Dissonance
Event XXXVIII
The Chapter of Abnormal Happiness
A can of coffee, hot and having been dispensed just seconds ago from a vending machine, sailed peacefully through the air, launched from one hand and caught by another. Cracked open without a word being uttered, lips touched aluminum and the piping hot brew immediately scorched a tongue.
The atmosphere reminded some of them of field trips with school. The sun had yet to rise, faint fog covered the mountains up north and the deep shadows that were ruling the only just emerging twilight that reached out from the horizon. Morning dew clung to plants, flowers still slept and those that were there to witness that fact wished they could be flowers right now.
"I never even got up this early when I was in school..." Cure Black sat on a particularly round and smooth rock, a couple of steps off the paved path, tall grass tickling her legs and the burning hot coffee failing to adequately take her away from the longing of a warm bed, a beautiful wife-to-be and much needed additional three hours of sleep at the minimum. In full costume, her body was at odds with her mind.
"Even my morning practice doesn't start this early." Cure Sunshine was just joining her, lightly grunting and nodding in one direction, gesturing for her training partner to make some room so she wouldn't have to sit in the still wet and cold grass. "Hibiki was snoring so hard that she didn't even notice that I left."
"Honoka woke up, groaned, pulled a pillow over her face and then went quiet. She either suffocated from a loose pillow or fell back asleep." Black yawned with such force that her jaw made a loud noise and she followed it up with a loud, annoyed groan.
Bloom was with them, putting away some energy bars and looking like she hadn't slept at all. Her face appeared to be almost melting and she seemed to be falling asleep standing up for about a second every now and then, waking with a surprised and exhausted look.
All three of them took notice but failed to perk up even a little when they heard numerous heeled steps approach from the direction of the plaza. They were waiting in front of the arena building – not by choice but because all of them had been told to be there by someone who was possibly the most stubborn and annoying person in the world if she was told no. They all considered blowing her off, staying in their warm bed instead of stumbling around their own dark hotel room, putting on potentially complex costumes to go out.
Four sets of steps, none of them energetic. Training group two arrived, meeting up with group one, and those who had shown up second closely mimicked the general mood and looks of the first. Passion immediately headed past Black and Sunshine, passing by Bloom, and putting some coins into the vending machine. While the machine made the typical noise of processing she leaned forward, resting her head against the glass window that showcased the products. Everything about her expression said I don't wanna be here.
Moonlight and Rosetta both had dark rings and black bags under their eyes, making Bloom pale when it came to looking terrible and sleep deprived. "Ugh..." Crudely creating a long, thin barrier, Rosetta offered a seating opportunity to her training mates. Mint went ahead and joined Passion by the vending machine, looking the least bad out of everywhere there, while Moonlight sat down with Rosetta, both of them using each other as a side rest to avoid falling over. "Miki?"
"Yeah..." Moonlight didn't need to specify any further than that. Even there in the almost dark, Rosetta could see a large purple bruise looking spot on the silver Cure's neck. "You?"
"Don't ask me that." Rosetta dodged the question in a very crude way and Moonlight did not press the issue any further than that. "I thought I was used to getting up on little sleep but..." She groaned in the most unladylike way imaginable and created a second barrier as a backrest. "My shoulders hurt..."
Moonlight said nothing to that and just slumped in what was basically a bench seat now, waiting for her nightmare to end.
Passion was squatting next to the vending machine, caring not even a little bit about appearances, slowly sipping on the hot coffee, holding the can between both hands so it would warm them up as well. I'm used to getting up early but… Love and Ellen were so clingy we didn't get to sleep until… like three hours ago.
It was just past five in the morning and considering they all needed time to get dressed, they had been awake between fifteen and thirty minutes now.
Mint created a dome barrier on the ground, then another for Passion but she politely declined and Mint made the second one vanish. The coffee was much weaker than what she was used to when she woke up in the middle of the night, either because she had a loneliness attack or a flash of inspiration. Either would keep her awake, but more importantly, keep her busy. And right now she was not busy.
"They're not doing any better than we are." Black played a little with the now half-empty can in her hands, leaned forward and bent down, so far so that she could almost touch her head to her thighs. "Uggghhhhh..."
"Echo better shuffle around the teams, I am not getting up this early every morning." Sunshine yawned and while she yawned, a second, more powerful yawn emerged and she nearly fell off the stone. "Gods..."
Bloom went back to the vending machine, got another energy bar and looked like she was ready to just fall over and sleep on the stone pavement any second now. Mint made the second dome again, only about fifty centimeters high, and gestured to Bloom that she could sit there. "Thanks..." Yawning, covering her mouth with her arm, Bloom could see that Mint was fighting to keep from being infected by the yawn. Passion just capitulated the fight right away and yawned loudly into her sleeve.
"Love and Ellen still asleep?" Mint saw herself forced to make conversation or she was gonna fall asleep right there and then.
Passion nodded and put the hot can between her legs, only black and sturdy stocking separating hot metal from skin. But the warmth it provided was making a little bit of extra life and energy flow out of her center and to the far ends of her limbs. "Love can sleep anywhere… Ellen was all… all..." Passion yawned again and tiny tears popped from the corners of her eyes. "Sorry… curled up like a cat. So cute..." Passion smiled wide and held on to that image to starve off exhaustion.
Moonlight had fallen asleep and Rosetta was on the verge of doing the same. Lightly tapping her boots against Moonlight's, she felt guilty when the tall girl rose from her light slumber with startle and shock. "Sorry."
"No… it's fine..." Moonlight stood up and immediately wished she could just plonk back into bed. "Why are we all up at this ungodly hour?"
"Something something extending training hours..." Black commented and then got off the rock to stand. If I sit around any longer I'll either fall into a coma or die.
Wallowing in desire to crawl into fluffy, comfortable beds and hold on to the body of their loved ones, the seven of them fell silent other than groans, moans and a lot, lot, lot of yawning. What really were only five minutes but felt like forever to those seven, a final, eighth set of heels clacked over the pavement, approaching with a lot of speed, much more than anyone that lacked sleep could have managed.
"Look awake, everyone!" Echo's loud and cheery voice reached them before she could see them and they all, to various degrees, wanted to shut her up or strangle her. "If you're that tired, you need to go to bed earlier."
"Easy for you to say..." Moonlight looked rather hostile and tried to suppress a yawn, unsuccessfully.
"I've got just the thing." With a single snap of her fingers, Echo forced life into them. Not with some kind of fancy healing spell or an elaborate enhancement ability. She zapped them. All of them felt a powerful, painful electric burst hit their butt and that jolted them wide awake – and made all of them look at Echo like she was a pinata. "Remember that feeling and channel that energy of wanting to kick my butt into working."
The arena staff was not up at such an early hour and so Echo unlocked the door with a key she had been holding. "After you, ladies." Stepping aside and waiting for her first flock, training group one and two, to enter the still dark and silent arena halls, Echo looked entirely too chipper for it being so early in the morning.
Standing up, the seven solemnly marched through the doors towards their temporary doom. They knew that the training that awaited them was going to leave them exhausted. If they hadn't already been ready for bed now, they certainly were after.
The battlefield was different that morning. They arrived at a large clearing of short grass and not much else. To their left, arcing around them in a hundred and eight degrees, was a forest of mammoth trees, thick like railway bridge pillars and much taller, the entire ground covered in the shadows of early morning. To their right on the other hand was a desert of endless dunes consisting of even more endless sand.
"Group one, over there in the forest. Group two, into the desert." None of the seven seemed particularly happy with this. Although it was a pretty safe bet that unless the target area had been a humongous bed or kotatsu, they would not have been happy no matter what. They all knew that they could just leave. That they could abandon the training, fall behind but enjoy days of peace and tranquil. Relatively so, at least.
But they had pride in who they were, in what they did and in how hard they had trained to be where they were now. They couldn't leave. Especially so those who were either stubborn or proud, which accounted for about half of them easily.
Taking a break before they even started, Black, Bloom and Sunshine walked back out, knowing that they were in no condition to do any real training. A swirly portal of white connected the training space back to the arena and they made use of it the second Echo turned away.
"Ugh..." Black nearly fell into one of the not so comfortable metal seats that comprised a waiting area by the vending machines. "I should have gone hooky today. Everything hurts and I haven't even started."
"Same." Bloom sat down next to her and leaned back so much that her chest was practically the highest point of her body.
Sunshine did not say and instead walked along the vending machines, of which there were quite a lot. And some very unusual ones too. One in particular, eight machines in, caught her attention. It was difficult to carry anything on you as a Cure in most circumstances, but luckily money in this place wasn't confined to a wallet or purse or anything like that.
While Sunshine fed a machine with a light case of excitement on her face, Black hung her head and wished she was back in bed. "Honoka is not gonna let me back in if I go back now, so might as well pull through somehow."
"No breakfast is killing me." Bloom's stomach growled like a wolf that was trying to scare off an intruder. "Makes me regret building all that muscle."
"If I ever need help moving furniture, I know who I'm gonna call."
"The movers." Bloom turned her down without so much as Black even getting to asking.
"Cold."
"I might think about it if you get a place with a garden and a grill."
"Don't make me think about barbecue right now. What are you, a villain?"
"I'm so hungry I can smell food that isn't there… I kinda want ramen now."
"Stop. Now I can smell it too."
Before they could even exchange looks of confusion, Sunshine sat down to Black's left, with a big bowl of steaming hot ramen in her hands that she then rested on her thighs, frowned, tried to hold the bowl with one hand further up, frowned more and finally stood up, only to sit on the ground cross-legged, holding the bowl with one hand anyway, breaking the chopsticks with her free hand and her teeth and blowing on the hot broth.
Black and Bloom didn't have to say anything – salivating, physically so, over Sunshine's food, they were pointed towards the vending machines further in the back, big hunks of metal that dwarfed the typical vending machine dispensing drinks or snacks.
There was not only ramen. Curry, fried rice, even sushi. Some of the machines very clearly defied common sense and any normal person would have seriously questioned how that food was being prepared or dispensed or how the machine was being refilled. But not those two. They were hungry, sleep deprived, annoyed. Hitting the extra big button on the fried rice machine three times – and a fourth time but it responded with a loud refusal noise – Bloom went for something that she knew would last her for several hours and until the dining hall was properly open.
Black on the other hand went for shoyu ramen with extra thick noodles. What took even a restaurant at least five to ten minutes the machine produced in just about two. It didn't come cheap, amounting to twelve hundred yen for a big bowl of ramen, but for Black it was totally worth it.
Sitting in silence would be quite a wrong depiction in words of what happened next. Slurping, blowing, loudly chewing and pleased moans of filling their stomach was all anyone would have heard if they were listening in. Sunshine finished first and put the bowl on the empty seat next to her. "Coffee and snack bars are no replacement for real food. Ever."
"I didn't take you for the type that could eat ramen at five thirty in the morning." Bloom commented between large spoonfuls of fried rice being shoveled into her mouth.
"Not many people know but after my morning routine I always cook about two bowls worth of white rice in a small backroom in the dojo and eat before I finish up, clean, shower and eat actual breakfast."
"Why?" Black couldn't really understand what drove Sunshine to do that.
"I get it." Bloom nodded and her words were so obfuscated by her mouth being full of rice that the other two only managed to understand her through context clues. She then paused, panicked and slammed her own chest because she had been wolfing it down too fast.
"You're so stupid, not getting at least a bottle of water with that mountain of rice." Black was almost done with her ramen and had mostly broth left. Handing the nearly empty bowl to her friend, the broth disappeared near instantly and Bloom let out a very relieved shout. "I thought I ate a lot in the morning but this is ridiculous. What was that, a four people serving?" Black looked at the huge plate that had come with an even bigger dome of fried rice on it. I couldn't eat that for dinner, much less breakfast.
Sunshine got up and took her empty bowl with her as she returned behind the seats to the vending machines. "It's… satisfying. Some freshly cooked white rice after a workout."
"That sounds more like a Hibiki thing, you know?" Black saw Hibiki as someone who lived moment to moment without much of a plan or a care in the world.
"She's totally a bread person. I can't get her to eat rice when we go for breakfast no matter what." Sunshine sounded mildly annoyed by that. "Maybe it's because I live with a pretty traditional family, but I don't really understand that. You're just gonna be hungry a few hours later."
Bloom put away the last spoonful of fried rice and noticed Black looking at her like she was a bottomless void. "Don't give me that look."
"Goes to show that all that muscle isn't just for show."
"I kinda skimped on dinner."
"You ate a bucket worth of fish. I was there." Black lightly elbowed her friend.
"But no rice!"
Sunshine smiled at this exchange and put the bowl back into the machine and the dish was swallowed up and a lot of whirring followed; then silence. "Are you two done? Echo's gonna have our hides if we don't go back soon."
"I actually feel alive now, so yeah." Jumping to her feet, Black returned her bowl the same way Sunshine had and was confident that these machines would bankrupt her if she kept having to wake up this early.
The three of them came face to face with a dangerously lethal smile just as they turned the corner to return back to the battlefield. Echo was staring right at Black with her eyes practically closed and the corners of her mouth far apart. Bloom and Sunshine tried to slip past but found their plan to be thwarted by Echo's rather impossibly strong grip. "So this is where you three were. If you need breakfast that badly maybe I should wake you up a little earlier."
"We… we discussed theory over breakfast!" Bloom lied through her teeth and looked to Sunshine for help.
She wasn't a great liar but she really didn't want to get her chops busted for playing hooky first thing in the morning, even if the hooky was kind of justified. "I wasn't sure how to… channel my energy for… when I'm being defensive."
We're doomed. Black and Bloom saw no future that didn't involve a lecture.
Their salvation came through a flash of inspiration for Sunshine. "We… talked about Bloom's defensive powers and how she shields herself-" Sunshine shot Bloom a look and Bloom hastily nodded, although this was not exactly what she did. "So I figured… what if I channeled my powers to act like sensors. Feel an attack before it connects just by feeling… further through magic." I can't believe I managed to pull that together from nothing.
"Wow, that's impressive." Echo's smile didn't dissipate. "Impressive how the three of you so easily became close enough to lie for each other and get off the hook." Finally she let go of Sunshine and Bloom. "If you need to eat, don't just slink off, tell me. I went looking for you everywhere. I thought a system glitch ate you or something terrible like that."
"Yes..." They looked like they had been scolded by their parents. For one reason or another, they felt guilty of doing something bad. Their faces told Echo that this guilt came with feeling really bad about themselves.
"You smell like a ramen stand."
Sunshine turned around and point at the wall. "Around the corner are vending machines. There's bigger ones in the back and they even serve curry, ramen, fried rice and who knows what else."
"It would not be fair to let you have this-" They all gulped. "Without also offering it to the second group." They breathed out in relief. "But when I come check on you after I give the others a breakfast break-"
"We're gonna be in the middle of training our butts off." Black hastily stated. "We'll go right away."
"Remember, communication is key." Echo was lecturing after them as they walked past and hurried towards the battlefield.
The three of them stopped just a few steps into the clearing, exchanging looks and then bursting into laughter. Black air-elbowed Sunshine and grimaced. "You sly girl! I can't believe we got away with this!"
"Way to think on your feet! She totally bought it!" Bloom put her arm over Sunshine's shoulders and weighted down on her – if not for her Cure powers, Sunshine would have crumbled like a house of cards under Bloom's weight. "But that was some genius thinking."
"Okay, listen for a sec." Sunshine lightly shoved Bloom away with a smile. "What if it wasn't just a fib for what we were doing? I kinda pulled that out of a hat at the moment but what if it works?"
Bloom looked at Black and then both of them looked at Sunshine. "I mean that is somewhat what I'm trying to do. Raise my defenses all the way so I can protect those that can't take a Michiru to the face. The how and when is kinda up in the air still."
"You know how to do that magically enhanced senses thing?" Black had her curiosity piqued.
"Hm… not even close. That's more something Blossom would know how to do. But it sounds like a better idea than just training my body. I'll try that later. Just cover myself with energy like a shield but instead of it being all defensive I'll try sensing incoming attacks and use that to counter."
"The power of breakfast." Black tried to look serious but couldn't help but grin. "So, we going?"
"Yeah, we better make good on our promise."
While group one was on their way to actually train, group two was leaving the premises and making good use of the vending machines. Passion was hunkered down with extra spicy curry that was giving her face some real red in a way that would have made everyone think Love was whispering lewd things to her. Mint was eating a big helping of hot, sweet red bean soup, sitting just a little ways to the side.
"I am telling you that does not work. Spatial dimensions extend to more than just physical space. You have to account for time, gravity, energy, light, vacuum, all sorts of factors. Creating a grain of sand is not actually creating a grain of sand but an object that has the same atomic building blocks as a grain of sand and then you mimic the molecular composition of it. Creating a space has to work the same way." Rosetta was arguing with Moonlight, both of them opting for sandwiches.
"That might hold water with an academic investigation but we have magic and magic is applied energy. Some of us convert magic energy into physical matter or metaphysical matter, like fire, wind, and so on. And we make that matter behave in ways that break the regular applicable laws that handle the state of matter." Moonlight argued back and took a large and hurried bite out of her very large vegetable, cheese, pepper and onions sandwich – Rosetta had been slightly disgusted at her choice.
"Yes, but that is relatively speaking minuscule compared to what we are trying to do. A fully established space, a pocket dimension, requires an element of temporal linearity to function. Otherwise matter will not know when it has to change shape, decay. Entropy is a mandatory building block of reality and you cannot simply omit it. Temporal clarity is absolutely required as you cannot have temporal linearity without establishing clarity and gravity requires temporal linearity and so does entropy. Thermodynamics dictates-"
"Again, that is purely the scientific approach. We should look at the scientific elements only as a guideline-"
"It took centuries for the brightest minds of humanity to establish the rules of-"
"They didn't have magic!"
Glaring at each other, Moonlight and Rosetta hurriedly ate their sandwiches, unscrewed green tea bottles and washed it all down. Seconds after they were on their way to get seconds.
"Magic is not a solve-all, Moonlight." Rosetta remained steadfast on how they should approach spatial establishment of pocket dimensions.
"Not unilaterally, but it can bridge the gaps between typically impossible physical phenomena. We do not have to reinvent time, entropy, gravity and everything else that composes our physical reality. We should focus on making space function even if those elements are only present in a superficial way."
"That is-" Rosetta looked like she was told that pigs should just grow wings to fly. "That is so much harder than just obeying the laws of space!"
"Our goal is the deployment of a pocket dimension, a closed off area of spatial confinement. Yours is a prison and while mine is similar, it's more like a personalized space that assists me. Maybe we should agree to disagree on the extended principles used to establish the space since our goals diverge beyond the initial convergence."
"I think it will be beneficial if we manage a unified approach."
"Why is that?"
"I have known Rikka for many years now and she is the smartest person I know. One thing she has told Regina and Ange over and over was that if at all possible, a unified approach means further elevation through colla- and corroboration of idea and implementation of practice."
"That is true but what about our divergences?" Moonlight got another sandwich that disgusted Rosetta.
"Those we can develop independently but the core approach is the same. Both of us want to create a closed off space that has special properties affecting those inside. In your case, you are inside as well, but that does not mean my ability would not affect myself if I were to use it on myself."
Moonlight paused, took a bite out of the white bread sandwich and hummed. "You do have a point there."
"So then-"
"What if we simply bridge the gap between temporal establishment and spatial establishment by having the spatial sphere access the temporal… essence? I am not sure on the term. By accessing the temporal essence of the reality we reside on."
This time Rosetta fell silent. "I have to be honest, I am not sure my powers will lend itself to doing that."
"What if you trap just the temporal essence in a temporal barrier and use that to connect the spatial sphere to the temporal source?"
"How do you two even know about this sort of thing? It sounds like science fiction to me." Mint didn't mind getting distracted, it kept her conscious mind occupied, which was exactly what she was looking for.
"Rikka." "Library." They looked at each other and smiled.
"Rikka seems to be a living library."
"A library wishes it contained as much knowledge as Rikka does." Rosetta looked really amused. "Perhaps I exaggerate a little, but Rikka has the capacity to give tailored explanations while a library cannot do that."
"Come to think of it, did we discuss the possibility of simply converting existing space through rearrangement with magic and cut it away from the dimension we reside on?"
"That would leave a massive spatial gap akin to a black hole behind. And no I do not recall… no, maybe I do?"
"Moonlight, you're making a special space to fight in, right?" Mint chipped in. "So it's fine if it's just a sealed off space that you control, like the inside of a barrier but everything inside the barrier is made of barrier, if it was me? Something like that."
They both fell silent and seemed to be thinking it over.
"If-" Mint cleared her throat. "If that is nonsense, don't mind me!"
"No, for my uses that might actually not be a bad idea. It makes the space subject to interference by a strong enough power from the outside but if I control the spatial arrangement inside, you would need someone like Echo to break out. Breaking in might be possible but they would be subject to the same changes of spatial composition as those already inside."
"For me that does not work, however." Rosetta shook her head. "My approach is tailored specifically towards those that are powerful enough to break in or out of such a spatial prison and create something that is beyond their means. A completely, spatially and temporally locked off dimensional pocket that serves as a holding prison. I cannot leave that subject to outside manipulation. Someone like Rikka could easily break through if the standard laws of space apply."
"What about making a prison and then moving the entire prison? Shift the prison like a container, without regard for the contents, to a different dimensional layer." Moonlight tried her best to come up with a solution. Ever since last evening she had been getting along with Rosetta quite well, much to the dismay of Yami and Erika, who now saw themselves attacked by reason and good behavior from two sides.
"That is a very difficult action to execute. I am not sure I can-"
"You are not sure?" Moonlight looked shocked. "None of us here are sure we will be able to do what we're setting out to do. You're a Cure."
Rosetta chuckled, looked down and shook her head. "Unbelievable."
"Am I not right?"
"That is why this is so unbelievable. That I had to be reminded of the very essence of having magic. With Rikka and all that happened in our world, the curses and everything, I lost the wonder in magic. I suppose it is time I rediscover it."
Moonlight felt like she could have put her hand on Rosetta's shoulder as a gesture but she refrained. This was still her little sister's much older girlfriend. She couldn't be too welcoming now.
"Aw whe weady fho gho?" Passion was posing this question and her strange way of speech made everyone look. Her already red face would have intensified any further if that had been possible from shame. "Ophay, iht fhwas fhoo sphisey!"
The three others snorted and then laughed openly at Passion's desperate attempt to speak normally but it was pretty clear that she ate magnitudes too spicy. She had been absent-minded the entire morning and for good reason. Her ability was the one involving the absolute most self-reflection and thought out of everyone, easily so even.
"I have just the thing for you." Mint got up and walked to a very inconspicuous vending machine – that sold a wide range of what seemed to be sugary soda. Buying one that was called Zettai Sugar – Flavor Diamond, it came in a small plastic bottle, she threw it over to Passion who caught it and looked at a very dark red liquid contained within.
Without much of a suspicion, Passion unscrewed the bottle and took a sip – regret flooded down her throat alongside a carnival of intense sweetness that left her tongue and taste buds completely numb to anything else. And then the regret tried to come back up together with a gag and Passion looked like distilled evil was inside that battle.
"I know it's way too sweet but it will just about kill the spiciness and pain. Clog your nose. You don't really need to swallow much of it, just take a mouthful and use it like mouthwash." Mint tried her best to sway Passion.
Pinching her nose, Passion looked very unhappy with what she was about to do. Taking a big gulp, her cheeks puckered up, she nearly spat it all out. It was like concentrated syrup with the consistency of diluted yogurt. How can something be this sweet? It's so gross.
"What did you give her?" Moonlight was curious now because the disgust on Passion's face was outright picturesque in its intensity.
"It's a drink they sell locally where I live. Or rather, sold. It's so full of sugar that it'll never spoil and they filled an entire vending machine with it. Nobody I know likes it but it does wonder as a pick me up – if you dilute it nine parts water and one part that."
"So it is a syrup?" Rosetta of course knew of that sort of thing although she had never tried it.
"No, it was marketed as a sweet drink." Mint smiled. "It is pretty disgusting if you drink it as is, but there is nothing better to fix spiciness than this." She omitted that she knew a single person that was actually capable of liking that drink as it was; her sister. Her taste buds were made out of steel.
Passion looked like she was going to throw up and spat the drink back into the bottle, put the lid back on and threw it away. "That… was the worst thing I ever tasted. I've been to Thailand, Korea, the Philippines, all over Japan… this was no contest the worst food related thing I ever came across. It was like someone melted down sugar cubes in fruit syrup."
"But you can talk again." Mint pointed out that the purpose was served. "I should give some of this to Kurumi, she definitely likes extremely sweet things."
"That was terrible." Moonlight groaned. "Accurate but terrible."
"Are we ready to go back in?" Passion didn't want to break group and go on her own.
"I believe so." Rosetta took a quick, deep breath and exhaled. "We should run a few experiments before we continue to discuss the finer workings of spatial composition."
"You two do that. I have… a lot of pebbles to toss." Mint was really unhappy with what her training consisted of. "There has to be a better way than this." Sighing, she looked to the pair surrounding Yami for advice, especially Rosetta.
"I am not entirely clear on the details of what you are trying to do so I cannot help." Rosetta shot her down and upon seeing Mint's disappointment visible on her face, she decided not to tease her. "So if you would just explain these details to me-"
"Happy to!" Mint grabbed hold of Rosetta's hands and breathed a sigh of relief. "It's just us two who use this type of ability so I was really worried I would have to figure it out all on my own."
"We have different goals so most of the work will still lie with you." Mint's enthusiasm made Alice happy. "But I will gladly lend any support I can." I am not sure how much help I can be considering what Echo told her.
"What about you?" Moonlight looked to Passion.
"Bit of a special case. I think I have to work this one out for myself. But thanks for offering." Looking a little happy, Passion smiled at Moonlight.
"The general idea is that I create a big dome or sphere or really any kind of big barrier that acts like a territory or zone. Similar to how my Clear Zone can suppress the abilities of those who have less magic than me. But this will be a barrier that works like my usual barriers but automatically lets in those I consider allies. So, a safe refuge, basically."
That is pretty much what Echo told her to do. "I understand the crux lies with automatically."
"Yes! I should have asked you for help earlier!"
"Please do not get too excited, this was very easy to see. The main issue I see is that the only way to reliably facilitate this will be for the barrier to work as an extension of yourself."
"I thought about that but that opens me up to all sorts of transitive property damage abilities. The way I am thinking I need to develop a way to sync the barrier to my perception but not completely to my mind so attacking the barrier doesn't relay damage back to me. I say perception but what I really mean is like… who I consider an enemy or not."
"Would it not need to include abilities bearing hostility?"
"Oh..." Mint facepalmed. "I completely forgot about that."
"This is a difficult task."
"Tell me about it..."
"Is there a need to allow friendly abilities to pass the threshold?"
"From inside to out, yes, but not the other way around."
"Similarly there will not be a need to allow enemy ability to flow from inside to the outside… a polarized approach based on how the ability is identified. What if you were to pivot?"
"To where?"
"In combat we typically know ahead of time who our allies will be, in here and in the real world as well. How good is your detection of magical signature?"
"Do you mean telling apart each person's magic from someone else? Hm… okay, I guess?"
"By preemptively memorizing the signature of every friendly you could ease the burden on your cognition of each individual and magic that tries to pass the barrier threshold."
"Like a sign-in sheet."
Rosetta chuckled. "That is an amusing thought, but yes." When Mint showed a look that Rosetta knew all too well – someone who felt like they had said something not quite stupid but far off from being as smart as their conversational partner would have put it – Rosetta lightly touched her forearm. "There is absolutely no shame in being able to put things in an easy to understand and concise way. I was brought up in high society and for the rest of my life there will be things I can only think and talk about a certain way. Mana has been trying her best to change that but as I do not mind, well, her success has been waiting."
You are terrible at encouraging, Rosetta. Mint was amused by Rosetta trying and failing something as simple as saying You didn't sound dumb or anything. "That still leaves the problem of the territory itself having to work off of my understanding of who is an enemy and who isn't."
"Perhaps some kind of mental link… that is a very different type of ability however. I am sorry, this is quite outside my own plans."
"Mental link… maybe… maybe…ah… I don't think I can manage that if I'm being realistic."
"I am intrigued what you do to infuse your barriers with the damage repel- no, the damage returning property. I never considered an application like that."
"That's because I ended up all on my own. I didn't want to crush or smash enemies with barriers. What if they can break them, you know? So I thought I had to do something. And…" She bridged her fingers. "What if I can reconnect with Karen? So I wanted something that can protect others too."
"Yes, but on the technical level."
"Right, right. It's… kind of intuition. I give my barrier the power to protect and it just manifests that way."
"Would you not be able to do the same thing then but with a different property?"
"It's tricky. That's how [Clear Zone] works, kind of. Instead protect I'm thinking about suppressing but it took me a long time to make that stick properly."
"How long?"
Mint looked away, so much so that Rosetta could not see her face. "A year… and there were some… setbacks."
"Setbacks?"
"It ended up… suppressing my own powers."
"I feel that there is something you are not telling me." Rosetta sounded lightly amused.
"My clothes too." Mint admitted and blushed.
"We have all had our setbacks." Rosetta took a deep breath and looked up. "When I lost the ability to jump and run, even as a Cure, I had to shift my powers. It took quite some time before I was able to properly maneuver myself around a battlefield. I took… a few unintentional falls."
"Thanks for telling me that. You're older and more experienced than me so sometimes it feels like you're my senpai as a barrier Cure. It's great to know that you're not infallible." Rosetta looked surprised, so much so that Mint looked confused. "Did I say something wrong?"
"Not at all. I would love having a wonderful kouhai like you."
"Then do you mind if I call you Rosetta-senpai?"
Rosetta fell quiet and fell behind in walking for a moment. "In another life perhaps. Just Rosetta is fine. We do all call each other by name. I do find this lack of honorifics refreshing. In high society we had a lot of that formality and I was never that much of a fan of it."
"It kind of felt natural to just use each other's first names. With everyone being Cures and all. It's not like I would ever shout Aqua-san or Blossom-chan or something like that. Just feels silly."
"Now there is something we absolutely agree on." Rosetta smiled. "But back to our matter at hand. So you believe it will take too long to condition yourself to intuitively infuse a different property?"
"Probably. No, definitely." Mint felt a sense of defeat.
"Have you considered that in the process of developing this new territory you might have to convert your old approach to one that relies less on repetition and intuition?"
"Do you fight like that? Thinking about everything?"
"I have far more combat experience than you do and that offers a large boon to my approach of assessing the situation and reacting. Some of it is of course a sense for battle but even so it is pertinent to always calmly assess the situation. Have you not wondered why it is that in our confrontations I always seem to have a matching answer for everything you think of?"
"Everything is a little much… most of it!"
Rosetta chuckled. "We can settle on that. I spend many hundreds of hours contemplating possible vectors of assault against me and how to defend and counter them. It has helped that you are my primary opponent here and so I have focused on you, analyzing your powers."
"You have?!"
"Is that so shocking?"
"No, I mean… yes… I mean… it's kind of embarrassing."
"Setting your embarrassment aside, I believe you are capable of adopting a similar approach to this. Intuition serves you well when it comes to battling itself, but you should mandate full control over your abilities by conscious thought. It might set you back a little but to advance toward and arrive at your goal I believe you first need to step aside and fix something that until now did not constitute a problem."
"Changing [Clear Zone] and my infusing to be something I do consciously… it would be a pretty neat trick to be able to make barriers at will that aren't infused with the damage returning property."
"Hah… a mighty headache is what it will be for those of us who will have to deal with it as an opponent."
"Think of it as helping your sparring partner level up to your… level!" Mint tried her best to put it in a positive light.
"We are not enemies so of course I see no true issue with helping you. But I am still just a person so I cannot help but think about what a headache it will be to fight you later."
"I'll treat you to tea!"
Rosetta paused. "What kind of tea?"
While Mint was scoring a personal victory of sorts, Passion felt like her head was going to explode. Her goal was incredibly different from everyone else and, in many ways, absolutely crazy. She knew that without Echo backing her up, it was not going to work. She also knew that if and when it worked, there was still a lot of trouble to go through. There were also so many unknown elements still.
"Hard at work?" Echo's voice came from right in front of her and Passion opened her eyes.
She sat on the dunes, under the sweltering sun, barely feeling the heat, the hot desert winds passing by unnoticed and the infinite grains of sand no more than barely a distraction. "Trying to."
"I gave your plan some thought." Echo sounded very serious.
Passion perked up. This sounded like an and this is what you should do scenario to her.
"Too much. What you are trying to do is too much. It is like a human trying to leap over a mountain or even just a building. It won't work." She raised her hand when Passion opened her mouth to object. "Not the way you are trying at least. You want to take part of yourself, shave it off and grant it autonomy. You command the spatial dimensions and by extension, matter itself, to a degree. The creation of a body is not what will pose the true issue here though."
"Yeah. The real problem is the autonomy you brought up. I haven't been Eas in so long and even when I use [Memoria] it's not like Eas and I switch places. But I'm sure she's still in here. I remember growing up, I remember Labyrinth, everything. I stopped being her, but it's not like she is gone entirely. And I just… I got a second chance but it was at the expense of leaving behind parts of myself. I don't regret it or anything and I don't think it's injustice or unfair. I did bad and I paid for it. But I want to… I want to fix this."
"A lot of Love has rubbed off on you, hasn't it?" Echo sat down next to Passion, held out her hand and created a small glowing orb in her palm that swirled around at random like a firefly. "I do think what you want to do is right. Not necessarily a good idea, but doing the right thing is not always a good idea so go figure. I mean look at what happened with you. Most people wouldn't have tried as hard as Love did to save you, right?"
"That's part of what made me fall in love with her."
Echo chuckled. "Yeah, yeah, I get it, you two, sorry, you three are the super duper mad in love trio. Makes even Mana look bad."
Passion bridged her fingers and looked a bit embarrassed. "I wouldn't go that far."
"See, the thing is, to give real autonomy to Eas, you can't just cut yourself in two pieces and expect the piece you slice off to function properly right out the gate. It's like having someone who was always home schooled attend a public school and expect them to fight in right away. There's no way that'll work out. Bullying ahoy."
"I didn't really think about that."
"That's why this is supervised training and not stick everyone into the arena and see what they come up with training." Echo looked really smug. "So I'm thinking… Windy and Pine both have powers that access the mental state, right?"
"You think they can help me with the autonomy?"
"Hm, no. Pine's about taking away autonomy of even the person affected and she'd probably need a lot, lot, lot of time to figure out a way to put that big a spin on it. And Windy is just about pushing the power off button. No, I was just bringing them up because I think that is the avenue you gotta travel down."
"Translation?"
"It's probably easier to just show you. A lot less talk about the incorporeal state of the soul and memories comprising the self through anchorage within the expected self and so on."
"Show me?"
"Don't worry, it's not dangerous-" Echo grabbed the firefly, which turned into a stake, and rammed a stake of light right into Passion's head, through her forehead. Leaving no mark, leaving no sound, Passion was just left surprised, with her mouth wide open. "Or anything."
"What-"
Now look what you did. It was her own voice, in her head, albeit much deeper pitched than usual. Couldn't just leave me to rot down there, no, you had to swoop in like a hero. There was a moment of silence that just compounded Passion's mix of panic, confusion and mouth gaping surprise. Well… you know, thanks anyway.
"Is it working?" Echo snapped her fingers in front of Passion.
"My own voice is talking to me in my head!"
Not wrong but that's definitely not right either. What, you can't put one and one together? You realize that you don't sound like this. I'm me, the you before you. Do you need me to spell it out for you? You did it, applause, pachipachipachi. You woke me up.
