The first order of business Roman Torchwick set to once settled in his new base of operations was to recreate his weapon. As Louise had promised, he was able to not only find scrap metal aplenty in the academy, but the equipment to weld it together, paint it, and add such essentials as a scope. Most self-respecting warriors who hailed from Vale were adept at crafting weaponry, and Roman was no exception. At last, he cooled off the finished product. The original Melodic Cudgel had gone down in flames with the Nevermore that had eaten him. The Melodic Cudgel 2.0 was identical to the original: a gun that posed as a simple cane, capable of firing heavy blasts of Dust from one end and featuring a grappling hook on a retractable cable at the other. All it needed was a chamberful of Dust and it would be ready for action.
That being done, Roman realized that as the closest thing this small faction had to a weapons technician, he had one more responsibility. Louise had asserted that she could more than defend herself with her magic, Vathek definitely didn't need a weapon, Ark knew how to find single handedly, Sho and Coco could make due with their Reaper abilities, Jason can do some hefty damage with his machete, Rui can use Blood Demon Arts, Taylor has a Dream Eater Form, Albert has cyborg powers. That left five factors accounted for.
~~~~~~~~
"Grimes, I made your weapon kind of like a Mambele," Roman explained, gesturing to the new weapon he'd forged laid out on the table of the forger room. "and you've got a fully functioning uzi. Of course, like mine, its Dust chamber is still empty, but hopefully we can fix that soon. You can slash people up, or you can just blast them dead. So? Whaddaya think?"
Grimes noted that Roman seemed awfully proud of himself for coming up with this new weapon. He reached out, taking up the Mambele – shaped like a remora - in his right hand, twirling it slightly as he did so. The metal was still warm from the forge. "This is fine," Grimes judged. "Plus, seems well crafted."
Roman gave a playful bow to this. "In the meantime, keep it here." He handed over a leather belt fashioned with a a scabbard of sorts.
~~~~~~~~
"Kanade, your weapon is kind of like a guitar, since I can guess you're an Ultimate Guitarist where you're from," Roman explained, gesturing to the new weapon he'd forged laid out on the table of the forger room. "And as a plus, you've got a fully functioning railgun. Of course, like mine, its Dust chamber is still empty, but hopefully we can fix that soon. So you can just whack 'em over the head or pluck a few strings and blast someone into hell. So? Whaddaya think?"
Kanade noted that Roman seemed awfully proud of himself for coming up with this new weapon. She reached out, taking up the guitar – shaped like a dragon - in her hands, twirling it slightly as she did so. The metal was still warm from the forge. "Are we sure you aren't an Ultimate Blacksmith where you're from?" Kanade joked. "Cause this seems well made."
Roman gave a playful bow to this. "In the meantime, keep it here." He handed over a leather belt to hold the guitar.
~~~~~~~~
"Hibiki, I made yours kind of like a cat-o-ninetails and a microphone, considering you're the Ultimate Vocalist where you're from," Roman explained, gesturing to the new weapon he'd forged laid out on the table of the abandoned Hotland laboratory. "And as a plus, you've got a fully functioning glock. Of course, like mine, its Dust chamber is still empty, but hopefully we can fix that soon. so you can hit a high note and blast someone to hell, whip 'em like a dominatrix or, of course, just use the chain to strangle somebody. So? Whaddaya think?"
Hibiki noted that Roman seemed awfully proud of himself for coming up with this new weapon. She reached out, taking up the microphone – shaped like a bunny rabbit - in one hand, twirling it slightly as she did so. The metal was still warm from the forge. "It's amazing," Hibiki said. "And you made it look cute."
Roman gave a playful bow to this. "In the meantime, keep it here." He handed over a leather belt fashioned with a gun holster on one side.
~~~~~~~~
"Aria, your weapon's kind of like a rapier," Roman explained, gesturing to the new weapon he'd forged laid out on the table of the abandoned Hotland laboratory. "As a plus, you've got a fully functioning rifle. You said you were good with those old-timey guns, right? Of course, like mine, its Dust chamber is still empty, but hopefully we can fix that soon. So you can stab people or blast a cap in them. So? Whaddaya think?"
