Ad Victoriam Military Academy, April, a.t.b. 2012
The shroud of night rolled back into the dreary grey of pre-dawn in the skies above Ad Victoriam, and as the first rays of sunlight just began to crest over the horizon, setting the dew-laden foliage to a sparkle, two girls tore free of the tree cover of a forest trail at a dead sprint.
The goal was a pair of metal water bottles—more jugs than bottles, in truth—and bell-weights, and both sets of eyes, amethysts and jadeite, were locked upon it. Neck-in-neck, their arms and legs straining against themselves as they bolted through the grass, with beads of perspiration streaming off of one of them to glitter like the dew itself, they seemed fated to reach the mark at the exact same time.
And so when a winner was decided, the sweating one barked out a sharp curse. "No fuckin' way!"
The other, her skin damp but not actively perspiring the way her friend was, shrugged, her amethyst eyes glittering with smugness and high spirits. "You started sprinting too early. I've told you, a human body is limited to around three hundred fifty metres—and even we can only sustain the sprinting effort for one kilometre at most. Half that, if we want to still be in any shape to do the rest of our work afterwards."
"I guess I gotta start workin' harder," swore Kururugi Suzaku, taking a deep draught of her water.
Justine vi Britannia rolled her eyes as she unscrewed the cap on her own bottle. "Yes, obviously you can train your body to stop producing lactic acid through sheer force of will."
"Certainly not with that attitude, ya can't," Suzaku chuckled, and as the princess brought the rim of the open bottle to her lips and took her own drink, she took a controlled fall forward onto her hands, taking some satisfaction in being the first to begin the one thousand plyometric push-ups of their morning routine.
"I suppose you have me there," Justine snorted, replicating the fall to begin the work-out herself.
A ten-kilometre run, one thousand plyometric push-ups, and one thousand squats, followed by five full minutes of six-inches and cooled off with a sustained cobra stretch for another five full minutes. As today was not the day they'd go into the school's gymnasium to use the weights or the rowing machines, this was the morning exercise routine Lady Izanami had imparted upon them, to maintain and continue to gradually build up the resilience of their bodies while they were away. In the two weeks since they'd arrived at the school—this was the beginning of their third full week of classes, as the program did not take a break from coursework on Saturday and Sunday to keep up with the accelerated nature of the curriculum—they'd kept to that regimen strictly and without fail.
They'd both learned some time ago that their tutor expected unflinching obedience from her pupils.
The chorus of their clapping hands filled the air, Suzaku taking full advantage of her brawn to keep powering on through the exercise, while Justine was sure to maintain a strict, controlled rhythm, following precise timekeeping instead of her sense of what her body could or could not handle.
Once they were done, and Suzaku rose from the position to broaden her stance for what came next, she huffed and stared at her friend just slightly. "Y'know, I know you're workin' as hard as me and all, but it's still fuckin' wild to me, just how little you sweat."
"I am amply uncomfortable, I can assure you," Justine swore as she followed suit, bare and slender fingers wrapping around the handle of her bell-weight as she settled her body into the proper posture. "My skin always feels so clammy and disgusting as a result of my inability to properly perspire that, at times, I find that I rather envy the fact that yours beads up so."
"And here I thought you'd be envyin' my stunnin' good looks," Suzaku joked as she lowered her body with perfect form, ass-first, and rose again, the bell-weight still firmly in her hands.
"Oh, please," Justine huffed. "As if there's anything to envy. Your 'B-movie Amazon princess' aesthetic might work wonders for you, but I have my own appeal, thank you very much."
"Mm, guess ya got a point there, what with how Mils stares at ya like a starvin' cat does a hunk of fresh meat," Suzaku ribbed. She was pleased to see her all but unflappable friend's eyes go wide as her pale cheeks, already reddened with exertion, flushed further.
"You're incorrigible," Justine swore. "Insolent wench…"
Suzaku shrugged. "All just part of my charm, Princess."
They exchanged no more words, and went about their regimen as the sun continued to climb higher into the sky, the grey turning pink and purple and all sorts of other livid colours. By the time those radiant hues had begun to subside into plain blue, though with clouds beginning to gather overhead, the pair were already on their way back to the dorm block; and practised as they were at moving through a residence full of sleeping people without waking any of them, Justine and Suzaku had no trouble moving on light steps, virtually silent, through the front door and the corridors to the bedroom they bunked in together, on the first floor and near the far end of the building, away from the door.
"I'm gonna go ahead and take the first shower, if that's alright with you?" Suzaku asked as soon as their door closed behind them, jerking her thumb in the direction of their private attached bathroom.
"Go," Justine agreed, waving her off. "I've gotta take off my sports corset and put our equipment away. Besides, you probably need it more than I do anyways."
Suzaku shrugged, reaching up under her cotton t-shirt and unhooking her sports bra. "Well, I guess that isn't exactly untrue…"
"I have to take the tablet and video-call Milly anyways," said Justine, pulling up a desk chair from nearby and propping her foot up on it as she worked at unlacing her sneakers. "It's just after twenty-two hundred in Tokyo right now, after all."
"Right, right, time zones," Suzaku mused as she nodded to herself, discarding her shirt on the floor and shedding her shorts and underwear just as quickly. She kicked off her own sneakers, content to do the unlacing of them later, and peeled off her socks. "Well, tell Mils I said 'hi,' would ya?"
"I'll be sure to give her your regards," laughed Justine. "Now get! Go be about your ablutions!"
"I'm movin', I'm movin'!" Suzaku crowed, sauntering into the attached master bathroom and using her hip to nudge the door shut behind her.
Justine sighed, shaking her head in fond exasperation as she walked over and picked up Suzaku's discarded clothing, depositing the garments into their shared laundry hamper. "Now, then…exactly where did I leave that confounded tablet last night…?"
Spotting the slim screen in question on her chest-of-drawers—cherry, the same as all the rest of the comparatively fine furniture—she went back and picked up the desk chair, rolling it over to sit in front of the piece of furniture that doubled as her nightstand. Next, she plucked it from the surface, logged in, and with practised ease, navigated to her (incredibly sparse) list of contacts; then, with a few more deft taps of the screen, she initiated the first of two video calls she'd make to Tokyo that day.
She sat on the rolling, rotating desk chair, waiting primly and eagerly for the request to get accepted at the other end. Thankfully, she didn't have to wait for very long.
She'd been expected, after all.
The rush of shower water from the next room roared to life just as the link was fully established, the tablet resolving itself to reveal none other than Milly herself—sitting at her vanity, but otherwise prepared for bed in all her nude glory.
Her lips split into a broad, sharp grin, with the ghost of mockery lingering over it. "Good morning, my love."
"Milly," Justine breathed, and she felt tension fly out of her shoulders as relief suffused her, robbing her muscles of their strength. She smiled back—she still wasn't entirely used to doing so to such a wholly involuntarily degree as Milly drew out of her, but she liked to imagine she was growing more accustomed to it with each such incident.
"Me," she teased in return. Her keen eyes darted down to Justine's neck, her gaze lingering on the day collar that sat there, as always, and then back up to her. "Just came back from your morning exercise?"
Justine nodded as she reached her fingers down to the hem of her blouse, lifting it up over her head. "Suzaku's in the shower as we speak. I daresay the sound of the water is giving us some extra privacy. Oh, she says 'hi,' by the way."
Milly nodded, and Justine's heart swelled. Her fiancée had found the process of warming up to her best friend's…idiosyncrasies to be slow in coming, and had informed Justine of such in the past; it meant a lot to her that Milly was more than willing to put up with her even so, for her sake. "How much time do you have?"
"Marksmanship class doesn't start until eight-thirty," said Justine, her fingers creeping around to her back so as to unfasten the hooks that held her sports corset together around the sheer camisole she wore to protect her pale skin. "So I suppose I've got a little in excess of two hours before I absolutely have to be somewhere."
"But you have yet to shower, dress, or eat, though," Milly completed.
"Very much so," said Justine, catching the last hook and peeling the layered cotton and quilted linen of the undergarment off of herself, stripping off the camisole and leaving herself nude from the waist up, save for the silver-and-ruby collar around her throat. "And you? Had a productive day?"
