「The Secret Life of Gardenias」
「December, 181: Invitation, Please – Physalis」
…
The sun danced and sparkled across the Kattegat like a carpet of brilliant blue gems. From this altitude, one could scarcely see the ever-present turbulence where it repelled the Skagerrak's invading waves or the violence with which it tore at Skagen's shores. High in the cloudless sky, a single airshuttle skated across the horizon, the blue winged-earth crest of the United Earth Sphere Alliance blazoned across its wings and tail against bold green stripes.
There were two men in the leather-and-oak passenger cabin: a slightly green-looking wisp of a man and a stalwart Allied Armies General. Across the modest space, in her own fabulously appointed booth, sat Ambassador Romefeller, a beautiful woman in a severe pink suit, clearly their superior in every way.
The amber liquid in her delicately stemmed wine glass lapped alarmingly at its edge as the shuttle veered towards its target trajectory. Arthur Noventa was a better pilot than he gave himself credit for. In the entire time she has flown with him, he has never once so much as jostle a landing and it gave her some measure of pleasure to show it off. A stack of loose folders on her desk skidded to the right. The Ambassador sipped from her glass and straightened them with the same absent cool, apparently distracted by the scenic country below, drawing a derisive snort from the General loud enough to startle their mutual colleague.
The northernmost arm of the Dansk peninsula was a dappled expense of velvety boreal grass. A massive limestone fault stretched across it like a glistening, writhing scar, a livid reminder of some long-ago geo-nuclear disaster half a world away in another age, and cradled in its crook was a small wasteland of sand fine as powder and pale as honeyed cream, where once, there was a church.
It must not have been a very important church because no-one remembered it was there until some silly young man cartwheeled into its buried steeple while trying to impress some girl, so the story goes. Many years later, he returned to that spot and, for whatever reasons, dug up the steeple and the bell-tower under it and built himself a house in its place. The house became a fort, the fort became a castle.
Despite her love for the view, Melusina Romefeller was not a fan of Skagen Castle. It was plebeian and artless, in her view, lacking in vision and imagination, like so much about the sovereignty it housed. Generations of Peacecrafts have added to it according to their changing needs and vanities and little consideration towards architectural fashion or even, in some cases, a coherent style. What was not cut from the nearby rockface had been pilfered from forgotten places around the planet by whimsical pirate kings with a taste for fancy domes and antique weapons installations, connecting empty silos and colourful cupolas with Cistercian arcades and atria in a sprawling compound that more closely resembled the homebase of a clan of eccentric warrior monks than the palace of a Royal House of the European Dominions.
There were no gardens to speak of, only brisk, manicured patches of native flora scattered throughout the grounds, subject to the mercies of the Northern sky; and though she used to find it charming and more preferable to the painstakingly curated displays in the climate-controlled parks of her childhood Schloss Charlottenburg, she has since shed the magical innocence of young girls in love and saw it plainly now as a kingdom too limited to spend her resources on taming her environment and a king too naive to realise the message that sends.
The guest hanger with its retracting stained-glass roof was new. The last time she was here, visiting aircraft were still expected to use the main castle driveway as an airstrip. She was further surprised to be received almost immediately from the shuttle with a proper assembly of staff and flair, especially given the lack of notice she had accidentally-on-purpose neglected to send. Even with plenty of warning in the most expensive nations, it was not unusual to be kept waiting a full twenty to forty minutes for one's hosts to prepare a decent reception.
But Enrique Catalonia was unaffected, being the sort of man only capable of understanding violence and opulence. How such a man came to hold a diplomatic post was a mystery to her, although, Melusina had to admit, he was an exceptionally good stick. On the most part, the higher societies were content to regard him as a bodyguard and he, well… as long as Enrique continued to be addressed as a General and bowed to by the servants, she wasn't entirely sure he'd notice.
Ken Tsubarov alighted next, out of turn and hard on the General's heels with the disposition of a nervous puppy suddenly thrust upon unfamiliar surroundings. Ironic, considering he was the most prolific visitor to Sanq Kingdom in recent years out of the shuttle's passengers and the real proponent of this expedition.
Melusina Romefeller Prinzessin Khushrenada, United Earth Sphere Alliance Ambassador to the European Dominions and Second Princess of the now dead Empire of Deutschland, paused at the top of the airstairs and waited for her moment before gliding down the carpeted steps, onto the sovereign soil of Sanq.