Aria noted that Roman seemed awfully proud of himself for coming up with this new weapon. She reached out, taking up the rapier – shaped like a wolf - in one hand, twirling it chain slightly as she did so. The metal was still warm from the forge. "It's amazing," Aria judged. "Soon as it's filled with working ammunition. Seems like a Teigu."
Roman gave a playful bow to this. "In the meantime, keep it here." He handed over a leather belt fashioned with a scabbard of sorts for the rapier.
~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~
"Archie, your weapon is kind of like a kusarigama," Roman explained, gesturing to the new weapon he'd forged laid out on the table of the abandoned Hotland laboratory. "Except instead of a sickle on one end of the chain, you've got a fully functioning pistol. You said you were good with those old-timey guns, right? Of course, like mine, its Dust chamber is still empty, but hopefully we can fix that soon. Now, on the other end, instead of a ball, you have a hammer. You can still throw it like a ball weight and wrap the chain around whoever, or you can just whack 'em over the head, like you said you almost did to that one Omelette kid with a wrench. And, of course, you can always just use the chain to strangle somebody. So? Whaddaya think?"
Snatcher noted that Roman seemed awfully proud of himself for coming up with this new weapon. He reached out, taking up the pistol – shaped like an old flintlock - in one hand and the mallet in the other, twirling the chain slightly as he did so. The metal was still warm from the forge. "It will do," Snatcher judged. "Soon as it's filled with working ammunition. Seems well crafted."
Roman gave a playful bow to this. "In the meantime, keep it here." He handed over a leather belt fashioned with a gun holster on one side and a scabbard of sorts for the mallet on the other.
~~~~~~~~
The sun dawned over the horizon, and Louise found herself groaning awake to a perilous situation: Grimes had, at some point, discovered the concept of beauty, and decided to climb directly over her bed to stare out the window and watch the sunrise. She stared carefully downwards, biting her lip when she saw the gut of Grimes on her chest along with Ramiel being too close too it.
"You know," she stated, "I don't know how, uh, you're surviving out of water, but humans tend to be rather squishy in our nature, and therefore not overly fond of large or sharp objects on our bodies." Founder, when did I become so sarcastic?
Grimes and Ramiel, with a quiet nod and hum, moved away from Louise and shimmied into a corner. Then Stocking seemed to finally register Louise's room for the first time. She gave an audible gasp.
"Careful now, we don't want to lose our boss to suffocation." Rui told her.
"You're…you're so…" Stocking sprang out of the dessert pile. "ADOOOOORABLE!" She ran toward Louise, arms outstretched.
And now Louise got glomped into a bosom around Zerbst's size. Louise mrgled. "Founder's sake, why must my life involve dastardly boob demons?!?!?" she lamented. Stocking didn't listen, just flinging her arms around her at random.
"You're so soft and squishy!" she gushed.
"You're crushing me and those things are mutually exclusive!" Louise snapped.
"I just wanna adopt you!" Stocking went on. "Not as a kid but definitely as a sibling to replace my trash bitch whorebag sister who I killed!"
"Sibling?" Louise repeated. That was the magic word. "My siblings weren't that much of bitches, honestly. But I'd love another one!"
"Oh, you are preaching to the goddamn unholy choir." Stocking gushed.
"It looks like we have a lot to talk about."
Yawning, Louise quietly rose and dressed herself. She felt kind of awful, honestly- the incessant giggling throughout the night had infiltrated her dreams and made horrible nightmares full of things she couldn't understand, and the amount of times she'd woken in a cold sweat last night had been more than she'd ever want. In all honesty, she just wanted to crawl back into bed and sleep until noon, hopefully without dark giggling for hours again.
Still, classes waited for no girl, even one with a familiar along with a cast of misfits (she also made her familiars to avoid suspicion) as weird as hers.
She glanced at the window. "Come, now."
Vathek slowly trudged back over, humming quietly in almost a content fashion.
Louise opened her door and walked out, yawning again. Across from the hall, another door opened and Kirche strutted out. The two girls stared at each other for a moment. Then Kirche's face lit up.