"In a manner of speaking," she sighed. "I have Sayoko hard at work removing the last obstacles to us having a self-sustaining sakuradite mining operation, so it won't be long before I can start moving my attention to other things."
"Last time, you said that a lack of qualified personnel was the major stumbling block in getting the manufacturing facilities up and running," Justine recalled. "Have you found a solution?"
"We have," Milly nodded, leaning forward and setting her elbows down on the wooden surface of the vanity, propping her chin up on one hand. She shrugged. "It turns out it was rather disgustingly simple."
"…May I know what it is?" Justine asked.
"You may," she replied, her grin shifting into an indulgent smile. "You know, I'd thought perhaps to have you guess, but you're rather outrageously bad at those, so it'd be really no fun at all. Grandfather has started building a school, for the sake of resolving our manpower issue in the long term, but we discussed it and came to the conclusion that our short-term solution would be the Elevens themselves."
Justine had a feeling she knew where this was going, but she asked anyway. "How so?"
"You already know where I'm going with this," she accused playfully. "You just want me to say it."
"I know where I'd be going with this line of logic," Justine refuted with a shrug. "But it isn't for me to say where you're going with it, is it?"
"Touché," Milly sighed with an affectionate roll of her eyes. "We simply realised that the industries we need technically already existed here before the annexation, albeit not quite in the same form we would need. Still, if we need expertise, we have a ready workforce right at our doorstep. We'll throw in Honorary Britannian status to sweeten the pot. That ought to prove sufficient incentive."
"Speaking of which, how have the relief efforts been?" asked Justine. "After all, this solution that you've devised is dead on arrival if there's no base of goodwill between the Numbers and the viceroyalty."
"They've been proceeding apace, as I'm sure you'll be glad to hear," said Milly. "We wrapped up the Saitama Reconstruction Project today, and we released a statement that the relocation initiative was up and running, effective immediately. The people who used to live there will want to move back, for the most part, but projections indicate that the tax credits and fixed-rate housing are going to bring in more from the surrounding areas."
"Well, it certainly takes the pressure off of Neo-Shinjuku," she noted. "That's one less headache to worry about, at least."
"I'll just be glad when Yamanashi's fully rebuilt, and we can stop importing foodstuffs," said Milly.
"I thought you were funding the imports with profits from the sakuradite mines?" asked Justine.
"We are, and we can more than afford it—we're turning quite the pretty penny already—but it's the image of the thing," Milly explained. "We can't afford to be seen as reliant on other Areas. It's bad optics."
"And gives the other high nobles a way to strangle you into giving them more favourable terms…" Justine realised.
Milly nodded. "And Grandfather and I didn't go through the trouble of steering this place out of the economic depression that's befallen every other newly-established Area just to have robber barons carving it into their own little petty kingdoms."
"Anything I can do to help?" asked the princess.
Her fiancée shook her head. "Just having you here to help me stay sane is more than enough. I'm seeing someone tomorrow morning to help resolve the food issue anyways. I've already got a proposal for prototype high-yield hydroponics farms on my desk, awaiting my signature, and they're going to help me seal the deal."
"Oh, really? Who, if I may ask?"
Milly smirked at her, teasing once again. "An old friend of yours—who else? I think it's high time that Sumeragi Kaguya and I finally meet face-to-face."
Justine was about to reply to that, but the rushing water of the shower was suddenly cut short, and she could hear Suzaku step out of the stall, moving about the bathroom for the door. "Suzaku's just finished up in the shower…"
The indulgent smile returned, and she lifted her other hand, threading her fingers together as she put her chin atop them, framing her face. "Go. Start your day."
Justine nodded, and smiled back at her. "I love you."
Indulgence sharpened with satisfaction. "I love you, too, my Justine. We'll speak later."
With that, Milly cut the feed from her end, and Justine was left with the dull, throbbing beat of her own heart. She took a deep inhale, down from her diaphragm, and expelled it all at once, drawing within reach her mastery of herself.
The door swung open with a bellowing of water vapour, and Suzaku walked out while towel-drying her hair. "It's your turn."
"Right, then," sighed Justine, slipping off her compression shorts and underwear. She brushed past her friend, unfastening the collar from her neck, and placed it by the sink as she turned the shower water up to a near-scald; then, she palmed the decoction Suzaku had thoughtfully retrieved for her, her friend's own phial sitting empty beside it. Unscrewing it, she gazed into the unnaturally glowing pale-green hue of the liquid contents, the tang of blood laced with the scent of something distinctly other already an old friend. She threw her head back and took a swig to empty it, and then, bracing herself, she stepped into the stall.
If asked about her fondest memory, Elizabeth Bernadotte—what few loved ones she'd once had had always called her 'Lisa'—would be hard-pressed to name a recollection more dear to her heart, or indeed core to what she considered to be the foundation of her being, than when her mother first took her out hunting. If she focused on it, she could still recall the sharp notes of the earthy scent of wet leaves, together with the feeling of the well-worn wood of her mother's old Springfield rifle in her hands. She remembered how her shaking, anxious grip subsided as she followed her mother's directives faithfully, her hissing encouragement to breathe, and let the thundering gallop of her heart calm, subsiding to a canter, and then to a trot. She remembered sighting the black-tailed deer in the undergrowth, the way the recoil felt as it kicked her in the shoulder, with the stock braced firmly against the joint, and the harsh sound of working the bolt to chamber another round with a sharp click. Even to this very day, whenever the world around her grew too loud or too bright, the touch too sharp and the scents too vivid, she wound her mind back to the sour tang of gun oil, the bite of smokeless powder, and the death-shriek of the deer as it went down, and then she could recall how it felt to stare into the deer's black eye as she slipped the bowie knife into its throat, through the oesophagus.
She liked guns. With a rifle in her hand, her heart rate slowed, and little by little the disparate pieces of a chaotic, cacophonous world clicked together into a picture she could grasp, a concept with which she could grapple as she pleased. She'd always had excellent vision—a trait she allegedly shared with the noble father she'd never met, who'd fucked her mother in a one-night stand behind enemy lines when both of them were soldiers in the Defence of the Falklands, resulting in her conception—and after the venison stew they'd shared around the campfire that night, even when she was at her most overwhelmed, her hands never shook again. And so, when her mother Philia, on her deathbed, had prompted her to sign onto the Ad Victoriam exam rolls to try and get into the Youthful Conquerors Program, and she'd ranked thirty-fourth, it seemed natural for her to pursue a course path as a sharpshooter.
What was proving significantly less natural for her was maths.
"Mathematics? Truly?"
Lisa fought the urge to cringe in the face of her force captain's incredulity—an old reflex of hers, and one long since mastered—and instead nodded. "Yes, mathematics. These past few weeks, I've found myself struggling with the subject, so I wanted to address the point with you before it became a problem."
"It's a simple enough problem to resolve," Princess—no, Force Captain Justine refuted. She shook her head, the look of perpetual displeasure that seemed to be her natural state interrupted only by a cocked eyebrow and a widening of her purple eyes. "Forgive me, as it is not my wish to impugn your intelligence. I was merely surprised—you've proven a capable sharpshooter, and so I'd assumed that such calculations as the sort you say you're struggling with would have come naturally…"
"What sort of maths are ya doin'?" Suzaku, her appointed adjutant, asked, lifting her head away from her work spread out across her desk in the background. The Eleven was an odd one, her surprisingly gregarious nature having since proven to be something all of them found disarming, but for all of that, her interjections to this effect were not at all uncommon, so Lisa couldn't exactly say she was surprised.
"…Algebra," Lisa replied.
"Oh! Well now, that makes significantly more sense," remarked Force Captain Justine.
"It's what I'm here for," Suzaku shot back glibly.
"And I'm grateful that you are," finished the force captain. "So you're fine when it comes to things like geometry, trigonometry, some elements of basic calculus, but algebra trips you up?"
