Important note: It has only happened once before so know that underline is much like italics except it means that Shiro is speaking to Kuro but not with speech. It's the difference between Kuro speaking with just italics and Kuro speaking with quotation marks and italics. The latter can be heard by other people the former cannot.

Toaru Kokoro no Bubun

A Certain Piece of Mind

Kuroko found herself a white specter bound by the pure black chains dangling from the executioner's axe that was embedded in the middle of the dais on which she sat. surrounding the dais was a massive expanse of land, flat and vast as the eye could see. From this infinite flat plain jutted massive spires of ivory, rising as towers each of different size. The greater the distance the more ruined the towers became but the majority were pristine. In each tower was embedded a massive clock face set to different times and ticking at different rates. Some had second and minute hands whizzing by at a surprising speed, others crawled along, still many others were entirely motionless. Some clocks were obscured by more chains, some white, some black, some a mix of the two, that wound up and wrapped around the stony spires upon which they were set.

She looked behind her to see another specter, identical to her except of the inverse color, similarly bound by white chains attached to the same axe. The black, shadowy presence was staring at her as well. Though the motion was almost invisible she saw it open its mouth to speak. It has been a difficult day, but it is good to see that you are still fighting for yourself .Kuro said to her, this realm granting her a perceivable outline.

Shiro smiled a smile of comfort without knowing who it was for. It was not as difficult as I had thought it would be. And I believe that I made considerable progress in my quest to be less of a burden. I think I've done some real good today.

Remember that you must look after yourself. You still haven't patched up that stab wound and your fatigue is building. You have just come out of Hell, while that aided in your recovery it still means that you should rest.

Every moment I rest is one less moment I can be proving that I'm worthy of my Onee-sama. I want to be back with her as soon as possible even if my body breaks apart in the process.

A Shiro in her right mind would have seen how faulty this logic was, but this Shiro was in a state of mind where she was refusing all logic and mental stability in exchange for emotional stability and the strength to go on past the pain. If Kuro tried to get her back in a reasonable state of mind she knew it would destroy her. So all she could say was, You must ensure that there is a person to forgive, a living, preferably unhurt person.

I know I know. I'm resting now aren't I?

Kuro sighed and pointed to the horizon. Climbing up the sky was a wall of black thorns dripping a tainted black ooze, looking like the most menacing storm possible. These were the remnants of the Queen incident, they were what the voice had left behind.

Rather they were the visual representation of what was actually going on. This world was a world entirely thought up by Shiro, constructed during her martial arts training as a place of meditation. It was how she represented her mind and the things that filled it. The towers represented her memories, the more pristine the better remembered. Kuroko was a hoarder of memories, had been for years. She claimed that she did not cling to the past but in her desperate attempt to avoid the past, repress it, and lock it away, she had accidently made them stronger. Now the very memories she had tried to push far away could haunt her forever, perfectly preserved and sealed safely within these ivory towers.

In this world of mind and symbols the thorns were a representation of the effects that the incident with the Queen had had on the teleporter. The Queen's power was to physically alter the brain of her victims. She would either psychically change the neural pathways of the hippocampus in order to alter the memories of the victim or adjust the levels of certain chemicals secreted by the brain controlling their emotions in order to influence their actions. Normally this process was quite clean with almost no residual damage, after all the Queen was a level 5. However Kuroko's strong resistance to the process in addition to the neural reshuffling that had happened afterwards as a byproduct had caused the process to inflict lasting harm, creating a chemical imbalance in her brain.

This chemical imbalance manifested itself as a state of depression that Kuroko had been struggling with the past few weeks. This depression, along with the hard-to-escape nightmares that she had been having, had been the cause of her recent insomnia and also her poor eating habits. Depression also caused, in rare cases, hallucinations and delusions along with numerous other problems that had been inflicting her as of late.

Kuro had suggested getting checked out by a psychologist or at least getting some over-the-counter antidepressants, which would have quickly solved the issue, but Shiro had been steadfastly against it, not willing to risk losing Kuro simply to be rid of this feeling that she was sure she could fight against. Even though Shiro did not, as some did, see taking pills as a defeat or resignation, she was not going to take them as long as she was even slightly unsure of whether or nor Kuro could make it through.

