interaction really were low.
Human, huh?
Another argument Ciel had lost and been forced to abandon. Penny was a robot. A robot who was incredible at passing for human, all things considered, but still.
Ciel had no idea how she was going to broach that subject.
Scratch that. She had no ideas, full stop. To her agony, her brain refused to engage.
"We have lost quite a bit of our practice time," Penny said as they entered the training room. Everything was exactly as Ciel remembered it: the drones, the program, even Penny, more or less. When Ciel still didn't say anything, for fear that more than words would escape her if she opened her mouth, Penny went on. "I recommend we cut an equal amount of time from each of the scenarios."
"No," said Ciel. The words had gone from her before she could think. She cursed herself internally. All of this… everything was breaking down her self-control.
But could she really blame herself for that?
"No?" said Penny curiously, cocking her head as she always did.
"Pyrrha," said Ciel around deliberate swallows.
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's Pyrrha," Ciel said, nodding to herself. "You should practice against her. The whole session will be Pyrrha."
That took Penny aback. "I don't understand. I'm not more likely to fight Pyrrha than anyone else."
"Yes, you are," said Ciel. "Pyrrha will be your opponent. I know it."
"No one knows who my opponent will be. Fighters aren't chosen until the last moment before the fight, when the selections are made at random. Even the tournament organizers do not know the pairings in advance." Penny brightened, growing excited. "That was a reform made after the 34th Vytal Tournament. There was a match-fixing scandal involving a Vacuan team and a Mistrali—"
Penny's exuberance was too much. "I just know," Ciel said, cutting across the girl's (robot's) eager monologue. "It's going to be Pyrrha."
Penny's face fell into annoyance. "But you can't 'just know'," she repeated. "It's not possible."
Ciel threw up her hands (while trying not to throw up). "Call it a hunch, then, but it's going to be Pyrrha, I can guarantee you that."
That threw Penny for a loop. Ciel could see the conflict playing out on Penny's face. "I… want to believe you. I think you believe that, but I don't understand why I should. You have never told me about your hunches before."
Ciel grimaced. That was because hunches weren't a thing for her. The words had tasted foreign coming out of her mouth. She needed better lies.
That thought was so staggering she couldn't follow it with any other words or thoughts.
Penny, apparently sensing that the conversation had stalled, gestured to the console. "We really should get started."
Ciel tried to tamp down her panic, tried to force her thoughts back into some sort of order. "Could we at least double the Pyrrha portion of the training? She is the betting favorite to win it all. Maybe… maybe you're not more likely to face her, but she's a more dangerous opponent."
Penny nodded at that. "That makes sense to me. I agree."
Something. It was something.
Having even the slightest thing go Ciel's way was a relief beyond words.
She dutifully took her place at the console, divided up the remaining time amongst the potential opponents, then took a slice from each to dump onto the Pyrrha section.
Even as Ciel did so, she despaired. Pyrrha was fully capable of killing Penny. She'd done so twice. How was an extra fifteen minutes of practice going to narrow that gap?
Ciel felt herself starting to hyperventilate.
In, tick, tick, tick, out, tick, tick, tick. Think. Think, darn you.
She tried reaching back to her classes, to her instructions about keeping a cool head in combat. She wanted those techniques to work, oh she did. They were so much easier in a classroom.
This was a classroom, too, wasn't it? It was a simulator, at least, so not much more dangerous than a classroom.
Okay, maybe… but as Ciel thought about it, it wasn't what was happening now that was terrifying her so. It was that horrible future rushing towards her with every breath. That unavoidable catastrophe that, in fewer than 24 hours, would extinguish the life of the sweet girl before her, and then kill her too as an afterthought.
Ciel didn't want either of them to die. She felt death approaching, knew how close it was, knew how each tick of the watch on her wrist brought doom a second closer.
Fifteen extra minutes of practice.
That was nothing.
Ciel was stuck firmly in her own head through the entirety of the practice session. She could practically feel a noose tightening around her neck with every step she took. And Penny…
By the gods, Penny. So bright, so impossibly bright, she didn't know, she didn't know, but Ciel did and that was unbearable. You're going to die. Even knowing Penny was a robot wasn't changing how Ciel felt about this, and "how she felt" was like she was being strangled with barbed wire.
What could she possibly do to stop it?
"I wonder what could be taking them so long," Penny said.
"Bird strike," Ciel replied without thinking, then shook her head. They'd gotten all the way back to Beacon cliff. When had that happened?
"That is a plausible explanation," Penny said charitably. "Ooh! Is this another one of your 'hunches'?"
"Sure," said Ciel as a crawling sensation danced up her arms.
"Fascinating," said Penny. "No mentions at all before, and now two in two hours! How do you get hunches? Where do your hunches come from?"
Of course the robot with no human experience would ask those questions. Of course the person who didn't do hunches, and who knew the truth only because she'd lived it already, would have to try and answer.
She blubbered useless words in Penny's direction. The Manta picking her up couldn't arrive soon enough.
Yet it was, as expected, far behind schedule. "Sorry we're late," said the crewman when it finally arrived. "Bird strike."
"Must have been some bird," said Ciel as Penny beamed at her and looked very impressed.
