Chapter Four, sadly, is still 'in progress', so there'll probably be a wait for it.
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MAHOU SHOUJO SHINTO SCION
Episode Three:
"Supercell"
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Tanaka Izuna’s usual pose for computer use was tilted back in the comfortable office chair she’d brought from home, with one leg crossed over the other and kicking idly. Gaming, on the other hand, required what she thought of as ‘the typing pose’, leaning forward to put both hands in reach of the keyboard. Tonight’s event hadn’t given her much time to lean back.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: ican stil lhardly belive these thigns are suppodsed to be real. Straight out of a mvoie...
Hm, a movie with the strong and striking champion cutting down the foul legions of the hungry dead, blazing a path to safety for the stunning love interest rescued from a destroyed cafe, locking the fallout shelter door behind them and smiling over into her companion’s adoring eyes...
Moonspawn was the excitable type, she’d found. At least when it came to her gaming, anyway. Fortunately, her own character had spells to increase another’s ability to deal damage to enemies, so turning Sunsword into an unstoppable killing machine and Moonspawn’s summons into useful support for the group was simplicity itself.
Involuntarily, Izuna’s eyes cut across to the magazine lying face-up on the corner of her desk, with her own blue-white eyes looking back at her from the cover, and an evil little chuckle - easily suppressed - lurked for a moment at the back of her throat.
It might be a bit bad of her, but she was totally looking forward to seeing the group’s resident tomboy get a major shock.
Especially since she’d be able to rub it in with an autograph.
* * * * *
For almost as long as Izuna could remember it had been one of her mother’s absolute rules that the two of them would eat at least one meal together every day. As her mother’s name ceased to be one spoken of as a minor novelty, as her career advanced into actual influence, some of the rules had changed - now it could be any meal rather than merely dinner, and they sometimes had guests - but even today her mother’s secretary had been given that ‘tradition’ as one of his guiding principles.
“I don’t even think that Yanagimoto disagrees about the necessity,” the older woman said, waving her chopsticks in an exasperated gesture she’d never have let any of her colleagues see. “He’s just taking his sweet time explaining what his price is because he figures it gives him more leverage. As though he needed it, with people dying in every incident!” A bite full of rice vanished into that famous icy glare.
If they’d been discussing anything other than the rash of supernatural terror attacks, Izuna probably would have teased her about ranting, but instead, since the particular problem was something she could see a way to do something about, she said, “His daughter is one of my kohai in the Student Government. I can try asking her, seeing if she knows or she’d be willing to pass a message?”
Granted that the two of them were three years apart in age and that Councilor Yanagimoto didn’t strike her as the sort to think to talk about his Important Work with his family, but it was worth a try.
Her mother thawed slightly as she thought about it, then nodded sharply. “If she doesn’t know, then yes, you can tell her to pass it on to her father that I’m asking.”
Izuna gave her a slight, seated bow, then rose to find herself being regarded sadly. “Yes... what?”
The fact that her mother hesitated a moment over replying took her mood from puzzlement to worry. Her mother - decisive and almost crushingly self-confident - never hesitated. “There are days,” the most important person in her life admitted, “when I regret what my career has meant to you, growing up. Like I’ve stolen your childhood somehow.”
Part of Izuna wanted to joke about how she really should have grown up by her last year of highschool anyway, or about how deathly dull most of her peers’ interests were, but this was a serious conversation. Something her mother was worried about had to be.
She set her chopsticks down. “There were a lot of times when I wished you were around more, or that I didn’t have to watch what I said and did everywhere anyone could see. But... I wouldn’t change any of it, wouldn’t have even then. Your work is, always was, actually important, and as I’ve grown up I’ve only become more sure that you’re genuinely better at it than anyone else I could think of. The fact that you were always willing to trust me not to screw that up meant, still means, so much...
“Please don’t worry about that, Mother.”
Her mother reached over and brushed her hair away from her face, cupping her cheek in her palm. “You’ve grown up so well,” she said softly.
That was really alarming. She laid her own hand over her mother’s. “I’m not going to die,” she told her firmly, “and neither are you.”
Her mother blinked at her, then laughed. “No, no,” she said,” Nothing like that. But once they think their man won’t get splashed by the blame for all of this, I’m going to need to start washing my neck.”
For the executioner’s blade to find a clean and respectable target.
Izuna scowled and started to open her mouth, but her mother kept going and interrupted. “And that’s the way it should be. People are dying when it’s my job to protect them.” She smiled and picked up her own chopsticks again. “You are also still forbidden to kill my political enemies in sword duels. Mother’s orders.”
* * * * *
“Holy shit,” Yanagimoto muttered, and Izuna relaxed out of her stretch with an amused smile as Yamanaka Eiko started laughing outright, for once stopping her constant flitting around the edges of the conversation to hold her stomach.
“I know!” Iwasaki Hanabi agreed with a fervent sympathy that was at least half meant to tease Izuna herself. “It’s disgusting! She’ll eat more than all three of us put together and put it all on those things!”
“An inhuman monster,” Eiko intoned with wavery solemnity, spoiled by her badly hidden laughter and habit of talking too fast. “Why, she ignores her diet nearly as much as you do, Miss Athlete.”
“Your envious calumnies are noted,” Izuna said wryly. “But-”
“You know why she agreed to this trip, Ei-chan?” Hanabi interrupted, patting the ruffle of whatever anime outfit she was wearing this time back into place.
“Miki’s, Bicchan,” Eiko said.
“Lingerie shop,” Hanabi explained. It had been her turn to pick the destination, so it was Akihibara rather than someplace good for that, but that didn’t make them wrong about her own reasons.
“They’re still growing, you see.”
“It really does make you sick.”
“With envy,” Yanagimoto cut into the back-and-forth patter with a tone dry enough to use in a martini.
“Well, duh.”
“Speak for yourself. I saw the bill the last time she did this.” Ei-chan held both of her hands up as thought to ward off the expense. Given her own slender - the unkind would and have said ‘rail thin’ - figure, she had cause for her horror.
“Also, backaches,” Yanagimoto said.
“No,” Bicchan said solemnly, and Izuna covered her own eyes with one hand.
“No?”
“Not that she’s ever admitted,” Ei-chan said. “And we’ve gotten her to relax enough to bitch about everything else that annoys her.” Like being too tall, something that Eiko, barely 150cm, had no time for.