"Why is she so rude?!" Passion instinctively looked right up without moving her head, as if she tried to look at her own forehead.
You think this is rude? You don't really remember much of what you were like before, don't you? Accursed Pretty Cure! Like that?
Echo wasn't privy to the internal conversation so she just went with what Passion was saying out loud. "I take that as a yes."
"What did you do?!" Passion was completely dumbfounded by this development.
"Not so easy to explain."
Tell her to try.
"Try!" And you be quiet for a moment!
It's not my fault this happened. That's on you.
"Basically I went and targeted what little I could sense of the you before you and put it into a container. And woke it up. Like a little you in your head that's not you. Am I making any sense?"
"You could have warned me about this..."
"Want me to make her go away then?" Echo reached towards Passion and smiled when Passion backed away like she was made from depleted uranium. "I take that as a no."
"No more surprise attacks! But this… what exactly did you do this for?"
Good question.
"Step one; wake up Eas. Step two, put her in control. Step three, give her a body of her own." Echo paused just long enough for Passion to open her mouth and then cut her off before she could say anything. "This probably isn't what you had in mind. Probably makes you feel like you've gone crazy."
She's calling you crazy, you know. She's got a point. You're hearing voices in your head and everything.
"More annoyed than crazy." Passion looked mighty put off. Can you be quiet for five seconds?
"I had to catch you unaware because the mind has this nasty habit of putting up subconscious barriers and all that jank. The more I'd try to get you to relax and not think about Eas the more you would think about her. You know that phrase about the pink elephant?"
"Okay, I get that part."
"After spending a little while thinking about what you wanted to do I figured that if I didn't step in and give you a push you'd spend the rest of your life contemplating questions of spirit and soul. And..." She looked away. "I figured that sometimes the crude way can be the good way."
"What am I supposed to do now? It's like someone is riding passenger in my head."
That sure is a thing to call me. I'd have gone with freeloader.
You're not a freeloader. You're me.
Huh… Well, I guess that's true.
"You are definitely gonna need time to work this out. The idea – my idea – is that this way, Eas can at least practice autonomous thought for a while. Step two, you use [Memoria] and if that doesn't do the trick I can try a couple of things to put her in control while the ability lasts. Step three, your idea put into action. Just turning a single leap into, you know, hop, step, jump."
"This is going to be… an adjustment."
You figured out how to live on Earth and date someone as suffocatingly lovable as Peach. How much harder can this possibly be?
"Work out how you feel about this. I can put her back to sleep. Probably. If it's something you can't handle."
"Are you kidding?" Passion almost lunged at Echo to grab her hands. "I was at my wit's end on how to make this happen! I'm not Pine or Windy and I'm not as smart as Diamond or Beauty. I was totally lost. This is a big step to where I wanted to go."
Would it kill you to play it just a little cool?
"Glad to hear that. You should spend at least a few days like this before you consider moving to stage two."
"I gotta ask though… how do you come up with this sort of thing? Everyone's training, their abilities, where to go, how to go about it… I couldn't even figure out my own ability."
"Hm… it's the same for me."
"The same? I don't get it."
"You didn't really think you could split off Eas from yourself, right? At least not until very recently."
"Yeah."
What changed?
We can talk about that later!
"It's the same for me. I still figure out what I can do and every time I stop and think I can't I realize I haven't tried. And then I try and it just… it just works. It's like my powers are exactly what I think I can do. Like echoes of my thoughts." Echo grimaced wide. "See what I did there?"
"Unfortunately so, yes."
I hate this woman.
"In any case-" Echo pulled her hands back and smiled. "If it becomes too much-" Her right arm suddenly moved forward and pinched Passion's forearm really hard, so much so that Passion winced and bent over. "Did that hurt her as well?"
I am going to beat this woman. That hurt like hell! I'm going to fill an entire Fukou Gauge off of her alone!
"She's a little upset."
"I had to know if you share bodily sensations. It's kind of important. You know, tasting food, feeling the sun-" She stopped and looked up. "Maybe a little much sun right now, but anyway. You understand what I'm getting at."
Even if she doesn't, I do.
I get it! Why are you so condescending?
You should ask yourself that.
Puns. Really?
This situation is weirder for me than for you.
I can't argue with that too much.
"You okay?" Echo seemed worried when Passion said nothing.
"Just talking to her." Passion stopped again. "I'm gonna get a lot of this, aren't I? Maybe I should talk out loud instead..."
You're going to be talking to yourself, I can't talk out loud.
Not yet.
Kind of hard to get my hopes up considering how ridiculous this whole idea sounds.
I was kind of expecting for you to know my memories.
There was a short pause. I can look at them, but five seconds of memories will take me five seconds. Another pause, this one lasted long enough for Passion to talk to Echo.
"I still need to figure out how exactly to apply my powers to create a permanent split-off."
"Nobody said this will be easy." Echo got up and dusted off her skirt. "Maybe ask Eas for help."
Don't. I have basically no idea how your Cure powers work.
"I'll figure it out."
"Come to me if you notice anything like a headache or worse. I don't exactly know what side effects this is going to have. Better safe than sorry. I'd monitor you all day if I had the time." Echo held out her hand to Passion and, upon being taken, helped her stand up. "That sound okay to you?"
"Yes. Thank you for this."
"It's fine."
Five minutes later, Passion was back by the vending machines, sitting in a chair, eating a snack bar. "Can you taste this?"
That is a lot better than anything we had in Labyrinth.
"Things did get better after Moebius was taken out."
What is the place like now?
"I haven't been back in a long time. And with everything going on I have no idea, really."
Tell me really, what brought on this crazy idea? You are me, why this obsession with- I don't even know what to call it.
"So many things changed for me back then. I wasn't the same person anymore, in many ways. My personality changed, my entire approach to life changed. I stopped being you and started being me."
You draw that hard a distinction at it? Aren't you overreacting?
"I don't think so. Or do you think I am?"
Eh… I don't know what to think. This is so insanely weird. What are you expecting me to do if all of this works out the way you think it should? Go back to Labyrinth?
"That's if and when we get out of here."
Okay, so then before that.
"That's up to you."
What if I decide I don't like being surrounded by Pretty Cure?
"I find that hard to believe."
Why?
"If we hadn't started coming around to these values of being good, I wouldn't be here."
There was silence for a good minute. Fine, let's say I'm good with that. What do you want me to do?
"Love taught me that everyone controls their own fate. You might need help from others… have you looked at any of my memories?"
When exactly was I supposed to do that?
"There are several others here that are in the same situation I am. Enemies of Pretty Cure that switched sides, became Cures. Michiru and Kaoru, sisters. Yami, she was brought back from the dead. Regina… I don't think I can even explain her situation."
What a circus. Wait a second. I kinda didn't question it because you weren't, but that woman earlier-
"Echo?"
She's another Cure, right? How many others are there?
"Including everyone around Love, there's about forty of us."
Forty. You're kidding me. Aren't you supposed to be legendary warriors that exist to protect Infinity or something?
"Where do I even start?" Passion got up and walked over to the vending machines. "What do you want? We'll be here a while."
Just get something you like. I barely have any idea what any of this stuff is.
Going all the way to the end of the lineup, Passion ordered french fries and a burger – she didn't even stop to consider the ludicrousness of these machines. "Lots of legends out there, lots of Cures. Most of them are our age, too." The machine displayed several minutes waiting time.
If I didn't know I could just check your memories to be sure I'd make a bet that you're telling me nonsense. So what, even if I had beaten Peach, Berry and Pine back then another group would have stepped in?
"Probably not. Maybe. Hard to say. But a lot of time went by and now we're all here-"
Where is here anyway?
"Long story short, nobody is really sure. Explaining it will be a real chore so let's leave that for later."
But really, you and Peach huh. I mean… I kinda get it.
Passion felt a sting and her cheeks started to heat up. "Are you doing that?"
Not doing anything, shut it.
"I don't remember being interested in Love before I became Passion."
I didn't say I'm interested. I just get it. All right? She's this buzzing ball of lovable positivity that you can't help but come to like even if she always messes up your plans.
"Sounds to me like you do like her."
No way.
"I didn't tell you but those nearly forty Cures?"
What about them?
"All into girls."
Now I know you're just messing with me for the heck of it.
"Hah." Passion chuckled, then snorted. "By the way, it's not just Love."
What is?
"It's a long story, but Love and I are in a relationship-"
I get it already.
"With a third girl."
What?!
"Going to be a long day of explaining myself to… myself." Taking the finished meal back to a seat, she just went ahead and used her fingers to eat everything.
No wonder we tried to invade Earth if they have food this good.
"I'll feed you- me- lots of good stuff, but we need to agree on something else first."
Fine. What do you want from me?
"I'm not going to stop being intimate with Love and Ellen, so-" Her face lit up like crazy and she felt somehow just a smidgen violated. "Stop that!"
Not doing anything. It's your body. Her own thoughts were practically pouting in her face.
"Anyway! If I get intimate with either of them – and obviously I'm going to tell them about you – no talking. Just keep quiet."
Don't you realize how weird that is for me?!
"I'm sure you'll find that they both look even sexier than Love did back then."
That isn't really the issue here.
"You do remember what kind of clothes we used to wear back then, right? Getting embarrassed over being seen naked-"
Put me to sleep or something!
"Can I even do that?"
Go ask that Echo chick!
"Why does this bother you so much? You are essentially me and it's Love-"
Because they're not my girlfriends!
"So them being girls doesn't bother you?"
What a damn loaded question. If you fell in love with girls isn't it pretty damn obvious I would, too?
"By that same logic you would fall in love with those two."
And it doesn't strike you at all as a problem if that were to happen?
"I wouldn't want to sleep with myself but if you're fine with sharing-"
There's no way any reasonable person would be okay with this!
"Reasonable people don't have magic abilities and magical girl girlfriends. I'm sure Love wouldn't be bothered. Ellen would probably not mind either."
What is wrong with me? I mean You!
"Nothing is wrong with me." Passion continued eating fries. "How do these taste?"
Amazing, but that isn't the issue here!
"I'll talk to Echo if you absolutely need to be asleep- come to think of it, do you just see what I see or how does it work for you?"
Pretty much. I gotta say we… grew up pretty damn fine.
"Thanks, I guess?"
Does Pea- Love look as good?
"Love has grown up to be really amazing looking."
Huh…
"But honestly, everyone looks great. We have a few really tall girls around. And a few that are pretty, uh, developed."
What, even more than you? Me.
"Please keep screaming in my head to a minimum when I see Alice or Nao."
That's kind of a worrying request.
"I'm glad though."
About what?
"That you seem to be… distinct."
Not sure what you mean.
"I didn't know if there was enough left of who I used to be to make up a person. I didn't want just a second me running around. Someone who talks and thinks like I do."
That why I'm not looking at that mountain sized backlog of memories. Not because I'm lazy or anything. But because that means giving up any chance to make my own experiences.
"I'm smarter than I thought."
Eh… She didn't seem to agree with herself. The outfit we got on isn't terrible but I really prefer my old clothes.
"And you're giving me trouble about some simple intimacy with my girlfriends."
That's not the same!
"It was a fetish-y leather outfit and everything!"
Clothes are clothes, not actions!
"I can't believe I used to worry about stuff like that."
At least it's still red and black.
"This isn't my original outfit, you know."
Don't even tell me you wore one of those stupid Cure outfits that had magic skirts.
"Magic skirts?"
All frilly from below so even if you did a high-angle kick you could only see frills, no panties!
This time it was Passion who caused herself to blush. "Oh my god, I remember trying to look under Peach's skirt now! Why did you make me remember that?!" Passion pinched herself in the cheek and winced.
Are you damn stupid or what?! You know that'll hurt you as much as it hurts me!
"My skirt wasn't like that! But I wore black tights that were completely opaque."
Tights. I'm even more glad now I didn't look at those memories.
"Hey, I looked very good in those!"
Yeah. I'm sure.
"I don't want to hear that attitude from you!"
I'm just you, so-
"Oh no, you're not playing that card this time! You were all I'm gonna make my own memories and decisions and now you're acting like we're exactly the same!"
Bet you regret waking me up by now.
"Hah." Passion took a huge bite out of the hamburgers and chewed without thoughts for a good minute.
What? We're already bickering.
"When you get your own body you will be practically my twin-sister. Or sister at least. Family bickers."
What is this disgustingly intense optimism? How much did Love rub off on you?
"A lot. Thankfully." Passion burped very quietly, covering her mouth with her hand. "And I know myself. You act all grumpy and tough but I know you really do want to be properly alive again."
She said nothing in return for a while and Passion just ate, starting to feel rather full. What followed was just a single word, a quiet and somewhat hard to notice thought.
Thanks.
=== DISSONANCE ===
(Piece One)
"Tired?" Happy, part of group three, was sitting next to Mint, who had just been released from her prison and harsh labor. In response to Happy's question, Mint slumped so hard in the metal chair that she was practically lying in it, her butt just barely touching the edge of the seat, and letting out an exasperated groan the likes of which were reserved for people arbitrating high school debate teams. "That bad, huh?" Happy tried to laugh at it but it was more of a 'ha ha oh no I'm next' laugh than the genuine type.
Bloom and Black were staggering past them, heads hanging low, their faces twitching in that certain way when each step made sore muscles flare up and complain. They said not a word to the next two groups that had shown up a whole five minutes late and still somehow five minutes early – Ayumi had deliberately given them the wrong time.
Sunshine was in a corner, resting against a vending machine, still unopened can in hand and fast asleep. She was bruised all over and it looked like bathing or sleeping or really doing anything that involved bodily contact with anything would be a pretty nefarious adventure.
"You show this-" Lemonade gestured with her index finger at the wounded and exhausted soldiers. "To any of the actual villains we fought and they'll want to take classes on how to do this." She tried to spin the situation into something that had nothing to do with her but she was clenching a little on how hard she was going to get put through the wringer, just like these seven did.
And she wasn't the only one that took to the situation with more severity than they expected to be putting up. Aqua was so nervous that she was on her fourth coffee just so she could keep her hands and head busy and all that coffee was already showing – she kept tapping her right heel on the ground in an uneven rhythm and she felt like any second now she would be called up for an impromptu exam of something she could never study enough. Even though her girlfriend was there, she didn't have the nerve to be all affectionate right now; not to mention that Mint was very much not in a position to spare the energy.
"I've seen waiting rooms full of emergencies with less tension than this." Pine was very much feeling the atmosphere. Seeing everyone worked to the bone, even those who were practically beacons of stamina and guts, was giving her a certain kind of expectation. I'd rather be studying for the medical exams than be in this room.
The arena doors further down the hallway swung open with force. "Ladies! Let's get to work!" The voice sent everyone from group one and two that was still there into a frenzy, like a hare that heard a wolf's gnarl.
Lemonade tried to slink away upon seeing that but didn't get very far. Beauty and Sword flanked her from both sides, cutting her escape route off at the root. With groan and eyes rolled accompanying each other just like Beauty and Sword accompanied her, Lemonade resigned herself to her fate.
"Group three and group four." Echo turned to look at the clock and everyone saw a smear of blood in her hair and her cheek. That was worrying even those who were used to spartan standards, like Lemonade's captors. "Starting at… eight. Right on time." Her smile promised a lot of things, most of them pretty intimidating to her new trainees.
"And I thought Rikka teaching me medicine was hard." Sword felt a ten percent decrease in conviction that she was up to this.
"Not too late to join me and get out-" Lemonade tried again to get out of it.
"Unless you want me to snitch on both of you, get going." Windy walked past them in her ten centimeter heels, showing not an ounce of hesitation in her stride.
With seven come and gone, Echo ushered group three and four into the big battlefield that looked just as pristine as it had been when group one and two entered. "Don't let those exhausted looks fool you." Echo seemed to be reading their minds. "Tired, sure. Exhausted? Clearly. Worn down to the bone? To be expected. But any of those girls say 'I wish I hadn't come'? Anyone say 'Don't bother'?"
"Spare us the speech, Echo." Lemonade stepped out from the line and groaned without hesitation as she shrugged. "We know you have absolute mastery of cheesy speeches. Even Sword over there knows. It's that famous. Yeah, yeah, you're right, we all signed up for this voluntarily but nobody goes into the gym thinking 'oh man I can't wait to hurt all over tomorrow' so spare me the talks of how nice it'll be when we're done." Lemonade sighed so hard it was basically a grunt. "Let's get on with it."
"Nice speech." Echo mocked Lemonade and got her to open her mouth in horrifying realization.
"She got you there." Aqua felt strangely relieved and also very amused. "Getting you to give a speech for her? I wish I had something to record this for Ako."
"You can trash talk each other later. First, assignments. Pine, Windy, Happy? Over there in the forest. Aqua, Lemonade, you're with them too but keep your distance from the first three. At least a thousand meters. Sword, Beauty? You two are over in the desert."
Five minutes later, Lemonade was sitting on a large rock, accompanied by Aqua. "How do you stay motivated for something like this?"
No answer came for about five seconds – right up until Aqua lost control of a thin water pillar she was manifesting in front of her. "It's been one day. Are you already giving up?"
"I sing for a living, you think I could do that if I was only able to perform when motivated? Hell, you play the violin, you telling me you were motivated for every single performance?"
"Point taken. So what is this about?"
"Everyone else seems to be all- you know, excited? Something like that. Team unga bunga could barely walk out the door they were that worn down. That really kills my desire to be here, signing up for it myself or not."
"And?"
"How do you get up at five in the morning the next day after something like that thinking 'hell yeah I wanna practice until I can barely stand again today'?"
"You don't. You get up knowing that it'll suck and you do it anyway."
"That's already a lot of my life back home. I don't want to do that shit here."
Aqua stopped what she was doing, sighed and jumped up on the rock, her heels making loud clacking sounds as she landed. Folding back her skirt in the back she sat down next to Lemonade. "What is this really about? I don't know you as well as Rin or Ayu do, or Ako at this point, but this isn't about just motivation to power through something that sucks."
Lemonade chuckled. "Close but no cigar. No, this really is about motivation."
"Motivation… because you don't want to do this and bicker all day about it."
Lemonade looked away and clicked her tongue. "I'm as crude as we come and I'm dating miss crown princess of Majorland. Gimme a break if I want to not bitch about being worn out all day long."
"So this is about Ako. Or rather, you want to improve-" Aqua cut herself off when she saw Lemonade's eyes narrow. This must be really hard for her to talk about. I kind of get it. "I think your problem isn't that you need to figure out how to stay motivated but how not to complain about something you don't like doing."
"Great, so the solution is suck it up? No thanks, I tried that once. Didn't work out so great."
Aqua grimaced, raised her hand and slapped Lemonade in the back of her head. It made a satisfying smacking sound and her heart beat five times faster in fear of what she was kicking loose there.
"Hey..." Lemonade sounded like she was just about ready to hit Aqua with a large standing speaker.
"Will you get over yourself? Do you think Ako would like you if she couldn't deal with your complaining?"
"That isn't the point. And I swear, if you slap me again-"
"But it is! Making an effort is nice but trying too hard and falling flat on your face because you tried to jump to the moon in one go is obviously just stupid. You didn't get into music and consider yourself a failure because you didn't do your first show in Tokyo Dome!"
"Wow, didn't know that not complaining is considered fucking stardom if you're me."
"Not complaining, no. Not complaining about this? Ayu's a slave driver. My head was killing me so much after that first session I wished for intravenous aspirin. Komachi said five times last night how she was not going today. And she went anyway. Everyone is complaining. I admire you want to do some self improvement because Ako seems like she's unflappable but you should ask her how she feels about this before you try to improve something that's fine."
"Look who's talking about asking how people feel."
"Oh, I can say it because I lived the alternative. Komachi did, too. I don't want to see anyone else screw themselves."
Lemonade chuckled, snorted, chuckled again and finally burst into full on laughter. "Seriously?! Seriously?! You try and be a better person, better girlfriend and then your old teammate tells you, nah, you're just fucking up a perfectly good version of yourself."
"I didn't-" Aqua grimaced and tilted her head to the side. "I didn't say that but I guess I did mean it. Anyway, you know what will happen if Ayu just finds us sitting around doing nothing?"
"Too late!" Someone screamed at them from behind, poking their sides with lightning fast finger stabs.
"Garagrgrghhlll!" Lemonade lunged about and tried to smash whatever was behind her with a long chain while Aqua soared into the crown of a particularly tall tree more than ten meters away, a loud Kyaaaah filling the forest.
Looking at her teammate with a look of that worked a bit better than I expected, Echo tugged on the chain that was sort of hanging over her head and getting in the way of seeing what was in front of her. "Okay, maybe we need to also work on you girl's situational awareness."
Aqua's heart was pounding so hard she heard a shrill noise in her ears. Ayu! Screaming in her thoughts, Aqua made a mental note to never slack off during training again. At least not today.
"I don't know what you two have been taking about but I have a feeling it wasn't about training. I get that everyone has their problems but can they really not wait a few hours?"
Lemonade looked a big disheveled after her sudden and panicked reaction. "Never! Do! That! Again!"
"Don't be such a wuss." Echo clicked her tongue and then grinned. "Your face right now is amazing, I wish I had a camera."
"I'll end you."
"Aqua! Come down already!" Echo shouted. It only took a moment before Aqua landed on the forest floor, a few steps away and still visibly upset. "Since when have you two been such scaredy cats?"
"Anyone would get startled out of their mind from that!" I so want to punch her in the face but I know it'll not even do anything.
"Beauty didn't. Anyway, I guess it's not going great for both of you?"
"I was actually making decent progress." Aqua went through her hair with her right hand, trying to get it to stay down but the odd strand here and there sprung up like an angry cat's tail did. "I just took a small break to talk to Lemonade."
"And you?"
Lemonade just stared at Echo, the way a snake would stare at a frog. Just in this case the frog was the size of a small building and the snake wasn't any larger than one normally got, so the whole thing really bordered on the ineffective and silly. "Starting now. You startle me like that again and I will perfect a way to hang you."
Echo just smirked, took a step backwards and very slowly turned invisible.
"Showoff!" Aqua was more upset about that than Lemonade was. "Ayu, you showoff!"
"Dammit, I almost pissed myself." Lemonade could see that Aqua was not doing any better than she did.
"I'm… taking a bathroom break." Aqua looked away. "I didn't. I swear. But I really need to go now."
While all of that was happening, Beauty and Sword were finishing up their first exercise match. For them, real combat experience was the best way to improve and so they went at it very hard in the desert. Large swaths of sand were frozen solid and huge glacial spikes were littering the otherwise sandy dunes.
"What were you trying to do in the seventh movement?" They had separated combat into actions, movements and approaches, each bigger and more encompassing than the last. This only worked because both of them had a large amount of real combat experience and on top of that a keen understanding of each other's fighting style.
"Manufacturing an ice shadow to create a pincer approach." Beauty answered with complete honesty. "Why did you bait out an opening action from me?"
"I am already capable of strong offensive action so I'm trying to remain on the defensive. My goal is to turn my own body into a blade."
"Close quarters priorities." Beauty went quiet for a moment. "Then your sixth action in the fourth approach?" The action in question had been Sword letting Beauty get much closer than mere strike range of her weapons, which caused Beauty to retreat, anticipating a trap that in the end did not exist.
"Yeah, that too. What about the seventeenth action in the twelfth movement in the eighth approach?" It got to the level of play-by-play analysis that no normal mind could possibly follow. Sword gave Beauty an inquisitive look. "You retaliated but the moment your weapon was broken you retreated – but we were surrounded by glacial mass, why not use it?"
"Difference in objective. You acted primarily defensive – I didn't press pursuits because that is not what I am trying to develop." There was a solid twenty seconds of silence before a reaction from Sword came.
"I see. The objective here isn't to beat me. Just like mine isn't to beat you. It's to hone and develop a different type of skills. So pursuing my openings is pointless as it would simply shorten the engagement and cut an approach or movement short." Beauty smiled at her conclusion and that smile was such a surprise – and radiant – that Sword blushed. "If you do that in the middle of combat I think it will catch anyone off guard." Sword muttered to herself. That's a level of foul play that should be Mana's domain.
"This is very enlightening. Having a competent partner is worth so much." Beauty looked up and squinted. The sun was quite brutal over there in the desert, compared to the big clearing and most assuredly compared to the forest where shade was in abundance. "If you don't mind-"
"My style of combat?" Sword anticipated this question.
"No, I, uh… this is a more personal question." Beauty looked like she was really struggling to find the words. "You were seeing Mana as well as Ange before, yes?"
"That's right. I'm impressed you remember that. We broke that up almost immediately after coming here." Sword didn't feel any embarrassment at all talking about this.
"How do you- I mean how did you… are there any bad feelings between you and Mana now?"
Sword could – at times – be really insightful into what others were feeling. "Is this about Nao?"
Beauty was now visibly uncomfortable. "Yes. I'm worried about how she would react to me dating someone else..." It was hard to change and even then, it didn't happen overnight.
"She broke up with you, right?"
"Yes, but-"
"Just be open about it. I doubt Pine will mind." Sword stopped and suddenly looked confused. "Sorry, not sure how I wound up at Pine… I guess… it makes sense if I look at who is actually available?" I don't remember thinking about this before. Was there some obvious sign I picked up on earlier when we were all waiting? They didn't even sit together though.
"No, you're right. Going by who is single, Pine is who makes the most sense." Beauty materialized a small icicle and started drawing lines into the sand. "It just sort of happened but I don't want to mess it up like I did with Nao."
"What do you think was the problem with Nao?"
"Probably that I wasn't around enough."
"Well, unless you learn how to teleport, that won't be a problem here, will it?" Sword was a little amused. "But you know that. So… are you worried because your last relationship fell apart?"
"Yes."
"And now you're already in a new relationship."
"Yes again."
"It feels awful because you moved on so quickly."
"Are you certain your powers do not include mind reading like Pine?"
"I got a few years on you and I've been around Mana a long time. It's normal to feel like this. Was Nao your first girlfriend?"
Beauty just nodded.
"Such a cliched scenario."
"I'm sorry-"
"No, I mean… that wasn't meant in a bad way. It's something that happens all the time, everywhere in the world. And most people don't feel nearly as bad as you do. That just shows you have a really good character and you're loyal. Pine's lucky."
"You think so?"
"If – and I'm just talking hypothetically – I didn't have Ange, maybe… just maybe I would have been interested in you."
"E-Eh?" Beauty blushed and broke her icicle by accident.
"Just saying if! I'm not Mana, I'm all maxed out with one girlfriend."
"I wish I was as good at this as I was at fighting."
"We all got our strengths. Except Mana, she's just great at everything. Except saying no."
"She must be amazing to be dating so many girls at the same time."
"Special circumstances, but yeah. Mana is… maybe a little too amazing."
"What does that mean?"
"Uh…" Sword scratched her cheek. "It gets a little demotivating when someone right next to you can do anything with minimum effort. That's not why all of us are so extremely specialized, but it sure made it easier to feel good about achieving something when you're not competing with a perfect do-it-all."
"Specialization is key to develop. Trying to do everything isn't necessary if you have partners." Beauty averted her eyes. "Although I am the last person to say that to anyone."
"You are awfully hard on yourself."
Beauty sighed loudly. "Pine tells me that too. That I should 'loosen up'."
"That's good advice. Ange sometimes tells that to me too..."
"Birds of a feather."
"Cures of a… what do we even call a group of Cures?"
"A… legend?" Beauty didn't hesitate long for that.
"How do you figure?"
"I don't know, just came to me."
"Should we continue before Echo comes to yell at us?"
"Good idea." Beauty stood up and held out her hand to Sword. Taken up on the offer, the two of them suddenly clashed without warning, icy weapon creaking as it smashed into an energy blade. Pushing Sword down with raw force, Beauty exerted her ability and started to freeze even the energy blade that sprung forth from Sword's hand.
A lethal kick soared through the air, a thirty centimeter blue energy blade emergent from Sword's boot, narrowly missing Beauty's face and cutting through a few hairs that didn't make the retreat in time. Using her hands to propel her legs like a rotor, Sword unleashed a rapidly turning onslaught of attacks on her training partner. Her hands became stuck on the sand when Beauty flash froze the entire dune, speeding forward at her enemy, an icy greatsword colliding, sparking against four blades piercing out of Sword's shins.
"Oh." Beauty looked impressed. "This is certainly new."
"I'm not done yet." Sword focused on her arms and hands, stuck in ice and smashed through it by slashing it apart from the inside, creating blades like a hedgehog's back. Aiming straight for Beauty's throat, she balanced herself on just one hand, her legs blocking the greatsword still, while her now freed hand was approaching a critical zone fast.
Air was hammered out of her lungs by a half-formed copy of Beauty, made entirely out of ice, one arm a big mace and the other missing, no lower body at all. But it had enough kinetic force behind it to knock Sword out of her stance – the greatsword smashed into the frozen sand and Sword slid down the dune, tumbling, slicing the ice apart and using the emergent solid chunks of frost to kick herself off the ground and into the air.
Materializing a bow, Reika took aim but didn't fire. Her purpose wasn't to beat Sword after all. Focusing her magic into the ground around her, she managed to form a pair of arms, a head, a bow and half a torso, all separate from each other. "This is much more difficult than I anticipated..." She fired and the arrow cut through the air, finding it's mark.
Sword blocked the arrow with her leg, a thin energy blade covering her entire limb – to no avail. A single arrow was enough to shatter the leg-blade and pierce her leg. She grunted and started to fall. Before she could hit the sands below, she was caught in mid-air by her opponent, who looked really worried.
"Don't give me that face." Sword grimaced. "Now we're even for me slicing off your hand earlier."
"That did hurt quite a bit I may add!" Beauty let Sword down. "Can you continue?" That Sword had a gaping hole in her leg didn't seem to faze her at all.
Trying to stand on the leg, Sword nearly fell over. "Yes. This will be good practice for fighting in a damaged state."
"You are much tougher than I expected."
"Mana rubs off on you after a while. Don't tell Ange about this, though, she's gonna chew me out."
"Is she the one that…"
"Unlike most there's no one in our relationship that always calls the shots."
"And she still chews you out?"
"You wanna tell me if I tell Pine about slicing off one of your hands or a leg, she's not going to tell you that is not a good way to train?"
Beauty paused. "Ah… well… That would probably be unpleasant."
"See?"
"I agree, we should not talk about this."
"We have it hard, us close range fighters, huh?"
Beauty smiled a little. "You think so?"
"Yeah! You know what, if we can still move when we're done, we should get drinks together."
"You… want to get drinks with me?" Beauty seemed really surprised.
"What, you never go social drinking with anyone on your team?"
"Not… really..." I've never gone social drinking with anyone at all.
"First time for everything then." Sword limped towards Beauty. It was a split second between happy talking and Sword slashing at Beauty with an elbow emergent blade, switching to full combat mode.
Taking the blade straight into her arm, Beauty stepped hard on the sand and froze it over, a pair of her own arms forming from the ground, wielding a broadsword. Attempting a defense by turning her left leg into a blade, Sword failed – and so did Beauty, the arms cracking and failing under the weight of the large weapon. Normally neither of them would have missed a beat to continue but it was not real combat after all. Sword retracted her blade, Beauty froze over her wound with a grimace and they stepped away from each other.
"You think the kinetic stability of the ice needs to be reinforced further?"
"You have a good eye. The internal stability was compromised because I didn't freeze the ground thoroughly enough."
"My boots didn't become stuck, I noticed that."
"What about your materialization?"
"I think that's down to experience. I'm going to get sliced up a lot more often before I have this down."
"Want to run some materialization drills isolated from combat?"
"What about your training?" To Sword this sounded good, but it was leaving Beauty with a burden.
"I will practice asynchronous conceptualization and materialization. There is no point if I cannot replenish as needed without discarding existing constructs."
"Sounds good to me then."
"Before we start..." Beauty looked straight up, shielding her eyes from the sun with her right hand. "Should I do something about the sun?"
"I know you're strong but destroying the sun seems a little difficult."
"Destroy… no, I meant should I create a ceiling?" Is that the image people have of me? Someone who would just randomly try and destroy the sun?
"If you can, please."
While Beauty create a simple ceiling, supported by four pillars but no walls, above them that had internally shifted crystalline structure to prevent light from coming through easily, Sword took a few steps back. "First I would like to test with my arms. Let's go with a hundred attacks for starters."
"Under-" Beauty cleared her throat. "Alright."
While those two shifted their training regimen slightly, the last three of the seven were taking a break entirely. Windy was sitting on the forest floor, pinching her nose to stop a nosebleed caused by repeated brain injury. "Without this special place, this sort of training would take years to complete." The limiting factor was that she could only attempt the channeling of her powers or being subject to Pine's and Happy's so often before it became a serious health risk. But in the arena, she was restored to before entering upon completion.
Happy was reading little words from a list. "I'm Cure Happy, I'm Cure Happy..."
"Windy." Pine was the third and lying down on her stomach, scratching at the dried blood that was stuck to her ears.
"What?" Both Windy and Happy responded. Windy groaned and pointed at Happy's piece of paper while Happy went back to read out loud.
"Doing this at the breakneck speed the others are developing their abilities is kinda debilitating… in more than one way." Pine knew that complaining was not getting her anywhere but she really was quite annoyed.
They had decided to run some practical tests but the results were one disaster after another. Happy ended up believing she was Windy half the time, Windy had shut down Pine so many times that she had started to leak out the ears and Happy had functionally broken Pine and Windy's emotional centers after too much overstimulation.
"I think Happy is about to reach her limit soon." Windy briefly let go of her nose and immediately started bleeding. That's not good.
"Same here… I feel this really, really intense craving for egg over rice… Is that from you, Windy?"
"Used to eat that a lot for breakfast."
Happy suddenly screamed. "Ah! I'm Cure Happy! Miyuki!"
Windy slightly rolled her eyes. "Four-hundred eighty-eight seconds." She had been counting the time it took for Happy's brain to adjust properly. "That's fifty-three seconds up from last time and four-hundred and two up from the first time."
"Okay, we're done with practical tests for today." Pine didn't want to get in trouble for messing up Happy any more than this. "Going back to theory for the rest of today. And probably next time."
Happy dropped back and fell into the grass. "This is really hard!"
"I don't wanna say we have the hardest to improve abilities of everyone here, but it does feel that way right about now." Pine slowly rolled over, tried to sit up and immediately fell to the side. She didn't even seem to realize she had fallen over.
"Pine, your equilibrium." Happy pointed it out for her.
"Again? Still? Hah..."
"Explain to me how you normally use [Domination]." They were all in the same boat so they helped each other.
"I create a pseudo electrical magic signal that is fired at neuron speed at my target. On contact the magic expands across the target neuron pathways and takes over. The existing consciousness functionally exists under the magic, which is like a magic coating over the original pathways."
"That sounds really hard… how do you control us?" Happy was absolutely part of the discussion. She had some very helpful and creative insights before.
"After using [Domination], the signal is magically going back and forth. That's why it breaks if there is some insurmountable blockade like a magic negating zone around the target. Functionally, I think rudimentary commands that put pressure on the original pathways to create a puppet-master response-"
"What's that?" Happy asked.
"She basically plants a basic command in her target's main consciousness that is then turned into a more elaborate action by said main consciousness." Windy had gotten the gist of it.
"Oh. So that's why you don't actually need to know everyone's abilities in and out. You make them think fight enemy and they will react accordingly."
She's way sharper than she looks. Or acts. It's kinda scary, actually, Pine thought and nodded. "The problem is that if I try to do this on two targets simultaneously, the impulses get completely mixed up. I even get relay feedback from one target's main consciousness and it fires onto the second."