"Like it was made of brick," laughed the crewmate.
Ciel couldn't think of anything else to say, and after a long moment of awkwardness broken up only by the whine of the Manta's propulsion, Penny boarded, saying as she went, "I'll see you tomorrow, Miss Ciel! When should I arrive at Amity?"
"1615," Ciel replied numbly.
"Yes, ma'am!"
The Manta's bay door shut, the airship lifted off, and Ciel was alone on the cliffside once more.
No, not alone. She had the enormity of her situation, of the impending disaster at Amity and catastrophe at Beacon, looming over her, dominating her thoughts and giving no room for her to think of anything else.
She scanned across the courtyard. Having seen calamity befall the place twice, she couldn't look at it the same. It seemed serene and intact, but she saw fire, rubble, collapse, rampaging grimm and White Fang alike, she could hear the false-friend sound of commandeered Bullheads overhead and those searing, gut-wrenching screams...
So strange, to have a memory of something that hadn't happened—that had happened twice, but also never.
It would happen again all the same…
Ciel frowned. The same? No, not quite the same.
She walked forward, looking over the grounds. As far as her memory was concerned, it was not even three hours ago that she'd died here—right there, she knew. Hit by White Fang rockets.
But the first time she'd died (even now it was almost impossible to grapple with the idea), it hadn't been from a rocket. She'd been underneath one of the towers—the one hosting the headmaster's office, she was pretty sure, the Emerald Tower as the locals called it. She'd been crushed by falling debris from the Emerald Tower. That stupid, oversized gear.
Not the same.
And she'd gotten Penny to do more Pyrrha practice the third time through than the first or second…
Slowly, slowly, the ideas began to form in Ciel's mind. She knew they wouldn't stay there, though. Her mind wouldn't hold them like this. She needed to formalize them. She needed routine.
With new conviction, she headed back for her dorm room. There was no space in her head for her Aura essay, only for getting all of this down on paper to try and make it stick. She likewise paid zero attention to the loud dorm rooms and the quiet ones alike. None of them were dealing with anything she cared about; they might as well have been on another planet.
She got back to her room, sat at her desk, and scrawled as quickly as possible, "I am dying and returning."
It looked a lot more ridiculous written down than it'd sounded in her head.
What other conclusion could she reach, though? She frowned as she thought more, thought harder. Her breathing picked up as if she were exercising. She crossed out the final words and tried again. "I am dying and coming back to the night before my death."
Closer. This was helping. Her brain was engaging with this despite the enormous weight and residual fear from her deaths. Try again.
"I am dying and coming back to the night before my death, with the ability to change the circumstances of my death."
Closer still. She could feel herself approaching the truth. The magnitude of her discovery was overshadowing the trauma that gave rise to it. Her hand trembled, spoiling her writing; it took several attempts to finish her next try. When she finally got the thought down, she stared at it, trying to take it in.
"I may have unlocked my semblance."
Professor Absinthe, wearing a decidedly informal variant of the Atlas instructor's uniform, had a dreamy look about her, with frazzled hair down about her shoulders, a resting half-smile on her lips, and moist gray-blue eyes that never seemed to focus. Her words nevertheless held her class in their grip.
"The most important thing to remember about your semblance is this: you can't force it."
Ciel felt a chill sweep through her. She kept it stifled, kept herself totally still.
"The semblance is the awakened soul," Absinthe said, spreading her arms grandly. "You may have heard the myth that the semblance reflects the self—untrue, but close enough often enough for the myth to persist. Compared to basic Aura, the semblance is deeply personal and much more advanced. I could, if I wished, unlock the Auras of any number of untrained civilians… and maybe one in a thousand would manifest a semblance."
She smiled. "Which is why there is no judgment in this class. There's every kind of person in this world, and so every kind of semblance. When and how those semblances reveal themselves is as different as we are. There's a reason this class appears in the catalogue as 'Aura Supplemental Course' and not anything with the word 'remedial'."
Absinthe turned towards the screen at the back of the room. Given the moment, many students whispered to their neighbors. Ciel could make out snippets, enough to sense the mood. Confusion and wariness dominated.
After some inscrutable shuffling and typing, Absinthe returned her gaze to the class. "Certain bandit tribes have practices that are supposed to force semblances to manifest, but the results are inconsistent, and frequently fatal."
A mental image bolted, unbidden, into Ciel's mind, of herself falling from a cliff and begging her semblance to appear, to no avail. Oh, she had not needed that.
"Frankly, if those practices were at all effective, the bandits would be much more of a threat than they are. A more civilized, less gruesome approach is to attempt to coax the semblance out. All the practices and disciplines that we use to refine a person's control of Aura, we double-up. Each student embarks on a journey into themselves, until the borders between mind, body, and soul blur to nothingness, until your awareness of yourself is as complete as it can be."
Her arms had lifted at some point during her speech; she didn't seem fully conscious of the fact. She did notice the scattered mumbles her words provoked. Her next smile was more cynical. "I know some of you will take this as New Thinking nonsense, or some ivory tower-run-amok sort of thing. Let me remind you of two things. First, I am a licensed Huntress, and I am fully capable of defeating any two of you in a duel without breaking a sweat."