“Mostly boys,” Bicchan said. She’d spent most of that discussion being comically smug about 160cm being just the right height.
Yanagimoto considered that. “That is disgusting.”
“Incredibly,” Ei-chan said, with an agreeing nod that set her ponytail bobbing.
“Horrifically,” Bicchan said.
“Remind me why we’re friends, again?” Izuna asked, to general laughter.
“Comedy value?” Bicchan offered, brushing her stylishly feathered bangs out of her eyes..
“Mutual dark secrets?” Ei-chan suggested.
“Oh, so that rumor is true, then?” Yanagimoto asked interestedly, if after a beat or two of pause.
“About the threesomes?” Bicchan said. “No, worse luck. She’s still in denial.”
“Or at least the closet,” Ei-chan chipped in.
“Um,” Yanagimoto said, finally nonplussed.
“They’re lying to you,” Izuna said. “Both of them have perfectly nice boyfriends.” She rolled her eyes. “And, of course, there are all too many people willing to make my business their own.”
“...I could note that that statement does not actually say that you’re also not interested in girls-” Yanagimoto observed.
Izuna said nothing.
“-but instead I think I’ll point out that I’ve heard nice things about that Karaoke spot on the corner.”
“Clever girl,” Ei-chan said to Bicchan as several of Izuna’s guard detail stepped into the business to speak to the receptionist.
“I vote we keep her,” Bicchan said to Ei-chan as the girl behind the counter flinched away from the looming dark-suited security types.
A few moments later, the guards came back with the all-clear, and they went inside with Izuna saying, “I’m fine with that, but I think it might cause problems with other people.”
Yanagimoto smiled at the receptionist as she came back from leading a guard to check on the room they’d be using, but when she turned back her tone was as serious and harsh as her choice of words. “If the first thing my father actually notices about my entire life is whose daughters I’m making friends with, he can go get stuffed.”
Eiko elbowed her taller friend in the ribs. “Hey, defiant! She’s just your type.”
Izuna took hold of her friend’s shoulder and physically propelled her into the room. “That’s not funny.”
Eiko stopped smiling and slid into one of the benches. “Sorry.”
“You and your mother are actually close, then?” Yanagimoto asked, sitting and leaning forward to examine the song list on the room’s console. Her voice was soft, and her eyes were hooded and sad.
“So!” Ei-chan cut in, “what kind of music do you like, Yanagimoto-kun?”
The four girls traded glances around among themselves, then burst out in giggles. Eventually, Hanabi was the first to recover. “Boy, Ei-chan!” she teased, “you sure know how to read the mood!”
“This is just a day out,” Eiko defended herself, “There’s no excuse for being that serious.”
“I need to keep my direct-access-to-Mother hat on for a moment longer, sorry,” Izuna said, “but after that we should be clear for the rest of the morning.”
Ei-chan and Bicchan traded a private glance of their own, then adopted identically comically serious poses, sitting bolt upright with their hands daintily on their pressed-together knees. Izuna threw a cushion at them, then turned to Yanagimoto.
The younger girl looked back at her. “you invited me because your mother has a message for my father.”
“That’s why I invited you,” Izuna agreed, but went on, “That’s not why I’ve enjoyed having you as part of our morning so far.”
The suspicious look kept up for a moment, then relaxed into a smile. “Then I’d say that Shi-chan is fine. What was the message?”
Izuna brushed her hair back and leaned forward. “Well... First a question of my own. Does your father really think that the police can cope with these zombie attacks on their own?”
Shi-chan blinked, an expression of dawning enlightenment racing across her features, followed by regret. “Sort of. He’s serious about it being a police-only function, but that’s because he’s angling to give the National Police a permanent upgrade.”
Izuna blinked in turn and leaned back thoughtfully. “...Okay... That makes a kind of sense... I’ll tell Mother, that that’s his goal. She was... unhappy... at what seemed like a ‘leverage’ tactic with lives at stake. But if it’s that... Well, I’ll tell her, and let her decide.”
She smiled a little. “All right, serious time is done.”
Shi-chan nodded also, and the other two relaxed with dual relieved sighs. “Okay, so,” Ei-chan said, turning to the group’s newest member. “Seriously, ‘Shi-chan’?”
‘Shi’ was the most common reading for the kanji for death.
“‘La petit morte’?” Bicchan quoted in what was barely recognizable as French. The others ignored her.
“It’s really Nadeshiko,” said girl explained, “And anyway I didn’t want to ruin the naming scheme.”
“Huh?” Ei-chan said.
“‘A’,” Nadeshiko said, pointing at Eiko’s own boyish chest.
“‘B’,” her indicating finger aimed at what modest beginnings Hanabi’s own ‘Akiba Style’ ensemble made good practice of.
“‘C’,” she tapped her own chest, calling attention to its unspectacular but unmistakable encumbrance.
“And...” she grinned, wickedly, and pointed at Izuna, who regarded the entire speech with a tolerantly raised eyebrow that fooled no one present. “‘E’.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Izuna said, then let herself smirk.
Shi-chan’s face fell. “You’re disgusting,” she said, and Ei-chan and Bicchan burst out laughing.
* * * * *
Just before noon, Outa-san, the head of Izuna’s security detail, stepped into the door and interrupted the debate over whose turn it was next. “Miss, we need to go, now.”
She blinked, and stood. “All right,” she said, concerned. “What’s happened?”
“We have reports of the walking dead from all across Akihibara,” the guard said.
“Do we have room for three more?” she asked, turning to physically lift Nadeshiko and Hanabi to their feet, since they were too busy being startled to get up themselves.
“Of course,” Outa-san said. He’d been with her detail for more than long enough to predict the question - and the insistence that would have followed about getting her friends out as well if he’d answered otherwise. There was no percentage in courting the argument.
Usually, there would have been a relatively discreet car waiting in the street outside to scoop them up and rush them out of the area, possibly with a police car to clear its way through traffic. Certainly Outa-san had expected it to be there; he’d never have sworn that way if not.
