I couldn't help but feel as thought I'd once been on the opposite end of a conversation that, while not exactly the same, was still very similar.
Telling Sylvie just how I knew the, admittedly few, things that I had no right to know, every other improbability aside. Talking to Akagi Ritsuko in one set of memories, and doing much the same - only in concert with Gabriel - to a group of people who would have the potential to allow the world's end, or faciliate its salvation.
Fujino Shizuru had been told about myself, told about
Black and the world as was ...
"I was not informed of more, but there was a sense of something far deeper developing beneath the surface," she said. "The person, he said he was already skirting the edges of a set of 'Rules' he'd mentioned a few times. Just that. Without actually saying anything about what these were."
"Who? How did you meet them?" I inquired, understandably interested. If this person knew that much of traversing Limbo, enough place a specific individual at a point of the multiverse after briefing them, accurately if sparsely, on the place they'd be ending up in ... I was more than eager to make their acquaintance. Add to that the fact that the person knew me, or of me ...
"I was involved in an altercation, the results of which I was assured had been fatal. I knew no more, and upon awakening, I was met with an offer."
"Another chance at life?"
"In a way," she evaded. "And I never received a name. From the person's words, they did not have a need for one. Merely ... after they had told me to try and come into contact with Shiraga Katsu, or whatever monicker you had chosen, they implied you could interpret their chosen form of address. The person had called himself the White Guardian."
We'd been speaking in Japanese all the while, so the sudden shift to English was a bit unexpected. A moment was needed for the mind to catch up with what had been said, but once that happened ...
... I remembered the body I was in. The body I had been in. The places I had been to.
Alright. So maybe it wasn't as impossible as my mind had tried to make it seem.
"Westerner, past his middle age, white hair and suit?" I asked, the image of the Col.Sanders wannabe from some of my remembered dreams coming to me. Another bit sprung out at me, the voice speaking seemingly neither in Japanese, nor in English, but at the same time in both those languages. A half-recalled snippet of a dream I'd had a few days ago.
"He told you you'd see her again."
She stiffened minutely, eyes suddenly sharp enough to pretend they were simply red tinted chips of diamond.
"The visions," she stated rather than asked, surprise flowing away into a sort of understanding. "You have the visions as well."
It followed that, if this so called White Guardian was somehow restricted from informing her about - well, exactly why he thought I'd be the best chance of assistance for his piece in this game, I had my suspicions about - more than the general state of the world that was Earl, he would give her a connection of sort to the person who could deliver to her that more in-depth information.
I nodded. "A few. I don't usually remember all too much of them, but mostly, the common theme seems to be some sort of anomaly. A red moon crawling with shadows, or maybe some sort of shape covering the normal moon ..."
She shook her head. "No ... mine were ... different. There was little in the way of a common theme ... a city of technology, and war being waged. A person whom I'd wanted to call Gabriel, but wearing the body of someone I'd known as a character from a television series. Looking down at Earth, floating in oddly colored space."
"Those were ..." I blinked in surprise. "So, what I was seeing. Those were your memories?"
Fujino Shizuru suddenly seemed ... very brittle, and the hardness of her eyes had turned jagged.
I had a feeling of huge scales teetering on the brink of overbalancing.
Swaying.
Finally, ever so slowly, tipping to one side.
And she told me, in explicit detail, of where she'd come from. She told me of who she'd been. What't she'd done.
The story of the Festival, and of the HiME.
We were both silent for some time afterwards, myself still working through exactly what I'd been told and her ... though she was a very reserved person, from what I'd seen during the conversation and half-expected to come from her resemblance to Viola, she seemed emotionally wrung out.
I could hardly blame her, though.
It was a bleak, bleak picture that she painted ...
Do you want to see her again? seemed stuck in my mind, and I was now in the position of knowing exactly who the person Fujino-san had wanted so badly to see again was.
For all his restrictions, and even from what I could recall - though I wasn't certain how old Dr.Who episode reruns and reading about Craig Reed's 'fictional' meeting with the person qualified me to make that judgement - ... the White Guardian had never been deliberately misleading.
Do you want to see her again?
Her.
I looked to the display of Otome figurines standing against the far wall. Specifically, one figurine in particular.
Her.
Not somebody who looks like her.
They didn't.
They wouldn't!
...
They would.
Still, I held onto a vague hope that ...
"Kuga Natsuki," I said, voice even. Maybe too even. "You said something about Elements. What was hers?"
Fujino's gaze snapped up again, measuring. After a moment, she responded. "Two small pistols."
"Ah. I think I misunderstood," I amended, slightly relieved. "I'd assumed that meant some sort of elemental affinity."
"Not all of them, but Natsuki's," she spoke. "Her Element, even her Child, were very much aligned with ice."
Ice.
Bloody ice.
Bloody ice sticking out of my chest and back. Ice Materializing in the air around the Schwarz ... member? Project? Black armor, bulky and blocky enough to obscure anything but the fact that the wearer was human.
The White Guardian had put his piece in, out of death, but restricting himself or being restricted to putting Fujino Shizuru in place without her powers as a HiME.
What in Hell's name had his opposite number done?!
Better yet, how was I going to explain this ... did it even still count as a suspicion now? ... to Fujino?
'Very, very carefully.'
Still didn't hit every point I'd wanted to, but I tried to have it not be too awkward in a way that screams 'blatant excuse for exposition'.
And incidentally, yes, I'm doing this because it gives me an excuse to work with an already completed plot to supplement the still incomplete knowledge of Otome.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm