"G'morning!"
The suddenness of the morning sun streaming into her new bedroom shocked Mitsuko into awakening, the stats on her chest clicking into place. The false adrenaline rushed through her momentarily, causing her to jump to her feet, but she soon recalled where she was and the voice that was speaking. Blinking, she let her arms droop back to her sides, looking at Phil, already up, his tail swaying casually behind him. He held a tray of food in his hands, looking as if he were giving her breakfast in bed.
"Hello," Mitsuko said carefully, eyeing the food.
"You don't have to say anything-I know that robots don't eat much. But the doc said that your body was equipped to be able to eat and consume food as an extra source of energy, and your head unit can do it as well. So I was wondering if you'd like to expand your horizons," said Phil cheerfully.
Mitsuko looked down at the bed behind her, and then back at Phil. It seemed strange, to be in this place, when just a day earlier she had been battling against faeries and seeing robots she had known, but not really known, for years fall to the mercilessness of Fyora's faeries. Yet she couldn't say that she felt anything for their deactivations-they were insignificant in her mind, just passing occurrences in her life, now passed occurrences. It was now that she was in, and Phil was now the occurrence in her life. So she sat down bit by bit on the bed, Phil sitting behind her and placing the tray of food on her lap.
"See, here's some meat," he said, pointing towards a lump of brown material. Mitsuko held it up, sniffing it guardedly. Without haste, she placed it in her mouth, closing it.
The sensation of taste was a completely new one for her, one that she didn't even know existed. Her tongue seemed to burst with the new sense, taste, making Mitsuko's eyes widen to enormous proportions. She waved her arms up and down, opening her mouth, unable to hold it in any longer. Phil quickly put his hand over her mouth, forcing her to keep it within her mouth. "Move your jaw up and down, like you're biting the meat again and again. Then force it down the back of your mouth," explained Phil, his touch gentle. Mitsuko looked at him with a fearful look, but his eyes reassured her. She followed his orders, swallowing, almost choking on the food. Phil stroked her neck to help the chunk of food down, Mitsuko panting as it slid down an invisible tube within her.
"How was that?" asked Phil, smiling up at Mitsuko as she gasped for air.
"Strange," she answered, blinking hard. "But. . .good. . ." she added, a certain satisfaction swelling within her stomach. She picked up another piece and tried chewing by herself, swallowing without so much as an incident. Phil gave a little round of applause.
"Meat's a little tougher than the rest. . .I probably should've started you on the rice. It's a gone a little bit bad, but it's certainly better than any of the stuff you'll find in the marketplace." Mitsuko hardly heard him, beginning to down the food as if she hadn't eaten in years, which she hadn't. Soon, the food on the tray was gone, and Phil gave her an impressed look. "Not bad, for an amateur," he said with a wink.
"It's fulfilling," she said, her eyes eagerly looking for more.
"Yeah-but we've got a small supply, and you just ate my breakfast as well, so we can't have any more 'til dinner. Until then, you care to help with some chores around the house? 'Course, you're my guest, so you don't have to. . ."
"I would like to," cut in Mitsuko, her voice definite. "I will help you." Phil's expression lightened from one of passive worry to one of happiness.
"Great! We'll have to go to the marketplace, though, so you'll probably want to wear this cloak," he said, standing up and rummaging in the closet of the room, producing a brown sheet. "Most Neopets wear 'em anyway, but you'll have to wear it as a hood too. . .the marking on your forehead is pretty conspicuous." From the closet, he also pulled a golden and blue covering from the closet for himself. "Unless, of course, you want to wear mine. . .?" he offered, holding it out to her.
"The brown one will do," she said, shaking her head at his offer and taking the brown one. She pulled it around her shoulder and over her head, tying the straps at the neck. "What will we be doing?"
"Just some general errands. . .I'll introduce you to some people, and show you around the town more extensively," said Phil, walking out the door, Mitsuko following like an obedient dog after him. "Any objections?"
"None," answered Mitsuko, trailing after Phil, keeping close to him. The experience in Krishna's town was still fresh in her mind despite happening so long ago, and she did not desire something like that to ever happen again. As they walked out into the town onto a main street, she clung even closer to Phil, practically grabbing to his arm. She knew to fight well, but this was obviously not an appropriate time, and she would have to control herself.
