Still Waters Another Turn, Chapter 12

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I Ain't Got No Crystal Ball.

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Seven people stood or sat in silence around a table in Eva's resort, contemplating their options and trying to work out a plan.

"Negi…"

The boy flinched at Asuna's voice, but still refused to raise his head. His hair was covering his eyes, but everyone present knew he was on the verge of crying.

"You do realize you only have two weeks, right?" Eva said suddenly, her voice echoing in the cavernous room. Negi winced again, then quickly wiped away some tears.

Max grumbled something under his breath, and Eva shot a glare at him. Clearly, she did not want the elemental in her resort. Jennifer met her glare instead, managing to hold it until Eva got bored and muttered something about 'foolish children'.

"Negi," Asuna said again. The boy was blaming himself for this disaster, like he did with everything. "Hey, Negi! Wake up, snap out of it!"

"But Asuna-san," Negi said. "I don't know what to do!" And the tears started flowing in earnest.

"Well that's obvious, isn't it?" Kotarou broke in. "We just have to go and save them."

"But how? We don't even know where they are, and I don't want to involve my stu—"

Asuna smacked the back of his head. "We're already involved, idiot!"

Eva sighed and took a sip of the tea one of Chachamaru's sisters brought in as Asuna and Negi continued their comedy routine. "Chachamaru's with Hakase right now," she said as she placed the tea cup on the table. "Apparently, they've found a bit of information about whoever made the robots, and they're looking into it."

"What?! This is news to me!" Asuna shouted, jumping up from her chair hard enough to knock it over.

Eva raised an eyebrow at the fallen chair, and gave Asuna a blank look. "Of course it is." She took another sip of tea.

"Why didn't you tell us?!"

The thump the teacup made when she put it on the table made everyone jump. "If you were told every little bit of information as it became available, nothing would ever get done, brat!"

"Don't call me a brat!"

And so, Asuna and Eva began their comedy routine.

Akira, who had been silent up to now, looked hesitantly at Max and Jennifer, who were across from her at the table. "Do they know where everyone is being held?" she asked, her voice oddly wavery. The density of the magic here made her feel strange and…yeah. She was embarrassed to feel like that, and found that she couldn't meet Eva's gaze or ask her anything directly either.

Eva dusted off her dress and sat back in her chair. "Just hints, nothing more," she said, waving off the girl's question.

"They'll probably separate the hostages, keep them in small groups in different locations," Max said finally. "No sense in putting all your eggs in one basket," he said when everyone looked at him. "They obviously knew what they were doing; other than those two cheerleaders, the others were all involved with magic in some way. In a school with thousands of normal students, well, the odds are way too high to say that it was anything else."

"But what about Kakizaki and Sakurako?" Asuna asked. "They're just normal."

Eva rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair, propping her feet up on the table. Idiots. All of them.

"They were probably just unlucky."

Eva gritted her teeth as she listened to them prattle on.

"Hmph. Unlucky? Have you ever actually met Sakurako, Max-sensei?"

The sound of Eva's chair legs slamming to the floor silenced everyone.

"You people would argue with a rock," Eva said under her breath as she got to her feet. "You're wasting my time," she said flatly. "Training! Apprentices, come here. The rest of you, don't break anything," she ordered as Negi, Kotarou, and Asuna gathered around her.

When they were gone, Max looked at the other two. "So, what do you say? Let's see how these pactios work."

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Chisame was awoken the next morning by a line of sunlight formed by the cracks of the boarded up doorway of the small building. She ached all over, both from sleeping on the hard floor and running so much the day before.

Chisame and Madoka had run for hours, it seemed, stopping only briefly to remove the bindings around each other's hands. Luckily, they had found an ancient shrine building in the woods just after dark, so they had had a place to sleep at least, cold though it had been.

She groaned as she shielded her eyes from the light and shivered. Winter really was approaching fast, it seemed.

"Shh!"

Chisame froze and realized she heard activity outside. Kugimiya was standing by the door, holding a broken off piece of wood as one might hold a dagger, blade down and ready to be plunged into the soft spot between the collarbone and shoulder blade. She was listening to the sounds outside.

"Doesn't look like they came this way, Sarge," an unfamiliar voice said in slow, heavily accented Japanese.

"Check that building there."

Footsteps approached and someone tugged on the boards covering the doorway. "It's solid, they ain't in there," a deeper voice said. Chisame hoped against hope that the man wouldn't notice the loose boards at the bottom that they had pulled out and carefully replaced the night before during their breaking-and-entering.

She could see the man's legs through the narrow spaces between boards. Abruptly, a heavy pack was dropped to the ground, and the man knelt down and started rummaging through it.

"What are you doing, Carter?"

"Just looking for my cigs," the deep voice replied after a moment. There was a papery noise as the man pulled out a cigarette, and an odd scraping sound Chisame recognized as coming from someone flicking a lighter. "Damn, last one," the man said, then shoved the empty box of cigarettes into the narrow space under the bottom board. "Anyone got any trash?" He shoved some other things under as well.

"Sure, here ya go," someone said. After a moment, they were done.

"Let's get out of here Sarge, looks like they didn't come this way. They might've followed the river back there," Carter said after a moment.

"You're right. Pack up, let's go."

Chisame and Madoka stayed in place, hardly daring to breathe until they were completely sure that the men were gone. Both of them let out a deep breath at the same time, prompting a tired, strained smile from Madoka, which Chisame tried and failed to reciprocate.

"I was sure they would find the loose boards," Madoka said after a moment as she leaned against the wall, dropping the piece of wood she had been holding as if unaware until then that she had even picked it up. When the other girl didn't reply, she glanced over at her and saw her looking at something in the pile of rubbish the men had pushed under the door.