Hanabi and Eiko were tense and serious, the latter pale and shaking slightly and the former sweating and shifting from foot to foot. Izuna recognized her own mood as the same singing calm that had overtaken her during the time that cult tried to kidnap her. She’d ended up sobbing all over her mother’s suit once it was over, but that hadn’t hit until well after she was safe. Nadeshiko, in contrast, seemed placid, almost doll-like in the face of danger, except for the faint hint of irritation at the inconvenience.
“Right,” Outa-san said after a few moments’ furious consultation with his earpiece, “This way.”
They hustled off through the streets of Akihibara, a knot of schoolgirls at the center of a ring of large, grim women and larger, grimmer men in sober black suits. For a while, most of their progress was owed to the way their direction matched the crowds’, and the way already alarmed people swirled out of the way of the guards’ air of purpose.
And then they turned a corner, and the press of the crowd and the roar of near-panic were gone, replaced by an eerie, echoing silence and a completely deserted street, strewn with bloodily slashed and dismembered corpses. The only sign that they hadn’t suddenly teleported across the city was the buzz and flicker and flash of the signs and shop displays glaring down from every floor of the eight-story towers looming over the narrow street. The only other sound was the grief-stricken sobbing of a woman not immediately visible.
Outa-san took one look at the situation and swore again. “All right,” he said, “back-”
“Watch out!” one of the other guards shouted, starting to draw his gun and pointing to direct his compatriots’ attention to the skeletal, ragged figure crouched behind a trash can.
It was the wrong thing to do. Not drawing the gun, but shouting the warning. The zombie looked up, weeping black blood from both dark, empty eye sockets, then - guided by the sound or by some other sense - leaped, covering the half-block to the sharp-eyed guard with a single bound and a banshee shriek of rage.
His name had been Ishida, Izuna recalled with a corner of her mind as she grabbed Eiko and Hanabi and all but physically threw them through the door of the nearest shop. Nadeshiko was already moving on her own, she didn’t need help - and then, as she’d been half-bracing herself for, Outa-san’s shoulder hit her in the ribs and knocked her staggering through the doorway herself.
“Oof,” the guard grunted under his breath, “how much do you weigh, bitch?”
“More than you!” she snapped back over her shoulder. Eiko had stumbled over a severed leg, distracted by the screaming as the monster-woman tore at the guards with superhuman strength and fingers that ended in kitchen knives; Izuna yanked her back on balance and dragged her behind her. Nadeshiko had the door to the small shop’s stock room open, and they poured through it, Nadeshiko, hanabi glancing over her shoulder, then Izuna, dragging Eiko, and finally Outa-san slammed the door behind them.
“Don’t lock it!” Eiko said from where she’d tumbled to the stockroom’s floor. “If the others need to get in...”
Hanabi had her eyes closed and was breathing deeply, visibly fighting down nausea. “They won’t,” she said.
Eiko went pale. “...Oh.”
“Outa-san,” izuna said, and held up her cell phone to show its ‘no signal’ warning, “Does your radio have reception?”
He blinked at her, then locked the door and raised a hand to his earpiece. After listening a moment, he pulled the discreet speaker plug out and tucked it over his collar. “Jamming and horror-movie threats,” he said.
“Charming,” Nadeshiko said.
There was a long, rasping scratch at the door. Everyone else in the room, even Outa-san, flinched. Izuna looked at the door thoughtfully. “Don’t bullets go through doors?” she asked.
“Yeah,” said a male voice from behind her. “But sorry to say that ain’t likely to slow a Servitor that strong down much.”
Hanabi squeaked loudly enough from the shock to provoke a fit of screeching and banging from the monster at the door, and Izuna whipped around with her hands raised in an automatic empty-hand stance even as Outa-san’s gone came up, tracking towards...
A snake - or something very like a snake, since it had just blinked at her when real snakes didn’t have eyelids - curled on top of one of the boxes of dolls piled along the wall next to her. “Yo,” he said. “You Izuna?”
She blinked, then, just like fear and grief, sat shock aside to deal with later, once things were safe and settled. “I am.”
“Sweet. Hang on a sec. Your daddy had something he wanted me to give you.”
And then he made a noise that she remembered hearing from a number of different cats over the years, usually right before a rug or coverlet gained a wet and hirsute new decoration.
“This is way, way too freaky,” Hanabi muttered as the gleaming damp endcap of a traditional scabbard emerged from the deity’s wide-gaping mouth.
And emerged, and emerged.
“I’m unpleasantly reminded of childbirth,” Nadeshiko noted.
The familiar back-and-forth sarcasm, joking, and wordplay helped calm Eiko’s nerves. “For a telephone pole, maybe.”
“It gives...” Hanabi swallowed a pulse of nausea and repeated, “It gives a new meaning to the idea of sword-swallowing.”
Eventually the ‘Serpent’ coughed out the last of the pommel and the blade began to tilt over and topple to the ground. Conditions by years of iaido and kenjutsu classes - and suddenly, Mother’s hints about studying those rather than sporting-only kendo techniques took on entirely different overtones - Izuna caught it before it could finish falling.
“What,” Eiko said, “the fuck.”
For a long, long moment, Izuna looked down at the creature coiled on top of the stock box. Eventually, she said, “I always thought Mother was joking, or at least being metaphorical.”
The serpent laughed like a dog, with his eyes and a gaping mouth and hanging tongue, showing thorny triangular shark-teeth white against the midnight blue and stormcloud gray of his scales. “Nope,” he said, and his tone confirmed the impression of amusement. “Straight from the armory of the storm-god himself.”
Outside the door there was a shuffle and a thump, then another long moment of silence, broken at last by the first of a series of wretched sobs.
“Ii-chan,” Nadeshiko said.
“Yes, Shi-chan?”
“Your father is Susano-o.”
“Apparently.”
“And you knew it.”
“For values of ‘knew’ not involving actual belief, yes,” Izuna said, amazed at how placid her voice remained. She’d known that she could be calm ‘under fire,’ but this ridiculous.
The... wyrm, maybe? …snickered. “These three are snarky, Boss,” the serpent-god said, working his jaw and throat uncomfortably. “You should keep ‘em.”
“Outa-san,” Izuna said, feeling the weight of the blade in her hands without taking her eyes off the tiny dragon coiled just under eye level, “how long do we have?”
“She seems to react to noise,” the bodyguard answered softly. “So I’d say as long as we’re quiet, long enough for rescue to come.”