"There's no need to be afraid, Suko-I won't let 'em hurt you," reassured Phil. Although Mitsuko knew the statement was said merely to soothe her, as it could not be true (Phil did not look very suited for battling, and she would be much better off just fending off her own villains), it still made her grip loosen on him, a bit of confidence ringing a chord in her heart. Straightening her back, she looked forward towards the bustling crowds and walked on, Phil a steady post beside her, the familiar sense of fearlessness creeping into her heart.
Nothing could strike her down.
". . .and so the ducks says, 'do you have any nails?'"
Mitsuko could feel a smile creeping onto her face, not one of falsity, but of genuine amusement. The trueness of the smile was what felt so strange, making her face quiver and tingle with delight. She and Phil sat in one of the sand dunes, enjoying prime pieces of meat that they had managed to haggle for an excellent deal, baking them up to peak condition for a wonderfully juicy dinner, lighting up Mitsuko's senses. For the first time in her life, she could truly feel the sense of being alive, even if it was artificial, even if she had had to be alive behind a cloak, meeting so many new people who were actually happy to see her.
"Y'know, I have yet to get a laugh out of you tonight," said Phil with a good-natured sigh, grinning. "One might question if you really have a full range of emotion."
"I do," said Mitsuko, defending herself. It was difficult for her to think up a defense on the subject, however, so she did not back up her cause, merely falling silent, looking up into the sky, which was once again clear, save for a few wispy clouds, dancing over the pale moonlight.
"Mr. Phil. . ." asked Mitsuko, leaning backwards into the ground, resting her hand in the pillow of the soft sands, ". . .do you know what really happened to this planet? To make it this way?"
"Not really. . .I was very young when it happened, just hatched from the egg. I hardly even knew my owner. . .I can just remember her eyes, watching as I was born. They were so brilliantly blue. . .but I can't remember anything else," admitted Phil, leaning back with her to stare up at the sky. "They say horrible rays fell from the sky onto the planet, warping everything it touched. . .I myself have a bit of a deformity. . .one of my wing's longer than the other.but I've adapted to it. S'what we do after all. There were some plagues too. . .I think that's what claimed my owner. It claimed almost all of the humans-the others it didn't fled as fast as they could. I don't remember much else."
"And it wasn't Frank Sloth's fault?"
"No. He was an easy scapegoat at the time-he doesn't really have the cleanest record on Neopia. But he'd disbanded his armies before then, and had been rendered to a wheelchair before then."
"What put him in the wheelchair?"
"Somebody snapped one of his vertebrae near the base of his spine. . .probably an attempted assassination. They failed, obviously."
The two gazed up at the sky, their silence calm and serene, their comfort levels with one another having increased quite a bit from a day ago.
"Mr. Phil?"
"Just Phil's fine."
"Phil," she amended herself, closing her eyes. "It was. . .nice today."
"Yeah. It's nice to have someone else helping you do your daily chores.less lonely, that's for sure."
"Yeah. . ." With those words, it turned her mind back to Krishna's pained face, and a sense of guilt plugged itself into Mitsuko's stomach, making her feel uncomfortable. She turned over onto her side, turning her back to Phil. "I don't want to be lonely anymore," she admitted to herself privately, muttering it into the ground, the sand muffling the words beyond recognition.
"Did you say something, Suko?" asked Phil with a yawn, turning his eyes towards Mitsuko, licking the remainder of the meat off of the stick that it had been served on. Mitsuko turned back onto her back, closing her eyes and giving off a long, tired sigh.
"No. . .nothing at all."
Waking up, for the next few days, was not a chore for Mitsuko. Instead of feeling the deep sense of laborious duty to wake up for another day of battling as she felt every day in the transport of RARE, she felt the warmth of a new day beginning, to a new adventure, in a way. Her sense of needing to be a warrior, needing to fight, needing to strike and be struck back at, was already fading by the moment, as days turned into weeks.
