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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:28:01 GMT -7
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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:28:59 GMT -7
This Looks Like a Safe Neighborhood
"This looks like a safe neighborhood," the red-headed woman said as she stood on the roof of one of a number of empty buildings, looking out with a pair of purple eyes.
There were a handful of people here and there, but for the most part the entire place was empty. A bunch of abandoned shops and stores surrounding what had been a fairly large warehouse in more prosperous times. It would not have been considered a safe neighborhood by most people's standards. In fact, unless the inevitable squatters were considered, most probably wouldn't have even called it a neighborhood.
This was one of the selling points for her.
The other was the sleeping lines of energy that flowed into and out of the area. Whoever had set up business here wasn't a complete fool. The entire area was vibrant with creative energy just waiting to be tapped. Everything from the lines of the streets in the area to the facing and floor plans of the buildings had been designed with ease of travel in mind. The effect made the flow of ambient energy stronger, if also unrefined.
However, the people who had built here had failed to account for the fact that the entire region was naturally easy to overlook. Approaching the warehouse at the center, the ground sloped upward gently and consistently until one came within about two miles of the warehouse, which is when everything sloped downward into a slight bowl. From the layman's perspective outside, one looked up and only saw a line of buildings, old buildings now that the area was mostly unpopulated. The bustling of business at the center would have gone unnoticed and only the people in the know would have been able to find it. Nobody would have simply been drawn there by curiosity.
That trend was duplicated on the spiritual level, isolating the area above like an island in the flows of ambient life and energy. It was a very bad place for anyone running a business depending on attention and new clients, but for someone who wanted a place both vibrant and secret, it was perfect. Sitting down casually, the red-headed woman retrieved a cell phone and started checking accounts over the internet.
She was a tiny woman of clear Asian descent, despite the vibrant red hair. For the moment, she was dressed casually in jeans and a white shirt with a red jacket. It would be hard to guess her age, but she couldn't have been younger than her late twenties and was probably somewhere in her mid-thirties. The clothes were fashionable and high-quality though not extravagant. She looked more like some middle-class housewife out for a walk rather than someone contemplating a major real estate purchase.
A satisfied expression came over her face and then she pitched herself off the side of the roof with all the attitude of a person hopping off a stage to the floor below. She hit the ground thirty feet below as lightly as if she were taking a simple step and then thrust her hands into her pockets and started strolling down the street, whistling to herself.
The red-headed woman didn't pause at all as she felt some of the scavengers of the area finally taking notice of her as she headed on to leave the area. The auras were weak but clear as they moved about out of balance with themselves, each other and the world around them. They wouldn't be even a casual threat to her children, much less herself.
This was why she barely even yawned as the first of the thugs leaped out in front of her, gun in hand.
"Hold it right there, lady!" the thug said with a smirk on his face.
The smile vanished as his intended victim simply turned to the side a little and kept walking as if he wasn't a concern. In fact she barely acted as if he was there at all. Two other thugs stepped into the street at the same time and the three exchanged glances, trying to figure out exactly what this woman was thinking.
"Didn't you hear what I was saying, lady!" the thug with the gun demanded.
When he failed to get any response from her, he snapped a curse and fired his gun at the back of her head. The red-haired woman shifted her head to the side and turned slightly as if to look back at the thugs. The bullet moved on past her harmlessly at the same time and didn't even seem to faze her.
"Do you really want to try this?" she asked casually.
"Listen, lady," the thug said, brandishing his gun again. "I ain't about to take no guff from some tiny Geisha girl who got lucky. Now, if you don't want this to get messy, then you're going to have to hand over your money right now."
"All right," she said. "Do you have a palm reader?"
"A what?" one of the thugs asked.
"A biometric palm reader," the woman repeated. "Maybe a retinal scanner?"
"What the hell does that crap have to do with anything?" the thug demanded.
"Well, without either of those," she said. "I'm not going to be able to give you any money, didn't take out any cash yet, so I'm not carrying anything."
After all, she wanted to establish that she'd been looking into matters in the neighborhood. Coming out of nowhere with large amounts of money attracted a bit too much attention.
She shrugged and started to walk away from the situation, chastising herself silently for provoking the fools this way. When she felt the harmful intent forming this time, she didn't step out of the way and let the bullet strike her in the back of the head. It rocked her head forward, but she kept her balance with no trouble at all.
Yawning again, she reached up to the back of her head and scratched it, without stopping her walk. A small caliber, poor-quality round fired by someone of no skill, that wouldn't even leave much of a bruise, much less anything to worry about. Like hitting her with a pebble, they'd have to be an out and out master gunman to threaten her with that pathetic weapon and ammunition combo. And that was aiming for areas of the body that weren't really available from the back. Where they were, they couldn't even hurt her by sheer bad luck.
"Di…did you just see that?!" one of the thugs demanded shakily. "The bullet just bounced off."
"Had to be some kind of trick," another said determinedly.
"Fuck this! I'm doing this the old fashioned way," the third snapped angrily.
With a roaring cry he charged forward down the street at the small woman's back. The woman kept walking until the thug was within arm's length of her. At that point, she stepped back, stepping into the arc of the man's haymaker and simply pointing her shoulder out with a slight lean.
To all appearances, the thug might as well have run full tilt at a granite statue; the impact was largely the same. The red-headed woman didn't even flinch or shift, never took her hands out of her pockets as the thug whimpered briefly and collapsed into a shivering mess at her feet.
"Are we finished?" she asked, arching an eyebrow as the thug at her feet groaned weakly.
Not getting an answer, she went back to her walk.
Behind her, the thugs scrambled to collect their friend and carry him off, hopefully to a hospital but he should survive either way.
As she walked along, she caught sight of a tiny flittering butterfly and bit off an irritated curse as she held out her hand for it to land. Once in her palm, it quickly changed from a beautiful insect into a piece of folded parchment which she worked open and read.
"They know I'm out of town," she muttered as the buildings around her shifted from abandoned and empty shells to brighter and more bustling store fronts.
She'd left the little patch of obscure urban rot and entered the larger portion of the small city. As she read what the letter had to say, she did snap out an under the breath curse as she refolded the parchment after adding her own short note to the message. Then she held it tightly in the darkness of her palms as she concentrated firmly.
Opening her hands again, the parchment was again a butterfly flapping into the air before vanishing around a corner, off to find the next closest person who could help.
"I guess I was the closest one it could find," she muttered. "Wrong place, right time."
She turned a corner and pulled out her cell phone to take a look at the public case history.
American girl missing for two days.
Confirmed abduction.
Picking up her pace she frowned as she kept reading. It wasn't her sort of thing, but a kid's life was at stake, so she was moving following her phone's GPS to the hotel where the majority of the witnesses seemed to be. It was already surrounded by reporters from all over the place of course and the woman shook her head in exasperation. However that did give her a good opening for information gathering.
Stepping into the edge of the crowd of journalists, she was about to snatch up a camera and mix with the herd when a voice called out.
"Mao Semezou," the man's voice said. "What are you doing here?"
Pausing and looking to the side, she arched an eyebrow in surprise to see a familiar face start walking across toward her at the edge of the crowd. Several of the journalists seemed to take an interest as the man recognized her.
"What am I doing here," she repeated. "You're a bit far from your normal stomping grounds yourself."
"You know this person, Hendelson?" one of them asked.
Hendelson was tall and broad-shouldered, virtually dwarfing Mao as he walked over toward her. By his voice and character, he was American, but anybody watching carefully could see where he'd picked up some habits from his time reporting in Europe.
"Yeah, Miss Semezou is a bit of an amateur web-journalist," he said. "I give her advice from time to time."
Mao scoffed visibly and crossed her arms, that same eyebrow arching higher.
"Oh, just what we need," another reporter said, "Some blogger trying to get the scoop."
"I'll talk to her, all right?" the tall man said in an appeasing tone as he gestured for Mao to follow him off somewhere quiet. "Let's go talk about not stealing cameras, shall we?"
The red-headed woman waited a little bit before voicing her disapproval.
"Amateur," she said coolly.
"Well, you aren't a professional reporter," he commiserated. "And this way you're under the radar. Are you here about the insect-man? Something to do with Socrates Group?"
"Socrates Group collects artifacts," the small woman said with a dismissive wave. "This isn't their sort of thing. Nah, I think the Vollstahl police brass talked to Psyche and Psyche sent out a general call. I just happened to be the closest to the site. Can you get me to the witnesses?"
"Afraid not," Hendelson said. "They aren't letting anybody inside there. Hotel security is trying to keep the kids and their teacher sheltered. They barely let the police inside. Best I can do is to give you a room number."
"That's enough," the red-head said. "Anything else you can give me?"
"Not going to ask why I'm a few thousand miles away from my normal beat?" the reporter asked.
Mao idly tapped her wrist where a lot of other people would wear a watch.
"Right, kid in danger, what was I thinking?" he said. "The victim and the witnesses are part of some sort of international symphony. She's first violin or something like that. The attacker snatched her outside of their last performance when she wandered a bit away from the rest. All the reports say he's some sort of monster. And if you're here…"
"Yeah, don't get ahead of yourself," Mao said. "And even if it is, you know the drill."
"Same one as always, yeah," he said shaking his head. "I get the exclusive once the secret can be revealed. Until then, all this stuff is a conspiracy theory."
Hendelson nodded with the sound of a long-suffering sigh.
"The witnesses are all on the fifth floor," he said, "Pretty much an entire hallway there."
The reporter pointed up toward the indicated location and then glanced back toward Mao, but the small Japanese woman was already gone.
Mao landed lightly on the edge of a balcony at the second floor before leaping off again, straight upward this time and coming to a graceful landing at the top of the arch. Then it was just a matter of opening the balcony door to the empty room beyond.
Stepping out of the empty hotel room, she let herself feel the flow of chi in and out of the hallway, feeling the weak traces of untrained human beings made stronger by emotional upheaval. Her hands brushed against door knobs and walls as she worked to pinpoint the heaviest bit of emotional upheaval and came to something surprising as she passed one of doors.
There was a lingering trace of chi that felt just the slightest bit off in that room. It hadn't returned for at least a couple of days, but it had been strong enough to leave an imprint that Mao could still recognize.
She knocked firmly on the door and waited.
"Who is it," a nervous voice asked.
"Investigator," Mao said.
The door opened slightly and a nervous slice of a face looked out through the crack.
"Have you found her…?" the girl on the other side stopped as she took in Mao's decidedly civilian appearance. "Are you sure you're the police?"
"Give me a break, kid," the red-headed Japanese woman said. "They called me in from my vacation. I'm just trying to get your friend found as soon as possible."
There was a hesitant sound to the girl's voice, but she eventually unlocked the door and let Mao inside.
"All right, I'm sorry," she said apologetically as the small Japanese woman pushed her way into the hotel room. "Please come inside."
"Don't worry about it," Mao said with a friendly dismissal. "Can you show me the…what's her name?"
"Katrina Strnad," the girl said nervously. "And she has her things over here…"
The girl walked over to a suitcase and carry-on bag. It was all a bit small for the average teenage girl on vacation. Then there was the violin case. Apparently Katrina traveled light.
There was a small fridge built into the counter of the room and Mao opened it up to reveal a small selection of bottles filled with some reddish liquid which she pulled out and opened up. A good whiff gave her everything she needed to know.
"Does she drink this?" Mao asked.
"Once a day," the girl answered. "I always teased her that it smelled like blood."
It wasn't blood, but a chemical comparison between this and human blood would probably have come out eerily similar. Everything a growing young vampyr needed without the guilt of draining a person dry.
"What color are her eyes and hair?" Mao asked.
"Ummm, brown and… almost black, I think," the girl said.
Common human colors.
Nothing funky like being a full-blooded Japanese lady with flaming red-hair and purple eyes. That meant she might have been born outside one of the families and not even know what she was.
Mao took a moment to shake her head with a sigh and ponder about how inconvenient it was for evolution to add psychic powers or physical deviations to people outside the existing community. This meant she might have to pull out the whole "so you're a psychic" lecture.
"Did you see which way the guy took her?" the woman asked as she moved to the bathroom and started looking for something that carried a bit of off-human chi. She found it in the form of a hair from a brush.
"He went east from the theater," the nervous girl said. "Is she going to be all right?"
"Yeah, we'll make sure she is," Mao said with an encouraging smile as she moved toward the hallway. "Oh, kid, one thing."
"What is it?" the nervous girl questioned.
"I never said I was police," Mao said. "I just said I was an investigator. I'm more the private type. And you could have just let in someone very bad. Next time ask for ID before you let someone in."
The girl stared at her slack jawed a moment before slamming the door closed.
Hoping the lesson was learned, the red-headed woman moved to the elevators and called for one. She was walking out the hotel door mere minutes later and then pushing her way past the waiting journalists.
One of the reporters that had dismissed her as an amateur of some kind did a sort of double-take as she walked by, but failed to catch sight of her on the second look to confirm that he'd really seen her. The red-head could have simply gone through completely unseen, but there was a degree of notice such methods brought that Mao usually tried to avoid. Especially when it was entirely unnecessary, she did wave briefly at Hendelson and gave him a thumbs up.
Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew what seemed to be a necklace of crystal beads of varying colors. There were green, blue and red crystals assembled together and she tied the hair she'd taken around the beads before encircling it around one of her wrists like a Buddhist or Catholic rosary. She was one of a rare few, the only one she knew of currently living, that could naturally see the trails of life-force, but like a magnifying glass or compass, the extra tool was useful.
Arriving at the theater gave Mao a sharp moment of relief as she took in the lingering feelings of shock and fear that had pervaded the area at the time of the incident. The green crystals of her rosary glowed just faintly enough for her to notice. The trace was already faded past what she could see unaided, and had almost faded away so completely that even the bracelet wouldn't have made it noticeable.
Glancing east, the first thing she noted was the hill on which sat the warehouse she was inquiring about. Ordinarily she'd have considered the site a perfect place to hide given it was naturally predisposed to going unnoticed, but she'd just spent the better part of a day poking around that neighborhood and there wasn't anything there that stood out.
Which meant following the beads in Mao's hands, which was going to be slow based on how weak the girl's aura was. She was probably not further down than the tenth ring, and that was a generous guess.
Walking down the street as the night deepened, she moved slightly one way or another, watching for the glow in the beads to turn weaker or stronger. And that was how she came to the base of a deeply wooded hill she might otherwise have never noticed at all. But she was here now, standing at the base of it and bending down to examine the grass path that invited her upward.
A brief examination found a tiny rivulet, carved once by hand and maintained by the flow of rainfall in all the time since, where the darkness of yin streamed down from an unseen pool up above, a reservoir of yin that looked up at the sun.
That was impressive.
Also, apparently being misused at the moment.
Taking a deep sniff of the air, she stood up and pushed upwards. Immediately, she felt a sense of calming that paradoxically upset her. She didn't like being reminded that she was pushing the borders between human and … something else. Perhaps she had even already crossed it. Years of chi-mastery, curses, her damn passenger and certain … relations with powerful spirits had been driving her further and further toward being more a creature of the supernatural; places of heavy chi like this held a very physical sense of relief for her as a result.
"Not like I was all that far away to begin with," she muttered, fingering her red hair idly.
As she spoke, she came out of the trees into a small clearing at the apex of the hill and found what it was she was looking for: a veritable pool of dark chi surrounded by foreign-planted grey oaks looking up into the sky. In the center of the little bowl was a hole in the ground down into which a ladder descended.
Taking a brief walk around the edge, Mao examined some of the signs and feel of the place. The blue crystals glowed faintly as she walked around the edges of the bowl, fingers trailing along the bark of the gray oaks. That made her uncomfortable as well, though most would have been comforted to find traces of white magic in the area. It had to be expected, of course, certain types of trees made white magic easier to perform and oaks were high on that list.
Mao didn't use the ladder to get down into the hole, simply dropping down silently and avoiding any creaks or cracks that the old tool might have had in store for her. In doing so, she dived through a thick clump of sickeningly corrupted chi that had her covering her mouth and shaking her head clear. Landing just slightly off balance from the supernatural assault, she stood up and steeled herself.
One foot inscribed a line in the dust on the ground and drew a circle about it as each of her hands jabbed to the side and traced similar lines in the dust on the walls. A soft green glow worked up out of her and into the air and earth around and pushed back at the old trap, shattering it completely.
Grimacing and looking about, she saw old, very old signs of blood caking the walls. A deliberately laid trap to hold off exorcists, but it was old and out of date. Dependence on only using yang was something that most credible exorcists had moved away from over three hundred years ago. Nor was the trap maintained, it was a weak bit of surprise but that was all.
Whatever had originally desecrated this holy site had long ago either died or abandoned the location. Whoever was taking up residence now had either not recognized the chi trap or didn't know how to keep it up. Which meant it wasn't likely to be a psychic or paranatural threat.
That wasn't the same as no threat at all.
Wrapping herself up in the flows of chi, she stepped forward into the corridor ahead, keeping aware for any other old chi trap that might lay waiting for her. But then the woman stepped out into a wide room that shocked her senses yet again.
She stood in an ancient lava chamber, the walls virtually glowing with yang as yin seethed in the center until it was forced back through the corridor behind Mao up into the world above, forming that trickle that she'd found at the base of the hill.
Yang concealing yin, which concealed yang, the duality of the universe in perfect sequence.
It was such a moment of surprise that she dropped the cloak about her and almost failed to note the motion of a knife slashing her way. At the last moment, she dodged out of the way and the knife passed through where her neck had been before. Likely, it wouldn't have gone through, but unlike with the thugs before, there was no certainty of that.
"What demon comes to this holy place?" the man behind the knife demanded.
Mao had expected something like this. The man was long and spindly, almost anorexic, with deep, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. His jaw standing out against his skin could certainly look almost insectile in the wrong light; and those long strands of standing hair looked something like antennae.
"Shut up," she said coldly, retaliating with a simple strike into the man's face.
The killer tried to dodge, but Mao was already moving to handle that and casually struck out horizontally to slam the psychopath into the wall and unconsciousness with barely a concern.
That just left finding the girl.
The first alcove held a girl certainly, preserved by the flowing yin in the room beyond the walls, but she had still been dead for at the very least a month. The body hung from chains that pulled her back tight against the wall, a host of small cuts were slashed into her skin through the tatters of clothing and cloudy, half-rotted eyes stared outward.
The red-head wasn't surprised that the girl's body was still heavy with chi, or that she sported a pair of matted tails hanging limply from her lower back. Someone with the instincts, if not training, to find this place wouldn't go after just anyone. No, he'd be drawn to weirdoes like Mao, like this poor kitsune girl and like a vampyr. Like attracted like, and unfortunately sometimes a thing that was like was decidedly hostile.
"Got him, kid," Mao whispered quietly as she closed the girl's eyes and continued searching.
The missing girl was in another alcove, again with chains recently spiked into the walls with little in the way of real respect, though the freak had probably thought it was a reverential act. She was weak and barely conscious, breathing tiredly. Breaking the chains off her, Mao took the girl onto her shoulder gently and waited for Katrina to steady herself as much as she could.
"Don't worry," she whispered comfortingly. "I've got you."
The thin killer shook awake and stood up to see Mao helping the young girl forward, towards the exit.
"You will not remove that demon from this place of purification!" he shouted.
The girl on Mao's shoulder flinched fearfully at the sound of the voice and tried to back away from it. The fear was cut off by the sound of a bone-shattering crunch and the sight of the killer's body twisting across the room to slam in a twisted mass against the wall.
"If you'd stayed down, freak," Mao said. "I might have let someone arrest you." "He's dead?" Miss Strnad asked.
"Definitely," the exorcist said firmly. "And I'll have to come down and purify this place later. Don't worry about it, kid. We're just going to get you to some place that can help you and then call your teachers."
The girl nodded and weakly leaned into the tiny form of the red-headed woman, falling back into unconsciousness as Mao carried her out of the underground chamber. ________________________________________
The next week found Mao back in Europe, at least temporarily. Behind her, her children were busy with their assorted tasks. Eija was working at dismantling the dormant defenses, just in case someone came in after them and set them off. Deimosu was packing the weapons and various crystals for delivery to their new home. And Naiki…
Mao rolled her eyes and shook her head as she looked across at Naiki, currently leaning out the window and staring down toward the village courtyard below with an appreciative smile on her face. Coming up behind the green-haired girl, Mao looked out the window and found that, yes, there was at least one blond in easy view down the hill. Actually there were two, a sun-kissed surfer boy and his girlfriend, both scantily dressed and getting ready to head on down to the coast for some fun on the beach.
"Naiki," Mao said in a clear tone.
The girl's hand slipped out from under her and her chin dropped to the window frame as she flinched in surprise.
"Ahhh, Mum!" she snapped quickly, standing up straight and rubbing needlessly at her chin as her shark-tail braid bounced behind her with her embarrassment. She'd done more damage to the frame than it had done to her.
Naiki was taller than her mother. The tiny red-head probably topped out at five feet tall, if that. Naiki was almost five foot ten inches with shoulders Mao was certain had not been inherited from her. The sharp row of teeth was also a good sign as to exactly which of the suspects had donated the rest of Naiki's genetics.
"I was, uh, just taking a little break," Naiki said nervously before sliding around, keeping her face toward Mao. "I'm getting right on that packing, almost done in fact." Then she broke for one of the other rooms in the old monastery they'd appropriated for the last two years.
"Always doing something stupid," her son said as he watched his sister leave the room. "I'll bet she causes World War Three somehow."