“Very well,” she said, and carefully, began to draw the blade. It was tricky - the quarters were cramped, and for some reason her father had thought it was a good idea to give her a massive nodachi as long as she was tall, rather a more conventional blade.
And then she thought a little more about thirty centimeters from the hilt, and blinked. “An homage to the Worochi-no-Aramasa?” she asked, fighting to think through the frisson of awe. That famous blade had been in the ancient tsurugi style, straight and double-edged, rather than the single-edged and slightly curved modern form that the nodachi was extended from.
“Your dad had it reforged,” the serpent said, and she had to fight down the start of shock. She was holding the sword that had killed the dread dragon Orochi, executed the destructive god Kagutsuchi. It was real and it was in her hands.
She resheathed the blade even more gingerly than she had drawn it, finally feeling just as croggled as her friends looked. “I think,” she said shakily, “that you had better tell me everything.”
So he did.
The wyrm, it turned out, answered to the name of Kirara, and he was one of Susano-o’s trouble’biters’. “No arms,” he said wryly, “means I can’t shoot a gun. So I find trouble and bite it.”
Twenty years before, the lord of the gods, Izanagi, had ordered his three children and foremost lieutenants to proceed to earth and there sire or bear divine children who could serve as their heirs.
“Wait, don’t they already have kids?” Eiko interrupted.
“Like the Imperial Family?” Nadeshiko asked.
Not, as it turned out, within the last couple of centuries, and even then, most children of the divine would inherit only a small fraction of their parents’ power without the parent’s deliberate will. For the most part, Izanagi decreed that his subjects should not so exert themselves.
And then, abruptly, he had changed his position - then vanished just as the children began to come into their full adulthood, and as Izanami began her greatest campaign against the living in thousands of years.
“I don’t,” Izuna pointed out, “exactly have power over the clouds and rain.”
That was because, to hide her safely from Izanami and her family’s other enemies, her powers had been sealed away to only those levels that might be expected of any ‘ordinary’ one of her half-siblings. The tsuba of her new sword had been enchanted to loosen those locks, to unleash the power she had been born to wield from its suppressed state at the provision of the correct incantation.
Outside the door, the broken sobbing of the taloned zombie collapsed into a frightened whimper, making Kirara break off from his explanation of Heaven’s politics in the wake of Izanagi’s disappearance. There was an irregular thumping, hammering noise, like heels drumming on the ground, and a harsh rattling hiss of gradually released breath.
Then there was a tremendous impact against the door as the monster outside drove gore-flecked talons through the chipboard and began working them back and forth to try and tear it asunder.
Outa-san stepped in front of the portal, raised his pistol, and unloaded the weapon’s entire magazine through the door. The talons twitched as each bullet smashed through, then, when the barrage of fire paused, began working and shredding just as though completely unbothered. “Kirara-sama,” the bodyguard asked over his shoulder as he reloaded, “with that power, can she get away from this?”
“Maybe,” the wyrm said. “But one way or the other, she could certainly beat it.”
Outa-san didn’t like that idea in the slightest. No bodyguard would. But he was also a professional, and thus obligated to take what the available expert indicated as the best chance available. “Do it,” he told her, and asked Kirara, “What can you do to help?”
“Not much. The dead don’t mind poison.”
Izuna looked down at the cloud-and-lightning-bolt design of the legendary blade’s tsuba for a moment, then took a deep breath and drew herself up very straight. “I,” she said formally, “am Izuna, daughter of the Tanaka clan, sired by Susano-o no Mikoto out of Himari of the same line. Let this be known as a truth acknowledged by all parties.”
It felt, she decided once the intensity had receded enough to think again, like getting hit by lightning in the middle of an orgasm.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything like enough time to savor the sensation. There was a rending crash as the zombie witch smashed her face into the door’s splintering center. Firing one-handed, Outa-san emptied his second magazine into her head from close enough that all of them could smell her rotten flesh starting to cook under the muzzle flash.
Having her face and head reduced to a reeking black pulp didn’t stop the monster, nor dim the menacing green light that now filled her empty eye sockets. Izuna stepped around Outa-san while he was reloading and kicked the struggling zombie in what was left of her face.
The light fixture exploded. So did the door. The zombie went flying in a cloud of shattered wooden fragments, covered in crackling wisps of St. Elmo’s Fire. More of the auroral display lined its way across every surface of the shop and street, crackling and sparking off of antennae and counter displays.
She chased after it, not at a run but in a single leap over the bodies of people, friends, she’d known and trusted for years, drawing the long awkward blade and bringing it around to -
- miss badly after the monster threw itself down the street.
She followed.
It was the most bizarre game of tag she’d ever played, skipping through and over entire blocks full of suddenly dark storefronts full of blanked-out screens, ignoring sticky pools of drying blood splattering away from her shoes in favor of the dictates of survival. She would swing and it would dodge, it would pounce and she would duck... It was frustrating, and despite the ongoing evacuation they were having more and more near-misses with still-living civilians who hadn’t been able to flee quickly enough.
What would Sasaki-sensei say?
Tactics.
She needed a way to either damage the creature from a distance, catch up to it, or force it to come to her.
A storm goddess should have lightning, but she had no idea how to call it and no time to figure the trick out. She already knew that she couldn’t cover ground as quickly...
But if she took the pressure off, it tried to attack her.
She stopped dead in the middle of the street, next to the fallen body of a young teen, still staring sightlessly at the sky. Took a deep breath. Cleared her mind. And raised her father’s sword into the high guard, nearly vertical with the tsuba almost level with her eyes.
And, while she waited, the zombie glared at her with luminous eyes - then charged.
Instinct, and years of practice, told her the moment, and to focus everything in her being into the strike.
The report from the lightning strike that coursed through the blade in the moment of the cut shattered every window she could see - and reduced the monster to a smoking bisected husk.
Very carefully, she let out her breath and slid Worochi-no-Aramasa back into its sheath.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
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MAHOU SHOUJO SHINTO SCION
Episode Three:
"Supercell"
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Tanaka Izuna’s usual pose for computer use was tilted back in the comfortable office chair she’d brought from home, with one leg crossed over the other and kicking idly. Gaming, on the other hand, required what she thought of as ‘the typing pose’, leaning forward to put both hands in reach of the keyboard. Tonight’s event hadn’t given her much time to lean back.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: ican stil lhardly belive these thigns are suppodsed to be real. Straight out of a mvoie...