The center of Sakhmet was building up steadily, and every day the crowds seemed to increase. Already some faeries were appearing at the center of the arena to begin to decorate it properly, setting up a seat for the main sponsor of the event, the head of their closed, unknown and locationless culture. Many Neopets were already beginning to stake out their seats in the arena, which seating areas seemed to be growing larger every day. Applications were still accepted for robots, but most of them had been rejected-as Phil had pointed out afterwards, people preferred to see the more 'popular' robots, with all the new technology plugged onto them duke it out in the middle of the arena. He explained that, in the end, there would be approximately twenty real competitors, with many other "bait" robots-in other words, robots accepted merely for the heavyweights to beat on.
But she didn't really like thinking about the tournament too much now- Phil had already stated quite clearly that he would not even go to see the tournament, and Mitsuko didn't have it in her schedule either. Besides, she was beginning to grow attached to the Desert Shoyru on a personal level- more so than she had ever connected with anyone else, including Krishna.
Yet this morning was strange-the sun was already high in the sky, indicating that Mitsuko had waken up later than usual, which was odd, for Phil usually woke her up quite promptly at the same time everyday, certainly earlier than it was now. Her senses heightening at the unusualness of the situation, she stood up, stretching her cramped limbs, despite the fact she had been sleeping on a bed for the past few weeks instead of leaning against the wall as she had done in RARE. Getting to her feet, she walked out of the room quietly, peering out of her door.
"Phil?"
There was no reply to her query, and she stepped out into the hallway, looking around. She began to go down the hallway, checking every room, peeking her head in and calling out for Phil. She was not answered, however, even as she entered the kitchen/dining room/living room. It was vacant as well, void of any sign of life, besides the side of a sheet flapping in the wind that coursed through the room from an opened window. Mitsuko looked for some indication that he was okay-a note, something else that showed he hadn't vanished into thin air. A nervousness rose within her, an unfamiliar sense of insecurity finding its way into her body.
The sheet that covered the front of the doorway rustled, suddenly, Mitsuko's head snapping in the direction of the door. "Phil?" she called, but received no reply, though the curtain continued to move about, as if being stirred by an invisible force. It was certainly not a wind, and so Mitsuko crept towards the curtain, pulling it back suddenly, ripping it from its attachment to the door.
Immediately, something flew from the dirty, red curtain, catapulting across the walls and finally coming to a stop before Mitsuko, skittering to the ground, making a familiar, irritating buzzing noise. Seeming to realize that the floor was not an ideal place for it to be, the small, metal object floated into the air, hovering at Mitsuko's eye level, something attached to what appeared to be tiny little hands.
As Mitsuko looked closer at the now non-moving object, it was clear that it was a messenger robot, shaped like a Buzz. It was a particularly familiar one, and the message it held seemed to be for her, as it waved its small little arms up and down at her, squeaking her name again and again in its machine-like voice. "Mitsuko! Mitsuko!" It came to her that the Buzz must've been the small robot that Krishna had used for sending and receiving messages-yes, she remembered seeing it frequently at his house, constantly overhead, waiting to be sent off on an errand. A pang of worry struck into Mitsuko's heart, but she would not let herself overreact until she what was actually happening.
Snatching the small piece of paper from the Buzz, she reached for the back of its body, flipping its switch to off and then catching it before it fell to the ground and broke itself. Setting the deactivated messenger Buzz on the table, she paced around the room, reading the hastily scrawled handwriting, just barely legible and with sentences hardly put into full, complete thoughts.
Mitsuko could make out her name at the top if she squinted, and then worked on the other words, using a program stored within the back of her brain to determine the words each scribble was supposed to form. She could make out something about an attack on his house, his own kidnapping, the word faeries, and something about the RBT, the words written so sloppily that they intertwined with one another, making it next to impossible for the writing to be read. At the bottom was a signature consisting of a K and then a long, scribbled line-assumedly Krishna's sign-off.
A sense of urgency found its way into Mitsuko's stomach, making her glad that she hadn't decided to eat anything that morning. If she had translated it well enough, it was very clear that Krishna was in some sort of trouble, possibly caused by an attack by faeries onto his house. She couldn't quite figure out how the RBT was linked, except for the fact that it was run by faeries. Quickly, she reached down to the Buzz messenger and turned him back on, holding him close to her face.