"So that's why..." Happy made some very lewd and graphic groping motions. "You really love boobs a lot, Windy."
Should I try and wipe her memories… better not. "So you need a solution for how to control more than one target? Is that really what you want?" Is there maybe a better way to develop her mind control?
"Picture this; Rosetta and Mint under my control."
"Scary, scary." Happy slowly shook her head. "What if you give both targets the same command?"
"They do have to be somewhat specific so in most situations that would be very problematic. I considering broad commands but even so, the feedback is an issue."
"In more ways than one." Windy looked at Happy.
"Come on, there's nothing bad about it!" Happy reached for her own boobs. "Wow… they're nothing like Bright's..."
"Why did she end up like that?" Windy pointed directly at Happy.
"I figure the strongest prevalent thoughts are transmitted, but I really have no idea what is really happening. How about you, any feedback from Happy?"
"Maybe. Happy, how do you feel about egg over rice?"
"It's my favorite breakfast!"
"That explains why I thought I ate that a lot for breakfast."
"This is really bad. We hit a point of circular logic. We all think that which means we can't ascertain who the originator of the thought is anymore."
"That means the backlash is worse than you thought, then."
"A lot worse… if it's this bad there is no way I can make this work without a fundamental change to how I enforce control."
"What about a box?" Happy was offering a suggestion.
"A box?" Pine didn't follow.
"Yeah! Like an outlet strip. You send everything there and filter what comes back!"
"That might sound easy in theory but to filter thoughts I would look at them anyway. I can't just program a mental box to keep out specific thoughts. That's not how my magic works."
"Hold on, Happy is on to something here." Windy didn't see it as a failed suggestion just yet.
"I'm listening."
"Instead of it being just a box, compartmentalize a small section of your own brain. Use [Domination] on yourself in a slightly different way and create a two-part holding block that will accept the feedback from each other. Then you keep that box closed off and only open it when you actually enact control commands to the target. That way you never have contact to both targets simultaneously."
"That's one heck of a tall order..."
"But it is possible with your magic, right?"
"I… think? Maybe. I can't be sure. Using [Domination] on myself is something I never even considered."
"What about me, what about me?!" Happy wildly waved her hand in the air like she was in a classroom.
"I'm not even sure where to start..." Windy slightly tilted her head. "I still don't really understand what you're trying to do."
"I want to make everyone go Waaaah and Uoooohhh and Kyaaaaa!"
"Happy, we're both the scientific type, we don't understand an explanation like that."
"Oh." Happy leaned back. "Give me a little time."
"My turn then?" Windy scratched at her cheek. "Functionally I know what I want to do but in effect that is a lot harder than I expected."
"It's not simply shutting down consciousness, right?"
"It was fine as an ability while I knew for a fact that Bright, Egret and Bloom would be by my side, but I now have to consider that shutting myself down in turn is too big a liability. Especially for my wallet. My goal is to be able to do three things, all in isolation of the other functions. One, inhibit cognitive function. Take away the sight of someone like Black Lily and she becomes more or less harmless. Two, disable physical coordination. That is obviously targeted at the physical fighters. Three, disrupt magical processing."
"All of these require some level of conscious or subconscious thought. So you want to interfere with the part of the brain that handles these?"
"In simple terms, yes."
"And the problem is?"
"I used a sledgehammer all the time and now I'm trying to wield a scalpel."
"Ah." Pine saw that that could be difficult. "So you have the functionality down?"
"No." Windy didn't make excuses. "I have not a clue what part of the brain handles magical processing."
"Well, we're not going to find that in an anatomy book."
"Do you have any clue?"
"I could try explaining it in the context of my use of [Domination] but I kind of have my own system for that so translating it into some kind of scientific term… That's probably impossible."
"Oh, if you want just that, it's the anterior cingulate cortex and the parietal cortex."An unexpected curve ball came from Happy.
"How do you even know that?" Windy wanted to be perplexed but her emotional center was shot.
"Not sure!" Happy looked really confident in not knowing.
"She must be putting together information we both had with her own and somehow… it's a miracle." Pine also wanted to be impressed but she too had no means left.
"I figured out how to explain what I wanna do!" Happy looked at Pine and Windy with great enthusiasm. "I want to bust up the prefrontal cortex!"
Windy glanced at Pine, who explained. "You want to take away impulse control?"
"Yes!" Happy looked glad. "By taking away impulse control, emotions will direct all action which means critical significance like team alignment will fly right out the window. It will also completely render void any sense of urgency and capacity to assess danger properly. The impulse to pursue an enemy for that one more hit even though the brain knows normally they are about to counter… by taking away the ability to listen to that, everyone becomes super easy to predict!"
Pine looked back at Windy. "Ultra scary."
"Yeah. Ultra scary."
"Not any scarier than what you two do!"
"Just so I'm sure… what do you think happens if I taunt someone or ask them a question?"
"They'll totally just follow the first impulse they get!"
"That's one hell of a dangerous ability."
"It's better than having your free will taken away!"
"I mean that is pretty dangerous, too, but..."
"So what are we gonna do for the rest of today?" Windy let go of her nose again and a swath of blood ran out. "I'm probably going to die in a little bit." She couldn't even be dramatic about it.
"I think we should just focus on detailing the process and approach more." Pine didn't want to die from internal brain hemorrhage. That was a nasty way to go out.
"What about my ability?!" Happy wanted some help, too.
"What's your problem right now with it?"
"Hm… I kinda try to make it go bazoom and swoosh and… ah right, scientific. I try to force the brain to direct all neuron traffic to the prefrontal cortex and overload it so much that it becomes unresponsive."
"And?" Windy asked.
"Other parts get in the way! I can't find it! I miss!"
Pine paused and sat up only to fall over immediately after. She again didn't notice that she fell over. "So your problem is anatomical?"
"My magic is about restricting, binding, sealing up stuff… so maybe I'm using the wrong approach."
"What if instead of overloading the part you instead bind it so that it can't operate."
"Bind it how?"
"Tiny, tiny magic seals all over the neuron pathways? Kinda like Pine does, just more targeted and completely blocking any traffic instead of superseding it."
"That sounds really hard. Tiny, tiny seals… how tiny?"
"Tiny enough that you would need a microscope to see them." Windy offered a scale.
"Isn't that ultra impossible?!"
"What about binding the entire cortex instead of individual pathways?" Pine tried to help.
"The entire… oh, what if I bind the entire brain?!"
"Wouldn't that just be like what Windy does, but better? No offense."
"None taken."
"No, no, I just mean like… zing… er… I could put pressure on the entire brain so that the prefrontal cortex is deprived of blood and information and… and…" Happy fell over without warning and started foaming at the mouth and finally started to convulse rapidly.
"That's not good." Windy tried to crawl forward, lost all vision and crashed face first into the ground, bleeding heavily from her nose.
Pine remained put on the ground, watching the other two die without any ability to even feel bad for them. "I kinda expected trouble but this is pretty gruesome… Echo, you there?"
Nothing happened and Pine just laid there, two meters away from the now dead Happy and Windy. "This isn't optimal."
Another few minutes passed. Starting to taste something sour in her mouth, Pine realized that she had lost access to her motor functions. Her mouth refused to work and her tongue was completely numb. I guess I took more damage than I expected.
A few hundred meters away were Aqua and Lemonade, taking a break, both of them completely soaked and sitting back to back. A water sphere had gone out of control just earlier. "Lemme just tell you a thing."
"Do you have to?" Aqua was super tired out.
"Training sucks."
"You really had to."
"Ugh… why did you have to be using water? You couldn't be Cure Nice Breeze or Cure Refreshing Soda or something?"
"I don't want to hear that from you of all things, Lemonade."
"It's not the drink!"
Aqua rolled her eyes and shut up for a good minute. "Fanta."
"Hey!" Lemonade flung around and grabbed Aqua by her arm. "Who the hell spread that around?!"
"You're stupid if you think you can keep something like that a secret in a place full of women." Aqua was too tired to get especially upset at being grabbed.
"I'll have to kill everyone." There was a dreadful terror in Lemonade's eyes.
"Right, right, after our break."
Lemonade let go of Aqua and sighed. "Why is this such a drag. This was so much easier when we were teens."
"I can't imagine teenage me coming up with this sorta ability. And you're still a teen. You're eighteen."
"That's not how it works."
"How does it work then?"
"The other way."
"What's the other way then?"
"It's a secret."
She's kind of cute in her obstinate ways. "I see. So, making any progress?"
Lemonade flapped her lips loudly and an unnecessarily long time. "I wish. This is gonna take me forever."
"That's my song."
"Makes me wonder how everyone else is doing."
"Beauty and Sword probably turned the entire desert into a shaved ice mountain or something like that." Those two are complete combat naturals after all. Especially Beauty. Aqua couldn't have been further off.
"I can see it." Lemonade grunted. "It's like… I don't really wanna fight those two. Makes me feel like I'm a villain about to be kicked to the curb."
"Fighting then is more like… you know, fighting the villain."
"Oh. You're right. Especially Beauty. That robot like approach."
"Don't say that to her face."
"What if she is a robot? Do we know for sure-"
"Obviously she's not a robot. You think robots can become Cures? Come on now."
"Luminous, Bright, Windy, Rose, Passion, Black Lily, Beat, Muse, Joker… wow, is Happy's team the only one without an illegal alien?"
"Don't call them that."
"How much did Kurumi mooch off of you?"
"Err..."
"See?"
"Still, you wanna say that to Luminous or Muse?"
"Of course not. I wanna live through the day."
"Which one is gonna kill you?"
"Everyone, because I made Luminous cry, and then Rose kills me one over somehow. And Muse if I say it to her. Also I'd probably sleep on the couch for a week."
"See? Don't call them that. Especially not behind their back."
"What, you're gonna rat me out? You know snitches get stitches."
"I'll live with stitches. You? Not so much."
"Damn that is cold."
"So what is it exactly you're going for?"
"This again? I'm not in the mood to talk about my future right now."
"Not how you plan to live with Muse you… I'm talking about your ability."
"Oh that. How the hell was I supposed to get that when you suddenly change the topic?"
"Now you know."
"You heard what Echo said to me, so, pretty much that."
Aqua said nothing for a good ten seconds. "Explain it to me, in your words." Because I don't remember the first thing about it. I got enough on my mind.
"Eh, do I have to?" Lemonade sharply exhaled. "I chain one thing to another-"
"Thing?"
"Cures, villains, rocks, expired mapo tofu, whatever have you."
"Mapo..."
"I don't just use any chain for that but a special one that's even more unbreakable than my normal ones." She stopped. You're allowed to laugh. "And I figure I add a special trick to it, connecting the atomic stability of both targets-"
"How do you know how atomic stability works?"
"I don't, I figure Beauty or Diamond can explain that to me later."
"Right..."
"So basically I connect A to B and if you damage B, the damage is also applied to A."
"Isn't that something Peach does?"
"Not like she's got a patent on it."
"That's one lofty goal though."
"It's a work in progress. What about you? What are you doing?"
Oh, right, she went off before Echo talked to me. "I know I am going to work with manipulated water in some form so right now I am working out a theory in my head and practicing control."
"Theory of what?"
"Like… using water to create liquid shields or using pressurized beams to attack, but without actually thinking about doing it."
"A water laser?" Lemonade focused on the wrong part.
"Why a laser?"
"Packs a punch, right?"
"A laser is bundled light that-"
"I know what a damn laser is."
"Pressurized water beams are nothing like lasers."
"What happens if you shoot a metal plate with your water beam? It gets a hole, right? What happens if you shoot the same thing with a laser?"
"That's over simplifying things too much. With that logic a punch is the same as a laser if it leaves a hole!"
"Yes, yes, you're so smart."
"Don't take your cranky out on me."
"What are you gonna do after this?"
"Probably sleep like a log?"
"Seriously, going back to sleep?" Lemonade couldn't believe it.
"Are you kidding me? You still wanna do stuff after this?"
"Hell yeah I do. I go to sleep after this and by the time I wake up, Muse's going to training and then she comes back and wants to sleep."
"I suppose that's a good reason."
"Right?"
"I'm definitely gonna go sleep though."
"No sex with Mint?"
"She's probably sleeping like a rock right now."
"Ah, right. She was in the group before us."
"What are you gonna use to facilitate the atomic linkage between object A and B?"
"No idea. I figure if I get creative enough I can figure it out."
"I wish I could be that confident."
"What, you don't think you can do this?"
"With enough practice, sure, but… everyone else seems to be progressing smoothly and-" Lemonade burst into laughter. "What?"
"Smoothly? I don't know my ass from my head right now! You really think the others will get this done any faster than you? Did you look at them? Some of the first group had dead eyes. They were dead inside! Their spirit was leaving through their mouth! There is no way in hell this crap is going smoothly for anyone at all."
"You think so?"
"Nah. I know. I know what real struggle looks like. They were all ready to throw themselves off a cliff. So am I."
"Maybe you're right."
"So doubtful. When have I ever been wrong?"
"I could wipe the floor with Ayu if I had one percent more power for every time you've been wrong about anything."
"Big words."
"Why a chain that transmits damage?"
"Because some of us, like your girlfriend, are really hard to get to. And some others are a real pain in the ass with their sonic speed."
"That's more about shackling them."
"Figure I'd add an extra layer of screw you to it because just chaining them down I can already do anyway. And they'd just break whatever I chain to them. But-"
"I get it. If they attack whatever they are chained to and the chain transmits that damage back to them-"
"Yep, they're screwed. Good idea, right?"
"What about the physical fighters just grabbing what you shackle them to and using it like a flail?"
"Decent idea, right?" Lemonade corrected it down from good to decent.
"Huh… you didn't think of that?"
"It's a damn work in progress, I told you that! What about you?! It's not like you can go toe to toe with someone like Rose with… water beams."
"High enough pressure and you can cut diamonds with water."
"That's bull."
"Want to ask Muse about it and look dumb, be my guest."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
"So if you hit a person with that, what happens?"
"With enough pressure it should go through and through. Like a bullet hole."
"So like a laser. How hard is that to do?"
"I'm still here and nowhere near that level. Compressing and applying that much pressure… it's going to take some insane level of control."
"So your thing is all about control?"
"What, yours isn't?"
"I plunk it down and it works. If I get it to work. But a chain like that is gonna be a big eater. And putting out more than one at a time is probably a bad idea."
"How come?"
"To sustain my chains I do need to keep channeling some magic into them and actually focus. A super chain like what I'm trying to make is gonna need a lotta focus. Two is probably just gonna render me immobile or something stupid. Like making me run right into Black's fist."
"That sounds like a really bad time."
"You never gotten punched in the face by one of our muscle heads?"
"I… probably made myself forgot if that happened."
"It's like flying head first into a building."
"You wanna keep going?"
"What?"
"Training."
"Ah… sure. Before Ayu gets on our case again."
Just as they started going again, Beauty and Sword were finished. Sword had shallow cuts all over her right and left arm while Beauty was visibly exhausted, leaned against a large block of ice that provided a nice cooling effect in the desert heat. "How is it?"
Sword created another small blade that emerged out of her skin and ran along her forearm. She dinged it lightly against an ice great-axe that Beauty had left about and the blade broke. "I think I will have to reconsider the fundamental basis of this process."
"Can you explain that in detail?"
"Functionally I apply a creation process converting magical energy into pseudo-mass onto myself, allowing part of the blade to pass through my body by suspending the conversion process as needed and run it at full strength just above the outermost skin layer. The main problem I am running into is that I cannot get enough kinetic strength into the blade, at least not for more than a couple minutes. The more energy I spend the less stable the process becomes."
Beauty thought about a possible solution for a moment. "The problem lies in the layered process function."
Sword sighed. "So you think so, too?"
"Without a unified approach you will lack the required mental processing capability to create a blade strong enough to withstand the more powerful attacks."
"The question is what else I can do. I can't just convert my own flesh into a blade, that is impractical in the real world and will also leave me without the ability to create and cease at will."
"What about a coat of arms?"
"Explain."
"Instead of running individual processes across your entire body, what about a full body covering process through which you can localized instructions. Instead of setting up a process on your arm, you could simply instruct a present process to operate on a specific location."
"Won't that be a persistent energy drain?"
"Yes."
"Diamond and Rosetta are the ones that have the huge magical output. Me, not so much."
"A process that covers your entire body but does nothing unless instructed should be a much lighter strain than the continued creation of individual processes. It will also be a much lighter mental burden."
Sword tilted her head, sat up straight and smiled. "You are very good at this."
"Eh? T-Thanks." Beauty was caught off guard just a little there.
"Lucky for me I haven't yet spent much time on a fruitless endeavor. Well, not entirely fruitless, the creation of process experience will come in handy. But what about you?"
"I have to admit that I am a little stumped on what to do."
"What exactly is the problem?"
"Two-fold. One is that my magic capacity is too low for what I have been trying to do so I will need to find a way to supplement it. Second is that there is a huge variance in kinetic stability required depending on action and equipment, resulting in more required calculations than reasonable."
"So in other words you need extra magic and extra processing power."
"In your words, yes."
"You know, in my time there was research to turn crystals into super-high capacity storage and computing hardware. If you compress ice enough, it becomes ice crystals, yes?"
"Trying to solve the thought computing issue with higher magical expenditure is circular logic."
"Hm… you're right. Now this is not something I would normally suggest but what about simple intensity training? Have you done that before?"
"My energy output has already been more than adequate so I am afraid I have not."
"You should try it. Ange and Regina had some issues with their magical capacity years ago and they put in the time and hard work to raise it. It is very time intensive though, so I'm not sure this will work for you."
"I appreciate the thought but I expect a method like that would take a long time."
"What about applying your own suggestion?"
"A coat of arms? I create outside of my body and the goal is to have a number of ice constructs that served as my assists, I am not sure if that has any use."
"Right now you just make the copy out of whatever ice you produce right before, yes?"
"I thought that the most efficient."
"How magically intensive is the ice creation itself?"
"Hardly at all."
"Then what about creating a big zone of ice and manipulate the zone itself to create the copies. Like laying down an arena with a functional autonomy embedded in it."
"Embedded autonomy? So in function… it would be the area itself that computes the needs?"
"I think if you focus too much on the situation at hand you run into hyper specific scenarios and that is why your processing doesn't keep up. What about covering some basic weaponry instead? If it comes down to an order like maintain x copies of type A, type B and type C then it should be possible."
"Giving up on a tailored approach..."
"Aren't you already doing that by yourself? There is a limit to how many of you can engage a single enemy to begin with."
"I was so focused on being ready for every situation I did not consider that."
"You want to try it out?"
"Tomorrow. Right now I will focus on the theorem and recuperating."
"Ah, I get it. I'm pretty toasted myself."
"Toasted?"
"Exhausted."
"You say that I am very good at this but I would absolutely have pursued a futile approach without your input. Thank you."
Sword grinned. "Are you trying to make me blush? You've almost got it!"
"H-Huh? No- I mean- That's not-"
"You remind me of Rikka when she gets flustered, just cuter. Like a hamster on a spinning top."
"H-Hamster?!"
I can see what Pine likes about her. She is this… I wanna say cool beauty but I feel like Ange would judge me a lot. But she really is. And then the facade comes down and reveals someone socially awkward beneath. And it's so cute when she doesn't know how to deal with a social situation. "Should we go back? Our time is probably about to be up."
"In fourteen minutes it will be."
"You can tell it that accurately?"
"Ah. Uh… a habit from working in the real world."
"You gotta tell me about that at some point."
"I will."
Sword leaned back and sighed. "I'm totally spent though… I think I'm just going to go back to bed after this. What about you?"
"Formulating a new theory."
"You're a super hard worker. Makes me not want to lose."
"That's not what I intended..."
"It's a good thing. Motivates me. Also I wanna get this right before Ange finishes her thing."
"Your rival?"
"Hm, no. I just wanna brag to her."
"Brag?"
"Yes. Or maybe let her praise me."
"Oh..." That sounds nice. Praise.
"I'm gonna rest my eyes for a few minutes. Thanks for-" She gestured at all the ice around her. "Keeping us cooled down by the way."
"I do not like the heat either, so..."
"Wake me up when it's time to go back. Hm… coat of arms… huh…" She yawned, leaned back and closed her eyes.
=== DISSONANCE ===
(Piece Two)
The third group, consisting of Joker, Ace, Diamond, Peach, Berry, March and Black Lily, arrived to view quite a scene. Pine and Windy were holding cans containing cooled goodness against their foreheads, sitting together while Happy was face down on the cool floor, only twitching occasionally to show she was alive.
Lemonade and Aqua were in a corner together, drinking something highly suspect out of cans. Beauty and Sword were close by, shoveling an extra large serving of curry into their mouth with their faces looking like they had sunburn from the spiciness of it.
"What the hell happened here?" Wild Joker was worried and that worry was translated to Diamond with a tighter than usual grip on her hand.
"Nothing." Echo appeared from right behind them. "Come on, you're three minutes late already." Gently pushing Joker and Diamond with unstoppable force, she got them past the waiting area.
"Pine, you okay?" Peach was visibly worried about her.
"Just one hell of a headache… turns out dying from brain damage leaves you a bit nauseous, even if you get restored to normal." Pine groaned and pointed at Happy. "We'll be fine."
March knelt down next to Happy who very slightly raised her left arm to show her teammate a thumbs up. "No pudding for a week..." Happy was dealing with a bit of vertigo so lying down like that and closing her eyes had really helped.
"They are fine, everyone get going!" Echo called out to those she hadn't pushed.
"Actually I think I don't feel so good, I'll be ready tomorrow, I swear-" Black Lily tried to bolt but didn't get far; Berry got hold of her arm and pulled her along. "Lemme go!"
"You wanna tell your sister you chickened out over something like this?" Berry knew that if she didn't do something, Yuri would complain to her later.
"Mind your own damn business!" Black Lily pulled her arm free, ground her teeth and begrudgingly marched forward, knowing exactly what Berry was doing but unable to help herself. She would rather die than listen to her older sister berate her for probably hours.
She's so easy to understand, Berry smiled to herself and followed Black Lily.
With the arena once again restored, the seven of group three were assembled right by the gate and about to be split up. "Don't let that scene outside discourage you, that's the result of working hard and producing real gains."
"Looked to me like they gained one hell of a headache." Joker made a snarky comment and winced when Diamond stepped on her foot. Ow, Rikka!
Echo ignored the comment and continued. "So let me ask each of you, do you know what you are going to be working on? Let's go in order. Diamond." She skipped over Joker, who looked pretty annoyed by it but said nothing, lest she get a heel stomping on her toes.
"I will need to move very far out because I will be conducting dangerous experiments regarding chain-linkage of molecular-"
Echo interrupted her. "I see that you have a pretty clear idea so I will take that as a yes. I will handle transporting you. Now, Peach."
"I know what to do. But I'll need a partner, someone who can take a bit of a beating." Peach didn't eye anyone in particular but she knew who would step up for this.
"That's me." Berry volunteered. "It works out since what I want to try and do works best with a training dummy that is incredibly in love with someone else."
"Who're you calling a dummy..." Peach whispered to her teammate.
"That's just a phrase. It doesn't mean the same thing."
"You should head towards the forest then. Avoid getting too close to the desert." Echo gave them some simple instructions and both Peach and Berry nodded with a smile.
"Let's get this on the road." Peach grinned wide and started walking, Berry by her side. "Reminds me a little of the dance practices we used to have."
"I remember that one time you tried a new move and crashed face first into a phone pole."
"Hey!" Peach glanced at the others to see if they heard. "Don't give them the idea I'm a klutz!" She hissed at her friend.
"You could be a bit of one." Berry teased her.
"Sure hope you weren't hoping I'd go easy on you..." Peach grumbled to herself, just loud enough to ensure that Berry could hear it.
"There would be no point if you did. Leave my head on, though."
"I'm not Bright!"
"Your boobs are a lot smaller, yeah."
"Huh… I wonder if I should tell Moonlight about that comment just now."
"Maybe I should check if I can wipe memories if I just impact your head hard enough."
"So you get to take mine off but I shouldn't take yours?"
"Of course. I have perfect control after all. I do everything perfectly."
"You missed a spot shaving your legs. Backside of your right thigh."
"What?!" Berry stopped, twisted her upper body and right thigh to check. "Where?!"
"My mistake, must have been the shadows. But here I thought your confidence was perfect." Peach started to run in a playful way.
"Peach!" Berry went right after her.
"Black Lily, for you I have already setup a course." There was clear disdain for Echo's comment on Black Lily's face. "Do you have a problem with that?"
"Course I do! Everyone else gets to work on these new super special abilities and I'm stuck doing shooting range garbage!"
"These others all have done that sort of basic training. They had years and years to polish their abilities and they had nobody to compare notes with or give them advice. You have all of that and you're still not satisfied?" Echo laid it all out for her.
She grumbled and crossed her arms in an aggressively pouting stance. "It's still not fair..." Mumbling quietly, she resigned herself to what her fate would be.
"March, what do you want to do?" Echo was ignoring Joker still, who was wildly flailing her arms in the air, much to her sister's annoyance.
"I need to talk to you about that stuff from before." How do I even tell her I don't remember a thing because my head is full of good Akane right now?
"I can provide advice but ultimately the can do is up to you."She stopped and turned around. "Now that we have covered everyone-"
"Hey! Enough already!" Joker angrily shouted.
Ace sighed. "Please just call on her already. It's me who will have to deal with her moods. Have some pity."
"The hell is that supposed to mean? My moods?!" Joker stomped her feet on the ground.
"See what I mean?" Ace shrugged and knew exactly what she was doing.
Echo sighed. "You two already know what you will be doing, don't you?"
"Well, more or less," Ace answered quickly.
"Then just get going." Echo turned back to March and then looked at Diamond. "Gonna get to you in a few moments, first I'll get Diamond to a safe distance for her practical tests."
"What about me?" Lily was the other problem child beside Joker.
"Be back in a minute." She looked tired.
Joker, holding Diamond's hand again, turned to her and kissed her without hesitation in front of everyone. "We'll be back together later." She decidedly avoided saying see.
Smiling a little, her eyes hidden under her visor, Diamond put her index finger against Joker's forehead and slowly pushed her back. "Don't give your sister too much trouble. I will hear about that if you do."
"Yes, yes, I know."
"And Ace-" Diamond turned exactly to where Ace was. "The two of you are a unit. Work together. Even if she's acting a bit selfish."
"I know." She didn't say I will do my best as people sometimes would in such a situation. That was because back where they came from, doing their best wasn't good enough. It was always get the job done.
"All done?" Echo had been waiting for them to finish talking.
"Yes." Diamond let go of Joker's hand and turned to Echo.
"How far out do you need to be?"
"At least a hundred kilometers I would say." Everyone but Ace and Joker leaned just a little away from Diamond, thinking just what kind of earth annihilation level of ability she was trying to test.
"No problem." That too got a reaction of leaning away. "[Sunlight Gate] open!" Clicking her fingers, Echo manifested large double wing doors in pure gold and amber from nothing. Opening up, a wavering magical power covered the inside. "Just go through and you'll be a hundred kilometers in the desert. And take this." She produced a small marble. "Crush it and I will be there within three seconds. Just in case of an emergency."
"I will try to not destabilize the dimensional integrity of this place."
Lily had moved over to Joker. "Your girlfriend says some scary things..."
"She's got it under control. She hadn't destroyed a planet or anything like that yet."
"Yet?"
"Don't think too hard about that." Joker smiled and crossed her arms a second time.
Diamond was gone in a second, the doors closed and disappeared. "Now then. Joker, Ace, what are you waiting for?"
"Right, right, we're going." Ace pushed her sister and they both headed towards the desert. "There's gonna be a bit of a light show so I hope nobody else wants to use that big open space."
"Lily will be assigned to the woods and I am not sure about March yet." Echo answered quickly as the two walked away. "Then, Lily, today we will work on both your stamina, your aim and also your situational awareness."
"I'm gonna be shooting at you again, aren't I?"
"Not quite. March, can you wait here for a few minutes?"
"Sure." March slowly sat down and felt the grass. I wish I was in the same group as Akane… no, wait, I'd never get any training done there.
"Follow me, Lily."
Pressing deep into the forest, far past Peach and Berry, Lily was absolutely certain she'd never be able to find her way back on her own. "Are we there yet?"
Echo kept going for a few more seconds, powerfully jumping from tree to tree, with hundreds of meters between each jump, before she stopped. "Today you will be killing me."
"E-Eh?!" Lily recoiled a little.
"To be specific." Echo clicked her fingers. "[Manifest of Many]." One Echo became two, then two became four and it kept going until there were in excess of two hundred of them. "Each of these is a part of me, operating with all my thoughts. Normally they would have a much greater fraction of my power than this but I deliberately made them about as strong as Cure Black."
"That's still pretty strong!" And what, so Cure Black is less than a tiny fraction as strong as you?
"They will try to escape, attack and move about the forest. Your job is to kill all of them without being killed yourself. You will have to practice all that I mentioned. Your physical and energy stamina, your aim and your situational awareness, all working together to get this job done."
"No way!" She made an overt gesture with her arms. "How the hell am I supposed to do this?!"
"You complained about wanting to do that which the others did. They overcame plenty of situations that left them thinking How will I possibly win at first. Or was that just shallow pride?"
Grrr… "I'll do it! I'll show you!"
"All of these-" Echo gestured around herself. "Will not come at you at all once. Pace yourself. Your personality and your chosen fighting style are not a great match so you will have to work hard on this. Unless of course your sister is the only gifted one between you two." Echo raised her hand in a lightning fast motion and stopped an energy arrow that Lily fired right at her between her fingers. "Patience is key. And keeping a cool head."
"Then stop teasing me!" Lily stomped on the branch she stood on and caused it to break off, falling down.
"Good luck!" Echo shouted as she disappeared into thin air.
Back at the meeting point, March was startled by Echo just materializing like a ghost. "You scared me!"
"Did I?" Echo smirked. "Now, what is it that you wanted to talk about." Sitting down across from March, Echo waited for her to talk.
March made a whistling gesture but no whistle came out. "You know that stuff you showed to me, explained to me?"
"What of it?"
"I… kinda forgot all of it, sorry!"
"Huh?" Echo couldn't believe her ears and sat down. "How-"
"Th-That doesn't matter!"
"Maybe this is a good thing."
I doubt it. "So… can you explain it to me again?"
"First, give me your best self-evaluation."
"Okay… so… where to start? Huh… First up, I guess I could use my powers the same way Windy does, to slice and cut. But my wind is more about… I lack the control to make something precise like that and it's not really in my personality to cut people."
"That's a good self-assessment."
"So next I figure maybe I could do what Egret does, use it to fly but that alone wouldn't really make for a good technique and I don't have the tactical awareness to be someone with a supporting ability."
"You are the type to charge ahead without thinking so much. You have good instincts and your specialty is being fast. Your control isn't bad, but you are not the type to develop an excessively personal technique like Egret. Yet-"
"Yet?"
"Giving up on your control just because you don't see yourself imitating Windy is running away."
"So what should I do?"
"That I can't tell you."
"Eh?! But I'm sure you showed me an example!"
"And now you should figure things out for yourself." Echo looked just a little bit like she was enjoying telling March no.
"I just… I worry that if I commit to something and I fail, everyone will laugh at me. Just going fast isn't nearly as cool or useful as what Diamond can do or as versatile as some of the others, like Lemonade."
"You worry a lot about what others think."
"I wasn't always that way but after splitting up with Akane… well, I'm back together with her now-" She cut herself off and covered her blushing cheeks. "Don't tell anyone about that yet, okay!"
"All this talk but deep down you do know there is something you want to do."
"I… do want to use my speed to fight. But my mind and eyes can't keep up with it."
"Why not eliminate the need for both, then?"
"How?"
"Why do you need mind and eyes?"
"To see where I am going and to know when to brake or accelerate."
"So what if you did not have to think about either?"
"How would I do that?"
Echo pointed at the desert. "If you know ahead of time there is nothing in your way, could you run blindly?"
"Well, yeah, but battle doesn't work like that!"
"You could make it work like that."
March slumped her shoulders. "I'm a doofus, please explain it to me like I'm fourteen."
Echo sighed. "If you cannot fight because your mind and body cannot keep up, simply make it so that it doesn't have to. Create your own battlefield. Create your own route from A to B." Echo stood up and smiled. "You have mastery of wind. Wind can take hold of your body and throw it about, if strong enough. But just like that it can also act like a catapult."
"You want me to fire myself out of a wind cannon?"
Echo looked just a bit annoyed. "No… that's not quite what I meant." She sighed again. "I really wanted you to realize it yourself, but what if you were to create wind pillars, tornadoes perhaps, that act as connecting points for you to travel between. Not only is it difficult for others to attack the inside of a tornado, but you can also make great use of your speed. Being launched at such high speed will turn your very body into a weapon. If both your start and end point is a tornado, you can trust in your ability and discard the need to see and think about the in-between."
"That sounds… amazing. Too amazing. How could I possibly create… like, tornadoes on both ends, at the same time even?"
There was a real expression of deja vu on Echo's face. "I can give you a blueprint but I can't give you confidence in yourself. What would Akane think if she saw you moping around like this?"
March's expression changed. "You're right." I got too caught up in being miserable about not being able to just extend my way of fighting the same way the others do. I have to change what I do, but that's not a bad thing. I just thought it was and didn't even stop and think about whether that was right.
"Wind is one of the more difficult elements to master, and you don't give yourself enough credit. There have been very few Cures in history that have been able to surpass you in speed alone."
"Huh? Cures in history?"
"S-Something I heard from Rosa!"
"Oh. Wow… so I'm really that fast?"
"Well, not as fast as me but that isn't a fair comparison."
"Just watch, with my new technique I'll be too fast even for you!"
"Do you know what to do now?" Echo looked pleased with herself.
"Nope!" March said it with pride. "But now I know I need to figure it out! If I can see my goal, I can run towards it!"
"E-Eh… I mean, as long as it works for you..."
"I need to clear my head first." March took a deep breath and turned towards the desert. "I'll go for a bit of a run."
"H-Huh? This is training, you can't just-" Echo found her words falling on deaf ears.
"I'll be back with a plan in just a bit!" And March took off, leaving behind a cloud of dust and kicked of dirt. Each passing moment she accelerated further and further, pushing ahead into the distance, leaving behind Echo who was at a loss of words.
Not too far away, a dust storm raced over the dunes, right past Ace and Joker, who were just crawling out of a big hole they had blasted into the ground by accident. Standing in awe as the dust trail settled, Joker looked towards the horizon where the source of that trail was just now vanishing. "This place is full of weirdos."
"I think you're the last one that should call anyone a weirdo." Ace sighed and stretched. "What do we do, keep going?"
"Course. And the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"Looking at these others, you're a pretty unusual person to be here with everyone."
"Praise me more!"
"That wasn't praise."
"Being special is always praise!"
"Mana's really gotten into your head… Can you materialize the Spear of Light?"
Joker manifested the weapon and waited for her sister to come over. "I'm not sure what we were doing wrong. It just kind of blew up."
"I think we'll have to find a way to learn more about it. You think there's any books in the library about it?" Ace frowned. "What's that face? How much can you hate reading?"
"It's not reading! I hate studying!" Joker groaned wildly and rolled her entire head to match her eyes. "I think we should just keep trying! Marie Ange could work this thing so we should be able to, too."
"I asked Sword and there is no record of Ange ever using the spear of light at the level we do now. She never even invoked it's true name, Gorrum Nova."
"We're screwed then."
"Wow, Diamond is gonna be disappointed. Heart, too."