She paused to look behind and above her, where a battle axe taller than Absinthe herself hung from the wall. The muttering stopped.
"Second," she said, looking at them with a broader smile still, "is that few of you are nearly as self-aware as you think you are. Based on experience, I can say with confidence that ten percent of you have already unlocked your semblances and failed to realize it."
Ciel sucked in a breath. She was not the only one.
"Some semblances are not combat related, and so don't draw attention to themselves. Robyn Hill is a famous example."
"Mantleborn scum," grumbled a student to Ciel's right, but Absinthe seemed not to notice.
"Even after we discovered her semblance, which took a year," Absinthe said, "it took almost another full year to help her understand how to control it. Plenty of other semblances with subtle or non-obvious effects pose similar difficulties, especially since semblances, like people, are dynamic and change.
"On top of that, five percent of students manifest a semblance that is completely passive."
The class's reaction was much more than murmurs this time. Even Ciel couldn't help the noise of surprise that came from her mouth.
"Such semblances can never be observed directly. We can only measure their effects. My favorite experience with a passive semblance was Clover Ebi. He enrolled in this class in his second year. When five other students spontaneously manifested their semblances in the first two weeks, I knew something unusual was going on."
She looked up, as if looking into the past. "And to think, all along, he thought he never had to try to succeed because he was just that good. Well, I suppose he was partly right."
Her eyes returned to the class, this time settling on one student after another. "It takes uncommon self-awareness to discover such things. This class will help you develop that self-awareness, and give you another set of eyes to look at your situation. I don't know which of you have unknowingly been radiating soul energy, but it will be rewarding to find out. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's you."
Her eyes fell on Ciel, and for perhaps the first time they seemed to focus together, leaving Ciel pinned in place.
"Maybe it's you."
That had been three years ago.
Three years of meditation, discipline, breathing control, and "journeys of self-discovery". Three years of alternating disappointment, frustration, and despair. Three years of seeing other students rotate in and out of the class while she remained, the sole constant. Three years of reminders that her usable Aura was on the low end for an Academy student, below even lightweights like Neon Katt, to say nothing of juggernauts like Yang Xiao Long. Three years of those stormy gray-blue eyes looking through her and finding her wanting.
Three years of Professor Absinthe's mouth saying, "The search is its own reward", even as her eyes passed silent judgement.
Well, how was this for self-awareness? Huh?
Ciel underlined "I may have unlocked my semblance", once, twice, thrice.
Her combat school instructors had cautioned their students not to write off any unusual thing that happened as "must be a semblance". They started with skepticism. Absinthe had taken a different approach, encouraging students to take the unusual at face value and dig into it, try to replicate it, relive it.
Ciel was reliving it, alright. No wonder Absinthe had never been able to find Ciel's semblance. She'd never tried killing her. It was bizarre to think that the Branwen Tribe might have had more success finding Ciel's semblance than Atlas Academy.
Placing her pen down, Ciel leaned back in her chair and tried to think.
If she really was returning to the night before disaster… well, that meant she was barreling towards that same disaster. In which case, Ciel needed to do what Atlas Academy drummed into its students: report problems up the chain of command. Why, something this urgent needed to go straight to the top! The General needed to know about this!
Except Ciel couldn't go straight to the top.
The General's quarters were on the KAS Benefactor, pride of the Air Fleet. Ciel couldn't just call a Manta to pick her up and take her there at will. Nor could she call him; the Headmaster of Atlas Academy was not in the habit of passing out his scroll number to random trainees. He may have given this mission directly to her, but that access didn't go both ways.
What numbers did she have? There were the student coordinators for the Atlas exchange students… no, too low-ranking, too far away from operations. Their job was to make sure the visiting Atlesians didn't go to jail—or, failing that, to bail them out of jail. They weren't even involved with Penny, to their disgust.
Oh, that was it! The Penny mission lead!
The Penny situation was so unusual there was a mission just for her, with its own security officer in charge. They were based out of KAS Magnanimous and took care of Penny while she was sleeping (did she actually sleep?), as well as providing her escort to and from Amity and Beacon. If anyone had a stake in whether Penny lived or died, they did.
Ciel pulled up her scroll and searched her contacts. There was an entry for Lieutenant Som, head of the Penny mission. Perfect.
It took seven rings before she heard a click. "Hmm?"
"Lieutenant Som?" said Ciel.
"Mm-wha?"
He'd been asleep. Ciel, abashed, checked the time—well after 2200, perhaps she should have expected that—but this was so urgent…
"I'm sorry for waking you up, sir," she said.
There was an aggrieved huff. "Who is this?"
"Tr-trainee Soleil, sir," she said, formality waging war on embarrassment.
"Soleil? Oh… right. You. Whaddya want?"
"Penny is in danger, sir," Ciel said, knowing she had to get the most important facts out first.
"Penny?"
"Yes, sir."