"Did Doctor Krishna leave a verbal message?" demanded Mitsuko, staring intensely at the small machine.
"Searching!" replied the Buzz cheerily, his yellow eyes temporarily dulling as he searched his database. In a few moments, he piped up again in his automatically happy voice. "No record of voice message! Please return me to. . ." The Buzz began to rattle off the location of Krishna's house, finally falling silent after he had blurted out the return address. Mitsuko once again shut him off, putting him back on the table to be used later.
The RBT, Mitsuko had little doubt, was linked to the attack on Krishna's house. The initials were one of the few clear things in the note, and underlined along with a few other words darkly. Mitsuko began going through the possibilities in her mind, eliminating a few that seemed unreasonable.
Mitsuko's train of thought, however, was interrupted abruptly as a sharp pain suddenly struck through the side of her face, a fierce wind whipping through the room, knocking some figures off of platforms that they had stood on solidly just moments before. Mitsuko's head snapped in the direction that the wind was going, eyes lighting up in injury. Putting her hand against her cheek, which now sported a long, red line where she had been struck, she glared at the new presence in the room with a ferocity, her eyes adjusting to looking at a lighter spot to a darker one.
Standing in the back of the room was a lithe, humanoid figure, curvy like a real woman. She was taller than the average faerie, and unlike many faeries, sported a real sword instead of a staff. Judging by her build, she relied more on physical power than elemental. Large, butterfly-like wings spread behind her, and she wore a two-piece outfit of deep green. Her hair was of a light magenta color, matching with the brightness of her eyes, a cruel smile twisted onto her lips.
"You are the robot called Mitsuko, are you not?" asked the faerie, twirling her sword and crouching into an on-guard position, the tip pointed towards Mitsuko's face.
"Who wants to know?" demanded Mitsuko, her eyes narrowing.
"Tahora, our Empress, the one who has sent me to you, the robot of the half-faerie Krishna. I am the Battle Faerie. I am your death!"
The suddenness of the morning sun streaming into her new bedroom shocked Mitsuko into awakening, the stats on her chest clicking into place. The false adrenaline rushed through her momentarily, causing her to jump to her feet, but she soon recalled where she was and the voice that was speaking. Blinking, she let her arms droop back to her sides, looking at Phil, already up, his tail swaying casually behind him. He held a tray of food in his hands, looking as if he were giving her breakfast in bed.
"Hello," Mitsuko said carefully, eyeing the food.
"You don't have to say anything-I know that robots don't eat much. But the doc said that your body was equipped to be able to eat and consume food as an extra source of energy, and your head unit can do it as well. So I was wondering if you'd like to expand your horizons," said Phil cheerfully.
Mitsuko looked down at the bed behind her, and then back at Phil. It seemed strange, to be in this place, when just a day earlier she had been battling against faeries and seeing robots she had known, but not really known, for years fall to the mercilessness of Fyora's faeries. Yet she couldn't say that she felt anything for their deactivations-they were insignificant in her mind, just passing occurrences in her life, now passed occurrences. It was now that she was in, and Phil was now the occurrence in her life. So she sat down bit by bit on the bed, Phil sitting behind her and placing the tray of food on her lap.
"See, here's some meat," he said, pointing towards a lump of brown material. Mitsuko held it up, sniffing it guardedly. Without haste, she placed it in her mouth, closing it.
The sensation of taste was a completely new one for her, one that she didn't even know existed. Her tongue seemed to burst with the new sense, taste, making Mitsuko's eyes widen to enormous proportions. She waved her arms up and down, opening her mouth, unable to hold it in any longer. Phil quickly put his hand over her mouth, forcing her to keep it within her mouth. "Move your jaw up and down, like you're biting the meat again and again. Then force it down the back of your mouth," explained Phil, his touch gentle. Mitsuko looked at him with a fearful look, but his eyes reassured her. She followed his orders, swallowing, almost choking on the food. Phil stroked her neck to help the chunk of food down, Mitsuko panting as it slid down an invisible tube within her.