You have maybe half an hour's worth of rest before your body itself forces you awake. Kuro said, finishing her though.

How annoying, Shiro sighed, The nightmares don't even scare me anymore and yet my body still shakes me awake and doesn't let me get to sleep.

Interesting… The nightmares do not scare you?

At first they did, at first the thought of my Onee-sama disappearing from my grasp into the arms of another were so terrifying I couldn't even sleep alone, I still can't get any decent sleep without knowing she's right there. But now I simply convince myself that she does deserve better than me. I'm still sad to see her go but I know that she's happy, so it doesn't scare me anymore.

Kuro had never seen one of her nightmares so did not know the contents, but she had suspected something like this.

Meditation is still easier though, Shiro continued, Just as restful as sleep but without the problem of nightmares. She looked over the vast plain and all the clock towers that projected from the ground. She rested her gaze upon one of them which was quite close by, the spinning of the hands had just recently stopped and were currently resting at 3:17. While I'm here though I might as well go back to some happy times though. She said as the doors of the tower flew open and the tower drew closer at an alarming rate until finally the entire dais upon which she sat was swallowed into the threshold and the doors slammed shut behind her.

Within the hollow tower the walls which seemed to stretch upwards to infinity were covered in even more clocks every one of them either frozen upon a certain time or wildly oscillating between two points as if unsure which time they should display. Each of these clocks had a series of numbers in a plaque underneath them, a date. This particular clock tower represented all of her memories with her dear Onee-sama and each of the clocks represented an individual memory that she had of her.

Kuroko smiled at the number of memories and the emotion they held. She reached out and touched the first clock. The plaque on this one had the earliest date of them all. When she touched it she found herself back in her body of several months ago. She could feel the pain of recent injuries. She smelled the smell of sulfur and smoke, tasted the blood and acrid sulfurous air. She could hear a blaring alarm and her own heart beating in her ears.

What she saw in front of her was the bank that had been almost robbed recently, the one where she had gotten shot. It was also the bank where, several months ago, she, Konori, and Uiharu had all almost been killed because of her stupidity.

She watched as the robber threw several silver ball bearings as he gloated about his ability. She felt the fear that was now coursing through her younger self, though she was not afraid. She was not afraid because…

Suddenly a stream of light shot through the security door catching each of the bearings in its beam and vaporizing them like they were nothing but rice paper being thrown into an inferno.

At the time she had not known what it had been but she had gratefully used the opportunity to take down the criminal. It wasn't until a few months later, when she had seen her Onee-sama fire her rail gun up close for the first time that she had made the connection. And even though they had not gotten off on the best foot, after several hours of consideration, judging the facts and examining her feelings, she had decided that she would love this girl regardless of her somewhat-irritating little… eccentricities.

To others this would seem like an utterly illogical leap and for a normal person it would be. But as Kuroko saw it it made perfect sense. Up until that day at the bank Shiro had been completely independent, never having to rely on another person for anything. Kuro was the only one she would ever ask for help from. People relied on her, people were protected by her, that was how things worked. It had been so long since someone had genuinely cared for her that she had almost forgotten that other people would share her burden. But even if they would share it, her burden was great, far too much anyone other than her to handle.

That was what she had thought at least.

When she had been saved by someone else and had found out who that person was she saw that she herself was fallible, capable of making mistakes and capable of getting hurt. And for the first time in her life someone had actually helped her without any other reason than she was in trouble. She had found someone stronger than herself, much stronger, strong enough to rely on, to depend on, to be able to trust without fear of getting hurt by that trust.

Of course not even this paragon was perfect. She had numerous flaws that, until now, had annoyed Kuroko considerably. Chief among these flaws was the electro-master's glaring immaturity that made the adulthood that the teleporter so longed for look so far away from her. But now she saw these very flaws as an opportunity. If she was flawed then Kuroko could help her overcome these flaws and justify her presence and her place in the relationship.

Had her Onee-sama been absolutely perfect than the younger girl may have idolized her but she never would have loved Misaka, too worried that she would have been nothing but a hassle to the other girl, a burden, an inconvenience. This was what was happening now in fact. Her Onee-sama was improving upon her flaws even as Kuroko's confidence levels were plummeting, leaving her with the idea that her Onee-sama was perfect and she was worthless.

