Frenda adjusted her beret slightly, her breath misting a bit in her face as she weaved through the street and the holiday crowds. Their happy faces and laughing and joy grated on her foul mood. Pushing past it, she turned the corner into the small, easy to miss, private salon. It only had a few room and served as a meeting spot for ITEM and its subordinate organization.

There, waiting, was Kinuhata Saiai. One of the four members of ITEM, the wielder of the Offense Armor Esper power. She'd asked Frenda to meet her here. She was dressed in a sweater dress and tights with some fur boots to ward away the cold, looking at her phone with a sort of passive expression on her face as she waited.

"Hey, Saiai." Frenda said as she approached. She liked to consider Saiai her friend, but tension between them felt unusually high lately. Tension in ITEM itself felt high. She couldn't be the only one to notice it, right?

"Hey." Saiai tossed her phone onto the table, tucking her legs up onto the chair. Frenda sat across from her, raising an eyebrow.

"So, what's up?" Frenda asked, pushing a smile onto her face. Saiai tilted her head at Frenda, looking a bit curious. She gave a bit of a shrug.

"I was just wondering, you seemed kind of off after the last job. Something bothering you?" She asked, her hand reaching over and sliding her phone to the side after glancing at it for a moment. Frenda shifted in her chair a bit uncomfortably, the topic already shifting into a direction she didn't want to discuss. She was here now though, what else could she do?

"W-well…" Frenda took her hat off and dusted it off slightly, getting rid of some snow that had fallen on it. "When we went outside of that facility, we ran into Mugino, and she said she'd ran into some more SCHOOL operatives after we'd taken care of that Esper mercenary inside, but… those… those bodies didn't look like operatives to me, Saiai." Frenda said, not meeting the other ITEM member's eyes.

"...That's all? They could have easily been in disguise." Saiai said simply, shrugging. "Since when do you doubt the boss so much?" She asked with a raised eyebrow. Frenda glanced at her, seeing the suspicion in Saiai's gaze.

"...The looks on their faces, Saiai. They looked terrified. Like they were… running. And I didn't see any weapons around them." She added in, not answering Saiai's question. Her counterpart began to answer, but Frenda didn't give her the chance, deciding to toss in another piece of information that had begun to bother her.

"Rikou has been really sick lately. We've been pulling a lot of jobs, but this seems unusual. I always thought she was just fragile health but… Are you really sure that Ability Crystal dust is safe? Mugino says it's safe. Are you sure she's right?" Frenda asked softly, daring a glance toward Saiai.

Saiai had glanced away from Frenda, lost in a moment of thought. Frenda felt her heart pounding in her chest for a moment. She felt herself trusting Saiai less and less, just as she found herself… fearing Mugino more and more.

"Saiai… All these jobs. Hunting down SCHOOL Esper mercenaries, going after their operations… Whose bank rolling this? Who's hiring ITEM? Mugino seems to be relishing in every mission, but, it just seems so unusual to be put on such a direct confrontation with another Dark Side organization like this." Frenda said, her tone filled with doubt and agitation. Her eyes followed Saiai's, who seemed to refuse to meet with Frenda's, until eventually Frenda looked away again, staring down at the table, silence beginning to stretch on as Frenda found herself without anything else to say.

"You know what I think?" Saiai asked finally, a line of tense defensiveness in her voice, prompting Frenda to jerk her head up as she looked at her team member, the silence at last broken.

"What?" Frenda asked, a bit sharper than she intended.

"I think that girl, your target, is starting to rub off on you. You shouldn't let what's only another one of your sluts get so close. It's affecting your judgement. You're getting soft." Saiai said in a sharp, intentionally cruel tone, clearly attempting to get at Frenda. Frenda's words had bothered her, Frenda knew that. It didn't stop Frenda from getting to her feet, slamming her hands on the tabletop, shaking the entire surface, and growling at her like a feral animal.

"Fuck off!" Frenda stormed away from the table and toward the exit, Saiai not moving to stop her, only picking up her phone as she leaned her cheek into her hand as she propped her elbow up, idly sighing as if bored.

"I wonder what that little slut would think if she knew how many useless tarts just like her came and went through your bed before she did?" Saiai wondered aloud at the fleeing blonde, no response forthcoming, Frenda slamming the door behind her hard enough that the glass pane of the screen cracked.

Saiai waited a few minutes after Frenda was gone before checking her texts, clicking on the contacts. She went to the name 'Mugino'. She stared down at the waiting empty message field, pondering what to send. The last thing Mugino had sent her several hours ago that prompted her to call Frenda here…

"Can Frenda still be trusted? Find out."

Before this conversation, that question hadn't bothered her as much. The honest answer would be to express some doubts. Frenda was showing signs of cracking. Signs of… something. Frenda was doubting Mugino, at the very least. All of Saiai's taunting and mockery had gotten under Frenda's skin in a profound way that a few months ago would have, at best, earned her nothing but an uncaring shrug.

The problem was… was right now, as she pondered what to tell Mugino…

Pondered how Mugino might react based on what Saiai told her...

Saiai punched a few words into the phone and sent them to Mugino.