Deimosu was a little bit taller than Naiki and thus also towered over his mother, Mao. His hair was a brilliant golden blond and he had the build of a classical Greek hero. Not the overdone masses of muscle from those movies in the sixties, but a real perfection of proportion. Sometimes, the only thing Mao saw of herself was what she'd taught and her own confidence from before she'd had to build it back up.
"Let me worry about your sister," Mao said. "How's your end coming?"
"Almost done, Okaasan," he said gesturing to the small arsenal of swords, staves, axes and the like. "Unlike some, I'm not ogling people instead of working."
He shivered then and glanced back over his shoulder to see his mother staring at him pointedly.
"Right, I'll let you worry about Naiki," he said.
Mao nodded and set about her own tasks, setting the seals they would use to transport the bulk of this stuff. It seemed rather a mundane use for a skill meant to trap powerful, unkillable foes in a separate reality for an indeterminate amount of time, but it did work.
"Mitera," Eija said then, turning back to look over her shoulder. "Mr. Harker is coming up the path."
Eija was only a couple of inches taller than Mao. Her skin was pale, though not quite to albinism, and her irises were a deep, blood red. Sometimes the sclera, the normally white portions of the eye, shared the same color, but she usually didn't enjoy opening those eyes. Her black hair was kept long, hanging down to her waist in a single braid. It was long enough that she could cut it herself and not have to sit underneath anyone using a pair of scissors or other sharp instrument.
Mum.
Okaasan.
Mitera.
They each had their preferred language and level of formality for referring to her.
As she nodded, Mao wondered what the girl she'd been a month too late to save would have called her mother. Was she formal like Eija, saying "Mother" or "Haha"? Or was she more casual like Deimosu, or just outright loose like Naiki?
Somewhere, someone was trying to imagine their little girl still calling them and chatting with them.
"Okay, do I pack the glasses with the…" and there was a sound of breaking glass, lots of breaking glass. "Uhhh…okay, we're not packing the glasses…I'll get the broom."
The sound was a relief and she moved toward the door in order to let Mr. Harker in. Before they left, she had to arrange handing over information on the safe houses that Psyche was too polite to ask about.
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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:30:05 GMT -7
DeploymentThe wind ripped through the air between the close peaks and trees, carrying with it swirling snow that settled out over the wide, comparatively flat space hidden between the mountains. An old jeep trail wound through the rolling, uneven ground coming to a circular space cleared by at least somewhat frequent use, though it looked as if nothing had been through the area for at least a week, maybe two. A skiff of snow was starting to cover it but the storm hadn't been running long enough yet to lay down the winter's first covering of snow. Silence reigned, aside from that slight, constant sound of the fast moving air, whistling quietly as it twisted about the stone edges of the mountains at the edges of the area, or down over the cliffs descending down toward the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains. That accompaniment rose and fell in intermediate bursts as the gusts shifted about and fluctuated from one point to another such that the center of the sound moved from one place to another. And then the violent serenity was broken by an odd twisting sound piercing through the sky above. The source of the newest sound was obscured in the air by the darkness of the night. Then something large and dark landed with a solid metallic crunch into the snow beside the jeep trail. The object's lower form bent with the impact as one piece of it, something like a leg, moved forward and then an arm leaned down to place a huge hand down to the ground to finish steadying the figure's landing, a massive expanse of nylon billowed outward, cables snapping free so that the huge parachute was left free to whip out into the air for moments before the mechanical figure stood up with an almost noiseless stretch of artificial musculature, snatched the parachute and started balling it up in front before a small electrical fire consumed the parachute, turning it to ash. Two more such mecha came down behind the first and reproduced the same sequence of events. "Dunadan 6 reporting, on target here, landing on target, Dunadan 4," a young voice with an Eastern European accent spoke calmly over the radio. "Good," a woman's voice, apparently Dunadan 4, responded. She spoke with a primarily Californian accent that seemed to have a trace of an inherited accent underneath that. "You and I set up beacons; we're two hours from rendezvous. Dunadan 5, take watch. We're going to be inside the third ring of Melian's girdle so we're going to have to wait ten minutes when we trigger the beacons for them to do the math on calling us back." "Keep watch?" a third voice spoke doubtfully, betraying a faint Irish brogue. "From here? Who would choose this place to meet? A blind, deaf mute throwing darts at a board?" "You'd rather have dropped in over the chasm?" Dunadan 4 noted dryly. "Or maybe out over some plateau that isn't a hole in the international satellite coverage so that we can see ourselves on YouTube by the time we get back with a thousand conspiracy theories about time travel or aliens or flipping gods and demons or something?" "No, Ma'am," Dunadan 5 responded glumly as he piloted his mecha into position behind an outcropping of rock. "Activating predaflage." "Just an official reminder," Dunadan 4 noted. "The official name of the optical cloak is not 'predaflage'. Official reminder of not official name given, so let's get on with this." The image of the Irishman's machine wavered and faded into a near match for the rock face it leaned against, only flickering here and there as snow touched onto the machine before melting on contact with the warmth of the cloak. With the light snow fall and cover the rock provided as a windbreak, the flaw in the camouflage was tactically unimportant. The framework of the silent Dunadan 6's fifteen foot tall metallic humanoid figure went calmly about the task assigned to him. The first step was to remove the attachment that would normally be a short-range missile launcher and start distributing the four beacons he had been equipped with. Dunadan 4 was quickly doing the same and between the two of them, they sectioned off a large circular area. "I've got movement," Dunadan 5 said calmly. "A jeep just turned about a trail higher up, caught sight just through a break in the cli… oh bloody hell." "What's the problem, D5?" the woman heading the small unit asked. "Our spook has a tail," he said quickly. "Troop truck, looks like heavy infantry, moving slow." Dunadan 6 thought that only made sense, the jeep could take turns that a troop truck simply couldn't. "Tank," D5 said with a frustrated curse. "Damn, a spider tank takes a little bit more killing than a truck carrying infantry," Dunadan 4 muttered. "Not a spider tank," D5 responded. "I'm seeing what looks like a fully operational Y-41 up here." "You're shitting me," Dunadan 4 said. "I shit you not, they have a fucking Ogre," the hidden mecha said. "Who the hell puts a main battle tank up in the Himalayas?" "Apparently the Empire of Myanmar," Dunadan 4 said irritably. "How far are they?" "Hard to tell," D5 noted. "They're about two miles out from here, but that's going over what looks to be two chasms and the mountain ahead of us. Not going to be long." "Damn it," she muttered. "Okay, I'm getting into ambush position. Dunadan 6, see what you can do about slowing down that tank." "Understood, Dunadan 4," the third pilot's voice intoned calmly. "I shall be out of intercom range while I handle this issue." "I'm aware of that D6, keep radio silence except in case of eminent failure of mission," the woman noted. "Minimal risk, I repeat, minimal risk. We're piloting Thestrels, stripped down Thestrels at that. We're not in fully geared Errants." "Understood, Dunadan 6 out," the third pilot noted. Her own mecha walked up the jeep trail higher up into the mountains looking for a good place to fade into the background and get ready to meet their opponents. If the shift didn't take so long, there wouldn't have been the need for much concern, but ten minutes was too long a time to be still in an open place while an MBT was working its way to them. With that, Dunadan 6 directed his Thestrel into a straight run toward the edge of the cliff. As his unit lead had said, much of the normal armor and armament for the already light Thestrel had been taken down in favor of a lighter frame for the aerial drop they'd had following the shift. But they were still equipped with the normal jump jets placed on the small machine. He'd familiarized himself with the Rowling Industries Model 5 when they'd first acquired four of the machines and had taken some time to hypothesize a few variants on the normal settings for the machine and its OS. The jump jets flashed open with a quiet burst of heated air and a muted blue glow as he carried himself across one chasm toward the cliff face that separated them from their contact and his pursuers. His face remained calm within the cockpit as he came down onto the wide stretch of land. Two steps and he was directing his momentum away from a full on impact with the rock wall, and took a couple more steps before firing the jump jets again carrying him to the top of the cliff face and a gentle landing atop. "Bloody hell," Dunadan 5 noted. "How the hell does he pull that crap off?" Dunadan 6 piloted his Thestrel into slow walk both to listen for signs of structural strain and give the engine and jets a chance to cool off. As expected, there was no sound of significant damage to the vehicle, nor did the onboard computer register any significant damage. As ordered, there had been no real risk. The predaflage was activated as he slowed down; doing what it could to keep up with the forward motion of the machine and the occasional flurry of snow that threatened its purpose. The snow at least half melted around the machine's footsteps, making small puddles of water that quickly froze over into ice once the cloaked Thestrel had passed. His computer gave him a line towards the curving mountain road his targets would be taking and he lowered his machine's profile, but he still didn't reach for the limited armament they'd been sent with: a mecha knife and a small external cannon. The cannon was a standard external armament for reconnaissance squads and had the appearance of a large caliber handgun sized for a giant. The shells in the clips were anti-personnel primarily. Used well, they would incapacitate most light vehicles. But it was practically a bunch of stones for a fully armored tank. However, the tank was not operating in its ideal environment. Its movement was limited to the flat areas in the jagged mountains. Maneuvering for that tank was just a word. It might as well have been a bunker if it weren't for the fact that it was mobile. Putting it up here was just an idiot's ploy. Some Burmese general apparently thought he was Hannibal driving elephants over the Alps. Dunadan 6 came to a ledge overlooking the road again as his computer's tracking cut through the lightly swirling snow to pick out the Burmese Ogre slowing down slightly and turning its turret to face across the wide drop off the cliff face. It only took a moment's analysis to realize that the tank was aiming at another portion of the jeep trail and expecting to have their rendezvous in sight for an attack fairly soon. The pilot ran over his options. He could potentially pelt the tank from where he stood with the anti-personnel weapon. That would attract attention and possibly slow down the vehicle, but it would simply be able to fire on both his position and the portion of the trail it was now aiming at. There wasn't anything he could practically do from his current position. So he had to change positions. Getting a reading on the distances involved, feeling somewhat gratified that he was now jumping down rather than up or even across, he checked his operating settings a second time. Then he was flying through the air again, deactivating the cloak just prior to leaving the ground. "What the-?" one of the soldiers in the tank said, clearly confused by the warning his computer was giving him. "Sir, we just had something show up on radar." "Probably a piece of falling debris," the tank commander noted. "Focus on the path, be ready to stop that thief in his tracks, and don't worry about breaking anything, everything is repla…." A large impact carried through the crew compartment with a subdued clanging sound. The sound proofing, armor and shock absorbers kept most of the impact from affecting the three man crew, but they exchanged nervous looks anyway, before the commander started rotating one of the cameras outside to see what had just hit his tank. Elements of the metallic form of the Thestrel filled the screen within moments and they identified what had appeared. "Upright!" the commander shouted, "Drive!" The driver nodded furiously and pushed the tank up to speed down the trail, hoping the sudden motion would throw off their attacker. Meanwhile the gunner was swiveling the turret around and looking for any of the top mounted weapons in position to fire on their unwanted rider. "The target is in view!" the commander shouted. "Fire now!" Cursing, but not saying anything against his commander with regards to the mecha currently on top of them, the gunner twisted the turret around and took a snap shot across the gulfs towards the jeep on the other end. He did not get a chance to see if he hit it as he immediately turned his attention back to the mecha and trying to remove it. Dunadan 6 frowned slightly as heavy machine gun rounds tore into his Thestrel, registering damage on the computer. However, it was the plume of smoke and the imagined sound of impact from further on in the mountains that upset him as he brought his mecha's knife back up from slicing one of the tanks treads clean through. The driver, not realizing that one of his treads was damaged, had pushed himself, with all the enemy shaking acceleration he could get out of the massive tank. Surprise covered his features as, instead of moving straight, the tank turned sharply toward the edge of the cliff face. His brain locked in panic and he barely pulled the tank to a stop before passing the fulcrum point that would have given the vehicle over to gravity completely. "Damn it! What the hell is going on?" the commander shouted. And then Dunadan 6 stepped up onto the tank's body, adding his own weight to the protruding end of the vehicle, slamming his knife into the muzzle of the turret. The heavy machine guns had stopped firing for the moment as the gunner panicked and held still as their vehicle teetered over the edge of the cliff, their one working tread more than half out into the air. The Thestrel was probably less than a third the weight of the tank, but that amount was more than enough to make all three men in the tank nervous as the mecha swung out onto the turret muzzle. Slowly, ever so slowly, the tank started to teeter over the edge. "That pilot is insane!" the commander said in shock. "Abandon tank!" Frozen stares of fear broke as all three started rushing to remove themselves from their safety harness and reach for the hatches. Outside, the Thestrel kicked its feet out, launched a burst of jet blast horizontally to send it in a flip around the turret. It cut off almost immediately but had already imparted the momentum and, using the cannon as pull-up bar, sent the Thestrel up into the air, with its head downwards. Below him only the gunner managed to get out and clear of the Ogre as it toppled down into the chasm that stretched past the range of human sight beyond. Another half-second burst of the jump jet twisted the Thestrel back to upright posture and then a gentler, slower burn brought it to a safe landing on the path, or it would have had one of the two jump jets not sparked out of operation with a burst of electric light just feet above the ground. The result was a semi stumble which its pilot countered by directing it into a run down the path, catching his balance easily, leaving the shocked and startled gunner behind to catch his breath. Then he was running down the trail in a hurry to catch up with the troop transport before they reached their contact. He reached for the radio and broke communications silence, taking the risk of being picked up by local forces. Most likely, someone else had already been contacted as it was. "Dunadan 6 breaking radio silence," he said. "The Ogre is no longer an issue. However, the target's vehicle appears to have been disabled. I am currently attempting to intercept the transport from behind." There was no response beyond a burst of static that gave him the simple knowledge that his message had been received. And then all he had to focus on was the run along the path, trying to catch up to the truck. His computer system was giving him a running read out on the damage that the brief scattering of gunfire had done other than obliterate his optical cloak over large portions of the mecha. The shorted jump jet was as a result of received weapons damage, and he was apparently losing some hydraulic pressure in the same leg, but there should be enough pressure remaining to return to the rendezvous site for Melian to call them back in. He turned a corner and found himself behind the large transport truck coming to a stop and getting ready to disgorge its passengers to head for the site of the crashed jeep. Drawing his "pistol", Dunadan 6 aimed for the vehicle, catching sight of the surprised faces just now noticing his approach. In the next moment he fired and a shower of steel ripped outward through the massed troops and the truck they came in on. A piece of shrapnel sparked off another bit of metal and spilled gasoline erupted into a small fireball as the mecha ran on past the new debris. He came to a stop over the wrecked jeep, its front-end torn into an unrecognizable mass of twisted and charred metal by the rail projectile that the tank had sent through it. Smoke was still billowing out of the wreck as the pilot set his mecha to scanning the area for signs of life. "This is Dunadan 4, we have a visual on your position and are taking defensive measures," the woman's voice informed him. "Check for survivors and our cargo and take them on, we'll cover you. We're approaching from the opposite direction now." "Understood," was the response as he found human heat signatures through the smoke and set his Thestrel to kneel down and popped the chest open so he could exit. Dunadan 6 was a young man, not even out of his teen years. He could have been sixteen or eighteen; it was hard to tell though his quiet, emotionless demeanor seemed to make most people lean toward the upper end of the possible age range he fit in. A scar twisted up over his left eye in a partial circle underneath short, dark hair. He was wearing a black crash-suit that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie as he pulled a sidearm and moved carefully toward the wreckage. Dunadan 4 and 5 moved past him like flickering swirls of snow that would have given many onlookers a belief in the legends of the yeti. The driver of the jeep was dead, his head completely destroyed by twisting metal that had ripped off from the impact. Dunadan 6 assumed that that was their contact and grimaced just enough to put an expression on his face, and then it faded away. One of the back seats of the wreck had been pushed open, however, and someone had climbed down out of the toppled vehicle, pulling something along with them. Glancing over his shoulder to make sure that he was covered, Damir put his sidearm away and moved around the outer portion of wreck until he found a wiry girl not even in her teens trying to carry away a wooden box that was just short of a crate in comparison to her. She kept dropping it into the snow and falling herself. At least until she saw Dunadan 6 approaching her quietly. Instantly, her eyes flashed red and the pilot dived forward into a roll that came up behind her and out of her line of sight. Behind him, bright flames rose up as seemingly the snow and even the air itself seemed to burst into freestanding flame. He rose up behind the startled girl and firmly wrapped his arms about her to force her head to continue looking forward, but doing as much as he could to not hurt her. "Calm down," he said firmly. "We're not here to hurt you." "Are you from the facility?" she asked in something of a panic. Standing behind her, he could see the small, stylized sun tattooed between her shoulder blades, followed by a sequence of two numbers a dash and a third number. "No," the pilot said as the weary girl fainted. He held her as she fell back into his arms and then carefully repositioned her so that she didn't get in the way as he carried her toward his mecha at a quick pace. "Dunadan 4 this is Dunadan 6. We have a problem," he explained. "The contact is dead and I have a civilian manipulative as well as the cargo." "Get them into your Thestrel and get moving," Dunadan 4 said. "Radio chatter indicates people are starting to realize something's happening and we are not equipped for what they'll send after losing an Ogre." "Understood, Dunadan 4," the pilot said before turning back to the girl and strapping her into the built-in stretcher the cockpit contained for the purpose of serving as an emergency transport for a wounded comrade. Though in this case, he added a blindfold torn from the flame retardant blanket in the survival kit. Then it was just one more trip for the crate and he was ready to move on. As soon as Dunadan 6 was underway, Dunadan 4 moved on out ahead while Dunadan 5 continued to hold the rear. "A manipulative," D5 said. "There wasn't anything in the briefing about any akiras, what's this one do?" "Firestarter," Dunadan 6 said clearly and without any concern. "Bloody hell…" the other male pilot responded. "She is blindfolded for now and apparently fainted from either internal injuries or exertion." "Keep her safe for a little bit longer and we're home," Dunadan 4 said. "Then the Captain can see about her. Get in the circle, I'm activating beacons now." "Okay, radio chatter says that every Burmese base within a hundred miles of here is sending something out," Dunadan 5 said. "So, something like two bases," Dunadan 4 said, holding her anti-personnel cannon carefully as they waited for the ten minutes to pass, unable to tell if Melian had started the shift or not. "I think they have copters in the air," D5 noted. "Those will be fifteen minutes out at least," Dunadan 6 noted. "It is not an issue." "Movement on the path," Dunadan 4 said. "Two more truck transports." That was something more of an issue. The missile-like beacons around them were blinking at a steady pace with a simple yellow light near the top of their structure. However, it was starting to turn greener as time passed. Melian was receiving active information updates apparently. "We might have an issue if a fire fight starts," Dunadan 6 noted. "The shift will bring projectiles in flight as well." "I'm aware of that, D6," Dunadan 4 noted. "Dunadan 5, you got those charges placed?" "They're ready," the other pilot noted. "And they're active. First truck through that pass is getting a surprise." "That should buy us some time," Dunadan 4 said. "Hurry up, Meli…" And the world about them vanished in a swirl of liquid blue light before being replaced with the inside of a large metal room more than fifty feet tall with a long line of other mecha, mostly larger than the Thestrels, were secured against the sides. "…an…and we're home," she shook her head in the cockpit. "Melian, this is Sergeant Major Desai reporting. The intelligence operative was killed before contact. We have with us a civilian manipulative in uncertain state of health and what we believe to be the cargo that was to be taken back." "Understood, Sergeant Major, medical and security is being dispatched," an older man's voice informed her through her radio. "Is the manipulative's talent identified." "Firestarter," Dunadan 4 reported. "Emotional and medical state unknown she fainted or fell unconscious. Care should be taken." "Indeed, an akira event would be unappreciated onboard," the officer on the other end noted with a trace of dark humor. "Please stand down and prepare for debriefing. Captain Trolleti instructs that Lieutenant Commander Sarkis will speak to you shortly in briefing room seven. Welcome home." A few minutes later, after the firestarter was handed over to the medical team, the three pilots were walking through the hallway heading for the briefing room. Beside Dunadan 6 was a woman of Indian features who was just a hair or two shorter than he was. With the piloting suit set aside, the woman's arms and shoulders were clearly discernible as something belonging to someone who spent much of her life engaged in physical activity. She most clearly did not seem to be one of the slender, "proper" women many Westerners associated with Indian culture, or Asian women in general. Though there were several who had commented out of her hearing that she'd probably look just about killer in an evening gown. Behind her and on the other side was another man somewhat broader in the shoulder than his team members with reddish brown hair and a cover-model face that had just the right amount of stubble for the fashions of the day. His hair was a bit longer than either the woman's or the teenaged mercenary and somewhat better prepared to look at. The quiet fuming of the woman gave the youngest of the three plenty of indication that she was not terribly amused by his actions earlier. At some point, he decided, he was probably going to have to figure out exactly what the term "minimal risk" entailed, since that was the issue that Sergeant Major Desai most frequently noted as him not attending to. However, the design specifications in the operator's manual clearly indicated a much broader performance parameter than the standard safety protocols implied. With the machine so stripped down and underweight, the safe performance protocols were further expanded. He was well aware that neither she nor Sergeant Whelan operated any of their machines on standard parameters, so he was hardly the only one that had noticed the discrepancy between the operating manuals and the actual capabilities of the vehicle. The Sergeant Major was too professional to say anything just yet, but he was sure to be receiving a discussion, assuming that Lieutenant Commander Sarkis himself did not find anything to be critical of, which was somewhat hard to believe. The door to the briefing