The whole idea of love had been as an aftereffect of this decision to enter a relationship of some kind with this girl who had saved her life. Kuroko's fairly recent, but quickly blossoming, desire for an adult relationship (which, now that she had a job and was otherwise a completely independent and mature girl, she saw as the last step to achieving adulthood) had convinced her that there would be no better candidate for the position of her girlfriend than the electro-master.

And the plan had worked out magnificently, much better than expected. She had had so many happy times with her Onee-sama. Even just thinking about the older girl's smile made her happy. Everything was great.

Kuro narrowed her eyes and reached up to touch another plaque, adjusting the clock slightly beforehand to access only a certain part of the memory. This memory was far less pleasant, it was the memory of one of her harsh punishments at the hands of her Onee-sama, her very first one back when she had just moved into her future girlfriend's room with her.

She felt once again the blinding pain as enough electricity to kill a normal person coursed through her. Back then the enthralled little dove was not accustomed to the harsh shocks and the temperamental swan was not accustomed to holding back, she still wasn't. Had Kuroko not been as hardy as she had become after her years and years of body training, there was actually a high chance that she could have died. As it was it had paralyzed her arm, numbed her entire body (though that may have been a blessing considering the fact that the dorm mistress stormed into the room the next second and snapped her neck as a consequence), and disturbed the rhythm of her heart causing severe Atrial fibrillation for the next two days until she had gone to the hospital to get it fixed.

I am not trying to quash your happiness Shiro, Kuro said, making her point, But I am trying to get you to understand that you should not place your happiness so much on another person.

What would you know about happiness? Shiro shot back caustically

What would you?

Shiro sighed. She could actually see Kuro's point here. Still… Better unhealthy happiness than none at all right?

But being alive and unhurt is more important than being happy. You need to learn which risks to take for your happiness and which risks are not worth it.

Reviewing happy memories can't hurt me physically, even if pain is involved so I see no reason why this is a bad thing.

Very well then, carry on. I will not disturb you further.

Kuroko nodded then began sifting through the memories to all the happy times she had shared with her Onee-sama for the next 23 minutes until she was woken from her meditative state, jolting upright in the sleeping bag that she kept down here in her safe house.

She sighed, disappointed that the end of her happy reminiscing had come so soon. Despite that she was ready to get back to her "work" as soon as possible, knowing that going back to sleep was futile. So she stood up and readied her suit for more combat. Since she didn't have Riko to guide her at the moment, she would need to monitor Anti-Skill communication in order to figure out where she was going. If this was the case then the calls would likely be more severe than what she had had to deal with so far and quite possibly in another district. Kuroko had been finding teleportation easier nowadays so even teleporting across the city wouldn't drain her too much if such an act was necessary.

Since it was night she decided not to wear anything on top of her stealth-suit and also put her helmet on. She simply turned it onto its shadow sneak function which would allow her to meld seamlessly with the shadows and remain virtually undetectable. Of course this meant she couldn't bring along her bag of handcuffs but that wasn't really a problem considering that she would now be responding to crimes that Anti-Skill was already trying to deal with and that would mean Anti-Skill would be right there to arrest the criminals.

So Kuroko teleported upwards, out of her safe house where, not surprisingly, it was impossible to get a signal. She teleported on top of a nearby building and began working through the various functions of her suit to access the radio scanner. As she began to do so she heard the soft caw of a bird perched beside her, a midnight black raven almost invisible in the shadows of the night.

"Hello Prometheus," she said to the little hallucination of a raven that was perched beside her, the suit altering her voice, purging it of any audial signature which could be used to identify her by voice alone. She did not quite know why she chose that name for the bird, but it just felt right, and since it was a hallucination anyway it hardly mattered.

"Kuro," the jet black bird responded.

"Kuroko," the teleporter corrected, "Kuroko Shirai." She could have sworn she heard the raven sigh but any noise was quickly drowned out by the static of the now functioning radio as she managed to tune into the Anti-Skill dispatch for the city.

She sat down and listened for thirty minutes without any activity save for a speeder or two until an emergency call came through. Apparently one of the city's numerous anti-science groups had managed to break into one of the nuclear laboratories in district 10. They had several hostages and were threatening to cause a meltdown in the laboratories reactors if their demands were not met. Though such an feat was impossible, the laboratories reactor wasn't the same as a power plants reactor, and would cause no damage to the city even if accomplished, the hostages they held meant that the situation would need to be treated with extreme care.

It was the perfect task for a teleporter like herself, so she immediately set off in the direction of the call and was there in a little under a minute.

A man squatted near a small window in the entrance of the nuclear laboratory they had managed to capture. He was keeping an eye out for any moment from Anti-Skill as one of his comrades kept his gun trained on a few of the hostages that they had taken and another patrolled back and forth in the dark room, the electricity to the building having been turned off a while ago. Despite having a nuclear reactor it seemed that it wasn't used for backup power and they were still stuck in the dark.

It had been several minutes since they had delivered their demands and they had not made any contact since then despite Anti-Skill efforts to negotiate. It wouldn't be too long before this city was bowing at their feet and all this God-abhorred technology would be destroyed once and for all. Everything was going as planned.

"Look at those pigs squirm, we'll have them eating out of the palm of our hand in no time eh Kiko?" he called back to his friend. He waited for a few seconds but heard no answer, "Yo Kiko you listening?" he called again, still no answer. He turned around only to see that his comrade was gone.

"Tenma, what happened to Kiko? He was watching the hostages?" he asked the man who was still patrolling.

Tenma opened his mouth to respond only to suddenly disappear into the darkness of a nearby shadow with a muffled grunt.

Immediately Maki grabbed his gun and pointed it at the shadows the other man had just disappeared into. "Come on out you coward," he yelled at the darkness and fired several shots into it. He heard each shot hit the hard concrete wall, meaning he'd missed. He looked around frantically searching for the intruder who had taken out his friends but he could see nothing in the shadows. He stepped to his left into one of the rays of light cast by the moon. There were no shadows here, the intruder couldn't sneak up on him. Then he noticed as the long shadow that he himself cast on the floor began to shift and move. His eyes widened as the darkness took form long enough to punch him square in the jaw, knocking him out cold before disappearing the next second.

After a second one of the hostages felt his bonds being cut cleanly with a single swipe. The same happened to the next two as well. A voice with no source rang out from the darkness, seemingly nowhere and everywhere all at once, "Stay here until I have finished freeing the rest of the hostages," it said before the subtle presence faded.

Kuroko made her way through the facility using the helmets exceptional detention abilities to find all of the terrorists and the suits stealth to take them down one by one from the shadow. She prioritized rescuing the hostages but then began to hunt down the remainder of the terrorists using every tool at her disposal to knock them all out. Just as she finished off the last one, Anti-Skill began ramming the front doors of the building after an examination of the buildings security cameras revealed the hostages safely gathered in the entrance and all of the terrorists unconscious.

Her job done here she left the building and continued listening to the scanner for her next opportunity.

And so the night continued to pass this way. After another half hour of nothing she decided to patrol while she waited, keeping an eye out using her infrared for any goings on as well as turning up the sensitivity of her helmets sound detectors to their highest to listen to any sounds. The helmet auto-regulated incoming sound waves so every noise had the same volume to ensure that she wasn't deafened by the errant caw of Prometheus while the sensitivity was turned so high up. The curfew meant that there weren't many people around but she did manage to stop a few crimes in between Anti-Skill messages.

Finally, around forty minutes or so before sunrise she went back to her safe house for another half hour meditation session before getting back to work with Riko.

When she woke up again, she teleported upwards out into the daylight immediately after getting ready, including sweater and sweatpants again as well as her schoolbag and sports bag. Then she waited until she was contacted, which was fairly soon.

Once again Riko guided her all around the district like a ravenous beast picking off the scum of the city one by one.

However Riko also noticed something. The teleporter's movements weren't nearly as fluid as they had been yesterday. Her reactions were duller and even her teleportations were slower and less accurate than before. After examining some data he easily determined that she had been up all night as well, patrolling around the city, even helping (read; doing it by herself for them) Anti-Skill take down a dangerous group of terrorists. There were no camera evidence to her presence but it was not too difficult a stretch to make all things considered.