"How was that?" asked Phil, smiling up at Mitsuko as she gasped for air.
"Strange," she answered, blinking hard. "But. . .good. . ." she added, a certain satisfaction swelling within her stomach. She picked up another piece and tried chewing by herself, swallowing without so much as an incident. Phil gave a little round of applause.
"Meat's a little tougher than the rest. . .I probably should've started you on the rice. It's a gone a little bit bad, but it's certainly better than any of the stuff you'll find in the marketplace." Mitsuko hardly heard him, beginning to down the food as if she hadn't eaten in years, which she hadn't. Soon, the food on the tray was gone, and Phil gave her an impressed look. "Not bad, for an amateur," he said with a wink.
"It's fulfilling," she said, her eyes eagerly looking for more.
"Yeah-but we've got a small supply, and you just ate my breakfast as well, so we can't have any more 'til dinner. Until then, you care to help with some chores around the house? 'Course, you're my guest, so you don't have to. . ."
"I would like to," cut in Mitsuko, her voice definite. "I will help you." Phil's expression lightened from one of passive worry to one of happiness.
"Great! We'll have to go to the marketplace, though, so you'll probably want to wear this cloak," he said, standing up and rummaging in the closet of the room, producing a brown sheet. "Most Neopets wear 'em anyway, but you'll have to wear it as a hood too. . .the marking on your forehead is pretty conspicuous." From the closet, he also pulled a golden and blue covering from the closet for himself. "Unless, of course, you want to wear mine. . .?" he offered, holding it out to her.
"The brown one will do," she said, shaking her head at his offer and taking the brown one. She pulled it around her shoulder and over her head, tying the straps at the neck. "What will we be doing?"
"Just some general errands. . .I'll introduce you to some people, and show you around the town more extensively," said Phil, walking out the door, Mitsuko following like an obedient dog after him. "Any objections?"
"None," answered Mitsuko, trailing after Phil, keeping close to him. The experience in Krishna's town was still fresh in her mind despite happening so long ago, and she did not desire something like that to ever happen again. As they walked out into the town onto a main street, she clung even closer to Phil, practically grabbing to his arm. She knew to fight well, but this was obviously not an appropriate time, and she would have to control herself.
"There's no need to be afraid, Suko-I won't let 'em hurt you," reassured Phil. Although Mitsuko knew the statement was said merely to soothe her, as it could not be true (Phil did not look very suited for battling, and she would be much better off just fending off her own villains), it still made her grip loosen on him, a bit of confidence ringing a chord in her heart. Straightening her back, she looked forward towards the bustling crowds and walked on, Phil a steady post beside her, the familiar sense of fearlessness creeping into her heart.
Nothing could strike her down.
". . .and so the ducks says, 'do you have any nails?'"
Mitsuko could feel a smile creeping onto her face, not one of falsity, but of genuine amusement. The trueness of the smile was what felt so strange, making her face quiver and tingle with delight. She and Phil sat in one of the sand dunes, enjoying prime pieces of meat that they had managed to haggle for an excellent deal, baking them up to peak condition for a wonderfully juicy dinner, lighting up Mitsuko's senses. For the first time in her life, she could truly feel the sense of being alive, even if it was artificial, even if she had had to be alive behind a cloak, meeting so many new people who were actually happy to see her.
"Y'know, I have yet to get a laugh out of you tonight," said Phil with a good-natured sigh, grinning. "One might question if you really have a full range of emotion."
"I do," said Mitsuko, defending herself. It was difficult for her to think up a defense on the subject, however, so she did not back up her cause, merely falling silent, looking up into the sky, which was once again clear, save for a few wispy clouds, dancing over the pale moonlight.
"Mr. Phil. . ." asked Mitsuko, leaning backwards into the ground, resting her hand in the pillow of the soft sands, ". . .do you know what really happened to this planet? To make it this way?"