room closed behind him and the Sergeant Major took a glance around to see if their superior officer was present yet before twisting about. "Minimal risk!" she snapped. "What part of 'minimal risk' is so hard for you to understand?" "The Thestrel is rated at a reliable jumping distance of three hundred meters," he noted. "That would be just fine, Sergeant Milos," she responded. "If you hadn't damn well just jumped almost twice that distance!" "The official rating is based on normal operating weight and standard parameters," he responded, still uncertain as to just why she was annoyed with him. "The actual tolerable limits of heat generation are quite a bit higher, and the reduction of weight further makes matters easier. Also, the lack of the internal missile complement reduces the threat of ammo discharge making the tolerable heat limits even higher." "And the tank?" Desai asked. "It fell off the cliff," Milos offered honestly. "Heh, and I'll bet you had nothing to do with that," the Irishman said. "I can't wait to get a look at your video data. That's going to have to be some feat of derring-do." "Do not encourage him, Whelan," the Sergeant Major said angrily, whirling on the taller man. "You don't want to see what I'll do if you keep doing that." "I don't know, Eowyn, I think I might enjoy it," Whelan noted with a smirk as he walked past her. This was about when she slammed her hand into his abdomen, shoving the air out of his lungs for a moment. "Sit down and wait for Lieutenant Commander Sarkis," she ordered coolly. "Yes, Ma'am," Sergeant Milos said with a crisp salute as he walked around the gasping Whelan to take a seat in the briefing room's theater. "Oww," Whelan noted weakly as he followed. Eowyn Desai moved a row up behind the two and took her own seat keeping her silence from this point. It wasn't much longer before a grim-faced older man of Arabic features came into the room, prompting all three to stand up and salute sharply as they came to attention. The officer was a short, thick man, clean shaven and with dark, glittering eyes as he turned to look at his subordinates. Some might have mistaken him for being fat, but his size was mostly muscle. Old muscle that was no longer as well developed as it once was, lost behind some years at a desk, but still in better condition than many men much younger than he was. "At ease, be seated," he said without so much as glancing at any of the three soldiers in the room with him as he turned to the display screen and watched to see if the Thestrels' data was in the process of being made available. "Total operation time was just under two and a half hours. Your intended mission objective is dead, we have an extra civilian on hand and we have Burma stirred up like a nest of hornets. Sergeant Major Desai, might you explain how this occurred?" "Sir," Desai said, saluting as she did so. "The operation appeared to be compromised before we even made contact. If I had to guess, I'd say that the Intelligence agent we were to contact extended his mission without alerting his superiors. Either that or they did not see fit to alert us. With a ten minute recovery window, we were already committed to the action at hand by the time it became apparent." Damir listened quietly to the report as his squad leader continued with a point by point report of their actions up to and during the skirmish. He couldn't help but notice that Sarkis' eyes drifted toward him occasionally. It was not an unusual occurrence since the man did not feel that Sergeant Milos should have been in the outfit at all. He'd made no secret of the fact that he felt the Croatian was too young to be reliable. Dunadan 6, Damir Milos, did not let himself care about the situation. He was far more concerned with the effective failure of the mission than with Lieutenant Commander Sarkis's opinions for the moment. He was already running the scenario in mind and trying to think of how he might have better accomplished the task he'd been set. He should have been faster to remove that cannon instead of relying on the surprise of his arrival to prevent the crew from taking its shot. "Sergeant Milos," the Lieutenant Commander said. "Might I have an explanation for why you thought it a good idea to ride atop a main battle tank in your Thestrel?" The question immediately caught Damir's attention and he set aside his scenarios for the moment. "I lacked the means to reliably engage the enemy vehicle in any other way save at extreme close range," he explained calmly. "It limited them to the use of their anti-personnel weapons rather than the primary cannon and it was also intended to distract attention from attacking our objective, sir." "It didn't work," Sarkis noted. "No, sir," Damir admitted. "It didn't. The Ogre made one attack with its rail cannon and it caused the death of our mission objective." "Your flashy theatrics accomplished nothing, then," the Lieutenant Commander noted. "Pardon, sir?" Damir asked, confused as to what "flashy theatrics" might have been meant. He was answered with a tired look and the Lieutenant Commander shook his head. "Analysis seems to agree with you that this mission was fouled up already," Lieutenant Commander Sarkis said. "The reckless behavior shall be recorded along with the resultant damage to the Thestrel. In the meantime: dismissed." The three stood up and snapped salutes before taking attention. "Aye, sir," they said. Sergeant Whelan gave his with a sarcastically enthusiastic tone and smirk that was more or less ignored. "You know," Whelan said after the man had left. "I have to admit a certain amount of envy. It used to be that I was the one getting a piece torn out of my hide for reckless grandstanding. And the galling part is that Sergeant Milos here doesn't even really consider what he does showing off." "The actions were well within the operating limits of the Thestrel as it was equipped," Damir protested again. "The results were predictable." "See what I mean?" the Irishman asked Desai with a smirk that died as he saw Desai's expression. "I'm only joking Eowyn, it's not that serious." "It is when you persist in calling me 'Eowyn'," she said. "I know that your career started with the IRA and moved to mercenary from there, but I'd think somewhere along the line one of those groups would have mentioned something about how to talk to a superior rank." She crossed her arms and glared pointedly. Damir had received one or two of those in his time in this squad as well. Sergeant Major Desai was not a woman to be crossed and Sergeant Whelan knew better than to test what she might do if he did continue pushing her at the moment. "Okay," she said finally. "Get to the showers, get to your quarters and stay out of the crew's way while we're still in Burmese waters." "Understood," Damir nodded. "Yeah, I have no desire to be torpedoed because I was flirting with the sonar operator," Whelan agreed with somewhat less smugness than he'd been using before Desai had shut him down. "Then get to it," Desai noted. "We're not likely to get called in for anything before the Melian docks at Menegroth, so get the rest while you can." Damir nodded and walked out of the room to do as he was ordered. ________________________________________ The sergeant major was incorrect, however, about not being called in before they reached their home base. It was only two days later before they were called in to a meeting. On first meeting, Captain Gaetana Trolleti did not seem to represent the idea of an experienced naval commander. Sitting behind her desk and shifting through the papers in front of her, the long, lavender hair styled in a fetchingly feminine and entirely aristocratic manner while also taking it out of her way, she looked more like someone that the actual Captain kept on hand for reasons of aesthetic enjoyment. It was hard to guess her age, and Damir had known her for seven years, probably longer than most of the other soldiers in her command. She'd been working for another mercenary group as a tactician and researcher and ended up attached to the Croatian Liberation group Milos had grown up in. They'd survived the debacle of betrayal and bad luck that was Yugoslavia's attempt to copy Burma's growth into the Empire of Myanmar in the early fifties. The captain claimed that he had saved her life and he wondered sometimes if his being scouted and recruited into Avalon, and her division in specific, was a way to help repay the debt. "Sergeant Major Desai and squad reporting as ordered, Captain," the Indian-American woman said with a clear respect. "Please sit, have some tea," the Captain's Italian accented words conveyed a mellow manner that returned that respect as she gestured toward the tea set with the gently steaming kettle in front of her. "I have just received a request from the Table." The Table never made requests, and Gaetana only described them as such when the orders coming in were likely to be at the very least annoying. The three soldiers in front of her sat in anticipation. "I do not believe any of you are familiar with the city of Vollstahl," she said, standing to pass out a mission folder to each of the three. "But it is a small city in the Northern Territory of Australia." "That doesn't sound like it has much to do with us," Sergeant Major Desai noted as she took the folder. "Australia is one of the least hot spots in the world. Is this a drug thing?" "No, this will not be a tactical operation," she said apologetically. "As you said, Australia is one of the more stable places in the world. Economically stronger than the North African Allegiance, more inaccessible to outsiders than the United States and not next door to Myanmar like Free China. As a result…" "A school?!" Sergeant Whelan snapped in surprise as he read through the mission folder. Damir turned to look at the Irishman, a slight frown to his face at the man's outburst. Even though he was dismayed at the prospective babysitting job it sounded like they were going to be assigned. "We're doing security at a s…oh, I'm sorry, Ma'am, I didn't mean to interrupt," the man said immediately. Having noted that the tea was still untouched, Gaetana stood up and moved to pour out three cups, handing one each to the three soldiers before pouring her own and sitting back down behind her desk. In so doing, she more or less ignored the unintentional slight to her authority and moved on toward the briefing. "I understand the issues," Captain Trolleti said in an appealing nature whose outward softness hid the iron within. "But the Table is concerned that Burma's action these last couple of days have increased the level of concern, and we are aware they have operated snatch operations on promising talent in the past. Since Avalon holds the security contract for several of the private schools in the area, some reinforcement will be applied." It was a transparent reason at best. And it was meant to be transparent. Their team was effectively being beached for a foul up that wasn't their responsibility. "How long is this assignment going to last?" Desai asked wearily. "For at least the year," Captain Trolleti noted. "Might I ask who we are to report to?" Damir asked. "Reports on the matters at Bravura Academy are to be reported to me," Gaetana noted. And that was a double slap. Security contracts were usually local Intelligence's concern. Captain Trolleti was the South Pacific division commander she already worked heavily with Research on specific projects. She shouldn't have had to be bothered with something like one of their cover mercenary contracts unless something important was going on. "The Academy is experimenting with off-site housing for some students," Gaetana said. "Sergeant Major Eowyn Desai and Sergeant Connor Whelan shall be taking position as chaperones at the external housing." "How many students are we talking about?" Whelan asked. Damir shifted his head to the side briefly "For the moment, one is our concern," the Captain said. "She is the daughter and only heir of an important Korean industrialist. Jeon Yoon-Ji. Adopted, birth parents unknown, age sixteen, impressive scores in math and science; she has a record of involvement in student government and also seems to have a reputation as something of a trouble maker despite this." Gaetana paused for a moment as she looked at the photo in the dossier in front of her, pursing her lips in thought for just a moment before shaking her head slightly and moving on. Neither Desai nor Whelan seemed to notice the brief show of interest at all. "Watching her should allow us to be less of a hindrance to Intelligence's normal operations in the Academy," the Captain said. "Are there any questions?" "Permission to speak freely?" Damir asked. "Granted, Sergeant Milos," the Captain noted casually. "What is to be my cover in this security detail?" he asked. "Ahh, I was coming to that," the woman said, sipping her tea. "Your primary mission in this circumstance is not security. You are to act in reserve to Sergeant Major Desai and Sergeant Whelan. Your primary task will be to learn how to socialize with civilians." "Ma'am?" Damir asked, suddenly feeling lost. "We will occasionally be calling on you to engage in undercover assignments," the woman said in a well-disguised motherly tone that Damir himself failed to recognize. "And there will occasionally be other matters in life that do not pertain to the manner in which one must acquit himself in a war zone. It would be appropriate for you to take the chance to learn how to attend to such things now before you have grown too much older and it becomes difficult to adapt." "I understand, then this is to be a training mission for me dealing with infiltration," Damir asked. "I suppose you might look at it that way," Gaetana said with a sigh.
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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:31:06 GMT -7
Just a Girl
The day started with a headache and remnants of odd dreams from the night before, but there wasn't anybody to talk to in the house, so the occupant didn't bother to make much in the way of a coherent complaint, though she was working up to it. The girl, sixteen years old, threw her legs over the side of the bed and stretched on waking up, one hand rubbing at her forehead firmly. Her black hair hung in disarray down to her mid-back, strands of it sticking out in odd directions, a dark, royal purple showing at the base. Her feet showed a good deal less animation as they shuffled underneath her off toward the bathroom in a dazed trance that a zombie would be proud of. Briefly, she directed her gaze toward the clock on the wall next to a picture showing a tall Korean man, his wife and a young boy. The girl confirmed that she had a good two hours before she had to be ready and out of the house.
"Ugh," she said, shambling into the bathroom.
The image in the mirror was the same as always. Dark hair, not yet tamed for the day, sleepy brown eyes and a furrowed brow that someone was going to tell her was going to wrinkle if she kept making faces like that. Her tall form was slender, almost skinny, with long arms and legs that had muscles just the right subtle level of definition from years of enjoying frequent sports without being too obsessed with them.
Satisfied that she hadn't grown a horn or something out of her head - it would explain the pounding - she rolled up the sleeves of her pajamas and started on her morning routine, while she slowly muttered her way into recognizable Korean.
"First day of school term, gotta be ready, Vice President is responsible for enforcement of school discipline. Why am I still Vice President after the coffeemaker thing, why can't they get someone else to do this job?"
The words given in a monotonous stream at a constant pace that had the muttering character most would have assumed would be filled to the brim with under the breath profanities, oaths or swearing of the most colorful variety. Once or twice she might have said something like "damn" or "hell", but for the most part she got through her morning near-conscious complaining completely without incident.
By the time she'd gotten out of the shower, the vocabulary had calmed down somewhat as she moved to the mirror again and started putting the finishing touches on her appearance. This last phase started with a comb, a brush and a steely glint to her eyes as she stared down, not her own reflection but that of her hair.
"Listen up, you damn rebels," she said grimly. "We're going to try this again. We're going to have a nice, simple, straight hair style. There'll be nothing out of place. No damn European curls trying to sneak their way in, got it? Bad enough I have to dye you to look normal. You will be straight and manageable. Understood?"
She paused for a moment and blinked.
"Wait a minute, am I acting like that when no one's watching now?" she asked.
In response, a long strand of hair, drying out from the shower, coiled upward and hung like a long spring. The girl's mouth twitched irritably at the display and she hung her head dismally before moving to the attack. The hair was straight and held back in long, simple tail tied off with a ribbon by the time she was done.
However, some of it was already curling back to its natural state.
Hanging off her closet door was her school uniform, a sort of off-white with grey threads that made it look silver and lined by purple highlights at the collar, buttons, cuffs, hemlines and stitching. Beneath that was a short skirt, it would have reached half-way to the knees of a girl with average proportions. On this girl, it barely reached two-fifths of the distance down her long, slender thighs. . It was made of the same shimmering off-white. Long, thigh-length deep purple socks were pulled on then, ending just four inches shy of the hem of her skirt.
Finished dressing, she opened the closet door and frowned into the mirror there as she took in her slim body shape.
"The one European thing I could have appreciated was the figure," she muttered as she considered her tall, slender form.
Grimacing she marched out of the bedroom to the front and the items set out there on the table: six unsharpened pencils in three separate colors, each set about an inch apart; a pad of lineless note paper; a thick hand eraser; a pair of black ink gel pens; her cell-phone and seven separate phone charms; a calculator, much abused; a metal back scratcher two feet long, much of the paint scratched off; a bundle of carefully folded gym clothes and towel; eight labeled folders, each with a bundle of notes and a manila envelope inside; money set aside in a specifically measured amount; a key ring with keys labeled each with a set of four numbers; and a brown leather shoulder bag.
The majority of these items were carefully placed in the bag in what appeared to be long designated spots, save for the backscratcher that was snapped up and leaned against her shoulder, tapping it a couple of times where it rested. Then she took several calming, centering breaths and strode to the front door and slipped into her silver school shoes before heading out into the streets, locking the door behind her.
Once outside, her slight swagger turned into a more proper, feminine glide as she headed out of the house and down the road. The smile on her face was one of sunshine and friendliness as she held onto her shoulder bag, letting it swing with her step, and twirled the back scratcher in her hand, humming a pleasant tune.
"Ah, good day Yooji," one of her neighbors said she passed.
He gave her a casual smile and turned back toward his car, about to get in.
"Morning, Mr. Davis," she replied in a light tone.
"Doesn't Bravura up there not start for a bit yet?" the man asked casually, gesturing up the hill along the path the girl took to reach Bravura Academy.
"That's right, but I have to walk," she said shrugging.
"Don't they have a dorm for you boarding students?" he asked.
"There was a sort of misunderstanding," Yooji said, a bit embarrassed. "So, I'm currently … banned from living on campus. My father and the school came to this…agreement with the school so I could keep attending."
"Can't imagine a girl like you would get into anything worth that," Mr. Davis asked. "Always a polite girl, doing the baby-sitting and the like."
"Well, I said it was a misunderstanding," Yooji said with a sigh, reaching her back scratcher down the back of her shirt.
It wasn't ordinarily a lady-like gesture, but the way she stood there with confidence and completely ignoring the oddity made most people overlook it. Of course, some of her neighbors were similarly casual in their manners. In any case, the itch scratched for now, she retrieved the scratcher and used it in something like a quick salute, tempered with a bright smile, and then continued walking up the hill toward school.
"Have a good one." Mr. Davis said as he slipped completely into his car and started it up to head off to his work place.
He was soon passing her up the street, waving by habit as he passed her, and she waving back for much the same reason.
Yooji paused about fifteen minutes later to take some of her carefully portioned out money and slip some coins into a vending machine at the shop. As she did so she took in the stock at the corner store, mentally noting any specials or deals for the day or new stock that she hadn't seen yet.
"Good day, Miss Jeon," the old woman inside the story said with a sort of teasing tone. "Off to school again I see. I suppose we'll be seeing you on the way back."
"Yes, Mrs. Grayson," she said calmly. "Any kimchi yet?"
"Oh, sorry, but it doesn't look like it," the woman said shaking her head idly in a manner that suggested that she had this conversation fairly often.
"Hmm maybe next time," she said. "We do have some right fine steaks."
"Uh … okay, I'll think about it," she said. "See you after school."
"Be careful with that coffee, Miss Jeon," the woman said with a bit of a snicker.
Stepping back out onto the road, Yooji only paused cautiously as she came to one of the roads leading up into the mostly derelict neighborhood on the edge of town.
"What were they doing up there?" the Korean girl wondered before taking up her walk again and walking the rest of the way down to her school.
She was barely past the gates, still very early, when the real irritations of the day started to become apparent.
"So, Schmidt," a smug sounding boy's voice said. "We were going to talk about your rent this week."
"My name's not Schmidt," a nervous, German accented boy said to the two boys around him.
"Whatever," one of the boys, the larger one, said as his friend snickered at his side, "Where's the money, Hanz? I've given you a week to turn it over."
Slipping her shoulder bag's strap so that it was now hanging off the opposite shoulder and wouldn't fall off easily, Yooji flexed one of her hands and tapped the backscratcher against her shoulder as she walked forward, the confident sort of swagger returning for the moment.
"I haven't gotten any money this month yet," the young teenager said nervously.
"Well, you'd better…" the smaller, giggling bully started to say.
"Ahem," Yooji said.
It wasn't a clearing of her throat or a cough. She simply made a point of saying the sound effect.
"Who the hell are…" the larger bully paled as he turned to find Yooji standing there.
Her arms were crossed, she already looked annoyed and she was tapping her backscratcher against her shoulder in time with her tapping foot.
"Uh, Vice President Jeon," the boy said nervously. "I heard you'd been expelled."
"I just live off campus now," she said in a cold tone, arms unfolding. "So what the hell are you doing, Jerk?"
"My name is Jacob," he insisted leaning over her to try to apply some of his greater height and mass over her skinny frame.
He received a hard whack between the eyes with Yooji's metal backscratcher. Stepping back away from her he rubbed briefly at the spot between his eyes, growling. He turned toward his friend with a bit of a nervous snarl.
"Are you going to just stand there?" he asked.
"I'm not lookin' to fight her," the other boy said nervously.
"Uh, what's going on here?" the German boy asked.
"Your third-year class vice president is laying down some law," Yooji said. "And the first law for today is thou shall not extort the other students."
"Listen you self-righteous little…" he hesitated. "You're not the high and mighty untouchable you used to be. Do you think the school is going to listen to one thing you say after the whole coffeemaker thing?"
"Yeah," Yooji asked. "And who do you think you should be more worried about, the school faculty or the person who caused the whole coffeemaker thing?"
She arched an eyebrow and just waited for him to say something that would give her an excuse to blow her top at him. The backscratcher tapped against her shoulder impatiently, but the boy stood there staring at her from his extra four inches of her own five foot seven height. His courage seemed to be wavering.
"Talk about tsundere," he muttered.
Yooji's eye twitched.
"What did you just call me," she demanded, thwacking him in the face with her backscratcher. "Did you just say tsundere, huh? Do you even know what language that is, huh?"
With each "huh" her voice rose another volume level as she leaned hostilely up into Jacob's face. The boy's friend was meanwhile trying to get quietly out of the area, but that ended when a finger was stabbed out in his direction.
"You, out of here," she snapped, the boy didn't need to be told twice, and then turned to look at the German boy and smiling in a friendly manner. "You can go ahead and leave too, sorry for the trouble."
"That's all right," the German boy said as he quickly left for the main building of the academy complex.
"So, now that's just you, me and my backscratcher," Yooji asked. "Can we talk about the appropriateness of calling any Korean girl by a name geeks and nerds use to talk about over-violent psychos on Japanese cartoons? Or are you going to apologize before I start getting creative?"
Yooji kept whacking him in the forehead with each question, keeping a firm frown on her face that did not waver an inch from its implicit promise of incredible pain. The bully met those eyes for all of a few seconds before turning his back on her and slinking off.
"I don't have time for th—urk!"
He gasped as the collar of his shirt and jacket were snagged with the backscratcher and he was pulled backwards, bending until he fell hard and flat on his back with Yooji standing over him.
"Before you leave you're going to say something to me," Yooji said backscratcher back against her shoulder.
"Are you crazy?" the bully demanded.
"Crazy!" the Korean snapped. "Who are you calling crazy, are you stupid or something?! First you're trying to rob one of the freshmen and then you call me tsundere and then you call me crazy! Boy you are asking for a beating, aren't you?! Now! Repeat after me."
"Like…"
The backscratcher smacked his face, and a heel dug into his chest.
"Repeat. After. Me," she insisted, her weapon of choice in his face. "Mian hamnida."
