"C'mon, mate. Can't you go any faster than this?" Axl tapped his foot on the sidewalk. "At this rate, we're going to lose that red giant."

"It'll go faster if you stop complaining." Chipp was darting from house to house, frantically looking for some kind of clothes currently drying on a clothesline. "Like hell I'm going to run around in these clothes after what they've been through."

"You mean after you messed them yourself?"

"Shut up." Chipp scoffed. "There's nothing here in my size, let's see if we can find something else."

"What about this see-through shirt?"

"Fuck you, I'm not wearing that thing."

"Hey, it's a little small, but I'm sure you can squeeze into it with this pair of jeans. Besides, not like you had great fashion sense back when you were fighting in the tournament. Remember that one time when..."

"I grew up since then, you dumbass."

The two of them kept sniping at each other verbally for another minute, when a window opened and a fat woman leaned out to yell at them, "Hey, those aren't your clothes! Get your filthy hands off them!"

Axl and Chipp each muttered a curseword, and then ran down the street. Axl carried the shirt and jeans off the clothesline with him as the woman ran outside with a broom in hand, yelling various obscenities as the two ran out of sight. The people who were on the street looked at them with wonder and amusement, wondering why two well-dressed men would be running away with casual clothes and chased by a woman with a broom.

After losing sight of the two thieves, the woman was about to run back home and call for help from a local NOL trooper, when she spotted a young blonde-haired man wearing one of their blue military outfits.

"Hey, excuse me, those men stole my clothes!" The woman shouted at him. "Please do something about them!"

The officer in question simply grunted in response. When the woman pressed him further, he smacked her in the face with the hilt of his sword. "Out of my way you worthless peon, I don't have time to deal with your problems."

"What? Who's your commanding officer? I would like to speak…"

The blonde-haired officer grabbed her by her shirt with one hand, "I am the commanding officer, and I do not care about your pathetic clothes. You want them so bad, get them yourself and stop wasting my time." With his weapon hand, he hit the woman directly in the solar plexus with the hilt of his sword and tossed her away. A small crowd of people had begun to gather around him to view the event, and the man said to them, "Does anyone else have a problem with me?"

"Y-you were the Hero of Ikaruga, weren't you?" An older man said to him. "We are loyal citizens of Kagutsuchi, and members of the Librarium! Why would you do such a thing? What possible reason do you have to harm an innocent woman who simply asked for your help?"

"Because she annoyed me," the Hero said as he took the sword out of its sheath and pointed it directly at the man who talked back to him. "Now if you want to keep your face, I suggest you stay out of my way." The man immediately felt a chill run through him, and wasn't sure if it was through fear or if the temperature in the area really was dropping fast. Either way, he didn't complain and neither did anyone else when the officer simply re-sheathed his sword and continued along his way.

The elderly man waited until he was out of earshot, and then said, "Jin Kisaragi…what would drive you to do such a thing? Do the horrors of war still linger within you?"

Jin didn't hear the man as he continued his trek towards the upper levels of Kagutsuchi. Someone in the NOL had sent him a memo that the infamous Ragna the Bloodedge would likely choose the main Library branch in Kagutsuchi as his next target. Of course his superiors didn't want him to go, buy they had no idea how important this was to him. So he took the initiative and set out for the Kagutsuchi Library on his own.

He would be damned if some bureaucrat would stand in the way of meeting with his dear brother.

________

"Hmph, took you long enough." Kokonoe muttered as she snatched the bag full of lollipops from the unfortunate intern selected to bring them to her. "Don't worry kid, you can keep the change. Now get out of here." The intern nodded his head and walked as fast as he could out the door of the lab. With that little problem solved, Kokonoe moved on to a bigger one: Trying to figure out the mystery of this strange, angelic girl who had appeared in the containment cell originally designed to hold Hakumen.

The girl didn't even flinch when Kokonoe had taken a blood sample from her earlier and sent its RNA structure around to some of Sector Seven's scientists for a quicker analysis. The only thing that returned was that it wasn't anything that could be found in their database: Not a human, a cat-person, a Nox Nyctores or even one of the Murakumo units they had developed with Patient Zero as their base. However, Kokonoe did start dreaming up ways she could incorporate this entity into developing Xi-14. Hopefully she wouldn't just disappear like the last two units. But that would come later.

"Seems our subject is waking from her beauty sleep." Kokonoe mused to herself as she saw the feed from the containment cell, "Might as well go ask her a few questions, like where the tail and those heterochromatic wings come from." Kokonoe stretched as she stood up from her chair, and then went to head to the other room when Iron Tager came in through the opposite door. Luckily the door was large enough to accomdate Tager's massive frame as he lumbered over to Kokonoe.

"Ah Tager, you found the node?"

"Yes."

"You didn't run into any trouble?"

"A couple of drunken idiots and some low-rank NOL soldiers, nothing I couldn't handle."

"Good to hear."

"The engineers are repairing the nodes as we speak. Hopefully we'll still be able to call back Hakumen from the Edge once they're finished."

"Let's hope so, but in the meantime I think I've found something just as interesting."

"What would that be?"

