Sooo, the Wolkenritter and Hayate.
Hayate will come to at the Children's Blood and Cancer Center in Austin.
Good news: She's getting some of the best medical care in the world.
Bad news: She can't find the Tome of Night Sky and her Wolkenritter are nowhere to be found. Even the remnant of Reinforce Eins is absent.
Gil Graham is with her, along with Aria and Lotte (both passing for human). They are not certain what's going on, but for some reason, Hayate is listed as Graham's foster child and the Liese twins are her caretakers.
Meanwhile, back in San Antonio, events begin to transpire.
A nameless wretch finds the Book of Darkness. Who they are, unfortunately matters little, because they promptly stumble into a Witch's Lair (you know the one) and is devoured.
Leaving only the Witch/Simulacra of Alicia with the book.
Bad things are about to go down.
Meanwhile, back at Westwoods, Washu-chan, with the help of Nanoha, Fate, Raising Heart, and Bardiche are trying to get a better handle on Ben's anti-magic abilities. In an idle state, he seems to put out a passive field that only extends a few inches from his skin. Only a state of deep sleep or deep relaxation seems to fully disable it. And an angry or enraged emotional state expands the field by several meters and intensifies it by an order of magnitude. In this state, Benjamin seems to be able to completely dispel magic up to C-Rank (by TSAB's scale), partially degrade B-rank spells, and somewhat weaken A-rank spells. Spells that are AA-rank and up are not noticeably affected.
Washu hypothesizes that Ben has something similar to the Counteractor present in Misaki Masaki-Jurai, only much weaker. She also hypothesizes that Ben may be able to strengthen his ability, and even use it directionally, though it will take time for them to learn how he is able to control it.
Nanoha, Fate, and Alicia all begin attending a school nearby the apartment complex together. Alicia and Fate are officially foster children of the Takamachi's until Lindy is found. For the time being, they keep their original surname of Testarossa.
Alicia has tested well enough to place into third grade, but at Benjamin's advisement, she is placed with the 1st grade instead where it is likely that she will be much happier. Nanoha and Fate are in 3rd grade despite testing well enough for 5th - again, on Ben's recommendation. Although he does say that it's not a bad idea for the two to be in the same class together as that will greatly reduce the likelihood of bullying.
Meanwhile... Kyubey shows up and asks Alice Lowel-Bunnings if she wants to be a Magical Girl. Unfortunately, Alice has never read Faust or anything like unto it, and while she is aware of the overall situation, she does not know about what Kyubey actually is.
Her wish? For her and her friends to always be together.
Quick! Let's plot out what kind of Puella Magi Alice would be!
So. Let's mix all that together and stir...
Admiral Graham manages to make contact with Lindy, apprising her of the situation. They agree to keep an eye on the news for anything REALLY weird going on. And boy do they find it.
The strange disturbance at Joint Base San Antonio. And the string of bizarre deaths of homeless people.
They're not sure since none of it is the BoD's modus operandi, but they decide to keep an eye on things.
The Alicia-Witch has taken full control of the BoD and the Wolkenritter. With them working for it and not being any the wiser since their memories were wiped, they set out with two objectives:
Find linker cores to feed into the book.
Find and kill Fate and Alicia
Thing is, this thing is all the worst possible things that Alicia could have been - greedy, vicious, jealous... it wants to eliminate it's two 'sisters' so that its 'mother' will come back and love it like she is supposed to. A perfectly innocent desire twisted into something horrific and ugly.
In the meantime, it has been feeding on the hapless ones that stumble by it's nest who are already on the threshold of being suicidal. No shortage of that these days, unfortunately, and the Alicia-Witch has been growing fat off of this terrible bounty, both breeding new familiars and filling pages in the BoD.
And then along comes Alice. Completely unaware of the horrible danger she is in while being led by Kyubey. The Incubator is sure that with the feeding grounds being so rich, the Witch has spawned several mature familiars by then. (Not quite actually since, unknown to the Incubator, the Alicia-Witch has been splitting energy between breeding familiars and filling the BoD.) Besides, even if it hasn't been enough time yet, it figures that maybe Alice can be left to the Witch's tender mercies as it gorges itself on her.... or if Alice defeats it... well, without grief seeds to purify her soul gem, it won't take too long for Alice to become a Witch herself.
Slow progress, perhaps, but still...
For the time being, though, the night is awash for Alice, and she returns home with Kyubey reassuring her that tomorrow they'll find it.
The next day, disaster.