"Wha…" he started to say before she raised her backscratcher up. "Mia ham need a!"
Yooji's eyes twitched briefly but she stepped off of him and stood off to the side, pointing with an imperial air with her backscratcher off toward the main building.
"Close enough," she said. "Get to class."
"But we still have thirty min…" the bully protested briefly before the girl turned back to look at him, and then he was scrambling off toward the main building.
As soon as he was gone, Yooji took several deep breaths, glancing around to make sure no one was watching, and then leaned against the wall clutching her heart and allowing a very relieved expression to pass over her face.
"You know, if you keep doing that," a new voice said, "you're going to have real trouble getting a boyfriend."
She just about jumped out of her shoes as she turned to look at the sandy blond girl next to her, smiling over at Yooji as she walked to where the Korean girl had just had her confrontation.
"Don't do that to me, Amber," Yooji said with a gasp. "And is that all you're worried about? I swear, one of these days, the whole badass thing is going to fall flat on its face and one of these giants is going to pancake me!"
"Oh don't worry about that," Amber said waving her hand. "I'm sure you have health insurance."
Yooji stared at the American teen in a state of combined shock and confusion as the girl slipped her arm through the taller Korean girl's and started strolling calmly up to the main building.
"So what's it like living alone in your very own house?" Amber asked excitedly. "Have you had any boys over, yet?"
"I don't have a boyfriend, Amber for the last time," Yooji said. "I'm like the only Korean person for a thousand miles or something."
"Yeah, but there are plenty of other guys," the American girl said. "From all over the world here."
Yooji sighed and shook her head in exasperation.
"Yeah, but they're not…"
"Excuse me, Miss," a boy said, walking up to them. "Which building do I receive my unit assignment from?"
"Unit assign…" Yooji stopped as she got a look at the boy talking to them.
The speaker was about sixteen, her own age, and stood about as tall as the thug she'd just taken to task, though he didn't have the coordinated excess bulk of that other boy. He spoke with an odd European accent and had dark hair, there was an odd half curving scar over the left eye and he showed none of the usual trepidation of new students to the academy, simply a cool request for information.
"Do you mean classroom assignment?" Amber asked. "Well, you're in luck, this is Yoon-Ji Jeon, Vice President of the Student Council at Bravura Academy."
"You're the secretary, you know," the Korean girl protested.
"Ah," the young man came to attention. "My apologies for wasting your time."
"No, no, my job is to help students," Yooji said. "Didn't they give you a packet in the mail?"
"The intelligence offered on the matter is unreliable," he continued, glancing at the packet of papers in his hand. "The registrar's office seems pretty clearly marked, but they have stated that I am already registered and they do not have the information of where I am assigned."
"Uh, you'll want the counselor's office," Yooji said. "All the new students get their room assignments from there. Then they'll send you to the auditorium for the orientation."
"Thank you," the boy said, nodding at her. "Might I ask where the security office is? I'd like to register a complaint about the checkpoint at the front gate."
"What checkpoint?" Amber asked, blinking.
"Exactly," the boy said. "As I understand it, the children of numerous VIPs attend this school, and the facility appears to be open for anybody who wants to come in."
"The gate is locked as soon as the bell rings," Yooji responded. "Besides, most of the students live on campus, so who's going to come in and out?"
"People that aren't supposed to be here," was the response.
Yooji frowned and tapped her backscratcher against her shoulder.
"What are you talking about," she said, tone of voice turning harsh. "It's a school, not a damn military base."
Amber, standing next to her blinked as her friend's attitude noticeably changed.
"But the students here should be kept safe in case…" the boy started to say.
"In case what?" Yooji asked. "The reason so many people send their kids here is because nothing happens here. No Iron Curtain, no McCarthyism, no piracy, no civil war, no tin-pot despots, nothing. It's quiet, and it's thousands and thousands of miles out of the way. The only thing trying to kill you around here is the damn continent and the animals on it. So just get yourself to the counselor's office and stop wasting my time!"
She pointed her backscratcher at him and frowned.
"Do you get it, mister?" she demanded.
To her surprise he snapped a salute, though she was almost certain that was sarcasm.
"Yes, Ma'am," he said sharply. "I shall attend to that right away."
"Then get to it!" Yooji snapped, gesturing with an imperial manner.
The tall boy clicked his heels together and marched off as ordered. Exactly as ordered.
"I think this school council thing is getting to me," the Korean girl said with a sigh as she slumped again.
"So," Amber said with a smile.
"So? What so?" her friend asked as they followed down the path.
"So, you decided to pull out bad-ass Yooji," Amber said. "And he didn't end up reciting something Korean."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Yooji asked as they moved into the main building and through the hallway. "Oh you're not going to pull an anime thing out, are you?"
"I was thinking more Benedict and Beatrice," the American said with a smirk. "Your jaw was hanging open for a good long look before you started talking."
"That doesn't mean anything," she protested. "He's not even Korean."
"So don't mention anything to your evil stepmother," Amber said. "And you're fine."
"Don't call my mum an evil stepmother," Yooji said with a sigh.
They were in their classroom not much later, sitting down and waiting for the homeroom teacher to get in to start the day. The room was more or less bare as compared to many American classrooms, mostly because it was shared by several teachers and the students assigned to the room hadn't come up with anything to put on the walls yet.
"Well, first day, we get a free period while they induct the new students," Amber said in a relaxed tone. "Explain the whole one classroom thing. So you can tell me about living in your own house now."
"It's not my house," Yooji protested. "I think it's my Dad's, or someone's. There's supposed to be a chaperone and another student in there this term. Part of the agreement, I think."
"I wonder if it's that boy from before," Amber said in a gasp. "Could you imagine sharing a house with him?"
"Oh please, would you give up on that?" her friend protested.
Amber took a deep breath and shook her head.
"Yooji," the blond girl said. "Most of the school knows that you're the best person to go to when someone needs help with something, because if you can't help you can tell them how to find people who can."
"It gets them out of my hair faster," she explained.
"And almost as many people think you're totally the iron hand part of Student Body President Karl's silk glove regime," Amber noted.
"Yeah, until they find out I'm a big fake that's going to get my teeth punched out some day," she said.
"And now half the town thinks you're the person that closed the school for a week with a coffeemaker," Amber listed. "And you did it without getting expelled. Well, you got kicked out of the dorms, but you didn't get expelled, or lose your Vice President's status."
"Yeah, Dad pulled some strings," she said, she thought of another option. "Or Mom did."
"The one time we had a Korean kid here two months ago," the friend said. "You totally pulled the phantom boyfriend thing until he gave up. At this rate, you're going to get all the way to college without ever going on a date with the same guy twice."
The teacher came in then, looking somewhat nervous as he adjusted his tie and glanced out the door toward the hallway. Everyone wondered, as they adjusted their seats to the normal row and column classroom arrangement, just what had him so nervous and several students glanced toward the door suddenly imagining that a King Kong sized thug was about to walk into the room.
"Oh, time to meet the new students!" Amber said excitedly.
"Uh, right," Yooji said, watching the door nervously along with everybody else.
The teacher cleared his throat and started to address the class, eyes still fluttering out of the room.
"Good day," the teacher said. "We have two new students in this class starting this term. If you might come in to introduce yourselves."
Two teenagers walked in, one was the boy that Yooji had given directions to earlier and the other was a short girl with pale skin, long black hair and a pair of John Lennon sunglasses.
There was no doubt which of the two had disturbed the teacher. The pale girl smiled at them in a friendly manner and Yooji felt a quick shiver while she saw the kids around her visibly shuddering. That was, except for Amber who smiled and waved at the two newcomers.
"I am pleased to meet you," the boy said from a position of attention. "I am Damir Milos, a scholarship student who has recently come to this school to learn about socializing with the civilian population."
Yooji arched an eyebrow, looking away from the oddly disturbing girl towards the boy.
"Did he just say 'civilian population'?" she asked Amber, leaning over toward the other girl.
"Maybe he's from a military family," the other girl said, shrugging. "Sounds Eastern European, how mysterious!"
"I got that much from his accent," Yooji noted with arched eyebrow.
The pale girl stood there politely waiting and doing nothing worth the creepy feeling exuding out of her. Eyes kept looking toward her, but the oddness of the boy's introduction was currently drawing more looks.
"So, umm, where are you from?" someone asked.
"That's a good question," the teacher said, apparently eager to lengthen Damir's introduction. "Why don't you tell us some of the places you've lived, Mr. Milos."
"Very well," he said. "I've lived in countries such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Somalia, Rwanda, Colombia and Indonesia."
Everyone simply stared.
"Really, he just strung together a list of war-zones, didn't he?" Yooji asked, shaking her head in irritation. "He's going to be trouble."
"Uh, right," the teacher said. "Do you have any special skills?"
"I have a civilian class C upright operations license," he said after some thought and emphasizing the word civilian. "Which I have only used to perform construction work, and only in the last year."
"Wow," Amber said. "That's specific."
"And perhaps you might tell us if…" the teacher started to say.
"Excuse me, sir," Damir said, "permission to speak freely?"
"Uh, go ahead," the teacher noted.
"Should not Semezou now introduce herself?" he asked casually. "I believe I have adequately described my mission here."
Eyes shifted toward the girl in question.
"I can wait," she said sweetly with an odd sort of accent that Yooji couldn't place.
"No, I suppose we should get on with class," the teacher noted. "Please introduce yourself."
The girl nodded and then bowed respectfully to the class.
"Greetings, I am Eija Semezou," she said, smiling and flashing a perfect set of pearly white teeth.
"Hello, little Miss Dracula," Yooji said under her breath.
"Oh, I think she's adorable," Amber said, apparently the only one not affected by the creepiness the girl was radiating.
"I have also traveled greatly," she said. "I was born in Greece with my brother and sister, but Mitera, that is Greek for mother, took jobs in many places so we often traveled with her."
"So do you have any hobbies or anything?" the boy two seats ahead of Yooji asked. "Drinking blood or turning into bats?"
"Mr. Rhodes!" the teacher snapped. "Behave yourself."
Though it was the tapping of a backscratcher pointedly on a desk behind him that really made Mr. Rhodes swallow nervously.
Eija, for her part, didn't seem to notice the interchange.
"I like herbology and painting, actually," she said. "I do not have any shape shifting abilities nor do I have much use for blood rites."
The teacher and collected students took a long moment to stare at her.
"Did I say something wrong?" she asked.
"No, no," the teacher said quickly before looking around the room. "Why don't the two of you sit…ah, there."
He pointed and Yooji glanced, horrorstruck, to her side and the two empty chairs that were beside her and Amber.
"Miss Jeon and Miss Lot are on the Student Council, so they'll be able to help you," the teacher said.
"Excellent," Damir said as he started walking toward the back of the class where the girls in question sat.
Behind him the girl followed up, people trying to lean away from her as she passed. Yooji had all of ten seconds to think how to handle this as the two came closer. And quickly she had her answer.
"You can sit here, Damir," she said, gesturing sharply with her backscratcher to the seat right next to her. "It'll be easier to watch you that way."
"Thank you, Vice President Jeon," the European boy said, sitting down. "I shall endeavor to attend to my tasks efficiently."
Eija sighed ever so slightly and Yooji felt a pang of guilt stab deep into her as the boy sat down next to her. Apparently her attempt at being subtle had failed. And she found herself fighting the urge to apologize, something that came from within and in spite of the creepiness that the girl still radiated.
Though it didn't seem to be affecting Damir.
"Oh don't worry about her," Amber said. "She's always a bit bossy."
"I'm used to it," Eija said quietly with a smile.
Yooji flinched at the statement and looked toward Damir and Amber, hoping for some sort of vindication for her perfunctory assignment of the boy to sit next to her rather than the girl. Amber gave her a way out, in a manner of speaking.
"She probably just wanted to sit next to the hot new guy," Amber said dismissively.
Half the class and Eija turned to look at Yooji and wait for her response and the Korean girl had to summon every ounce of the ruthless and irritable badass-Yooji to avoid breaking into hysterical laughter or crying right there as she considered the choices in front of her.
She could either admit the hot guy was hot, Korean or not, and imply a desire to sit next to him.
Or she could confirm that the polite creepy girl unnerved her and kick the metaphorical dog again.
"Yeah, my prerogative," Yooji said shrugging and tapping her backscratcher meaningfully against her shoulder. "Any problems with that?"
The class turned to look at the teacher so quickly even Eija was surprised and impressed. Amber meanwhile quietly clapped her hands together and hummed to herself in a sated way.
"Excuse me, Vice President Jeon," Damir said in a whispered tone as everyone turned away. "Can you explain the term 'hot guy'. I assume this is some form of slang."
Yooji's only response was to drop her head to the desk.
"That's normal too," Amber said with a smile and a shrug.
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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:32:16 GMT -7
Creepy Cute
Eija panted briefly as she paused and glanced backwards toward the rising sun with a brief sigh as she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her sunglasses to slip them over her deep-red eyes. From her perch on the edge of the roof she'd been running across, she watched the shifting colors, wondering what it looked like without the glasses, but knowing that even taking them off she still wouldn't see the sunrise since the brightness would just force her to close her eyes anyway.
She lifted her hand to her chest and took a deep breath.
"Hello, Miss," a male voice said in a careful soothing tone.
"Excuse me," she responded. "I shall not be here long."
"No, no," the voice said quickly. "Don't be in a rush. Just take a moment and consider matters."
Eija's eyebrows furrowed briefly as she thought about that statement. It was oddly nervous and insistent and there was a heavy feeling of worry from the source.
The girl turned to look at the speaker and noted it was a young man maybe about college aged, dressed a little sloppily and apparently he hadn't shaved in a while. She glanced up casually toward the dried red stain that dripped down from his head. There wasn't much pallor to his face though, usually that meant a certain level of awareness.
"I'll be back later," she said in a polite tone. "Right now I must return home to get ready for school."
So saying she pushed off the edge of the roof, passing to the side of the man with the dried blood on his face. It would have been rude to go through him.
"Stop, don't do it!" the fellow shouted, reaching out toward her.
Eija landed lightly before pushing herself into a straight run for the warehouse in which her family had just taken up residence. This left the person she'd been talking to staring with blinking eyes.
The remaining distance between her and her goal moved by in a blur along the edges of the mostly empty street. The street curled around, presenting a low building, maybe two stories, between her and the straight path to her goal and she launched herself off the ground, letting the energy of her body flow through her in a controlled burst such that she was able to grasp the top of the roof and pull herself up gracefully to the top of the building and continue pressing onward.
Another leap took her back into the air and over the old wall and into the courtyard of her new home. She alighted on the ground with easy grace and then straightened up before wiping the sweat off of her forehead. Glancing around, she realized that there was no one in sight and gave a small smile, eyebrows lighting up with a bit of happy pride.
Eija clapped her hands together quietly and walked up to the front entrance of the warehouse and stepped inside. Passing through the first hallway, through what used to be the front offices; she came out into the main hall and stopped in the doorway before slumping slightly as she saw her brother running routines in the practice area. A moment later, her sister came out of one of the other doors in the part of the warehouse that had been made habitable already, it was quite clear she'd just finished showering.
That, of course, meant that she'd been here longer than Deimosu had.
"Anything to be aware of?" her mother's voice asked from behind her.
Eija turned to look at the short, slight Japanese woman that was her mother.
The pale girl with the red eyes was small and and curvy, but her mother was just about as tiny, and despite the clear family resemblance, especially in their faces, she often wondered how someone as tall as her brother and sister could have come out of Mao.
"There is something to take care of after classes, but nothing concerning," she said quickly and politely.
Mao nodded and looked toward Naiki.
"Now can someone explain the reason one of the buildings two blocks from here had its roof cave in?" the red-headed woman asked.
Eija's green-haired sister winced as she turned to face their mother and gave a nervous, toothy smile.
"There was nobody inside," she said weakly.
The rest of the family took a collective, long-suffering breath and shook their heads.
"We'll be talking about this," Mao said. "Eija, I'll handle the lunches and breakfast while you finish up your morning routine."
"Awww, I was hoping for some good Greek food," Naiki said.
"Well, I can make some if you…" Mao was stopped as quickly as her children responded.
"Japanese will be fine, Okaasan!" Deimosu said.
"Please do not trouble yourself, Mitera," Eija noted.
"Not your Greek food, Mum!" Naiki protested quickly.
Everybody looked toward Naiki following that blunt declaration.
"I think I'll go to the shower now," Deimosu said quickly. "Training floor's all yours Eija-chan."
"Thank you," the pale-skinned girl said, taking the opportunity to quickly get out of the area.
"Umm, sorry Mum?" Naiki said quickly.
It was almost another hour later that had the three walking down out of the neighborhood towards the rest of the town. Naiki stood in the middle of the three, holding out her wrapped lunch with a depressed expression on her face.
"Well, you should have chosen your words just a little more carefully," Eija noted from one side of the girl.
"Especially after being less than careful when you were on the run this morning," Deimosu added.
"I wonder if I have money to buy lunch," Naiki muttered.
As they left the forgotten, mostly abandoned neighborhood that sat at the edge of the small Australian city, they started to see people walking along the sidewalks and streets.
"At least we got our room assignments yesterday. But we're all three in different classes," her green-haired sister said after a few minutes of casual walking. "All day, what kind of crazy system is this where you stay in the same class all the time?"
They were walking up to a corner and coming to a stop while waiting for the light to change. Eija and Naiki were wearing the off-white and purple uniforms of their new school, though Naiki had taken the option of a feminine pair of slacks rather than a skirt. Deimosu was wearing the male version, a sort of dark gray jacket and pants. A dark purple vest was worn under the jacket with a dark silver-grey tie.
"It's the way things are done in Japan and a couple of other Asian countries," Eija noted.
One of the people in front of her, a tall woman with brown hair dressed in a modest business suit, shivered briefly and turned around to look at the Semezou triplets. Eija inwardly winced as the woman's eyes found hers through the dark lenses of her sunglasses. The woman's lower lip quivered briefly and then Eija nervously smiled at her with a friendly little wave. The woman twisted away and took several steps away from Eija to the edge of the sidewalk, glancing over her shoulder nervously. The motion seemed to be the trigger for several other people to step away from Eija, whether they were consciously aware of her or not.
Naiki and Deimosu, as usual, pretended not to notice and kept talking with her as if nothing was going on, while Eija continued to try and keep the slump out of her shoulders. All around her and her siblings was a circle empty of almost anybody else. She saw one man dressed in dark clothing, possibly a mortician, and an older woman in hospital scrubs still standing as if they hadn't noticed anything, as well as a man in military fatigues and two kids, both less than ten years old.
"We'll have to make sure to meet for lunch," Deimosu said. "And it is quite possible that there will be electives we can share together."
"I already picked my electives," Naiki said, yawning. "And I know Eija has too, probably art and cooking or whatever. Am I right?"
"Yes, that's correct," Eija said with a start, looking up from her nervous attempt not to look any of the people glancing at her in the eye.
"See, she's always into that stuff," Naiki said. "I guess it probably helps with circles and spell-casting and stuff."
"I just like art," Eija protested, clutching her sketchbook defensively.
Naiki nodded absently and waved her hand at Eija's protest.
"Right, right," the green-haired girl said.
"I took sculpting," Deimosu said. "And yes that's for crystals. What about you Naiki?"
"Swimming and co-ed track," Naiki said.
"We already have one physical education class," Eija said. "And we train for three hours a day after classes. And you took two extra physical education classes?"
"You train for three hours," Naiki said. "Deimosu and I train like five hours."
"If you call what you do solo 'training'," Deimosu noted. "And Eija spends a lot more time than both of us on other disciplines…like first aid and acupuncture."
The light changed and several people started to rush forward away from where Eija stood. Naiki stretched and started to walk forward as well at a calmer pace. Her pale sister reached out to grab hold of Naiki's sleeve and pull her aside so she didn't walk into the man in the military fatigues.
"Excuse us," Eija said quietly to him with a nod as Naiki blinked.
"Don't worry about it," the soldier said. "I'm used to it."
"Ugh! Is one of them here?" Naiki asked in Greek. "Why don't you do whatever it is you do and make them go away?"
"Naiki," Eija said quietly. "Try not to be rude."
She waved back over her shoulder at the soldier.
"Besides which, it's not a short thing," Deimosu said in the same language. "And you know that. We don't have that kind of time."
"Oh please, it's just school," Naiki said. "There's nothing dangerous or worth worrying about."
The taller of the two sisters put her hands behind her head and shrugged as Eija and Deimosu exchanged a look.
Bravura Academy was a boarding school for the most part, with on-site dorms where most of the students lived. Eija idly wondered whether the students that lived there would be allowed to leave the campus after hours, or if they would be allowed to remain on the campus. Not that it mattered much; it was just another reason most of the kids would have for not interacting with her or her siblings.
"The flows have been well shaped here," Deimosu noted drawing a nod from Eija.
"Every time we go somewhere," Naiki said stretching. "You say something about the chi flows or stuff. As if you can see it like Mum could."
"You don't have to," Eija noted. "I think a feng shui shih from our same school of thought helped plan the grounds. They use the same basic efforts for privacy and production."
She pointed back to the gates.
"We walked up an incline to get to the gates," she said. "There were no stairs to attract attention, and when people wander they will tend to move away from inclines. And the grounds inside are slightly lower than the edge, making it harder to see from below, especially past the buildings on the streets below. But inside, everything is set up for freedom of motion and ease of moving from one building to the next."
Naiki looked at her blandly and Eija sighed.
"I refuse to believe you are not capable of understanding that," Eija said.
"Capable, willing, whatever," Naiki said shrugging her shoulders.