"Hey, bringing them into this is unfair!"
"It's not like we can pretend we figured it out. What, you think they won't be suspicious if we never use it in battle?"
"Maybe there's nothing more to this thing." Joker did a few practice strikes with her weapon and blasted a small dune apart upon striking it. "It's already a super legendary weapon. Why do you think-" Joker shut up when she saw that one special look her sister sometimes gave her. The furrowed brows, the declining mouth corners, hands on her hips facing towards and narrowed eyes. She was scolding her without saying anything. "Fine…"
They both knew there was something beyond their ability to make the weapon go into overdrive, invoking its true name. They could feel it every time. They drew out so much power that they could barely handle it together but something about it was off. Like they were using the weapon improperly somehow.
"I hate studying so much..." Joker stabbed the spear's butt into the sand and fell backwards. "I hate studying, I hate studying, I hate it, I hate it, I don't wanna study!" She stopped when Ace poured sand on her face. Rising up, spitting out sand and trying to clean her face up, Joker shouted at her sister. "What the hell do you think you're doing?!"
"Treating you age appropriately." Ace sat down next to her and swiped some sand from her hair. "Get a grip already. You've done so many things you hate, why is this any different?"
"Because we're not in that abyss anymore!" Joker shouted at her with obvious rage in her voice. "I don't want to keep living from day to day thinking everyone around me could die at any time and acting like I have to swallow everything life throws at me!"
"Joker..."
"You know exactly what I mean!"
"I do know. But just because we're out of there we shouldn't-"
"Shouldn't what?! Stop fighting for a moment and enjoy life?!"
Ace sighed and took Joker's hand, who tried to get free but without enough effort to actually do so. "Doing this, doing some reading on the spear, working the same way everyone else does, none of that means we're back in that horrible reality. We're not doing it to survive. We do it because we want to be stronger, to be the same as everyone else."
"I know that!"
"Then why do you-"
"Knowing something is right and doing it is not the same thing!"
Pulling on her sister's arm, Ace put her in a tight embrace. "I know you're worried about Mana, but there is nothing that can defeat her. Maybe Echo, but she's our friend. And don't you think that getting stronger will make it so that in the future we can do something about a situation like this instead of just sitting around?"
"I hate you! Stupid always-right sister!" Pouting in a big way, resting her chin on her sister's shoulder, Joker took a little while to calm down. "What if there is like… I don't know, an evil Echo out there?"
Ace paused and patted Joker's back. "If there was someone like that out there, we would all be gone already. You saw how strong she is. None of us, all of us together, stood a chance. Human civilization would have perished a long time ago."
"I guess… gives me the creeps, actually, thinking about that. Imagine if like, an evil Pine controlled her."
"There's never been an enemy we couldn't defeat."
"Hah… how long are you gonna hug me you siscon pervert?"
"Do you wanna eat sand again, you ingrate little sister?"
"I'm the big sister!"
"Huh… wanna stand next to each other and compare?"
"Don't get so uppity just because you got a few centimeters on me!"
"And boobs."
"Like that matters!"
"Ohohohoho." Ace intentionally laughed like that and let go of her sister. "Did that excite you?" Her haughty attitude play was met with a powerful bonk to the forehead. "Ow, hey!"
"You had that coming!" Getting up and dusting off her outfit, Joker grabbed the spear of light. "Does this thing really have another secret hidden away in it?"
"It would be great if we could ask the ancient Cure that owned it."
"She's been dead for a while."
"You don't say."
"Hey! I'm trying here! Don't get snarky with me you… you boob monster!"
"Mana and Rikka are almost the same size, you want me to tell them they're boob monsters?"
"They're special!"
"So Alice is a boob monster?"
They both fell quiet. "Let's not tell Alice about this..."
"Yeah..."
They had a really bad experience regarding making fun of Alice for her figure. "So what do we do now? You really just wanna work on the spear?"
"It's our big thing. But we'll have to read up on it first." Ace stepped aside and looked at the dunes. "Want to do some drills?"
"Eh..."
"That's a no then?"
Joker crossed her left leg behind her right and both arms behind her head. "Can't we do something… new skill-ish?"
"What does that even mean?"
"I want a fancy new thing! Other than an even more super glowing stick!"
"Calling it a glowing stick… have some respect for it."
"Don't you think we should have some kind of ability other than the spear that sets us apart?"
"Hm… being two halves of a whole is our strong suit. We're different people, but when it comes to our powers, we're not so different. We both do a lot of everything."
"I should just eat you and become super good at everything..." Ace looked surprised at that comment and fell quiet. "No… I mean… I was joking… I wouldn't eat you or anything. I swear. I'm not like that."
"No, it might work."
Joker stepped back. "Don't eat me!"
"The base principle, not the execution!"
"I don't know what that means!"
"What if we could become one again?"
Joker looked at Ace like she was out of her mind. "That we can't is the whole reason we're both here."
"I don't mean permanently. I mean for a short while, you would absorb me and have both our powers."
"And you'd absorb me?"
"No."
"Huh?"
"Between you and me, I am the one who plans and listens to logic."
"Why thank you for calling me an idiot."
"You have instincts, talent and just luck on your side."
"Really?"
"I think you would do a much better job at having both our powers than I would."
"No, no, no, I mean even if we could do that, two people is just better than one."
"We could maybe fight off two people that are half as strong as Echo. But fighting off Echo is impossible."
"Ugh… I hate it when you're right."
"So do you want to try?"
"No!"
"Why-"
"I don't like it."
"I'm your sister, you shouldn't openly-"
"This isn't about that. We both came from Marie Ange. I am me, you are you. We're not her."
"Do you have any other ideas then?"
"Eh… even if you ask me..."
"I still think that temporarily becoming one-"
"Stop." Joker looked dead serious. "I'm really gonna get mad."
"Okay, okay. I won't bring it up again."
"What about… about…" Joker trailed off, then sat down in the sand. "Dammit, I got nothing."
"What if we could access the Golden Crown?"
"How would you even do… before that, would that even be useful in a battle? It just let you see visions, right?"
"You have the spear of light, I should have the golden crown."
"Didn't you try to call it back lots of times before?"
"That was back in our world, where everything was full of curses and we lived in fear of another day. Maybe… maybe deep down I didn't want it back. Maybe I was afraid it would show me just how hopeless it all really was."
"There you go again with all that melodramatic stuff…"
"I'm surprised you even know what melodramatic means."
"Hey."
"I think I'll work on manifesting the golden crown."
"Fine! I'll… I'll just do some workouts since clearly my head is empty!"
"I never said that!"
"You totally meant it though!"
"Did not!" "Did!" "Did not!" "Did!" "Not!" "Did too!" "No way!" "Totally did!"
"I see you two are having a lot of fun." Echo's voice came from above them, siting on what had to be an invisible chair. "If you are that bored, maybe you are strong enough already and you want to have a serious bout with me?"
Both sisters quickly lowered their head. "We're sorry."
"So what seems to be the problem here?"
"We will have to work through the books at the library to learn more about this." Ace grabbed hold of the spear of light. "It's the-" Ace let go immediately when she saw the look of pure, undiluted anger and hatred on Echo's face. The moment she stepped back, the look disappeared. "Did I say some-"
"Just do some individual practice today and visit the library later." Echo smiled and disappeared.
"What was that?" Joker's hands were trembling. "That look on her face, I didn't imagine that, right?"
"Yeah… I thought she was going to kill us."
"I wanna say this is your fault but… that was no joke."
"Yeah." Ace's hands were also still shaking.
Far away from there, Diamond was taking a break, sitting only a dozen meters away from a gargantuan black gorge that she had created by accident. "This is going worse than I'd hoped. Creating a controlled chain is much more difficult than anticipated. The reactionary force of magical particles with material elements and the atomic unbinding process that occurs when forcibly disrupting the molecular vibration frequency is really hard to measure properly… even if I inject negatively vibrating elements into the chain reaction it creates a massive runaway dependency that simply erases everything in a big, uncontrolled explosion."
"I didn't get a single word of what you were saying." March was there as well. She had almost fallen into the gorge after running all the way out to where Diamond was, across a hundred kilometers of desert. She hadn't aimed for Diamond but the gorge was too big to avoid.
"Are you sure you should be here? I'm worried that you might get caught up in one of my tests."
"I'll be on my way soon, don't worry. But wow, you made a really big hole."
"That wasn't my intention."
"Uhm… can I ask you something personal?"
"Of course."
"How do you manage being with both Joker and Heart?"
Diamond smiled. "You want to get back together with Beauty and Sunny?"
"No. I… just wanna understand how that went wrong in the first place."
"If you're looking for one person to blame, you won't find that."
"How come?"
"Even if you wanted it to work so, so much, it might not have been possible. Few people have a personality that makes it work. Heart is a giant ball of affection."
"What about Joker then?"
"What do you think my relationship with her is like?"
"I dunno. Same as Heart?"
"Couldn't be more different. All three of us bring something to the table, but what that is differs depending on whom we're with. You're one person but you show different sides of you because everyone has different needs."
"So… it's about what everyone needs?"
"I don't know."
"Huh?"
"I'm in love with heart and Joker. But that doesn't mean I'm an authority on having two girlfriends. Look at Peach. Her relationship with Beat and Passion isn't the same at all, at least from what I can tell."
"So there's no right answer." March rested her head on her knees and sighed. "I was hoping there was."
"That would be nice."
"You ever fight with them?"
"Sometimes. Heart can be very, very stubborn and so can Joker, but both in different ways. Sometimes they fight with each other and I get in the middle to break it up and it ends with me fighting with them over fighting with each other and we're all mad at each other."
"How do you make up?"
"Are you trying to make up with Beauty and Sunny?"
"I'm… back with Sunny, but I don't want to just not talk to Beauty anymore. We went through a lot together and I still want to be her friend. But I don't know if Sunny wants that and it's all so complicated that I kind of want to run away from it."
"In my case there was many extenuating circumstances. I don't know about Peach but everyone has their own way of getting there. But from what I'm hearing, you haven't asked Sunny about it."
"Hard to ask something like that. You okay if I'm friends with the ex I dumped right after you? That's not gonna go over well."
"And?"
"What do you mean and?"
"Just because it won't be easy or have an answer you like doesn't mean you shouldn't ask."
"That's easy for you to say."
Diamond smiled dryly. "Back in our world, we talked about what to do if one of us became infected with a curse. Other than my eyes, that is. There is no curing it and it eats you alive. It's a horrible way to go. So we talked about it."
"Stop." March covered her ears. "That's going to give me nightmares."
"But it was a conversation we had to have. Even if it was painful and none of us wanted it. After talking about it, everyone felt terrible and there was not a single good thing about it. But we knew where we stood, and what to do. And that was worth the pain of it. Without asking you can't move forward. You'll always wonder what you should do."
"I hate that life is so complicated." March turned her head to the side. "I miss my family…"
"How many?"
"A whole melting pot." March smiled. "I wonder what happened to them."
"In your time? In mine?"
"Just thinking about how that's not the same thing makes my head hurt."
"It's difficult for me too."
"Then there is no way I'll ever make sense of it."
"You got a lot to think about and deal with, don't you?"
"It sounds like sarcasm when it comes from someone like you." March hugged her legs. "Sorry, that came out wrong."
"Maybe. But that doesn't mean it isn't true."
"I didn't think you'd be this talkative."
"Do I give that impression?"
"Yeah. Kind of… hard to approach."
"Because I'm blind?" There was an uncomfortable grunt coming from March. "It's okay. I know. It was a big change for Heart and Joker too." She paused. "I'll never not be sad about it. Of being not able to see them. But I still have them by my side. I am not giving up on being happy just because it's harder and I went through some hard time."
"Hah..." March sighed really hard. "I feel like a spoiled child being all miserable on my own next to what you have going on."
"That's stupid."
"Eh?"
"Everyone deserves to feel miserable when they are. Just because I had it hard doesn't mean you can't feel bad. It doesn't make your sadness and feelings any less valid just because you think it's not as bad as someone else."
"I'm… I'm super not sure what to say or feel right now. You're really smart."
"That's my strong point." Diamond smiled. "Do you feel better?"
"Not really."
"That's okay too."
"Do you? Feel better I mean."
"Not particularly. I'm worried about Heart, and I worry about Joker worrying too much about Heart. But we're Cures, right? We're not going to let something like this keep us down."
"I wish I was that strong emotionally… when I think about Sunny saying she doesn't want me hanging around Beauty, I just lose the words. Do you ever chicken out?" March scoffed at herself. "As if."
"Plenty."
"Huh? Really?"
"There are some things I wanna do but if I told Heart and Joker about it, they'd be all worried about me doing them because I can't see. And that worry, that… tone in their voice, I can't stand it. It makes me so depressed I want to cry and run away and hide and just crawl into bed like a snail into a shell. So I don't say anything. Usually."
"Usually?"
"Courage doesn't come to everyone equally."
"Is it okay to say all that stuff to me? We… don't know each other that well or anything."
"That's exactly why I can tell you."
"I don't get it."
"You barely know me and so you won't feel as affected by what I say. You have your own problems that I don't know about. Sometimes talking to a stranger can be really helpful to clear up your own head. You've been able to talk about what worries you, too, right?"
"Oh… yeah. I couldn't tell this stuff to Miyuki or Yayoi."
"But you know-"
"Hm?"
"The important thing really is to keep trying."
"You mean with Sunny?"
"In general. We never gave up on living all that time and we never gave up fully on being happy either. We just chased whatever happiness we could grasp. And now there is this big world of Cures that we never knew, all these nice girls and women. And it's just as scary as a world of curses and death."
"That's a bit hard to understand for me…"
"That's fine. Nobody can understand everyone else. Not even Heart could."
"They should call you Cure Wisdom."
Diamond snorted. "I had a few years to think this stuff over and over and over, you know?"
"You don't really seem that sad… sorry, is that rude?"
"If you let yourself be sad all the time because something bad happened to you, isn't that letting the bad thing win?"
"There's no beating you in words, huh?" March felt a bit cheered up.
"Heart says that a lot. It is one of my pride points, you know?"
"What about Joker?"
"She just says I'm a nag!" Diamond laughed.
"Oh, I can sort of see that."
"Excuse me?!" Diamond was still smiling and threw a handful of sand in March's direction, coming short a couple of meters.
"My bad, my bad! Don't super annihilate me or anything!"
"Molecular annihilation!"
"How smart do you even need to be to understand that stuff?"
"I guess only one or two of the others would get it."
"Cure Wisdom is on point after all!"
Diamond chuckled. "Now, I enjoyed our chat but Echo will have your hide if you stay dawdling around here."
"You're not doing anything either!"
"Oh, I was thinking about atomic constructs and their breakdown while we were talking."
"Yeah, I bet." I'm totally… sixty percent sure she didn't! "But you're right, I ought to get going and figure out what to do. In more than one way."
"Please don't come back."
"Ouch."
"It's not safe here, is what I mean."
"I know, I know." I didn't.
"I will see you outside, later."
"Diamond."
"
"Yes?"
"You're a good person."
"Thanks."
Waving, fully knowing that Diamond could probably not see it but doing it anyway, March took off, racing towards the south, to go around the huge gorge.
"Now, where was I? Right, the function disrupter to establish a closed range coordinated destabilization of the molecular integrity of…"
While Diamond was pursuing lofty heights of magical science, Peach and Berry had just finished following their gut instinct. Peach was beaten up to such a degree that she looked like she had been the sole recipient of a violent riot and flash mob.
"Everything hurts a lot. This is a lot more than I figured I'd be dealing with."
Berry wasn't doing so well either. Her face was swollen in various places and her right arm had truly seen better times, having been dislocated an entire three times already. "Look who's preaching to the choir..."
Lying about on the forest floor, the two of them were taking a break. "Been a while since it's just been us two, huh?"
"Makes me remember when we were totally new at this and just starting out as Cures." Peach chuckled. "That sure was a different time. Remember when some of our biggest worries were whether we'd have a dance routine down pat in time?"
"The era before paying bills and jobs."
"Before traveling."
"What's it like, just traveling around with Setsu?"
"It's nice. We get by, and we get to see lots of places."
"Kinda jealous."
"Even though you got the job you wanted and everything? You wanna go on tour with Yuri?"
"Never." Berry snorted loudly. "Yuri's way too tightly wound for that sort of thing. And I wouldn't last one week. If that long."
"You haven't even tried it."
"I shrivel up emotionally if I go two days without a nice relaxing bad. And I think would be on her phone fourteen hours a day sending thousands of texts to check on her sister."
"Yeah, I can see that!" Peach chuckled. "She's really protective of her."
"It's a bit annoying actually."
"How's that?" Peach rolled over and looked at Berry from the side.
"Overprotective older sister isn't what I signed up for!"
"Are you going to split up?"
"Heck no." Berry shook her head. "I expected you to know me better than that."
"What if I knew and just wanted you to say it out loud?"
"I see Setsuna's got a bad influence on you."
"Does not."
"When are you gonna come back to Japan?"
"I wonder if this place has an airport that has direct flights there…"
"You know what I mean, come on!"
"How would I know?! I never might've gone traveling with Setsuna in the first place."
"Oh right, the time… thing." Berry grumbled.
"Timeline."
"When did you become so smart?"
"It's a lot to think about! I'm surprised you're not thinking about it."
"With everything that's going on I got enough on my plate."
"Trouble with Yuri?"
"Not exactly? It's more that Yuri has trouble with herself. Suddenly being an older sister to someone like Yami completely threw her for a loop. She was wondering this morning if she should make her a lunch… she's totally out of it."
"That's kinda sweet though."
"Would you want Setsuna making lunch for… what am I talking about, you'd beam with glee."
"I would!" Peach giggled happily. "You wouldn't want lunch from Yuri?"
"I'll thanks ten, thank you, right away, let me order already." Berry looked over at her now oldest friend. "But it does get a bit on my nerves."
"Yuri's older sister act?"
"It's not an act."
"Just a phrase. I didn't mean she was pretending."
"I know."
"But you wanna defend her anyway, huh?"
"Shut up, gimme a break." Berry blushed.
"If it gets on your nerves, maybe it's because it's taking time away from you?"
"Well… probably."
"There is a super easy solution there!"
"Please don't tell me you're talking about getting more girlfriends."
"Of course not." Peach grinned. "I know that's not for everyone."
"So lets hear it."
"Help her."
"With what? Being a sister? I have a brother but he's basically my age and not the type to need older sister advice. I still cringe when I remember people mistook him for my boyfriend."
"Turns out we're not into boys at all."
"Can you imagine if we had that figured out back then?" Berry paused and grimaced. "Of course you can. You and Eas were all lovey-dovey even before she became Setsuna. You literally charmed her over to our side."
"Setsuna was always a good girl!"
"Uh huh. Makes me wonder when exactly you got the hots for her. That was quite an outfit Eas walked around in."
"Hehehe~" Peach made a dirty face and grinned wide.
"Pervert."
"I didn't make her dress like that!"
"But I bet you ogled her every time she shoved up."
"Did not!"
"Huh… I wonder why I don't believe you, miss two girlfriends that used to be the enemy."
"Hey! That's got nothing to do with that!"
"I know I ogled Eas a couple of times."
"Should I tell Setsuna about that?"
"Don't, she'll teleport me into the sun."
"She should! Ogling someone's girlfriend… tsk, tsk."
"Except she wasn't your girlfriend at the time!"
"Tomato, potato."
"Peach, that's not… forget it."
"You know… I wonder if Tsubomi and the others have any photos of Yuri when she was our age."
Berry's eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed. "You're not gonna tempt me into asking them."
"Should I ask?"
"Don't you dare… without sharing."
"Wouldn't it be funny if she was really short in middle school?"
"I can't imagine that."
"Like, the same size as Erika."
"Super serious Erika..."
Both of them started and then kept on laughing until their bodies hurt even more than before. "So what's it like, having two girlfriends? You ever say the wrong name during sex?"
"Never. They both feel totally different. Ellen's boobs are a bit smaller but perkier than-"
"Woah, too much info, too much info! Peach, you gotta keep that to yourself!"
"That's wasn't a very perfect response."
"Why you!" Berry reached for her friend's arm, rolled over and lost all energy to keep going. "Ugh…"
"So what it's like with Yuri?"
"Like I'd tell you!"
"Oh come on. It's not like we keep secrets." Peach sounded so friendly that Berry felt her resistance budging.
"It's… better when she takes charge somehow…" She was glad that she was lying face down in the grass because her head was definitely changing color.
"Oh, that I totally get. Setsu taking charge gives it a whole new spin."
"You three ever… uh…"
"Do it all together? That's the only way we have sex now."
"E-Eh…? Wow…" I thought I was good with this stuff but Peach's something else…
"It does get a bit complicated position wise."
"Stop, stop, I'm gonna have dreams about this and I do not want erotic dreams about my closest friends."
"You think Yami gets to be-"
"La la la!" Berry covered her ears and Peach laughed by herself. The ear block lasted for thirty seconds and then she relented. "That topic's taboo!"
"Because someday she'll be your sister in law?" Berry didn't respond to that. "I don't know what I'll do though."
"You're not going to marry Setsuna?"
"Maybe not? It would make Ellen feel like an outsider and I don't want that."
"Marrying more than one woman probably isn't gonna happen, assuming we can even marry at all in whatever Japan we go back to."
"But can you imagine Ellen and Setsu in cute wedding dresses?"
"You want a western style ceremony?"
"Maybe. Oh, I could just have the ceremony without legally marrying… then we could have one western style and one Japanese style!"
"What about Labyrinth style and Majorland style?"
"So many events to think about."
"I was joking but I guess I'll have to attend all of these now, won't I?"
"Bring Yuri!"
"Course I will." Berry very slightly raised her head and saw Peach almost salivating. "You're imagining her in a suit, aren't you?"
"She's tall and slim and her face is really handsome!"
"I can already hear the comments, Oh, you're the only guy here, and then she opens her mouth and they fawn all over her."
"She does have a very nice voice."
"Hey."
"What? It's not like she's competition for Ellen, though!"
"That's a really unfair comparison! Your Ellen is literally a magical opera songstress!"
"Hehe, it's great, right?"
"That's not what I meant..." Berry put her face back in the grass. "What the heck were we even talking about?"
"Old times?"
"Say, Peach… if Setsuna asked you, would you go to Labyrinth with her? Or Ellen and Majorland, for that matter."
"We won't."
"But what if-"
"I don't think about some what if they dump me either. Do you worry about how you'll decide where to live?"
"Yuri's not exactly my neighbor so… I guess, yeah."
"That's something to work out later."
"You really got your own pace you follow, huh?"
"That's my perfect way of doing things."
"Touche."
"Remember that time we all went to the movies and you spent two hours dressing up to have your perfect look-"
"Aaaaaahhh, don't say it!"
"And it rained the second we finally got out the house, we ran towards the bus and you only realized your clothes were getting see-through when we were halfway to the theater?"
"You promised to never bring that up again!"
"Did I now?" Peach faked ignorance.
"I know you remember!"
"Do I now?"
"I'll sock you!"
"You already did!"
Peach rolled over on her back and stared up. "Inori looked like she was in pretty bad shape."
"How was Setsuna?"
"Asleep and mumbling in her sleep. Ellen's keeping an eye on her."
"I think I'll go sunbathing on the beach after this."
"Really?"
"Why not?"
"I don't know about you-" Peach touched her face and winced. "But I'm gonna get a soak at the bathhouse, stuff myself with forty pancakes and go to sleep."
"And turn into a cow."
"That's an old fairytale!"
"Uh huh, you mean like legendary warriors fighting back forces of darkness?"
"That's not the same."
"Is it?"
Peach was visibly unsure. "Four pancakes."
"There was no way you could eat forty pancakes anyway."
"Is that a challenge?"
"No, common sense."
"Still sounds like a challenge!"
A dismissive grunt came from Berry. "By my guest and upset your stomach. Setsuna is gonna love holding your hair while you hang on the toilet."
"My stomach can handle anything! Setsu is a bit more delicate. One time we had that fermented fish dish and she was sick for three days."
"I don't even want to know the details. Fermented beans is already hard enough for me, forget fish."
"You still don't like natto?"
"Don't… don't ask."
"At least it's not octopus!"
"Peach, shut up…" Berry groaned.
"So you figure out what's going with your new ability?"
"Nope." She groaned louder. "Maybe it just won't work on you because your entire brain is filled with Setsuna and Ellen thoughts all day long."
"Hey."
"And pancakes."
"Better."
"And waffles?"
"Maybe."
"In any case, I dunno if I can make this work."
"Think of me like… a test dummy!"
"You can be a bit of a dummy, yeah."
Peach playfully punched Berry's shoulder. "I'll show you dummy!"
"So you think if I can make it work on you it'll work on everyone?"
"Yep!"
"Maybe? I dunno. I mean what else can I try but keep at it?"
"You could ask Inori for help."
"Eh… it's not really the same type of ability and Inori's terrible with romance."
"If you need romance, then-"
"Yeah yeah, I know. I have miss super romance right here."
"I was gonna say ask Honoka, but hey, thanks."
"Honoka?"
"Don't you see how super lovey-dovey she and Nagisa are?"
"Looks kinda normal to me, to be honest."
"That's what makes 'em special!"
"Sorry, you lost me."
"Everyone is all romantic and in a special mood when they're new in love. But those two have been together a really long time, right? And they're still every bit as close as the rest of us that just found a new girlfriend a little while ago."
"Now I get what you mean. They're like one of those still all over each other at age sixty couples?"
"Exactly!"
"I'll tell Honoka you called her an old hag then."
"Maybe I should tell Yuri about that time there was an octopus mascot and the mall and-"
"I surrender." Berry had no energy to play this game.
"Wanna continue training?"
"I'mma take five."
Peach rolled over on her back and looked up at the tree crowns. "You know, I missed you and Inori."
"Even though Setsuna was there?"
"Because Setsu was with me. I love her and Ellen a lot but sometimes you just want to hang out with your friends. Like this!"
"Your idea of hanging out is beating each other up? Ultra Violence Girl."
"You know what I mean!"
"Yeah, I know. We did miss you two, too. We ended up being so busy all the time, Inori and I barely saw each other. Who knows if we had kept hanging out at all if not for this place or if you had come back."
"I can't wait to have Ellen try one of Kaoru's donuts."
"How are you gonna introduce her to your mom? You're not gonna try to adopt her, are you? Having one sister girlfriend is gotta be enough."
"Mom's gonna understand I can't just pick one."
"Your mom's a force of nature with how much she can just accept."
"What about you?"
"There's no trouble introducing Yuri. She's perfect."
"Except when her little sister is around?"
"Or she has to get into that swimsuit." Berry sighed in an exhausted way. "Yuri is never gonna let Erika live that down."
"At least it's just while she wears it. Imagine if that was permanent!" Peach snorted.
"I'd rather not."
"Would you split up?"
"Huh? Heck no. I'd love her just the same."
"So why?"
"Just imagining how irritated she would… it's gonna give me an ulcer."
"That bad?"
"Imagine if Erika gave Setsuna some dumb clothes and it causes her to become an A cup."
"Wouldn't matter to me."
"Bad example. Imagine… it happened to Bright."
"Oh wow." Peach made a worried noise. "Yeah, that'd become a problem."
"See?"
"Maybe she could use magic to fix it?"
"Don't think any of us have abilities like that. I… I mean, where would that ever be useful? What kinda type ability would that even be?"
"Lewd magic!"
"We're Cures, not… whatever it is that uses lewd magic."
"Hey, for all you know there's a Cure using sex appeal magic out there! Wait a second, isn't that exactly what you do with [My World]?"
"That's not even remotely the same! You're talking about… like, resizing boobs. I don't do anything that graphic!"
"I wonder if that would be in high demand. I can see March wanting a reduction. Rosetta, too."
"Nah, Yami would throw a tantrum."
"Really?"
"She and Yuri have very different ideas of what an optimal cup size is."
"Huh… That's kinda finny."
"It wouldn't be if it was your girlfriend that gets into fights with her little sister about this."
"Setsu and Ellen actually fight over the type of pillow to use."
"The… type of pillow? Like, what filling?"
"No, no, stretched long or plain square."
"I don't get it."
"Same here. They both tried to explain to me why each type is great and the other isn't… I just don't get it."
"I bet you can sleep even with a sack of rice as a pillow."
"Yep!" Peach was proud. "I did that a few times actually. Once time we used our costumes piled up as pillows and slept in small boat. Setsu was so sore after that."
"I don't need to know about your kinky adventures."
"Nothing kinky about it!"
"Sleeping naked in a boat is pretty kinky."
"You and Yuri don't sleep naked?"
"That's classified information." Berry quickly changed the topic. "So how'd you resolve that… pillow fight."
"Har, har, funny." Peach chuckled anyway. "Ellen turns back and forth a lot-"
Like a cat, Berry thought.
"So she uses an elongated pillow. Setsu is a very calm sleeper so she uses a good pillow that's plain square."
"And you?"
"A big one!"
"That's it? Just a big one?"
"Did you think I'd be using a heart shaped one?"
"Eh… no, just… that's kinda anti-climatic as a solution. Not that a pillow argument was very climatic to begin with."
"What do you use?"
"Just… a normal one?"
"I guess?"
"Ready?"
"To hit my pillow, yeah." But Berry knew what Peach meant. "Let's get this show back on the road. Thank the gods we don't keep looking like this after we get out."
"Setsu would be so mad." Peach got on her knees, then slowly got up. "Ow… your attacks hurt quite a lot."
"They're designed to inflict maximum damage even on a heavily armored enemy."
"I bet you could take Rose for a real whirl."
"Maybe if I catch her off guard but she's like a walking tank." Sighing, inhaling, Berry got back on her feet and looked like she really didn't want to get back into it. "I wonder if I'll ever be able to nail this."
"Trust in yourself!" The gigantic, beaming and glowing sunshine like smile on Peach's face was like a ray of purification.
Berry smiled awkwardly. "There's really no beating your optimism, ever, is there?" Taking a stance, her brows furrowed. "Come!"
While they resumed fighting – training – one of the others had just finally finished. And she was in a bit of a precarious situation that she refused to resolve out of stubbornness.
Hanging upside down from a tree, Black Lily couldn't see a thing, her long skirt covering her face. I hate this. Not the skirt, of course. But the very fact that she was off on her own, training in a way that didn't make sense to her. Why can't I train with my sis? Or better, Alice… or even Erika and Regina?! Noooo, I have to be off in this stupid place by myself and now I'm hanging in a tree. Argh! This is all Echo's fault! Look at me, I'm so strong and powerful and know everything and can do anything! She grimaced wildly as she thought this. And then she's all nice and stuff and it's so hard to stay mad at her! Argh, that makes me more mad!
Getting sick and tired of hanging in the tree, she kicked at the branch her right foot was stuck in with her left leg and freed herself, falling and hitting the extended trunk and roots of the tree, launched to the side like she hit a ramp. Rolling through leafs and dirt, she looked like she had just come out of a forty hours wilderness trek. But most of all I hate how I can tell this is working! Stupid damn effective training! I can't even go all but this isn't working when I obviously know it is. Alice and Erika both say I shouldn't lie about stuff that matters, so…
Pushing herself up, her heel slipped on a mossy stone and she fell backwards, falling right into a muddy patch. "Argh, stupid ass stupid dumb silly stupid forest!" Flailing and screaming, she jumped up and attempted to punch a tree with her full strength. And she stopped just short of it, her head bonking against the bark. Alice says I shouldn't vent by breaking stuff…
Sitting down, crossing her legs, she tugged on her skirt and then ran her fingers over the long boots she got on. Sis got good taste… this is really sexy somehow. Flapping her lips, she leaned back against the tree. "No hard feelings?" She paused, a grin formed and said grin got bigger and bigger. "Get it? Because you're a tree? Hard feelings?"
There was no reaction, but if trees had capability to speak it would surely have groaned. Or whacked Black Lily with a branch if it could move.
"Echo!" Lily shouted but nobody showed up. "Go figure. Of course Diamond gets a magic summon marble but I don't. Because why would I? I'm just some new girl with a bow, bleh..." She looked up at the tree crowns. "Wonder how the others are doing… except Diamond, I don't care about her." She said this without really believing it, just in case someone was listening.
"I'm so gonna complain to Alice about this…" Making idle threats by herself, she felt tired. "I want some… some… chicken wings and fruit salad. And Alice." Thinking about her girlfriend, she got a little horny. She's so hot… Heart must be crazy to let her go. And I must have super luck getting to snag her. But you can't have her back, Heart! I'm not gonna let go! I'm like that fish, the biting one. What was it… eels? No… wait, was it an eel? I gotta ask Erika later, she's got all that ocean knowledge stuff. Probably? Does she? I mean, she's got to, right? She's Cure Marine and all.
Bored, exhausted and horny, Black Lily leaned to the side, looking behind the tree and checking the surrounding area. Nobody's here… right? "Echo! Peach! Berry! March! Anyone?!" Shouting loud, but not as loud as she could, she got no answer. I'm all on my own… so… Reaching under her skirt, Black Lily started to breathe harder. I totally shouldn't do this but I can't get that image of Alice wearing only panties out of my head… she's so sexy…
"There you are!" Echo's voice came from up ahead. "There's a few more things I want you to practice!" Getting closer, Black Lily could see her now.
Of course, now you show up. Her face spoke for itself. You have the worst timing. What am I supposed to do with all these amazing Alice images in my head?! Huh?! "Right… training… yay…" Her lack of enthusiasm was beyond palatable. The second I get out of here I'm gonna run to Alice!
But that wouldn't be for a while.
=== DISSONANCE ===
(Piece Three)
The fourth group was sent to training after lunch – with Echo leading the first group before dawn, the third finished around noon. The goal was to have all five groups, each consisting of seven people, be finished around dinner time, leading to all of them having three hours to train.
So far the day had left behind destruction, despair, exhaustion, hopes crushed to dust – well, at least that was the expectation but everyone that went seemed to progress much better than they anticipated. Whether it was developing key theories of a new ability, laying the foundation of a new magical principle or simply putting practical knowledge first and establishing what didn't work.
"What a sight." White was looking at the group had just left the arena. Among them were Ace and Joker, who despite being restored to normal, looked like they were zombies. Diamond was swaying left and right so much that it seemed like she'd crash into a wall any moment now. Peach and Berry were laughing and laughing as they walked, dropping nearly dead into the seating arrangements, not a single sound coming from them after. Black Lily staggered past everyone, looking more mentally exhausted than anything else. March was on the ground right by the entrance and had a soda can resting on her forehead, her face sunburned.
"Don't worry, Hi- Luminous. We won't end up like that."
"You will." Egret was also there as part of group four. There had originally been ten groups but they were now consolidated into five to increase training time.
"Everyone will be okay, right?" Luminous was constantly glancing to the entrance at March, who was unresponsive and babbling about a great tower of pancakes at the horizon.
"They will be fine." Echo was of course there as well and looking just peachy.
"Don't scare them." White lightly elbowed Egret on the arm. "We got enough to deal with ourselves."
"I know, I know. Saki already gave me a heads up." Egret smiled a little. "I was just joking. I do think we'll be… pretty tired."
Peace took an empty seat and mumbled to herself. "I wanna go back and do literally anything else..."
Meanwhile, Marine made her way to a vending machine that proclaimed to be selling mystery drinks. Buying one, opening the can, an unspeakable stench assaulted everyone's faculties. With all the ferociousness of a pissed off scientist, White sent a scornful look at Marine that did absolutely nothing but encourage her to actually drinking it.
A moment later a huge spray of mystery liquid became airborne and intensified the stench twenty-fold. "Disgusting! This is way disgusting!" Marine stuck out her tongue. "Uueeeeeeeeeeee…" She almost started retching.