There was a long, dramatic groan. "Listen, Trainee, I didn't go to bed until after I was sure Penny was buttoned up tight. She's now in a secure section under armed guard. Her hidey-hole is somewhere on an eight-hundred-foot-long battleship, newest in the gods-damned Air Fleet, still sporting that new ship smell. Said battleship is floating five thousand feet in the air as part of a three-ship task force, and protected by its own guns, hard light shielding, and an all-hours two-fighter combat air patrol.
"How in all the hells is Penny in danger?"
It was an impressive speech for someone who was barely awake. Ciel forced herself to swallow, trying to shake off the force of it—and the force of belief behind it. "I'm sure she's safe right now, sir. It's tomorrow. She's headed for danger in the tournament tomorrow."
"Then you can call me about it tomorrow, after I've slept. You are to call no earlier than 0800. Are we clear, Trainee?"
Orders resonated deeply with Ciel. "Yes, sir."
Beep.
The scroll fell out of her hand.
Well, she'd butchered that, hadn't she? Not only had she failed to make Penny safer, she'd antagonized her protector. It would have been better to call earlier. No, wait. It would have been better if she'd gone with Penny on that last Manta. She could have dealt with Som face to face.
Twenty-twenty hindsight, and all that.
Ciel groaned. She was fully capable of stewing in her own regrets for hours. If she did that, she wouldn't sleep much, and she already had enough to keep her awake: the twice-relived horrors of dying, anxiety over Penny, the dire possibility of dying again…
Her eyes fell upon the book for her Aura class.
With all due respect to Professor Absinthe, she was blowing off her damn essay.
As predicted, her sleep was fitful and low-quality. She felt more tired in the morning than she had the night before. Her morning routine helped—routine always did—but the small amount of fatigue it banished was quickly replaced with anxiety.
Just what, exactly, was she going to tell Lieutenant Som? How could she explain what was happening without sounding like a lunatic?
0800 ran up on her like the largest engine on the Solitas Express. She hadn't found an answer she liked. Why couldn't this be in a manual? Atlas Academy had reams of manuals on dozens of subjects. Ciel leaned on them heavily, which left her unbalanced now. Where was the manual on how to report things you couldn't reasonably know?
Admittedly, that would have been a niche manual.
But this was a niche situation!
Even not having a good answer, she still had to make the call. This was an urgent matter, she'd promised Som she'd call then, this was a schedule thing. She had to, if only for herself.
It went more poorly than she could have feared.
"You're asking me to believe," Som said, "that your semblance is more powerful than time itself?"
Ciel wanted to be buried in a hole in the ground, never to emerge. "Respectfully, sir," she said, trying not to let her mortification consume her, "it's the only explanation that checks out. There's nothing else that could keep throwing me back when I die."
"When you die," Som repeated. Ciel could almost hear the vast depths of unimpressed within the man. A person could get lost in there.
"Yes, sir," she said, cringing even though he couldn't see her.
"And, based on your… visions? Experiences? You want me to pull Penny from the tournament."
"She'll be matched up against Pyrrha, and she can't survive," said Ciel, trying to contain her desperation and not really succeeding. "Pyrrha not only kills her, but shows the whole world she's a robot."
Ciel could hear some sort of shuffling going on over the line. When Som spoke again, his words were clipped and formal. "Trainee Soleil, you are to report to the Beacon cliffs for Manta transport to the Magnanimous. You are not to discuss this call or any of your visions with anyone along the way."
Ciel burned to correct him—they weren't visions or hallucinations or anything like that!—but she couldn't. Obedience was too ingrained. "Yes, sir."
"You have ten minutes. Out."
Well, that wasn't so bad. If they were extracting her with urgency, and taking her to the Penny mission directly, that meant they were taking her seriously. That had to be good, right?
Then why was her hand shaking?
Something wasn't sitting right, and Ciel didn't know what it was. Still, if this offered even a chance of saving Penny and fulfilling her mission, Ciel had to do it.
Besides, it was an order. Following those was good in itself.
She made it to the cliffs with time to spare. The Manta crew brought her aboard with a minimum of conversation; they chattered amongst themselves, but didn't seem to have the time of day for Ciel. That gave her plenty of time to gawk at the Magnanimous.
Ciel had been close to ships of the Air Fleet twice. The first time was part of a training exercise, when one had hovered overhead serving as the command post for the mission. She never got the chance to take a good look at it, seeing as the grimm of the Solitas tundra had dominated her attention. The second time was a tour sponsored by Atlas Academy of an almost-complete ship in the yards, giving students the opportunity to see the latest Atlesian hardware before it went into service.
Somehow, neither of those experiences prepared Ciel for the approach to Magnanimous. It seemed an impossible thing: over eight hundred feet from stem to stern, dominated by its long, gently tapered fuselage. Rectangular pods sat below and to either side of the stern and contained the ship's main drive. A fan-like spread of cylinders splayed out behind the fuselage. Ciel understood that those were maneuvering controls: by moving gravity Dust from one cylinder to another, the ship could change its pitch, roll, and yaw with speed and precision, making the Magnanimous and its sister ships shockingly nimble for their size.
The whole assemblage sat in the air like it belonged there, in plain defiance of common sense. It had no wings nor visible means of staying aloft. It just was. The General had described it as a testament to the indomitable will of mankind. People could make the impossible happen by wanting it to be so.