"Not really. . .I was very young when it happened, just hatched from the egg. I hardly even knew my owner. . .I can just remember her eyes, watching as I was born. They were so brilliantly blue. . .but I can't remember anything else," admitted Phil, leaning back with her to stare up at the sky. "They say horrible rays fell from the sky onto the planet, warping everything it touched. . .I myself have a bit of a deformity. . .one of my wing's longer than the other.but I've adapted to it. S'what we do after all. There were some plagues too. . .I think that's what claimed my owner. It claimed almost all of the humans-the others it didn't fled as fast as they could. I don't remember much else."
"And it wasn't Frank Sloth's fault?"
"No. He was an easy scapegoat at the time-he doesn't really have the cleanest record on Neopia. But he'd disbanded his armies before then, and had been rendered to a wheelchair before then."
"What put him in the wheelchair?"
"Somebody snapped one of his vertebrae near the base of his spine. . .probably an attempted assassination. They failed, obviously."
The two gazed up at the sky, their silence calm and serene, their comfort levels with one another having increased quite a bit from a day ago.
"Mr. Phil?"
"Just Phil's fine."
"Phil," she amended herself, closing her eyes. "It was. . .nice today."
"Yeah. It's nice to have someone else helping you do your daily chores.less lonely, that's for sure."
"Yeah. . ." With those words, it turned her mind back to Krishna's pained face, and a sense of guilt plugged itself into Mitsuko's stomach, making her feel uncomfortable. She turned over onto her side, turning her back to Phil. "I don't want to be lonely anymore," she admitted to herself privately, muttering it into the ground, the sand muffling the words beyond recognition.
"Did you say something, Suko?" asked Phil with a yawn, turning his eyes towards Mitsuko, licking the remainder of the meat off of the stick that it had been served on. Mitsuko turned back onto her back, closing her eyes and giving off a long, tired sigh.
"No. . .nothing at all."
Waking up, for the next few days, was not a chore for Mitsuko. Instead of feeling the deep sense of laborious duty to wake up for another day of battling as she felt every day in the transport of RARE, she felt the warmth of a new day beginning, to a new adventure, in a way. Her sense of needing to be a warrior, needing to fight, needing to strike and be struck back at, was already fading by the moment, as days turned into weeks.
The center of Sakhmet was building up steadily, and every day the crowds seemed to increase. Already some faeries were appearing at the center of the arena to begin to decorate it properly, setting up a seat for the main sponsor of the event, the head of their closed, unknown and locationless culture. Many Neopets were already beginning to stake out their seats in the arena, which seating areas seemed to be growing larger every day. Applications were still accepted for robots, but most of them had been rejected-as Phil had pointed out afterwards, people preferred to see the more 'popular' robots, with all the new technology plugged onto them duke it out in the middle of the arena. He explained that, in the end, there would be approximately twenty real competitors, with many other "bait" robots-in other words, robots accepted merely for the heavyweights to beat on.
But she didn't really like thinking about the tournament too much now- Phil had already stated quite clearly that he would not even go to see the tournament, and Mitsuko didn't have it in her schedule either. Besides, she was beginning to grow attached to the Desert Shoyru on a personal level- more so than she had ever connected with anyone else, including Krishna.
Yet this morning was strange-the sun was already high in the sky, indicating that Mitsuko had waken up later than usual, which was odd, for Phil usually woke her up quite promptly at the same time everyday, certainly earlier than it was now. Her senses heightening at the unusualness of the situation, she stood up, stretching her cramped limbs, despite the fact she had been sleeping on a bed for the past few weeks instead of leaning against the wall as she had done in RARE. Getting to her feet, she walked out of the room quietly, peering out of her door.
"Phil?"
There was no reply to her query, and she stepped out into the hallway, looking around. She began to go down the hallway, checking every room, peeking her head in and calling out for Phil. She was not answered, however, even as she entered the kitchen/dining room/living room. It was vacant as well, void of any sign of life, besides the side of a sheet flapping in the wind that coursed through the room from an opened window. Mitsuko looked for some indication that he was okay-a note, something else that showed he hadn't vanished into thin air. A nervousness rose within her, an unfamiliar sense of insecurity finding its way into her body.
The sheet that covered the front of the doorway rustled, suddenly, Mitsuko's head snapping in the direction of the door. "Phil?" she called, but received no reply, though the curtain continued to move about, as if being stirred by an invisible force. It was certainly not a wind, and so Mitsuko crept towards the curtain, pulling it back suddenly, ripping it from its attachment to the door.