"This isn't the circus." Echo clicked her fingers with a deadly smile and a big portal opened up across the hallway of the arena gate. Then she clicked her fingers a second time. "[Yin Yang Gate]." All six that were slated for training felt the ground under them give way and suddenly their world was turned sideways – entering one way, they all came flying out the portal by the arena door and flew right in there. "Shia Shia…" Shaking her head, Echo followed after the others.
Marine had become a pillow that everyone was piled up on and in terrible danger of being flattened. "Get off me! I'm warning you, I'll use my powers!"
"That's gonna go real well what with Peace having electric powers and being right on top of you." Egret was sitting on White's back, who sat on Rose's back, who in turn was performing an acrobat deed by spreading all her limbs to the limit so Luminous, who was right below her, wasn't squeezed on by everyone on top.
"Get off!" Rose used her remarkably high physical prowess to push everyone else off like they were nothing. White and Egret both landed on the grass rather roughly while the knight Cure helped up her girlfriend. "I knew it would be annoying to be in one group with Marine."
"Hey, nothing about this is my fault!" Said evil doer was still on the ground, rather uninterested in that Peace was on top of her. "Don't leave footprints on my back!"
"I'm not that heavy!" Peace objected much too strongly as she got off and blushed when she realized that this had made her very suspicious. "There's… there's not a whole lot of time to exercise when you make manga and you're always indoors and there's snacks and you need to fuel your brain and Mamo had that really good snack on sale and-" She went quiet when Rose gently put her armored hand on Peace's head.
"I get it." She clenched her other fist. "Luminous' snacks are too good… and that face she makes when I gobble them up… and the taste… I could eat them all day… I get it."
"Eh…?" Luminous was a little confused. "Should I bake less?"
"No!" Rose nearly shouted and then cleared her throat and joined Peace in being embarrassed and a slave to tasty things.
"A circus on this side too." Egret mused as she dusted off her costume and extended a hand out to White, who hadn't even made the effort to sit up. "You okay?"
"I'm just suddenly thinking… between Black and me, neither of us is any good at baking…"
"You're a chemist, just follow the recipe."
"That's different." White sat up and took Egret's hand. "You ever bake for Bloom?"
Egret smiled at White and then decidedly averted her entire head and stared in the distance with eyes of emptiness. "Once."
"Do… I even want to ask?" White tried to smile but that empty, vacant look in Egret's eyes spooked her a little.
"You remember that time you came over and we all had dinner and you commented on how neat and modern our kitchen was?"
With anyone else I can see where this is heading but surely Egret didn't-
"Baking… is a mystery." There was now an ephemeral distance in Egret's voice, like she was speaking to a great beyond.
"Okay, everyone done with your skits?" Echo clapped her hands twice. "Good." She didn't accept any actual answers. "White, are you still set?"
"I was thinking of training with Peace today. Her ability intrigues me and I think I can get some valuable information about magical structural composite from her."
"With me?!" Peace was still not the greatest with social situations outside of people she already knew pretty well.
"You don't like me?" White was smiling wide and walked over to Peace. "Now, Egret over there bites, but I don't." She used both her index fingers to point at the corners of her own mouth. "Would a smile like this lie?"
White's skirt was suddenly taken by a gust of wind and flipped up so hard that she was like an upside-down teru teru bozu. "Who bites?!"
Flinging around and fighting down the skirt, White produced a fake smile that promised a lot of punishment if someone didn't stop messing around. "Should I call Bloom over and have her strip? I'm sure we can find some traces of last night."
"That's not biting!"
Echo was watching the entire thing with the deadest of dead fish eyes.
"Are they… always like that?" Rose was nudged up right next to Luminous and holding hands with her. "I didn't think White was the type to get involved in… you know… that." As she asked, she watched White and Egret get into a staring match with fake smiles that got more and more dangerous every second.
"I'll make them stop." Luminous smiled, genuinely at her girlfriend.
"Make them?" Rose refused to let go of Luminous' hand. "That seems… kind of dangerous."
"You'll see, it's fine." Wiggling free with a smile that could defeat even the toughest of guards, Luminous walked right up to the two fighting white Cures and said something to them in a quiet voice, so only they could hear it.
Wow… Rose watched both White and Egret turn blue in the face, looked at the ground and then turn away from each other, immediately defeated. What did she say? Is she secretly super strict with her friends?
Returning to her partner, Luminous could read the question on her face with ease. "It's a secret… but… I guess I can tell me love." Rose's face nearly became one with her heart when she heard that. "I said-" She pecked Rose on the cheek and whispered to her. "Even Saki and Nagisa were more mature than this."
"I know what to do, so… I'll just go." Peace sort of said this to nobody and slowly slunk off towards the forest. She started to sweat not from the eat but because White had caught up with her in a flash. I not good explaining this without manga terms… is she gonna know what a Kamehameha is?
"Two nuisances gone…" Echo grumbled. "Anyone else know what they're going to do?"
To Rose's surprise, Luminous raised her hand. "I thought of something." Upon getting Echo's attention, she explained. "After seeing how amazing everyone's abilities in the future become I wanted to be able to do that too!"
"They are abilities you will eventually develop. Using them now-" Echo tried to explain why that was not going to work.
"No, no! Give everyone a chance to use their ability like that!"
Echo's eyes widened a little. "How exactly would you do that?"
"I'm not sure yet… not entirely. But my [Queen of Light] can increase everyone's abilities. So maybe if I work really hard I can give everyone a big push and they can use it. If they develop it later, then the ability to do it was inside of them all the time. Right?"
"To most of you I'd say that's crazy but you are a special existence." Echo frowned. "Why do you look so pleased with yourself, Milky Rose?"
"No reason!" Rose looked like she was gonna sneeze out rainbows.
"Luminous, do you have a plan of action of how to do this?"
"A little? I'll need someone to practice on!"
"That's a problem."
"Huh?" Luminous didn't understand.
"This training is about becoming stronger. Training while under someone's influence that already makes you stronger will falsify results."
"Oh…"
"I'll help her." Rose immediately volunteered.
"I just said-"
"My training is about becoming a great knight that can protect Luminous from anything. To do that I need to draw out every last bit of power from the blue rose. I'm definitely going to have to spend some time thinking, recovering and just sitting around because I exhausted my powers for the day. So I make the perfect pa-partner for Luminous." She started blushing towards the end.
"Hey, hey, I'm taking some sugary damage over here!" Marine was still on the ground, lazily and slovenly lying about like she was just an observer.
"You two go then." Echo was not going to fight either Luminous or Rose on their decisions. "That leaves… Egret and Marine. Come to think of it, where is Rouge?"
Marine shrugged in the most overt way possible. "Maybe she's got a hot date!"
"I will bury you under a world's worth of desert if you keep this up." Echo threatened and Marine just rolled over in the grass with a pout. Continuing to roll back and forth, she was like a human rolling pin. Ignoring her, and getting a shocked face with a loud gasp in return, Echo turned to Egret. "What about you?"
"That is something I'd like to discuss with you."
Echo sighed. "Marine-" She turned around and found Marine to be gone; run off. She clenched her fist so hard that the ground under her cracked and the grass withered. "I'm going to kill her."
Scary… "About my ability?"
Echo took a deep breath and calmed down. "Is there a problem with your ability?"
"I would like to go over it again as I had… mixed results the last time."
"Where do you want to start?"
"The beginning. Stop me if I make any wrong assertions. So, My powers concern the winds but that is not quite is, yes? It is more like the sky itself."
"Yes, and we know that that is a difficult aspect to incorporate into an ability."
"You can fly, can't you?"
"Yes and no."
"It has to be one or the other."
"I can do what looks like flying but it technically is levitating myself with magical energy."
"Ah… well, my approach is that want to actually be able to fly."
"That will require wings or some-" Echo was sort of going through the motions with Echo.
"I am Cure Egret, the fact that I am only developing an ability for this now is honestly strange."
"So, what exactly do you have in mind regarding rectifying that?"
"Do you think it will be possible to not only create wings for myself but provide them to my allies? Wings that provide full flight and gliding. I need an honest answer to this. Especially after how my previous tests went."
"They will have to be pretty substantially sized and creating them out of magic is not easy. Have you worked on making material constructs out of magic before?"
"Other than the previous tests, no..."
"Then you should attempt some trials regarding that first and refine the process. Try focusing on yourself, your power, and picture a feather. The more vivid the picture in your mind, the more easily the materialization of-"
"Like this?" Egret held up a large white feather like it was nothing. "I can already create wings but not ones that are capable of sustained flight."
Echo blinked a few times. "So then what is the issue?"
"Like I said, they cannot sustain flight." Egret bent the feather a few times and it sprung back into form. From the size alone it was about that of an ostrich's wing feather. "Am I creating the feathers wrong?"
"I don't think so… andI forgot that you are an artist. Of course great materialization capabilities are a given already."
"Oh, is this sort of magic tied to imagination?" First I've heard of it.
"Specifically creative thinking. That's why those of us that are more about logical and structured thinking like Aqua have a lot of trouble with materialization abilities."
Egret clasped her hands together. "But that is great for my plans, right?"
"Yes." Echo smiled and took the feather from Egret. "If making this is that easy for you, you should simply continue to visualize wings in your mind. It will simply be an effort in trial and error to get the right size, durability and magical integration."
"Magical integration?"
"You want to give wings to those other than you. So how will they control those wings? You can't possibly control them for each person. So they need some sort of magical integration into their senses. You should ask Windy, Pine or Happy about that sort of thing. It requires a lot of fine control so that might be difficult for a very free thinking person."
"Ups and downs." Egret mused and looked still happy with herself. "But now I know I wasn't going about this all wrong."
"The first approach, or the simplest one, is often the right one."
"Wow, sage advice now?" Egret joked and watched Echo roll her eyes. "Now, well, I like the sun but not-" She gestured at the desert. "Not that much. But I'm probably going to be doing some flight tests-"
"I get it, you want to stay here in the temperate open. That's not a problem."
"What are you going to do? Hunt Marine?"
"Hah… hahahaha! Ahahahaha!" Echo looked crazy while she laughed. "Oh I would like to. But I get the feeling it's not worth the headache."
We should pitch all in and get her some relaxing tea… some really good tea. And maybe some flowers. "Are you gonna observe me then?"
"Sometimes." Echo glanced towards the forest. "I might be sneaking off sometimes to do a little training myself." The air distorted where Echo was and within the blink of an eye she was gone. No ruptured ground, no shock wave, it was like she had gently disappeared instantly.
"I wouldn't wanna be the environment where she trains…" Egret looked up at the sky, took a deep breath and let herself fall backward, hitting the warm grass. The right type of wings… so if I look at the Egret… She stopped. I'm gonna need some utensils to draw out my thoughts. Sitting up in a way only someone with serious lower body strength could, Egret then jumped to her feet. I'm sure Echo's not going to mind if I make a pit stop at Mamo's real quick. Although… given how angry she got over Marine… I'll just bring some tomorrow.
While Egret was contemplating her own approach, Peace was sweating bullets. There was the heat of the desert of course but she couldn't really feel that, even under the long hair she had. It was White walking right behind her, with that air of expectation oozing just out of her. What… what do I say to her?
"There's no need to be that worried about me." White had dealt with plenty of awkward situations before. She was going to marry Nagisa after all.
Peace flung about, looking at White with shock. She read my mind! She was secretly a mind sweeper, like Pine-
"I can't read your mind. I don't need to. Body language goes a long way." She would have had to bend down quite a bit to be on eye level with Peace so instead she just casually looked down. "Your expressions are really funny."
"They are?" Peace covered her cheeks, trying to hide how embarrassed she was.
"Not as cute as my lover's." Tantalizing Peace intentionally with that word, White chuckled. "Now, enough teasing." White turned around, looking back the way they had come, before facing Peace again. "We should be far enough out for practical testing. But first I'd like to discuss some materialization theory with you."
The yellow Cure started to turn pale. "About that… I really don't know if I can help you with that."
"I've seen you in action."
"Doing and explaining… I could explain to you how I write and draw manga, but would that mean you could do it too? Do you understand what toner is?"
"The… pencil to draw thicker lines?"
Peace was sweating more now. The blazing sun felt impossible to bear. "Nuh uh." She shook her head. "My ability… it works by pouring magic into thoughts given form and I then that form becomes alive and moves like I know it should. There's just a loooooo-" She gestured very slowly in a big circle. "-oooot of imagining going on."
"Hm… what I want to do is bit different from what you do. Think of it like the difference between…" White searched her brain for an adequate manga reference. "Between a Kamehameha and… that beam Piccolo did."
"You know dragonball?"
"To be perfectly fair, only a few volumes here and there that Black left around the house."
"Oh." Peace seemed almost disappointed. "So you just read them when you're at her place?"
"Hahaha." White couldn't help herself. "We live together. If the law were agreeing with it, we would be married."
Peace tried to smile but it just looked awkward instead. "Should have known."
"What about you? I don't want to jump to conclusions here, but Bright and Windy-"
"Ah! Ah! Okay, so what kinda energy thing do you wanna do?!" She was not ready to have this talk with someone, especially not someone so mature.
"Black is working on her [Fade to Black], while I am working on [Fade to White]. I know, we are both somewhat terrible at aptly naming things."
"Simple is good! Everyone knows the Kamehameha but nobody remembers all those gundam classifications."
White just nodded so the topic went away. "Black's technique is all about channeling her power inward, to make herself physically stronger in exchange for basically abandoning magical capabilities."
"Oh, like Super Saiyan three."
Please stop. "My ability is about the opposite, reducing my physical enhancements from my magic to very little, especially my defense, but heightening my magical powers to the limit."
"I bet you two could be almost unbeatable if you had Potaras."
I'm not even gonna ask. "You manage to channel a massive amount of energy into your creations so I figured you'd have some advice on that topic. I have hit a dead end by approaching this purely logically."
"Did you try getting really angry?"
"I don't think that is going to-" White stopped. "I get it. Super saiyan." I can't believe she's making me remember all those long winded explanations Nagisa was giving me about dragon ball… why do I remember what a spirit bomb is?
"Hm… do you know Naruto?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Okay, so basically, in Naruto, it's about ninjas but they use abilities that are basically magic. They have this theory-"
She's become really chatty as soon as the topic became manga… Do I sound like this when I talk about research? It reminds me of Mai when she talks about art. But unlike Mai… Peace, how long are you gonna talk? What is a gate? Why are you talking about sealed beasts? What is a Rocklee?
"So by utilizing these gates, he can temporarily elevates his power. There's some drawbacks, but isn't that fundamentally the same?"
I'm almost afraid to ask… "How does this gate thing work?"
"Okay, first I gotta explain what each gate does-"
This is gonna be a long three hours…
Listening to Peace very intently even though she had to keep steering her back towards the topic at hand – she even once started talking about a new idea she had regarding spies in victorian London using magic-like ninja powers. "I… see." I think I will be able to sympathize more with Nagisa going toward, especially about manga and when I try to explain science fiction shows to her. "I'm not sure if this will help me but I will try."
The moment the conversation of manga was over, Peace shriveled up. "I… I prattled on for so long…"
"I asked. If this is your way of explaining, that is my job to deal with. Assuming your hypothesis works and some of what happens in that manga will apply to me, you will have helped me a great deal. So don't worry." I never want to hear hand signs ever again though.
Peace bridged her fingers. "Really?"
Normally she would just have said really and let it go, but there was something about how Peace didn't seem to believe her. "Do people tell you that you talk about manga too much?"
"My editor always criticizes me for scope creep and talking her ear off..."
"There is quite a difference between you now and when you talk about something you love. You do love manga, right?"
"Enough to have become a mangaka."
"I know for a fact that Black doesn't understand half of my explanations on some sci-fi TV shows or my research but she always asks anyway and lets me explain. Your editor, does she listen to you?"
"She does. But she always complains after."
White tilted her head left and right a few times. "Well… I kind of know both ends of the stick." Now I do… "But if she listens, that means she cares." Pausing, White smiled again. "I don't know if it's your height or your personality but just looking at you I really want to pet your head."
"I-I'm not a kid!"
"Anyone who says you are probably never looked past that cute face."
"Kaoru said the same thing." Peace covered her mouth but it was too late.
"I'm going to work on that… gates theory you told me about. What will you do?" White pretended that she hadn't heard that. It takes barely more than the ability to put two and two together to see that those two have a thing going on with you, Peace. Egret knows, I know, some of the others definitely know, too.
Walking off with a gentle wave, White found the top of a dune and sat down after flattening a spot. So the theory was essentially dedicated compartmentalization of powers… looking within, identify the way the energy flows. Visualize gates, distributing power to speed, defense, strength… my magic originating from within, coalesced at the source, flowing… She paused. This is harder than I thought. I never really thought about the internal workings of… myself to this degree. I wish I could study someone else with magical powers under a microscope. Maybe perform some tests, see how they react to stimulus… Maybe…
Sitting there, contemplating, White could feel each second stretching longer and longer. Do I need to rethink this approach? I'm not gonna be able to listen to another long winded explanation from some manga though and I'm at a dead end approaching this with logic… crap, aren't I already back at logic, thinking about it like an electrical system… maybe it's more of a gut feeling thing? But that's Nagisa's area of expertise, especially when we have meat for dinner… White snickered at her own joke.Maybe I should see if we can't go on a date tomorrow evening… or maybe later in the evening. She was really tired when she came back. The only time I've seen her that exhausted was when she was studying for high school entrance exams. White took a deep breath. I wonder what Matsudaira-san is doing with the research for the EG-664-Y samples… she always mixes up the documents and… no, focus, White, focus. Gates.
She lasted a few minutes. Mamo had some really nice memory foam pillows on sale… Nagisa turns a lot on normal pillows but with one of those she slept like a log. It was kinda pricey even on sale though. It's a bit annoying we're all living off our savings right now to be honest… it's like being out of a job. I should definitely cut back on some expenses… but I can't stop going to the bathhouse. Nothing beats a hot soak like that. The atmosphere… I might like a lot of western things over our Japanese ones, like toilets, but unless you go to Rome or something in southern Europe, you're not going to find anything that can compete with a well run bathhouse. Come to think of it, I did have that epiphany about the EEAG-12 cell structure and the growth factor index form branching process while I was stopping by that bathhouse on the way home. Nagisa nearly took off my head for being three hours late without calling… thinking about it, when we get home, if we get to keep our powers like they are now… that makes me wonder about Mepple and Mipple though. Are they going to know us? I wonder if we can still get to- Her thought flew away together with a gargantuan amount of sand, propelled by an explosion that could only be described as a mountain shattering kaboom.
Getting up and looking at the source of the catastrophe, White jumped down a huge hole, sliding down a sharp decline and arriving more than ten meters below ground – staring at Peace's panties. The short Cure was stuck in the sand, upside down, and not moving at all. Grabbing her right ankle, White yanked her out of the sand and for a moment she could have sworn Peace's eyes were doing the swirly motion that comic characters did. "Peace, can you hear me?"
There was no response at all. Feeling pulse and breathing, White was satisfied that she was at least still alive. What do I do now? Well for starters… Carrying Peace in both arms, princess style, out of the huge hole she had made, White stopped at the top. I wonder if I should carry her back… leaving her in the sun is not something I'm comfortable with. Well, I suppose I can keep her company. I was not getting anywhere to begin with.
Putting Peace down and sitting by her side, White adjusted her position after about a minute, letting Peace use her lap as a pillow. Black won't mind.
Looking down at her, White couldn't resist poking her big cheeks a little bit. If I have a daughter someday, I'd want someone this cute. And I'd name her Sayaka. I wonder if Cure powers can be inherited. We didn't, but given how everyone prefers girl company, Cures probably rarely if ever have kids. That'll be an interesting experiment. I should check with some of the other couples if they want to have kids and ask them if they'd be okay keeping an eye out on whether their kids will have any powers. Come to think of it… what if someone had a boy? I wanna say that's impossible but… it's not like I have a basis for that. It just feels like that's not even worth considering somehow.
Peace twitched and a single hiccup escaped her. White had seen enough people drink and get sick to recognize this sign. Rolling Peace to the side, she held her head up and punched a hole into the sand. And sure enough, with the force of a garden hose at full strength, Peace emptied out her stomach contents right in front of her with a horrifying noise that made White gag a little.
"What…" Peace went for round two before she could say anything else and then started struggling. "T-Toilet!"
Pulling Peace up with her, White stood up. "Can you stand?"
"Y-Yes!" Her lie was laid bare immediately as she staggered forward hastily, fell over, rolling to the side, got back up like she was running from someone trying to kill her, stumbled again and this time fell down the dune, ending up out of sight of White. "I'm fine!"
After three minutes passed – White had only budged to shovel some sand over the vomit with a kick – she got somewhat worried. Just as she was about to shout, a very unstable Peace climbed up the dune on all fours, like she was constantly in danger of falling over forward. "So… so sorry you had to… see that…" She looked positively dejected and horrified at herself.
"I saw nothing bad." She held out her hand and Peace happily took it before tumbling right into White's chest. "Did you blow yourself up?"
"Just a… small miscalculation!" Peace hastily separated herself from White, tumbled backwards and landed square on her butt in the sand. Giving up on maintaining even the lie of being okay, she pulled her legs in close and hugged them. I want to disappear. This is so embarrassing…
"My [Fade to White] isn't going too well either."
"Did you try the gates?"
"Hah… I'm ashamed to say that when I try, my thoughts just wander off."
"Maybe you could try something else. There's a franchise called Magical Girl Lyrical-" Peace cut herself off when she saw that certain look of exhaustion in White's eyes. "Sorry, it's just that I found a lot of use in manga stuff and anime for my own abilities..."
"That's not the problem. I don't know much about anime or manga so a lot of it sounds just really abstract and convoluted to me."
"So you don't hate it?"
"In the worst case scenario I think you could say I don't get it. The appeal. And what it is about. There are a few anime I like, though."
Peace's eyes lit up like floodlights. "Really? Which ones?!"
White leaned a little to the side, startled by the sudden enthusiasm. "One of them I ended up watching because of Black, it was all about muscle training."
"Dumbbell Nan Kilo Moteru?" Peace was like a hawk with a scope.
"You really know a lot."
"As a mangaka it is my job to be always knowledgeable about the industry."
"I see."
"What else?"
"One I really like is called Doctor Stone."
"That one can be a little hard to follow. All the chemical compounds and interactions and physics stuff."
"Really? I found it interesting how well presented it all was."
Of course you would… when they started making a cellphone in basically the stone age I thought my head was gonna explode."Any others?"
"Peace, how good are you at keeping secrets?"
"Okay, I guess?"
"You cannot tell Black but I actually recorded a show called Keijo when it aired and watched it secretly by myself." Seeing Peace blush, White knew that she wasn't the only one that had watched that. "Don't give me that look! I bet you watch a lot worse!"
I totally do. Lots… "That's just so unexpected."
"The girls were very cute and so hard working. One of them reminded me a lot of Black."
"Nozomi? Or Kazane? Definitely not Sayaka, she was all about speed."
"I don't remember that much." White chuckled. She's like a different person, talking about this. "What do you like?"
"Seto no Hanayome!" Peace beamed. "It's about this teenage boy that almost drowns but is rescued by a mermaid and she takes him to the mermaid place and it turns out all the mermaids have human forms but they're also this really shady yakuza organization and they protect their secret of being mermaids by killing everyone that knows, so to avoid that she wants to marry him but of course-"
"Stop, stop, there's no way I'll be able to remember that." White didn't want to get her hopes up too much. "Are there any mangaka that you admire?" I need to keep this topic sort of on but… if she keeps explaining another ninja thing to me I think I'll have weird dreams.
"Ito Izumo!"
"What kind of manga does Ito-sensei do?"
"It's about a girl that has demon ancestry and-"
"Another battle story?"
"No, no! Actually a very, very cute yuri story about a magical girl falling in love with a demon, even though the magical girls are supposed to hunt and exterminate the demons!"
"That sounds a bit like Peach, don't you think?"
"The main character is called Yuuko, but the magical girl? Her name is Momo."
White tried to hold in a snort but couldn't. "Phwa!" Chuckling and hurting on the inside, she kept laughing quietly. "That is almost too much to be coincidence!"
"She has pink hair and she is super strong. The demon girl is super, super nice but also stubborn, very poor, and her transformed outfit is all leather-y and sexy."
"Now she sounds even kinda like Setsuna!"
Peace looked up and her smile grew wider. "Bless you, Ito-sensei."
"You are a pretty funny girl."
"Funny?"
"Maybe not in the haha here is a joke way, but it is… enriching to talk to you. It makes me smile." White saw Peace blush again. "Not like I feel about Black. Just… you are kind of like an endearing cat video I can talk to."
Peace steeled herself. "I take that as the highest praise."
White chuckled again. "This is the kind of thing I mean."
Bridging her fingers, Peace didn't know what to do with herself. "Do you wanna try listening to how it works in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha?"
Rolling her eyes just a little bit, White sighed. "Okay, but keep it simple enough that I can understand it. No bizarre insider-only terms unless you can explain them in ten words or less!"
"I'll do my best!"
While all of this was going on, Luminous was running her first serious test exercise after doing some focus training by herself while Rose had been fighting imaginary beings, protecting the spot Luminous sat on with all her might. The forest had suffered a little at first and Luminous had given Rose a really scolding look.
"Oh! Oh! I can feel the power welling up inside-" She stopped. "Did… I say something wrong?"
Luminous was so overtly pouting at her with the meanest look a through and through nice person could manage. "There is not a chance I managed to do it right the first try!"
"M-Maybe you did! You're amazing after all!" Rose felt extreme emotional damage when Hikari frowned at her and bonked her on the head like she was a disobedient cat.
"Bad!"
Looking down, like she was a scolded kid, Rose sighed. "Sorry… I didn't want you to feel down because it didn't work and-"
"Everyone else is trying really, really hard. I have to try really hard too. I didn't learn to bake in one afternoon in the kitchen either. I love that you care so much about me that you would pretend it worked but…"
"I know… Hah…" Rose sighed. "I can't help it. You are so cute when you smile!"
Smiling that exact smile at her girlfriend, Luminous leaned forward and hugged Rose. "Thanks… but you can't be extra nice to me because we're girlfriends."
Rose's heart nearly did a somersault at that. "I'll do… my best." Her face was slowly turning to red and she fought it with everything she had. That smile is so unfair… it's like the sun going up and down at the same time and twice as cute!
Luminous stepped back, put her hands together as if to pray at a shrine and focused. I can't just use my ability the normal way. I need to make it stronger, pour more into it… like I am sending her off to the final battle against the… the… big bad! Power of light… protect my love… "[Queen of Light]!" Clapping her hands twice, again in typical temple praying motion, she exerted her power onto Rose. "And?!"
Rose made a fist, turned, jumped on the spot a little. "It's a bit different from normal but it's more that I feel… kinda sluggish? But also..." She clenched her fist again and punched herself in the face. "Really sturdy? And..." She kicked the ground and barely made more of a dent that a normal person would have. "My armor is also really heavy..."
Luminous was beaming ear to ear.
"W-What?"
"I love you, Rose!" Jumping at her girlfriend, Luminous dealt massive damage to the armored girl's heart and psyche all in one go. "That tells me so much! I raised your defensive powers way too much and even took away your offense. So now I know what kind of feeling won't work." Releasing her ability, Luminous stepped back again and started to pace in a small circle.
"Any…" Her soul almost escaped through her mouth. "Anything I can do?" I'm so happy I could just die…
Luminous paced for a few seconds more. "Gimme your hand!"
Rose slowly held out her right hand and Luminous put both her hands gently around the gauntlet. "I'll try something, tell me when you feel… like you're floating!"
"Okay. Now."
Luminous giggled. "You know what I mean! Gosh, you're so… so cute." Luminous blushed a little and averted her eyes just enough to look cute.
Rose took several deep breaths and closed her eyes. "Okay… okay..." She clenched a fist and punched herself on the herself. "Okay… ready." Why does she have to smell so good even transformed… it's like a sun kissed grass field…
Holding Rose's hand, Luminous had a closer look at her fingers, slowly sliding her own between the empty spaces. So pretty. Pulling her hand back, she used her teeth just a little to pull on her own glove, on her right hand, taking it off and then taking Rose's hand again. "Rose, can you-" She blinked in surprise. "Rose?"
"Yeah?"
Your face is all red! Smirking a little, Luminous reached for Rose's face with both hands, setting an index finger each right on the corners of the knight's mouth and making her smile. "Smiling Knight Savant, Milky Rose!"
"D-Don't tease!" Opening her eyes, Rose blushed pretty intensely when she saw Luminous' delighted expression. Ah, don't teeeaaaassseeeee!
"Okay, okay!" The warm and happy smile of Luminous lowered the knight's defense all the way to nothing. "Can you take off your gauntlet? Maybe? Please?"
Hurriedly reaching for her hand, Rose fumbled the removal for a solid twenty seconds before giving up. Someone just kill me! "Y-You want to give me a hand?"
"Sure!" Pulling very lightly on Rose's gauntlet, Luminous didn't get it to budge. "Is there a hook somewhere?"
It's not a bra… "Pull a little harder, it's designed to withstand combat and all."
"Ey!" Pulling with all her might, she got the gauntlet off and played up how heavy it was. "Uwah… this weights a ton!"
"I-I gotta be strong to protect you!"
"Being that strong… I bet you can easily carry a groceries bag!"
I'll carry anything for you. "Leave it to me!"
"Hehe, my strong knight!" Taking her girlfriend's hand again, Luminous smiled less and took a deep breath and closed her eyes. "Okay, time for more tests!"
Rose felt like someone stuck a garden hose into her and suddenly opened up the vent all the way. S-Stop! She felt like she was gonna puke, not in a physical way. Stop! She couldn't say anything out loud but she felt something run out of her nose. Squeezing Luminous' hand really hard, she got her to open her eyes and immediately let up.
"Rose!" She almost tackled her girlfriend to her ground. "Are you okay?! Can you talk? How do you feel?"
Swiping her nose with her other gauntlet, Rose took a deep breath and felt much better. Just glancing at her gauntlet she felt relieved. Just snot… I really need a tissue though… "I'm fine, I'm fine."
"You're not fine, you looked like you were about to turn blue! I'm so sorry, I shouldn't be trying-" Luminous was cut off by Rose grabbing her hands really tightly, one with gauntlet and one without. "Rose?"
"No matter what happens in here, it can't hurt us. Well, it can hurt but you know we won't be worse for the wear… much. I'm fine, really." She took a really deep breath and exhaled slowly. "You can feel my pulse, right? Fine."
"Really?"
"I'm a big girl. I'm your knight, right? Knights are tough."
"I wonder where this went wrong..."
Rose wasn't sure how to explain it. "Kind of… it kind off felt like you were gushing more and more power into me but without any real target. Like… inflating a tire but not checking how much more you gotta put in." Squeezing the blonde's hands, she smiled. "Let's go for the next one."
"The next one?"
"I am not letting you quit because I felt a little inflated there! I didn't even fart!" Rose blushed tremendously as she said fart out loud. "Forget that!"
Luminous wrestled one hand free to cover her own mouth to hide her chuckling and giggling. "You're so cute."
"Don't say that! Forget I said that!"
"Rose, Rose." Luminous couldn't help but keep chuckling. "I'm very, very close with Nagisa. You would be amazed the things she's said and I heard!"
"Like… like what?"
"Burping the name of the prime minister!"
I'm surprised Nagisa even knows the name of the prime minister… I'm not surprised she can burp it… I probably can too. "So you like that kinda thing?"
"Hm… No." Luminous only thought about it very briefly. "It was funny because it came out of nowhere."
"You, Nagisa and Honoka seem really, really close."
"We are. We should all go and do barbecue together!"
Rose started to sweat a little. Given how close they are… isn't this like meeting her parents? No, no, no… I already know Nagisa and Honoka. So there's-
"Don't worry, they like you. Especially Nagisa."
"No reading my mind! That's cheating!"
"It was all written-" She lightly touched Rose's forehead with her index finger. "Right here!"
Covering up her forehead, Rose vehemently denied it. "Not!"
"Totally is." Luminous chuckled. "Okay… you really sure you can continue? You don't need to lie down?"
"A knight feels no pain!"
"That's definitely a lie!"
"A knight… doesn't lie!"
"That is also definitely a lie!"
"Nuh uh!" Rose smirked. "Okay, try me again. I'll do a few more practice sets of my own after so give it your best shot."
"Okay. Ready? On three. One-"
"Is that when you say three or like a three, go deal?"
"Rose!"
"Kidding!"
While those two were flirting a lot, Marine was rinsing off Egret's face. "That had to hurt. And it looked really funny!" A minute earlier she witnessed Egret soaring through the air, rapidly towards the ground without brakes.
Looking mightily annoyed, Egret splashed seawater on her face a third time and rubbed the last of the dirt off her skin. "Not that I'm not grateful for a wash… but why are you here?"
"White and Peace are doing nothing at all so I got bored watching them."
"You're supposed to be training."
"And you're supposed to slow down before landing!" Erika grinned wide and very quickly found herself to be a small animal in the eyes of a predator bird. "Kidding, kidding!" Not!
"Unlike you I am actually making an effort." Egret was not in a great mood. She was not making any progress on producing wings capable of sustained flight.
"I am too!" Marine stood up and stretched. "I'm so working on the perfectest bestest ability ever."
"Very convincing." Egret was very much not believing her.
"Hey! It's hard!"
"Right. Your… [Thieving Cat]? How are you even going to do that?"
"Trade secret! State secrets even!"
"Is that so?" Standing up, Egret patted down her outfit and started to generate a new set of wings. Wait… I already tried these. Dissipating them, she thought about other shapes.
Marine was very intently staring at her and she couldn't tell if it was just a joke, if she wanted her to ask again about the ability or something else entirely. No way anyone but Tsubomi can tell with this girl. "Okay, I will bite. Tell me. How is it going to work? I clearly have clearance."
"He he he he he! Listen and be amazed! Ladies and Ladies!" Marine pranced around Egret and then suddenly touched her back. "[Thieving Cat]!"
"Ow!" Egret felt a sting, like getting pricked by a thread needle. "What did you-" She turned around and found Marine holding a pair of boots. Her boots. "How did you-?!" She looked down and found her boots to be still there.
"That's my ability! Copy a power and make it show as clothes. But I'm a little stuck with the copy process." She waved the boots around before putting them down, next to her own. "See? They're way not my size. Also-" Marine started to whistle and the boots disappeared. "I kinda meant to make the whole set… and got only your boots."
That's one scary ability… "I don't even understand how your powers let you do that."
"Don't you know? All life began in the ocean!"
I see. "Okay."
"You don't believe me!"
"No, totally do."
"Lies!"
"My powers relate to the sky so I am trying to fly but how does oceans equate stealing abilities and making clothes?" Egret couldn't resist.
"There are a ton of rare living things in the oceans. Jellyfish are amazingly adaptable, algae can grow anywhere, and so on. My powers totally include that!"
"Suddenly I'm glad you're not the overly serious fighting type like Beauty…"
"Hey. I do fight seriously!"
"Any chance you're good at calculating things?"
Marine got very close to Egret and eyed her chest area rather conspicuously. "Looks fine to me. Did they get bigger?"
"Not my clothes!" Blushing, she tried to swat Marine but she might as well have tried to hit a dragonfly. "My wings! I can't figure out the wingspan, density and what not… I'm more… you know, the creative type."
Marine grinned wide, pointed at herself and made a very obnoxious face. "Designer!"