Hm, a movie with the strong and striking champion cutting down the foul legions of the hungry dead, blazing a path to safety for the stunning love interest rescued from a destroyed cafe, locking the fallout shelter door behind them and smiling over into her companion’s adoring eyes...
Quote:[Team-OOC]Stormward: They are. My mother's been working all hours and worrying a lot, and she's scattered her work all over the place whenever she's been home.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: yes but sombies?1
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: Less talk, more tank! Leave my pets alone you fucks!
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: there ,aggroded.
Moonspawn was the excitable type, she’d found. At least when it came to her gaming, anyway. Fortunately, her own character had spells to increase another’s ability to deal damage to enemies, so turning Sunsword into an unstoppable killing machine and Moonspawn’s summons into useful support for the group was simplicity itself.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Stormward: Don't worry, we'll finish them quickly.
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: LOL Sic em, boys! Fuck up their shit!
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: monsters or not wer’re still on for tomorros, right/
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: Damn straight. I refuse to believe either of you is /that/ fucking pretty.
Involuntarily, Izuna’s eyes cut across to the magazine lying face-up on the corner of her desk, with her own blue-white eyes looking back at her from the cover, and an evil little chuckle - easily suppressed - lurked for a moment at the back of her throat.
It might be a bit bad of her, but she was totally looking forward to seeing the group’s resident tomboy get a major shock.
Especially since she’d be able to rub it in with an autograph.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Stormward: Whatever your judgement on that score may prove to be, I am indeed that tall.
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: 5pm then?
[Team-OOC]Stormward: Presuming that the district isn’t evacuated, that should be manageable.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: Styill works for me
[Team-OOC]Stormward: I’ll see you all there, then.
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: TTYL
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: sleepp well.
* * * * *
For almost as long as Izuna could remember it had been one of her mother’s absolute rules that the two of them would eat at least one meal together every day. As her mother’s name ceased to be one spoken of as a minor novelty, as her career advanced into actual influence, some of the rules had changed - now it could be any meal rather than merely dinner, and they sometimes had guests - but even today her mother’s secretary had been given that ‘tradition’ as one of his guiding principles.
“I don’t even think that Yanagimoto disagrees about the necessity,” the older woman said, waving her chopsticks in an exasperated gesture she’d never have let any of her colleagues see. “He’s just taking his sweet time explaining what his price is because he figures it gives him more leverage. As though he needed it, with people dying in every incident!” A bite full of rice vanished into that famous icy glare.
If they’d been discussing anything other than the rash of supernatural terror attacks, Izuna probably would have teased her about ranting, but instead, since the particular problem was something she could see a way to do something about, she said, “His daughter is one of my kohai in the Student Government. I can try asking her, seeing if she knows or she’d be willing to pass a message?”
Granted that the two of them were three years apart in age and that Councilor Yanagimoto didn’t strike her as the sort to think to talk about his Important Work with his family, but it was worth a try.
Her mother thawed slightly as she thought about it, then nodded sharply. “If she doesn’t know, then yes, you can tell her to pass it on to her father that I’m asking.”
Izuna gave her a slight, seated bow, then rose to find herself being regarded sadly. “Yes... what?”
The fact that her mother hesitated a moment over replying took her mood from puzzlement to worry. Her mother - decisive and almost crushingly self-confident - never hesitated. “There are days,” the most important person in her life admitted, “when I regret what my career has meant to you, growing up. Like I’ve stolen your childhood somehow.”
Part of Izuna wanted to joke about how she really should have grown up by her last year of highschool anyway, or about how deathly dull most of her peers’ interests were, but this was a serious conversation. Something her mother was worried about had to be.
She set her chopsticks down. “There were a lot of times when I wished you were around more, or that I didn’t have to watch what I said and did everywhere anyone could see. But... I wouldn’t change any of it, wouldn’t have even then. Your work is, always was, actually important, and as I’ve grown up I’ve only become more sure that you’re genuinely better at it than anyone else I could think of. The fact that you were always willing to trust me not to screw that up meant, still means, so much...
“Please don’t worry about that, Mother.”
Her mother reached over and brushed her hair away from her face, cupping her cheek in her palm. “You’ve grown up so well,” she said softly.
That was really alarming. She laid her own hand over her mother’s. “I’m not going to die,” she told her firmly, “and neither are you.”
Her mother blinked at her, then laughed. “No, no,” she said,” Nothing like that. But once they think their man won’t get splashed by the blame for all of this, I’m going to need to start washing my neck.”
For the executioner’s blade to find a clean and respectable target.
Izuna scowled and started to open her mouth, but her mother kept going and interrupted. “And that’s the way it should be. People are dying when it’s my job to protect them.” She smiled and picked up her own chopsticks again. “You are also still forbidden to kill my political enemies in sword duels. Mother’s orders.”
* * * * *
“Holy shit,” Yanagimoto muttered, and Izuna relaxed out of her stretch with an amused smile as Yamanaka Eiko started laughing outright, for once stopping her constant flitting around the edges of the conversation to hold her stomach.
“I know!” Iwasaki Hanabi agreed with a fervent sympathy that was at least half meant to tease Izuna herself. “It’s disgusting! She’ll eat more than all three of us put together and put it all on those things!”
“An inhuman monster,” Eiko intoned with wavery solemnity, spoiled by her badly hidden laughter and habit of talking too fast. “Why, she ignores her diet nearly as much as you do, Miss Athlete.”
“Your envious calumnies are noted,” Izuna said wryly. “But-”
“You know why she agreed to this trip, Ei-chan?” Hanabi interrupted, patting the ruffle of whatever anime outfit she was wearing this time back into place.
“Miki’s, Bicchan,” Eiko said.
“Lingerie shop,” Hanabi explained. It had been her turn to pick the destination, so it was Akihibara rather than someplace good for that, but that didn’t make them wrong about her own reasons.
“They’re still growing, you see.”
“It really does make you sick.”
“With envy,” Yanagimoto cut into the back-and-forth patter with a tone dry enough to use in a martini.
“Well, duh.”