"Lucy, liebling, you should have called ahead," the Sanqere Queen approached immediately with open arms, chiding her fondly like an errant favourite child, but Melusina turned ever so slightly and took several steps with her perfect porcelain hand extended towards the King instead. One might well think she thought Katrina invisible, except for the way her eyes darted, constantly stealing sharp secret glances at the latter.
"Byron Peacecraft, how delightful to see you again!" She curtsied deeply, flawlessly.
"Willkommen, Prinzessin." Byron smiled, enveloping her hand in a light courtly kiss. "You are as radiant as ever,"
"Nein, bitte," she replied in a short, flippant laugh, just a slight touch too shrill, "I am no longer a princess, only a faithful servant of the Alliance."
"Madam," he protested gravely, dropping another kiss on those delicate fingertips, "you will always be a princess to me."
The beautiful blonde blushed prettily and tittered despite herself, dizzy and delighted. "Flatterer!" she exclaimed and snaked her arms around Byron's elbow with the familiarity of old lovers.
If Katrina noticed, she showed no sign of it. "General Catalonia, Mister Tsubarov," she greeted the others warmly, gliding gracefully past her husband and sister without a glance or care. "Congratulations on your daughter, General. How is your father? It's been far too long. I simply adore the pictures Emillie sent along."
Enrique Catalonia bowed a little to her and mumbled a pleasantry in reply, to the shock of his companions.
"And you, Mister Tsubarov," she smiled enigmatically, "welcome back. We do hope to see you at the Ball this year."
...
A festive bustle permeated the castle as the days counted down to its coldest and shortest and the smell of sweet pie fillings took over all but the airiest hallways. Maids scurried along with a waltzing spring in their steps and stewards took every possible opportunity to peek in on the kitchen. Young men and women blushed and smiled at the slightest provocations and talk everywhere turned towards party plans, ballroom fashion, and who's-seen-what-where. The Queen's Starlight Ball was the event on every Sanqere's calendar.
Once a year, on the anniversary of Byron Peacraft the Third's first marriage, the castle plays host to a lavish three-day affair culminating in an open-air costume ball that rivalled the most prestigious parties in all the Dominions. Once a year, lords and ladies from all over the Earth Sphere who would not normally spare any thought towards this particular little corner of the Europe, vied bitterly for a place at the Peacecrafts' table, sparing no expense at catching their attention. And for those three magical days every year, through some grand ineffability, the tiny pacifist kingdom of Sanq became the centre of the civilised world.
Dennis Weridge, Master Swordsman and Gentleman of the Realm, hated it.
It wasn't just that he was allergic to the extravagances of the rich or that it was his sister's favourite excuse to ambush him with potential wives. For seventy-two mad hours every year, Skagen Castle becomes a public tourist attraction freely accessible to a horde of costumed strangers and masked rivalries, each one a potential assassin for any of the castle's residents or guests, not to mention all the usual political intrigues and headaches sure to follow wherever people of a certain social strata go. The whole thing was one monstrous security nightmare.
"And what in God's name does the Alliance want here?" He glowered darkly from a service landing overlooking the Alliance welcome. "As if we do not have enough to worry about, now the little princess too—nothing good can come of this."
"Maybe she came because she missed the Kaiserin," his conversation partner, a weathered old man hunched over the banister in the dirty grey jumpsuit worn by the castle's garage staff, dragged calmly on his cigarette. "She is her sister."
"Half-sister," Weridge hissed belligerently. "All the more reason to watch our backs, or have you already forgotten?"
A troubled and often bloody history spanned between Melusina and Katrina for a little longer than either have been alive, as has always been the case for those born to the throne of Imperial Deutschland, the Bloodiest Seat of Eurasia. There were easily a dozen motivations for murder there on any given day. Power, revenge, jealousy, boys... it was, at the heart of things, the reason their empire was no more.
The engineer laughed.
"They're sisters, Bursche, who's to say what's really between them?"
.
The first thing Melusina did when left to her own devices was draw a scalding bath. They'd put her in her old rooms, the ones she used to live in when she used to visit Skagen Castle a different lifetime ago, where various portraits of her between ages five and twenty-five lived year-round in exquisite handcrafted frames on the walls. The most recent ones picture her with a sylphic boy with deep blue eyes the colour of the cloudless morning sky on the best day of your life. She flinched.