"Right. I should go find White." I'm not getting anywhere just with trial and error. There's like a thousand types of wings I can imagine right now and probably another thousand tomorrow. I am not taking a few more hundred falls.
"Oh, I'll come with!"
"Right, you know where they are. Thanks."
"Oh, no, no, no, I don't remember the first thing about where they are other than-" She drew a massive circle in the air towards the desert. "Somewhere out there."
Great. "So why are you coming with me?"
"Because it sounds interesting!"
"Why not go look for Luminous and Rose?"
"They are so lovey-lovey-dovey-dovey that it's gonna melt my teeth!" Marine grinned again. "They're cute, I don't want to be in the way."
"But you're okay being in my way?"
"You're not flying, so I'm not in the way!"
She has this… obnoxious way with words that reminds me of Kaoru, but way more annoying! Smart but annoying! She's like… a gremlin. Cure Gremlin! "Fine. Come on."
"He he, can't shake my charm, huh?" Marine smirked and joined Egret by her side. "So… wings?"
"What?`You're going to make fun-"
"That's way cool."
"Really." Egret couldn't take it at face value. "You think that's cool?"
"Flying is everyone's dream! Superheroes in comics always fly. We can jump really high, we can do energy beams and all sorta stuff, but real flying we can't! Not even with magic capes. It's not the same. I wanna do like a bird and go soaring on the winds! Not be some slightly short supergirl!"
She seems genuine… "My ability isn't just for me to fly."
"You and one other?"
"Everyone that is my ally."
"Wow. You must have some serious juice to give everyone magic wings."
"I try. So far I'm mostly drawing a blank on how to make wings that actually work."
"You're really good at making the kind that let you dive really quick!"
"Maybe I should work on making wings that can achieve lift off without a jump."
"That's silly."
Hey… "Okay, why?"
"We can already jump really well. Lift off is really stressful for birds, way more than properly flying. That's why birds dive off high places so they don't need to do lift off!"
"How do you even-"
"Know that? Seagulls!"
"Of course."
"I'm smart, right?" Marine put her arms behind her head and proudly strutted next to Egret. "Wings! I can't wait to fight by your side!"
"You're really excited about this."
"Hey, hey, hey!" Marine looked even more excited now. "Those are gonna be big white wings, right? Can you imagine how cute Blossom is gonna look?"
"I didn't think about that but… I guess."
"You and Bloom have been going out for a while, right?"
"Where did that come from?"
"Hm…" Marine looked away and scratched her cheek. "I'm not sure I'm doing okay as Tsumi's girlfriend."
"What makes you think that?"
"Everyone." Marine was lacking that typical luster of confidence in herself. "You and Bloom, White and Black, Peach with Passion and Beat, you know, everyone."
"For how smart you are, you're pretty dumb."
"Hey!" Marine pouted with a grim look.
"Wouldn't Tsubomi say something if she wasn't happy?"
"I don't want her to be just happy! I want that super duper happiness that all of you got!"
"That's different for everyone. For me and Bloom… I'm not sure we even have that, right now."
"How come?"
"Hah…" Egret sighed. Am I really gonna spill my guts to Marine? "Saki isn't sure what to do with herself, her life, when we get back and I'm not sure I can just stay the way I am. I feel like I am just… falling off the starting line, becoming this one dimensional person who has their own hobby which is also their job and a partner and there's nothing else to them."
"For a smart person you say some really weird things. If you're afraid of who you're becoming, just be something else!"
"I'm trying that and it's been blowing up in my face quite a bit. Lately I feel like I'm becoming too much like Urara and it's frustrating and the only thing worse than Urara around here is Akane. Know what, forget it, it's not like you're going to give me advice anyway."
"What's wrong with just being an artist and a hobby or work you're dedicated to? You're nice, quiet, calm, at least used to!"
"And that's why I worry I'm-"
"You're really not smart if that makes you worry. Did Bloom ever say she's bored with you?"
"No, but-"
"Are you sure you're not just reading too much into it because we have some really odd girls here?"
I don't want that to hear from the queen of weirdos. "So… what, I should stop trying?"
"Of course not."
"What?" Egret couldn't make sense of what Marine was saying.
"Try everything! Maybe something will be nice and you can just add that to nice, calm and quiet artist! But you don't have to throw that away. That's like me throwing away being the helpful sage character!"
Egret snorted. "You are not the helpful sage character."
"Gaaaaah..." Marine faked surprise. "But if not me then who could possibly-"
"Diamond, Pine, Moonlight, White, Aqua-"
"Hey!"
"You asked."
"Okay, fair."
Egret didn't say anything for a little while. "Sorry for being snarky."
"Snarky? I mean, you are kinda long and winding, but-"
"Snark! Not Snake! It doesn't even sound the same!"
"Snarky Snake Egret."
"Stop being so annoying when I try to apologize to you!"
"There's nothing to apologize here." Marine revealed a big sincere smile. "You got your issues. Everyone got some. Small. Big. We're all stuck here together and I guess we haven't talked much or at all before but that doesn't mean we're not friends. Right, Cure Snarky Snake?"
"What do you mean winding?"
Walking sideways, Marine did a big wave shape with her hands as she followed Egret's body line. "Pretty wa-wa-woom~."
Covering her chest by instinct, Egret blushed. "Watch it."
"I think this snarky snake personality fits you too well."
Egret let out a bit sigh. "I get it… I tried to be like Honoka but that didn't work out so great either. I don't know when to stop teasing and it went overboard."
"Of course you can't be like the great Erika! But maybe you could learn a thing or two from Komachi."
"Komachi?"
"She's doing the whole reinventing yourself thing too."
"Actually I think I'll spend some time thinking about where I am going with all of this."
"Hey, speaking of going."
"What now?"
"We're totally lost."
"We are not-" Egret turned around to point at the distant grass fields and found that she could only see sand in every direction. "Okay, maybe we are just a little lost." Noticing that Marine was starting to dig a hole, Egret sighed again. "What are you doing now?"
"I saw this on TV! If you trap the water down there and-" Her explanation was cut short by a shock wave rolling over the dunes and knock both of them flat on their butts.
Marine was back up first, shaking her head like a wet dog. "Egret? You okay?" For all her shenanigans, she cared for those around her.
"Getting a little tired of this..." Egret was face down on the sand and her mouth tasted like sandbox.
She was not the only one of that opinion. A few kilometers away, at the bottom of a very, very big hole, were White and Peace, still sizzling with electricity and white plasma and both of them also very, very dead.
At the edge of the hole stood Echo, looking down with a frown. "The high-spec energy types can be such a pain to deal with…" Looking down what amounted a slope almost a hundred meters long and over thirty meters down, she jumped lightly and landed right down next to White. "I think I need to change the assignments a little. Maybe put Peace together with Aqua. Opposing minds." Picking up White's lifeless, charred body, Echo clicked her fingers and the corpse disappeared.
Back outside the arena, White materialized – and within an instant her hair stood up like she was masquerading around as Lady Frankenstein or a character from Night before Christmas. "Oh..." Realizing that she was back outside, she sighed. "That was an unexpected chain react-" She cut off when Peace showed up next to her. "You okay?"
Peace's hair standing wildly away in every direction, like the worst case of bed hair in all of history. "My head hurts a bunch… and I can kinda taste vanilla ice… What happened? White, are you okay?"
"Other than probably going to need a few hours to brush this down?" She glanced up. "Everything hurts and I have a headache."
The doors swung open and an irritated looking Echo came out. "Back in, both of you. There's over an hour left."
Following the spartan trainer, Peace continued talking to White. "Do you remember what happened?"
"We tried infusing highly unstable magical plasma with electrical charge. It kind of… exploded."
"There was a gigantic crater and both of you were toast." Echo summarized it up for them. "I'm glad I didn't send the two of you to the forest. Putting out some huge kind of plasma induced fire would be a pain."
"The crater is not a problem?" Peace seemed relieved.
"The area is reset after everyone is out." Echo stopped, turned around and smiled before she continued in a much quieter voice. "Diamond almost cut a hole into the spatial dimensions of reality earlier and caused a bottomless gorge to exist out there. So a little crater is nothing. Do they to avoid blowing yourself up, unless I'm nearby it might take some time before I can restore you."
"Wasn't Blossom supposed to do that?" White had been meaning to ask about her absence.
"I had her teach me the principles behind it." Echo quickly answered. "She needs to train to. I can get off with a little bit of slacking off. I'm kinda strong already."
"Kinda." White smirked. "You took on all of us and put us on our asses."
"Who? Me?" Echo faked innocence. "I'd never!"
"Yes, yes." White smiled. "Peace, you ready to blow ourselves up another time?"
"Eh?!"
"I'm joking." Ruffling Peace's extreme bed hair, White smiled. "Let's avoid any more big explosions."
"Hey! No ruffling!" She pouted. "This'll take forever to go back to normal..."
"You have problems with bed hair?"
Not answering right away, Peace just looked away. "No."
"Must be nice. I do. Not as bad as Nagisa- I really ought to take a picture of her right after waking up."
"How do you deal with it?"
"Just a brush. You?"
"Sometimes I don't. I don't go out every day- You tricked me!" Pouting wildly at her training partner, Peace still followed her without losing a step.
=== DISSONANCE ===
(Piece Four)
"Bwahahahahaha!" Melody could just barely stand, laughing too hard to think or form any coherent sentences. The sight of White and Peace was just too much, both of them looking like a farm's worth of sheep had stampeded through their hair.
Beat had to try very hard not to laugh and was failing at it, hiding herself away in a corner, bent over against the wall and not looking at them other than the occasional glance.
Muse managed to stay quiet but the attentive observer could tell that she was pinching her own arm pretty hard and the corners of her mouth were still twitching.
White's hair was practically a fir tree while Peace's resembled a tumbleweed that tried to grow in every direction by extending large cowlick like roots. They were leaned against each other, across two seats, and too exhausted to react properly. I'm gonna get them for this… White thought.
"Get-Get-" She was snorting somewhat heavily in-between words and trying her ultimate effort to not laugh. "Pfhw- Me-Melody, don't la-laugh." Rhythm was trying to the a voice of reason but it was futile.
"You are all terrible!" Blossom managed to not laugh although this was partially in thanks to Marine. Her girlfriend was hanging over a seat upside down, her head nearly touching the floor and her cleavage very visible for everyone.
"Peace, are you okay?" Bright was there, part of the last group for that day. She didn't laugh because she knew exactly what kind of bed hair Yayoi could have in the morning. It was just as magical as being a Cure.
"Parfait..." Was all that Peace could bring herself to say.
Sunny was keeping her distance and kept nervously glancing to Echo.
"You're the last group, ladies, let's start. Even I want to go home at some point." Echo found it hard to get their attention when half of them were about to laugh their guts out. "Hey!" Raising her voice, she finally got the Suite girls to turn towards her and she pointed towards the arena over her shoulder with a thumbs up gesture.
Passing White and Peace, Muse finally found a chance to talk to Rhythm. "Where were you all day?"
"I…" Rhythm felt very uncomfortable discussing it. "I went to the mountains with Rin… and… there were mushrooms. I swear they didn't look poisonous!" Muse looked at her like she was a moron. "I swear I don't know what came over me! Rin and I were down most of yesterday, last night and today… I hope my stomach is finally okay..."
"What's this, what's this, Rhythm blabbing about sexy misadventures with Rouge?" Melody joined the two of them after overhearing Rin and I were down.
"That's not what it was!" Rhythm shoved Melody to the side with a flare on her face.
"Eh, that's not what your face says though!" Melody was already snickering, leftover reflex from seeing White and Peace. "Beat, come over here real quick!"
"Melody!" Rhythm was blushing harder now, out of shame.
"What's the big deal? I get down with Itsuki all the time." Sounding proud of it, Melody didn't miss Muse overtly rolling her eyes. "You don't get to be all prude about it! I bet you and Urara-" She backed away, went around Rhythm and hid to her other side, all because Muse glared at her. "Woah scary. Just what to expect from a princess."
"Don't fight." Beat had caught up and entered the gap between Rhythm and Muse, all four Suite Cures now in formation. "What's so important, Melody?"
"Listen to this, Rhythm here wasn't missing, she just spent a whole marathon in bed."
A few weeks ago, Beat would have turned scarlet at that comment but not so now. "Really?"
"No! Don't listen to this dumbass!"
"Who're you calling a dumbass?!"
"You! Dumbass!"
"And I thought you two were finally over this literally manzai act." Muse sighed. "Rhythm ate some mushrooms without checking if they were poisonous and was down from that since yesterday."
"Pfffff, hahahahaha, are you stupid?! You're stupid, Rhythm!" Melody ducked when Rhythm took a swing at her and quickly dodged to the side when there was follow up.
Watching Rhythm angrily chase Melody through the hallway, towards the arena, Blossom, next to Bright and slightly ahead of Sunny, felt suddenly a lot better about her own girlfriend's behavior. "And I worried about how people view my group..."
"Those four are a bit special. Not a single normal person among them." Bright felt Blossom's probing eyes on her. "Not that I'm one to talk."
"Are you going to be fine without your sister here?"
"We're on the opposing ends of the fighting spectrum so there's no problem. Saki would be real handy to have around for sparing."
"You don't have a problem with hitting your friends?"
"Everyone here goes at it seriously in combat and you ask that now?" Bright chuckled. "No, I feel comfortable hitting Saki because I know there is nobody else here that can take it better than her. Maybe except Heart, but that is a special case."
"I really wanna know how her magic works..." Blossom was a healer, and Heart was someone who healed herself. An obvious overlap in interest.
"So you can stop her?"
"No!" Blossom wasn't sure herself. "Well, maybe…"
Marching on through the arena gates, they entered the big grassy plain, forest to the left, desert to the right. "What kind of ability-"
"Bright!" Echo called out to her.
"Yes?"
"Do you have a plan already?"
"A theory, not quite a plan."
Echo walked over to her, ignoring that Rhythm was still chasing around Melody, Beat and Muse acting like a table they were going around. "What kind of theory?"
"We have healers like Blossom and girls that are almost indestructible like Heart. Others with great defense capabilities like Rosetta and Mint. I am looking at channeling my power into something overwhelmingly destructive to bypass issues like that. In some situation simply lacking someone capable of a massive, powerful attack will result in an impossible to win situation."
"That is a very logical approach. Your power concerns the moon itself, which is different from Moonlight. How are you planning to utilize that?"
"The moon is a massive object of gravity that is necessary for such things as tides on a global scale. I will attempt to use my powers to channel that enormous force into a single attack. Most likely a punch. A result similar to the moon crashing into the Earth." She paused and saw Blossom's worried face. "On a much smaller scale. I doubt even Echo here could hit something as hard as the moon colliding with Earth."
"Probably not." Echo was smiling just a little. "That sounds like an adequate theory, but given the possible degree of destruction, I will move you far out into the desert."
"That's fine."
"I'll go with her!" Blossom suddenly volunteered. "With an ability like that you are definitely continuously overtaxing your body and that is going to be a great way for me to refine a method to provide better support."
"You have something in mind alrea-" Echo stopped when a large clump of dirt and grass hit her head from behind, dirt and grass flying everywhere. She breathed faster and there was a violent look on her face.
Turning around, Muse was already putting both Melody and Rhythm back in line, dragging them by their hair, away from the others, with dirt stains and an aggressive frown on her face.
"Those four…!" Echo clenched a fist and the grass below her withered.
"M-My goal is to be able to provide healing over time, even when I'm not close by! Healing one person at a time is okay when it's just the four of my group and we all fight together, but with big groups like we have here… it's not enough. So I'll work on something that can provide healing over a longer time, even if it's less powerful!" Hurriedly explaining herself before Echo lost her patience, Blossom was glad to see the angry look disappear.
"[Sunlit Gate] open." Creating a large, yellow gate next to herself, consisting of a frame and two winged doors, Echo gestured for those two to go in. "It will take you about a hundred kilometers into the desert. That should be sufficient to avoid interference with the other groups."
"There might be some tremors, but sand should act as an adequate dampener." Bright walked right through the gate and disappeared into a wavering yellow surface of magic.
"Thanks. And I'm sorry for anything stupid Marine might have done or said." Blossom lightly bowed and then hurried after Bright. The gate disappeared a moment later.
"I don't believe you two." Muse was staring down Melody and Rhythm while Beat was standing just left and behind the princess. "This isn't the circus or a beach party. Throwing around things would not even be acceptable on the beach either!"
"Yes, we're sorry." Melody apologized and shot Rhythm a look.
"We're sorry."
"Why do I get the impression you really aren't?" After spending so much time with Urara she could tell a genuine apology from one that was only given to get out of trouble.
"It got a little out of hand! You're being way too harsh here! You're not our team leader either, so why-" Melody mouthed off and then quickly hid behind Rhythm when Muse looked like she was ready to blast the two of them with some Majorland secrets.
"Don't use me a shield, doofus!"
"You're the one who got all mad and chased me!"
"Because you couldn't keep your mouth shut!"
"I'm so glad Love and Setsuna aren't here… I'd be embarrassed to have you as my friends." Beat's comment did some major damage to both of them and they visibly started to feel bad over what they had done.
"Maybe we did go too far..." Rhythm was first to show repentance.
"Yeah. You know I was just riling you up, right?"
"Of course."
"Ho? So this was all an act?" An immense killing aura was coming from behind them and Echo stood there, having appeared in a flash. Making a break for it like kids that were trying to escape, Rhythm and Melody raced to hide behind Muse.
"Oh no, you do not drag me into this." Moving out of the way, both Melody and Rhythm collided, face to face, rolling on the ground, covering their faces with their hands. "You two are both…"
"What kind training are we doing?" Beat stepped up in an attempt to deescalate the situation. And it worked.
"Do you have anything in mind?" Echo was still giving Melody and Rhythm stink eye but she wasn't doing anything else.
"It's pretty obvious. That's why the four of us are in the same group." Muse felt a little annoyed. "Beat and I are both capable of using Hymnos. Expanding on that seems to be the natural choice. Although in my case-"
"At the beginning of this training I told all of you that you would be receiving a little extra for me to facilitate the proper combat application of your new abilities. In the cases of you four, I'll be giving you that before we start to enable the logical progression to begin with."
"Eh… what?" Melody didn't follow that.
"She's going to increase everyone's power so we can even start working on new abilities." Muse interpreted for Melody.
"Thanks. Long day." Echo exhaled sharply. "Beat, Muse of course can't decide for you-"
"Hymnos training is good. If I can find something that empowers Peach and Passion-" Beat blushed when she felt Melody and Rhythm staring at her and then heard them snicker. "Both of you, sh-shut it!"
"Did you hear, Rhythm?"
"I sure did, Melody."
A thick and pulsating vein became visible on Echo's forehead. "If you two don't stop-"
"Okay, okay, no more jokes!" Melody raised her hands in surrender, got up and helped up Rhythm. "What about us? We can't do the whole Hymnos thing. Or can we?"
Muse groaned. "Are you from Majorland?"
"No."
"Then of course you can't."
"I got a plan B then." Melody rubbed her index finger right under her nose. "We can't do magic songs but we can do magic singing!"
"Huh?" Rhythm wasn't entirely sure what Melody was getting at.
"Think about it. We can do all sorts of magical singsong to do stuff, but what if we just apply that to ourselves?"
"You mean like… a solo karaoke to power ourselves up?"
"Ding-Dong, that's right!" Melody said the last part in horribly pronounced English. "Itsuki helped me come up with that."
"That's along the lines of what I would have suggested. You four command the powers of music in various ways. That is a very unique type of power, so you should capitalize on it."
"So." Melody gestured for Echo to hand something over. "Gimme the big plan of how we're gonna do that!"
"Huh?" Echo was confused. "Didn't you just say you came up-"
"With the end result!"
"Are you serious…?" Echo let her head hang. "I don't use song magic. I don't know how you're going to work that out."
"Then how are we ever-"
"Enough." Muse couldn't stand it anymore. "Everyone else is trying hard. Everyone here has a girlfriend that's already went through this. I doubt Echo just gave them a bullet point list of things to do."
"Abilities are something you need to work out for yourself. At most I can give you an idea of where to look and what to try, but not how."
"Phoney…"
"Come on, it's not like you have to try it all by yourself." Rhythm tried to encourage her friend.
"Do you have any great ideas?"
"Nope."
"Ugh..." Melody looked disappointed.
"It's not like you got any!"
"I thought up the whole singing ourselves stronger!"
"Itsuki did!"
"For me!"
As they started fighting again, Muse stepped forward. "Can we go elsewhere? Somewhere deep within the forest."
"In a moment." Echo whistled and both Melody and Rhythm stopped pulling each other's hair and faces. "Circle around me. Now."
Taking position in the four cardinal directions around Echo, the Suite Cures felt anticipation well up. As far as they had heard, they were the first to actually receive this so called extra from Echo.
"I'm going to be exerting my full power. Don't move or I can't guarantee something bad will happen."
A deep breath that seemed to slow down time. The grass quivered by the stormy touch of power, radiating off of Echo stronger now, stronger still as each moment passed. The trees rustling in the distance, clouds parting from the sky above, baring the great and wide azure.
Their skin prickled by power, their tongue tingling as they could taste the power in the air. They had fought her before, seen how strong she was. But they had not understood then just how powerful she was.
Grass grew higher, elevated to a greater form of self, the sky turned to the brightest of blues, the winds seeking refuge far away and yet hair and cloth were shaken by the very figment of reality they stood in. A reality under attack, supplanted by a power greater than itself. Creation anew in front of them, they looked onto Echo as from the ground up bloomed a flower of pure red, thorns of darkest green growing up by her legs, leaving nay a scratch on skin or cloth. A transformation upon a transformation.
Roses blooming throughout her hair, vines taking the place of cloth, Echo transformed in front of their eyes into a form of greater power still, the guardian deity of the Rose garden. Her lips a fierce red, her eyes a deep shade of purple, her hair an abyss of black.
"[Rebirth by Dawn]"
The world stood still, holding its breath so it might not interrupt Echo Guardian. From the roses in her hair, four tiny spheres of light were born, brighter than the rays of a morning sun at the horizon, each a perfect crystal of pure energy. Floating slowly outward, each towards its recipient, their new owner.
Burning, shining, crystal became light itself, bound together by force of mind, like the tiniest of sun flares, circling a singular point of might. By themselves, by instinct, they held out their hands, a gentle cup, upon which the light came to rest. Warm and hot, like a relaxing bath after a long day, it fit snugly into their hands.
Enclosing the power into an embrace of two hands, like they were to protect a baby bird just born, they pulled their hands close, towards their chest, holding close their powers new. A warmth flooded their bodies, spreading through every fiber of their being – mind, body and self.
Like the end of a sudden downpour the atmosphere lifted, a gust of wind blew by, goosebumps rose from the sensation.
"Phew." Echo's transformation came undone, vines and roses dissipating into fragments of light. "All of you are now stronger than before. I have shared a little piece of power of the Rose Garden Sanctuary with you. As long as I and it lives, the power will remain within you."
Melody was the first to get herself together. "I don't really feel any stronger. Just… kinda full? Like I ate fifteen dumplings."
Rhythm took a step forward, then aside, then another, and whacked Melody in the back of her head. "Can you not ruin the moment with food talk?"
"Huh?! Excuse me, then how would you put it!"
"The satisfaction of having just perfected my newest, best creation!"
Muse was so ashamed to be part of the same team as those two that she turned away and sighed. "Beat."
"Y-Yes?" Beat was a little taken aback by what she had witnessed just moments before.
"Come. We'll get going while those two keep wasting time."
"It will take too long to go by foot." Echo gestured next to her. "[Moonlit Gate] open. Use this."
"That's a really interesting technique. How does it differ from the [Sunlit Gate]?" Muse was curious.
"The [Sunlit Gate] goes only to places ruled by the sun. The [Moonlit Gate] is more about shadowy places like the forest." Echo explained and had the gates open, revealing a dark purple wavering surface. "It will take you really far. If there is trouble, I will come and get you."
"Won't it be a problem if we die?" Beat asked.
"Why?" Echo didn't follow.
"Dying ends up restoring us to… what we were like the moment we entered, right? So no more extra pow-" Beat was cut off by Echo raising her hand.
"Sort of restored. Everyone is still tired and such after a battle and training, right? Magic isn't given back and your new power is already becoming part of that. Unless someone dies within the next five to ten minutes… actually, Melody and Rhythm might need to receive it again." Echo was gritting her teeth and staring past Beat.
"Whack them around once or twice and they should give it a rest." Muse wasn't about to stay for that. "Beat." Gesturing to the fairy turned Cure, the princess left through the gate.
"Thanks." Beat smiled at Echo and hurried after her liege.
Cracking her knuckles, Echo smiled like a villain. "Hey."
Melody and Rhythm stopped dead in their tracks, in the middle of pulling each other's hair again. "Oh no." They responded as one.
"Stop messing around now."
"Okay, okay!" Melody separated from Rhythm and they both fixed up their costumes. They could withstand an explosion or being smashed into a building but that didn't mean they were glued in place.
"I should probably split you up so you don't fight again but as you both want to try-" She stopped. "Actually, Rhythm, do you even want-"
"I'll get there before Melody!"
"Hey!"
Echo sighed. "Fine. I'm sending the two of you to a different part of the forest."
"Why can't we stay here?" Melody wanted to.
"Because the second I turn around and go off, you two will sneak out and just do dumb things in the lobby and slack off."
"We would not!" Rhythm defended herself and her friend.
Melody leaned towards Rhythm so she could speak quietly. "We kinda would… probably."
Rhythm answered just as quietly. "She doesn't need to know that. They had a cupcake vending machine. I have got to try that."
"[Moonlit Gate] open." Creating another passageway, Echo nodded at it pretty enthusiastically. "I am not letting you stay here."
"Tche…" Melody patted Rhythm on the back. "Let's go. We'll finish this before Muse and Beat and show them we don't need some fancy inherited magic song power to out-music them."
"No such thing as out-musicing someone." Rhythm sped up and walked one step ahead of Melody, only to be overtaken by Melody and then overtaking her again. Bouncing and pushing against each other, they were stopped before they could fight again. Echo moved behind them with lightning speed, grabbed Melody and threw her like a bag of rice, right into the gate. "W-Wai-!" Rhythm tried to go ahead and enter normally but Echo was seemingly fed up with them.
Finally having sent off everyone, Echo turned to deal with the last of her problems. Sunny was still there, having sat by herself in the distant grass, aggressively stoic and unwilling to do anything. Now that everyone else was gone, that farce dropped, she stood up and the illusion disappeared, revealing Bad End Sunny beneath, worried out of her mind. She couldn't even process how it happened when Echo moved from more than a hundred meters away to directly in front of her. It was like time had stopped.
"What-" Hinako opened her mouth.
"-am I gonna do now?" Echo seemed to read her mind. Slowly putting her hand on top of Hinako's head, Echo reassured her with a head-pat and smile. "Don't worry. Just sit tight for a while. I can make you look and sound like Sunny, but giving you her actual powers… well, even if I did that, you'd have trouble using them, right?"
"Well… probably." Hinako frowned a little over being treated like this and backed away slightly. "I'm grateful for this, but why-"
"I want everyone to be happy. I get this isn't exactly ideal for you, but Nao is really happy. You don't think you could get used to her?"
"That's not really the issue… I already have someone-"
"Then what about handling it like Peach?"
"No, no, no, Peach is definitely special. There is no way I can handle dating Nao and Harumi."
"You sure? Otherwise Nao or Harumi are gonna end up heartbroken."
What is even the point of trying to convince me here? I'm not gonna dump Harumi. Nao is nice but… "Can't you just send me back?"
"Not without this entire place falling apart." Echo tried to say it as nonchalantly as possible. "I guess I better explain it, so you understand why I'm keeping you here."
"That would be great."
"This whole place, not just the arena, is kind of unstable right now. While everyone is training, I'm constantly searching for the source of the problem. That's also kinda why I want everyone to train. If it's something I can't handle on my own then I'm going to need everyone else." She lowered a voice and glanced away. "Not that I don't already have an idea…"
"What about the other side?"
"Moving someone from here to there is like… imagine that there's this big place we're all in and part of it is covered by plastic wrap. Anything going in or out leaves a hole. The system that creates all of this plugged the holes now. To get you back, I'd have to break through the safeguards this place has set up. And there is no way that isn't going to be a huge problem."
Hinako looked crestfallen. "So there's no way back?!"
"Hey, hey, I didn't say that." She smiled. "I'm sure that if we get rid of the problem that's causing all the malfunctions, like the other hotel being overrun by… errors, well, if we get rid of that, everything should return to normal, including returning everyone where they belong."
"So what is that problem?"
Echo shrugged in a really exaggerated way. "This is a big place to search even for me!"
"How big?"
"Hm… do you know how big Mars is? About that big."
"Huh?!"
"I didn't make it! I don't know why it's this big…"
"How long is this gonna take you?! I wanna go back home! I mean… it's nice here, much nicer than over where I'm from but all my friends are there!"
"A few weeks at least. Maybe a month or two? I can move really fast but there is no point in just moving fast and being shallow while looking for some kind of problem I don't even know the shape or nature of."
"Then what do I do?"
"Like I said, you could just go out with Nao for real! She's a nice girl, right?"
"So is Harumi!"
Echo clicked her tongue. "So what if I move you over there by force and as a reaction to the barrier being broken this entire place is reduced to rubble?!"
"I didn't say anything about doing that!"
"Then stop moping about your lot. I didn't bring you here!"
"Yeah… I know… it's just… it's just I wanna see my actual girlfriend."
Echo scratched wildly at her scalp. "So what?! Do I look like a genie?!"
Hinako backed away, scared by the sudden outburst of irritation. "I didn't mean-"
"I told you to make you understand! I didn't ask for your opinion!" Turning around with anger all over her face, Echo stomped on the ground a few times. "I'm not having fun searching half the earth for something that might be the size of anything!" Again turning, she faced Hinako. "Just sit tight here! This is not going to be the last day you'll have to show up for training!"
"I… I get it..." She lowered her head, hands shaking, legs wobbling. This woman… is scary. Way scarier than anyone on my side. When she looked up again, Echo was gone and her illusion had returned. I can't believe she bought all of this. Kaoru told me to expect her to show up and she really did. She didn't show even a hint of realizing that I know she isn't really one of them, that she replaced Dream. I almost blabbed about the others… Kaoru didn't say anything about not mentioning them but I'd rather not say anything she might not already know… ah! I screwed up! Kaoru asked me to squeeze her about how much she knows about that other Echo… I'm… I'm so in trouble.
Sitting down normally, then cross-legged to better emulate her image of Sunny, she thought about bringing a book for tomorrow. I'm just glad Nao's not in the same group… it's hard to keep this charade going. I don't know the first thing about Akane's life and past other than the most superficial elements. Luckily Nao's more concerned with the now than that. I can't just make up stuff all the time and there is no way she's never gonna ask me about the past. Maybe… maybe if I… ugh, I don't know…
Falling over backwards, Hinako stayed on the ground and looked up at the sky. The sun sure is nice… I wonder if we could get Mamo to deliver some sunscreen out to us. It's great not feeling sick or getting headaches from daylight. Although the night is kinda… still better. "Hah… I miss-" She bit her lip, sat up and looked around in a frenzy. Nobdoy here… Kaoru had warned her in the most strenuous terms to never say out loud anything that could give her away. "I miss Nao already." It was not exactly a pure lie. She was swept up in Nao's charm, but at the same time she would not have said Nao but Harumi.
Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao… I hate this. Kaoru said it would be dangerous if I said the wrong name while half-asleep or something… I want to go home… Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao, Nao…
A very great distance away, Bright and Blossom were talking a short walk, leaving behind a crater filled area of dunes and sandy pits. "I just cannot seem to do it right." Bright clenched her fist and looked at it, as if she was going to be able to gleam a secret from it. "Punching with full strength is not nearly enough."
"It looks plenty powerful to me. At least you're already at the stage of practical tests…"
"Theory will just be burdensome with something like that. How is it on your end?"
"Eh…" Blossom looked away. "Not great. Trying to infuse healing power and then have the power modulate itself over time like a fertilizer is just… I can't figure out how to handle the autonomy of the modulation."
"Best of luck."
"No advice?"
"You want my advice?"
"Do you have any?"
"Hm… my sister would probably be more help."
"She's not here. I won't turn down someone else's viewpoint just for not being a master manipulator."
"In most instances in the real world, something like what you are trying to do has a separate regulation protocol, a mechanical valve, a computer controlled plug, something like that. A pacemaker for example got sensors that check your heart and work with a small computer, a generator and battery to produce the electrical signals needed. So we got your healing magic, which I would liken to the battery itself. Right now you basically insert all the energy at once, like an electrical resuscitation device, a defibrillator. There's nothing to regulate the magic with you. Others can make things so how about giving that a try?"
"Let me see if I understood this right." Blossom briefly went over it in her head. "Because there is nothing auxiliary to regulate my magic flow, it goes in all at once and to solve that I should try out making something that regulates it?"
"That's about it."
"And you said your sister would be more help than this?"
Bright chuckled very briefly. "She's a good influence on me. Just because I focus on solving things with my fist doesn't mean I can't use my head."
"A fake brawler!"
"I wouldn't put it like that." Bright stopped. "This should be far enough." She relaxed her arms and wrists and started doing a few stretches. Finishing by reaching far over her head, Bright slowly inhaled until her lungs were ready to burst. Taking a stance, legs far apart, knees bent, supporting her weight and the impeding recoil like two pillars, she raised one hand next to her head in height, the other arm diagonally across her chest. Holding the breath, she focused all her energy onto her fist. "Hah!" Shouting, exhaling all the air in one go, her arm ripped forward like a bolt released from a railgun. Sand was vaporized by the energy powered force of the punch, kinetic power displacing sand and air alike. All that was left was a big hole in the ground. "Tsk."
Bright clicked her tongue and sat down, cross legged, scratching at her scalp. "Okay, that's the same kind of fail every time, I need to reconsider how I am doing this." Without doing anything her body suddenly felt farm and light. Glancing to her behind, Blossom was there. "No luck on your end either?"
"I thought I'd try at least one more time before stopping and trying to work out that pacemaker analogy you gave me."
"Don't blame me if it doesn't work out. I don't command healing powers after all."
"Excuse me, do I really look like I would do that?" Blossom pouted a little.
"Suppose not." Bright smirked, rested an elbow on her legs and propped her hand up on her palm. "So how are things with your little gremlin?" Bright didn't waste any time changing the topic.
"Don't call her that."
"Even though-"
"Yes, even though it's true!" Blossom had no delusions about who she was dating. "She'd object saying she's the master gremlin."
"Pfhaw, hahaha, that sounds like her."
"I do think she's gotten more… amicable for everyone since we came here!"
"You think so? Hm… I wonder."
"What about you? Any special someone?" Blossom was probing with a small pout.
Bright glanced at her, then faced straight ahead. "I wonder if I should tell you."
"In this place it's impossible to keep any secrets. The bigger the secret, the easier it'll slip out!"
If you knew what was going on with this place and Echo, you'd probably revise that. "I suppose it's been long enough and I'm tired of sneaking around."
"Who?! Who is it?! Is it a forbidden love?!"
"Aren't we all-"
"You know what I mean!"
No… uh, I actually don't. "It's not… someone else's girlfriend if you think that." That's what she meant, right?
"Hah… that's a relief."
"Worried someone might steal Erika?"
"No." Blossom answered and moved up front to sit next to Bright. "We both know that I'm the only one for her… in more than one way."
"Well, you're right about that."
"But even I sometimes don't know what she's thinking."