The lull in activity was too short to have gotten any decent rest, something that most people needed. This caused the gradual erosion of the young girl's performance. She even began receiving injuries during her fights, something that had not happened yesterday.

This was actually slightly worrying to Riko. Many people would argue that the software designer/ information broker was a psychopath and they would probably be right for doing so. After curing himself of his childhood bipolar disease with his ability at the age of 12 he had been quite utilitarian about the contents of his brain and had gotten rid of many things which he deemed useless, like ethics, empathy, and desire. He wasn't a man who cared about other people.

But like many psychopaths he was quite possessive and could actually genuinely care about what he saw as his and, while he could hardly claim such a wild spirit as the teleporter as his own, he certainly found her fun. Watching her was more entertainment than he had had in a long time and if she died then that entertainment would be lost.

So, even though this was the most fun that he had had in years, at the end of the day he told her that this was the end of their partnership. He made up a lie about not being available tomorrow but told her that it was nice working with her.

To her credit she seemed to take it quite well, thanking him for his time and cooperation quite formally and bidding him good day in a very polite manner. A few seconds later she disappeared again, like she had done yesterday. Normally he could track her using the Gaokerena but it seemed to be in a place that no tracking device could reach. It was fairly annoying but there was nothing he could do about it, so he began his other work: his "investigation".

The past two days had caused quite a stir, both for the criminal underworld and for Anti-Skill. Yet the normal world seemed to know nothing. Normal news had reported the more interesting of the crimes, like the weapons and drugs busts, and, as expected, they had given all the credit to Anti-Skill, something the officer they interviewed just went along with. The agent told the reporter that they had "been following this lead for a while now and we're glad to see this bust come to fruition. It took a lot of effort on behalf of our officers but we pulled through and, as you can see, we have plenty to show for it."

Even weirder was the report on the terrorist attack which featured interviews of the hostages. They themselves credited their rescue to Anti-Skill, describing the attack and rescue in vivid detail. They showed footage that showed Anti-Skill storming the building, taking out the terrorists in an efficient and heroic manner.

To a normal person with normal resources this would be all they knew about or suspected. Of the fifteen major crimes and 243 more minor felonies or misdemeanors that Kuroko had been responsible for stopping in the past two days, a total of four of them had been reported, just a slight increase of the average report rate despite the astronomical increase in the number of arrests made and crimes solved.

Using his sources within one of the major news network he discovered that nothing, to his knowledge, had been faked or scripted or staged, and considering that he was the Editor-in-Chief Riko trusted that this was the truth. He did however reveal that there had been some fighting between the chief of Anti-Skill and the agent who had done one of the reports. The chief had ordered him, on penalty of being fired, to go along with the "official story" after the other officer had complained that it hadn't been them who had solved the case.

This made the puzzle almost too easy to solve unfortunately. The chief of Anti-Skill was nothing but a puppet of the government. The tapes of the incident could easily have been altered by someone with access, which any major government agent did indeed have. Even the interviewees' inaccurate reports could be accounted for by a quick mind alteration by one of Academy City's numerous psychics.

Riko sighed. As the maintainer of so many urban legend websites he was extremely accustomed to government conspiracy theories. What irritated him was how many of them turned out to be true. "Only in Academy City," he said.

Still Riko knew his boundaries. The government was powerful and dangerous so opposing them directly was never a good idea. Nevertheless it was very fun to skirt that line. In the past he had usually leaked just a tiny bit of secret information via an urban legend to see what people would do. It quickly mutated into something insane but that kernel of truth was still there and, if they cared to do so, some very perseverant people could actually unravel it and find that kernel of truth, and actually do something about it, much like the incident with the Level-Upper that he had discovered.

Still he could not see the purpose of this conspiracy. All it looked like was credit snatching, but why would they go to such lengths simply to make sure that it was Anti-Skill that were hailed as heroes.

The only thing that made sense was that the conspiracy wasn't to benefit Anti-Skill, but rather to protect Kuroko. Well, it was not the only thing which made sense but it did fit with the other things that Riko had dug up about the teleporter.

Though so far, failed to dig up would be a better description. So far Riko only found out two remotely interesting things about the girl, and one of them was the fairly mundane fact of her being a friend of the level five ESPer known as the railgun that went to the same school.