As Nanoha, Fate, and Alicia ride the bus to school, Shamal locates them. It is only a last-minute Barrier Seal by Arf that keeps everyone else from coming to harm. And while Nanoha and Fate go on the defensive to protect Alicia, the Westwoods Apartments become a kicked-over anthill. Of course, in all the excitement, Ben gets a bit too carried away with things, manages to get a gun, and before anyone realizes it, he's taken off in Scrappy.
He has Family out there now, and the only way they're gonna take it away from him is over his dead body.
Meanwhile, Nanoha and Fate are confused. The Wolkenritter do not seem to recognize them, and it is slowly starting to sink in that the worse has probably happened. As they dodge attacks, this time wary of Shamal's tricks, the worry over what has become of Hayate.
And then Benjamin, having been let in by Arf because she hasn't heard yet, arrives and makes a distraction of himself, running and carefully gunning to conserve ammo, and basically just making himself enough of a threat that he can't be easily ignored. It helps that he's familiar enough with the terrain to make hit-and-run tactics work in his favor. And it works just enough for Nanoha and Fate to get to the safety of Washu's lab with Alicia.
Finally, Vita manages to nail Ben, nearly killing him.
Squishy shows up and assimilates itself into Ben and then he let's Vita have it.
Up until then, the Masaki family and Urzu Squadron have been tying up the Wolkenritter with a combination of skill and numbers. And now, Lindi, Chrono, Gil Graham, and Lotte and Aria have just shown up to the party. Between that and Ben's Antimatter Surprise, the Wolkenritter retreat, leaving the others to perform damage control.
Marller and Sebastian get called in for backup - shit has well and truly hit the fan.
Ben calls a powwow - there's too much to go over, too many new players on the scene, and not a whole lot of time. Newcomers are briefed. The newly acquired information is disseminated, and everyone is debriefed. Ben is admonished by Sebastian. Ben counters with, "And what if it had been Lord Phantomhive before he was made a Grand Duke of Hell, out there with no protection?" Sebastian counters that he would not have been as incapable as Benjamin and that Fate and Nanoha were far from defenseless, but concedes the points that Alicia was vulnerable, Nanoha and Fate were outnumbered at the time, and that when family is in danger it tends to pull all the stops out.
Though at any rate, Benjamin is far from defenseless himself now. Washu sticks him in a hyperbaric time chamber in order to give him a crash-course in how to make use of his new physiology, as well as to whip up a basic combat suit for him. (Think along the lines of the same suit that Washu gives to 'Walker' in AdmiralTigerCla's Sleeping With the Girls.)
Taking into consideration the situation, Peorth is called in as well - they'll need her skills in order to deal with the BoD once it's subdued.
Trouble is that a Witch's Lairs are notoriously hard to find. Even the Goddesses can only point to a general direction. So the idea is had to use Nanoha and Fate as live bait, having them simulate a battle in the skies above San Antonio.
And it works!
As the Wolkenritter emerge, even though they are being stealthy about it, the portal is still detectable and they have a fix on the lair.
But just as they think things are about to start going their way... Alice shows up, led by Kyubey.
Ben realizes his horrible, critical blunder. In the aftermath of Precia's ultimate demise, he only gave the broad strokes, and then with Alicia's resurrection occupying his mind, forgot to go into further detail. In fact, everyone pretty much forgot about it.
And now, poor Alice had become damned soul - a cursed child because of his shortcoming.
Benjamin is torn between rage and despair as he tries to get Alice away from Kyubey... but instead, Alice insists that this time, she was going to stop the big bad so that Nanoha didn't have to... and then dives into the Witch's Lair.
Unfortunately, Kyubey gives them the slip, but now at least they know to watch for the little fucker.
Outside, Nanoha, Fate, Arf, and Ryoko continue their battle - Ryoko on Zafira, Arf on Shamal, Nanoha on Vita, and Fate on Signum. On the surface, it seems that everyone is evenly matched... only that with the exception of Ryoko, all the others know their Wolkenritter counterparts quite well. And even with Ryoko, she simply and completely out-classes Zafira.
As they fight, memories from before are slowly reawakened, and just when everyone has each other on the metaphorical ropes, the Wolkenritter suddenly understands what has happened, and the true master that they are betraying. With that, they turn their attention back ground-side.
Inside the Witch's Lair, Alice has gotten a head start on everyone, using her movement abilities to close the distance between herself and the Witch. And has discovered an abomination.
A horrible, twisted, and disgusting parody of little Alicia, reclined in a gothic bed, its body that of a mature woman, but its face that of a child still - one with black, soulless eyes that only communicated a ravenous hunger. Its belly was horribly distended as unborn things writhed under the skin and small versions of the Witch, like horrible ghoulish toddlers, climbed out from her skirt one by one. The Book of Darkness hovers ominously overhead, pulsing with an evil intent.
