Disclaimer: I do not own Zero no Tsukaima or Destiny
Chapter 8: Can't Touch This
Tristain, Halkeginia
Tristain Academy of Magic
The Day of the Void
Louise woke up the next morning thinking of all the things she wanted to do, and places she wanted to go. Then, the events of the previous day came roaring back like a Thundercrash to dispel her wishes, and she remembered where she really was. Part of her wanted to roll over, go back to sleep, and hope that maybe this would end up being a dream when next she awoke. Guardians could do just fine without sleep, even through days or even weeks of continuous combat, but she still enjoyed dreaming every once in a while.
Reluctantly, she got up, also remembering that this was supposed to be her bed. The entire feeling of this place felt alien to her. Colbert had led her to this room, and told her that it, and everything within, was hers and had been for over a year. Yet she remembered exactly nothing of it. A little bit of the academy interior was vaguely familiar to her, notably the large dining hall that they had passed through, but not this place.
Fortunately, she had no need of the uniforms in the closet. Her immediate reaction was that they were completely worthless garments that offered little protection from the elements, and none from hostile action. No warlock would be caught wearing those.
She stood up, naked, and thanks to Saito, the form fitting undersuit of her armor appeared on her body in a swirl of light, just as perfect feeling as it always was. In seconds she was just a helmet away from being able to operate in any environment, from tropical paradise to irradiated airless desert. She left that off for now, leaving it stored in Saito's transmat matrix, but re equipped the rest of her gear. Louise exited the room, Thorn on her hip, and her wire rifle on her back, the old Eliksni weapon partially covered by her hair that was left to flow freely instead of being trapped inside a helmet. It would be there if she really needed it.
It was only as she was exiting the room that Louise realized that she had absolutely no idea how to interface with this place. She wasn't some young student from a noble family anymore, if she ever really was at all. Memories of that time seemed to be well and truly gone. Her life consisted of combat, exploration, and hands on study in the field. She was truly out of her element in a place like this.
In the City, the Tower especially, everyone knew guardians, even if they did not know exactly who she was, they could still identify her as a warlock. They knew what that meant. But here? This was an academy teaching an unknown form of magic to decidedly mortal human students. How was she, a quasi immortal warrior scholar used to endless interplanetary warfare, supposed to interact with them?
Furthermore, it was obvious that this place, maybe even this whole world, was technologically primitive. Magically advanced to a degree, but still many centuries behind Earth, and pre Golden Age Earth for anything that required physics and engineering. These people had the rough equivalent of seventeenth or eighteenth century tech at best, and were well behind in some areas. That alone threw out any number of ways she may have been able to procure local assistance.
"So, where to first?" Saito asked her, appearing over her right shoulder. "Dining hall or library?"
"Might as well find out what they eat on this planet." Louise muttered as she turned toward the hall. "The library will still be there in an hour, the food probably won't be."
A few minutes and several corridors later, Louise found the dining hall once more, and it was far more lively than the first time she had passed through it. Instead of being empty, there were at least a hundred people in the cavernous room, mostly students and a few people that appeared to be servant staff.
Louise wasn't sure what first caught their eyes, maybe the fractal blue glow of her Transversive Steps, but soon enough she had dozens of eyes upon her. She kept walking, not paying them any attention. Despite being human, Louise could not help but feel that they were as alien as any Fallen or Cabal she had run into over the years. Although, she had met a few not so Fallen Eliksni, Mithrax and Variks immediately came to mind, that she could almost call friends. These people were much the same; they looked like something she recognized, but that was where the similarities ended for most of them.
She took a seat, and a decidedly too upbeat servant arrived moments later Louise got a plate of something that looked and smelled and tasted like good chicken, a glass of actually good wine, and a glass of water her ghost was far too interested in.
"Is there something in the water?" She asked Saito as he hovered over the glass.
"No, there's nothing in the water, but that's the interesting part." He replied.
"What do you mean?"
"For a place with virtually no technology, I'm wondering how they managed to hand you a glass full of virtually pure molecular H2O. There's traces of other substances from being exposed to the atmosphere, but still. This is far too pure to have come from a natural source. Even City manufactured filters would have trouble replicating it." Saito floated around the glass, unleashing the full might of his sensor suite on it, and causing a light show in the process. All around them, people were staring at the talking, floating creature that they all assumed to be Louise's familiar.
"Go track down the servant that brought it and see if she knows. You'll probably get an answer along the lines of 'it's magic', but you might learn something. Or maybe it really is magic." Louise suggested. Saito agreed and flew off, eager to solve the water mystery.
As he did, two more female students approached and sat down just to her right. The first was tall, with caramel tan skin and flowing crimson hair. Only one eye was visible as half of her face was covered by said hair. The second was visually less impressive, being almost as pale as snow, with light blue hair. Her eyes were different though, they were those of a person that had seen battle and death up close. Ms tall and dark sized her up with an aura of confidence that had to be backed up by something, whether real or imagined.
"So what really happened yesterday, Zero? The strange portal, that ridiculous arm, and what's with that outfit?" The redhead asked. Louise could already tell there was going to be some friction here, so she did the one thing that would be sure to piss her off; she stayed perfectly calm.
"In my line of work, you have to wear something a bit tougher than a skirt." She replied, not even looking at the girl. "A lot of things have tried to kill me. I don't make it easy for them. A little bit of armor helps in that regard."
"Last night." The second girl spoke before her friend could. Her voice was quiet, but focused. "Those creatures you killed, what were they?" Hearing this, Louise perked up, wondering just how she knew that. Had she witnessed the fight from somewhere nearby? That was the only logical answer.