But in Riko's philosophy a lack of knowledge could be just as informative as knowledge itself. After all, normal people didn't exist in his experience and even if they did one would never come to him for something like she had been here for.

The revelation came shortly after he helped her track down Jango. When she heard her mention her mental instabilities it had been nothing but a fun little quirk of the girl, but the next day it had raised a question. How did a girl with a condition like that come to be in Judgment? Even if such a noticeable condition as schizophrenia could be concealed from standard tests for the 5 years she had resided in academy city prior to joining Judgment Anti-Skill tested the mental and physical abilities of their young recruits extensively before they were allowed to join.

After additional investigation he had found out something else. Her school transcripts from grades 3-6 had been altered. It took him seconds to break the basic encryption and reveal the original data. According to the transcript Kuroko had taken off massive amounts of time from school due to injuries or illness, the only reason she remained in the advanced class was the fact that it seemed to have no impact on her grades and she still managed to earn top marks in all her classes.

The data had been changed shortly before her admission to Judgment by the school itself for unknown reasons. If it had not it could have brought up serious problems in her consideration for the position.

He tried to find any medical records for these times that she had taken sick but he could find none despite the fact that her illnesses were clearly marked off by a doctor. Any records he did find listed her as perfectly healthy, though he found that these too were edited and their editing histories encrypted.

And here was where the truly interesting part lied: the encryption for these parts were far more advanced than almost anything he had seen before, only matched by certain top-secret military and governmental documents. The encryption pattern, or lack thereof, was similar to the kabbalah based encryption of the Orihime-I satellite that housed Tree diagram. It had taken Riko 3 years of his life to break that encryption pattern, only for the satellite to be destroyed a week after he did so. This pattern was even more advanced and Riko knew it would take another 3 years at least to figure this one out as well.

Someone very high up was looking after her, allowing her to get into Judgment and keeping her from being too conspicuous. The obvious answer would be a relative or friend of a relative but Riko could see no connection anywhere there. Kuroko's only living relatives were her parents and neither of them had anything to do with Academy City. Certainly they did not have nearly enough power to accomplish this level of data manipulation even if they did have a presence in the city. They were far too ordinary... boring. Riko didn't even bother digging into it any farther.

This same group that covered up her medical history also seemed to cover up other achievements as well, seeming very cautious about making her too interesting to other people. It would explain why they were trying to cover this up as well.

They were good at this, very good. They were far better than Riko and he knew it. Still he hardly wanted the hard work that the girl had done in the past couple of days to have gone to waste.

"Will today be the day I get in over my head?" He asked the air as if someone was listening. Then he spun around in his chair once, twice , three times before coming to a stop. "Will today be the day I die?" he wondered amusedly as he gazed at his computer screen. If the people covering this up had as much power as he suspected them of having then that was not an impossibility.

He gazed for five seconds before hitting the enter button, submitting the data onto one of his websites. "It might be," he mused, answering his own question, "but such is the game."

It was now the early morning of Kuroko's third day on the beat and her body was weary to the point of collapse. Still she roamed the streets. Once again without Riko's support and without the police scanner that came with her helmet she was wandering blindly until an hour later when, by chance, she stumbled upon a group of thugs trying to break into a building. She stood in front of them and began announcing her presence, "Halt. I am Judgmeennnnn…" She managed to get to before she collapsed in exhaustion.

The four boys who had had past porblmes with Judgment saw this as a golden opportunity for payback, so they began to advance on the little girl. They had almost reached the unconscious teleporter when they heard a laugh as a man rounded the bend of the alley that they were in.

The man was young looking, quite tall, and seemed foreign, with pale white skin and styled brown hair. He wore an expensive looking designer suit. Pinned to his lapel was a white and black flower with vermillion leaves that looked like a cross between a lily and an orchid. "Good evening gentlemen," he said in French with a light but distinctive accent and a calm, haughty voice.

The four boys looked between themselves. They couldn't understand the man's words but they did notice the suit. A man like that probably had a lot of money and he didn't look very tough. They grinned at their continued good fortune and began advancing with more purpose. "No idea what you're saying old man but if you can understand us you better give us your money before we decide to hurt you. If you don't understand then I'm sure you can understand pain."