"That's normal. I've been together with Kaoru since we were born and there are still times I don't understand her."
"Really? That's surprising."
"We can't read minds."
"Windy probably could!"
"Her powers are more detrimental towards the psyche and consciousness. Pine has better odds."
"So gimme an example."
"Of not understanding Kaoru? Hm… I guess food is one thing we rarely agree on. She can be a bit of a health nut and she has this unreasonable obsession with fish… I don't get it. I'm more of a rice and meat person." She paused, glanced at Blossom and then lightly punched her on the shoulder.
"Wha-!"
"For thinking well, that makes sense. I'll have you know that you can get bulky and physically strong even through other diet regimen."
"So much for mind reading!"
"It's relaxing, isn't it?"
"What is?"
"Instead of being the tsukkomi to Erika's boke, you can be the boke for once."
"Hey!"
"Don't pretend it's not true."
"Gununununu..."
"You sound like Yayoi now."
"What is that all about anyway? You two have been hanging around her so- ooohh!"
Bright snorted. "That took a while."
"Wait, which one of you two-" Blossom gasped audibly. "Both of you?!"
"Yayoi doesn't mind."
"Wow… I thought Love and Mana were the only ones capable of handling something like that."
"Well, we are sisters."
"So… you take turns dating her?"
"No, we are just both her girlfriends."
"How-"
"If you're curious about how that works with sex, it's not like Kaoru and I haven't slept together before."
Blossom was turning rather red in the face at this point. "Even-"
"Yes, even though we are sisters. We aren't exactly related by blood and we have no memories prior to being fourteen. So most of the issues you would bring up just don't exist."
"Stop reading my thoughts!"
"Regarding your ability-"
"Eh? What- oh, right." Blossom was taken for a spin by the sudden change.
"You are Blossom. That makes me think of blossoming, the act of a flower coming into bloom. It draws energy from the earth and sun to complete that. And during that one battle during which we had access to abilities from far in the future, you created floral objects."
"Please don't remind me..." Blossom turned a little blue remembering that.
"What if you were to create a flower that does not bloom but withers slowly?" Seeing the confusion on her comrade's face, Bright elaborated. "Instead of draining power, what about a flower that bestows it? A flower, attached to a person. The flower itself is made from your magic and a container of magic. It would be difficult to develop sensory magic on top of what you have and combined it all together, but what about a flower that will slowly bestow healing energy upon those who have the flower attached to them?"
Blossom fell quiet for a moment and then a sparkle slowly grew greater in her eyes. "That… could work. By having the flower itself be the container and the stem by a magical valve through which only a small amount can pass.. this could really, really work!"
"Good for you." Bright smiled. "I wish it would could as easily to me. I've been thinking of auxiliary muscle augmentation and redirected magical storage-"
"Maybe you are thinking too hard?"
"What do you mean?"
"In my case a complex solution was the right thing, but what if your solution isn't complex at all? But more something someone like Nagisa would come up with?"
"Nagisa is a friend but she's not exactly the greatest when-"
"Just give it a chance. Try to… try to just draw energy from yourself, channel it into your fist… and keep doing it!"
"You mean like… running a dynamo to slowly fill a battery?"
"Uh… yes!"
"Would that really..." She stopped and looked up at the sky. "It's worth a try at least. Thanks."
While the desert group was figuring things out for themselves, the two forest groups were not doing anywhere that well.
Having arrived at a large forest clearing, Muse and Beat were by themselves, the former sitting on a large fallen tree and the latter sitting down in the grass next to said tree. "This is not going to work." Muse bit her lip. Even with the power that Echo granted us I still can't get results. That is so… humiliating. If only I was at least as old as Ellen. Or better, someone from Heart's group… no, moping like this is unbecoming of a princess. Or rather… I'd rather die than go back and tell Urara I couldn't manage on my own and gave up. There's still a way out of this! But I'll have to swallow my pride to do it. "Beat."
"Y-Yes?" Beat had taken some time for herself to think about what exactly she was going to do. Deep down she knew what the right choice was but due to her past in this place she wanted to look for a possible alternative first.
"I know this will be asking a lot of you-"
Uh oh…
"But… I… well..." Muse trailed off, took a deep breath and tried again. "I want you to… be my backup for [Replekia]. So-Someone like the queen can get results on her own, but-"
"I'd be happy to!" Beat nearly leaped to her feet. "All those that wield Hymnos know it is their duty-"
Muse bit her lip. "Don't say duty. I am not asking you this as the princess of Majorland." She in- and exhaled sharply. "You're my friend first and foremost. Even when I become queen that will not change." Sitting up, her legs together and ladylike hanging down the side of the tree, Muse looked almost defeated. "I do not look forward to all the formality of being royalty after… after this. Even though we're not here on our own will, going back will be a big adjustment. So at least while we're here, forget that I'm the princess and just treat me like you would Melody or Rhythm."
"That… might be hard."
Muse saw Beat's hesitation but knew what to do. "Okay then. A compromise. Like you would Melody or Rhythm if they had common sense and tact."
Beat quickly turned away and snorted loudly before she could cover her mouth. "O-Okay. I will."
"That being said… Hah…" Muse felt reluctant just pouring out her real feelings to Beat. "What we say here will stay between just us, understood?"
"I know how to keep my friend's secrets." Like that time Hibiki switched sugar and salt as a prank and made me promise not to tell and Kanade found out immediately and made her eat all the salt cookies on purpose.
"The thing is… my age is getting in the way of really keeping up with everyone else. My road forward is the Hymnos, the Crescendia Key, because that is just who I am. Even if I don't like being royalty, it would be stupid to ignore a gift like that. But it's just… singing [Replekia] by myself will not get me any results, even now. So I… want you… and maybe Melody and Rhythm as well, to be my choir. I will still handle the execution… seeing that [Replekia] is a Crescendia Key Hymnos, but by having the three of you support me-"
"I think it is a little sad that you want to justify it so much." Beat was sweating bullets on the inside. "We-We're your friends and teammates. We fought off Noise. We saved Majorland. Not because I'm from there or because it was our job but because it was the right thing to do and so is this. So what if you can't do it on your own? We're here, right?"
Muse was so embarrassed she opened her mouth to scold Beat but stopped herself by pinching her arm, out of sight of her friend. "Urara would make so much fun of me."
Beat looked in all directions and then got closer to Muse. "You did not hear this from me, but earlier, when Lemonade was training… she was slacking off with Aqua and Echo surprised them. She made an amazing sound, allegedly. Like gghrahhagar or something like that."
"Ha… Hahahaha-" Muse covered her mouth but it was no use. "Haha hahahaha!" Laughing loudly, very unladylike, she fell over, lying back on the big log, her legs kick air as she continue to laugh, her mouth covered, her face turning red from the exertion.
That's a lot stronger of a reaction than I thought… Beat suddenly felt bad and stepped away. I don't know anything about this. Nope!
Calming down all of a sudden, Muse cleared her throat, fixed her hair and tried to look like nothing happened.
Beat could not help herself. "Grahghaaa..."
Sending Muse down a second fit, Beat received a light kick to the back in recompense for her actions. Five minutes total of being able to get a coherent sentence out, Muse finally calmed down properly. "Never… never speak of that again." She was suppressing light snorts and chuckles.
"Un-Understood."
"What about your plans of going forward?" Serious topic, serious topic… curse you, Beat, I'm going to need to pinch myself bloody when I see Urara later.
"I… I'm still looking."
"Are you afraid of utilizing [Purger]?" Beat twitched just enough for Muse to realize that she had hit the nail on the head. "It's understanding you're reluctant-"
"That song hurt so many of my friends..."
"So what?"
"Huh?"
"You didn't do that on purpose. Imagine if I had been the one to end up in exile and it made me sing one of the more dangerous songs like [Hibernation] or [Nullascension]."
Beat turned pale. The mere mention of [Nullascension] was typically enough to scare the hell out of Majorlanders. "That-"
"Would have been horrible, yes. What if it had been Pine and everyone was afflicted with [Domination] and started to behave like they were also in exile? What if it was Happy? Rouge? There's lots of us that could have caused much greater damage than [Purger] did but that doesn't mean we would have blamed them for it. You already suffered more than enough just by being in that place. I'm glad it's gone."
"I know you're right, but-"
"Deep inside it's hard to convince yourself, right?"
"Yeah."
"How do you think I felt when I told Urara the truth about how old I am, what I look like without magic?"
"Uh..." This was not a topic that Beat was particularly comfortable with.
"It took a lot of courage to be honest with myself, even though this-" She spread her arms a little. "Is what I am comfortable with now. Think about how proud Love and Setsuna will be if you can get over this and make the most of your ability."
"That's dirty! Bringing their expectations into it! Now I can't just not do it!"
"Oh, is that so?" Muse feigned it being accidental. You needed a push, Beat. I'm giving it to you.
"Using [Purger]… but how exactly? I can't just sing it indiscriminately."
"It's one of the more powerful hymnos, yes, so limiting the scope is key. Not just to only enemies but perhaps you should limit the function itself to attack something that isn't a black or white choice."
"Black or White? You mean Nagisa and Honoka?"
"They embody a perfect split of physical and magical attributes. Attacking their bodies would leave those with a magical focus mostly unaffected. Attacking magic directly… you see where this leads."
"What about… attacking their thoughts?"
"You mean their brain?"
"It's… true gruesome?"
"Bright is developing a punch that can obliterate Heart in one go. And you're worried about something being gruesome? How did you ever cut it as one of the villains?"
"H-Hey! I was very good at it!"
"Is that so? Maybe I should ask Melody and Rhythm about that."
"Don't! They'll just brag!"
"Attacking their thoughts… their central nervous system. There are diseases that cause damage to that, resulting in all sorts of things like blindness, paralysis, nausea, vertigo, lots of things."
"Now I really sound like a villain…"
"What if we come up against a monster, a true evil creature, that is impervious to magic and all our physical attackers are down?"
"I get it, I get it… I can see why Lemonade doesn't stand a chance against you."
"Should we start?"
"Who will be first?"
"[Replekia] is functionally an energy cannon and doesn't require a person as a target. [Purger] however you will have to test on me, so-"
"Wait, wait, wait, wait, what?!" Beat took several steps back. "Testing it on you?!"
"I will definitely be exhausted after at most a handful of attempts. After that I will serve no purpose but to be a target."
"There is no way-"
Muse's expression hardened. "I will be seriously offended if you don't."
"But what if something happens?!"
"Then it happens. We are in the arena for that very reason. Even if you should shatter the concept of space and time, it wouldn't matter."
"Is… there someone that can do that?"
Muse opened her mouth, closed it, then found an answer. "I'd rather not know. Probably not." Muse jumped down from the log and stood in front of Beat. "You need to train using [Purger] and I am who is available."
"I really don't want to- ow! But- ow!" Muse kicked her not once but twice. "Okay, okay, no more kicking!"
While Beat found herself unable to go against Muse, Melody and Rhythm were far away in a different section of the forest. Lying on her back, like she was about to slide down the large rock she was on, Melody flapped her lips loudly and repeatedly. "I was all I'll do this but I've got no idea how."
Rhythm was at the base of that rock, slowly plucking little bits of grass from all around her. "I figure we gotta… do music? But it's not like we used our powers for that before. You played the piano before, can't you have a flash of inspiration or something?"
"That's not something you get on command…" More lip flapping later, Melody looked down at Rhythm. "I can see into your cleavage you know."
Grabbing a small pebble, Rhythm flung it at Melody so hard that the pebble was obliterated and a red spot remained on the pink Cure's face. "Can you not do comments like that?"
For how much they could fight, Melody realized that this was really her fault. "Fair. My bad." Sighing, she bent her right leg and used the heel of her boot to scratch an itch on her other thigh. "You got any bright ideas?"
"Beat and Muse got their Hymnos but we can't do that… so you figured the whole Symphogear thing would work out but it's not like I knowhow that works just from you doing it once."
"Come on."
"I know… all things considered it's super likely we came up with it together and… isn't this a chicken and egg scenario now?"
"Huh? What's that?"
"You know, we came up with this because we saw us doing it in the future, but if we only came up with it now because we are doing it in the future, how did future us come up with it?"
"You mean like a time paradogs? Beats me. Does that matter?"
"Philosophy would be dead if everyone thought like that."
"That's fine with me. As long as I get envelopes during new years."
"You… still get those?"
"Dad likes to think I'm still fourteen."
"That is gonna go great when you introduce Itsuki to him."
"He's not stupid." Melody yawned. "But seriously, what are we gonna do?"
"You are the one who got to experience it. I'm counting on you to figure it out."
"Hah… okay, let me try harder." Trying to get up, Melody fell victim to gravity and slid down the rock, bonking head to head onto Rhythm, both of them groaning and on the ground right after. "My… my bad…"
"I knew you had a hard head… but this is ridiculous..." Rhythm was feeling up her scalp. "Once we get a foot in the door, I can help figure it out."
"Yes, yes, enough pressure! You are such a perfectionist!"
"Melody."
"Right, right, let's not do this right now. Echo is seriously gonna lynch us."
"That and I don't want to go back and tell Rin ooops, I spent all the time squabbling with Melody and learned nothing."
"Itsuki would probably put me in the doghouse…" Melody didn't like that prospect at all. "Okay, just… gimme some space." Melody stepped away. "I hope I can remember how it felt… I know I was singing and the stronger I felt about what I was singing the stronger I got…"
"Just picture how proud Itsuki will be!"
You're not helping! Okay, think, Melody… music… music… popipopopipo… "Argh! Not that one!"
"Everything okay there?"
"Just a stupid ear worm suddenly popping into my head." Eeeeeeeeeeeh… goddammit. It was like… my magic made the music, the beat, the melody, the rhythm, everything… and my voice was the glue that put the parts together. Deep breath… remember what it was like playing the piano…
Rhythm watched with open mouth as thick pink energy started to whirl around Melody, briefly stabilizing on her skin, on top of her outfit, before dissipating again. Do your best, Melody!
A song from within, from the depth of soul… emotions bare… that is so embarrassing to even think… but Rhythm knows everything there is to know. We went through everything together, we fought, made up, loved and lost each other… but finally we broke out of that loop. We managed to break out of that cycle… break out… I like the sound of that. I can feel it, that surging emotion in my heart, to tell her how I felt, how I feel now… but to give voice to it… to say it out loud… screw it! Rhythm changed! I can change, too! Taking a deep breath, Melody let out her feelings.
A good minute later, Rhythm picked herself out of a tree, and branches out of her hair. "At least something happened..."
"Uh huh..." Melody was not so much in a tree as she was through a tree, her legs out one side and the head another. "You wanna try next?"
Rhythm landed down on the ground and plucked a single other branch from her hair. "I think I'll continue supporting you for a little longer. I'll grab your legs, okay?"
"Don't." Melody wiggled her legs briefly. "Just gimme… a moment." A small magical burst and the hole got bigger, breaking the tree off at ground level. Crashing into the forest, it left Melody free. "Not that I didn't trust you or anything but-"
"You're ticklish on your legs."
Melody turned scarlet in the face. "Don't you dare tell Itsuki that!"
"She probably knows. It's hard to miss." Rhythm grimaced a little. "So what now?"
"I'll try again. Until I get it right."
"You mind if I watch from atop the rock?"
"Why from up there?"
"I was thinking maybe a little bit of distance would give me a better idea of what went wrong. If I don't get caught in the blast, I can tell what's happening."
"Oh. Good point."
But things did not go as planned.
"You okay there?" Melody, her face looking like she had taken a grime ball to the face, dug Rhythm out of a tiny air-borne avalanche of dirt and grass, pulling her up by her arm.
"Swear-" Rhythm spat out dirt. "Swear to me-" Coughing and more dirt spiting. "This is not on purpose."
Melody put her hands together like it was customary at a shrine. "I swear."
"Why then?"
"I don't know!"
"Again… this time I'm gonna sit-" She looked around and pointed at a particularly large and majestic tree. "In that tree over there."
"… I wanna say overreaction much but I have no excuse after this."
Melody had blown herself off in a spectacularly strange way – the explosion ripped out the ground from under her and launched said ground at Rhythm like it came from a cannon big and powerful enough to fire a blue whale.
Starting up again, Melody focused. Picture myself… clad in the song of my heart… that's so embarrassing… whatever! Song of my heart! Don't think! Feel! Imagine! Break out of the shackles of normalcy! Surpass common sense! Melody of my heart! Blushing fiercely as she thought those embarrassing thoughts while Rhythm was watching her, she felt it working. Magic coalesced around her arms, her waist, her legs. Again she inhaled. And this time she looked straight ahead, her eyes wide open, her lips ready to give form to her thoughts.
Music rang in her eyes. A beat that was drumming up her emotions, that rose through her with force. This is it! This is how I do it! A power swelled inside her throat, inside her soul. Magic that tried to escape in the form of words.
I still remember the pain of those times
Rippling through my mind with force
(Scaring me inside)
Magic became material, became her armor and power. She felt light, lighter far than ever before. Each minute movement of her hands, her arms, she felt stronger than before. I did it! "Rhythm, I got it!" She turned about, shouted, and her body started to heat up. Far more than she wanted. "Eh-?"
Rhythm was nearly shaken out of the tree when Melody exploded again, this time being launched right into the air with force, black smoke rising off of her, the Cure knocked visibly unconscious.
"Jeez, what would you do without me?" Jumping, crushing the branches by her feet, Rhythm leaped into the air, catching Melody by her arm, pulling her along, pulling that close friend she's had so long onto her back, landing at the edge of the small clearing. "Melody, you in there?"
She didn't get any reply at all and so she just let go, dropping the girl down to the ground like she was a bag of potatoes. Oh, she wasn't faking… good that she won't remember this then. Rhythm knelt next to her and used part of her own skirt to wipe off Melody's face. I can't believe she got it in three tries… well, almost got it. But it was amazing, I could literally hear music emanating off of her… and I felt strangely empowered. Grateful? Something like… I kinda wanna draw on her face. Maybe whispers? Hm… I'll bring a pen tomorrow.
Sitting next to Melody for a while, Rhythm got bored when her training partner didn't wake up. What do I do now? I could try and emulate what I saw but I got no idea what her thoughts were… "Hey, enough sleeping." She poked Melody's cheeks and then pinched them pretty hard. Man she really outdid herself on this one… we should probably relocate to a river or something so I can dunk… wait is this gonna happen to me to?! I don't want her to dunk me… so maybe I should just… but she's doing the hard work… "Wake up already!" Rhythm pulled Melody up and shook her a bunch. "Free cupcakes!"
No reaction and so Rhythm gave up. If that doesn't wake her up she's probably… Putting her hand over Melody's mouth, she could still feel her breathing. It's kinda amazing she just stays transformed while unconscious… I wonder how that works actually.
"What happened here?" Echo had finally shown up, walking into the clearing from between the trees. "Did you blast Melody?"
"She exploded."
"Could everyone stop blowing themselves up? Is she dead?"
"She's breathing."
"Hm..." Clicking her fingers, Echo create a swath of water that clashed down on Melody and that finally got her to come to.
"Hajwhabfkwhat?!" Looking like she had just returned from a journey to the stairs, Melody had her eyes wide open and tried to adjust to her surroundings. "What… what happened?"
"You went kaboom the moment you turned around and tried to brag."
"I did not brag!"
"Okay, but you still exploded."
"Echo, you got any advice on this?" Melody was not up to fighting with Rhythm.
"Song magic… I don't use it, so I can't really-"
"You ever tried?" Rhythm was curious. Wow… what's that look? It's like I asked something stupid.
"It takes a certain talent to use it. I'm strong but I can't just randomly pick up unique skills like that." Echo sighed. "I gotta go and check if Muse and Beat are okay. There was a light show up north earlier."
"Oh, okay." Melody sat up, cross-legged. "I'll keep trying."
"If she blows herself up again, shout for me." Echo directed this at Rhythm and disappeared like a mirage, into the wind.
"What now?" Rhythm was sitting sitting next to Melody.
"Gotta keep trying. I almost had it. I dunno why I just went kaboom…"
"Keep in mind you gotta explain to me how this works."
"I know, I know." Melody wiped her arm in her cheek – causing her face to become way dirty again – and got up, ready to continue. "Okay, let's keep going until I got this down!"
=== DISSONANCE ===
(Piece Five)
"There's not a trace of them anywhere." Natsu fell face first flat into the grass. "I'm dead now."
"Okay." Namaki used her hands to start throwing dirt on Natsu's back.
"Hey!" Rising from an early grave, Natsu started to chase the much more cheeky and mean spirited version of Peace around their camp.
"So my Rin-" Nozomi realized how that sounded and blushed. "That's not how I meant it!"
Yume put her hand on her original's shoulder and slowly shook her head. "We know. We all know. Even Kokoro knows."
Nozomi covered her face. "I swear I'll get the hang of this…"
"You will." Yume patted her on the back. "So as suddenly as Rin and Kanade showed up, they were gone. That's not worrying or freaky at all. I'm sure the sky won't crack open or- ow! What the hell?!" She got hit in the head by Kokoro and threatened retaliation with an angry glare. "Koko, are you outta your mind?"
"Are you? Jinxing us like that."
"Now, now, let's get along." Mana showed up out of nowhere, wearing hot pants and a shirt that was a little short on her, extras from Hinako, who wasn't around. There and gone like a storm, Mana hurried over to catch up with Ibaraki who was leading her flock to the fields.
"She's… exhausting me." Kokoro looked kind of like her soul was dying off at the speed of light.
"Yeah…" Yume was completely on board with that assessment.
"Really?" Nozomi on the other hand didn't see the issue.
"You wouldn't get it." Yume shrugged. "I'd kill to know what's going on on the other side." She glanced at Nozomi. "Figure of speech."
"Hm?" For the second time now Nozomi didn't see the issue.
"You're exhausting too." Kokoro lightly tapped Nozomi on the shoulder with the back of her hand. "So what exactly is your plan going forward?"
"No plan!" Nozomi sounded proud of herself. "Everything's changing really quickly all the time right now, so no plan would survive a good night's rest anyway."
Kokoro snorted. "Ey, Yume, your original says some good things."
Yume blushed in embarrassment. "Shut up."
"No, I mean it!" Kokoro's face was a big mix of trying to hold on to playing it straight and about to burst into laughter.
"Huh? Huh? What's going on now?"
"It worries me we haven't seen Echo all day though. She's been gone ever since Rin, Yuri and Nao went missing." Yume looked up at the dark night sky. "Nozomi, you used to the night life yet?"
"Getting there. I do kinda miss the sun though. But it's kind of cool to see the world at night for a change! Usually I just sleep."
"We gotta do something about you two though." Kokoro walked around the Nozomi-Yume pair. "It's easy enough when I remember who wears what but from the distance it's a crapshoot of who I'm calling out to."
"You trying to make me hit you?" Yume clenched her fist, absolutely ready to follow up on that.
"How about I get Miyuki over here and you can play the guessing game."
"I can tell just by the way you walk or stand. All bully-like."
"Huh… how about I show you what a real bully is like?!"
Turning around while Yume and Kokoro were having a glaring and threatening gestures match, Nozomi pulled up her hair and tied it into a ponytail. "Hey, would this work?"
"Huh?!" Kokoro forgot to tone down the delinquent and grunted at Nozomi. "Oh." Oh. "Yeah, that'd work. Yume, you do that."
"Why would I-"
"Because that's hot."
"Hey…"
Nozomi let down her hair – she didn't have anything to fasten the ponytail anyway – and watched the couple argue. I wonder if Miyuki and I will argue like that… I miss her. I miss everyone else, too, but Miyuki most of all. I wish Rin was still here. I don't understand what's going on. If only Karen was around…
"Nozomi!" Himari was calling out to her. "We're going fishing, you coming?!" Standing about ten meters away and shouting, Himari carried Namaki under her arm like she was a bag of fishing gear. Which was mostly accurate.
"Why me every time… can't we just get some fishing rods…" Going fishing was the least favorite activity of the yellow bad end. It always lead to her getting wet, cold, exhausted, and most of all, she'd smell of fish really strongly after.
"Later. Bye bye." Waving very briefly at Yume and Kokoro with both hands, Nozomi made her exit, both of them looking after her.
"Stop staring at her ass." Yume nagged at her girlfriend.
"You first."
"I'm not staring."
"So you're staring at Himari's ass then?"
"Like heck I am."
"I'm worried."
"Your ass is fine."
"Very funny." Kokoro sighed and finally broke line of sight. "Echo's nowhere to be found, Rin and Kanade disappeared… and doesn't it feel like the days are getting… shorter?"
"You think we're heading for winter?"
"No, I mean that there are literally less hours now per day."
Yume didn't say anything for a long moment. "That's scary as hell."
"Right?"
"Feels like we should appreciate the irony of being scared, considering where we come from."
"More jinxing? You want me to spank you?"
"Kinky."
"You're one to talk, leather fetish woman!"
"Big words from someone parading around her curves in that skintight bodysuit."
Both of them started to breathe a litter faster. Before anyone could notice them just standing around, they rushed towards the building, heading straight for the second floor and Kokoro's room. Getting all sassy with each other was one of their plays.
Meanwhile, Nozomi was walking side by side with Himari and Namaki. "How far out is the ocean?"
"Actually we're going to the river. The ocean's too far away for us to get there without Nao." Himari shot Namaki a look that promised intense suffering if she should so much as try to run off.
"You usually don't go to the river to fish?"
"There's a lot of us to feed so the river typically doesn't yield enough. It's still early though so we'll probably be there all night to get enough. Reina's already there waiting for us."
With Mirage Sunshine – Himari – and Bad End Peace – Namaki – flanking her, Nozomi looked up at the trees. "I wonder if you could breed fish in a lake or something."
"You go ahead and make a lake then." Namaki looked exhausted already. "I can already see our future, spending months with shovels… no thanks."
"When I get back to the others, I'll ask if someone can make one for you! Hm… Komachi or Alice might have the easiest time of it… maybe Bright if we just need a big hole..." That made something click for Nozomi. "Speaking of Bright, it's strange there's nobody here that looks like her!"
"I don't think that's how this works." Himari smiled like the sun. "Although wouldn't it be funny if it turned out Echo was someone's villainous alter-ego?" Nozomi and Namaki both stopped and looked at Himari with obvious worry. "Come on, I'm joking!"
"That's not a joke. That's like saying what if the sun fell down and burned us all to a crisp is a joke."
"Sunshi-!" Himari tried to do a pose but stopped when she saw the dead fish eyes of her audience. "You two have no humor. Obviously someone like Echo isn't evil or someone's alter-ego. Think about it. My group excluded, it's not like Yume's or Kokoro's group were any stronger than their originals. So for that to work, there would have to be someone else as strong as Echo. And not only that, but you gotta be strong enough to make someone that powerful and I don't see that happening. Like what kind of godlike existence would be capable of making someone like that?"
"Keep talking, just keep talking, I know who I'm gonna blame when we all become enslaved in the kingdom of jinxed suffering and merry abuse." Namaki was laying on the sass.
"Like anything like that would ever happen." Himari grinned. "For someone so cheeky you worry about weird stuff."
"Unlike you I'm not into the whole masochism thing."
"Just how am I-"
"You're dating that slave driving demon!"
"Watch who you're calling a demon."
"So you don't deny she's a slave driver?!"
"That's what's good about her! So hard working!" Himari swooned. "No nonsense, always looking out for everyone, always-"
"Making everyone work until they drop dead!"
"There's nothing wrong with working hard!"
"Maybe for you! I don't wanna wake up and feel like someone beat me up!"
"Just get someone to cuddle with you at night."
"Like that'd make any difference! And who?! Miho's an idiot! Mizuki also an idiot! And I'm already short, I don't want a shorty girlfriend so Umi's out too!"
"Don't be so picky! And like you have any room to call Miho and Mizuki idiots!"
"Hey, I'm smart!"
"Uh huh. I'm sure that's why Kokoro keeps putting you in time out."
"She beats the hell out of me! That's gonna be a permanent time out some day!"
"Eh? Kokoro beats you?" Nozomi had just been listening in until now.
"She says that but it's really just a chop to the head to shut her up. She's our de-facto troublemaker, worse than Rin or Miho."
"Am not!"
"Want me to tell Nozomi about that time you got Umi to believe she could water the plants?"
The life waned from Namaki's face. "No. Don't."
I can sort of picture what must have happened… Nozomi thought. "So how are we going to fish?"
"Yeah, tell her how you are going to fish." Namaki looked still lifeless.
"We throw her into the river."
So they really do that… Nozomi had held on to that being some running gag they were all in on. "So why are we two there?"
"Someone's got to pick up the fish that come floating down the river."
"Seriously?" Nozomi pictured a hellscape of dead fish floating down a river.
"Seriously." Namaki had none of her usual spunk. "Just be ready to smell nothing but fish all day long. Usually we do this over at the ocean with Nao but since she isn't here… haaaaaaaaah, why did Peace have to have electric power?!"
"Blaming your original isn't gonna help. Would you rather be stuck with some heat power like Akane or Natsu?"
"Not really. Why can't my power be air conditioning?!"
"There's no convenient power like that!"
Nozomi snickered. "You two bicker just like the girls on my side."
"Really? I thought everyone over there was happiness and sunshine all day long." Namaki couldn't picture her original bickering with anyone.
"There are some like that but that's a really bad generalization, you know? We got our own unruly ones, like Erika, Urara, Yami, Regina… everyone's different."
"I figured being a Cure came with the prerequisite of being all good all the time." Namaki didn't know much about what had happened to her original after she was beaten after all.
"The only difference between them, me and you here is that we come from different backgrounds. For example, Harumi would totally fit in on our side. You two, too. Although I foresee someone disciplining you a lot, Namaki…" Nozomi was not making any excuses for the girl.
"Argh, no matter where I go it's always people dunking on me!" Ruffling her own hair, Namaki left a mess when she was done. "Why doesn't anyone understand my genius?!"
"You're more crazy than genius." Himari fired a salvo.
"They do say there's a fine line between the two!" Nozomi didn't realize she was pouring oil in the fire.
"Collusion! You two are colluding against me!"
"As if anyone would bother."
"You totally- Nozomi, what's wrong?"
"Hm? Oh, nothing, I just thought I saw someone between the trees-" Peering, stepping to the side and looking with greater intent, Nozomi found nothing. "I could have sworn…"
Namaki ducked, sneaked up behind Nozomi and poked her sides. "Gyaaarrrhhhh!"
Roaring like a beast, Namaki followed up with a loud pained groan. "Gooargh!" Hitting the ground, her left cheek was swelling up already.
"D-Don't do that!" Nozomi had hit whatever attacked her instinctively with the back of her hand as hard as she could.
"Message… received…"
"Please don't damage the fishing gear, Nozomi." Picking up Namaki from the ground and carrying her under her arm, Himari nodded towards the direction of the river. "Come on Nozomi."
"Right." Walking again, she looked back. Did I just imagine it?
"So Nozomi, between me and Itsuki, whose cooler?"
"Eh? Even if you ask me that… I don't like comparisons like that."
"Come on, humor me."
"Hm… I think Itsuki has the edge there."
"Rats. How come?"
"You're a bit more… hm…"
"Crude? I know, I know. Itsuki is really hard working and responsible. I'm kinda like that too, but I also like to have fun."
"Our Itsuki is really similar to that you know? She's kind of… very much marching to her own pace. I think that's why Hibiki likes her."
"Imagine if there'd copies of everyone here in Hikage. Can you imagine?"
"It's hard to remember everyone's names as is!"
"Sounds right. Honestly, I'm really thankful to Mana for giving me a real name. I didn't mind going by Itsuki but I can see how that's confusing for you. And having my own name… it just kind of feels right?"
"You are definitely your own person. Although you're also still similar to the Itsuki I know. Not that I know her that well, mind you. I wonder what Hibiki would say… maybe I can introduce you two sometime."
"Better not. What if she's into me and Itsuki decides to eliminate the competition…"
"Everyone is really afraid of our side just attacking like that but we're not like that! We have Kaoru, Michiru, Setsuna, Ellen, Regina, Yami… so many redeemed former villains that we know better than to attack someone just for being different!"
"You say that but we can't help but worry. Especially Kokoro's team."
"I mean I kinda get why you would worry but can't you trust me on this?"
"We do trust you. We trust that you believe in them, but we can't believe in them like you do."
"Rin was very nice and understanding, wasn't she?"
"At least more so than I expected… she's not even the same person as our Natsu."
"How so?"
"She's not an idiot for starters. Or is she?"
"No, she's actually really smart. Not like Karen, but-"
"How did we end up with Mizuki and Natsu? I get different personalities but… there shouldn't be such a difference in intelligence, right?!"
"Even if you ask me that…" Nozomi didn't know what to say. "I don't think they're stupid, just… easy going?"
"No, Natsu is definitely stupid. It's her fault this whole messy situation is even a thing. Her and Miho."
"Sh-She had good intentions though!"
"You really do try to just see the positive in everything, Nozomi. That's a bit different from Yume."
"What is she like then?"
"I mean she is similar to you in a lot of ways, especially in regards to not giving up on people. When we first got here, it took a long time for Kokoro and her group to turn things around. The warped personalities they had been stuck with weren't set in stone and Yume worked really hard to help everyone figure out what they wanted to be like."
"How did Reika's double turn into… Reina…"
"None of us understand how that happened. It's like she just snapped, discarded all choices and went straight for eccentric-but-happy. Not that I mind, she's kinda easy to understand."
"I think if our Reika met Reina… she'd probably have an identity crisis."
"Oh, is she exactly the same?"
"No, she's… Reika is hard to describe. She's kind of distant?"
"Who's she dating?"
"That should be Nao."
"Eh, really? Nao and Reika? Strange couple."
"Knowing Yuri and Reika, those two together would be a much stranger… no, wait… maybe… maybe they could work out…"
"You're really getting a handle on this whole lesbian love thing."
"Eh?! I mean- uh, uhm… about… I-" Nozomi looked down, eyes wide open and blushing. "It's still… a lot." Clenching her fists, she bore her embarrassment and looked up. "It's not like I don't understand others being in love like that!"
"I get it, I get it. So… spill the beans, you got the hots for Kokoro too?"
"No!" Nozomi denied it a little too strongly. "She looks like Miyuki but her personality is totally different."
"Yeah, that's no surprise. Nobody from her group is anything like their original at all, I bet."
"Aren't you quite different from your originals too?"
"Hm, I guess so, but we don't make a big effort out of it. We just kind of follow up on what we were like to begin with. Not that I really know why or how we were what we are."
"How long are you two going to babble…" Namaki was hanging in there like a wet sack of rice. "Original this original that…"
"I think Yayoi would really want to learn a thing or two from you, Namaki." Nozomi really thought so.
"Really?"
"She's a bit shy and I think maybe a little awkward with crowds, but you don't seem like you have that problem at all."
"I wish she'd learn from Yayoi, not the other way around. She can be such a bother. That's why she's single despite having such a rocking body."
"Rock… rocking…" Nozomi's thoughts went to strange places and she returned to blushing.
"Heh, so you're into me, Himari? Why didn't you tell me earlier? We could arrange- ooof!" Namaki groaned as she was dropped without warning, hitting the ground like a sack of sand. "Hey! What are you- ooof!" Groaning louder when Himari stepped on her back, Namaki could feel the grass press into her face. "Get off me!"
"You realize what's gonna happen to you if Ibaraki catches wind of you making a pass at me?" Himari put a little more strength behind her leg and pressured Namaki into the grass even further. "She's gonna boil you into soup."
"I wasn't making-" Raising her head to talk, Himari quickly pushed her back into the grass.