"This is why you get in trouble," Deimosu said with a frown.
"Anyway," Naiki said. "Let's get to this orientation thing and be done with it."
The orientation was in the auditorium and was filled with a bunch of young boys and girls from all around, the first year students and a handful of older kids transferring in like the Semezou triplets had. Already, Eija was gauging dangers from the people around her and she knew that her siblings were doing the same, or at least they should be.
There was a lanky kid who had the arrogant aura of someone who expected his troubles to go away before he noticed them. He was one of the older transfers and Eija wondered if he had been expelled from some other school. It was one of the things people had expected of her in the past when she'd come mid-term to a new school.
That, of course, meant that it was not the only possible explanation.
Moving on from the lanky person, she looked over the collection of younger students in between the other transfers. Not much of note in there, the lanky kid was the first one she thought of as any sort of problem.
On the stage, the principal and dean continued speaking calmly about procedures and rules. She kept one part of her paying attention to that orientation carefully, if for no other reason than because Naiki wasn't. There wasn't anything particularly unusual about it except for the whole organization of classes being based on the Japanese way of doing things and it wasn't going to be hard to simply stay in the same room class to class. Still, it generally paid to pay attention.
"And now, it is time for you all to find your classrooms," came the final word of the orientation speech. "I hope your time here is very successful."
"Okay," Naiki said, flipping to her feet and twisting about. "Finally, so let's get to class."
With that she started walking determinedly out of the door, heading for her class, or at least planning to.
"She is right," Eija said with a sigh. "I shall see you after classes, I assume?"
"Of course you will," Deimosu said as if he shouldn't have to confirm that.
Eija nodded with a soft smile and walked into the crowds of students. There was no difficulty getting through the door or into the halls as students parted ahead of her, shivering slightly for reasons that they weren't entirely sure of. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw Deimosu was already turned and passing through the crowd on his own in another direction. That meant that she was alone.
She reached a hand up to her chest and held it there over her heart, the center of her palm about two inches to the left of her heart. The beats were quickening slightly and the people around her stepped further away from her than before, though a lot of that was due to the thinning of the crowds rather than her own loss of control.
The door with her assigned room number came into view fairly soon, and ahead of her it looked like there was at least one other new student in the same class. He was talking to a teacher who was also just about to reach the room and it was a moment before the pale girl realized that she hadn't noticed the boy in the orientation, even though a glance to his hands found the documents that had been passed out there.
"How did I miss him?" she wondered.
She cast her mind back toward the orientation and how she'd scanned the auditorium to take in the other new students.
"No, wait," she thought. "I scanned the students, not the whole auditorium. I didn't look into the areas I thought to be empty."
She kept the shade of nervousness that awakened in her off her face as she stepped forward, quickening her pace to catch up to the two.
"Excuse me, sir," she said in a friendly, cheerful tone. "I am Eija Semezou; I believe that I'm assigned to this classroom."
The man turned around toward her and the smile on his face was already dying as he noticed her completely. She held off the wince and kept the friendly look on her face despite the way the man stepped away from her.
"Right," the man said. "I'm Mr. Terrence, can you and Mr. Milos wait out here for a moment, I'll call for you to come in and introduce yourself in a moment."
She nodded and looked over to the boy as the teacher gestured toward him.
Mr. Milos was tall with dark hair and a semi-circular scar over one eye that her experience told her was from a short fall that had cracked open his skull on the edge of something. Deimosu had had a similar scar for a time, but it was almost completely faded away now. This boy's injury hadn't been treated as well and had scarred more distinctly.
"Hello," the boy said with a European accent as he extended his hand. "I am Damir Milos. I am pleased to meet you."
She smiled and took the hand politely.
"Thank you," Eija said. "I'm happy to meet you as well."
He didn't flinch when she shook his hand, and that was odd. The military way he held himself started to take on a little bit more interest for her and she was briefly considering opening her eyes up all the way when they were called into the next room.
It was hard for Eija to listen as the dark haired girl came into the class room and looked out at the large group of people as she stood at the front, to be presented by the apparent leader of the congregation who stood at his podium…she reminded herself it wasn't an altar…directing the class…it wasn't a ritual…. She tried to keep her heart beating slowly, keeping in mind breath and body control techniques, but, even so, her heart beat pounded fiercely in her ears and her breath rasped loudly in her mouth.
The polite, mild smile did not leave her face, nor did the hands come from behind her book, but she listened to the boy at her side talk about some distinctly dangerous parts of the world. Those Eastern European states that remained allied under the Warsaw Pact even after the economic collapse of the Soviet Union were especially dangerous to people like her family. Psychics had a tendency to disappear into hidden laboratories over there. Her eyes darted about, taking into account the exits of the room…
…the window would easily break and probably wasn't able to cut her skin deeply. It was only the third story of the school, an easy jump…
…the sorts of seating the students were in…
…there was no way that any of those other kids could get out of the chair quick enough to stop her first seconds of action…
…and other such things.
"Don't be paranoid," she chided herself in her thoughts. "This isn't a ceremony space, these aren't cultists, I'm not the sa…"
"Should not Semezou now introduce herself?" the boy next to her asked casually. "I believe I have adequately described my mission here."
Eyes shifted toward the girl in question.
"I can wait," she said sweetly, burying her own anxiety.
"No, I suppose we should get on with class," the teacher noted. "Please introduce yourself."
Eija nodded and turned toward the large group of people that were staring at her with a trace of mild fear. Most of them were cautious and on edge, but she knew, intellectually, that that was her fault. People were always frightened of her. Still, it made her nervous, being away from her family and facing so many people by herself. Sometimes, she wondered if any of her family was aware of how nervous she was on her own, or if she'd managed to keep her act fairly well.
"Greetings, I am Eija Semezou," she said, smiling in a friendly manner learned over years of hopeful attempts at making friends and fitting in with the people around her.
A pair of girls in the back muttered between each other. Neither of them seemed as scared as some of the other people in the class. One of the two, a dirty blond actually waved at her and gave a smile as bright as one that Naiki might give.
Between that and the boy next to her, who seemed even to be speaking up for her, she felt some confidence building. In fact, the whole class room seemed to be getting just a little bit brighter around her.
"I have also traveled greatly," she said. "I was born in Greece with my brother and sister, but Mitera, that is Greek for mother, took jobs in many places so we often traveled with her."
"So do you have any hobbies or anything?" one of the boys asked. "Drinking blood or turning into bats?"
"Mr. Rhodes!" the teacher snapped. "Behave yourself."
Eija considered the question, resisting the urge to squirm at the mention of drinking blood. She'd never had the urge to drink blood, nor did she use all that much in the way of blood rituals herself. She had no problem with blood willingly donated to a spell, but given that spellcasting was already a rigorously painful process for her family, she didn't feel like they needed any more damage on top of that.
It was curious that they would ask about such things so openly, however. Then again, she'd already noticed that the school used the same school of geomantic thought as her mother did, so maybe the school was a Psyche front. Though given that the closest haven was several hundred miles away, she somehow thought that was wrong.
"I like herbology and painting, actually," she said. "I do not have any shape shifting abilities nor do I have much use for blood rites."
The teacher and collected students took a long moment to stare at her.
"Did I say something wrong?" she asked.
"No, no," the teacher said quickly before looking around the room. "Why don't the two of you sit…ah, there."
He pointed and Eija was relieved to see that he was directing them to sit by those two girls toward the back.
"Miss Jeon and Miss Lot are on the Student Council, so they'll be able to help you," the teacher said.
"Excellent," the boy next to her said as he started walking toward the back of the class where the girls in question sat.
The pale girl remembered vaguely that his name was Damir and again chided herself for her earlier anxiety attack. She followed behind him, hoping he wouldn't take the very back seat before she got there, but couldn't see a way to get past him without making a scene.
"You can sit here, Damir," the Korean girl said, gesturing sharply with her backscratcher to the seat right next to her. "It'll be easier to watch you that way."
"Thank you, Vice President Jeon," the European boy said, sitting down. "I shall endeavor to attend to my tasks efficiently."
Eija sighed ever so slightly. That would put her in the back where she wanted to be. Excellent view of everything in the room, though she was a little disappointed at the brief glance her way that the girl with the backscratcher had given her.
"Oh don't worry about her," the blond said with an American accent. "She's always a bit bossy."
"I'm used to it," Eija said quietly with a smile.
The Korean girl winced slightly at the comment, and the death-seer recognized the trace of guilt people usually felt after deciding that their fear of her was undeserved. It was still milder than what most people seemed to feel, which was at least something of a relief.
"She probably just wanted to sit next to the hot new guy," the blond said dismissively.
Eija glanced to look toward Damir surreptitiously as most people seemed to stare at Yooji and felt her pale face warm slightly as she realized that she was trying to determine whether or not she agreed with the other girl's assessment of Mr. Milos. He was quite interesting looking, but she wasn't sure that the boy with the Croatian accent could be really considered hot or not.
"Yeah, my prerogative," the Korean girl said shrugging and tapping her backscratcher meaningfully against her shoulder. "Any problems with that?"
The class turned to look at the teacher so quickly even Eija was surprised and impressed. Unlike her own issues, this Miss Jeon was skilled at invoking fear all on her own. Perhaps that would require some caution, especially if her fear and power came from use of her apparent position. Though Eija wondered just how much power the student council could actually have.
The class began in earnest then and there wasn't much chance to get more than the given names of the two girls sitting between her and the bulk of the class. The blond was Amber Lot and the Korean was Yoon-Ji Jeon. The boy was Damir Milos, and he was keeping a careful eye on the surroundings, like she was.
Beyond just the professional level of awareness he had, he'd caught her analyzing him at least once, he the fact that he seemed to have already shed all his baby fat, unlike most teenagers, and he was in excellent physical condition. She didn't think he had that lightness of form and motion that implied someone trained to channel chi into their motions, but then again, her mother was the expert in perceiving spiritual energies like that. Still, he was ready for action, if it came down to it; Eija thought he'd have Deimosu's level of control with Naiki's reaction time.
She'd have to mention this to her mother later.
The bell rang out above her and the other students started to stand.
"All right, so now I've got art," the Korean girl said. "You Amber?"
"Photography," the girl said smiling. "Same as last term."
"All right, I'll see you…"
"I have art," Eija said quickly. "Do you think that you might show me the way, Miss Jeon?" The Korean girl paused and turned to look at her carefully before answering.
"Sure," she said finally before quickly turning toward Damir. "How about you, what's your elective right now?"
"I am also in photography," he said. "It is an effective skill for acquiring information to reference easily later. Though I suppose hand drawing is less conspicuous in some circumstances."
"I just like drawing, actually," Eija said.
Damir paused for a moment and considered that.
"I see," he said, though Eija wasn't sure he actually did.
The red-eyed girl sighed.
"Whatever," Miss Jeon said. "Let's go, the art room is in the next building."
Eija nodded and stood up, reaching for her bag to retrieve her sketch pad and the modest art kit she had. Her supposed guide was already getting close to the door, so she picked up her pace mildly to catch up, hoping she didn't put too much speed on. Looking over her head, she saw Miss Lot talking to Mr. Milos animatedly.
"She's got a boyfriend," the girl ahead of her said casually.
"Huh?" Eija said as they walked out of the room.
"You're wondering about the other new kid talking to Amber," the Korean girl said. "And I'm telling you she has a boyfriend and is really close with him, so I doubt she's going to get in your way…if you're interested in that sort of guy."
"I wasn't interested," Eija said quickly, flushing. "Like that anyway."
"Uh huh, yeah, I saw the way you looked him over," Yoon-Ji said idly. "I'll admit, he looks…good."
Eija missed the slight flush on the other girl's face as they walked through the halls toward the stairs.
"No, really," Eija said thoroughly flustered now. "I was…I was just admiring his stance."
"Uh huh," the other girl noted with narrowed eyes, looking ahead.
The crowd was giving way ahead of them, which Eija did not find particularly unusual. What she did find note-worthy was that the other girl didn't seem to be surprised either. In fact as it happened she seemed to get a bit angry and tapped her backscratcher against her shoulder.
"Excuse me, Miss Jeon," Eija said, moving into a slightly faster pace than her small frame usually adopted. "Are people usually scared of you as well?"
"What are you talking about?" the other asked as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
She gestured toward some kids standing in front of the door and Eija watched as the other students virtually stood at attention and cleared off down the halls. The pale girl turned to glance over at Yoon-Ji and both her eyebrows raised up over her sunglasses.
"All right, I have a bit of a reputation," she said. "And I guess the goth thing explains you."
"What goth thing?" Eija asked, her red lips stood out against her pale skin as she frowned in a combination of confusion and denial.
"Right," the other girl said, stopping just outside the door to the next building. "Let's see that sketchbook."
Eija hesitated briefly and then handed it over cautiously, the other girl took it in a polite manner that seemed to go against the rough attitude she portrayed, and then started flipping through it.
"Let's see what kind of creepy things you have drawn in here," the Korean girl said. "There's probably webs, ghosts, spiders and…kittens? You draw pictures of kittens?"
"I don't just draw kittens," Eija protested. "There's the next page…"
"That's…a very pretty fountain," Yooji said with a hint of disbelief. She continued as if she was in absolute shock. "And I kinda… really like these clouds."
"Thank you," Eija said with a small smile of accomplishment.
"Is this an old boyfriend here?" she asked. "He's pretty good looking."
"Uh, no, that's my brother," Eija said, peeking around Yoon-Ji's side to see what she was talking about. "And that's my sister and my mother."
"Cool," the student vice president said. "You really like your family don't you? All this lightning here and is your mother supposed to be glowing?"
"Well, yes," Eija said, embarrassed.
"Why did you give your sister teeth like that?" the girl asked then.
"Because she has teeth like that," the ghost-whisperer said.
"Huh, she should see a dentist about that," was the response.
"Somehow, it works for her," Eija said with a shrug.
"Anyway, great stylistic embellishments," Yooji said enthusiastically.
Eija paused a moment and her eyes moved around cautiously.
"Right…embellishments," she said hesitantly.
Eija watched as the other girl switched to the next page and stared at it a bit blankly as if trying to figure it out. Her mouth was barely moving as a difficult to understand muttering came out of it.
"Pardon, what did you say?" Eija's voice asked.
Yooji shook her head clear and blinked.
"Uh…I said 'Are you into electrical engineering'?" she clarified. "That last page looks like one hell of a circuit. Well lots of circuits anyway."
"Lots of…" Eija blinked and looked down at the page. "Maybe if the circles shared some points. Hmm, that might work. One complex circle instead of a complicated mess."
The taller girl started to turn and say something else and then shivered as she looked over at Eija. She tried to keep the reaction down, but the way the new girl deflated more than showed that the brief and irrational discomfort was noted.
"Shouldn't we get to class then, Miss Jeon?" Eija asked.
"Err, call me Yooji," the senior student said by way of apology.
"All right, Yoon-Ji," the martial artist responded.
"Yooji," the girl with the dyed-black hair corrected, taking a subtle step away from Eija after handing back the sketchbook. "It's a nickname, just crush the syllables together."
Eija noted the step, but didn't comment. It was unusual for most strangers to be even this tolerant. Well, unless they dealt with death on a regular basis or were too innocent, and as long as the girl was willing to at least talk to her even hesitantly, then Eija wouldn't be exactly alone with all these strangers. That was moderately comforting.
"Now, let's get to class before…"
The bell rang through the compound provoking a sigh from Yooji.
"Before that."
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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:32:55 GMT -7
In Motion
Naiki wasn't particularly paying attention to the orientation speech. Instead she was smelling the air and scanning the audience.
She could smell blond on the air. It was a lovely scent as always.
It wasn't all that big of a trick. Different ethnicities, with different genetics and slightly different body chemistries put out somewhat different smells. When one spent one's life learning to distinguish specific people from the whole by scent, it became relatively simple to distinguish whole groups from each other. Add to that a rather specific fascination with blonds and she had definitely learned to tell that subset apart from the others.
There were more than a handful of blonds in the building with her.
There were also one or two people that were less human than she and her siblings were, but that was less important.
For the moment, she was instead focused on comparing the various merits of one blond to the next. Though most of what she saw around her were just little kids - a whole year younger than her. Still, there were a couple of people where she could see the face of the doctor that patched them all up for three years starting about the time they were six or seven.
Mum had really liked Dr. Njaladottir, so clearly blonds were very important.
Naiki herself really had three things going for her, looks wise. She was tall, she had big breasts already at sixteen, and she had green hair, making her exotic! However, other than that, she was kind of bleagh. She didn't have the crazy body-builder muscles, but she did have a little more visible definition than was ideal for getting dates save from a certain set of guys or girls, or so she'd heard anyway. Her face was bland and her teeth were visibly sharp. Fortunately, apparently most people never got past the second of her three appearance advantages to really notice, or at least she told herself that.
The guy at the podium said something about time or something and people started moving out of their seats.
"Okay," Naiki said, flipping to her feet and twisting about. "Finally! So let's get to class!"
She walked out the door with a bare glance toward her sister and brother, not giving time for either Deimosu to decide that he needed to perform brotherly oversight or for Eija to decide that she needed a sibling security blanket.
Dry land tended to be a sort of muted sensation for Naiki. Scents, sights and sounds were the most clear and sight and sound could be downright spectacular, but she almost had to be touching someone to pick up an electrical field off of them and forget feeling motions. The air was just not nearly thick enough to pull that off.
Still most people stayed on dry land, and thus dry land was where all the really fun and interesting stuff happened. It was also where a lot of the bloody and dangerous stuff happened. She wanted to be around for the first bit. She didn't want Eija or Deimosu to be alone for the second bit. So, Naiki tolerated dry land and thrived on the people it put her in contact with.
Her thoughts were diverted from her calmly cheerful walk through the hallways as she came to an intersection of several halls and the crowd started to split up into different directions.
"Home-room," she muttered. "Home-room. Where's the home-room?"
Blinking she turned around to thrust a hand against the wall, blocking the way for whatever random person was to her side.
Well, not entirely random.
A small cloud of dust rose up from the impact between her hand and the wall causing her to wince briefly at the minor amount of damage she'd just done to the establishment. Oh well, wasn't like anybody would know it was her. She turned her attention toward the girl whose passage she had just blocked.
Naiki wasn't exactly sure what the girl was aside from not human, because there were about twenty near-human races that she knew about and had never met yet. This one had red marks on her face resembling something like chains along her cheeks and down her neck along with a circle with a keyhole on her forehead. Not tattoos, marks, Naiki couldn't smell any ink on the girl. Dark, blood-red hair hung over one side of her face, obscuring it. Of course, the thing that drew Naiki's attention was the cane the girl was leaning heavily on and the dry, withered smell that she was now getting off the girl's left arm and leg.
"Oh crap! I just accosted a cripple," she snapped in Greek to herself, smacking her forehead and then switching to English as she failed to note the grimace and twitching eye from the girl in front of her. "Hey, how do I find my homeroom?"
"I'd imagine you'd check your introductory packet," the other girl said bitterly before hobbling around Naiki and continuing down the hall.
"Introductory packet?" Naiki said aloud as the girl left.
"You can read, Deep One?" the girl called back in Greek. "Can't you?"
"Of course I can read," Naiki shouted. "I…wait. What? Did you call me 'Deep One'?! That's rude and completely uncalled fo…" she paused and thought about what she had said. "…okay, maybe with the 'cripple' thing it was a little called for, but…wait, what? You speak Greek?!"
Of course, the girl was already out of her sight and the crowds were thinning in her particular area. She looked around as people started to leave her area, some a bit faster than was normal, though not because of her from the looks of things.
"Ah, come on, you're not all going to leave me out here lost for the bell to ring, are you?" she asked no one in particular, receiving no answer in particular back.
At least until the bell rang and the scents in the hallway started to pare down to one that smelled rather like an adult. Turning back to look over her shoulder to see a teacher coming down the hall, stop and stare at the damaged wall before looking to Naiki and crossing his arms.
The green-haired girl sighed and let her arms and head droop as she realized that an extra trip to the office was forthcoming.
First class. First day.
Not even that. ________________________________________
"Now, Miss Semezou," the woman behind the desk said. "We can understand you feeling frustrated about being lost. But that is no reason to take it out on the building."
Naiki's feet were bouncing as she sat in the chair. The assistant principal watched her fidgeting and foot tapping and wondered if the girl might have been a sufferer of ADHD or something similar. Then again, there was her height and clear athleticism and she wondered if there was some other explanation.
"Yeah," Naiki said. "I got a bit careless, but didn't break the wall this time, just sort of dented it. I'll hold back more next time."
The woman across from her grimaced slightly at the implications, it wasn't as though they used anything as cheap as dry wall for the hallways. It was real hardwood and shouldn't have been vulnerable to a simple, casual smack. The rational answer, of course, was that the girl was trying to cover for her mistake by making it look like more of an accident. Of course, in a previous month, the student body vice president had gone into the teacher's office to brew a pot of coffee for the faculty meeting and two minutes later, power surges had sparked off flames all throughout the main building.
For her part, Naiki was worried about only one thing: her mother being called. She really didn't want to be training memory, attention and precision control simultaneously. The first two usually involved booby traps and the last usually involved trying to not-break things which Naiki didn't want broken.
"Now, I have your room assignment and schedule here," the woman said. "And we're going to set this incident aside for now, but do realize that this means you've already had your warning."
"Yes, thank you, Ma'am, Mrs. Grissom, Ma'am," Naiki said quickly. "Can I go now please?"
"You may," the vice principal said.
She turned at her desk to look toward her printer, took the sheet from it and twisted again to find Naiki gone.