"Louise! How are you this wonderful morning? Did you sleep well?"
Said girl shot her rival an incredulous stare. "Does it look like I slept well, Zerbst?" And since when are we on a first-name basis?
Kirche tapped a finger to her chin. "No, no, you're right, my darling Louise. Did you-" A strange look passed her face. "Hm. I was going to ask if your familiar kept you up all night, but I don't think most of them are in quite the right shape for something like that..."
Louise exhaled slowly, massaging her temples. "Do you often imagine doing perverted things with other people's familiars? Or just mine?"
The other girl stared for a moment, eyes wide, before bursting into laughter. "Oh, Louise~! I knew that little sharp tongue was in there somewhere! Is there anything else you can do with it~?"
Louise felt like her face was on fire. "W-what! You! P-pervert!"
While Louise fought a losing battle to keep her composure, Roman stood off to the side, leering ominously above Kirche's familiar- a salamander called Flame- with a silent, judgemental (he hoped) aura that flooded the senses and left the fiery lizard thing quivering upon the floor like it was facing its own personal god.
Kirche immediately noticed. "Flame, what's wrong? Louise, what in Brimir's name is that man doing to Flame?"
"Staring," Louise deadpanned.
Kirche glared at her. "Seriously. I can feel his discomfort from here. What the hell is he doing?"
Louise shrugged. "Don't know. Roman, what are you doing?"
"That thing looked like a Creep that got on the wrong side of a volcano, and turned into a fire freak. Or maybe downed too much Fire Dust." Roman stated.
Roman stood feeling entirely too satisfied with himself as he took his place at Louise's side, secure in the knowledge that he had established dominance over the lizard.
"Asserting dominance," Louise blithely translated. "As expected, my familiars are clearly superior to yours."
The other girl scowled. "You don't know that. You don't even know what gender it is. You don't know what its affinity is. For all you know, it could be as useless as you."
Louise frowned. She had considered that. And then she decided she didn't care. She had familiars now, for Founder's sake. She smirked. "Aww. Is the Zerbst jealous of little Louise?"
Kirche narrowed her eyes, gathered her salamander into her arms, and stalked off, leaving a parting remark of 'see you at breakfast'. Louise chuckled.
"Well, looks like while von Zerbst can dish it out, she can't exactly take it, can she?" She looked towards her familiars. "Loath I am to admit it though, she had a point. What is your affinity anyway?"
Vathek didn't respond- not verbally at least. He made a skull in his right claw, while putting a void in the left hand of the others-
And yet Ramiel didn't respond- not verbally at least. Its humming grew louder, more high pitched as it changed shape, the octahedron of its body melting away in the same impossible way before reforming into a cross shape with four cores, each one with its own circle of runes. Ramiel glowed with an ominous power, the cores at each point of the cross generating faint lines of light that intersected along a central axis and-
Louise blinked, suddenly nearly blinded and deafened by the absolutely ungodly ray of energy that had burst forth from Ramiel and the others and just barely whiffed past Kirche's head before completely annihilating the far wall of the hallway in a blast of heat and energy so powerful that the entire corridor had become sweltering just with the leftover waste heat of the beam.
She looked at her familiars with lidded eyes. "Positively ludicrous amount of destruction. Right. I'm beginning to see why the spell chose you as my familiars."
She put her hands on her hips. "I'm going to have to ask you to tone the destruction down, at least indoors. YES, KIRCHE," she yelled down the hallway, "I'M PERFECTLY AWARE OF MY HYPOCRISY, BUT I SUDDENLY FIND MYSELF NOT CARING IN CASE YOU WERE ASKING!"
That said, she glanced back at Vathek and her new familiars. "I'm going down to breakfast. Familiars aren't allowed in the hall. Entertain yourself, I suppose?"
Her piece said, she marched down towards the Alviss Hall. I need coffee.