"The Taken. They are beings corrupted and transformed by malevolent dark energies. Their only real motive is to consume anything even remotely powerful, so it's best to just kill them on sight." She explained. The first girl looked completely lost as her friend's question was answered.
"Where did they come from?" She asked with genuine curiosity.
"They followed me through the portal that brought me here. There were maybe a hundred or so that made it through, out of the thousands on the other side. I destroyed the portal before they could get a hold on this side, and left no survivors. We shouldn't see any more of them around here, at least for a while."
"What was that magic you used?" She asked,
"I answered your question, now you answer mine. What's your name, and where were you last night?" Louise countered. She looked visibly surprised at being asked for her name, as if Louise should have known it. Maybe she should have, by this girl's timekeeping.
"Tabitha. I watched from above the clouds with my familiar. I used wind magic to open a small hole through the cloud layer to see the clearing. I saw you fight them."
"Whoa, slow down." The first girl interrupted. "What happened last night, and who did Louise fight?"
"Headmaster summoned Louise back. Taken creatures followed her and attacked. She destroyed them." Tabitha explained.
"Louise? The Zero that can't even cast a simple transmutation spell right?" She asked, disbelieving.
"I saw it." Tabitha replied. "Destroyed the creatures and shut the portal with strange magic."
"Light magic." Louise continued for her, taking the opportunity to get the name in their heads early. She didn't want to even use the term 'void' if it would just lead to extra headaches. "It's not something you have around here."
"Prove it." The redhead demanded. "All you've ever done is blow things up. You disappear yesterday casting the safest spell in the world, and now you come back and claim to have some kind of strange new magic." Louise grinned.
"Let's play a game. If you can touch me in the next thirty seconds, I'll tell anything you want to know."
"Anything?" The redhead asked greedily.
"Anything you can think to ask me." Louise told her. The redhead instantly reached for her, faster than Louise was expecting, but not nearly fast enough.
"Blink and you'll miss me." She said.
The whole room stopped what they were doing as Louise teleported five meters backwards in a violet flash. Over a hundred pairs of eyes were staring at her dumbfounded. Louise was a bit surprised by their reactions, until she remembered that she was so far from home that nobody had ever seen a warlock blink before. If they hadn't seen that, then they certainly hadn't seen a blade dancer do it either. Was there really no local equivalent of blink? Something about that idea just seemed wrong. How could these magical people live without blink? It was an absurd notion.
"How! How did you just…" The redhead gaped.
"Stop gawking and start trying. Twenty four seconds left." Louise told her with a loud grin. Her opponent scrambled away from the table and lunged toward her. She got close, but Louise blinked again, this time five meters to the right. Again, her opponent redirected herself toward her. Louise repeated the performance for the next twenty seconds, laughing hysterically as she made the redhead literally run in a circle as she teleported around the room.
By the time it was over, the audience had joined Louise, and a few of them looked as if they may asphyxiate from laughing too hard. They may have been awed by the display, but watching her pursuer fail so completely was pushing all their buttons.
For Kirche, it was a complete and total role reversal. Louise had never managed to so thoroughly thwart her as she had just done. She was still so awestruck by the fact that Louise the Zero had just performed some kind of ridiculously advanced magic, without a wand and seemingly without effort as well, that she had no idea what to say. She just stood there, truly speechless. She was supposed to be the class clown that always blew herself up, literally and figuratively, not...this.
"Well, how's that? Enough of a demonstration?" No response came, at least nothing intelligible from the caramel redhead who appeared to still be in shock. "Who is she, anyway?" Louise asked the girl she now knew to be Tabitha. This time it was Tabitha's turn to show even more surprise. Both of the girls looked familiar, if familiar was an accurate description for blurry ancient memories. She knew somewhere deep down that she had probably known them on some level in her pre guardian life.
"You really don't know, do you?" She spoke, more as a statement of fact rather than a question. From the context of the situation, Louise surmised that she was supposed to know these people from some time long forgotten. "How?" She asked.
"I've been gone a long, long time. So long, that I barely remember anything about who I once was before. To you, it was a few hours since I disappeared, but to me…" She nodded.
"Different." She said. "You're Louise, but somehow not."
"That's one way to put it. I'm not the Louise that you remember. She...died a long time ago." She tried to frame it.
"You're not kidding." The redhead beside them mumbled just loud enough to be heard.
"Start over?" Tabitha asked them both. The other nodded dazedly, still trying to comprehend that her supposed rival had truly gone, in spirit if not in body. She got back up, took a deep breath, and tried to compose herself. It was almost comical how fast she went from a beaten wreck to a puffed up big girl with a disturbing amount of self confidence.
"I am Kirche Augusta Frederica von Anhalt Zerbst." She proudly proclaimed, as if that was supposed to mean something to Louise. She clearly thought it should.
"That's a mouth full." The warlock appraised blandly. Kirche immediately twitched in visible irritation.
"Why you little…" Kirche reached for her, but Louise once again blinked back.
"Didn't we just learn that won't work?"
"Louise, if you're done playing with the locals, we're supposed to be at the library in five minutes." Saito interrupted, floating his way over. Louise took the escape offered.
"You should come with us, being as you were there last night." Louise offered to Tabitha, who nodded in agreement. Clearly she wanted to know more about what actually transpired.
The two of them began to walk off, Saito floating beside, and Kirche moved to follow them. New Louise or not, she was not going to let a Valliere get away with ignoring her. Louise walked away, continuing to do exactly that all the way to the library's door.