"Frenda's just fine. Operations can continue unchanged."

Saiai threw her phone back on the table.

...That… seemed like the right thing to do right now.

Frenda found herself storming away from the salon, her rage carrying her far, the fire burning in her eyes parting crowds in a way that one might not expect from the tiny blonde. She wasn't sure how long she walked, or how far. Eventually, she was going through the winding alleys between the more tightly packed buildings.

Eventually she paused as she needed to catch her breath in her stomping, and reorient herself on where she was exactly. She paused as she fished out her phone and flipped it open. Scrolling through the apps, her finger slipped and hit the picture gallery instead of the GPS map of Academy City that she meant.

One picture in particular caught her eye, and nostalgia beckoned her to tap it and bring it up onto the screen. As two happy blonde girls, two younger smiling faces from a couple years ago hugging each other into the selfie, grinned at her, she found herself returning the grin.

"What do we have here?"

She found the grin slide off her face as a crude voice interrupted her nostalgia. She snapped the phone shut as an unwelcome hand grabbed at her shoulder. So lost in her thoughts, she hadn't noticed the approaching figure, or any of his companions.

She looked over her shoulder at the revolting man and his companions; who, she noted, were moving to cut off the various points of egress of the alley. He smelled of cheap booze and smokes.

"I'm not in the mood. Piss off." Frenda said flatly, venom dripping in her voice. Blood pumped in her ears as anger began to boil, and she saw the man's drunken visage twist into one of impatience.

"Come on, me and my friends here are just looking to invite you out for a fun time…" His grin came back as he seemed to try to regain his, very drunken, cool.

"Walk away from me. Right now." Frenda said, her eyes shaded from view by her bangs as she tilted her head forward slightly. There was a pause as the men seemed taken off guard by the tiny girls audacity. The leader, growling, slapped the phone out of her hand, the plastic device bouncing down the alley.

"Listen you dumb bimbo bit-"

And then, Frenda saw nothing but red.

Frenda bent down and picked up her phone off of the ground, flipping it open again, checking to make sure the picture was still there. It was. Good.

She knew after she threw the first kick into the man's groin that it would have gone downhill. At that moment, she just didn't care. She was just too angry. She took a moment to turn and look at the array of bloody and broken bodies laying strewn about the alley. Five of them, in all. She hadn't bothered to count them when they'd first arrived. She stared for a minute.

She didn't know what possessed her to fish out one of the thugs phones and text Anti-Skill. They'd probably show up soon.

Some of them might even live.

She threw the thugs phone onto the ground and left, ducking security cameras and managing her way out to the appoint she knew she had today. She spared one final glance at the photograph of the two near-identical sisters in the photograph before she pocketed her phone.

Ruiko sighed a bit as she sat down on a bench in the gym. She'd been exercising and training alone all day. The numerous training sessions they'd had previously had been interesting to say the least- electric-ammo-dodging training, weapons training, 'guess the stun grenade', hand-to-hand, just to name a few… but Frenda was over an hour late. It was more than a little disappointing, to put it mildly. No response to any of her texts or call. Her concern was beginning to grow beyond her ability to dismiss.

Sighing and grabbing a towel to wipe some sweat off, a door opening and closing grabbed her attention, standing up quickly, she threw the towel down, ignoring the brief chill of winter air blowing past her as the door sealed itself shut. The figure of Frenda walked into the room, and Ruiko wasn't quite sure how to react at first. Should she be relieved? Angry?

"Frenda? Where the hell have you bee-?!" She paused as Frenda approached. Frenda's clothes looked a bit disheveled, but the most pointed concern were the fresh and obvious bloodstains on them. They weren't large, but they were there- small stains here and there. Frenda herself looked largely uninjured, which implied some unfortunates had been on the receiving end of her.

"Frenda… what happen-" She didn't get to finish the sentence before Frenda closed the distance, reaching up and grabbing at Ruiko's hair with intense aggression, pulling hard, forcing her head upward, and biting at her neck. Ruiko stumbled back, tripping and falling down. She felt Frenda's teeth rubbing into her skin, but after a few seconds, she noticed…

Frenda's heart… wasn't in it. It was a very, very weak attempt at covering up and pushing away Ruiko's alarm and concern away with passion that Frenda plain did not have at the present.

"Frenda…" Ruiko said weakly, looking down at the girl lying on top of her, not daring to meet Ruiko's eyes. "...You… you're sad." She felt so lame for saying something so blunt and what felt childish, but the truth was, is that it was all she could think of.

"Why…" Frenda whispered quietly against Ruiko's chest quietly, earning a concerned, hopeless look from her… lover? Ruiko admittedly did not know what she was to Frenda at this point. This wasn't exactly an opportune time to clarify it.

"What can I do right now? Just tell me." Ruiko asked, a slight trace of desperation in her voice.

The seconds crawled on before Frenda finally answered her. Frenda, who at this moment, felt like the world could not stop reminding her that she was exactly what, she felt, she knew she was; a monster.

"...Just, please, hold me."

And for the next few hours, on the training room floor until their backs screamed and they couldn't take it anymore and were forced to retire for the night, Ruiko did just that.