"I should've known such an uncivilized group of youngsters wouldn't know a language as nuanced as French," the man sighed, switching to Japanese, "and if were talking about the language of pain, I'm afraid I don't speak that very well at all." One second and four thumps later he continued, directing his speech at the four now-downed teenagers, "my power means that my opponents don't have much time to feel pain before they go down."

Now that he had taken care of those he looked at the other girl and smiled. He bent down and picked her up, taking her to a park a fair distance from the alley and setting her beneath one of the trees. Then he walked across the road on the other side back to where he had been waiting before he had stepped in. From there he watched as a young brown haired girl in a Tokiwadai outfit ran up to the slumbering girl as if she were her child who had been kidnapped for days and had just recently been found.

As he watched the other girl picked up the slumbering child he heard footsteps walking up to him and stopping beside him. "Finally back from the flower shop are you Lammington," he asked the other man, speaking again in his native French tongue.

"Indeed I am Vyers," he responded in kind with as distinctive an accent and as calm a voice as his friend. As he spoke he hefted the germania seeds and tank of Hydrogen Sulfide that he had picked up to show that his trip had been fruitful, "thank you for waiting." Lammington was slightly shorter than his friend and was currently wearing a pure white dress shirt and slacks, though he was quite uncomfortable in them and wished to get back into his robes as soon as possible. His hair was long and had grown pure white over the years. Other than the hair however he looked as young as Vyers did, which was somewhere in his mid-twenties.

"Oh it was no problem at all. As it seems something quite interesting fell into my lap as I was waiting," he said, pointing to the scene that he was observing. "You did say your little fleur de foudre [1] would be around here today didn't you? That's why you decided to go shopping today was it not? To finally get a look at the girl yourself?"

"You know me well friend, too well at times," he answered. Then he gestured his head towards the scene and said, "and the other one is the girl you have been talking about recently correct? The one who's been clearing up your mess with the horns."

"Indeed, it has been too long since I last checked up on her so I decided to do so again while I waited for you to finish up your shopping," he said as he showed the device which had been tracking her location ever since he had gotten the approval from his boss, "It was an hour well spent I believe."

"I see… how was she doing?"

"Not too good. When I saw her she was exhausted, like she hadn't gotten a good rest in days. I thought it would be best if I got her back to her friend to be looked after."

"You didn't take her to Az?"

"I'm sure he's too busy at the moment, besides it's quite a distance to his hospital and I don't have the Bentley because somebody thought it was a nice day for a walk."

Lammington chuckled, "I apologize friend, but it is a beautiful day is it not?"

Vyers simply sighed and said, "Indeed it is. Come on then, let's get going home now."

Lammington nodded and they began making their way back to their residence. Along the way he casually asked his friend, "What did our young supervisor have to say about your plan to use that girl as retrieval anyway?"

It was Vyers turn to chuckle now. He and his friend were some of the few people who could actually get away with calling their boss young, "He told me to be careful, though I do not know for whose sake his words were."

[1]: Flower of lightning

Author's Note: Since I haven't got many reviews of last chapter it's hard to know your impressions so I do not know if this explanation will be a defense or not.

Last chapter as well as parts of this chapter feature chunks of action from outside Kuroko's viewpoint despite her being the focus of the chapter. During these sections I focus exclusively on the action rather than what is going through her head during the events as I have been doing up to this point.

This is not laziness nor am I trying to focus on the action, I am actually trying to make a point about her state of mind. As Riko says in this chapter sometimes a lack of information is as good as information itself, in this case the lack of the events mental impact on Kuroko are trying to showcase how she feels. The point of her actions are at least in part to try and actually block out thought. She is trying to not feel and not think about anything other than what she is doing at that moment which I reflect by only including that. I hope that this is a satisfactory explanation for this.

Also I love foreshadowing and I really love it when that foreshadowing is finally brought to light, even partially. I hope you do too.

Dedications: I would like to dedicate this chapter to all the people in my real life who have helped me with this by listening and being supportive. Thank you all very much.

Coming soon: The assassin of gods versus the preserver of man; a battle of hearts and feathers begins.