As the Manta passed through the Magnanimous' shadow, Ciel thought she understood what he meant. Equal parts awe and pride swelled through her chest. This was Atlas at its best.
The Magnanimous' hangar was at its stern, ensuring that hangar operations never interfered with the Magnanimous' weapons fire. To Ciel's surprise, Lieutenant Som was approaching the Manta as she disembarked.
"Trainee Soleil?"
"Yes, sir."
Som nodded once. He was a scrupulously neat man with a fastidiously groomed mustache, dangerously sharp creases in his trousers, and nails that had been trimmed to within an inch of their lives. He seemed to view Atlas' uniform regulations as a lifestyle.
"This way," he said, and without elaborating he turned on the spot and headed deeper into the ship. Ciel had no choice but to follow.
She burned with curiosity as they walked on. Her curiosity was both general and specific: she wanted to know more about the Magnanimous and how it worked, but she also wanted to know where they were going. Would she see Penny? Were they taking her to whatever mission control they had for Penny? Or was Som taking her further up the chain of command? This was a life-or-death matter, after all.
Despite her tension and nerves, Ciel felt her excitement building. Something was going to happen, that was for sure!
Som took a sudden turn into a side hallway that was only fifteen feet long and yet still found room for three office doors. He opened the last. "Doc, I've brought Trainee Soleil."
Doc? Ciel's apprehension spiked, but she still reflexively obeyed when Som gestured for her to enter.
"Welcome," said a uniformed man behind a desk as he rose to shake her hand. "Officer Pavlov, Fleet Psychiatry."
The innocent introduction froze Ciel to the spot, hand half-extended.
Pavlov smoothly dropped his own hand. "I see Lieutenant Som did not inform you of your destination."
Ciel managed to turn enough to see Som. "You think I'm crazy, don't you?"
It wasn't Som who answered her, but Pavlov. "'Crazy' is far too blunt a term, and doesn't describe my function here. It's not my job to determine if people are crazy. It's my job to help."
Pavlov could say whatever he wanted, but Ciel could see Som's expression, and he pretty clearly thought she was crazy.
"You don't believe me," she said to Som.
"No, I don't," said Som bluntly. He gestured at Pavlov. "I wanted an opinion as to whether or not I should."
The walls of the Magnanimous seemed a lot tighter than they had before. "Sir, we don't have much time. It's nine hours and twenty-nine minutes to disaster, and realistically nine hours and ten minutes before we're locked in to that outcome."
"Then you'd better talk fast," Som said with no more empathy than before, and a clear gesture for her to face Pavlov.
Pavlov's expression was patient. He held out a hand, indicating a chair facing him—a rugged, stark affair, built for stability rather than comfort. Ciel sat all the same. It left Som standing behind her, his gaze boring holes in the back of her mind.
Ciel did her best to recount her experiences. It was more than she'd had to do with Som: with him, she'd confined her story to a description of Penny's death and the disaster that followed; to Pavlov, she tried to go into more detail, to describe how she'd come to her conclusion. She tried to convince him.
She couldn't tell if she succeeded. His face was impartial throughout. He asked a few questions seeking clarity, but revealed nothing in the process.
She struggled badly discussing her deaths. It was, she knew, the essential point of the story, the mechanism of her return, but even thinking about the words to describe it made her stomach churn. It wasn't so easy, after all, to relive death.
"How did the battle end?" he asked.
"I don't know. I only know how it ended for me. I didn't… last long." She shook and tried to swallow. "It was really bad. There were grimm and White Fang everywhere."
Pavlov nodded. "And you said some of the Bullheads were carrying grimm?"
Ciel had no choice but to answer, and no other answer she could make. She might as well have been locked on rails. "Yes."
From behind her, Som made a noise of disgust.
Ciel winced. "I know how crazy that sounds, but that's what I saw."
"You can't transport grimm like that," said Som, still standing directly behind her so she couldn't see him. "Even if you could load an unrestrained grimm on an airship, it'd try to munch the pilots before they even took off. The newest trainees are supposed to know that. What are they even teaching you at that stupid academy?"
Pavlov frowned. "This is a supportive environment, Lieutenant. No put-downs allowed."
"You can't mean she's telling the truth!"
Pavlov gave a wry smile. "I am not Ms. Hill, Lieutenant. I can't tell someone's truthfulness with a touch. She certainly sounds sincere to me, for what it's worth." He looked at Ciel. Whatever hopes she'd entertained that he was on her side evaporated at the sight of his face. "That said, I am hung up on the details of your semblance."
"It's bullshit," muttered Som.
Pavlov's eyes snapped up, looking over Ciel's head. "Excuse me, Lieutenant, but I don't believe you're qualified to speak about semblances."
There was a banging noise that made Ciel jump in her chair. She looked behind her. Som had smacked his fist against the office door and his face was almost purple.
"I don't know everything about semblances, either," said Pavlov to Ciel, drawing her attention back to him. "But I do have some training in the subject. One thing that is widely known is that semblances depend upon a user's Aura. When a Huntsman's Aura is broken, it takes their semblance with it."
Ciel could see where he was going. Her mouth tasted like ash.