It was good for her to get away from Roma once in a while. All that talk in the cities about colonial conspiracy and the Ermanno Larucca's children was getting to her head, making her paranoid, so much so that although Treize clearly had her hair, her nose, her cheeks, her perfect aristocratic jaw, even her family's square brow, all she could see in the boy's face was his father.
Melusina never learnt to like children, those fussy, squirmy, squealing attention whores. It would be simplest to say Treize's father was the only man she'd ever loved enough to beg for a baby from, and that was what she'd told her sister at the time, but the reality was that she did not know why she did it and still doesn't, ten years on. He would not have been considered a high value conquest in her teenaged games of love. These days, if he were still alive, she would have written him off without a second's thought. The Deutsche Princess' men were all men of exceptional substance and dreamers did not count amongst them, however successful they got at it or how great a lover they prove to be.
Maybe she just wanted a baby? This baby, any baby, something beyond anyone else's claim or control. Whatever the case, it was not within her personality to ponder such things. She sank into the water and let those thoughts melt away.
Byron's kiss lingered on the back of her hand. Katya must be livid, she smirked. Her sister has never liked her getting close to the Sanqere King, or any other man, for that matter. Katrina may have worn the crown, but it was well-known that it was Melusina who was the prettier and better loved of the two, to whom many an eligible (and some less) gentleman paid court; including a rakish young Byron Peacecraft the Third to whom Katrina had, at the time, been engaged.
There had been such an uproar, Melusina was surprised Byron survived and more so that he still dared to wed her sister years later. Katya had a temper and an extremely well-justified reputation for violence, much at odds with the docile atmosphere of her new home. How anyone who has experienced the thrills and bustle of life in old Berlin or Roma could stand to box themselves away in Skagen Castle is beyond her and it bothered her how well Katya, once Catherina Vera-Stella von Deutschland, the Devil of Berlin, seems to have settled in, "settling" being the operative term.
Sanq Kingdom was one of those bothersome places that maintained their sovereignty unchallenged because their neighbours could not be bothered to annex them. Perched precariously on one of the more hostile backdoors to the continent, it had no relevant resources, no geo-political influence, and no cultural significance to those who do not trace their lineages back to the Peacecraft mercenaries. Its chief industry revolved around an average quality pork that formed the backbone of the Sanqere diet as well as its modest economy, hardy and unassuming, just like the locals, and just as lacking in any definitive characteristics that may be mistaken for a national identity. Its King was a callous lout whose head she could turn as easily as breathing and who continues to publicly celebrate his marriage to a dead colony secretary despite having been re-married these past four years to an Empress of the Deutsche Imperial line. What about this all could possibly interest a woman who'd ascended to the top of an empire by age eighteen and singlehandedly fended her place there for fifteen years?
Analysts were quick to call "burnout", but Melusina refused to buy it. Monsters like her sister do not know how pressure feels nor how to crumble under it. They were cleverer and more insidious than that, indubitably heartless, and indomitably sublime; in no way possibly content to disappear into history as acquiescent country queens whose chief interests, according to their Social Pages, were gardening and tea. Certainly, if it weren't for that, she would never have entertained "Krackpot" Tsubarov's wild ideas of treasure under Skagen Castle.
It wouldn't be gold or riches, although the Peacecrafts' ancestors were pirates and that would therefore be the most probable outcome. No, it would have to be something better, more compelling, something so fantastic that the most powerful woman in the eastern Dominions would not think twice to abandon everything she had, and everything she has ever fought for all her life, in order to pursue.
She had to find out what it was.
.
Elise Weridge trembled over the over-gilded card shedding gold and silver glitter all over her dress. The poor thing was terrified, even though she said nothing of it. Her aunt had been quite clear as to what was deemed an appropriate reaction to the Prince's expectations, and it did not involve blubbing or tears. And anyway, that is not what a Mars Knight would do— so she bit her lip and curtsied with her head hung low while Lady Weridge fussed and swooned over what a charming little chevalier Milliard was and how honoured and excited they all were that he was taking Elise to the ball.
"Auntie wants to frame it and hang it over my bed," she mewed miserably to her friends as the older Knights of Mars huddled together around a round wood table down in the far corner of the kitchen courtyard, prodding gingerly at the hand-made invitation with horrified fascination.
"What if you lose it?" The rotund boy plumped out further in a fringed knit scarf and two layers of winter coats tried helpfully. That strategy has worked fairly well for him thus far in dealing with embarrassing presents from his extended family.