Even more surprisingly, it seemed as though they made a good pair. The force captain, coldly cruel in her harsh, forbidding beauty, with long raven hair and eyes like polished amethysts, her skin fair and her presence far outstripping her unassuming stature; and her adjutant, taller and lean of frame, with eyes the colour of imperial jade and a thick, unruly chestnut mane, her flesh kissed by the sun in a way that turned her East Asian features into something that seemed wild, free, and ferocious. The others had supposed that there would be friction, the princess freshly free of home doing her best to keep a leash on her exotic pet; she was part of a minority that had not assumed so, electing instead to watch, wait, and see.
The results, as expected, were…enlightening.
"Yes," said Lisa, crossing her arms under her chest as she leaned back into the soft sofa, looking around at the accommodations decorating the suite the force captain and Suzaku shared. The two of them were seated in what looked like a country gentleman's parlour, with a black leather sofa upon which she sat positioned directly across a metal-and-glass coffee table from a pair of armchairs—one of which, her keen eyes easily informed her, was a recliner. "All the maths that has to do with long-distance shooting—that is, determining angles, distance, the pull of gravity, calculating air resistance… All of that, I could do with my eyes closed and in my sleep. But those are… They're tangible. The quantities I'm working with, they have meaning, and I can feel them if I try. I can look at an angle and determine its measure to within a tenth of a degree. I can adjust my angle to account for gyroscopic drift and coriolis acceleration faster and even more accurately than a computer program to hit my mark every time.
"But the numbers, variables and problems in algebra? They don't have that," she explained quietly, the remembered frustration making the words hiss from a tense jaw. "I can't feel them. They're just little symbols, and the word problems only ever succeed in making it worse."
"So, in summation, your issue is that the values in algebra are entirely too abstract," said the force captain, sitting in her fabric-upholstered armchair with all the grace and poise of a queen upon her throne. Her face was calm, the neutral set of her features seeming faintly yet distinctly dissatisfied as always, but in glimpsing at her eyes, Lisa was more than a little taken aback by the level of laser-like focus being devoted to her and her plight. "And as a result of this abstraction, you find it difficult to get your mind into a frame where you can compute with the same ease as you experience in the field. Is that correct?"
Lisa nodded. "Yes, that's accurate."
"Which means it's not a question of comprehension, or one of rote memorisation—the solutions to both problems being conventional extracurricular tutoring," Force Captain Justine considered. "Well, there isn't very much that can be done to resolve the abstraction on an ontological level, I'm afraid. But perhaps if we reframed a problem into terms that have a stronger tactile association, the effect could be alleviated to some degree."
"May I ask what you mean?" Lisa inquired, no longer seeing the throughline of the discussion quite as clearly as she had been before.
"You may do many things, Miss Bernadotte," the force captain replied with a gesture of one of her gloved hands, the motion smooth and fluid. "This is your time, after all. My 'open door policy' does not by any means imply that the duration you spend here, seeking aid, will be any less devoted to your needs.
"As for what is meant—well, algebra, on its most fundamental level, is a field oriented towards the restoration and reconstruction of lost or otherwise incomplete information. The basic format of y = mx+b is based upon the assumption that, at the very least, m and b are known quantities—and when x is meant to be considered as a single value, y must also be provided…multivariable calculus aside." She stood from her armchair, and walked over to her desk on the side opposite her roommate's; she then returned with a spiral notebook in hand, which she flipped open, and a pen between her fingers. "But this is a principle that is, for all practical purposes, axiomatic; thus, if algebra is to be understood as it approaches further levels of complexity, one may then exploit that fundamental nature, and return to its rudiments to determine a method by which its flexibility may be employed to your benefit.
"Take, for instance, a simple problem," she continued as she sat back down, her pen flying across the lined page at a speed that genuinely took Lisa off-guard. "The y value is given, and a few constants are provided, while the x value is a variable. If we can reframe it, say to where the y value represents the angle at which a rifle must be raised, structure the constants to correspond to the environmental factors involved, and then leave x to correspond to an environmental factor that has not been taken into account…"
"So, what you're telling me to do is…just ignore the units, and imagine the problem as a shot I'm about to take?" Lisa asked, comprehension dawning.
"Only with the solution being given, and you having to work backwards to determine the missing factor, yes," the force captain confirmed. "For students who aren't like us, who have no issue with meeting each other in the eye directly, they first need to understand the algebra to get to the point where the more complicated interactions begin to make sense. All you're doing, really, is working in an inverted order. You have the complete picture, but you're struggling with the basics of things because, I would suppose, you've never really needed to use those basics—the way your mind works being so fundamentally distinct from theirs that such a limited set of circumstances lack the underlying logic for you to be able to understand what you're looking at. And having struggled similarly, albeit at a different point, I can relate."
"Truly?" she inquired incredulously. "Admittedly, and please don't take this as an insult, it's quite difficult to picture you struggling like this."
"I imagine that others will speak similarly of you in due time," said the princess. "But it's true. I'm actually rather dreadful at rote recitation, I must confess. I remember things like names and dates with great clarity because I connect them, mentally, into an interwoven web of events and consequences—as part of a narrative."
"Also because ya remember everythin' you've ever seen or heard, ya cheat," Suzaku interjected.
"Don't you have classwork that you should be doing?" the force captain snapped to her friend. Then she turned back to Lisa, her amethyst eyes seeming oddly…sympathetic. "While Suzaku's summary is true on the face of it, it's also an oversimplification. I don't forget, per se, but retrieving relevant information is, for me, like attempting to find a book in a library. Without a filing system, you'll have to check each title by hand, which is a time-consuming and inefficient process. A date that is given to me as a discrete point of information is like an unfiled book—just because I know it's there in that metaphorical library does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that I can recall it with any expediency. But I drift a ways afar of the point I was trying to make…"
"You're welcome!" snarked Suzaku.
"Honestly…" sighed the force captain, pinching the bridge of her nose in exasperation.
Lisa felt a laugh bubble up and out of her chest, so suddenly that it surprised her. "Apologies, Force Captain… I think I can speak for everyone else when I say that none of us expected such an unlikely bond of friendship…"
Force Captain Justine wore a small smile at that, and Lisa could clearly pick out a similar tightening of the Eleven girl's facial features, even at only half a profile. "At any rate, the point that I was working towards before we were so rudely interrupted was that algebra didn't really make all that much sense to me, either, until I learned calculus. At that point, knowing then of the higher principles from which more basic operations were derived, I found them much easier to grapple with. I haven't really had all that much in the way of trouble with mathematics ever since. So I have every confidence that you'll achieve a similar level of mastery."
"And what if the solution you suggested—reframing the equation as a gunnery problem—doesn't end up working for me?" asked Lisa.
The force captain shrugged. "Then we'll reconvene and try another method. After all, one hundred battles doesn't necessarily mean one hundred victories, now does it?"
"I wouldn't know," said Lisa, truthfully. "I don't believe I have the head for tactics."
"I suppose it is of no consequence, ultimately," the force captain sighed. "It shall suffice to say that I'm willing to extend to you my aid for as long and to whatever extent you will accept it, Miss Bernadotte. As a force, we stand or fall together, don't we?"
Lisa nodded. "I suppose that's true enough. And…thank you. I greatly appreciate your willingness to help me."
She shrugged again in reply, her full lips turning up into a bemused smirk. "Think nothing of it. As a means of repayment, you could begin to at least attempt referring to me as something a little less formal."
"…Pardon me?"
"I can see it written across your face, you know," she sighed, propping her elbow up on one of the arms of her chair and resting her cheek on the loosely curled fist, still wearing that same bemused smirk. "The impulse to refer to me as 'princess,' and referring to me as 'force captain' instead. In fairness, I did stipulate that that level of formality was acceptable if it's considered necessary, but if we're going to be working together to help you better learn algebra, well…I daresay excessive formality tends to grow quite tiresome over a protracted period of proximity. So why don't we dispense with that, hmm?"
Lisa flushed crimson—not in attraction (she preferred women with kinder faces and softer features), but in acute mortification at the concept of her, a commoner, of low birth however noble her bastardry, addressing a princess of the realm by her given name, no matter the circumstance. She would never have considered such audacity in a dozen years!