"Which means," Pavlov said, almost apologetically, "that what you're saying should be impossible."
Ciel felt like her body was collapsing in upon itself. She crumpled.
"'Should be'?" growled Som from behind her.
"Like I said, I'm no expert," said Pavlov. "I know enough to be dangerous, is all. With how wild and varied semblances can be, I couldn't say her semblance can't work like she says."
"Well, thanks for all the nothing," Som snapped.
Pavlov frowned. "I'm not going to say things I don't know just to give you the answer you want. If you want me to do this, I'm going to do it right. I'll need to take her to Sick Bay. It doesn't have full facilities, but it will get us started."
Ciel dared a look over her shoulder at Som. Som's face had an ugly smile. "She's all yours. Take all the time you need."
"But… sir," Ciel said, trying to cobble her thoughts together, "we're running out of time. How long are we going to spend on this?"
"As long as it takes to verify your claims," Som replied, and that answer sent fear coursing through Ciel's veins.
"Penny will be killed if we don't do something!"
Som crossed his arms. "My security detail will take good care of Penny. You'll see. We didn't need you for that, and we still don't." He looked past her to Pavlov. "Be sure to take the blood work I requested, too."
"Lieutenant," said Pavlov sternly, "you can see she's not intoxicated."
I'm not what?!
"She's not intoxicated now," said Som, speaking as if Ciel wasn't right between him and Pavlov, "but whenever she hallucinated all this nonsense about grimm and the White Fang? I bet she was then. I know the shit students get into at the schools during Festivals. I've heard what the student coordinators have to deal with. Put in the order."
Pavlov sighed but shrugged. "Fine."
Som nodded. "Now, I have a real job to do. I'll check back in later."
It only took him two steps to be totally out of sight, and another two before his footsteps vanished beneath the ambient background noise of the battleship.
"Sorry about him," Pavlov said. "He doesn't like…"
Ciel blinked at Pavlov. "Doesn't like what?"
"It's rude to gossip," said Pavlov, clamming up. "I'll hurry and type up these orders, if you can be patient a bit."
Ciel slumped in her chair. "It's not like I have anywhere else I can go."
She checked her watch. Under nine hours left to save Penny. That was no time at all, especially if she was stuck here on Magnanimous.
Penny was here, she was right here, and Ciel had no ability to find her, get to her, save her from all of this. Instead, she had to suffer through the tak-tak-tak of an officer typing out paperwork to prove she wasn't on drugs.
Ciel despaired.
"Pick an arm."
Ciel's skin crawled, but she forced herself to roll up her left sleeve, baring her whole arm. The ship's corpsman tied a strap around Ciel's upper arm, then started tapping against the crook of her elbow to encourage the veins to show themselves.
Ciel looked away. Don't look at it, the anticipation is worse than the moment, just let it happen…
There was a sensation of pressure, then a snapping noise.
The corpsman sighed. "Lower your Aura, please."
Every time Ciel thought she'd reached the lowest depths of shame, she discovered some new abyss to tumble into. "Done," she said.
The corpsman had to set up a new needle to replace the one broken against her shield, and the waiting was the worst, but eventually he succeeded in taking a sample of Ciel's blood. "Huntresses," he complained as he took the sample to a nearby machine. "You'll face down grimm, but you can't handle a little blood draw?"
"I don't like needles," Ciel muttered. Come to think of it, the grimm she hated most were Deathstalkers and Lancers. It wasn't a bug thing, Centinels didn't bother her nearly the same way, it had to be a pointy-objects thing.
"Sad," the corpsman said.
"Lay off," said the other person in the room who was typing away at a screen—a logistician or yeoman or something, Ciel couldn't quite tell.
"I'm just saying, they're the big shots, they're the 'Specialists', they get all the cut-outs and special treatment and shit, but they've got the same blood as anyone else, they get sick like everyone else, they break and bleed and die like anyone else. You've seen it."
"I know, and you're not wrong, but you're being a jerk about it."
"Not as much a jerk as Lieutenant Som was the other day," said the corpsman. Ciel perked up at the mention, but said nothing; the crewmen had either forgotten or stopped caring she was there.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. He came in for his annual, and he was having this big fit about Huntsmen. Like, all the stuff I said just now, but more. Way more."
"Sounds like a riot. I thought he attended Atlas Academy for, like, a semester, and then washed out."
"Nah, he never got in. He attended combat school, then failed the entrance exams for the Academy and got funneled over to the military instead."
"Well, he wouldn't be the first."
"And he won't be the last. I think sometimes half the officer corps is failures or washouts from the Huntsman pipeline."
"It can't be that many."
"It's enough…"
One of the machines made a 'ding' noise. The corpsman stopped his rant with visible reluctance and reviewed a screen. "Good news, Trainee. You are insufferably healthy. No indications of poison, of either human origin or grimm. Also no indications of intoxicants, and a blood alcohol content on par with seawater. You are good to go."
"Happy to hear that," said Pavlov when he returned and was briefed on the results. "In that case, I'll go get Dr. Lyman, she's the closest thing to an Aura expert we have on board."
"Who's that?" the corpsman asked the yeoman.