Shaking her head with a sigh, the woman waited a moment, wondering whether or not to buzz the receptionist to cut the girl off at the front office. And then the door opened and the embarrassed looking girl came bobbing in apologetically, the asymmetrically braided "shark tail" of her green hair, obviously dyed, shaking behind her.
"Umm, you said something about room assignments and schedule?" Naiki asked nervously.
The assistant principal held out the paper with a tightly controlled smirk, or maybe grimace and Naiki gingerly took it before leaving the room waving apologetically.
Clearly a nice if somewhat scatterbrained girl.
Hopefully she wasn't going to be too much trouble. ________________________________________
As Mrs. Grissom paid her tribute to the patron saint of impeccably bad timing, Murphy, Naiki was making her way to the class that she was already thirty minutes late for. It was much easier this time, what with the lack of people in the halls and actually having a paper that told her where she needed to be.
Following a familiar stand-out scent trail to a particular door with the emblazoned numbers indicating that this is where she was supposed to be. She approached this set of details and information with her usual level of caution and consideration by pulling door open and half-barging inside.
"Okay, hey," she said, waving at the teacher who was staring at her along with most of the class. "Umm, sorry, I got lost and had to go to office and get my room assignments re-printed. So, sorry again, and I guess I'll sit down and get on with...whatever."
The green-haired girl scanned the room and found an empty seat which she started to head for and paused as she caught sight of a certain mane of red-hair in the back of the room.
"Oh hey, it's the cripple-girl," she said, waving in a friendly manner. "I mean, sorry, the girl I scared accidentally. Sorry about that."
There was no missing the image of the mentioned girl's twitching eye and mouth as Naiki talked.
"Wait," Naiki said in embarrassment. "That didn't come out right, maybe…"
"Maybe you could quit rambling, introduce yourself and sit down?" the teacher asked.
"Oh, right," the girl said, scratching the back of her head. "Umm, I'm Naiki Semezou, and I'm new here, my brother and sister are attending school too. We're kind of triplets, and Mum taught us mostly and school really isn't my thing, but I'll try not to cause too much trouble. All right?"
She gave a wide, nervous toothy smile, her hands both raised with two thumbs up and most of the people in the class sort of twittered at her. Which was equal parts annoying and relieving. At least she didn't have Eija's problem. Still, the most annoying thing about the class was the more or less absence of anything blond.
"Please sit down, Miss Semezou," the teacher said with a weary sigh. "I believe you'll find the book in your desk."
Naiki took out a book from the stack of texts in her desk, she wasn't quite sure it was the correct book but that was mostly because she was, for the moment, focused on other things than the introductory stuff that was going on in these first classes. So she sat in her desk and turned through pages, eyes skimming over the text here and there and worrying about her mother getting word that she had gotten into trouble the first day.
"Now, I see we're running out of time," the teacher said calmly, glancing up toward the clock. "So I'll leave you with an assignment to be finished by the end of the week. I'll need an essay summarizing the class syllabus and your opinions as to why it is arranged the way it is."
Naiki nodded absently.
"Got it," she said, not looking up from her desk and the picture she was doodling.
A simple buzz signaled the end of the class and the teacher walked out of the room as Naiki paused in confusion before glancing up and around
"Wait. What?"
The boy next to her glanced over, twisting in his desk as the break period between classes saw many of the students doing likewise. Mostly they were coming together in small groups of two and three to discuss the class, the new students or anything else.
"He gave a homework assignment," the boy said. "But it wasn't really that hard. All you have to do is summarize what we'll be studying out of the book and say why you think it was put in that order. You've got notes right? I've been watching you scribble stuff for a while now."
Naiki glanced back down at her childish doodle of her mother putting her through various exaggerated training exercises. Okay, so she'd forgotten to get her teeth out of that particular worry. This brought up focus and awareness again: her big problems. Namely that she sometimes, like now, failed to shift focus and thus let awareness slip.
"Or maybe not," the boy beside her said with a knowing smile. "What's that some sort of superhero character?"
He was on the small side with clearly Mid-Eastern looks to his face, and wearing a pair of simple glasses under short-cropped dark hair. Very nice and friendly to the look and very nerdy, which wouldn't have mattered really… if he were blond. Still, didn't need to be blond to be a friend to talk to.
"No. I'm kind of worried Mum will hear I screwed up my first day," Naiki said. "She gets upset when we screw up basic stuff and then she takes over training from us."
"Training," her class-neighbor asked. "I guess you do some sort of sport?"
"Martial arts," Naiki explained. "And stuff."
Exorcism, which Naiki barely knew anything about, was not something to discuss too openly. Nor was magic or chi channeling or anything else "new age-y".
"I'm Issa Massri," he said, holding out a hand to her.
Naiki blinked and looked up at him.
"Wow, there'res lots of people from all over the place here," she said.
"Indeed, I'd guess you were from one of the US Asian states," Issa said. "But your English is accented incorrectly for that."
"Born in Greece," the green-haired girl said in a friendly tone. "But I think Mum is Japanese-Australian originally."
"Ah, so this must be a home co –"
Issa was interrupted by the clunking sound of a cane that thudded pointedly into the floor behind the two talking students. Naiki turned about and found the non-human girl with the red-marks and withered left side.
"Before you continue with this conversation," she said darkly in Greek. "I wish to make you aware, Deep One –"
"Hey, I apologized, stop being rude," Naiki snapped irritably.
"I wish to make you aware, Scion of the Waters," the girl continued irritably. "That you have offended Hel Logesdottir multiple times now. I will not stand for further public humiliation."
Naiki blinked and scratched her head.
"When did I humiliate you?" she asked seriously.
Hel's visible eye twitched and she glanced toward Issa.
"Massri, I hope you don't intend to let this one distract you," she said. "Her mere presence is going to reduce our comparative averages without you letting your scores relax as well."
"How am I going to reduce your 'comparative averages'?" Naiki asked in a confused manner.
"Very clearly you are of a sort whose puissance in physical capabilities is in direct inverse proportion to your accomplishments of the mental variety," Hel said irritably.
"Hey, thanks," the green-haired girl said. "I try to work out all the….wait. What?"
And of course, the other girl was already limping back to her desk without hanging around to answer the question.
Issa laughed a bit nervously and turned to look toward Naiki.
"Don't worry too much about her," he said. "Every week the school puts out the class averages and she's been comparing us to other classes in our year. Class 3E is consistently scoring better than our class and every once in a while, so does Class 3B."
"Oh … a competition, got it," Naiki said. "Yeah, okay, I'll keep out of her way so she can get all her high grades and stuff and just do my thing."
"Well, it's class averages she worries about," Issa said.
"Okay, so what's that got to do with me?" the green-haired girl asked.
"You're part of the class."
"But I'm not part of the average class, so we're fine," Naiki said with a shrug before turning back to her text books. "Next class was history right?"
"That was last class," Issa said.
Naiki glanced back over her shoulder at the sound of a thump and wondered briefly why Hel was repeatedly letting her head fall against the desk she was sitting at, but shrugged it off and turned back to trying to get out the right book for the next class as the teacher walked in through the door.
The next break in classes saw a handful of other students besides Issa gravitating toward the new student out of curiosity.
"Did you say that your family practices martial arts?" one guy asked, sitting on a desk talking to her.
"Yeah, I've been practicing like forever," Naiki answered casually.
"So you can break boards and bricks and stuff?" a girl asked.
Naiki snorted a bit at the way they asked about such simple things. She could break boards, bricks, most cars, buildings…cause earthquakes. Okay, the last was less martial arts and more just her, but still.
"Sure," she said in a friendly tone after getting hold of herself.
"Oh, awesome! We've got like our very own VP Jeon here," one of the kids said.
"VP Jeon?" Naiki asked.
"Yoon-Ji Jeon," Hel noted from where she sat, "Mathematical and scientific prodigy, adoptive daughter of Jeon Industries owner and CEO, Kyung-Suk Jeon, Vice President of the absurdly influential student council at this institution. She has a reputation for being one of the more dangerous people at this school and she is the leading high scorer for Class 3E."
"She also reprogrammed a coffeemaker to shut down the entire school for a week!" one of the students said in a tone of sheer awe.
"Wait. Really?" Naiki said with her mouth open. "That's so cool! Think she'll do it again?"
"I am beginning to severely hate this girl," Hel muttered. "I swear there is a God in the faculty somewhere."
The next couple of classes went rather like the first handful until lunch started to approach and Naiki's eyes were fixated on the clock as it ticked along.
"Naiki, you've switched the page numbers on the math syllabus with those from the English class," Issa noted. "If you do that you're going to have trouble when you're studying for the next class."
"Yeah, yeah," Naiki said. "They'll tell us what to read the day before anyway, what's it matter?"
"This is how they tell us what to read," the Egyptian told her.
Naiki thought about it a moment, eyes drifting off the class clock.
"Wait, what?" she asked.
"The syllabus tells us when all the subjects will be discussed so that they don't have to tell us the day before," he explained.
"So…I have to keep track of it myself," Naiki said eyes widening. "That's not fair. That's like Mum's special training not fair."
"It's to get us ready for the real world," Issa explained. "At least that's what they…" The bell rang and Naiki stood up in a flash.
"Okay, that's lunch," she said with a broad, toothy smile. "I'll be sitting with my brother and sister if you want to keep talking … so, be right back!"
With that she exited the door quickly, almost knocking over one of the guys in the doorway and pushing aside one of the girls. Hel grimaced and shook her head as the shouted apology trailed back and the displaced other students muttered about the incident.
Naiki was in the halls, tracking down the scent of food wafting up through the halls with an unerring direction. She licked her lips at the scent of the spices and meats and juices she smelled, even this far away. She moved fast, not really bothering to keep her athletic ability hidden despite the fact that it more than passed what most people considered normal. There never seemed to be anyone commenting on the matter, though, so she didn't know why she should bother keeping such things hidden.
Which was why she was surprised to find that Hel was already in line at the cafeteria as Naiki came to the room. It was enough of a surprise; especially since she didn't think she'd smelled Hel ahead of her until after she'd seen the girl, that the green-haired martial artist paused and arched an eyebrow as she tried to comprehend how a crippled girl had beaten her to the food. Especially when said girl had still been cleaning her desk when Naiki left the room.
While the green-haired fighter was standing there, three figures pushed past and spotted the cripple pushing her tray along the lines, waiting to be served.
"There she is, always first one here, the fake," one of them muttered.
"Wait, is there a teacher around?" one of the others asked.
"Or that crazy Korean girl?" another asked. "Every time we've messed with Logesdottir, we've ended up in detention."
"Right, and this time we're going to get her and show her that we mean business," the third said.
They started to crack their knuckles and smile darkly as they advanced toward where their target was transplanting her purchased lunch items into a bag so that she could carry it to a seat without anyone having to help her. She didn't seem to be paying any heed to anything else at the moment and it was almost inevitable that the thugs would likely get several shots at her.
At least until a green-haired form leaped over the three and landed gracefully down in front of them. Naiki's own knuckles being cracked in gleeful anticipation while she smiled broadly down towards them. The play of her muscles was visible even through the jacket she was wearing as she looked at them.
"Hey," she said. "I don't think it's fair. I mean even if you lot are a bunch of no-skill scum, she's a cripple. And you have to take her in ambush? There is a whole lot wrong with this picture."
Behind her, the person she was protecting winced and slowly turned to face the scene as more people came into the lunch room.
Naiki was tall, just about an inch taller than the average adult man. This meant that she was freakishly tall as far as other sixteen year olds were concerned. This was combined with a physique that was neither the wiry muscle of a slender athlete, nor the absurdly over-developed bulging muscles of a dedicated body-builder, but which was that of a predator or warrior perfectly balanced to maximize strength without lacking grace and flexibility. Finally, the sharp teeth that were usually overshadowed by her honestly friendly attitude were, in cases like this, just not human enough that it made most intelligent people subconsciously worry that not everything was as it seemed.
These three stopped at Naiki's chest and failed to catch most of the other warning signs.
"Listen, Boobs," the central thug, and presumably the leader said. "You're one of the new students so you don't know, but we've got business with Miss Birthmark over there. Get out of the way and you won't get hurt pretending to be a fighter."
"Pretending…." Naiki repeated in thorough disbelief. "Oh that's it, this is personal now. First you're picking on defenseless girls…" Hel's grip on her bag of lunch tightened enough that it tore the paper and spilled the contents down to the ground. "…and now calling me a fake?"
Behind her, Hel started to quietly whisper something under her breath.
"What do you think, Hel?" Naiki asked the girl behind her suddenly.
"Huh, Hel?" the red-marked girl asked, blinking in surprise as her whispering was interrupted with that statement. The distraction didn't last long. "Listen you barbarian, I am well capable of…Don't look away from me!"
She would have continued but then Hel's eyes widened and she quickly hobbled away to find a place behind a pillar as another girl pushed her way through the gathering crowd out into the open to pass up the three thugs and approach Naiki. Well, actually, the crowd seemed to have reflexively jerked away from her approach, but the visible effect was much the same until you realized she wasn't actually touching anyone.
The new girl was much shorter than Naiki, though there was a clear family resemblance in some of their facial features. Her shoulders were slender and despite the clear resemblance to Naiki, her features were much more elegant and refined. She was a real beauty. Though the shivers running down several spines in the area had little to do with how pretty she was.
Behind the girl a tall, blond young man followed, arms crossed over his chest. He overtopped Naiki by a couple of inches and most of the kids and even adults in the room as well. And there was a slight tingling feeling in the air around him as the crisis built up that put several people on edge.
"Naiki?!" the girl asked nervously. "What is going on here?"
"I'm just about to teach these jerks a lesson or two," Naiki said her smile not fading. "That's all, Eija."
"You know what Mitera told us," Eija said. "We're not supposed to be fighting in school. Deimosu tell her."
"They accused me of pretending to be a fighter," Naiki said.
"Sorry, Eija," Deimosu said. "For once I actually think she has the right idea. In fact, if this isn't a real challenge, then I might just join in."
"Really?" Eija protested before switching to Greek. "Look we can't just go around fighting or we're going to attract attention, and it isn't a real challenge, so you shouldn't be letting them get to you like…like…"
"Hey, they were also going ambush this little crippled girl from my class over..." Naiki paused as she turned around. "Hey, where'd she go? Uh, whatever, look, they're bullies, thugs and they insulted me, they need to be taught a lesson."
Meanwhile the thugs were nervously eyeing Deimosu and sweating as the crowd formed around them. It was just moments away from either a teacher or…one of them caught sight of a backscratcher leaning against the shoulder of an Asian girl that was turning to glance toward them with a sour expression and starting to head their way with a look of determination.
Behind her was a curious looking young man almost as tall as the blond Heracles in front of them, and with a decidedly dangerous looking circular scar over one eye, and the frown on his face was anything but encouraging. The room was starting to pile up with known and apparent badasses who seemed to be very willing to throw down with the three of them. Or they could just opt for the challenge thing the one guy said and only have to fight one idiotic girl with boobs.
Who, honestly speaking, was arguably the worst person in the room they could have chosen to fight. Then again, of the two worst choices, Naiki was the least likely to forget that the matter was not deadly.
"All right!" he said. "We challenge you to a fair fight, girl! We'll see how much of a fighter you really are."
All three of the Semezou siblings stopped talking and turned to look at the leader of the thugs. Naiki's face slowly broadening back into the smile she'd had when she first landed in front of them.
"You've got it," Naiki said eagerly.
"All right, very good!" proclaimed a new, German-accented voice, drawing all attention to it.
The speaker came into the middle of the crowd and took in all the onlookers with a brilliant smile and a wave of his silk-covered hand. He was clearly older than most of the students looking on, probably eighteen, and had come into much of the height he'd have in life already. This put him in the same height range as the yet unidentified kid with the scar and the tall blond named Deimosu.
"You heard the challenge and the acceptance," the young man said. "Vice President Jeon, I believe you can serve as referee in this case."
Jeon had already stopped in her path when the other student stepped out into the middle of things, and now was basically staring forward with a flabbergasted look.
"Uh, you don't want me to stop them from having a fight?" she asked, confused.
"When it was just a brawl that certainly was your duty, Yooji," the tall man said.
"But now that a challenge has been made and accepted," the soldier coming up to Yooji's side said. "It is not just a brawl?"
"Exactly, now I've already dispatched Miss Lot to secure the rugby field for us," the German senior said. "Now, I must discuss the situation with the faculty and staff. Arrange terms and rules and I shall meet you at the field for the event."
"Uh, sure, Karl," Yooji said, blinking as he left. "Yeah sure! What the hell do I know about refereeing a martial arts challenge?"
"It'll be real easy," Deimosu said. "When she's knocked out all three of them, you declare her the winner?"
"Wait, all three of us?" one of the thugs said.
"You don't mean you were thinking you'd fight her alone?" Eija said with widened eyes.
"Well, we have to give her some sort of chance," the thug leader said. "It wouldn't be sportsman-like otherwise. I mean we know karate?"
"What sort of karate?" Naiki asked, curiously. "Kyokushin Kaikan? Shotokan? Isshin-Ryu? How many dan?"
"Umm, it's that place near the mall," one of the thugs said. "And who's Dan?"
Several people put their faces into their hands.
"You don't have any more friends, do you?" Naiki asked, somewhat hopefully.
"Attention, will all classes please move from the cafeteria and class rooms to the rugby field to witness a demonstration fighting match that shall be fought for the honor of Hel Logesdottir," a voice declared over the intercom.
Eija frowned as she heard the announcement.
"I've heard that name somewhere before," she said.
"All right," Naiki called out happily. "You heard them, let's go demonstrate!"
She was the first out the door and she was standing expectantly in the middle of the field as the crowd started to file in to the benches around her. The green-haired girl was stretching her hands and tightening her fists in clear anticipation, in between giving friendly waves to the surrounding crowd, her shark's tail braid swinging behind her as she moved about.
"She can't really be seriously thinking about taking on all three of those guys at once," Yooji said to Eija. "Is your sister crazy?"
"That is a matter for some debate," Eija noted quietly. "However, these three do not even have skill enough to threaten me. It is not a matter of whether she will win; it is a matter of whether she will win cleanly."
"Your sister is a skilled soldier then?" Damir asked her.
"Deimosu is actually technically more skilled," Eija said thoughtfully. "But Naiki…" She stopped talking and frowned, unwilling to explain further.
Instead, she focused around her, wondering how any student, even the council president as this "Karl" was supposed to be, had managed to make a near-brawl into a school-wide sporting event.
"Hello, hello and welcome back to Bravura Academy," Karl's voice called out. "Now, as our name implies we thrive on displays of boldness, daring and excellence of skill. Included in that is the fighting skills, such as wrestling and boxing which we maintain full teams in. As well as in other forms which these students have seen fit to demonstrate for us today and which the faculty has graciously allowed us to witness. Hmm, we seem to be missing members of the school band. Somebody really needs to look into fixing the music hall's intercom."
Naiki grimaced as she looked over toward the speaking young man and tapped her foot impatiently as he went on and that Jeon girl walked out onto the field. Across from her, the three thugs were lounging about and waving at the crowd, flexing, posing and generally seeming to forget they were actually about to have a fight.
"Are you sure about this?" Yooji asked Naiki, glancing away from the green-haired girl and towards the thugs. "I can always call it off, you know."
"Nah, I'll be fine," Naiki said with a smile. "I just wish this wouldn't take so long. Hey, by the way. Aren't you some sort of fighter too?"
Yooji paused and looked very carefully over at Naiki.
"And if I am?" she asked.
"Because it'd be just cool to take on another great fighter when they weren't trying to kill me," the green-haired girl said.
Yooji's expression became rather unreadable then, at least to Naiki, and the Korean girl took a step back and then turned toward the stands and pointing.
"Oh look, I think Karl's almost done," Yooji said quickly.
"Great!" Naiki said smiling.
"Is everybody ready? Vice President Jeon?" Karl asked from his position holding the microphone.
"Are you guys all ready?" Yooji asked.
"Is that girl really going to take us all on?" one of the thugs asked with a smile.
"Why? Are you scared?" Naiki asked.
"Hell no!" came the response.
They'd been scared of fighting the girl's brother along with Yoon-Ji Jeon and the mysteriously threatening boy that had been standing with her all at once. But a girl that wasn't Jeon? That couldn't have been a threat at all.
They still hadn't bothered to actually look past her chest to see what sort of condition she was in.
"Okay then," Yooji said, raising her hand and the backscratcher in it. "Begin!"
And she backed away quickly to give room as the three thugs started to move forward toward Naiki, only to find her running at them and already having covered more than half the distance.
"You're going to find out why I'm named after the goddess of victory!" she shouted with a broad grin as she flashed her arm out in a knife hand that slammed into the first thug's abdomen, hard, doubling him over in pain. From that, she launched into a spinning roundhouse aimed at the next thug's head and which her target barely dodged under with a desperate duck.
Yooji found herself coming back to the sidelines as Eija released a loud sigh. "She's being sloppy," Eija said.
"Yes, neither of those two opponents should be an issue any longer," Damir agreed. "She is holding back for some reason."
Yooji glanced back out toward where the girl was blocking the third thug's attack and wondered why the girl would be holding back at all.
"I suppose she wants the fight to look good," the calm, sweet voice of Amber Lot said as she stepped up to join them with a quiet smile. "Did I miss anything? Newspaper and Yearbook are both going to want photos here."
She lifted up a digital camera to snap a shot of the action on the field.
Naiki flowed around behind the third thug and swiped his feet out from under him with a needlessly showy motion that ended a bit too slowly for actual use in a fight. The result being that she barely had time to duck aside as the thug she'd earlier missed completely with her own roundhouse swiped out a punch at her.