"You're not mommy..." hisses the abomination. "Only mommy is allowed here!"
And then Reinforce Eins's voices comes from the BoD itself: "RUN ALICE! RUN!"
And so she does, with a horde of chittering, giggling, and squealing with delight as they chased her. This is about where she runs into Ben - much to her surprise. After making sure she's alright, Ben goes to work on the familiars using a basic beam-saber weapon given to him by Washu. His AMF makes them vulnerable enough to kill easily. Alice snaps out of her BSOD moment, gets her magic rifle, and starts helping.
Once the others start showing up, Ben takes a moment to explain to her how important it is that she protects her Soul Gem. Naturally, she sticks to the middle of the group for safety's sake.
"Is it always like this!?" she asks Nanoha.
"I don't know. This is only my third Big Bad... well, fourth if you count Precia twice!"
(As a side note, Ben can tell that Fate is being squicked out by having to fight horrible perversions of her sister, but she's being a real trooper about it. All the same, he makes a note to make sure Fate and Alicia have some cuddle time later.)
Once they get to the Witch itself, Ben takes a shot at it - his time in the hyperbolic time chamber having given him the opportunity to practice lowering the yield of his M/AM projectiles to much safer levels. Of course, the BoD reacts, but Ben just keeps right on hammering the abominations until he's all spent. With the Witch weakened, a risky gamble is put into play.
Hayate is teleported in. She may not have had the BoD in her possession when she arrived, but she still has its backdoor access keys. With a bit of effort, she is able to wrest control of the BoD from the Witch, turning it back into The Tome of the Night Sky once again, and expel the malignant code that had developed (again).
And then everyone just unloads on the Witch. Ben, of course, makes a grab for the grief seeds before the get the hell out of dodge.
Once it's all over, Ben calls another big pow-wow, this time calling in the Takamachis, the Lowell-Bunnings, and Tsukimuras. It's decided that Alice will stay the night with Washu since they need to see if they can fix what's been done to Alice, or at the very least, make it so she's in no danger.
Alice, however, makes it clear that she does not want to go back to how things were. She wants to remain as a Mahou Shoujo and stay with Nanoha and Fate. Suzuka stands by her side out of solidarity - besides, as a vampire, albeit a young one, she's actually no slouch herself. Shinobu sighs and says that it looks like she's gonna have to teach her sister how to use her abilities effectively in a scrap.
Ben jokingly says, "Oh great. Yet another mouth to feed!" with a wink and a grin.
In the meantime, Hayate is having her reunion with the Wolkenritter... And Eins. And then once the subject of the BoD's self defense program comes up, Ben shuts them down flat. He will not see Eins going that route again. They have Goddesses and quite possibly one of the most brilliant minds in the multiverse, along with enough quantum computing power to disassemble the BoD's programming code like a cheap watch.
They absolutely CAN fix her.
The only question is now, would Eins like a little sister named Zwei?
A few more things are sorted out. Lindy spends some watching how Nanoha and Fate interact with Ben before confronting him: she has decided that she will leave Fate in his capable hands. Besides, how could she take the girl away from him now when it's obvious that she's in love with him? (And not to mention how Nanoha seems to be right there with her~...) Lindy doesn't mean for it, but it does make Ben a bit uncomfortable having that pointed out by someone new to the situation.
It's also decided that Hayate will stay there as well. Washu has already repaired her body and Hayate is taking great glee in being able to walk, run, jump, and dance. And then she causes a bit of ruckus and teasing by kissing Ben on the cheek for the help he's been.
Admiral Graham will stay at Westwoods with Aria and Lotte. Together, they'll be starting training for the young ones.
Later on, Ben is still up, and so is Washu. Fate, Nanoha, and Alicia are staying in his spare room for the night - they're already conked out and snuggled up together in one big futon. It is adorable.
Ben has just fired off the report to the other Apartment Managers, letting them know what's happened so they can stay in the loop. Tea is shared and Ben admits to Washu that maybe he's not technically human anymore... but he'll be damned if he's gonna let anyone tell him otherwise. But what's really troubling him is The Girls.
For the time, he's simply going with it, but he is worried about other people finding out. And regardless, this is going to be almost a decade of walking on eggshells for him if they never grow out of this. He is fine with being like an adopted brother, but the romantic aspects of their relationship worry him.
Washu isn't going to tell him about what she and Momoko talked about. Everything is up in the air, still, as far as she's concerned. But Washu does comfort Ben in reminding him that Nanoha's parents approve of him... and so does Lindy. And Ben grudgingly agrees... for now.