Immediately, something flew from the dirty, red curtain, catapulting across the walls and finally coming to a stop before Mitsuko, skittering to the ground, making a familiar, irritating buzzing noise. Seeming to realize that the floor was not an ideal place for it to be, the small, metal object floated into the air, hovering at Mitsuko's eye level, something attached to what appeared to be tiny little hands.
As Mitsuko looked closer at the now non-moving object, it was clear that it was a messenger robot, shaped like a Buzz. It was a particularly familiar one, and the message it held seemed to be for her, as it waved its small little arms up and down at her, squeaking her name again and again in its machine-like voice. "Mitsuko! Mitsuko!" It came to her that the Buzz must've been the small robot that Krishna had used for sending and receiving messages-yes, she remembered seeing it frequently at his house, constantly overhead, waiting to be sent off on an errand. A pang of worry struck into Mitsuko's heart, but she would not let herself overreact until she what was actually happening.
Snatching the small piece of paper from the Buzz, she reached for the back of its body, flipping its switch to off and then catching it before it fell to the ground and broke itself. Setting the deactivated messenger Buzz on the table, she paced around the room, reading the hastily scrawled handwriting, just barely legible and with sentences hardly put into full, complete thoughts.
Mitsuko could make out her name at the top if she squinted, and then worked on the other words, using a program stored within the back of her brain to determine the words each scribble was supposed to form. She could make out something about an attack on his house, his own kidnapping, the word faeries, and something about the RBT, the words written so sloppily that they intertwined with one another, making it next to impossible for the writing to be read. At the bottom was a signature consisting of a K and then a long, scribbled line-assumedly Krishna's sign-off.
A sense of urgency found its way into Mitsuko's stomach, making her glad that she hadn't decided to eat anything that morning. If she had translated it well enough, it was very clear that Krishna was in some sort of trouble, possibly caused by an attack by faeries onto his house. She couldn't quite figure out how the RBT was linked, except for the fact that it was run by faeries. Quickly, she reached down to the Buzz messenger and turned him back on, holding him close to her face.
"Did Doctor Krishna leave a verbal message?" demanded Mitsuko, staring intensely at the small machine.
"Searching!" replied the Buzz cheerily, his yellow eyes temporarily dulling as he searched his database. In a few moments, he piped up again in his automatically happy voice. "No record of voice message! Please return me to. . ." The Buzz began to rattle off the location of Krishna's house, finally falling silent after he had blurted out the return address. Mitsuko once again shut him off, putting him back on the table to be used later.
The RBT, Mitsuko had little doubt, was linked to the attack on Krishna's house. The initials were one of the few clear things in the note, and underlined along with a few other words darkly. Mitsuko began going through the possibilities in her mind, eliminating a few that seemed unreasonable.
Mitsuko's train of thought, however, was interrupted abruptly as a sharp pain suddenly struck through the side of her face, a fierce wind whipping through the room, knocking some figures off of platforms that they had stood on solidly just moments before. Mitsuko's head snapped in the direction that the wind was going, eyes lighting up in injury. Putting her hand against her cheek, which now sported a long, red line where she had been struck, she glared at the new presence in the room with a ferocity, her eyes adjusting to looking at a lighter spot to a darker one.
Standing in the back of the room was a lithe, humanoid figure, curvy like a real woman. She was taller than the average faerie, and unlike many faeries, sported a real sword instead of a staff. Judging by her build, she relied more on physical power than elemental. Large, butterfly-like wings spread behind her, and she wore a two-piece outfit of deep green. Her hair was of a light magenta color, matching with the brightness of her eyes, a cruel smile twisted onto her lips.
"You are the robot called Mitsuko, are you not?" asked the faerie, twirling her sword and crouching into an on-guard position, the tip pointed towards Mitsuko's face.
"Who wants to know?" demanded Mitsuko, her eyes narrowing.
"Tahora, our Empress, the one who has sent me to you, the robot of the half-faerie Krishna. I am the Battle Faerie. I am your death!"