And yet…
"Elizabeth…"
The force captain—Justine's brow cocked, perplexed. "Hmm?"
"If I must call you…Justine," Lisa said, growing more resolute by the moment, "then you must, of course, likewise address me as 'Elizabeth.'"
"And would that help you grow more comfortable with using my name so?" Justine asked patiently.
"Immensely," replied Lisa.
"In that case, I'll be happy to oblige…" said Justine. "Elizabeth."
Lisa spared a grateful smile for Justine, and then she turned her attention to her bag. She reached in and extracted a slim workbook and a notebook of her own (bound instead of spiral), placing them on the table between them. "Would you mind helping me get to grips with this? It seems like it'd be more sensible to see if it works here, first, so that we can think of an alternative solution more quickly, if it fails."
"An excellent point," Justine nodded, shifting out of her regal posture and leaning forth to see the small-scale typesetting of the workbook's sturdy pages. "Shall we start this from the top, then?"
"Let's," Lisa replied. She looked up at her impromptu tutor's attentive, patient expression, and felt a glimmer of hope. Maybe this won't end up being such a bad experience after all…
Human beings thrive on expectation, Odette's brother Edmund had once told her. And the origin of fear is most often when things are not as they seem.
He'd been encouraging her to seriously devote herself to her studies, the young Lady Rochefort recalled, in his typically roundabout, very Edmund way—because would it not just be the most unsightly of unthinkable things if the only daughter of James, Duke Rochefort, somehow failed to win great acclaim at the very same institution the man himself had founded?—and because she loved her brother dearly (even if he had the rather unfortunate habit of becoming something of an overbearing mother hen when it came to her), and to an even greater degree admired him, she'd taken the admonition to heart. The fact that she had resoundingly failed to break into the top twenty scorers in the entrance examinations smarted still, and was alleviated on two fronts: first, that she had, in fact, ranked twenty-third, and was thus placed amongst the upper quarter of her schoolmates; and second, that she had the luxury of understanding just how thoroughly she was outclassed.
The adjutant for her group, Miss Kururugi (she did not wish to consider exactly which order would be accurate in reference to a forcemate who was all but an Honorary Britannian—a Number in name only), was admittedly someone she was at first inclined to write off entirely; Suzaku was brash, and uncouth, and she seemed to take pride in presenting herself as an ill-bred ruffian, which were all traits and qualities that Odette's upbringing considered proper grounds for dismissal, in conflict with her instincts which insisted that doing so would be missing the forest for the trees.
As it happened, the past few weeks had both seen her instincts vindicated over what her high birth had at one time conditioned her to assume, and had struck a chord with Odette, a chord that possessed the approximate acoustic shape of that particular bit of Edmund's chiding. The girl was fiercely intelligent, in a manner both distinct from and complementary to their leader, and beyond that, she possessed a sort of keen awareness, social cunning, and vicious efficiency that worked in tandem with her swaggering thuggishness. That such things could coexist with one another was a jarring realisation that had provoked some degree of profound awkwardness in how Odette dealt with the girl during their second week, and it had taken her 'til the beginning of their third for her to understand that incongruity to be a manifestation of a sort of low, base fear of hers—that Miss Kururugi was not as she seemed.
Even now, she leaned easily against the wall of the school lorry that was driving the ten of them to their destination, where they'd engage in their first round of monthly mock-battles. Indeed, she and their leader were the only two of Odette's forcemates who seemed entirely devoid of anxiety over this first outing of theirs as a unit, though in very different ways: Miss Kururugi's arms were crossed under her bust, and her eyes were closed in a sort of focused, half-meditation, as she leaned into the seat as the vehicle jostled, and to a duller eye than Odette's—who was herself a capable marksman, though not at all a sharpshooter—she might have even appeared to have fallen asleep entirely.
Force Captain Justine vi Britannia, who sat beside Miss Kururugi, was an entirely different image of an equally unflappable demeanour, and a much subtler (and perhaps more insidious) defiance of her expectations. She wore her uniform like it was regalia, her bearing unconsciously prim and immaculate; in her right eye, she wore a monocle, of all things, while her gloved left hand was splayed across the spine of a paperback novel proclaiming the title of Guards! Guards!, authored by a Mr. Terry Pratchett. Her legs were crossed over one another, and her lifted foot shod in its heeled high boot jostled at the ankle absently, independent of the lorry's occasional lurching.
Odette had had a great deal of suppositions regarding what the daughter of the Azure Comet would be like, in appearance, in sensibilities, and in personality. The late Commoner Empress had been a woman her lord father had admired greatly—and with good reason, for it was unheard of for someone to reach the esteemed ranks of the Knights of the Round, and then to continue climbing by sheer force of merit—so she and her brother both had grown up hearing of her as a childhood hero. She remembered Edmund taking her to the funeral along with him, as a show of support from their family, and she had remembered not seeing either of the late Empress Marianne's daughters there, and she'd braced herself since to suspect the worst upon seeing that name on the exam rolls as surely as she'd hoped for the best. But Justine vi Britannia had been neither the worst she'd expected, nor entirely the best she'd imagined; and even those points of the imagined best she had fulfilled, it hadn't been in a manner Odette had ever thought to expect.
She imagined this first mock-battle, taking place on the third of the five days allotted to the war games of the fourth week of classes, would be an illuminating experience, if nothing else.
The dull roar of the lorry's powerful engine subsided as the driver slowed, causing Odette to perk up, rousing Liliana to the left of her in the process; and with a sharp smack on the shoulder, she awoke Marika on her right—they were, after all, nearing their destination.
As the vehicle came to a halt, its engine idling, the force captain snapped her book shut, stowing the monocle in her jacket and rising to her feet all in one smooth, almost serpentine motion. Suzaku's eyes also snapped open, and suddenly she was on her feet; in quick succession, the rest of them followed suit, filing out of the lorry's carriage in their leader's immediate wake, all without a word spared between them.
"So, where are we, exactly?" Marika asked, leaning in and keeping her voice low in Odette's ear.
Odette took in the surroundings, from the way the temporary roof of the base had been removed to leave the reinforced brick of the walls reaching around two and a half metres up into the open, cloudy sky, to the three entrance passages and the artificial plateau upon which the utilitarian structure was built, all the way across the verdant rolling hills that she knew would be an unholy slog to attempt to traverse—the bare ground beneath her feet was good soil, she knew, springy and pliant, and the fact that it had rained quite hard the night before promised slick, loose mud in the hills beyond, even if the dreary uniform grey-white of the clouds overhead never managed to intensify into rainfall. The lorry turned about and drove off back the way it had come, out the front entrance and down the earthen ramp leading from the plateau, and in its wake, she turned to see the rather large, schoolhouse-sized shed that stood near the rear wall, within which all of the equipment they'd requisitioned as a force would be found. She recalled the form the princess had drawn up, one for each of them, and the force captain had said she'd handle the rest—and not that Odette doubted Justine vi Britannia, per se, but she was nonetheless looking forward to finding out how well the requisition process had been handled.
Speak of the Devil, Odette thought as Force Captain Justine came out of her impromptu conference with her adjutant, walking to stand in front of them with Suzaku at her shoulder; her stance possessed a sort of peculiar carriage to it that made all of them feel compelled by instinct to straighten out their postures just that much more. "Now then. It appears we've been dropped off on the far southern end of the field. Our opponents, led by their force captain, Victoria Hartigan, and her twin brother Blaise, her adjutant, are at this very moment positioned in the base on the far northern end. Before we proceed any further, however, we'd best consult the armoury, to ensure that all is in order."
She gestured to the shed, made of granite brick and a sloped sheet metal roof, with a gloved hand, and Odette had just enough time to wonder where her book had gotten to before she was brushing past all of them, leading the way to the armoury with her lieutenant in tow. In a fluid motion, she put both hands on the handles to the large steel double doors, and wrenched them open with a flourish, leaving them to swing outwards on their tungsten hinges. "Now, before you all crowd in, I would like Miss Gaunt to step forth, as I daresay her requisition is rather more time-sensitive in nature than the rest of ours. Miss Gaunt?"