"Behind this door lies an entity that doesn't exist in our database at all. We know it has a humanoid form, but other than that not much."

"An experiment left over from the war?"

"It's possible. We're still analyzing the blood sample, but…ah, it seems she's woken up." Kokonoe flipped the switch as the door to the room with the cell slid open and stepped inside. "Let's go greet our sleeping beauty."

"I'll be right here." Tager said, noticing that the door to the cell was a bit too small for him to fit through.

Kokonoe walked over to the containment cell and tapped on the glass. "You awake? Good, I didn't know what affect the Substantiation Driver would have on lifeforms such as yourself." Kokonoe spoke to the girl in the cell. "So, you mind telling me your name? Maybe what those wings and tail are supposed to be good for? That would be a good start."

"My name is…" the girl grabbed her head, "Dizzy…"

"Well, I guess there would be some dizziness after we yanked you from the Edge." Kokonoe pulled out a small pad and pen from the pocket of her lab coat and scratched down some notes. "So what was your name again?"

"Dizzy."

"Yes, we've established that you're dizzy. What is your name?"

"Dizzy. That's what I'm called."

Kokonoe chewed on that thought for a second. "Good to see the trip gave you a sense of humor. Fine, Dizzy it is then."

Dizzy didn't respond to that, but instead asked the strange cat-person in front of her, "Who are you? And where is this?"

"My name is Kokonoe, and this is…well, I can't really tell you where it is."

"Why not?"

"It's a secret."

"Are you one of Ky's friends? Is he okay? He isn't hurt is he?"

"Ky?" Kokonoe scratched down some more notes on her pad. "Who or what is Ky?"

"He's a good friend, he tried to save me from That Man."

"What man?"

"That Man?"

Kokonoe stopped writing and just stared at Dizzy for a moment. "Kid, I'm a scientist, not a comedian. I don't have time for your stupid jokes. Just tell me the last thing you remember before waking up here."

"I was captured by some bad guys, and That Man appeared, said he'd found some kind of brand new magic."

"Magic?" Kokonoe cocked an eyebrow as she scribbled more notes, "Was it some kind of Armagus?"

Dizzy continued her tale at a fast pace, "But then Ky showed up in the room, he looked all tired, said That Man was just going to use me to resurrect the power of the Gears or something. Ky fought with That Man, and then…and then…"

"And then what?" Kokonoe watched as Dizzy started to sputter and babble incoherently, before finally letting out an unearthly growl that seemed several octaves deeper from her previous voice. Kokonoe's instincts kicked in, and she started running out of the room with notepad in hand as Dizzy started pounding the walls of the cage. The walls delivered a shock to Dizzy each time she pounded, and any normal person would have stopped, but something weird happened: Her dark-green wing suddenly transformed into what appeared to be a face, and the wing slowly covered most of her body, and then an arm extended out from that wing and smashed one of the containment cell's walls. However, a force field shimmered into place soon after.

"Come on, we built this thing to contain one of the Six Heroes, what chance do you have to escape from it?" Kokonoe spoke as she continued to watch as Dizzy with the heterochromatic wings continued pounding against the transparent wall. "Calm down, we can talk this over or you go to sleep again."

Eventually, the beast emerging from the dark green wing had shrunk back as Dizzy lay unconscious on the floor of the cell. After scratching down a few more notes on her pad, Kokonoe walked out of the room to see Tager standing directly outside with a worried look on his face.

"I thought you were under attack? I was afraid I would have to burst through the wall to save you."

"No, luckily the backup force field kicked in just in time. Damn creature tired itself out, and the low oxygen level in the cell certainly helped speed things up." Kokonoe shook her head, "Maybe we can use her genetic code for when we get the resources to work on Unit Xi-14, but I'll be damned if I'm letting this thing out of its cage anytime soon. It's certainly sentient enough to speak and listen in our language, but it seems to have the brainpower of a child. One minute it was joking with me, the next it lashed out in anger when it struggled to understand something."

"So what should we do?"

"For now? Wait until it wakes up, then maybe we can run some more physical tests, but this shouldn't take away from our aim of trying to capture Hakumen. Go call the boys in engineering and find out how long it will take to finish repairing those nodes, and then we'll try again to pull Hakumen into here."

"Why are you so concerned with Hakumen?"

"Because he has something I need." Kokonoe glared at Tager in a hostile manner.

"Is that it?"

"Unless you happen to know where I can find another Sankishin unit, yes."

"Will this cell even be able to contain his power?"

"Well, it proved itself against this strange little girl, hopefully it will be able to handle Hakumen."

"Hopefully? That doesn't sound like a very scientific conclusion."

"Until we can study more of this subject's abilities, hope is all we're going to get for now." Kokonoe exited the cell area and went back to her computer to transcribe some of her notes into a word processing program. Such a high operating budget and the higher-ups at Sector Seven still couldn't afford to buy her some of that smart paper that would do it automatically, how annoying. "Oh Tager, a message came in for you from upstairs…you've got another assignment."

"I do?"

"Yeah." Kokonoe swiveled around in her chair so that Tager could see the monitor with the message. "Just make sure to get a status report from our engineering crew, and then you can go."