Quote:Well, really it was a classic service shot, but yeah. Glad you enjoyed it. ^_^
Midori and the classic spit take. Priceless.
Quote:Well, it's her or Nao, really - which would you rather have someone as literal as kitty-girl picking things up from?
And Shiho 'teaching' Mikoto even some things? Oh, how this can not end well.
A few moments later the door swung back open, and Midori waved us inside. She had tossed on a sweatshirt and a pair of shorts, and from the look of her face had splashed some water on it to wake herself up before she redid her ponytail. I took a moment as Mikoto and I were taking off our shoes to give it an envious glance. I missed my hair.
"How did you identify me?" she asked, once all the properly mannerly welcoming rituals had been taken care of.
I glanced at Mikoto, and she nodded and started rooting around in my book bag - she'd insisted on carrying it, with my arm in a sling like it was. Between that and her own and a lunch that must have weighed more than both of them put together she must have been carrying the better part of half her own weight even with Miroku left back in the umbrella stand in the apartment's entry foyer, but she'd given no sign of even noticing the weight.
It was, frankly, pretty disturbing - not because of what she was capable of, but because of how readily she put all that power at the complete disposal of someone else... Which was made even worse because, even if she'd likely never be in the running for the Nobel Prize for Physics, if you know what I mean, her grades in class and her comments in the planning sessions that'd taken over most of my most recent bout of hospital time had made damn clear that she wasn't anywhere near as dumb as she came across - she might have been a simplistic puppet, but only because someone else had made her that way.
Seeing something like that done to a real person - any human being, let alone one whom you knew and liked - was as scary as it was sickening.
Anyway, she rooted around for a moment, then came out with a thinnish sheaf of printer paper that had been hastily stapled together. I took it and handed it to Midori, then sat back and waited.
She gave me a cockeyed look as she took it, then glanced down at the typed first page, scanning the first few lines. Then she did a double take and read the entire thing, carefully, before flipping the page and starting on the first page of xeroxed handwriting. After a while, she shook herself out of the trance and looked up. "How certain are you of all of this?"
It was a question I had asked myself, one any student with even part of a historian's training would would, and I shrugged. "Not completely, of course, but as much of it as we've been able to check in other sources has panned out perfectly."
She watched my expression consideringly as she thought about that, and I made a mental note to be very careful not to underestimate this woman. Sentai silliness aside she had the same sort of iron will I'd noticed in the other HiME, and I'd be shocked if she wasn't actually the smartest. Without Mikoto or Akira's skills or Shizuru or Yukino's resources or Mai and Kagutsuchi's raw power I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call her the most dangerous of them, but I decided then and there that I had no interest whatsoever in ever seeing the question put to the test... especially on me.
Quote:*pikupiku*
Sleeping on a cot in an obviously hastily thrown together living space where my office had once been, and there was something about her that suggested she dearly needed the downtime, was a dead ringer for a younger Shizuru Viola.
Fujino-san?
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."