Somewhere on the south side of town in the half-abandoned industrial sprawl that was once Kelly Air Force Base, a group of Kyubeys appears. They are herding a pair of the Familiars from earlier into a secluded alley, and it is here they begin to make another Witch's Lair.
And in the San Antonio Children's Hospital, Akemi Homura's eyes snap open.
She knows already.
Something is incredibly wrong.
The End....?
<mingthemerciless>OH-HO-HOH-HAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! AHH-HAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!</mingthemerciless>
Hayate will come to at the Children's Blood and Cancer Center in Austin.
Good news: She's getting some of the best medical care in the world.
Bad news: She can't find the Tome of Night Sky and her Wolkenritter are nowhere to be found. Even the remnant of Reinforce Eins is absent.
Gil Graham is with her, along with Aria and Lotte (both passing for human). They are not certain what's going on, but for some reason, Hayate is listed as Graham's foster child and the Liese twins are her caretakers.
Meanwhile, back in San Antonio, events begin to transpire.
A nameless wretch finds the Book of Darkness. Who they are, unfortunately matters little, because they promptly stumble into a Witch's Lair (you know the one) and is devoured.
Leaving only the Witch/Simulacra of Alicia with the book.
Bad things are about to go down.
Meanwhile, back at Westwoods, Washu-chan, with the help of Nanoha, Fate, Raising Heart, and Bardiche are trying to get a better handle on Ben's anti-magic abilities. In an idle state, he seems to put out a passive field that only extends a few inches from his skin. Only a state of deep sleep or deep relaxation seems to fully disable it. And an angry or enraged emotional state expands the field by several meters and intensifies it by an order of magnitude. In this state, Benjamin seems to be able to completely dispel magic up to C-Rank (by TSAB's scale), partially degrade B-rank spells, and somewhat weaken A-rank spells. Spells that are AA-rank and up are not noticeably affected.
Washu hypothesizes that Ben has something similar to the Counteractor present in Misaki Masaki-Jurai, only much weaker. She also hypothesizes that Ben may be able to strengthen his ability, and even use it directionally, though it will take time for them to learn how he is able to control it.
Nanoha, Fate, and Alicia all begin attending a school nearby the apartment complex together. Alicia and Fate are officially foster children of the Takamachi's until Lindy is found. For the time being, they keep their original surname of Testarossa.
Alicia has tested well enough to place into third grade, but at Benjamin's advisement, she is placed with the 1st grade instead where it is likely that she will be much happier. Nanoha and Fate are in 3rd grade despite testing well enough for 5th - again, on Ben's recommendation. Although he does say that it's not a bad idea for the two to be in the same class together as that will greatly reduce the likelihood of bullying.
Meanwhile... Kyubey shows up and asks Alice Lowel-Bunnings if she wants to be a Magical Girl. Unfortunately, Alice has never read Faust or anything like unto it, and while she is aware of the overall situation, she does not know about what Kyubey actually is.
Her wish? For her and her friends to always be together.
Quick! Let's plot out what kind of Puella Magi Alice would be!
So. Let's mix all that together and stir...
![[+]](/images/collapse_collapsed.png "[+]")
Details Details Details!![[Image: Miss-Annie-Oakley-peerless-wing-shot.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Miss-Annie-Oakley-peerless-wing-shot.jpg)
![[Image: Annie_Oakley_shooting_over_her_shoulder_...irror..jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Annie_Oakley_shooting_over_her_shoulder_using_a_hand_mirror..jpg)
Admiral Graham manages to make contact with Lindy, apprising her of the situation. They agree to keep an eye on the news for anything REALLY weird going on. And boy do they find it.
The strange disturbance at Joint Base San Antonio. And the string of bizarre deaths of homeless people.
They're not sure since none of it is the BoD's modus operandi, but they decide to keep an eye on things.
The Alicia-Witch has taken full control of the BoD and the Wolkenritter. With them working for it and not being any the wiser since their memories were wiped, they set out with two objectives:
Find linker cores to feed into the book.
Find and kill Fate and Alicia
Thing is, this thing is all the worst possible things that Alicia could have been - greedy, vicious, jealous... it wants to eliminate it's two 'sisters' so that its 'mother' will come back and love it like she is supposed to. A perfectly innocent desire twisted into something horrific and ugly.
In the meantime, it has been feeding on the hapless ones that stumble by it's nest who are already on the threshold of being suicidal. No shortage of that these days, unfortunately, and the Alicia-Witch has been growing fat off of this terrible bounty, both breeding new familiars and filling pages in the BoD.