"Yes, of course," said a girl with a voice like wind-chimes.
Hecate Gaunt wore her uniform a touch stiffly, as though she had yet to truly get used to it—and it wasn't as though Odette herself couldn't sympathise or even personally relate—but she stepped forth when she called, her dark cyan hair and large aquamarine eyes quite striking against both her fair complexion and the dreariness of their surroundings. She was of a height with their leader, and similarly built, though it was clear to anyone who knew how and where to look that her level of physical training was nowhere near as robust as the force captain's, and the shorter style of her hair, like a pixie cut that had since grown out, only seemed to highlight the doll-like beauty of her delicate features. She'd ranked thirty-first, though, and so it was clear to Odette that beneath the veneer of fragility, there was a good head and a keen body of expertise. She stepped forth over the threshold of the shed at the princess's prompting, with said girl following from a respectful distance in her wake, but her surprised squeak could be heard even from outside the building.
After a brief flurry of activity, she stepped out into the bailey with a female merlin perched on her shoulder, with its checkerboard white-and-brown chest plumage and its small bluish beak. Much of its head was enclosed in a black leather falconry hood with a royal blue plume, but ornithology was one of Odette's elder brother's most enduring interests, and even based purely on what she'd absorbed by osmosis over the years, Odette doubted she could ever mistake such a bird. Hecate's pleased grin as she held the leather jess in a gauntlet of sturdy brown calfskin was much more apparent to the layperson than the species of her pet, however. "I must confess, when I filled out the form, I hadn't actually expected…well, this."
"Far be it from me to discount such a unique skill," the force captain replied with a shrug. "It was a bit of a trial, finding the proper form to submit for this sort of thing, but I daresay that navigating such a process is only difficult the first time through, so I didn't mind too much."
"This is real nice and all," interjected Suzaku. "But maybe the rest of us could get our gear now?"
The force captain looked at her adjutant and blinked owlishly for a moment. "Oh! Yes, of course. Everyone retrieve your effects in an orderly fashion, if you please. In the event that a clerical error has seen us deprived of anything, it's best we discover such sooner rather than later."
"Thank you," the brash girl huffed, sweeping in past Hecate to go after what she'd requested. It was like a spell had been broken, then, and all of them moved towards the shed, forming a queue of their own volition: the shed's interior was sufficiently voluminous to fit all ten of them at once, perhaps, but the shelf space upon which their effects would be stored was not so generous, and already half-occupied by bags of sand, tripods, and other sundry materials for the construction of temporary fortifications and gun nests—as well as an obligatory first aid kit, as a precaution against myriad misfortunes.
A few minutes later, they all had their gear, just as it had been requisitioned—Odette slid her hand to the grip of the gunsabre she'd asked for, silently pleased by its reassuring weight at her hip, while to her side, Marika and Liliana both were testing out the balance of the spears they'd selected, weapons not used by Britannian regulars, but still seeing frequent enough deployment in the hands of the Royal Guard and of the Knights of the Round that the school kept a few in stock. Off to her other side, she caught a glimpse of Elizabeth testing out what looked to be a DMR of Waldstein Arms manufacturing, furnished with collapsed legs and a scope, Hecate doting on her merlin with what looked like a cutlass at her hip, and Lindelle, scion of House Rathbone—their tenth member—staring at the unassuming submachine gun she held in her hand as if it was liable to bite her. Yennefer, in contrast, was much more visibly familiar with her model, wearing the combat knife on her thigh in the manner of someone likewise accustomed to its use and weight, while the white-haired girl whom they'd all seemed to agree had to be Yennefer's paramour, Sif, tested out an assault rifle, with a longsword hanging from her waist as a back-up.
And finally, Odette's attention shifted forward to fall upon the force captain and her adjutant, both of whom had chosen swords of vastly differing make. Slung upon Miss Kururugi's shoulder, then, was a large double-edged sword that seemed nearly as long as she was tall, with a two-handed grip on its almost pointedly plain hilt, while at the princess's side rested a foreign blade Odette recognised as some cultural armament of the conquered Elevens, with an elegant, fluid curve, the edge of which appeared to be turned to face the ground like a cavalry sabre.
"Miss Gaunt," called the force captain in that odd tone of hers that seemed to always cut through all of the sound that should by rights have drowned it out.
"Yes, Force Captain," replied Hecate, turning away from her companion as though it pained her in a physical manner to do so.
"Can you wield your weapon with that gauntlet? I confess, I'm unfortunately rather ignorant on the matter of the finer points of falconry," said their leader.
"I use one if I lack the other in fencing class," she replied with a one-shouldered shrug, careful not to disturb her pet unduly.
"Excellent," said the princess. "Then you may set Artemis to scouting ahead, if you would."
"I… How…?" Then Hecate seemed to visibly swallow her confused curiosity. "Very well, Force Captain."
She walked off towards the open front gate of the base, and after a few muttering moments, a shrill, chittering cry heralded the merlin, the name of which was apparently Artemis, taking wing.
"Very good," declared Force Captain Justine. "Now, onto the plan of battle, shall we?"
The passage of half an hour saw Odette splattered with mud, and it felt like she was covered in the muck up to her waist—most of that, of course, was on her boots, which covered her up to her thighs, but all the same, she didn't exactly look forward to the lengthy scrubbing-down they would require after this was over and done with. The plan the force captain had concocted was a simple one, on its surface: an assault against the opposing base was as textbook as it got, after all. But before Odette, or indeed any of the force, could consider thinking less of the princess for the transparency of her battle plan, she'd taken the time to briefly detail the core motive behind this tactic, to take advantage of the fact that no one in this first round of mock-battles was particularly keen on falling behind this early on, and as such would naturally be more inclined to risk-averse tactics, such as strong defensive fortifications to cut their opponents to ribbons from the relative safety of their base. And in that, Odette had to concur; even in this round, the previous two war games had concluded with the victor having completed the secondary win condition—that is, depleting the fighting strength of their opponents by nine-in-ten: no amount of martial skill or tactical brilliance, after all, could overcome such a devastating blow to war potential.
To ensure both flexibility and the safeguarding of the lion's share of that war potential, then, they'd been split up; and to prevent them from being picked off, the unit size selected had been pairs. Odette stole a glance at her assigned partner, Sif, who seemed every bit as unhappily cold and mud-splattered as she, with the mist and fog having been replaced with a faint, noncommittal drizzle that soaked one to the bone at a pace that remained surprising, even after having spent practically her entire childhood in Middle Pacifica; yet, the look on the white-haired girl's face was one of intense focus, her golden eyes sweeping back and forth across the area before them. Her assault rifle was brandished and held with proper form at the shoulder—the other girl paid a great deal of attention in Assault Tactics class, apparently—and she kept herself low to the ground alongside Odette as they crept into position. The two of them made up one of the three strike teams whose task it was to breach the insides of the enemy fort on foot, while the two support teams kept the pressure off of them from a distance. Even now, she felt the watchful eyes of both Yennefer and Hecate on her back, and she knew that they'd make sure that the pair of them up front didn't get tied down too badly. Though, she made a note that she'd have to ask Hecate after the mock battle exactly how long and difficult it had been to set up such a complex system of signals with her bird Artemis; it seemed that whenever the longwing returned to its master, the blue-haired girl had some fresh information to share with them about the lay of the land ahead.
Sif and Odette reached their destination at last, in clear view of the southwest entrance, with its one student sitting behind a barricade of sandbags with what looked, from this distance, to be some manner of carbine, serving sentry duty. On the other side, she knew, Marika and Liliana were likewise positioning themselves at the southeast entrance, with heavier fire support from Elizabeth and Lindelle since neither of them had weapons that could be used at varying engagement ranges. And running up the centre, planning as they were to take the south entrance with no support whatsoever, was the force captain and Suzaku, who would be the ones to send the signal to attack.
It was a plan of such audacity that it bordered on madness, and certainly none of the rounds to come in the months to follow would see such a risky, aggressive tactic bear fruit—especially once the Prytwens were added to the requisition pool, and the recreational Knightmare Frames became a fixture in the battles that would follow—and yet, Odette knew from the fact that they had encountered no enemy contacts on the way across the field, there remained a chance that such a plan could and would work, under these specific and unique circumstances.
"I wonder how she's going to avoid the obvious counter to this entire idea," muttered the muscular girl beside her, without so much as pulling her handsome face away from the rangefinder attached to the top of the rifle.
"Defeat in detail only works if the defence can assume an aggressive stance and steal the initiative," Odette noted. "Though I admit, I'd posed the same question to myself on the way here."
"So our idea is essentially to hope they don't do that?" Sif huffed sceptically.
"I mean, she's correct. They probably won't," Odette replied. "No one wants to be the one to take a hit in the rankings on the literal first round…"
"So, we'll win because we're playing to win, while they're playing to not lose?" she summarised.
"Essentially—or at least, as near as I can figure," the noblewoman whispered.
"Well, let's hope this works…" Sif sighed. "Did she mention what the signal was?"
"The force captain assured us that if we kept our eyes peeled, we'd know it when we saw it…" said Odette. "Past that, she didn't elaborate."
"And how could we possibly know the signal when we see it when we don't even know what we're looking for—since, you know, we haven't been told what the signal is?" Sif grumbled.
Odette was about to respond, but immediately bit her tongue, catching a flash of movement in the corner of her eye; she turned to take it in more fully, and felt her heart almost stop when she saw the two in the middle, Force Captain Justine and Suzaku, stand tall and approach—the princess with a measured stride and an august grace, while Suzaku swaggered and sauntered, sword held high on her shoulder.
Cries of alarm went up from the sentry at the south entrance, and suddenly five of the seven other students flocked to the sandbags, revealing a machine gun nest and laying down a cover of suppressive fire.
And the pair of them moved.
The machine gun fire swept back and forth, but no matter where it was, it was just an instant too late for the rapid-fire rubber rounds to catch the princess, who dashed and danced and twirled effortlessly around the field directly in front of the entrance; likewise, Suzaku exploited her friend's drawing of enemy fire, and grinned, gripping the monstrously large sword, a weapon fit to be wielded by a man with half again her height and build, and twice her age, in both hands, before charging directly into the immediate wake of that ballistic hail.
"…I believe I stand corrected," remarked Sif, her low, normally somewhat curt voice numb and flat with shock, and perhaps no small degree of awe. Odette could certainly relate to the latter. "That's…fairly unmistakable, yeah."
After a beat's pause, and Odette noticing that both Liliana and Marika had recovered on their side and had begun their advance, she scrambled to her feet, her gunsabre naked in her hand, and Sif joined her on her rise; together, then, the pair joined the fray.
The opposing sentries cried out in surprise at about the same time, both the southeast and southwest sides catching sight of them, but both were quickly silenced, a resounding bang shattering the air, quelling the masculine bellowing of the southeast, while the southwest side's sentry, right in front of Odette, took a faceful of sharp merlin talons, followed by a rubber round directly to her chest.
A glimpse to the centre caught a split second of Force Captain Justine, her single-edged blade bare, swinging the weapon faster than Odette's eye could track and seemingly not taking any damage (wait, is she…slicing the rubber bullets out of the air?!) before, in perfect synchrony, Suzaku launched herself into the gun nest, her sword swinging to-and-fro with reckless abandon, and the princess took a running leap for the wall, running up it and then vaulting overtop it.
Then it fell to Sif and Odette to clear the sandbags, over which they also vaulted, albeit in much less of a spectacular fashion; thus, they beheld an image of mayhem.
With every harrowing swing of Suzaku's chosen weapon, another student failed to dodge and was laid out on their back, groaning in pain. She was a whirlwind of destruction, pinning down the middle almost single-handedly and keeping reinforcements from reaching the flanks, and in short order, Justine herself landed deftly on her feet on the ground before Odette and Sif, her naked blade in hand, as she approached the opposing force captain and her adjutant unmolested.
The adjutant, Blaise, moved to menace Justine, but his twin sister, Victoria, held out a hand in silent command; thus chastened, he backed down, though he bristled anew when Justine favoured him with a nod of approval.
And so Justine approached the enemy force captain, and swung her blade up, its point near enough to the Hartigan sister's throat that a single lunge would pierce it. As Suzaku finished with her final foe in the background, and Marika and Liliana mopped up in her wake, their leader grinned genially at the other force captain, and spoke: "Your fortress is hereby taken. I will now accept your surrender."
Victoria Hartigan, who was a very pretty, leanly-built woman in a rough, roguish sort of way—like Suzaku, who now approached them, grinning broadly—with ochre skin, a strong brow, long, jet black hair fashioned in an undercut, and a case of heterochromia, blue-and-brown (which was quite literally mirrored in her brother's own pigmentation, brown-and-blue), huffed. Her épaulettes shifted when she shrugged in ruefully grinning resignation, her indigo shoulder cape wet from the rainfall and slumping over her side in a manner not unlike a drowned cat. "Yeah, guess so. Won this fair and square."
With that, she reached a bare hand around behind her, dragging a combat shotgun from the small of her back and tossing it to the ground in front of Justine (and since when had she, a duke's daughter, thought to think of her royal-blooded force captain in such a casual capacity?), and then she raised her hands before her in the universal gesture for peace. "Force Captain Justine vi Britannia, you are victorious."
"Well-met, and well-fought, Force Captain Victoria Hartigan," Justine replied, returning her blade to its scabbard at her side and extending one of her gloved hands for her beaten foe to shake.
The defeated force captain eyed the princess's extended hand dubiously, but when Justine made no move to retract it, the ochre-skinned woman sighed, and accepted the handshake. "Our parents call me Victoria. You can call me Verse."
Justine smiled at her again, sharper this time. "Then it is a pleasure to meet you, Verse."
"Penny for your thoughts?"
Suzaku's voice in Odette's ear made her jump in shock—when had she moved?!—but, to her own credit, she recovered quickly. She sighed. "What you did back there…"
"Awesome, wasn't it?" and Odette could hear the insufferably charming grin on the girl's face.
"I want to do things like that," she said, like it was a confession. "Can it be learned?"
"Learned is a tough one," Suzaku opined. "But taught? Sure as shit."
Odette closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, in, and then out. "Can you teach me?"
"…Mm. Guess so," Suzaku allowed. "I'll put a word in with Justine, if ya want?"
"Please," Odette hissed. "And…thank you."
"I haven't done jack shit for ya yet," Suzaku remarked.
But that wasn't true, now was it? She was here at Ad Victoriam because it was expected of her, because Edmund had passed through the school's halls as a student and she loved him, she wanted to be just like him, and because her friends had wanted to attend the Youthful Conquerors Program together with her. Never had her wants come from herself—until this moment, standing frozen in time, it had been her friends, her family, and her obligations who all dictated what her dreams should be, the rough shape of her goals, the intricacies of the process of living her very life.
But Princess Justine and Kururugi Suzaku had given her something else entirely, less tangible, but perhaps of far greater import.
"On the contrary," she chuckled. "You've given me something to aspire towards."
Suzaku was silent for a long, pregnant moment, so long that she tore her eyes away from what was going on right in front of her, to which she was no longer truly paying attention, and took in the Kururugi girl fully. Her jadeite eyes were calculating, her lips pursed in consideration as she looked Odette's body up and down, and Odette, in returning the favour, noticed that Suzaku's sword had a blunt edge.
"You're fuckin' crazy," the adjutant remarked, nodding to herself. "So I think you'll fit right in."
Odette couldn't help it.
She laughed.
Not for the first time today, Cécile Croomy found herself wishing with a vehemence that no longer surprised her that her first visit to San Francisco could have happened under a more auspicious star. And not for the first time that hour, she bemoaned the indignity that she, who was a child prodigy by any metric, a doctorate student at nineteen and in the final stages of writing her thesis, had been reduced to acting as a glorified caretaker while her friend occupied himself with brooding in a corner…
"Miss Croomy?" called the boy behind the counter—he was all of fifteen or sixteen years old (and since when had that age seemed so young?), so nearly or already a man in the eyes of the law—as he held out a tall paper cup full of black coffee to her.