“Speak for yourself. I saw the bill the last time she did this.” Ei-chan held both of her hands up as thought to ward off the expense. Given her own slender - the unkind would and have said ‘rail thin’ - figure, she had cause for her horror.
“Also, backaches,” Yanagimoto said.
“No,” Bicchan said solemnly, and Izuna covered her own eyes with one hand.
“No?”
“Not that she’s ever admitted,” Ei-chan said. “And we’ve gotten her to relax enough to bitch about everything else that annoys her.” Like being too tall, something that Eiko, barely 150cm, had no time for.
“Mostly boys,” Bicchan said. She’d spent most of that discussion being comically smug about 160cm being just the right height.
Yanagimoto considered that. “That is disgusting.”
“Incredibly,” Ei-chan said, with an agreeing nod that set her ponytail bobbing.
“Horrifically,” Bicchan said.
“Remind me why we’re friends, again?” Izuna asked, to general laughter.
“Comedy value?” Bicchan offered, brushing her stylishly feathered bangs out of her eyes..
“Mutual dark secrets?” Ei-chan suggested.
“Oh, so that rumor is true, then?” Yanagimoto asked interestedly, if after a beat or two of pause.
“About the threesomes?” Bicchan said. “No, worse luck. She’s still in denial.”
“Or at least the closet,” Ei-chan chipped in.
“Um,” Yanagimoto said, finally nonplussed.
“They’re lying to you,” Izuna said. “Both of them have perfectly nice boyfriends.” She rolled her eyes. “And, of course, there are all too many people willing to make my business their own.”
“...I could note that that statement does not actually say that you’re also not interested in girls-” Yanagimoto observed.
Izuna said nothing.
“-but instead I think I’ll point out that I’ve heard nice things about that Karaoke spot on the corner.”
“Clever girl,” Ei-chan said to Bicchan as several of Izuna’s guard detail stepped into the business to speak to the receptionist.
“I vote we keep her,” Bicchan said to Ei-chan as the girl behind the counter flinched away from the looming dark-suited security types.
A few moments later, the guards came back with the all-clear, and they went inside with Izuna saying, “I’m fine with that, but I think it might cause problems with other people.”
Yanagimoto smiled at the receptionist as she came back from leading a guard to check on the room they’d be using, but when she turned back her tone was as serious and harsh as her choice of words. “If the first thing my father actually notices about my entire life is whose daughters I’m making friends with, he can go get stuffed.”
Eiko elbowed her taller friend in the ribs. “Hey, defiant! She’s just your type.”
Izuna took hold of her friend’s shoulder and physically propelled her into the room. “That’s not funny.”
Eiko stopped smiling and slid into one of the benches. “Sorry.”
“You and your mother are actually close, then?” Yanagimoto asked, sitting and leaning forward to examine the song list on the room’s console. Her voice was soft, and her eyes were hooded and sad.
“So!” Ei-chan cut in, “what kind of music do you like, Yanagimoto-kun?”
The four girls traded glances around among themselves, then burst out in giggles. Eventually, Hanabi was the first to recover. “Boy, Ei-chan!” she teased, “you sure know how to read the mood!”
“This is just a day out,” Eiko defended herself, “There’s no excuse for being that serious.”
“I need to keep my direct-access-to-Mother hat on for a moment longer, sorry,” Izuna said, “but after that we should be clear for the rest of the morning.”
Ei-chan and Bicchan traded a private glance of their own, then adopted identically comically serious poses, sitting bolt upright with their hands daintily on their pressed-together knees. Izuna threw a cushion at them, then turned to Yanagimoto.
The younger girl looked back at her. “you invited me because your mother has a message for my father.”
“That’s why I invited you,” Izuna agreed, but went on, “That’s not why I’ve enjoyed having you as part of our morning so far.”
The suspicious look kept up for a moment, then relaxed into a smile. “Then I’d say that Shi-chan is fine. What was the message?”
Izuna brushed her hair back and leaned forward. “Well... First a question of my own. Does your father really think that the police can cope with these zombie attacks on their own?”
Shi-chan blinked, an expression of dawning enlightenment racing across her features, followed by regret. “Sort of. He’s serious about it being a police-only function, but that’s because he’s angling to give the National Police a permanent upgrade.”
Izuna blinked in turn and leaned back thoughtfully. “...Okay... That makes a kind of sense... I’ll tell Mother, that that’s his goal. She was... unhappy... at what seemed like a ‘leverage’ tactic with lives at stake. But if it’s that... Well, I’ll tell her, and let her decide.”
She smiled a little. “All right, serious time is done.”
Shi-chan nodded also, and the other two relaxed with dual relieved sighs. “Okay, so,” Ei-chan said, turning to the group’s newest member. “Seriously, ‘Shi-chan’?”
‘Shi’ was the most common reading for the kanji for death.
“‘La petit morte’?” Bicchan quoted in what was barely recognizable as French. The others ignored her.
“It’s really Nadeshiko,” said girl explained, “And anyway I didn’t want to ruin the naming scheme.”
“Huh?” Ei-chan said.
“‘A’,” Nadeshiko said, pointing at Eiko’s own boyish chest.
“‘B’,” her indicating finger aimed at what modest beginnings Hanabi’s own ‘Akiba Style’ ensemble made good practice of.
“‘C’,” she tapped her own chest, calling attention to its unspectacular but unmistakable encumbrance.
“And...” she grinned, wickedly, and pointed at Izuna, who regarded the entire speech with a tolerantly raised eyebrow that fooled no one present. “‘E’.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Izuna said, then let herself smirk.
Shi-chan’s face fell. “You’re disgusting,” she said, and Ei-chan and Bicchan burst out laughing.
* * * * *
Just before noon, Outa-san, the head of Izuna’s security detail, stepped into the door and interrupted the debate over whose turn it was next. “Miss, we need to go, now.”
She blinked, and stood. “All right,” she said, concerned. “What’s happened?”
“We have reports of the walking dead from all across Akihibara,” the guard said.
“Do we have room for three more?” she asked, turning to physically lift Nadeshiko and Hanabi to their feet, since they were too busy being startled to get up themselves.
“Of course,” Outa-san said. He’d been with her detail for more than long enough to predict the question - and the insistence that would have followed about getting her friends out as well if he’d answered otherwise. There was no percentage in courting the argument.
Usually, there would have been a relatively discreet car waiting in the street outside to scoop them up and rush them out of the area, possibly with a police car to clear its way through traffic. Certainly Outa-san had expected it to be there; he’d never have sworn that way if not.
Hanabi and Eiko were tense and serious, the latter pale and shaking slightly and the former sweating and shifting from foot to foot. Izuna recognized her own mood as the same singing calm that had overtaken her during the time that cult tried to kidnap her. She’d ended up sobbing all over her mother’s suit once it was over, but that hadn’t hit until well after she was safe. Nadeshiko, in contrast, seemed placid, almost doll-like in the face of danger, except for the faint hint of irritation at the inconvenience.
“Right,” Outa-san said after a few moments’ furious consultation with his earpiece, “This way.”
They hustled off through the streets of Akihibara, a knot of schoolgirls at the center of a ring of large, grim women and larger, grimmer men in sober black suits. For a while, most of their progress was owed to the way their direction matched the crowds’, and the way already alarmed people swirled out of the way of the guards’ air of purpose.
And then they turned a corner, and the press of the crowd and the roar of near-panic were gone, replaced by an eerie, echoing silence and a completely deserted street, strewn with bloodily slashed and dismembered corpses. The only sign that they hadn’t suddenly teleported across the city was the buzz and flicker and flash of the signs and shop displays glaring down from every floor of the eight-story towers looming over the narrow street. The only other sound was the grief-stricken sobbing of a woman not immediately visible.
Outa-san took one look at the situation and swore again. “All right,” he said, “back-”
“Watch out!” one of the other guards shouted, starting to draw his gun and pointing to direct his compatriots’ attention to the skeletal, ragged figure crouched behind a trash can.
It was the wrong thing to do. Not drawing the gun, but shouting the warning. The zombie looked up, weeping black blood from both dark, empty eye sockets, then - guided by the sound or by some other sense - leaped, covering the half-block to the sharp-eyed guard with a single bound and a banshee shriek of rage.
His name had been Ishida, Izuna recalled with a corner of her mind as she grabbed Eiko and Hanabi and all but physically threw them through the door of the nearest shop. Nadeshiko was already moving on her own, she didn’t need help - and then, as she’d been half-bracing herself for, Outa-san’s shoulder hit her in the ribs and knocked her staggering through the doorway herself.
“Oof,” the guard grunted under his breath, “how much do you weigh, bitch?”
“More than you!” she snapped back over her shoulder. Eiko had stumbled over a severed leg, distracted by the screaming as the monster-woman tore at the guards with superhuman strength and fingers that ended in kitchen knives; Izuna yanked her back on balance and dragged her behind her. Nadeshiko had the door to the small shop’s stock room open, and they poured through it, Nadeshiko, hanabi glancing over her shoulder, then Izuna, dragging Eiko, and finally Outa-san slammed the door behind them.
“Don’t lock it!” Eiko said from where she’d tumbled to the stockroom’s floor. “If the others need to get in...”
Hanabi had her eyes closed and was breathing deeply, visibly fighting down nausea. “They won’t,” she said.
Eiko went pale. “...Oh.”
“Outa-san,” izuna said, and held up her cell phone to show its ‘no signal’ warning, “Does your radio have reception?”
He blinked at her, then locked the door and raised a hand to his earpiece. After listening a moment, he pulled the discreet speaker plug out and tucked it over his collar. “Jamming and horror-movie threats,” he said.
“Charming,” Nadeshiko said.
There was a long, rasping scratch at the door. Everyone else in the room, even Outa-san, flinched. Izuna looked at the door thoughtfully. “Don’t bullets go through doors?” she asked.
“Yeah,” said a male voice from behind her. “But sorry to say that ain’t likely to slow a Servitor that strong down much.”
Hanabi squeaked loudly enough from the shock to provoke a fit of screeching and banging from the monster at the door, and Izuna whipped around with her hands raised in an automatic empty-hand stance even as Outa-san’s gone came up, tracking towards...
A snake - or something very like a snake, since it had just blinked at her when real snakes didn’t have eyelids - curled on top of one of the boxes of dolls piled along the wall next to her. “Yo,” he said. “You Izuna?”
She blinked, then, just like fear and grief, sat shock aside to deal with later, once things were safe and settled. “I am.”
“Sweet. Hang on a sec. Your daddy had something he wanted me to give you.”
And then he made a noise that she remembered hearing from a number of different cats over the years, usually right before a rug or coverlet gained a wet and hirsute new decoration.
“This is way, way too freaky,” Hanabi muttered as the gleaming damp endcap of a traditional scabbard emerged from the deity’s wide-gaping mouth.
And emerged, and emerged.
“I’m unpleasantly reminded of childbirth,” Nadeshiko noted.
The familiar back-and-forth sarcasm, joking, and wordplay helped calm Eiko’s nerves. “For a telephone pole, maybe.”
“It gives...” Hanabi swallowed a pulse of nausea and repeated, “It gives a new meaning to the idea of sword-swallowing.”
Eventually the ‘Serpent’ coughed out the last of the pommel and the blade began to tilt over and topple to the ground. Conditions by years of iaido and kenjutsu classes - and suddenly, Mother’s hints about studying those rather than sporting-only kendo techniques took on entirely different overtones - Izuna caught it before it could finish falling.
“What,” Eiko said, “the fuck.”
For a long, long moment, Izuna looked down at the creature coiled on top of the stock box. Eventually, she said, “I always thought Mother was joking, or at least being metaphorical.”
The serpent laughed like a dog, with his eyes and a gaping mouth and hanging tongue, showing thorny triangular shark-teeth white against the midnight blue and stormcloud gray of his scales. “Nope,” he said, and his tone confirmed the impression of amusement. “Straight from the armory of the storm-god himself.”
Outside the door there was a shuffle and a thump, then another long moment of silence, broken at last by the first of a series of wretched sobs.
“Ii-chan,” Nadeshiko said.
“Yes, Shi-chan?”
“Your father is Susano-o.”
“Apparently.”
“And you knew it.”
“For values of ‘knew’ not involving actual belief, yes,” Izuna said, amazed at how placid her voice remained. She’d known that she could be calm ‘under fire,’ but this ridiculous.
The... wyrm, maybe? …snickered. “These three are snarky, Boss,” the serpent-god said, working his jaw and throat uncomfortably. “You should keep ‘em.”