"I was gonna ask you that question," the yeoman replied. "Sounds like a civilian. Must be a rider, someone here for the special project."
The corpsman grunted, but Ciel thought she understood. The "special project" was Penny, whether the ship's crew knew that or not. Penny was a robot, and this was her trial run, so it made sense that someone from the group that built her would be out supporting her operations.
It took several minutes for Pavlov to retrieve this Dr. Lyman. The lost time made Ciel feel like she was bleeding out; each minute was a lost drop of lifeblood. At last, Pavlov returned with a smaller woman in a lab coat, who said that she was fascinated by this discussion and couldn't wait to investigate.
What followed was a series of frustrating and probably fruitless measurements, test runs, and re-measurements, with Aura raised and dropped. As time went on (and Ciel was painfully aware of the minutes as they frittered away), Ciel became more and more convinced that neither Pavlov nor this Dr. Lyman really knew what they were looking for, or what it would look like if they found it.
When at last she had the guts to voice this, Lyman blinked in surprise. "Of course I wouldn't expect to find anything right now," she said. "This is just to establish a baseline. It will take a lot of data-gathering to establish differentials, adjustments for activity and metabolism and body rhythms, and—"
"Penny is going to die!"
The room went silent.
Ciel had had enough. Her patience was gone. She had wasted hours on this, and there was no more time. Every tick of the clock rang loud and clear in her skull. "I've seen it. I've lived it. We have to fix this, we have to get her out of this situation."
Lyman wrung her hands nervously. "Oh, dear. That's what this is about?"
"Yes," said Ciel, amazed yet somehow not surprised at Lyman's ignorance. "Penny is going to be matched against Pyrrha Nikos, because someone is trying to get Penny killed to trigger a grimm attack on Vale. We have to stop it. You care about Penny, don't you?"
"O-of course," Lyman said, but her eyes looked to the uniform Pavlov was wearing. "It's just… I have no authority, I have no rank, I have no standing. I'm only here as an observer."
"Then go back to Som," Ciel said, "or whomever you can find, and get them to take me seriously!"
"Is that an order, Trainee?" said Pavlov quietly.
The words were a shock. Ciel stiffened. "No, sir," she said.
"I didn't think so," Pavlov went on. "As I'm sure you understand, you're not in a position to give orders to anyone. As you may not understand, I'm not, either. It makes no difference whether I believe you or not, you see. The 'officer' rank I carry is the short form of "limited duty officer". I can't give orders to anyone in the regular chain of command, only to other specialists in Fleet Psychiatry. And Dr. Lyman has no rank at all.
"The person you must convince, in other words, is Lieutenant Som. I advise you that you will make negative progress by yelling at him."
Pavlov looked to Lyman, who squirmed under the gaze. "I-I'll ask him," she said. "Som, I mean. I'll ask him to come down, I mean. I mean… you know what I mean."
She sprinted from the room. Pavlov gave Ciel a stern look, then followed.
The wait was agony. Even as the yeoman and the corpsman finished their duties and left, Ciel had to stay, and wait, and every minute spent waiting was torturous. She counted down the ever-diminishing hours and minutes until doom, until Penny would be locked on this course, locked into her fatal matchup with the Invincible Girl, who would more than earn that infernal title—
The door opened at last, and Som entered.
Ciel rose instantly. "Sir," she said, the words tumbling out of her, "we're almost out of time, Penny's due at Amity at 1615…"
"Oh, don't worry," Som interrupted. "She'll be there. It is my mission to keep Penny safe, on-schedule, and out of trouble."
Ciel almost gasped, because those words resonated with her. They were the same ones the General had said to her when he'd handed down her mission.
And Lieutenant Som had that mission before she did.
Clarity arrived. "You think I'm trying to replace you, don't you?"
Som's face turned an ugly color. "The Atlas Military is more than equipped for this mission, Trainee," he said nastily, "no matter what the General says. We don't need any of his precious baby Huntresses, and we'll prove it. Everything will go fine with Penny while you stay up here."
"Stay?" said Ciel, alarmed.
"I order you to sit down," Som said.
Ciel did so automatically, but only afterwards did her brain dig up an objection. "Are you in my chain of command? What orders can you actually give me?"
His expression, if possible, turned even fouler. "If you don't want to follow orders, I could just have you arrested."
Ciel swayed backwards as if struck. "For what?"
"Security violation," Som said. His expression turned triumphant, but was no more pleasant for it. "You spoke about Penny's true nature over an unsecure scroll line. Penny's secret is classified. You violated protocol and demonstrated you're a security risk to Atlas."
They were words of damnation. Ciel felt them as such.
"So," Som said, "you'll stay up here nice and cozy and harmless, where you can't screw anything up, while we take care of good girl Penny. I'll post a guard to help you remember your place. If you behave, maybe we can talk later. Do we understand each other?"
"Yes, sir," said Ciel in a minute voice.
She had never felt so powerless. No, not just powerless: pointless.
When Som was gone, Ciel realized at last that nothing she could have done would have changed his mind. He didn't want to believe anything bad could happen to Penny. He wouldn't listen to anything but his prejudice, and she didn't have the power to make him.