"Yes, of course, thank you," she said quickly, flashing the boy a quick smile in hopes of hiding the state of distraction he'd interrupted. She took the cup from his hands, and turned away, sighing heavily as she made her way across the floor of the café to the corner table, where Doctor Lloyd Asplund, twenty-four years old, was sulking like a ten-year-old commoner with a scraped knee. She slammed it down in front of him perhaps a touch more firmly than was absolutely necessary (and who could blame her? That the man was undeniably her friend certainly didn't make him any less insufferable), and barked out, "Lloyd."
The man looked up from the bulging folio on the steel table in front of him, blinking his bleary grey eyes as sullenly as a character out of Shelley, and Cécile had to admit that he very much looked the part. He was tall and very thin—lanky, even—and his wardrobe consisted entirely of black slacks, shoes, and green turtleneck shirts with long sleeves. His skin was pale by nature, but also by virtue of the sheer volume of time he spent indoors, and in climate-controlled environments, spectacles with large square rimless lenses seemed to augment the very classical sense of erudition that surrounded him, and his wavy lavender hair was long and somewhat unkempt through no exercise of vanity, and instead was the product of very much the opposite: a profound lack of motivation to keep it under control. She considered it a blessing in many ways that she'd at least managed to nag him into keeping it washed, given how he resented any time he was forced to spend away from his precious work.
"What is it this time, Cécile?" he whined in his high, reedy tenor. "Another guest lecture? Perhaps at yet another prestigious academy filled with supercilious highborn brats steeped in ignorance?"
"Coffee," she declared, electing not to rise to another of his morose idiocies. "You wanted a refill."
"Did I?" he asked, his eyes going owlishly wide for an instant, and then his entire posture slumped, his surprised expression subsiding into one of mild embarrassment. "That…certainly does sound like me, I have to admit. T-thank you."
"Don't mention it," Cécile replied, pulling out a chair to sit opposite him. "And I mean that. Don't."
He nodded glumly, picking up the cup and bringing it to his lips to take a sip. No sooner had it hit his tongue than did his entire body recoil in disgust. "What is this?! Wh…what was done to this coffee?!"
"Nothing," Cécile said primly, smoothing out nascent creases in the pencil skirt of her black suit. She folded her hands upon the table thereafter, her clear blue eyes glaring at him meaningfully. "And that's precisely the point. If I gave you any milk or sugar, you'd go from insufferable to entirely uncontrollable."
He scowled at her, but as far as she was concerned, he could scowl all he wanted—at the end of the day, she was correct, after all. The Pudding Incident was an embarrassment for all of them even to this day, and that included Lloyd's old rival Rakshata, a woman who was just as eccentric as him, though admittedly better at hiding it. It took only a few moments of her holding her ground before he lifted his hands in the universal gesture of surrender, his face neutral in resignation. "Fine—fine! You win."
"I'd better have won," she half-muttered, returning at last to her own coffee drink, which, as a bit of a personal indulgence, was much sweeter than her friend's. "It cost a whole five pounds."
Not that it wasn't worth every shilling, she added mentally as she luxuriated in its high quality.
Lloyd, it seemed, was of a decidedly different mind on the subject, given how his expression soured as he mouthed 'Five quid…' under his breath.
A very clear, smooth, commanding mezzo-soprano cleared its throat behind her.
"Excuse me," said the feminine voice, her diction precise for all its melodic quality. "I couldn't help but notice—Doctor Lloyd Asplund, and Miss Cécile Croomy, M.A.S., yes?"
"And just who are you supposed to be?" Lloyd huffed rudely.
Having grown used to covering for her friend, Cécile was already turning in her chair, mollification readily leaping to her lips. "Please, forgive him—he's had a trying day, but that's no excuse to be a boor—"
"Peace, Miss Croomy," the girl chuckled, raising a single hand clad in an oddly well-fitting black glove. "I entirely understand. I have a great multitude of brothers and sisters possessed of a level of acumen that is impressive only in its atrocity, and I imagine that if I were to administer a lecture on a field of interest with them as an audience, I'd feel much the same as Doctor Asplund here."
Cécile did not answer, shocked as she was by the girl's appearance. She was beautiful, astonishingly so, but it was a sharp sort of beauty, harsh and somewhat cruel, with pale skin like living marble, full lips, a strong, dark brow framed by a curtain of straight, shimmering raven hair, and keen purple eyes that glinted like expertly-cut amethysts. The golden épaulettes, aiguillette, and rich scarlet shoulder cape over her black uniform marked her as one of the nearby academy's 'force captains,' and she carried her slender form with a grace and ease that made her seem a great deal more imposing than her unremarkable height—though if my eyes don't deceive me, she's a little larger in the chest than I was at her age…
The girl lifted a delicately-arched eyebrow at her, seemingly bemused. "May I sit?"
"Oh, yes, of course," Cécile sputtered briefly, slightly mortified at having been caught staring. She moved immediately to shift to the side, leaving enough room for the girl to pull a chair from a vacant table nearby to fill the space. The girl sat there in one fluid motion, and the posture she adopted made the chair seem to take on an air of sudden grandeur, not unlike how Cécile'd imagined a throne might look.
"Thank you," the girl replied with a gracious nod. "Now, as for introductions—as you've doubtless deduced already, I was one of the students attending Doctor Asplund's lecture on sakuradite oscillation this morning. It was…rather riveting, for lack of a better term. For such a fascinating topic, it's rare that any orator could do the subject such justice. My name is Justine, force captain of the so-called 'Royals.'"
"And exactly what can I do for you, Force Captain Justine of the Royals?" Lloyd drawled, his face wan with resignation—though Cécile caught a glimpse of guarded optimism behind his glasses.
"Well, I was certainly hoping you'd be open to discussing the concept of a blaze luminous field in greater depth, though I confess that running into the two of you here was sheer happenstance," said the girl, her eyes glittering with interest. "I'd thought that such a forcefield would be prohibitively energy-intensive, and beyond that, present several flaws stemming from that root power constraint that would render the concept unfeasible for practical application in defensive technologies."
"That much is certainly true," said Lloyd, leaning forward across the table. "And so why not write me off as some kind of charlatan, knowing this?"
"I imagine a fair few people have already done so, haven't they?" said Justine, her face twisting into an apologetic and conciliatory expression. "But given how well-founded the rest of the lecture was, you're clearly incredibly knowledgeable, and what little I was able to pull up about your academic record at the Imperial Colchester Institute in the admittedly brief period I've been able paints you as an alumnus in great standing, well-regarded. So I'd begun to wonder—for indeed, 'if a skilled adversary commits an obvious error, it is in truth nothing of the sort'—why, if it was such an impossibility, you have yet to discard the idea."
"And why do you think I'd hold on to such a concept? Perhaps I'm merely prideful, and I refuse to admit error," Lloyd asked, seemingly increasingly energised as he continued to speak.
"I have no doubt you are many things, Doctor Asplund," the girl smirked. "But never that. No, the only conclusion I was able to come to, however impossible it might have seemed, was that you'd discovered a method of rendering the idea not such a practical impossibility after all."
Lloyd went still, though his index finger continued to tap on the cover of the folio for several long seconds as he visibly debated with himself. Then, seemingly coming to a consensus, he nodded sharply.
"The idea is…unproven," he began, looking down at the folio and moving his hands to the edges of its cover. "Finding funding for testing something everyone else in my field seems to have already deemed a fantasy has been, as you might be able to imagine, rather difficult. And in truth, the concept even at this stage is unrefined…but what tests I've been able to conduct with my limited resources have shown a great deal of promise. The body of data I've gathered is somewhat slim, unfortunately, and I can't do any more without a backer, so I've been shopping around in search of one, but…no luck yet."