“Outa-san,” Izuna said, feeling the weight of the blade in her hands without taking her eyes off the tiny dragon coiled just under eye level, “how long do we have?”
“She seems to react to noise,” the bodyguard answered softly. “So I’d say as long as we’re quiet, long enough for rescue to come.”
“Very well,” she said, and carefully, began to draw the blade. It was tricky - the quarters were cramped, and for some reason her father had thought it was a good idea to give her a massive nodachi as long as she was tall, rather a more conventional blade.
And then she thought a little more about thirty centimeters from the hilt, and blinked. “An homage to the Worochi-no-Aramasa?” she asked, fighting to think through the frisson of awe. That famous blade had been in the ancient tsurugi style, straight and double-edged, rather than the single-edged and slightly curved modern form that the nodachi was extended from.
“Your dad had it reforged,” the serpent said, and she had to fight down the start of shock. She was holding the sword that had killed the dread dragon Orochi, executed the destructive god Kagutsuchi. It was real and it was in her hands.
She resheathed the blade even more gingerly than she had drawn it, finally feeling just as croggled as her friends looked. “I think,” she said shakily, “that you had better tell me everything.”
So he did.
The wyrm, it turned out, answered to the name of Kirara, and he was one of Susano-o’s trouble’biters’. “No arms,” he said wryly, “means I can’t shoot a gun. So I find trouble and bite it.”
Twenty years before, the lord of the gods, Izanagi, had ordered his three children and foremost lieutenants to proceed to earth and there sire or bear divine children who could serve as their heirs.
“Wait, don’t they already have kids?” Eiko interrupted.
“Like the Imperial Family?” Nadeshiko asked.
Not, as it turned out, within the last couple of centuries, and even then, most children of the divine would inherit only a small fraction of their parents’ power without the parent’s deliberate will. For the most part, Izanagi decreed that his subjects should not so exert themselves.
And then, abruptly, he had changed his position - then vanished just as the children began to come into their full adulthood, and as Izanami began her greatest campaign against the living in thousands of years.
“I don’t,” Izuna pointed out, “exactly have power over the clouds and rain.”
That was because, to hide her safely from Izanami and her family’s other enemies, her powers had been sealed away to only those levels that might be expected of any ‘ordinary’ one of her half-siblings. The tsuba of her new sword had been enchanted to loosen those locks, to unleash the power she had been born to wield from its suppressed state at the provision of the correct incantation.
Outside the door, the broken sobbing of the taloned zombie collapsed into a frightened whimper, making Kirara break off from his explanation of Heaven’s politics in the wake of Izanagi’s disappearance. There was an irregular thumping, hammering noise, like heels drumming on the ground, and a harsh rattling hiss of gradually released breath.
Then there was a tremendous impact against the door as the monster outside drove gore-flecked talons through the chipboard and began working them back and forth to try and tear it asunder.
Outa-san stepped in front of the portal, raised his pistol, and unloaded the weapon’s entire magazine through the door. The talons twitched as each bullet smashed through, then, when the barrage of fire paused, began working and shredding just as though completely unbothered. “Kirara-sama,” the bodyguard asked over his shoulder as he reloaded, “with that power, can she get away from this?”
“Maybe,” the wyrm said. “But one way or the other, she could certainly beat it.”
Outa-san didn’t like that idea in the slightest. No bodyguard would. But he was also a professional, and thus obligated to take what the available expert indicated as the best chance available. “Do it,” he told her, and asked Kirara, “What can you do to help?”
“Not much. The dead don’t mind poison.”
Izuna looked down at the cloud-and-lightning-bolt design of the legendary blade’s tsuba for a moment, then took a deep breath and drew herself up very straight. “I,” she said formally, “am Izuna, daughter of the Tanaka clan, sired by Susano-o no Mikoto out of Himari of the same line. Let this be known as a truth acknowledged by all parties.”
It felt, she decided once the intensity had receded enough to think again, like getting hit by lightning in the middle of an orgasm.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything like enough time to savor the sensation. There was a rending crash as the zombie witch smashed her face into the door’s splintering center. Firing one-handed, Outa-san emptied his second magazine into her head from close enough that all of them could smell her rotten flesh starting to cook under the muzzle flash.
Having her face and head reduced to a reeking black pulp didn’t stop the monster, nor dim the menacing green light that now filled her empty eye sockets. Izuna stepped around Outa-san while he was reloading and kicked the struggling zombie in what was left of her face.
The light fixture exploded. So did the door. The zombie went flying in a cloud of shattered wooden fragments, covered in crackling wisps of St. Elmo’s Fire. More of the auroral display lined its way across every surface of the shop and street, crackling and sparking off of antennae and counter displays.
She chased after it, not at a run but in a single leap over the bodies of people, friends, she’d known and trusted for years, drawing the long awkward blade and bringing it around to -
- miss badly after the monster threw itself down the street.
She followed.
It was the most bizarre game of tag she’d ever played, skipping through and over entire blocks full of suddenly dark storefronts full of blanked-out screens, ignoring sticky pools of drying blood splattering away from her shoes in favor of the dictates of survival. She would swing and it would dodge, it would pounce and she would duck... It was frustrating, and despite the ongoing evacuation they were having more and more near-misses with still-living civilians who hadn’t been able to flee quickly enough.
What would Sasaki-sensei say?
Tactics.
She needed a way to either damage the creature from a distance, catch up to it, or force it to come to her.
A storm goddess should have lightning, but she had no idea how to call it and no time to figure the trick out. She already knew that she couldn’t cover ground as quickly...
But if she took the pressure off, it tried to attack her.
She stopped dead in the middle of the street, next to the fallen body of a young teen, still staring sightlessly at the sky. Took a deep breath. Cleared her mind. And raised her father’s sword into the high guard, nearly vertical with the tsuba almost level with her eyes.
And, while she waited, the zombie glared at her with luminous eyes - then charged.
Instinct, and years of practice, told her the moment, and to focus everything in her being into the strike.
The report from the lightning strike that coursed through the blade in the moment of the cut shattered every window she could see - and reduced the monster to a smoking bisected husk.
Very carefully, she let out her breath and slid Worochi-no-Aramasa back into its sheath.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."