"Gah! Not even a magpie would want that thing," Spencer, burly heir to the Sanqere barony of Saksun, retorted with a sharp, dismissive laugh. "Just tell him no way, and if he won't accept, get your dad to teach him a lesson!"
"Spencer, he's the Prince!"
"So? Her dad's his martial instructor. That's like a free pass to kicking his ass!"
Thomas Feenly, eldest and most common (and therefore most worldly) of the group sighed at the pale uncertainty on Elise's face. "We can't ask her father to go around beating kids up just because we don't like them," he said pointedly to Spencer. Spencer had not always been liked by the children of Skagen Castle, and some of them still remember why.
"Fine, we'll do it ourselves," the bully proposed, exasperated. "I can take him. And we're kids, so they'll call it roughhousing and let us get away with it if you guys'll back me up."
"It's still treason," quiet, aloof Alain pointed out. "As long as we are subjects of Sanq, it counts."
"Okay, so that leaves Dimitri and Luc," Spencer carried on, unwilling to let go of the opportunity, any opportunity, to get in a fight. "We'll say one of them did it, better?— Where is Luc anyway?"
"I didn't tell her," Elise finally confessed after a round of guilty reflection on when each of them had last seen or spoken to their 'Captain'. "I don't know how to."
Perhaps it was the effect of her recent Lady-in-Waiting training, Elise realised vaguely that this was really more about hurting Lucrezia, their leader, than anything else, even though she couldn't really understand it. Luc would, being a sophisticated Ladyship from Roma and all, but then asking Luc would defeat the point of keeping it from her, and Elise was determined to protect her from Prince Milliard's latest cruelty.
.
General Catalonia of the United Earth Sphere Allied Armies poured a stiff drink from the sideboard and quickly drained it before anyone had the chance to ruin it for him. On one hand, he was glad to be away from Roma and her compulsive obsession with gossip and conspiracies. What does it matter whose blood runs in whose veins in this day and age? Given the chance, he would happily rid himself of Dominion politics altogether. On the other, as long as he had those like his father hanging over his head, it seems it would be some time before he can truly escape those insipid operatics.
The Eurasian continent has been its own closed-off political and cultural sphere since the Harmony War in the first half of the first After Colony century, absurdly, so its native countries could fight their own wars without "outside" interference. It was only in the last five years or so, with all other earth territories finally united unanimously under the Alliance flag that the spotlight was turned back on its part of the world. Four years ago, Colonel Dermail Solada paraded a dazzling display of the Alliance's most advanced commercial and military technology before the Dominions' top echelons in hopes of enticing them out of isolation. It did not go well. At the end of the presentation, he was pointed at a titleless businessman, titles being everything in the Dominions' social hierarchy system, who brought him to his factory on the outskirts of the city, and the Earth Sphere was forever changed.
Enrique will never forget the look on his father's face when he first saw a Leo suit. It was four times the size of anything the Alliance built save multi-personnel vessels, versatile for a wide range of purposes from construction to deep space retrieval —and yes, military— and adaptable to land, air and space. The Europeans called them Mobile Suits, and they were what the Allied Armies' bleeding edge exoskeletal Battlesuits could only dream of becoming, like a five-year old dreams of becoming an astronaut.
Instead of drawing the Dominion nations out into the united earth community, the united earth community poured into the Dominions. Respectable men and women turned themselves into clowns for a chance at any Dominion rank or title, even to the extent of forsaking familial ties. People who have never been to any of the Dominion countries started to adopt their syntax and concerns. Fashion, cuisine, media, politics, entertainment; in four short years, without breaking their isolation policies, without even bothering to negotiate a united front, the Dominions successfully infected and conquered the earth. The earth just hadn't realised it yet.
A large part of it, Enrique suspects, has to do with money.
The war on the colonies was bankrupting the Alliance and people were starting to notice. A hundred and twenty years of isolationism had made the Dominions, collectively, the strongest economy on the planet. Of course, the Dominions were too refined and stiff-necked to bankroll the Alliance. They did not, however, restrict their merchants from conducting business across continental borders and of these merchants, the Romefeller Foundation, owner of the factory where Alliance leaders first saw the future of the Earth Sphere, was currently the most successful. In return for the Foundation's fiscal and political support, the United Earth Sphere Alliance granted it a certain degree of leverage towards its private interests and goals. It would not be too far off the mark to consider it the new owner of the United Earth Sphere Allied Armies, although it would certainly be an executionable offence to say so.
Men like Dermail embraced this. The Romefeller Foundation was their best opportunity at amassing personal power in the emerging world order, once they have accepted the inevitability of a Dominion-led society. The Dominions collectively own a good third of the planet, and have done so for longer than most of the United Earth Sphere Alliance's member administrations have existed. That they choose to adopt a low-tech country lifestyle should not be mistaken to mean that they did not have the capabilities, as Dermail found out, and the Alliance still had no clue as to the true reach of Dominion scientific superiority. Without Romefeller as their intermediary, no-one from outside the Alliance would have been warranted any attention in Dominion eyes. So men like Enrique, good-looking soldiers of some arguably arbitrary pedigree, were honorarily promoted to puffed-up posts and relegated to standing pretty at poncy parties and babysitting the maniacs the Foundation sent to "further their mutual goals".
The Europeans on the whole were fairly pleasant and not that different from everyone else, he found, but the aristocracy that made up their ruling class... take his fellow emissaries for example. Tsubarov had brought his own sealed supply of food and water, madly convinced that the Sanqere routinely drug their guests, and that simpering Romefeller woman was the source of half the scandals flooding Roma right now. He wished he could say these two were the exception not the norm, sadly, that would be a lie. His wife Lady Emillie Catalonia, a distant titled heiress of some dukedom or another arranged for him by his father and to whom he has had to surrender the Solada name, was a fervent proponent of something called a Social Page that publicly chronicled every flippant passing fancy of those who thought themselves somebody in Dominion social circles on the internet, complete with pictures.
Enrique wasn't thrilled about it; a man should have his privacy. But as with most things that kept her happy, particularly since they've had Dorothy, he stayed out of it. It's what he's been trained to do.
.
"How's your waltz, Larucca?"
An awkward head of slept-in black hair peeked uncertainly around the corner from the bathroom in Room 13-K. At home he was Lord Alessandro, son of Duca Ermanno and heir to his House and titles. Here he was merely Alex Larucca, latest addition to the Saint Anthony's Academy for Fine Gentleman. Where the former would have launched into a boastful embellishment of his many qualifications on the subject, Alex has learnt to get by with a cautious "Well enough. Why?"
Another boy sat, statuesque, at the table they shared in the centre of the room, reading a rare piece of mail with an elegant lack of expression. The school's postal service is generally wasted on the Academy's students, being as most families were only too happy to be rid of the inconveniences they politely called their children and move on with their lives.
"I've been summoned to a costume ball," he said without looking up.
"And you need someone to teach you the waltz?" Alex smirked, equally satisfied and surprised to hear that there was something Treize Khushrenada could not naturally do.
"Not exactly," Treize replied mildly, stuffing the richly embossed piece of paper back into its fancy envelope with unusual carelessness. "I thought you'd like to go in my place."
And prance around like a giddy five year-old in some ridiculous poofy costume? "Not a chance," Alex chortled. "Who's asking you?"
"Ambassador Romefeller."
"Romefeller the TV guy? 'See The World Through My Eyes'?" Alex hummed the well-known jingle. Orri Romefeller owned television, an incidental that the industrial tycoon spared no opportunities to advertise. Everyone who has ever spent any time in front of a television set knew his face and name. Why would he write to Treize?
"No, the Alliance Ambassador, his wife—" Treize explained. A shadow of a snarl twitched in the corner of his eye and was gone in an instant "—my mother."
And the reason Treize was at Saint Anthony's. Children are a socialite's greatest liability when trying to land rich, influential husbands such as the head and founder of the preeminent Romefeller Foundation. Alex would feel bad for him except, given the particular type of place Saint Anthony's was, being sacrificed by your family for greater social mobility was so passé.
"Wouldn't dream of being in your shoes," Alex grinned wickedly. In the eyes of ten year-olds, the only thing worse than going to an embarrassing party is turning up with your parents.
"Are you sure?" Treize slid the opened letter across the table at his roommate just a tad too smugly. "It's in Sanq."
.
"I'm running away, Lucius," a small, earnest face framed in soft inky locks announced. "It's only fair to warn you."
Lucius closed his eyes and opened them slowly again on the off-chance that she was some kind of anxiety hallucination. It wasn't. The little girl with the fiendishly purple eyes was still there, perched cat-like against his shoulder, commanding his entire field of vision with an uncanny stare.
"Why?" He muttered groggily, which she mistook to be a question.
"So you wouldn't worry and think something bad's happened to me when they tell you I'm gone, of course!"