That threw her into crisis.
She hadn't worked with anyone on this mission other than Som, and if he was determined to be a roadblock, she had no idea how to go over or around him. The ships had scroll numbers, they could be called, but Ciel didn't know any of those numbers and they weren't exactly public knowledge.
She'd started pacing restlessly as she pondered this, and almost stumbled when a new thought occurred to her. Even if Ciel was able to contact one of Som's superiors, would it matter? How much likelier was someone of higher rank to believe her than Som?
If anything, they'd likely be even more frustrated with her for bypassing the chain of command.
At least she'd avoid Som's prejudice… or would she? If what the corpsman said was right, any number of Atlas officers might be as antagonistic as Som towards Huntresses, especially uppity Huntress Trainees. The only person she could be sure wouldn't have that prejudice would be the General himself, and if she couldn't get past Lieutenant Som, how was she ever going to reach the General?
She'd always thought of the chain of command like connective tissue, something that united everyone in a common purpose. For the first time, she saw it like a series of walls.
Was there anyone on this ship who would help her? Lyman might, but Lyman couldn't. Who did that leave?
Just Penny.
Ciel needed to get to Penny personally.
She swallowed. That would mean… violating orders. When she was already under confinement for a security violation.
The door loomed in front of her. It might as well have been a mile wide.
Could she?
Could she do something so profane?
She felt the pain of dying again. The sight of Penny's dismembered corpse flashed in her eyes, making her shake.
If it meant stopping this, maybe she could disobey orders.
Her hand grasped the doorknob. Trembling with effort, she opened it.
An Atlas security guard stood at rest opposite the door.
"Where do you think you're going?" the guard asked.
"Bathroom," Ciel invented. Her mouth was as dry as the Vacuan Abyss.
"You'll have to hold it until Lieutenant Som comes back," the guard said. "And, since he told me he was going to personally escort Penny down to Amity, he might be a while."
Ciel searched for any hints of humor on the guard's face. There were none.
She shut the door.
Trapped in the corpsman's office, feeling like she was quickly going mad, Ciel felt the time flying past her quicker than ever, which meant disaster was falling on her as fast as a guillotine's blade. Before she knew it she had her scroll open, watching the broadcast from Amity, and wondering with a sick feeling what Lieutenant Som was telling Penny about her 'teammate'.
The randomizer—what a joke—spun the competitor's portraits once more.
Penny. Pyrrha.
Ciel's perspective was different through her scroll, not to mention much smaller. When the end came, it came suddenly, catching Ciel by surprise even when she knew it was coming, but it was the same end as ever.
Dead Penny.
Motionless Pyrrha.
Then a loss of feed, and that awful, awful voice with its grotesque lies.
Ciel felt her body prepping for combat. She knew what was coming. Grimm. White Fang. They would be assaulting Beacon even now. The Fleet wasn't going to just let that happen. It couldn't. Even if no one would listen to Ciel, they couldn't ignore this.
She felt a rumble under her feet, felt the ship shift. A laugh escaped her. This was what she'd been waiting for, down in Beacon courtyard. The Atlas Air Fleet was engaging. That'd show those—
The world split apart.
She was blind and deaf; the air was ablaze and her lungs burned; everything hurt.
Blink, blink, and she could sort-of see, except the top half of her vision was dominated by a blinding after-image and all else was dark around her. It felt like she was breathing cinders. The harsh tang of burnt mental filled her nose. She coughed and hacked and tried, tried to figure out what had happened when half her senses didn't work.
Things were falling all around her. She looked up, and there was a gap above her, two ceilings were gone, she could see cleanly upwards because everything in between was burned-out and on fire.
Something fell from the gap, landing beside Ciel like a fallen tree. Ciel could see remnants of a uniform. It was a person—or had been; now it was charcoal.
Magnanimous had taken large-caliber laser fire.
The ship lurched beneath Ciel's still-down body. She scrabbled for a handhold, anything to keep her steady, and she had just managed to point her feet in the right direction when there was a jarring impact like a blow from a titan's hammer. It knocked her senseless all over again.
Left became up, right became down; the battleship Magnanimous, newest in the gods-damned Air Fleet, still sporting that new ship smell, was sinking.
And Ciel realized, with growing panic, that it was sinking with her inside, and it had taken most of her Aura to survive that laser blast. She was moments from death, and she couldn't do the slightest thing to save herself. That horrible thought wouldn't let any others into her head.
She was pinned against the wall as the ship came apart, as all its elegant engineering failed all at once and it returned to the ground, faster and faster and faster and—
-and the sound of smashing was almost slower than the other wall rushing at Ciel's face and—
Bright!
Ciel staggered backwards, lost her footing, and fell on her ass.
"Miss Ciel! Are you alright?!"
She threw up over her own shirt and combat skirt.
"I will take that as a 'no'."
Ciel managed to twist enough that most of her puke ended up on the floor. It also delayed the moment she'd have to look up and see her again.
Nothing but delay. As Ciel's guts finally settled, she un-twisted and looked up.
A very much not-dismembered Penny looked back, a concerned expression on her false face.
Ciel had accomplished nothing.
Next time: Shame