~~~~~~~~
Meanwhile, at the outer reaches of the kingdom of Radiant Garden, there was a dilapidated castle known as Villain's Vale. It was erected in the shadow of the much larger castle that belonged to the kingdom's civilians and Restoration Committee. Once, Maleficent and her many associates had gathered in the shadowy darkness of that castle, utilizing its many resources, such as its raw magic pipeline and its extensive library, for their own gain. Now, however, they were forced into the rickety Vale, their numbers considerably thinned. Captain Hook had been deemed unfit for the operation long ago, and Maleficent had turned her back on him, opting to use him as a transformative vessel for the Darkness instead during the year of Sora's sleep. Oogie Boogie had more or less turned in his resignation when he and Maleficent had last worked together, and she wished nothing more to do with him, and then Maleficent and her crew were culled from this plane of existence permanently. That left only Diablo, Maleficent's pet raven…as well as Pete. How Maleficent had ended up with Pete on her side, Diablo to that day was not quite sure, and it almost seemed beneath him to even entertain the idea of continue working with the cat, but all the same, he seemed to be serving his purpose well, and he had yet to truly and utterly disappoint.
Diablo looked around the circular chamber at the heart of Villain's Vale to see them lined up around him: himself and unfortunately, Pete. It was this group he had to rely on in order to plan his next move. As Pete was the only one here, that only made him all the more suited for the job.
"We've little time," Diablo insisted sternly to his only associate. "That fool Mickey all but killed Maleficent and her allies, and now we're the only ones left!"
"I'll bet that was embarrassing," Pete chuckled.
"SILENCE!" Diablo rounded on Pete who flinched at the outburst. "The king and his little friends were all simply lucky. However, they also realized there is strength in numbers. Perhaps we are to take a cue from them. Against any one of us, they are weak. Against many of us at once…"
"We're unstoppable!" Pete volunteered.
"Please do not interrupt when I am speaking," Diablo calmly stated.
"Eh, shame about the captain and the bag o' bugs," Pete grumped.
"They were more hindrance than help," Diablo reminded him. "Still, we should get a few more people to back us up," Diablo mused. "I mean, look at all the insolent fools running around out there. And every one of them doesn't bat an eyelash at the thought of fighting a god like Hades. If we want to put them in their place, we must pack a punch. What about that lion you were talking to over in the Pridelands? Doesn't he have a load of Darkness?"
"Y'mean Scar?" Pete clarified. "If I never work with that guy again, it'll be too soon! Oh, sure, he was good at beatin' people up, but it was always whine about this and that! Ooh, nobody listens to me when I'm not the king, la-dee-da! Ix-NAY on it!"
"I'd heard tell of a swordsman in the Land of Dragons whose prowess with the Darkness was nothing short of impressive," Diablo brought up. "He goes by Shan-Yu, the leader of the Hun army. He could prove promising."
"Or," a disembodied voice echoed throughout the chamber, "instead of putting your car on a tired old horse, you could put it on a unicorn."
"WHA?" Pete scampered to hide behind Diablo's perch. "WHO SAID THAT?"
Diablo rolled his eyes. "Minions," he muttered.
A mass of light, roughly the size and shape of a human being, glimmered into view in the center of the circle. When it abated, it left in its wake a man clothed entirely in gold armor. But what was stranger still was the helmet he wore.
"Tenjuro Banno, I prefer Gold Drive. Pleasure is mine." The man said.
"Enough of this idle chatter." Diablo said stonily. "Tell us why you have come here."
"I've always set my sights high," Gold Drive began. "Back home, there are many places I've wanted to conquer. In fact, you could say I wanted the entire world kneeling before me. It's come to my attention recently that there isn't just one, but SEVERAL worlds out there for the taking. Ever since that little spiky-haired kid with the enchanted sword turned up, tongues have been wagging. So I decided to take a little 'world tour' for myself. As it turns out, there's an infinite number of worlds ripe for the conquering. My intent was to become god of them all."
"And this affects us how?" Pete interrupted.
"You're giving us more reason to eliminate you as competition than to join forces with you," Diablo pointed out.
"I'm not finished," Gold Drive growled. "As it turns out, taking the worlds into my own hand is…" Gold Drive searched for a moment for the right word.
"Impossible?" Pete supplied.
"Difficult at best," Gold Drive concluded. "But then I heard about you. You want to call the world your own too. At first, the idea of a division of the spoils was less than appealing. But now, I'm willing to let you all have your fair share of the profit so long as I get to keep a few worlds of my own. In short, I would like to propose that we work together. I think you'd find me a useful asset to your little team."
Diablo thought it over. "Tell me…Gold Drive," he beckoned, "what have you done thus far that you believe puts you at our level?"
"Well, for one…" Gold Drive gestured toward Pete. "Your level seems to be this cat and above."
"HEY!" Pete snapped.
"And because I copied the Drive Driver and made my own designs, and I suppose I can divvy the resources so that we both can achieve what we want." Gold Drive explained.
Diablo then frowned. "Fine, we'll let you join, but no funny business, deal?"
Gold Drive shook Diablo's wing. "Deal."
~~~~~~~~
Entertaining itself, Ramiel found, was actually quite a difficult ordeal- one could only fire off so many positron beams at random objects before the energy expenditure vs enjoyment graph dipped too low to be worth it. Still, there was always terrifying the local organic non-sentients (and slightly larger blue sentient). Ramiel found that, upon going over the few memory files it had between its reawakening and near death, it quite enjoyed the expressions of fear on the faces of the lilim. It also found that scaring the non-sentient organisms unconscious was fun until all of them had fallen unconscious, whereupon it quickly became quite boring due to the lack of subjects to impose its utter dominance over.
Perhaps it could move onto establishing dominance of the humans?
Ramiel paused. That was a somewhat contradictory line of thought- was it not subservient now to one of the puny humans? The bond etched into its soul certainly imposed such a rule.
Then again, it was not unfamiliar with the concept of hierarchy within species. Ergo, of course, the more beings it could impose dominance over, the higher its own tentative master (Louise, of course) would rise in rank.
Perhaps.
The line of thought bore further calculation to include other variables. The minor background process devoted to passively learning about the social hierarchy of the world was bumped up a few levels, and Ramiel immediately spun around to head for what a topographical scan of the area designated to be a "library".
There was research to be done, and in the absence of a connection to its progenitor nor any form of high speed information sharing network, it was left to do things as the humans did- or at least, how it assumed the humans did.
Ramiel paused for a moment, spun around twice in agitation, and resolved to find some method of deleting its new function of "ridiculous random thoughts" before those thought processes could spread and infect the rest of its processor core with inane considerations and half-baked theories.
"I suppose Ramiel could go nicely with pink feathers? Everything else is jarring." Snatcher stated
He stopped when he noticed everyone else staring at him. "And what's all this about?" he asked the group at large.
"How do YOU know so much about women's fashion?" Hibiki asked.
"Having to pose as a fashion forward seductress in order to further my goals of deception left me with quite a bit of knowledge in that department," Snatcher explained. "Not to mention growing up the son of the town tailor and dressmaker."
"Seriously, he could be one HOT woman," Roman pointed out.
"Though it's…only for the purposes of deception," Snatcher quickly covered. "The majority of the time, I couldn't care less."
"Why do I get the feeling that's not quite true?" Aria pressed.
"I am a man among men," Snatcher asserted through gritted teeth. "And if you're implying – "
"It doesn't MATTER!" Kanade broke in. "Wearing dresses for evil schemes, wearing dresses for things that aren't evil schemes, I don't care! And none of us SHOULD care! But if you have an opinion to weigh in on this hat, then OUT WITH IT!"
"It doesn't matter," Snatcher mocked, looking around the group…who all appeared to be largely nonchalant, merely awaiting his answer rather than stringing themselves out from tenterhooks to snap at the first opportunity to mock him. It then occurred to him that he was far away from the jeering judgments of his hometown. Perhaps, just perhaps, here was a place he could risk acknowledging the freedoms he enjoyed with his alternate persona. "Though the matter may be…somewhat of a hobby as well as a tool of deception."
"And what about getting Ramiel a hat?" Taylor pressed.
"The one with pink feathers is the ONLY proper choice."