"When?" Lucius groaned, wondering if it was worth the trouble getting out of bed this morning. All things considered, it probably wasn't. On top of the childish hijinks of his cousin and her antagonist, Ken Tsubarov was expected to descend upon the castle any day now on his annual crazed hunt, for what he would never say, and it was Lucius Darlian, Bart.'s job to herd and clean up after them all.
"I can't tell you that," she seemed genuinely apologetic. "But you should probably find someone else to take you to the ball."
So before, if not during, the Starlight Ball. "And where would you go?" He sighed.
"Well, obviously I can't tell you that either," she made a disapproving little face at him. Not that she needed to, Lucrezia Larucca has made no secret of her ambitions to seek out her brother at school and serve at his side until one day they can both return home to Roma proudly as elite Scholar-Knights. "Honestly Lucius, you have to think for yourself sometimes. I won't always be around to look out for you~"
"Why not?"
She had no answer.
"What about your friends? And Milliard? What about your deal with the King?"
"It is very regrettable," Lucrezia replied with a barrage of very large, well memorised words, "but I have to do what's best for me and a clever man knows when he must concede to an insurmountable circumstance while only the fool insists on miring himself in a futile conundrum. I'm clearly not getting anything out of being saddled with that stronzo,"
"Lucrezia!"
"It's the truth!" An indignant little pout scrunched her nose into a pinkish pumpkin. "I know we're supposed to be nice about the Royalty and all, and they're supposed to be the absolutes, but he's not my Prince and his father's not my King. You can't expect people to cherish and obey all the Royals everywhere, it just wouldn't make sense!"
"But this is your home now, doesn't that count?"
"No!" The little girl cried, launching herself off his pillow and onto the carpeted bedroom floor with all the vicious ferocity of a stung cat. "My home is Roma! I am a daughter of Neo-Lombardia under the Iron Crown! And as soon as Mamma gets better she will come get me! I will never be a subject of Sanq!"
She regretted it almost immediately, once she'd calmed down. Flying off into a tantrum was not a dignified grown-up thing to do at any age. That went doubly so for a Lady of a noble House under the Iron Crown, and Lucius did not deserve it. Regardless of what she thought of Milliard or his kingdom, it was Lucius' home and she should not have been so rude about it. Besides, he didn't know any better. How could he? He'd spent all her life cooped up in one country castle far away from anyone or thing really important and could not possibly understand the weight and honour of belonging to a great nation like her beloved Neo-Lombardia.
But by then it was too late, she was already somewhere over the Kattegat, past the usual watchful eyes of the castle, well on her way to freedom and adventure. She had no idea how to turn back now, even if she wasn't too proud to do so. That's the problem with sneaking away on the first shuttle one sees, especially when one is in too much of a state to stop and find out who was on it and where they were going.
The sticky bitter smell of petrol seeped into everything in the cramped cargo hold. Lucrezia clapped her hands over her nose and breathed heavily through her sleeves. She needed to stay angry, but it was tiring sitting still all crouched like that and the fumes made her dizzy. By the time she was discovered twenty minutes later, she could no longer remember why.
...
A/N:
Physalis Alekengi, the Chinese Lantern Plant (although ironically originating from Japan), is interpreted in Japanese as "Natural Beauty", "Peace of Mind", "Fascination", "Please Invite Me", "Unreliable", "Skeptical", "Falsehoods" and "Deception" and carries a cultural interpretation as "guidance for the dead". The GP02 Gundam from Stardust Memories carries its name and is piloted by Anavel Gato who is voiced by Otsuka Akio, who in turn narrates Gundam Wing, among other such roles as Vice Foreign Minister Darlian, Solid Snake and clones, Ansem the Seeker of Darkness, and Ghost in the Shell's Batou.
Invitation Please – this refrain echoes in my head from the Seramyu song "Set Me Free - Hitomi wa Sora e" (opening number to the 10th Anniversary show) through this part of the story: "人は優しいものと信じたい/ 約束も無い街 少しの恋を乗り継ぎ/ 繰り返し 繰り返し アア 生きている/ ホントは私も強くはないし I want to believe that people are kind/ Connect the town that holds no promises with a little love/ Over and over, that's life!/ Truth is I'm not strong either".
Glossary:
Liebling – German, lit. "Darling"
Willkommen, Prinzessin – German, lit. "Welcome, Princess"
Bursche – German, "boy", or "student"; used here as a pseudo-Germanic "young padawan".