The girl leaned forward in her chair, threading her fingers and propping her elbows upon the table. "Try me. If your idea shows as much promise as you claim, I just might be able to put you in contact with the proper sort of people."
Lloyd's eyes went wide. "Wait…you'd do that? Why?"
Cécile was wondering the same thing herself. Neither she nor Lloyd blamed the people who viewed them and their work with such incredible scepticism, for all that it frustrated him; anyone possessed of the means to expand the experiments into usable data and test beds wouldn't simply be tendering material or financial resources (though they'd certainly need to tender a great deal of both), but their very reputation in the event that what seemed like a fantastical gamble should fail to bear fruit. Such an aristocrat would be, in an almost literal sense, very much sticking their necks out on behalf of two strangers spinning wild tales and unproven concepts—they'd known this, for what revolutionary breakthrough hadn't been regarded so in its nascence?
So why would this girl offer to help us?
The obvious thing to do would be to suspect duplicity, but some instinct of Cécile's prevented her from even seriously considering such a possibility, however reasonable it might be in a vacuum.
And besides, it'd be awfully hypocritical of us to ask a peer of the realm to take a leap of faith, if we are not ourselves willing to do the same, wouldn't it? Cécile mused.
"Because if you're correct, this is an almost unprecedented leap forwards, not just in Knightmare technology, but in all adjacent military fields," said Justine, her musical voice gravely serious, while her amethyst eyes seemed almost glowing with intensity. "So much of our modern technology revolves around sakuradite, a miracle material the surface of which we've barely scratched. If it truly is to be called the Philosopher's Stone, Doctor Asplund, then I would see it used to produce the Elixir of Life. And I believe, if what you say is true, that you may well have the key to reaching that brave new world already in our grasp."
Cécile turned to Lloyd, then, and when she looked into his eyes, the glint there had blossomed into a conflagration of near-mania. She couldn't blame him.
That's why she didn't stop him as he turned the folio around, and swept open the cover, skipping past the title page, and displaying the first page of experimental data to the student who had joined them.
The force captain's eyes went wide as they scanned line after line, the purple gaze flicking across the rows faster and faster, as tables and explanations and analyses and diagrams flew past with each turning of a page. When she looked up from the folio at last, she spoke with a potent mixture of elation and awe. "This is…ingenious… Visionary, even…"
"What is?"
Cécile turned around almost quickly enough to give herself whiplash as she took in another student moving to take a seat at their table. In her bare hands, she held two tall paper cups of steaming liquid, and though her uniform was unadorned (and it took Cécile a moment to recognise the almond shape of her eyes and the subtly golden tone to her sun-kissed skin as things that marked the new girl as an Eleven), the easy familiarity of her greeting, coupled with Justine failing to take issue with what would otherwise be seen as base vulgarity, suggested to her a level of camaraderie between the girls.
"Ah, Suzaku," Justine greeted with a smile, with one gloved hand reaching into her uniform jacket to produce a gold-rimmed monocle, of all things, which she placed into her right eye with a single smooth, practised motion. "You've returned just in time, I should think. Miss Croomy, would you mind too terribly if my friend pulled up a chair and joined us?"
"Not at all," Cécile replied almost in reflex, too nonplussed by the sudden development to consider refusing. Not that she would have, of course; she'd have stopped Lloyd from refusing, too.
Justine nodded, and she had to admit it was a bit of a queer sight, given the girl's choice in eyewear. Not, of course, that Cécile hadn't seen highborn make stranger fashion choices, ranging from the opulent to the bohemian—and not that she hadn't tried to deal with those sorts in the past—but coupled with the girl's no-nonsense demeanour, it seemed slightly incongruous. Yet, from how movement now on her left seemed to stir to life as the other girl, Suzaku, brought over yet another unattended chair, entirely undeterred by the oddity, it must not have been all that uncommon in the eyes of Justine's friend for her to be so attired.
Finally, the girl reached across the table in front of Cécile to furnish Justine with her choice of drink before plopping her own down in front of where she would sit—and then she promptly took that seat. Her hair was a curly, unruly mane of chestnut brown, bound behind her head in a thick, voluminous ponytail, and Cécile was almost stricken dumb at the stark contrast between the two girls.
"Doctor Asplund, Miss Croomy, this is Miss Kururugi Suzaku, a dear friend of mine and one of my closest companions," said Justine with a flourishing gesture of her hand.
"Only one of the closest?" the Eleven girl jested.
"Well, of course," Justine rejoined with a saucy smirk. "It would be quite unseemly were it the case that my fiancée did not occupy the place of highest esteem, no?"
Suzaku chuckled. "You've got me there."
"Incidentally, Suzaku, these two are Lloyd, Earl of Asplund, PhD., and his companion, Miss Cécile Croomy, M.A.S.," Justine explained, serious once again as she gestured to the two of them. "You'll recall that little problem Milly's having? I believe I informed you of such."
"That whole brainiac deal?" Suzaku asked, taking a sip of her drink.
"The very same, though I daresay I wouldn't have put it in quite those exact terms," Justine replied, smiling somewhat ruefully.
"You're damn right ya wouldn't've," Suzaku scoffed. "That's my thing."
"Quite," said Justine, taking a long draught of her own beverage and letting out a subvocal moan of satisfaction. "Ah, wonderful as always. But to the point: I think these two could very well be our solution."
"Maybe, but they might not be for long if ya keep ignorin' 'em," Suzaku remarked.
Justine grimaced. "My apologies, Doctor Asplund, Miss Croomy. I'm afraid I got carried away just a little bit there."
Lloyd shrugged. "So long as it gets us closer to the point where I may see our work in action, I'm not particularly given to mind, exactly."
"Knowing when to keep quiet during a negotiation is just as important as knowing how to speak," Cécile agreed. "If not more so, in fact."
"Well, while we're on the subject, exactly how much sakuradite do you think you would need to see us reach that point, Doctor?" Justine asked, once more focused on them and their conversation.
"Impossible to say, really," Lloyd replied honestly with a shrug. "The experimental data that we've been able to generate is promising, extraordinarily so, but a more specific order of magnitude has yet to be determined."
"And say you had as much sakuradite as you would ever need, with funding and facilities aplenty, together with a ready workforce rife with the relevant expertise," the force captain posited.
A younger version of herself would have found the mad spark in Lloyd's eyes as he leaned forward across the table once more to be perhaps a touch concerning. The version of Cécile Croomy that abided in the modern day, however, had come to regard it as a brilliant omen. "If you provide me with all of that, your highness? In your name, I could work wonders."
…What?
"Lloyd, what do you mean 'your highness'?" Cécile almost demanded.
Her friend regarded her with a singularly bewildered expression, clearly unsure what she meant, as impossible as that was.
"He means me, Miss Croomy," said Justine, taking another long draught and lowering the paper cup back to the table. "I am, after all, Justine vi Britannia, Fourth Princess of the Britannian Imperial Family."
Cécile froze, turning to Lloyd in a flash of paralysing fury. "Lloyd. You mean to tell me that, all this time, you knew we were speaking to a princess of the realm?! That you didn't even hesitate to mouth off to a princess of the realm?!"
"I thought you knew!" Lloyd protested, sitting bolt upright and raising his hands in surrender. "I mean, even if you aren't privy to noble gossip, the eyes alone should have been a dead giveaway! How am I meant to account for your cognitive failures—ACK!"
"Lloyd Octavius Asplund, you absolute dastard!" She'd grabbed two handfuls of her friend's shirt, she realised dimly, and was now throttling him in full and open view of what seemed to be a very bemused princess of the realm and her Eleven companion, who'd thrown her head back in boisterous laughter.
"I don't imagine throttling the man is going to do much good, Miss Croomy," said the princess, and she seemed to be struggling to bite back laughter herself, and electing to mask it by drinking…whatever it was she'd ordered.
Finally, Suzaku finished crowing, and sighed.
"I'm thinking you lot'll fit right in," the brunette declared with unshakeable confidence. She raised her cup to salute both of them, first Cécile, and then Lloyd. "Cheers."
"Indeed," intoned the princess. "Welcome aboard the great ship Vi Britannia, both of you."