Naiki whistled slightly as she bent back double and the kid's fist passed over her. The guy was a bit more skilled than she had thought at first. She planted her hands back and shifted her weight so that her legs would follow the same path, and thus bring her knees slamming into the back of her attacker. The blow sent him sprawling past Naiki's position as the green-haired girl pushed into and off his back to move into a flip that landed her gracefully near the third thug.
She'd lost track of the first opponent in her playing around, but was aware of him now as he slammed his fist into the back of her head. The actual blow didn't do anything given how much body-hardening she'd put herself through, but it did send her sprawling to the ground in an embarrassing display.
Rolling to her feet angrily, Naiki pulled herself into a tighter stance, such as what she should have started with rather than merely playing games. Even as she located two of her opponents, the third came up behind her, slipping his hands in under her arms and pulling her back into what was supposed to be a hold for the other two to take advantage of.
Naiki should have been able to easily take care of the so-called hold and pound that opponent, and the other two, into submission now that she wasn't just messing about. However, she was angry at the fact that she'd allowed that last hit in on her. Making the fight more exciting was one thing, actually being shown up for no other reason than that she had been caught being stupid was something else again. She waited for the other two to get closer.
As Naiki prepared her action, Yooji's eyes seemed to fade off, as if staring at something very far away, and her voice almost forced its way weakly out of her mouth.
"Hybrid biological form," she muttered. "Intense psychokinetic potential."
"What did you sa…" Amber started to ask.
Everybody in the stand marveled as what looked like a burst of green light rippled out of Naiki's form and in its wake the three thugs strewn about unconscious on the rugby field as Naiki stood in a small crater.
She took in a deep breath and then crossed her arms with a smugly proud look as she thrust her chin out and smiled in satisfaction. Not the wide toothy smile from before, just a normal, triumphant smile of accomplishment as the crowd murmured and began clapping in at first small patches before growing louder.
"And Okaasan is going to nail her hide to the wall," Deimosu said, shaking his head while his other sister sighed in agreement.
The Jeon girl walked up beside Naiki with slow, deliberate steps and a frowning grimace on her face. Once there, the hand holding the backscratcher went up and silence washed out over the assembled students as Yooji looked about the stadium.
"Winner is Naiki Semezou!" she shouted to renewed applause.
"Do you hear that students, the honor of Hel Logesdottir is secure!" Student President Karl declared. "How truly wonderful it is that chivalry is not dead in this day and age."
Naiki lifted both of her hands up and waved in celebration, and then felt herself gagging as Yooji's backscratcher caught on her collar and she was suddenly dragged down to stare at the crater that had been made in her last action.
"Now fix your mess!" Yooji shouted as the audience got quiet again.
"Uh…sure," Naiki said, not terribly surprised at either the command or how it was made. Nor was she at all intimidated, but was moderately impressed. Especially with the way the girl was already walking off, apparently used to her orders being met without question. "Wow, I have to try to fight it out with her sometime."
Yooji meanwhile focused obsessively on moving one foot ahead of the other and making sure that her expression stayed annoyed and not at all fearful as she walked back toward the sidelines, passing Amber carrying a towel along the way.
"Good job, vice president," Amber said under her breath, "But you're still scaring all the boys."
Yooji winced, wondering just what sort of rumors she'd spawned now.
The blond herself walked over to where Naiki was looking at the section of blown away dirt and sod and trying to figure out how she was going to fix it. She hadn't noticed, or didn't care about, the warning gestures that Eija was quietly trying to give her.
"Here you go," Amber said in a friendly tone as she handed over the towel.
Naiki nodded and reached over to grab the towel, squinting at the sun behind Amber and then eyes opening wide as she got her first good look at the girl backlit by the afternoon sun to glorious effect. The light touched on her sandy blond hair and the light breeze whipped her school uniform skirt and blond locks up dramatically. An uplifting melody of appropriate music played through the air as if from afar, such as from the band hall.
Still holding the towel, jaw slack and mind frozen, Naiki tried to remember what to do when faced with heavenly beautiful blonds.
"Anyway, I'm glad to meet one of Eija's sisters," the girl said with a friendly, all-accepting smile. "I'll see you later okay?"
As Amber walked off to join the flow of students back to school, Naiki weakly waved after her, blinking, "Later," she breathed.
Then Amber turned about, bringing up her little digital camera and Naiki quickly gave an appropriately victorious pose in the moments before the automatic flash went off, and then the blond girl disappeared into the mass of other people returning to class.
"I have seen heaven," Naiki muttered.
"Hey, Naiki," Issa said, coming up to her side. "Hurry up and clean this up so you can get to class on time."
"Oh! Right!" Naiki said, again looking around for any sort of dirt that she could use to fill the emptied area. "Don't worry, I'll be right there." Neither of them at the moment stopped to wonder where Hel might be. ________________________________________
It was sometime later when the three thugs woke up in the infirmary, groaning and wondering what happened.
"Damn it, did she have some sort of stun gun on her?" the leader asked.
Which was when the tip of a cane was planted in his chest and he followed the cane up to meet Hel's one visible eye.
"Oh, you," he said. "What the Hell do you thi…"
He'd tried to sit up and winced in pain as every muscle in his body seemed to protest at the effort. Apparently whatever weapon that the Semezou girl used really took a lot out of a guy.
"Because of you three," Hel said in a shaky voice. "My name is across the school as someone to be protected. Because of you three I'm seen as helpless…."
That one visible eye was wide open and twitching as she barely held onto her anger.
"Hey, don't look at us, girl," one thug said, also trying to sit up. "We were just going to beat the crap out of you."
"Yeah, you want to complain, talk to the girl with the dyed hair," the last thug noted.
"Oh, I'm going to talk to her," Hel said thwacking each of the thugs with her cane as she did so. "Oh yes…and then…"
"Ahem," a voice said.
She paused in her speech, and then turned around to see the nurse standing there.
"Miss Logesdottir, I can understand some desire for revenge," the woman said. "But I have to insist you return to class now before I have to report this. It wouldn't be a good idea to have detention on the first day back."
"You would dare threaten me with incarceration?" Hel asked, "Me of all people?"
"Detention it is," the nurse said.
"But," Hel responded, deflating suddenly.
"And since you're here, we'll see about those vitamin shots you were supposed to be in here for two hours ago," the nurse added.
"But," Hel said weakly as the woman walked away.
Slowly her mind reached back to the lunch room when she'd been whispering a little curse under her breath meant to deal with the annoying philistines making trouble for her. A little curse interrupted at the end with "huh, Hel?"
She stared, wide-eyed and shaking as her cane was brought down to the ground and she was leaning on it.
"I cast that curse on myself?!" she demanded. "Damn it!"
Meanwhile over the school's intercom, one of the teachers gave a message.
"Would Naiki Semezou please report to the office," the announcement called out, "Regarding the matter of a missing pitcher's mound."
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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:33:32 GMT -7
Center of It
"Hello, I'm pleased to meet everyone," Deimosu said cautiously, putting on a casual tone that he didn't really feel was appropriate. "My name is Deimosu Semezou and I have recently moved here from Europe. My mother's career has caused us to move on several occasions, so I have been many places. As to hobbies, I pursue the martial arts and do enjoy studying my mother's native language, Japanese."
"All right, Mr. Semezou, please sit down … over by Miss Minaba," the teacher said casually.
"Mr. Fisher," a boy called out, raising his hand.
"What is it, Mr. Orrin?" the teacher asked as he was arranging his papers.
"Is it fair to put the new guy next to Minaba?" the boy asked.
Deimosu paused in his walk to the indicated seat and looked to the speaker. He was a compact looking boy, with ears hidden under a mop of thick hair that had a brown color the character of an average dye-job. His eyes were a bit too big and his limbs were somewhat gangly, all very minor signs that most people would overlook. Deimosu himself wouldn't have thought twice about it if he hadn't recognized that the other boy dyed his hair brown rather than something more stand-out.
"Hey, what's wrong with me?" the affronted girl asked.
Minaba was a rather average looking girl, black with short, naturally dark hair styled modestly against the side of her head. She spoke with a slightly African accent and crossed her arms across her chest as she turned to look at Mr. Orrin with a frown of mild disapproval for the boy's statement.
"Are you kidding?" someone asked from elsewhere in the room.
"Hey?" Minaba protested.
"If you don't mind, sir," another boy suggested with a posh, British accent. "The new kid can have my seat; I'll be perfectly happy sitting next to Miss Minaba."
The girl in question flushed slightly at the new speaker's emphasis on "perfectly." Deimosu, meanwhile, turned to look at the teacher and shrugged expressively.
"Well?" The six-foot tall boy asked the teacher. "Is that fine with you Mr. Fisher?" The teacher thought about it a moment before nodding.
"That should be good enough," he decided finally. "Thank you for your sacrifice Mr. Marsh."
"Nothing to it, sir," Marsh said with a smile as he collected his things to move toward the empty desk that would have been Deimosu's.
Marsh was tall by the standards of most sixteen year olds, but he was still clearly shorter than Deimosu as the two passed each other. His eyes, once blue but already growing grey under his blond bangs, regarded Deimosu with a calculating sort of look that spoke of immediate and almost instinctive dislike that the Semezou boy returned with his own casual dismissal of the other boy after a brief glance and shrug. When the tall, powerfully built blond sat down in his new seat, Marsh was already seated and seeming to absolutely glare at Deimosu for the space of a blink before turning toward Minaba with a friendly, ingratiating smile.
"Well this is off to a wonderful start," Deimosu thought with a sigh as he sat down and started to take notes on the mathematics syllabus the teacher had passed around.
Tapping his pen against his desk he glanced toward the door and wondered how his sisters were doing. Naiki had to be doing well, he hadn't felt an earthquake or felt anything blow up yet, but if Eija had a problem he doubted he'd hear about it until later, and Eija was the one that was more likely to have a problem rather than cause one anyway. Looking down at his paper, he noted the subject matter was a sampling of so-called higher math. Logic was going to be easy, sort of; he'd always had an issue with wanting to answer "maybe" to a true or false question. Set theory, which came out of logic and was a bit easier to understand, would be another simple section. He wasn't looking forward to calculus or trigonometry or the bit of computer aided math that was on the late year docket.
Okaasan had a small library of math texts at home that might prove useful, though he suspected they were overly specific for even as advanced as this school's curriculum seemed to be. He could also talk to Eija, or …. no, trying to help Naiki with her math homework didn't give enough benefit to be worth the headache. Especially if this is the sort of stuff they'd be studying in her class as well.
The bell rang almost before he realized it and Mr. Fisher glanced up with a sort of surprise that seemed to suggest that he was also surprised that the class was over so quickly.
"All right then," he said. "Tomorrow we'll start with practice on proofs, since we'll be using those throughout the year, is that understood?"
An affirmative muttering was the teacher's answer as he nodded and left the room to head for his next class and the students within seemed to clump about into the inevitable conversation groups that such a class arrangement would provoke.
Deimosu saw Orrin start to look his way and nodded as the boy started to walk over. Off to the side, a collection of girls were chatting, giggling and occasionally looking in his general direction. He recognized some of the attitude from both earlier experiences and seeing his sister watching a particularly buff blond guy or beautiful girl. The Minaba girl was an exception, however, chatting happily away with a somewhat attentive Marsh.
Marsh himself was considering Deimosu whenever he could.
"He's a problem," Orrin said quietly with a trace of distaste to his voice.
"How so?" Deimosu asked cautiously.
"He's a selfish, egotistical jerk," Orrin said. "Thought about giving him a scare once."
"How'd that go?" Deimosu asked.
"It didn't, I got over delusions of superheroism," he admitted with a bit of discomfort. "I've seen him fight. Anyway, Jason Orrin, Canadian therianthrope. The classic variety, eh?"
The other boy held out a hand with a smile and this close, Deimosu could see that the roots of his hair were gray and silver.
"Deimosu Semezou, Greek electrokinetic," he returned calmly, looking to see if anybody else was listening.
"That's it?" the boy asked, a bit confused. "I thought you smelled a bit off-human." Deimosu paused at the mention, a bit uncomfortable with this hole in his knowledge.
"Okaasan's never said much about our other parent," he said with a shrug.
Jason looked moderately confused for a moment and then looked more than a little embarrassed.
"Uh, well…I'm sure he was a good guy," Jason said awkwardly.
"Was?" Deimosu repeated, curiously.
"I suppose they could have…broken up," the way he said it was laborious, as if the mere concept of a break up was hard to form much less admit to out loud.
"Yeah, I'm sure she'll tell us about him when she's ready," Deimosu said. "Are there many of us at the school?"
"A handful," he admitted. "There used to be a Kitsune girl…"
Jason frowned deeply and narrowed his eyes looking around before sitting back on the desk behind him and shaking his head.
"What happened?" Deimosu asked; keen to get word on any local threats in the area.
"Someone pulled a Van Helsing," the boy said hatefully. "Word is they got the guy, but didn't help Kiri."
There was a deep breath then and Jason shook his head.
"So, anyway, what does your mom do?" the boy with the dyed-brown hair asked, pushing back the previous subject.
"Feng shui," he answered.
"Oh, good money," Jason said enthusiastically. "I'll have to be sure to be your lunch buddy between packages from home." The last was said with a jovial sort of teasing. "My parents are accountants."
"Really?" Deimosu said, surprised.
"You were expecting park rangers or something?" he asked with a shrug. "Therianthropes are mimics. We evolved to blend, hanging out in the wild and howling at the moon isn't blending. Just a good weekend break."
Deimosu nodded at the logic behind that.
"They do volunteer with search and rescue for the local nature preserves," he noted shrugging.
"By the way, what's the problem with the Minaba girl?" Deimosu asked, nodding toward where the named girl was getting up to leave the room with an unidentifiably thoughtful expression on her face.
"There. Are. No. Words."
Jason closed his eyes and spread his hands out as if washing himself clean of the situation.
"Really, I guess she can be nice, but she's … odd," he glanced over his shoulder. "I still wouldn't wish Marsh on her."
"Maybe it'll be the other way around," Deimosu suggested.
As he spoke, Marsh stood up and started to walk their way, politeness clear on his face even as he turned to wave ingratiatingly at the girls that whispered just a bit more curiously as he moved to speak to Semezou. He stopped a mannered distance away with a casual, mild air that seemed practiced to Deimosu.
"So, the martial arts?" he said idly, not even glancing toward Jason as he spoke. "I'm pleased to meet another such enthusiast, what is your art, might I ask?"
"It's primarily the family art," Deimosu responded.
"Ah, of course," the young man said dismissively. "I, on the other hand, have had the benefit of learning from many great masters. Still it might be interesting to compare our levels of prowess sometime."
"And who would I be facing?"
"Oh yes, I do apologize," the boy said in a falsely ingratiating manner. "Completely slipped my mind and all, Darrin Marsh and you've already given the class your name, of course."
"That's fine," Deimosu said with a shrug. "Don't worry about it."
"Oh, I'm not," the boy said with a twisted smile before glancing back to the collection of girls. "They seem quite taken with us, don't they?"
"They can do whatever they want to do as far as I care," the blond noted. "Not the sort of girls I'm interested in."
"Maybe then…"
"The bell's about to ring," Deimosu noted. "I'd like to keep up the witty posturing, but I'd like better to be ready for my next class."
Jason burst out into sudden and quickly stifled laughter as Marsh glared at him.
"There's no need to be rude," Darrin noted.
"Without respect behind it, manners are just another sort of insult," Deimosu's statement had the attitude of a casual quotation as he looked down at his schedule. "Since I'd rather not be insulting, I'll just be rude."
Before Darrin could respond, Minaba came back into the room with a smug expression on her face until she turned to look to see the British boy she'd been sitting with glaring at Deimosu, who was unconcernedly looking down at his desk and she started to march her way over. Even the stuffiest nosed student looked up at the strong smell of soap that seemed to waft off her for reasons that weren't immediately apparent.
"Are you two nerds harassing my Darrin?" she asked loudly, drawing several looks her way, including one from Darrin.
"Miss Minaba," Darrin said quietly. "I believe we discussed this matter."
"Uh, Minaba, have you looked closely at Semezou?" Jason asked, scratching his head curiously. "I'd say he's the least nerd-like person in the school."
"You haven't met my sister yet," Deimosu noted without looking up before pausing as he considered the thought of Naiki being considered at all nerdy.
"No, no, no," Minaba said, "if you're bothering my Darrin here, then you're definitely cheating nerds."
Those last two nonsensically combined words did cause Deimosu to look up in a trace of confusion.
"Cheating nerds?" he repeated, emphasizing the first word as if asking for clarification.
"And if we were harassing him wouldn't we be over hanging around his seat?" Minaba blinked and seemed to consider that for a moment.
"No, no, no," the girl said shaking her head finally. "I don't think I care about that. He doesn't like you. I like him, so that's all that matters, got it?"
"What makes him 'your' Darrin anyway?" a girl asked, distracting Minaba before Deimosu could answer.
"What do you think makes him mine?" the girl responded teasingly with a smirk. Darrin himself seemed about to say something when the teacher walked in and he walked back to his seat with a somewhat unsatisfied expression on his face.
"All right, settle down everyone," the teacher said.
"Watch yourself, man," Jason whispered before heading back to his seat.
Deimosu shook his head and wondered about the sanity of the strange girl as she glared at him before returning to her seat and obviously pretended to pay attention to the teacher. So obviously that the Semezou was pretty certain that she was being obvious about it deliberately.
The next class break found a trio of girls coming nervously up to Deimosu's desk.
"So, Mr. Semezou," the one in the center said, she was a red-head with a Boston accent, though Deimosu couldn't have told anyone that. "It must have been hard, moving out here and everything."
"I've actually moved a bit," Deimosu said cautiously.
"Yes, but it's different at our age," a girl on the right said. She might have been Hispanic, he wasn't sure. "I mean I bet you had to leave all your friends and…other people behind."
They were trying to get some information out of him, that much he was certain of and he tightened up his posture briefly.
"How is that any harder than when you're younger?" he asked. "You almost learn not to make close friends after a while when you move often enough."
"Oh, so you didn't have anyone…special?" the third girl asked. Definitely Chinese, but he wasn't sure if she was Free China or from the US Asian states. She seemed too naïve to be a refugee from Burma-controlled China, but maybe she was a second generation escapee.
"What do you mean 'special'?" Deimosu asked as casually as he could, measuring the intent of the girls and trying not to be too paranoid.
"Oh, you know," the Chinese girl said, flushing. "Like…a girl…maybe?"
"Uh…not really…" Deimosu said uncertainly.
A number of the boys in the room were giving strained looks as the girls giggled and looked toward each other.
"Well, if you need any help with school work or anything…" the red-head said. "I'm Hannah, that's Maria and that's Wen."
The other two girls waved shyly.
"Thank you for the offer," the class's new and unwilling heartthrob replied. "I think class is about to begin."
The third break came with some of the boys from the class.
"Listen, Semezou, you're the new kid around here," one of them told him, the English was accented similar to Naiki and Okaasan's, meaning he was probably Australian, "and we already have enough with that English guy being something of a snot, so don't think we're going to let you get away with anything."
"Get away with what?" Deimosu asked in exasperation. He actually had a fairly good guess of "what" but didn't want to say anything that way. Anything he said would either give encouragement or offend someone and both were complications he didn't need.
"You know what I mean," a second boy who had something of a mullet said, looking back towards the three girls from earlier happily gossiping away. "You wouldn't want to be getting the wrong sort of attention if you get my drift."
He resisted the urge to laugh at the little threat. It was so empty and without effort compared to things he'd heard even from much stupider people. But laughing would not be a good way to disarm the situation. It was times like this he envied Eija.
"And you'll what?" Deimosu asked standing up and looking down toward the boys around him. Brute intimidation probably wasn't going to really disarm things either, but at least he didn't have to deal with it right then.
"You have to sleep sometime; Semezou and the dorms are…"
"I live off campus in the town."
"That's…that's not fair."
"Trust me on this one; I'm being a lot fairer than you really know."
As the boys slunk off toward their seat, Jason walked over again.
"Popular," he noted.
"How much of this am I going to be dealing with?" he asked.
"You're the new kid, you're six-feet tall and built like a Greek god," Jason noted. "How much trouble do you think you're going to have?"
"Joy."
By the time lunch arrived, Deimosu felt like he had been in the class room for ages. He really wondered sometimes what Okaasan intended them to get out of these places. It wasn't like they didn't already have skills they could use to earn a living. Psyche seemed to pay well, if their standard of living was any clue.
He walked out of the room, orienting himself in the hallway with the map in his materials; Naiki would likely just follow her nose, and noted Jason coming up beside him as he moved into the halls.
"So, as the new kid," he said, "interested in an invitation to join me and my friends for lunch?"
Deimosu turned to look at him cautiously, but was fairly certain it wasn't anything other than another student trying to make things easy for the new kid. Nothing really in the body language or tone of voice indicated anything else. A member of The Community, as some would put it, reaching out to the new neighbors.
Minorities stuck together quite often.
"Thanks for the offer," Deimosu said. "But strangers don't handle one of my sisters very well. And –"
Jason looked a bit confused at the wording and interrupted the tall blond boy before he could finish.
"Shouldn't that be your sister doesn't handle strangers very well?" he asked.
"…and that's the other one," he said.
"Well, think about coming over anyway," Jason said shrugging.
"Thanks, I'll see about it," he said. "She could always use a few friends of her…"
"Are you really certain this is all right, Miss Lot?" he heard Eija's voice from around the corner ahead of them and he came to a quick stop.