And then along comes Alice. Completely unaware of the horrible danger she is in while being led by Kyubey. The Incubator is sure that with the feeding grounds being so rich, the Witch has spawned several mature familiars by then. (Not quite actually since, unknown to the Incubator, the Alicia-Witch has been splitting energy between breeding familiars and filling the BoD.) Besides, even if it hasn't been enough time yet, it figures that maybe Alice can be left to the Witch's tender mercies as it gorges itself on her.... or if Alice defeats it... well, without grief seeds to purify her soul gem, it won't take too long for Alice to become a Witch herself.
Slow progress, perhaps, but still...
For the time being, though, the night is awash for Alice, and she returns home with Kyubey reassuring her that tomorrow they'll find it.
The next day, disaster.
As Nanoha, Fate, and Alicia ride the bus to school, Shamal locates them. It is only a last-minute Barrier Seal by Arf that keeps everyone else from coming to harm. And while Nanoha and Fate go on the defensive to protect Alicia, the Westwoods Apartments become a kicked-over anthill. Of course, in all the excitement, Ben gets a bit too carried away with things, manages to get a gun, and before anyone realizes it, he's taken off in Scrappy.
He has Family out there now, and the only way they're gonna take it away from him is over his dead body.
Meanwhile, Nanoha and Fate are confused. The Wolkenritter do not seem to recognize them, and it is slowly starting to sink in that the worse has probably happened. As they dodge attacks, this time wary of Shamal's tricks, the worry over what has become of Hayate.
And then Benjamin, having been let in by Arf because she hasn't heard yet, arrives and makes a distraction of himself, running and carefully gunning to conserve ammo, and basically just making himself enough of a threat that he can't be easily ignored. It helps that he's familiar enough with the terrain to make hit-and-run tactics work in his favor. And it works just enough for Nanoha and Fate to get to the safety of Washu's lab with Alicia.
Finally, Vita manages to nail Ben, nearly killing him.
Squishy shows up and assimilates itself into Ben and then he let's Vita have it.
Up until then, the Masaki family and Urzu Squadron have been tying up the Wolkenritter with a combination of skill and numbers. And now, Lindi, Chrono, Gil Graham, and Lotte and Aria have just shown up to the party. Between that and Ben's Antimatter Surprise, the Wolkenritter retreat, leaving the others to perform damage control.
Marller and Sebastian get called in for backup - shit has well and truly hit the fan.
Ben calls a powwow - there's too much to go over, too many new players on the scene, and not a whole lot of time. Newcomers are briefed. The newly acquired information is disseminated, and everyone is debriefed. Ben is admonished by Sebastian. Ben counters with, "And what if it had been Lord Phantomhive before he was made a Grand Duke of Hell, out there with no protection?" Sebastian counters that he would not have been as incapable as Benjamin and that Fate and Nanoha were far from defenseless, but concedes the points that Alicia was vulnerable, Nanoha and Fate were outnumbered at the time, and that when family is in danger it tends to pull all the stops out.
Though at any rate, Benjamin is far from defenseless himself now. Washu sticks him in a hyperbaric time chamber in order to give him a crash-course in how to make use of his new physiology, as well as to whip up a basic combat suit for him. (Think along the lines of the same suit that Washu gives to 'Walker' in AdmiralTigerCla's Sleeping With the Girls.)
Taking into consideration the situation, Peorth is called in as well - they'll need her skills in order to deal with the BoD once it's subdued.
Trouble is that a Witch's Lairs are notoriously hard to find. Even the Goddesses can only point to a general direction. So the idea is had to use Nanoha and Fate as live bait, having them simulate a battle in the skies above San Antonio.
And it works!
As the Wolkenritter emerge, even though they are being stealthy about it, the portal is still detectable and they have a fix on the lair.
But just as they think things are about to start going their way... Alice shows up, led by Kyubey.
Ben realizes his horrible, critical blunder. In the aftermath of Precia's ultimate demise, he only gave the broad strokes, and then with Alicia's resurrection occupying his mind, forgot to go into further detail. In fact, everyone pretty much forgot about it.
And now, poor Alice had become damned soul - a cursed child because of his shortcoming.
Benjamin is torn between rage and despair as he tries to get Alice away from Kyubey... but instead, Alice insists that this time, she was going to stop the big bad so that Nanoha didn't have to... and then dives into the Witch's Lair.
Unfortunately, Kyubey gives them the slip, but now at least they know to watch for the little fucker.
Outside, Nanoha, Fate, Arf, and Ryoko continue their battle - Ryoko on Zafira, Arf on Shamal, