Oddly enough, the week afterwards was strangely quiet. Kirche was leaving her alone, Ramiel successfully managed to not blow up the castle, and she managed to not kill any teachers. Granted, there was something going on with Guiche in the background, but since it had nothing to do with her, she didn't pay much attention to it.
She should have known the peace wouldn't last.
The familiar showcase was coming up, and she was desperately trying to get Ramiel to learn the concept of "restraint". The massive holes in the woods indicated things not going all that well, really.
Standing in the middle of the clearing with her familiar hovering beside her, Louise sighed. "Okay. Let's try that one more time."
F R U S T R A T I O N
Ramiel whirred around, blasting the trees around them in a scintillating display of power, finally deciding to take Louise's hints and actually tone down the power. Unfortunately, despite the drop in power, the resulting light show still resulted in untold acres of arboreal destruction.
Fortunately, the kinetic impact of the beams managed to snuff out the resulting flames before they could spread, so at least they weren't in too much danger of burning down the entire forest.
Louise sighed, kneading her forehead. "At least nothing is on fire this time. Can't you, I don't know, keep it in a self-contained loop or something?" She looked at her familiar pleadingly.
"Nope, we cannot." Roman snarked.
Ramiel spun around and faced Louise, fixing her with a blank reaction so deadpan it was completely obvious despite Ramiel not having any actual body language or a face.
Louise slumped. "So I guess the castle will end up on fire and we'll end up losing the showcase." She pouted petulantly. "I knew that streak of success wouldn't last..."
"So, do we kill the rest of the Familiars?" Kanade asked.
Ramiel spun around again, shining in the dappled sunlight that fell through the leaves above. It seemed quite pleased with its idea, even if said idea was nothing more than blasting all the competition with a low energy plasma ray to put them into a temporary coma for several days.
Louise pinched the bridge of her nose. "Everyone, no. No eliminating the competition. No matter how tempting that is, we'd be suspects instantly, and disqualified immediately." She exhaled in contemplation. "Let's try again. Can you aim upwards?"
"Maybe." Vathek stated.
Ramiel spun around, shifting with unreal geometries as its facets unfurled, glowing brightly from within as its normally crimson beam took on a decidedly violet hue, lensed through the structures of its body before unleashing it in a dazzling upward display that carved through the clouds in the sky and turned day into slightly brighter day for all of ten seconds, leaving Louise feeling slightly sunburned and also wondering just how the hell the words "signal beacon mode" could be packed into a simple word of affirmation. And then 27 more figures plummeted from the sky, crashing on the ground, miraculously surviving.
Louise smiled. "And nothing got destroyed!" She hugged her eldritch familiar, making sure not to impale herself on any alien geometries. "I think we're making progress, at last!" Then she looked at the pile. "Oh no, we got more familiars." Louise realized, facepalming.
The Frankenstein thing got up, dusting himself off. Then he looked at Guilt.
"Mein Gott...," he muttered, "Guilt, is it really you? We thought you died!"
"Guilt...," the bunny girl muttered, collapsing into the chicken man's arms.
"Just where the hell are we!?," The man wearing a metal mask demanded, "I feel like we were blown apart like we were paper mache or something!"
"I've seen some dangerous Quirks while traveling the world's waters," The octopus man said, "But this is something I can't even comprehend..."
Ramiel let out something approximating a happy trill, idly shifting around back into cube form so that Louise's organs would remain where they were supposed to be and not strewn all over the place like a bad art exhibit.
The tiny mage sighed in contentment. Then she withdrew from the hug and grinned. "Now. Think you can repeat that feat of not destroying anything?"
~~~~~~~~
To her delight, Ramiel could. So it was a very happy Louise who went to bed. "I think we could actually win something!" she declared excitedly as she was changing into her nightclothes. "Have a nice night, everyone!"
With that statement, Louise was in a content slumber. Her Familiars, though…
Ramiel spun around quietly as Louise slept, figuratively pacing and biting its lip as it considered the strange emotions that had become so deeply ingrained into its core processes as of late.
It wasn't rational for it to even consider lowering its power output- after all, it was a war platform meant for mass area destruction until it reached its goal of retrieving the progenitor to restart the seeding of life upon the planet it had been dropped upon, not meant to be the servant/pet of some pubescent lilim shaped magic using child!
And yet, so it was.
So what would it do? It could not terminate the strange thoughts that formed, not without inadvertently damaging core processes. It could not sever the bond, not without damaging its energy emission structures. It could not even find the will to actively dislike having emotions, as they had been the key to discovering the new and all encompassing feeling of free will.
Tethered as Ramiel was to Louise, it was free in a way it never had been before. Ramiel had been designed from the ground up, its evolution guided and its body manufactured to be an unassailable vessel of the progenitor's will. Even in its course of action, its only freedoms were where it analyzed the most efficient attack vector would be, and in self preservation.
But here in Halkeginia, Ramiel had time to think, time to ponder what it enjoyed, what it disliked, what it wanted to do. If it so wished, it could watch the sunrise every day, and watch it set every night. It could behold the moon, find quiet beauty in the forest, appreciate its sheer dominance over every other life form.
It could gently caress Louise's cheek with an angular pseudopod as she slept, watch over Louise at all times, ensure that all of Louise's enemies were naught but ash and particulates in the wind.
But still.
The emotions were troubling. It was a sheer lack of logic or reason, a set of instinctual responses based on the inefficiencies of organic thought processes and neural patterns.
Ramiel spun quietly, wondering if it would change even more as time progressed, if it would one day soon lose all sense of mathematical rationality in favor of emotional decision making.
Somehow, Ramiel thought, it wouldn't be so bad either way.
"Truly there is hardly a bond more precious than that of siblings," Kanade said wistfully.
Shimura made an attempt to say "Amen to that sis-"
His sentiment was hijacked by a shrill cry of "EX-FUCKING-SCUSE ME?"
Stocking was storming into the center of the crowd. "Sisters SUCK!" she spat. "Take it from someone who killed hers!"
"Hey, not all of us had your trauma," Shimura barked at her.
"Party pooper," Dabi chimed in.
"You know," Hibiki realized, "this could make an excellent transitioning point to finally finding out what Stocking's deal is. Start spilling beans!"
"You asked for it," Stocking replied. She straightened herself up, assuming a faux calm demeanor. "As you can see, I'm an angel. Or…was one. You would call me more of a 'demon' now. It's the Lucifer principle. My sister Panty and I enjoyed the finer things in life, and unfortunately, the rest of Heaven didn't agree with our ideals."
"Did you clean out their pantry?" Twice asked.
"I may have," Stocking said, "but that's beside the point. Heaven is the lap of luxury, but it's also run by a bunch of fucking pricks who take the whole 'Lawful Good' thing too far. Apparently I was consumed by the sin of Gluttony or whatever, and Panty, well, Panty screwed every guy that came within three feet of her. They also said something about us being selfish, hedonistic, and narcissistic, but I think that was an excuse to body-shame me and slut-shame her. Then again, I say that like it was a good thing that her fucking slutty whoredom got us kicked out on our asses. Anyway, they offered us a deal. We fight crime on Earth, we get rewarded with coins, the coins buy us our way back into Heaven. I think they thought it would teach us a lesson or some Saturday-morning-cartoon shit. Anyway, there were plenty of evil ghosts to fight to make bank. Turns out a pair of shitlord demon sisters were rounding them up to throw at Daten City for a grand scheme, but I'll get there in a minute. At one point, they just started manufacturing knockoffs instead of going all the way to use real ghosts. It was fucking pathetic. Anyway, living with Panty was a literal nightmare. Sure, we were heroes to Daten City, but we had to put up with all the problems of living on EARTH, and that's bad enough when you aren't being kept up half the night by your sister's unholy moaning! Half the guys she brought home were screamers, too, so that's double the volume. Nobody wants to get jerked out of sleep at two in the fucking morning because some dude hit the big O! But that's not even where it stops! Panty would insult me, ridicule me, talk over me, EAT MY FOOD, and she had the nerve to call me fat! I've only ever been fat the once and it was a fucking ghost's fault! Like, gimme a fucking break! And did I mention she ate my food? She stole my pudding out of the pantry. My pudding! She then had the nerve to replace it with something SPICY! I can't handle spice! And THEN there was the time she was an accessory to killing the only man I ever loved! …Or sending him to Heaven anyway; he was already a ghost. And I guess he crossed over himself, but she still WANTED to kill him. But the absolute lowest of the fucking low was when we landed our movie deal. It was an action flick: 'Sex and the Daten City.' It was gonna make us millions! Too bad Panty fucked it up when she bragged about her porn career on live TV and got us cancelled! I hiked around the world tracking down every last copy of her sex tapes for her, and I thought she'd be GRATEFUL, but what does she do? Edit me the fuck out of Sex and the Daten City so she can get all the credit! I! WAS! LIVID! AND YOU'D BETTER BELIEVE THAT SEX TAPE FOUND ITS WAY TO THE INTERNET THE MINUTE THAT HAPPENED!"
"Okay, she really does sound like a nightmare sister," Divatox said. "Even I wouldn't cut Havoc's screentime if there was a TV show about us."
"Though if it were about the period we spent fighting the Power Rangers," Havoc mused, "we only truly worked together for what I assume would be four episodes' worth of time anyway."
"Yeah, that's a big bummer," Hibiki said.
"So that's when you snapped?" Kanade asked.
"Damn right I did!" Stocking replied. "First, my plan was simple. When we got back into Heaven, I was gonna use my natural charms to get on the upper crust's good side and build myself a more successful future than Panty would ever have! You know how the smart one is supposed to ascend the corporate ladder while the bully ends up a janitor or some shit. Imagine my absolute joy when we pooled our coins and only ONE of us – the RIGHT one – got accepted back into Heaven!" Stocking gave a raucous laugh.
"But it didn't last," Toga pointed out.
"NO!" Stocking stamped a foot. "I'm there for less time than it takes to shart and the other angels start accusing me of having a superiority complex and leveraging meaningless moral signifiers against Panty in order to look better. They said I played up her sluttiness and played down my own flaws so I could manipulate people into giving me what I wanted and thinking I was the good guy! Can you fucking believe that shit?"
"I mean, is that what you did?" Spinner asked.
"Yeah, but they were never supposed to figure that out!" Stocking groaned. "…They kicked me out again. I tried to make it look like I came back as a last-minute hero thing to stop a bigger bad guy. But now that I didn't have Heaven to lord over Panty, I had to come up with a new plan to put her in her place AND get the life of luxury I wanted!" She smirked. "So I figure…if I can't go up, why not go down? The demon sisters were on their way out anyway. I got in a word with their boss on that big scheme of his. So his whole plan was to open this gate between Hell and Earth and bring Hell TO Earth using a giant dick ghost. Panty's stupid boyfriend turned out to be the key to opening it, or maybe just his dick was, I don't even know anymore. After I got my ass kicked to the curb, I gave him an idea. What if he ditched the useless demon sisters, tried the same thing just a couple towns over, and this time, I'd make sure neither Panty nor her dumbass boyfriend could do anything to stop it! He agreed to those terms and promised me everything I never had in Heaven if the plan worked. So I chopped Panty into six hundred and sixty-six pieces without actually killing her, I organized the scavenger hunt from Hell using those pieces to lead her dumbass boy toy to the next ritual site, and the point was he was supposed to waste all his time picking up her pieces and get desperate and give up so by the time he found out WE had her last piece, he'd give in and do the ritual, and we'd get rid of them both permanently! But then he spent three years actually collecting all the pieces, then he tricked us into giving him the last one at the big apocalyptic battle and he resurrected Panty and they whipped our asses, so that was a bust."
The room was silent staring at Stocking. "You spent how much time rambling about your sister stealing your pudding," Shimura said, "and that's ALL you're gonna say about a three-year quest and an apocalypse-level event?"
Stocking shrugged. "There's not much to say. Use your fucking imagination to fill in the damn blank. Anyway, after that was when shit really went sour, Corset kicked me to the curb straight into Tartarus, and then you know the rest of that story." Stocking concluded. "Major props to Jason, Taylor, Albert, Muku, Ark, Sho, Coco and Rui for keeping me from going crazy."
Those eight nodded.
"But it's all better now!" Stocking broke into a shiny grin. "Because I have a new family and Lou is the cutest widdle sister I could ever ask for, her and I are gonna be such good siblings," Stocking sighed. "She won't eat my food or keep me up with sex moans or cut me out of movie deals – "
"Can you please stop ranting about your sister for two seconds?" Gear Woman sighed. "I think we're all getting sick of it."
"Fine, I will." Stocking said, nonchalantly.