"Oh don't worry about it at all," another girl's voice said. "It's the least we can do to keep the new students company. And call me Amber."
"Hey, if she wants to go sit somewhere else, that's fine," a third girl's voice said with more than a little distaste.
"Don't listen to her," 'Amber' spoke in a friendly tone. "She's just as glad to be eating with new people."
"Will there not be accusations of fraternization?" a boy's voice asked.
At which point Deimosu stepped forward quickly and turned about the corner to see Eija walking between two girls with a tall boy walking behind her. The Korean girl to his sister's right seemed about as fidgety as the other people in the area, she kept tapping that battered backscratcher against her shoulder for instance, but she wasn't sweating the way most normal people would. In fact, the other two people seemed not nervous at all, at least with regards to Eija.
And the dirty-blond American girl was flipping through Eija's sketchbook.
"What the hell?" he muttered.
"If that's your sister, she doesn't seem to have any problems making friends," Jason noted.
The boy behind them was scanning the crowd in a familiar manner that Deimosu wasn't really sure that he liked. Especially as the gaze swept over him and locked, apparently noticing that the blond Semezou was regarding the group with some interest. Very subtly, the boy moved himself forward of the three girls, eyes ahead.
Eija did not miss the movement or its probable meaning and her uncertain manner faded briefly as she took a step back and tensed minutely to look for a potential threat. It wasn't even a second before she identified her brother and relaxed as much as any of them ever did.
"Oh, Deimosu," she called out, waving pointedly before stepping ahead of the other boy like she was playing some quiet form of leapfrog with him. "I wasn't expecting to see you in the halls. These are my classmates."
"This is your brother, Miss Semezou?" the boy asked.
"Yes, he is," Eija said, and the other boy relaxed even more fractionally than Eija had.
"Deimosu Semezou," the martial artist said, stepping forward and looking toward the other boy. "And you are?"
"Damir Milos," was the uninflected answer. "I am the other new student in your sister's class."
"Hey, I'm…" Jason stopped as he got close to Eija and Deimosu immediately saw the shiver work down the therianthrope's back before he stepped away looking between the Korean girl and Eija with a confused sort of discomfort. "Uhhh, Vice President Jeon…did I do anything?"
"I don't know, did you do anything?" she asked idly, momentarily wondering why he was acting so scared. Then she looked toward the creepy pale girl and nodded. "That's just her, she's a bit…"
Deimosu watched the girl try to find a polite way of saying "creepy" and walked closer to his sister.
"Eija, can I talk to you over here for a moment?" Deimosu asked calmly without looking away from the people he'd just met.
"I haven't introduced everybody yet," she noted.
"Oh, go calm down the Def-Con," Amber said with a smile. "I see Karl over there and I really should go talk to my boyfriend at least once for lunch. I leave them in your hands, Vice President Jeon."
"What?" the Korean girl said as the American wandered off, waving. "She's always doing this…."
Eija found herself drawn off to the side of the emptying hallway as her brother left his own classmate behind with Yooji. Deimosu glanced back and noticed that Jason was rather nervously talking to the Korean girl as he looked back toward Eija.
"Who are these people?" he asked quietly.
"They are my classmates?" Eija responded. "They sit between me and…the rest of the class."
"Eija, they aren't afraid of you," he cautioned under his voice. "Have you looked at them yet?"
"I'd really rather not, actually," she whispered. "I'd just…"
"…and now calling me fake?" a voice called out loudly from further down toward where the cafeteria was.
"Naiki," Deimosu and Eija said together.
"Umm, excuse me," she said. "We need to see what our sister is doing."
Before Deimosu could do anything she was pushing ahead through the crowd of people gathering around the cafeteria. He was surprised enough by that that he hesitated to follow her a moment. He decided he probably shouldn't have been surprised. Eija had a clear objective at the moment, that usually gave her a bit of help in ignoring her hesitation around strangers.
The crowd parted easily around Eija, letting her through without too much trouble, and Deimosu followed in her wake almost as easily. What he found didn't surprise him; Naiki was facing off against three punks who apparently weren't skilled at danger recognition. Her green hair, tied in its characteristic "shark-tail" whipped back and forth as she looked between the three, showing his more impulsive sister was somewhere between angry and happy at the prospect of a fight.
"Naiki?!" Eija asked nervously. "What is going on here?"
"I'm just about to teach these jerks a lesson or two," Naiki said her smile not fading. "That's all, Eija."
"You know what Mitera told us," Eija said. "We're not supposed to be fighting in school. Deimosu tell her."
"They accused me of pretending to be a fighter," Naiki said.
"Sorry, Eija," Deimosu said. "For once I actually think she has the right idea. In fact, if this isn't a real challenge, then I might just join in."
"Really?" Eija protested before switching to Greek. "Look we can't just go around fighting or we're going to attract attention. And it isn't a real challenge, so you shouldn't be letting them get to you like…like…"
"Hey, they were also going ambush this little crippled girl from my class over..." Naiki paused as she turned around. "Hey, where'd she go? Uh, whatever, look, they're bullies, thugs and they insulted me, they need to be taught a lesson."
"We can't do this sort of thing on the first day!" Eija said. "This is…this is…people are watching us!"
"If it was you they'd said this to, I'd already be wiping the floor with them," Deimosu noted angrily. "They're nothing, we don't even need chi for people like that. No stance or discipline."
"But how many kids our age have multiple Dan…"
"All right!" one of the three toughs said. "We challenge you to a fair fight, girl! We'll see how much of a fighter you really are."
All three of the Semezou siblings stopped talking and turned to look at the leader of the thugs. Naiki's face slowly broadened back into the smile she'd had when she first landed in front of them as Eija closed her eyes and sighed in resignation.
"You've got it," Naiki said eagerly.
"All right, very good!" came a new, German-accent voice, drawing all attention to it.
The speaker strode into the middle of the crowd and took in all the onlookers with a brilliant smile and a wave of his silk-covered hand. He was clearly older than most of the students looking on, probably eighteen, and had come into much of the height he'd have in life already. This put him in the same height range as Damir and Deimosu.
"You heard the challenge and the acceptance," the young man said. "Vice President Jeon, I believe you can serve as referee in this case." ________________________________________
Naiki's fight wasn't much different than Deimosu had expected. They were a trio of joke opponents, but the green-haired girl was treating them like a bunch of joke opponents. The result was embarrassing to watch. The completely unnecessary chi burst at the end was just her getting tired of the game and getting impatient with ending something that was no longer interesting.
"And Okaasan is going to nail her hide to the wall," Deimosu said, shaking his head while his other sister sighed in agreement.
Of more interest to Deimosu was the muttering from the girl that was supposed to be refereeing the match. He'd caught the word "hybrid" and looked down towards her in a combination of curiosity and caution. Which was when he noticed her roots.
Purple, the girl's natural hair color was a darker purple, not the black she had died it. It was a bit harder to catch than Jason's job, and if she was a human psychic, scent wouldn't reveal anything. The way she shook her head immediately afterword and look confused didn't help matters.
If Eija was in the same classroom as an untrained psychic, an akira, that was bad. The girl wouldn't even have to do anything deliberate to get his sister into trouble. He really had to talk to her about being careful after school.
The blond girl walking out to help Naiki out of the crater, and probably stepping into a bit of aggravation given how she was ignoring Eija's attempts at warning, was something of a mystery. He didn't get any sense that she was anything but friendly and open. But how many people out there could just ignore Eija's little fear problem like that?
He crossed his arms and watched as the Korean akira, "Yooji", walked up to Naiki and used that back scratcher to yank his other sister's head down to look at the crater she had made and continued his analysis.
Overconfidence in an akira, never a good thing.
"That could have been ended much cleaner," Damir said, shaking his head and drawing Deimosu's attention back to him.
Something set him off about the young man and he wasn't exactly sure what it was. Part of him admitted it was a hint of jealousy coming from the way this other boy had been taking his normal position earlier, that of watching out for Eija. However, that awareness was buried in the subconscious with the excuse of years of learned caution that almost matched Okaasan's not-quite paranoia.
"All right!" Yooji, or Vice President Jeon of the Student Council, said into the microphone after instructing Naiki to clean up her mess. "That's the finish. Everybody back to lunch and classes, got it?"
"Hmm," Damir said, checking his watch. "I shall meet you in the classroom; I have a minor issue to deal with."
"You do that," Yoon-Ji said before adding sharply. "And do not be late."
"Of course not, Miss Jeon," he said.
A wide-eyed Jason Orrin walked up to Deimosu as Naiki looked around for how to fix the crater she'd just made.
"Your mother does Feng shui?" he repeated. "And you practice a family art. I saw Marsh looking rather concerned a moment ago."
"Okay, he can be concerned, I'm fine with that," Deimosu said, shrugging as if there were nothing about that noteworthy. "I have to see about something real quick, meet you back at the class."
He didn't wait for the other boy to respond before slipping through the crowd to follow along Damir's path. He didn't have Eija's skill or talent with stealth and concealment, but he thought he made a good showing for himself as he shadowed Damir to the bank of lockers and watched him open one up and switch one notebook out with another before turning suddenly and shutting the locker closed.
The narrowed look in his eyes faded somewhat when he caught sight of Deimosu.
"Ah, Mr. Semezou," he said blandly, though his eyes were still focused ahead. "Is there an issue you need discussed?"
The taller, blond boy blinked at being discovered and the odd, somewhat precise way the other boy talked. But he recovered quickly and stepped forward, crossing his arms across his chest and noting that Damir did not seem put out at all by the subtle display.
"Your name's Milos, correct?" he asked.
"This is correct," the European said, taking a piece of gum and idly sticking it to the corner of his locker.
"If she gets hurt, I will be upset," Deimosu informed him, noting the depositing of the gum with a feeling of familiarity.
"I can understand this," he responded. "I shall do what I can to insure that neither she nor any other civilian in my class is hurt."
Deimosu arched an eyebrow and appraised the answer. There didn't seem to be any deception going on, nor did the boy seem at all concerned about being talked to in a vaguely threatening manner by someone a little bit taller and quite a bit larger than him. Though, it was clear that he was also in good condition. At the very least he was an athlete, the scar on his face implied other things, maybe a street punk or something else, though he didn't have the normal vibe for those either.
"I'll hold you to that," Deimosu promised.
"Understood," the dark-haired young man said with a snap. "If this is no longer an issue, shall we return to class before we are absent at roll?"
"Yeah, fine," Deimosu said curtly.
The other boy failed to notice the fact that Deimosu was a bit unsatisfied with the talk and simply walked past him on the way to the halls and, presumably, his class.
"Well, that went well considering I didn't expect to be seen," Damir muttered to himself and looked toward the other boy's locker and shook his head at the bit of disrespect that showed before walking off himself and just about running into Minaba as he came out of the bank of lockers. "What are you doing here?"
"I've got stuff in my locker, what do you think?" Minaba asked.
"Why do they even have lockers?" Deimosu asked. "There are dorms on site."
"Yeah, but the place is huge," the girl noted waving her arms out and almost hitting Deimosu as she did so. "The dorms are way over there on the edge. The lockers are smack in the middle of things."
"You'd think they'd build around the dorms and not need the lockers." Deimosu shrugged and walked on down the hallway, leaving Minaba to go to her locker.
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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:35:05 GMT -7
Unique Perspective
"Can anyone tell me where Sherissie Minaba is?" the teacher said about five seconds after coming into the room.
Deimosu looked over toward the empty seat a moment and frowned as several other students likewise started noticing the girl's absence while muttering excitedly and he heard Jason further down the seats saying "no words" while shaking his head.
Elsewhere, on the edge of the campus, the door to Minaba's dorm room slammed negligently shut behind her as she stormed into her room. Her solitary room, for the moment at least. She was between roommates again and she'd been told that the girls coming in either had been assigned to different rooms or lived off campus. She didn't particularly care since it let her use the space more practically.
It also told her that the Semezous were living off campus, since both this "Deimosu's" sisters were on the list of the people that weren't being sent to take up more of her private space in this room.
Setting her bag down on the bed, she took up her wallet and started scanning her walls and the various items papering it in something like a conspiracy nut's idea of wall paper. Fingering along she found the plans she was looking for somewhere between a list of names matched up with random words and the upside-down chocolate-stained memo on fire-evacuation procedures for the local water treatment plant. Looking it over for a few minutes she nodded and stepped back, crossing her arms.
"So, he's going to annoy my Darrin, hmm?" she said to herself while turning about on her heels towards a haphazard pile of magazines and catalogs and started skimming through them, tossing the ones she didn't want into another corner of the room. "Got you….hmmm."
The girl tossed the remaining magazines and such in her hand, the pile mostly now relocated towards another spot on the floor. What she held was a small coupon for a local business complete with hours of business and address. She'd shopped with them a bit, but the address always seemed to slip her if she didn't look at it. It was a bit farther than she remembered it being, always was, so it might take her a little while to get back to the campus and get everything set up.
While she was thinking about that, she pulled open one of drawers and pulled out the school approved clothes haphazardly before reaching down to remove the false bottom she'd put in within two nights of moving in to reach jeans and hoody underneath, replace it, and then replace the false bottom and start stuffing her clothes drawer again. She grimaced at the rather unrumpled look of the jeans and hoody, but folding them completely was the only way to get them to fit into the hidden space without an easily seen bulge. Resigning herself to the fact that she was going to look rather ridiculously wannabe in carefully folded, creased hoody and jeans, she got dressed.
Minaba checked the clock on her wall as she moved to take her cell phone from its charger in the wall, the phones weren't allowed in the classes, but they allowed them for keeping touch with family. Of course, most of the students were using the almost required laptops for the same sort of chatting and such that they would have used cell phones for, but that was neither here nor there.
Going to another section of wall for a moment and scanning along it before snatching a pair of binoculars from a hook and turning them on her ceiling, Minaba continued searching for the proper paper until she found what she was looking for.
"There it is, take out," she said with a smirk. "Okay…used them, used them…there we go."
Putting her binoculars back on their hook, she walked back to her bag and pulled out a notebook. Once opened it was apparent that every inch was filled with careful and neat handwriting. She flipped back to the rear pages and the handwritten index there before going back to the indicated page and the accumulation of notes there about the comings and goings of student, faculty and staff and tapped a particular piece of gossip.
Then she made a quick trip to the piles of not-quite abandoned phone books and scanned for the desired name. She flipped open her cell phone and dialed the number.
"Hey, is this the Jay-Jay's at the Livingston Mall? Am I speaking to Kylie Anderson?" she asked conversationally. "The one who's having an illicit affair with Mr. Dreyper at Bravura Academy?"
And then she hung up and put her phone into her pocket before walking out of her room, snatching up her purse and putting her notebook into it.
Minaba took her time working around toward the front gate, avoiding the landscaper who was undercover school security and stopping just within sight of the locked gates just underneath the camera that watched them. She crouched down and took out several stick of gum and considered each of the brands and flavors before settling on one and putting it into her mouth. It had taken her ten minutes to get from her room to the gate at a leisurely pace, and she waited for another ten before a car pulled up outside and a rather frantic sounding woman argued with the guard over the intercom until they finally started opening the gate to let the visitor in.
As the car slowly moved in, Minaba twisted about, staying crouched, and let herself out and dashed alongside the car's passenger side under the line of sight of one of the two external cameras and concealed from the other by the slow moving car just long enough for her to get past it, and then she was walking at a swift pace down the hill out into the town beyond. Humming to herself, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and flipped it open again to start sending a text.
Still chewing her gum ten blocks later, she sent a second text and stopped to look across the street at a shop where a large van was parked. The side of the van was emblazoned with bright colors advertising itself to be Waterson's Professional Fireworks. She passed by the van, looking at it curiously and pausing when she noticed that the passenger door was unlocked. Glancing around she opened the door and reached into the glove compartment. She was pleased to find the usual mess of assorted papers within there and calmly looked through them until she found a safety guide for arming and launching fireworks, which she folded up and stuck in her pocket along with a list of telephone numbers and addresses of musicians, caterers and the like. The rest of the paper was shoved back into the glove compartment along with the wallet she'd looked through long enough to get a name, address, a glimpse at family pictures and a credit card number.
Minaba had no reason to be mad at this guy just yet, but who knew what the future would hold.
She closed the van door and pulled out her notebook, turning to the first empty page and starting to write down some notes before her memory of what she'd just found faded and then turning to the back to index it on the appropriate letter page. All this while she was walking into the store front the van was parked in front of. Once inside she waved at the man behind the counter as he dealt with the customer there.
"Heya, Minaba, just give me a moment," the shop owner told her as she came in.
"That's fine Mr. Leinniger," she said in a friendly tone.
"I really appreciate this last minute help, Hank," the other customer said. "The damn inventory clerk at my place apparently can't be bothered to actually check everything."
"Just glad I had this on hand," Hank Leinniger said, putting out a brown cardboard box. "You could have been out of luck completely."
Hank turned away from the packages on the counter for a moment to ring up the first customer's purchase. At which point, the man started patting himself down and grimacing.
"Left it in the glove compartment again?" Mr. Leinniger asked.
"You know, that's dangerous, sir," Minaba said. "Who knows who could get a look at it."
"I'll be right back." The man sighed irritably and hurried outside to go get his wallet.
"Well, let me get your package then, Minaba," Hank said. "Feel free to look around while you wait, there should be some new silly string in the shelves."
"Oh? Really?" Minaba asked excitedly, turning and starting to look through the shelves with all the restraint of a cat presented with catnip.
As she disappeared back into the supplies of practical joke and party supplies, Hank went into the backroom and came out with another, similarly sized brown cardboard box to place on the counter beside the first. "Shouldn't you be in school?"
"The guard let me out," Minaba responded over her shoulder in between smacking lips.
"Did he know you were going out?" was the response.
The first customer came rushing inside then holding up his wallet and coming to the counter.
"Got it," he said in relief. "Thanks again, Hank."
"Not at all a problem again," the shop owner said pleasantly. "Have a good show tonight."
"Thanks," the fireworks man said, snatching one of the cardboard boxes up and heading out the door as soon as he was done paying.
Behind him, Minaba arrived with a handful of materials she put on the counter next to the last box.
"All right, I'm going to ring this stuff up," he said. "But then you get right to school, got it?"
"Oh yes, sir," Minaba said. "After the hardware store, but after that, right back."
"Is this for some sort of school project? A Rube-Goldberg device?" he asked.
"Well, my last one didn't work quite right," Minaba said. "Part of it went off way too early."
"Well, hopefully, this one works better for you," Mr. Leinniger said. "Are the snakes the last part of the device?"
"Yep!" Minaba said, waving cheerfully. "Bye, Mr. Leinniger."
The unusual girl was typing out another text as she came out of the hardware shop and, as promised heading toward the school. She reached it and leaned against one of the walls outside the cameras' arc of vision and waited, chewing her gum. The delivery truck passed by her three minutes after she'd arrived and her eyes widened briefly when she realized that it could have arrived before she'd gotten ready.
"Have to update the local take-out's delivery times," she muttered to herself as she slipped back into the campus using the delivery truck as cover and hummed to herself as she walked out into the grounds, heading for the dorms and her room.
Once there, the focused and determined girl moved to the built-in bookshelf against the wall and shifted it aside to uncover a large section of loosened wall. Pulling it aside, revealed a dusty crawl space with a small step ladder and a couple of large, empty plastic tubs, all of which she pulled out. With those in hand, she proceeded to hum to herself as she started cleaning her room, tossing the assorted collected pieces of information and putting them into her tubs, which she slowly dragged to the crawl space.
It was not an easy task given the way she was panting and gasping with each inch budged, but after an hour and a half of cleaning paper and magazines off the wall and floor…and another hour dragging the two tubs the fifteen feet to her hiding place for them…she had a room that appeared as boring as any of the rest of her class.
Well, except for the list of take-out businesses stapled to the ceiling still. Had to be fair after all.
Checking her clock again, she figured she had another hour before classes were released. Not including those that were being held after school for some reason, of course. But, while most of the students lived on campus and probably already put their morning stuff into their lockers at lunch time, Semezou would likely stop to leave stuff in his locker or pick stuff up.
Dressed once again in the school uniform, Minaba walked out into the hall with her purse and the cardboard box from the party shop. She passed by a teacher and saw that he looked rather tired and somewhat angry.
"Is something wrong?" she asked, trying to remember which of the teachers this was.
"Nothing you need to worry about," he snapped before calming down when she stepped away from him. "Sorry, it's been a bad day; someone … scared my girlfriend with a phone call today."
"Ah! That's terrible," she gasped with an angry face. "I hope they catch the jerk!"
"You wouldn't know if any of the students around here did something like that, would you?" he asked.
"Not that I know of," she said, thinking about it for a moment. "Anyway, I've got to get to what I was doing, I'm on a deadline."
"Then what are you doing dawdling in the halls on the first day when you have a job to do?" the teacher asked with a bit more humor in his anger than he had before. "Go to it. And get rid of that gum."
"Right away, sir," Minaba said with a smile and a mock salute.
Slipping past all awareness of either irony or karma, Minaba was soon at the locker and removing tools from her purse as she pulled the gum out of her mouth and compared it to the gum on the locker before putting it back in her mouth again and starting to take the locker door off. She paused a moment when she pulled out the canister of paper snakes and frowned at it. It looked somewhat different than she was used to, and seemed a bit heavier.
Shrugging that aside, she went about the work of fixing it into the locker in front of her. Once that was done and the door back in place, she removed the gum from her mouth and fixed it into the spot where the previous glob had been just as the bell rang.
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Post by thrythlind on Aug 11, 2012 17:39:57 GMT -7
That is all the chapters which are available public and free of the first novel.
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