"…I think they did," Chisame said, her face pale as she picked out two energy bars and a carefully folded piece of paper with 'Mana' written on it. "Or one of them, anyway."

"Let's go."

"Yeah."

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Natsumi paced around the dorm room, debating on whether to tell Negi about what she had witnessed. She shivered again as she recalled the kidnapping incident, and quickly changed her train of thought. 'Chizu-nee, Kotarou-kun, Iincho…' she thought to herself. They were all strong, each in his or her own way. They stood out from the crowd, and they could probably do something about it. But…

"Gahhh!" Natsumi groaned as she pulled her hair. "What do I do?!"

"What's wrong, Natsumi-chan?"

She froze midway through the process of yanking her hair out and turned around to see Chizu-nee in the doorway with a look of concern on her face.

"Oh, it's nothing, Chizu-nee!" she lied. "Have you seen Kotarou-kun?" she asked, just to talk about something.

"He is training with Negi-sensei," the dark haired girl answered as she went into the kitchen and began making some tea. "Natsumi-chan…tell me what's bothering you," Chizuru said, her tone serious.

"Well…I think we were targets too. To get kidnapped," Natsumi finally said in a wavery tone as she curled up on the couch.

"Oh?"

"Y-yeah, I…I overheard them."

"Natsumi-chan?"

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"Ooh, I like this one, she's feisty," someone said in the hallway outside Kazumi's room several days after the introductions.

"Ok, ok, I'll calm down, just don't try to touch me or I'll kill you," a familiar female voice said haughtily.

Kazumi almost felt curious enough to remove the blanket she was hiding under, but a mildly amused grunt stopped her cold. He was out there. Rav, the man she had thought of as the 'normal man' the first time she saw him. He had promised horrible things if she disobeyed during that first meeting, and she knew beyond any doubt now that he would follow through with his promises. The odd thing was that he had checked up on her several times, alone or with the big man, but never with the third man. He hadn't said a word about punishments or even made any threats at all since that first meeting…he would just give her a quick once-over and ask if she felt healthy. But the way he did it, she might as well not even be human, or even living. That horrible Caesar, the vile man, was a terrible beast, but Rav…he was a monster.

She listened to the muffled sounds as someone was put into a room down the hall. The voices were too far away to understand, but she could catch occasional words. Nothing that made any sort of sense, however.

After a moment a door slammed and footsteps approached, finally coming to a stop before her own door. She huddled deeper into her blanket in the corner of her closet until she heard the footsteps leave.

She started to cry.

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Misa and Sakurako had been thrown into a small storage room together the day before. They were lucky to be alive. One member of the small group that seemed to be in charge had wanted to kill them and dump their bodies out in the ocean somewhere, but the leader declined, preferring instead to stuff them in this tiny storage room instead. Being forced to share the small bed had been a bit awkward, but they had managed. The food, while bland, hadn't been bad, and they could drink anything they wanted as long as it was water or was something made by the pepsi company. Even the guard was friendly, joking with them whenever they talked to him and everything. The worst part was the sheer boredom. It was a bit odd, really. Somehow, the situation didn't seem real in Misa's opinion. More like something you might see on an American sitcom. But it was more boring than anything else.

'At least we have the playdoh,' Misa thought to herself. They had well over two hundred cases of the stuff in the storage room, actually. When Sakurako had asked the guard for something to do, he had smirked and told them to play with it, so they had. "I haven't done anything like this in a long time," Misa said as she put the finishing touches on a small statue of Negi-kun. It had taken a while to get the hair right, but it was worth it.

"I know I know, isn't it fun?" the other girl exclaimed, surrounded by an army of playdoh cats.

She could tell the guard was amused, but that was all that resulted from it. Sakurako continued to make cats long after Misa grew bored and plopped down on the bed. She glanced over at her slightly-sagging diorama of Dekopin Rocket On Stage and smirked as the playdoh version of herself fell flat on its face, overwhelmed by it's not quite true to life chest, legs sticking up in the air.

"I'll get some sleep, I guess," she said after a moment. Sakurako only made a noncommittal sound as she finished another cat.

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Hours later, Misa woke hazily from an odd dream of an unstoppable cat army to find that Sakurako had turned off the lights and crawled into the bed at some point. It seemed that the whole floor was covered in motion, but she was too tired to investigate and drifted back to sleep.

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Ayaka stalked to Eva's cabin and pounded on the door. No one answered, so she tried the handle and found the door unlocked. Wandering through the house revealed nothing but a lot of dolls, so she eventually tried the basement, where she found an odd series of bubbles with tiny scenery inside. The bubbles were connected by tubes.

"What…?"

She came closer, bending over one of the spheres when an odd sense of vertigo welled up. And, just like that, she was standing in front of a huge castle, staring wide eyed at Negi-sensei, Max-sensei, Jennifer-san, Asuna-san, Akira-san, Kotarou-san, and Eva-san, all of whom looked at her incredulously.

"Ah…"

"Oh…"

"Is…is this magic?" Ayaka asked hesitantly.

"Yeah," Asuna answered after a moment.

"I see," the class rep said as she looked around. "Is this…this is inside the glass bubbles, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes. Why did you barge into someone else's house, Yukihiro Ayaka?" Eva demanded.

"I came in search of Negi-sensei," Ayaka said as she continued eyeing the enormous castle. "Chachamaru-san told me I would find you at Evangeline-san's home, but I didn't think…is this real?"

Everyone nodded.

"…wow…"

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Author's note: Things are building up, it won't be long now.