"Now this would be one thing if it was just you and me, but with her here?!" Himari gestured wildly at an overheating Nozomi. "You really think she'll not accidentally let this slip?"
"Oh shit. Oh shit." Namaki exerted her full strength and got out from under Himari's foot, struggling quickly to her feet and grabbing Nozomi by her shoulders. "I was joking, joking, joking! It's a joke, joke, villain joke!" Shaking her so hard that Nozomi nearly fell down, Namaki had terror written all over her face.
"I-I-I Ge-ge-get i-i-it." Talking through the turbulence of being shaken like a cocktail in a mixer cup, Nozomi staggered back. "Is Ibaraki that scary?"
"Not just scary! Once she put dangerous mushrooms in Natsu's food for messing with her turnips!" Namaki had fear written all over her face.
Nozomi shot Himari a look to confirm and got a shrug back. "Seriously…"
"Lemme clarify, dangerous mushrooms in the way that Natsu was completely off her rocker and started to run around naked, puking, climbing trees and stuff." Himari very overtly glanced away. "Don't make Ibby mad. That's just an all-around bad idea." Pulling Namaki off of Nozomi, Himari dragged her a few steps along. "Come on, I don't want to get to the river and find Reina fossilized or something."
They had been very close already and made it there within ten minutes. She wasn't quite fossilized, but Reina was leaned against a large tree in the most lady like way possible and sound asleep. The picturesque scene was ruined by Reina drooling on herself.
Himari walked over to her and kicked her butt pretty hard, causing Reina to move to the side, crash into the roots and sort of wake up. "Huee…" For all her pursuit in doing things beautifully, she had some rather glaring flaws.
"You didn't have to kick her…" Nozomi wasn't all aboard with the little bits of violence that happened here and there in Hikage. It felt like it was just part of their culture and so she didn't want to step in, but it also felt a bit unnecessary. "Do you always- kyaah!" Nozomi covered her face. "Wh-Why are you stripping?!"
"Huh?" Namaki was taking off her body suits, which was quite an endeavor given the size of her chest. "Because I don't want to walk around in wet clothes for the rest of the night? What, do I turn you on? You're not exactly my type, but if you don't mind me, we could-"
"Ey Namaki, you wanna know what Yume is gonna do if you come onto Nozomi?"
"I'm surrounded by boring people." Namaki groaned and pulled down her bodysuit over her chest, struggling and finally getting her boobs free. "Man it gets hot in there… I'm all sweaty…" Lifting up her boobs in a seductive way, giving Nozomi a show, she just barely dodged a large branch that came flying towards her, nearly taking off her head. "Are you crazy?!"
"What did I just say?" Himari groaned. "You need to take it down a notch. Kokoro is stressed out over Nao and Akane missing already, what do you think will happen if she sees Yume go off on you for messing around?"
"Sheeeesh, alright, alright." Namaki continued to undress normally and quite quickly, walking to a nearby small tree and hung her suit up by the heels so it could dry out. If there was anyone decent left I wouldn't have to come on to everyone for shits and giggles. But no, Himari's taken, Nao's taken, Harumi's taken, Kokoro's taken… bleh.
Dipping her toes into the water, Namaki flapped her lips and jumped in, submerged all the way to her neck. "This is deeper than I thought."
"Are you okay? Can you swim?" Nozomi was visibly concerned.
"Huh? Oh." Namaki was confused by the concern. "We usually fish at the ocean, I'm probably the best swimmer in all Hikage."
"She definitely it. Makes me look like a dog when I'm out there." Himari came walking over, with Reina in tow, carrying four stacked braided wooden baskets that also doubled for carrying laundry. "We fill these all up, then we get to go home. And that's why there's four of us."
"Slave driver making me buzz the fish and carry stuff."
"You get a break on cleaning duties instead. Or would you rather take filleting duty?"
"Yeah, yeah, I know." Namaki groaned. "The river's pretty strong… you should go further downstream and get in the water after I buzz."
"We're also going in the river? No nets?" Nozomi was still adjusting to the almost abject poverty in Hikage.
"It's on a to-make list." Himari shrugged lightly and started to undress, taking off her coat first. Nozomi realized right there and then what going into the river entailed and she suddenly regretted having signed up for fishing duty. "Don't make that face."
"But-"
"No but either, you take baths with us, fully naked. Get your hair wet enough and you're basically the same as Yume. And none of us here are into Yume."
Namaki opened her mouth and then didn't say anything because she didn't want to get drowned. "Just park here a bit further down than you and Reina if she's that embarrassed."
"No, I'll be fine. Everyone around me, everyone on both sides, is fine with this stuff, so I gotta learn to deal with it!" Nozomi raised her fists. "I can do it."
After ten minutes later, Nozomi regretted that. Peace hammered the river with a high voltage current and shocked, paralyzed fish floated to the surface, slowly carried downstream by the current. Peace climbed out to the side and sat in the grass, stark naked. "Have fun."
At the sight of her getting out, Himari gave the signal to Nozomi and Reina to jump in. The water was a bit chilly but not nearly cold enough to give them trouble. The three of them formed a triangle with Himari at the front. Letting food go to waste was bad, so they intended to catch every single fish.
"Are they… all dead?" Nozomi watched Himari grab a semi-large fish and throw it skillfully into the basket that was closest to her, right at the edge of the river.
"Not at all." Reina caught a fish and held it up by the back end fin. "They're shocked and out of it but they'll come to in a few minutes. It is a beautiful way to prevent any waste." She threw the fish at the basket. "Those we cannot catch, do not need or are too beautiful to be caught will recover and continue to beautifully swim through the rivers."
"Beauty maniac's tirades about beauty aside, she's right. We used to just blast them full force but that always resulted in stuff we couldn't make use of and Ibby really didn't like that so Namaki worked hard on adjusting her output."
"I'm the living stun gun." Namaki spread her legs a little and waved at Nozomi, knowing that she was playing with fire.
Eight fish in total got caught after the first blast. "Okay, everyone out." Himari was not formally in charge but everyone followed her orders regardless. Climbing out of the river, sitting by the fringes, Himari sat cross-legged, Reina lady like, and Nozomi very self-consciously trying to avoid covering herself in shame.
Namaki went back into the river, adjusted her position and buzzed out a second electrical charge. No fish started to float up and Namaki pouted. "This is a lot worse than the ocean… Gonna take five." There was little point to just repeatedly shocking a slow flowing river.
"Nobody's staring, Nozomi." Himari just barely turned her head to glance at Nozomi. "I'm steady with Ibby, Reina's only got eyes for Yuri and Namaki can't see you from there." Sensing that Nozomi wasn't doing so great with just that, she raised the bar. "Harumi fainted eight times before she got a handle on seeing some of us naked."
"She fainted? That many times?" Nozomi found that almost impossible to believe. "She looks so… on top of things."
"Ibby used to refuse to bathe with the rest of us because she felt like she didn't measure up."
"No way."
"Kokoro… actually never mind, I like my head attached to my body."
What… did she do?
"Lots of us had some kinda issue with the whole being into girls shtick. It wasn't exactly something that came up when we were fighting to grill you back in the day. So there's no need to feel stupid or whatever around us. Funnily though, Yume was the very first to come around to it and openly show that she was into Kokoro."
"Eh, really?"
"In hindsight that's really funny."
"A beautiful realiza-" Reina started up and was quickly shoved to the side by Himari.
"You zip it."
"I think you and Itsuki would get along just fine."
"Heh, you think so?"
"From what I've seen, yes!"
"Neat."
"Going again!" Namaki was shouting and the river was once again giving a mild shock. A large amount of fish was coming downstream, about a dozen meters ahead of Namaki. "Big haul!"
"Everyone get in, form a line." Himari was first to be in the water, Reina and Nozomi right behind her.
Grabbing living fish with her bare hands was quite a departure from the things Nozomi was used to, even after working a number of odd jobs. "They're so cold and kinda slimy… What kinda fish are these anyway?"
Himari threw a few and shrugged. "Nobody has any idea. You'd think Umi would know but that eh…"
"Are they even safe to eat…?"
"We've been eating these on and off for months."
"Kyaah!" A fish slipped out of Reina's hands because she squeezed too tightly and flew right in her face. Recovering, she looked at both Nozomi and Himari, shooting an intense glare at them that was completely uncharacteristic for her. Neither of the other two said anything.
"Do we just grill them later?" Nozomi turned the topic around.
"Mostly. Some are filleted and dried for later. Since Nao's gone right now… you ever gut fish before?"
"E-Eh… a few times?" Nozomi was not a great cook but she was adequate for making some simple meals for herself. She defaulted to fried rice a lot though.
"You're definitely gonna help out Harumi then."
"Everyone's really taken to the new names, huh?"
"Reina is such a beautiful name." Reina was visibly happy. "You see, you cannot spell Kireina with Reina and-" She was ignored by both of them as she kept prattling on about her name.
"Yume is a little on the nose though." Himari smirked. "I'm surprised Kokoro didn't end up as Tano."
Nozomi snorted. "Come on! That's too much!"
"Is it? I'm Himari. Almost Himawari."
"I can't tell if Mana's a genius or not."
"I like it. Some of the others I can't quite make sense of though. Like Miho." Catching the last of the fishes, Himari looked up and down the stream. "Okay, everyone out."
Nozomi still covered herself out of the river and wished she had a towel, but she no longer felt bad about doing that. "Miho… I wonder how you write that."
"Wanna ask Mana later?"
"I feel like we're setting ourselves up for a headache." Nozomi returned Himari's smirk from earlier. Spying Namaki approaching from the corner of her eye, Nozomi looked straight at her and regretted that immediately. She was unabashedly walking around naked and that was quite a sight. B-Big…
"That's three charges, I'm up for a break. How much did we get?" Walking past Nozomi without so much as taking a second look, Namaki confirmed for herself how much fish they had caught. "That's not terrible."
"You take breaks?" Nozomi just blabbed without thinking.
"Course I do? We're gonna be here for six, seven hours. Gotta pace myself." Sitting down next to Himari, Namaki overtly started at her boobs. Nice.
"That long?!" Spending that much time naked…
"You worried about catching a cold? That was a concern a couple months ago when the nights got pretty chilly, but not so much now." Himari tried to ease her worries.
"That's not really…"
"Should have brought a towel for her." Namaki looked over at Nozomi. Also nice.
"They take time to dry and we just barely got enough for everyone when we take a bath later." Himari didn't seem to think that was a good idea.
"I'll be fine. I think."
While Nozomi was struggling to keep her embarrassment under control, Mana was unabashedly raising up her shirt and revealing her boobs to wipe the sweat off her forehead. "This is strangely satisfying."
"How?!" Natsu loudly complained, her hands and face covered in dirt.
A number of things were ready for harvesting and each field had a quota to fill. Right now they were handling tomatoes, which was exciting for Mana as she had never harvested them by hand before. "Wow, that one is huge." Holding up a red fruit that was easily one and a half times as big as the biggest tomato she'd ever seen in a store, Mana was in awe.
"You should take example from Mana here." Ibaraki, the prickly demon slave driver, was just a few meters away, squatting with a small wooden basket of her own. "Hasn't complained even once."
"Because she's superhuman! We're not!" Natsu just wanted a break, really bad so.
"Natsu's got a point." Miho was there as well, carrying a basket with fresh produce. "We've been at it for hours. I'm about to drop dead…"
"Hm." Ibaraki stood up and looked at the field. "We are slightly ahead of schedule thanks to Mana." She looked in the other direction, seeing Mizuki stagger a little. "Okay, everyone take ten!"
Natsu just dropped on the spot and Miho followed suit the second she had set down the basket. Mizuki just fell into the dirt and stopped moving.
"You are a great help, Mana." Ibaraki was the only one that didn't immediately go into full rest mode.
"Thanks." Mana did stop working after putting down the huge tomato. "It's fun, working in the fields. Bit weird to do it at night but it's a neat experience."
"You getting used to seeing in the dark?"
"No problem!"
"That's surprising."
"Hm, I used to live on a plane and lighting was often not great. I also went blindfolded on occasion to make sure everything is where it should be for Rikka."
"Did something happen to her eyes?"
"She got hit by a curse grenade and since then she's been blind."
"And Tsubomi can't heal her?"
"It feeds on magic, so using magic to heal it is like trying to put out a fire by smothering it with burnable material."
"I apologize for bringing that up."
"That's okay." Mana smiled. "We accepted this a long time ago. Rikka's still one of my beautiful wives no matter what."
"Wives? Plural?"
"Yes! I got Rikka and Regina. They also got each other."
"That's… quite something."
"I'm not the only one with more than one girlfriend."
"You're kidding."
"Not at all. You don't know her, but Love's also got Ellen and Setsuna."
"Those names don't really mean anything to me."
While Mana explained who the girls constituting Fresh and Suite teams were, Miho had moved herself sluggishly over to Natsu. "Mana's amazing."
"She's inhumanly tough… if not for Nozomi being kinda normal I was gonna wonder if all Cures are crazy like that…" Natsu was still on her back, sweating like a horse in a humid summer.
"Makes me kinda mad we don't have a Mana of our own."
"Yeah. We totally deserve one of our own!"
"We wouldn't have to work so hard…" Miho hated working hard.
"Maybe we can keep her?"
"Doesn't she have her own group?"
"So let them all stay here!" Natsu always had the best ideas.
"Oh, good idea."
"We should ask Yume to let them all come over and stay."
"Do you think Mana has a girlfriend?" Miho stared over at Mana, who was just casually going topless to cool off.
"You think you got a chance with her? No way."
"Hey."
"I mean I can see why you would try-"
"I'll tell Nao you said that."
"Do that and they'll find your burned body in the woods."
"Woah, scary."
"Yume's still mad at me." Natsu lamented. "Feels like she's blaming me for everything."
"Hey, we match, she's mad at me too. But she's getting better. She's just grumbling at us now."
"We should get her to spend some alone time with Mana and Nozomi, their goodness will rub off!"
"Like lock them in a room?" Miho always had the best ideas.
"Oh I like that idea."
"Right?" Miho smiled wide.
"Uh huh, uh huh, so how are you gonna plan on doing that?"
"Hm, good question." Natsu kept looking at the sky.
"We haven't worked that out yet." Miho answered for her co-conspirator.
"It would probably work best if you ask me for help with something and the other one gets Yume and Nozomi because of an issue and you leave the room and chain it up."
"Oh, that's genius!" Natsu was in awe.
"Yeah, that would totally work!" Miho was in agreement there.
"But you should also work out how to get out of Yume punishing you for messing around again."
"Hm… Yume can be pretty scary… and if Kokoro gets involved…" Natsu turned a little pale.
"I'd rather not make her hit me again… or tie me up…"
"Maybe you could instead just take chore positions so that Yume and me end up together."
"Hm… but wouldn't that be-" Natsu stopped and she finally noticed something off. Looking to her left, Mana was there, squatting with a big smile on her face. "Gaaah!" Miho joined in on the reaction when she looked to her right.
"You two are kinda funny." Mana beamed.
"They're idiots is what they are." Ibaraki wished she could be towering over them but even when sitting down, Miho wasn't much shorter than her. Hitting Miho on the head and kicking Natsu's butt, she got both of them to crawl away in a hurry. "Five minutes on your own and you're hatching another harebrained plan that is going to drive Yume up the wall."
"Hey! It was a good plan!" Natsu defended her choices.
"These two remind me of Regina a little. When she was a teen, that is." She's a lot smarter now. This plan… she'd have something better within a minute.
"My condolences." Ibaraki groaned. "I should have taken Reina instead."
"Is there no rotation for who does what chores?" Mana watched as both Natsu and Miho took cover behind her.
"Something like that, but with Akane, Nao and Yuri gone, we're having trouble assigning the right people where they're needed. So I get stuck with the idiot duo here."
"Those who call others idiots are the idiots!" Miho complained.
"She's right!" Natsu supported her friend.
"I always wondered if you two would make good fertilizer or if the plants would become stupid, too." Ibaraki has a terrible look on her face.
"Eeek!" Seeking further refuge behind Mana, Natsu and Miho immediately started to fight over who got to take up the space they considered safe.
"You remind me a little of Makoto when she gets mad." Mana tried to redirect the conversation to something else. "I hope I'll get to introduce them to all of you. In a way, we've had a Hikage of our own all this time since Regina isn't really a Cure."
"You mentioned that before but how does that work exactly?" Ibaraki was curious, but not enough so to not shoot an angry glare at the other two still.
"Hm, I'll tell you over dinner? Speaking of which, are we gonna be using the tomatoes for that?"
"For salad, some of them. We're baking most of it and store a bunch. Unfortunately it's really difficult to preserve tomatoes with what we have so we'll have to look into other sources of vitamins for winter."
"Fish are still there in the winter but vegetables will be hard… what about a greenhouse?"
"Yuri can only make so many things. A greenhouse might be valuable but it's questionable if she can even make one. And with how the storms we get out here I worry about damage we can't fix."
"What about a big freezer?"
"Again, Yuri-"
"You don't need Yuri for that." Mana shook her head. "You have Reina."
"She can make ice, yes, but… where would we even store that?"
"What about a basement below the building? Then you won't have to worry about storms either. Or are there any dry caves nearby?"
"That's a no on the caves and as for a basement… how would we do that?"
"There's enough trees and time to dig a big hole, put in support beams and what not. I could probably figure out how to do that."
"I appreciate the idea but that seems like a big stretch."
"What about using one of the bedrooms as a freezer then?"
"Hm, that could work… if we bar the window up very tightly somehow and isolated the room… That is actually a good pivot."
"How long does Reina's ice last?"
"Technically it should just last if there are no factors that melt it. For better or worse, her ice is a permanent physical object. It's not really fit for consumption."
"I assume Mizuki's water works the same?" Mana looked over toward the girl in question, Dark Aqua.
"Yes, she's indispensable for fields work."
"Using Reina to turn one of the rooms-"
"Actually, most of us sleep together with our girlfriends, so a number of rooms are empty. That way we could easily store enough vegetables and fruit to last through winter."
"Won't that be difficult to maintain?"
"Reina is not all that useful right now so this will give her an important job. She'll definitely bite, considering how she is very enamored with Yuri's responsibilities." Ibaraki looked like a merchant about to score a big deal. "I was worried we might have to salt a lot of meat and rely on dried fish and whatever we can scrounge up in the winter days."
"We don't really have seasons – as far as I can tell – on our side, but given how warm this night is… is this summer?"
"Should be. Although this is also our first time here so we're not sure how it all works. But given that we went from spring to summer-" Ibaraki picked up a small pebble and threw it with full force and hit Natsu in the back – she'd been gradually sneaking away. "Break's over! Back to work!"
As the moon traveled through the sky and chores were being done, the night was slowly moving towards dawn. With the long summer days, there was less time for the Hikage to be out. All of that should have ceased to be an issue with the spell that Echo had cast, but fortune was not in favor of that. Remnants were still in effect, starving away the day for just a little longer than normal, emboldening the dark skies. But day came as surely as the sun rose in the sky.
"I'm… I'm beat…" Nozomi was shriveled up all over and couldn't even muster the shame to cover herself up anymore. Hugging her legs, head resting against her knees by the forehead, she was truly exhausted. I didn't think this would be so tiring… getting in and out, in and out, in and out… it's like a full body workout. And then catching and throwing the fish…
She wasn't the only one that was tired. Himari was rotating her shoulders, half-dressed, and looked pretty washed out. "This is definitely harder than when we fish at the ocean."
"No shit." Namaki was down in the grass, lying on her side, so tired that she couldn't even sass properly anymore. "I just wanna sleep. Eat, then sleep."
"Kinda same…" Nozomi just raised one hand to show agreement.
"A beautiful night's rest…" Reina was very slowly getting dressed, squeezing herself into her bodysuit. "I should have brought other clothes…"
"My other stuff's in the wash…" Namaki justified her own dilemma, mostly to herself. "We need more clothes."
"Erika's a fashion designer… I wish she was here." Nozomi groaned. "I can't believe I said that."
"You don't get along with her?" Himari stretched, bending back.
"She's just… she tires you out." Nozomi didn't wanna say she gets on your nerves.
"So Umi's original makes clothes?"
"Designs and makes them, yeah. I think she'd rotate if I brought her over here and told her there's a dozen girls in need of an entire wardrobe."
"Just one or two more outfits would be plenty." Himari was not the greedy type. "Don't get me wrong, the clothes we had with us when we got here are pretty nice, but especially in the summer it gets pretty stuffed under that coat."
"Your coat?! Try wearing a body suit!" Namaki groaned, rolled over and sprawled out on the grass, uncaring of what everyone could see.
"Yeah, Kokoro's group is majorly screwed." Himari glanced back at Reina, who looked positively hot in multiple ways in her suit.
"I wore my other clothes as long as I could but they're so sweat soaked…" Namaki pushed herself up and sighed. "At least this damn heat dries you off pretty quickly."
"Isn't that a bother? Makes you get hot really quickly." Nozomi wasn't sure why she saw that as a good thing.
"You try putting on a skin tight body suit while you're damp. You'll never be happy again. Same for trying to take one off when you're all wet." Namaki snorted in a mocking way and went to fetch her outfit.
"We got a decent haul. I get you're all tired but we still got more work to do." Himari put on her shoes and prodded Nozomi's backside with the tip. "Come on."
"Right…" Nozomi was hard working but after some time away from her jobs, she had gotten out of shape. More mentally so than physically.
Carrying four baskets of fish back to Hikage – the baskets were supplemented with powder snow from Reina – the fishing expedition was officially finished. The field workers were already there, sorting through produce to eat immediately and what to keep for later. Ibaraki quickly got up, dragged Natsu with her and switched Reina out for Natsu to pull her aside.
"What was that about?" Nozomi put down her basket where Himari had stopped.
"She must have needed her for something. Ibby's one of our leaders, so this happens a lot. She's also in charge of the food plan together with Nao and Harumi."
"That's so different from our side. Even if we were… I don't know, out in the wilderness or stranded on an abandoned island or something wild like that. Even then I don't think Komachi or Nao would take charge of the food situation."
"We don't have thirty plus people here, so everyone does whatever they can."
"I'm gonna take a break." Namaki set the basket down so roughly she nearly fell over with it.
"I'll come get you for dinner."
"Sure." Staggering away, Namaki looked like she was ready to fall over any second.
Turning around and assessing the situation, Himari tapped Nozomi on the shoulder. "Go help Harumi and Yume with the fish." They were already working on the first few after Natsu had just offloaded the basket onto Yume.
"Rough day?" Yume's hands were already covered in fish goop and guts. After a moment the three of them were joined by Mizuki, who looked ready to drop dead at a moment's notice.
"Pretty much… I didn't think fishing was that hard."
Yume looked like she was in a good mood. "You get used to it. The river's a big more tedious than the ocean. No clams there either."
"If we had at least nets… What should I do?"
"Lemme show you how to cut them."
"Good work today." Harumi was almost professionally filleting the fish while talking to Nozomi at the same time. "Any of the others give you trouble?"
"Not at all." Nozomi really didn't think that what Namaki did on their way there was enough to mention.
"The night's gonna be over soon. Think of it this way, if you help with the cooking now, you'll be fine for cleanup later."
"Oooh." Nozomi liked the sound of that.
"Ugh, it's this hot but I still want a warm bath…" Yume leaned back briefly and then continued to show Nozomi how to handle the fish. Lowering her voice, she continued talking to Nozomi. "You get along with Himari okay?"
"Hm? Sure? She's nice. Why?"
"Just asking. She can be a little prickly and to the point."
"No, she was nice. But she must have a body made from steel… just like our Itsuki."
"She and Ibaraki are some of our hardest workers."
Harumi loudly cleared her throat. "Move those hands, not your mouths."
"Hey, I'm your leader." Yume complained.
"And I'm in charge of cooking." Harumi's smile cut Yume to the bone. Nozomi snorted a little when she saw Yume back down. "You too, Nozomi!"
"Right!"
"They do look like sisters, next to each other." Kokoro was talking out loud to herself. I wonder if I can get along with Miyuki like that. If she's anything like back then, there's no way… Her thoughts were disrupted when someone planted a basket of tomatoes in her lap with two extra baskets by her side.
"If you're just sitting there and staring at your girlfriend, move those hands." Ibaraki knew no limits when it came to making everyone work. Sitting down next to her fellow leader of Hikage, she looked Yume and Nozomi. "Cute."
"Huh?!" Kokoro reacted exactly like Ibaraki predicted and felt herself shut down by the I knew you would look that Ibaraki gave her. "What's your problem?"
"It's fine to be rough around the edges. But if you want to have that with your original you'll have to make some compromise."
"What about you, miss workaholic?"
"We're fundamentally the same as our originals to begin with."
"Tsk."
"There's no need to get along with your original to begin with. Nozomi's a special case. No matter what, I can't see our Yuri getting along with the other Yuri for example."
"So what? You saying I can't make it work?"
"I'm saying you don't need to make it work. Yume isn't gonna judge you. You're you now. Not just Miyuki's bad end."
"What is this, a pep talk?"
"You looked like you were gonna cascade into stupid thoughts like I'll never be able to get along with my original and act out because of it."
"Was not." Kokoro didn't even have the energy to get angry at that insane level of insight.
"That so? Well, good then. Yume looks happy there."
"Hey, what are you saying?"
"That she's happy to have something like family."
"Oh. Yeah. I guess."
"What I don't get is how you're into Yume and Nozomi."
"I am not-"
"Good. Because Nozomi loves Miyuki, not you."
"You are one annoying woman, you know that?"
"Is that so?"
"If your original is anything like this the universe is going to implode if the two of you happen to be in one place, just to stop your annoyingness!"
"Is that-"
"Shuddup!"
"Hah… Kokoro's at it again." Yume sighed. While she was embarrassed, Kokoro get shouting at Ibaraki while the short girl calmly responded every time, only driving Kokoro further up the wall.
"She's a bit crass and rough around the edges but I think Miyuki would really get along with her."
"Huh? With Kokoro? You're joking, right?" Yume couldn't believe it.
"Miyuki is really kind and I think she'd see Kokoro as just being a bit rough but good deep down. She really looked out for me when you were on the other side."
"Kokoro being good deep down… I mean I've been thinking that too, but-" Yume looked right at her girlfriend, about ten meters out, threatening Ibaraki with a particularly large tomato. "Sometimes…"
"Did you meet Urara over there?"
"Uh… sorry, I was so freaked out most of the time I don't really remember."
"She curses a lot and loves to drink booze and she's really rough but she also really loves Ako and pulls through when we need her. I think Kokoro is like that. Like… like a chestnut!"
Yume snorted and nearly got spit all over the fish. "That's an amazing analogy."
"Right?!"
"Ladies, hands." Harumi was listening in but there was a limit to small talk.
"Yes~" Yume and Nozomi responded as one, then looked at each other and grinned.
"Like my twin!" Nozomi was really happy.
"Nee-san!" Yume played along and then blushed when she felt an unfamiliar warmth go through her. That… that feels really nice to say somehow…
"Leave it to your onee-chan, I'll fillet all- ow!" Nozomi cut her finger. Before she could even show it to Yume, Harumi slapped her in the back of her head. "Go get Ibaraki to fix that. Miho! Get over here! You're taking over for Miho at the sorting station, Nozomi."
"Yes…" There goes all my big sister cred…
The moon wandered further through the sky and dinner was served – grilled fish with a side of cabbage and tomato salad. Not exactly luxurious, but there was plenty of fish and salad to go around. "I can't imagine how much complaining there would be if all of us on the other side had to do so much work for a simple dinner like this." Nozomi realized what that sounded like. "N-Not that this doesn't taste good!"
"Simple pleasures. For us it's great just to be alive." Yume was sitting with Nozomi. "Of course we'd like some comfort items and such but it's not that we're unhappy without them."
"Maybe we can get Mamo to do delivery out here."
"The store owner?" Yume wasn't a hundred percent sure on the names.
"Although she sells stuff… maybe I can get everyone to pitch in some money. There's not a lot we spend it on right now anyway."
"What's this about Mamo?" Mana had picked up on a familiar name and walked over.
"Oh Mana. I was just thinking out loud if we could get Mamo to deliver some goods out here to help them out. Have everyone pitch in for it."
"Mamo's really leisure-fairez as far as our old enemies go, I bet she'd give you a good deal."
"Kind of strange how all these old faces are coming back around, right?" Nozomi smiled and looked at Yume. "I'm happy though. Coming to this place isn't all bad after all. Right?"
"I got a big sister out of it on top of everything. So maybe having Natsu and Miho mess up wasn't that terrible after all."
"This is so unfair. Why couldn't the selfish make a dark me? I want a nice sister like Yume too." Mana playfully pouted a little and walked back where she came from, chatting with Natsu and Miho, who seemed to really have taken a liking to her.
"Not to be mean to her but… one Mana is plenty. I can't even imagine having two people with so much energy around. I think that'd tire out even Ibaraki."
"Haha hahaha… hah…" Nozomi laughed but she agreed. I'll never tell Mana about this.
While the Hikage plus their two guests were having dinner, someone was watching them from afar, sitting on top of wooden chair that simply grew out of a particularly big branch far up. Eating croquettes with her fingers, she kept a keen eye on them. "Considering I just left them like that they don't seem too concerned. I would have expected that girl to catch on or at least have some suspicions but maybe the situation is just not suitable to that." Leaning back, she glanced at the sky. "For now everything is holding up."
A swoosh of darkness coalesced right next to her and a woman stepped out, standing in the air, right above the branch. She took just a quick glance around. "A tree. You serious?"
"What are you expecting? They might not be Cures but what if they sense me watching them with remote viewing abilities? The idea is to observe them secretly."
"I know. Man…" The woman – Eternal – let out a huge sigh and a second chair grew out of the branch and she sat down on it, a cup of coffee, piping hot, materializing in her hand. "You will not believe the day I've had."
"You're training them now, right?"
"Yup." Eternal yawned. "My god, some of them can get on your nerves. Makes me want to crush an entire sun into their face."
"You gonna be okay over there?"
"Sure. Can't speak for them being okay."
"Hey."
"I know, I know. But, I swear, some of them…"
"There's over thirty, so of course there'll be some problematic ones."
"Hah…" Eternal sipped her coffee. "Haaaaaah…"
"Aren't you exaggerating?"
"I wish."
"At least you get to do something interesting."
"Well, that's true. How's things out here?"
"I'm bored out of my mind."
"Any sign of Entity?"
"Not a crumb. It's like she just went poof and vanished."
"Well, her abilities are like that."
"Things are a bit unstable on the other side though."
"Unstable?"
"The damn time eaters are still crawling out of the woodwork here and there. I can do clean up all day and it's just… it's just like I'm hunting cosmic cockroaches."
"That's some comparison…"
"There's no big problem for now, but if this goes on for weeks and months, we might have to erase the entire continent down to marine bedrock to make sure they're gone."
"Eh… that'd cause some serious damage to the ocean."
"We can just spatially isolate the continent first."
"Won't they notice if we blast a ten thousand square kilometer hole into the planet?"
"Probably, but we can just make up something. Speaking of which, how's the mental cleanup going?"
"So-so… not great exactly. Some of the trauma is embedded really deeply. Windy thought she was helping but honestly she just made it difficult for me to fix things."
"If you're having trouble that must mean she's pretty skilled at it."
"Give her a century or two and she'll be formidable."
"They don't exactly live that long."
"Who knows. Maybe her plan includes them becoming immortal."
"Eh, that feels unlikely. So, what are you gonna do after this?"
"Want to hook up?"
"Getting horny after spending all day around them?"
"Some of those outfits… I swear, if they fight some kind of enemy like that, they'll beat them by bleeding them to death."
Echo grimaced. "It's creepy to lust after them."
"That's rude. Physically they're more or less the same age as we are."
"Yeah, physically."
"So what?"
"Ugh, come on, don't you think it's creepy to think about them as someone you'd have sex with?"
"Always the moral high ground with you."
"We can hook up later."
"Nah, I'm good now. I don't want a pity fuck."
"It's more about making sure you don't put your hands on any of them."
"Do you think I'm stupid or something? That'd be a massive disaster."
"At least you're aware of that. So, how's their training going?"
Eternal put down her coffee and the light faded from her eyes. "Some of them are… okay."
"Huh?"
"Others… well…" Her eyes were starting to turn dark.
"You telling me there's not a single one finished yet?"
"At this rate I'd be amazed if one of them finishes within a week."
"A week? What?"
"Apparently it is really hard to learn new abilities."
"I mean… that makes sense, but… really, a week?"
"Not looking forward to dealing with some of these idiots for a week. And pretending to be Ayu is also really annoying. That's so not my type."
"Then why the hell did you supplant their memories with that?!"
"Gotta keep the illusion adjacent to the truth so they don't realize what's going on."
"Speaking of illusion, why aren't you returning this side's Akane, Nao and Yuri?"
"I sorta panicked and fed the other Akane a bunch of crap and I can't just walk that back all easy."
"… You've got to be kidding me."
"I panicked."
"Also she's kinda hooked up with the other side Nao."
Echo crushed a croquette between her fingers with such force that not even dust remained. "She what?"
"I have not a clue how that happened either. She doesn't realize it's this side's Akane."
"Speaking of which, where is she? The other side Akane."
"What do you mean? I booted her over here."
"So you said, but I haven't see her."
"Huh?"
"Don't huh me."
"Just use a search ability to find her!"
"Again, what if they pick up on me being still around? I can't bullshit my way out of a situation like that as easily as you."
"Want me to do it?"
"How is that any better?"
"Then what? We just… let this go?"
"Honestly it doesn't seem like anyone is particularly missing her."
"I can't argue with that but she's still part of the plan and I need to fix the situation with the other Akane."
"How do you plan on fixing that?"
"I… haven't figured that out yet."
"What about cloning this side's Akane?"
"We need the real deal."
"Fine. I'll think of something. When I find her. Guess I know what I am doing tomorrow. Where did you boot her to?"
"She should have popped in just over there, like a hundred meters out from their… what is that, some kind of apartment complex?"
"I felt so bad for them, so I kinda… anyway, you're sure-"
"Of course I'm sure. Maybe she wandered off in the wrong direction?"
"She could be anywhere out there now. This is gonna be great."
"Don't blame me, blame her."
"I will." Echo looked very serious and then both of them groaned. "So… any plans for tonight?"
"Sleeping like a rock."
"You… sleep?"
"You would too if you dealt with these girls all day long. I'm gonna go back before someone notices I've been gone."
"No doppelganger marionette?"
"Too risky. Miyuki is really sharp, surprisingly."
"Must be nice getting to have a girlfriend."
"I'd much rather have that sassy princess."
"Keep it under control."
"Yeah, yeah. Tell me when you find Akane. See you tomorrow."
"What do you mean tomorrow? It's almost dawn."
"What are you talking about? I came over the moment I was done with everyone's training."
"You're training until early in the morning?"
"No, it's not even midnight yet."
They both looked at each other for a long moment. "Time eaters?"
"Probably." Eternal clicked her tongue. "So now we have time corruption. That's not good."
"Maybe it's just fallout from the huge mass of time eaters we removed."
"Possible."
"Or maybe… has the geographic makeup of the other side changed?"
"It has. I totally forgot to mention that."
"Maybe it's just that you're so many timezones away normally that your end of day coincidences with my end of night."
"Whatever it is, I'll check it out tomorrow. I'm tired."
"Fine with me."
Eternal disappeared into a black mist, into the night, and her chair dissipated with her. Echo was left behind, looking down at the Hikage, who were now cleaning up. "Nothing goes ever right, does it?"
=== END OF EVENT XXXVIII ===
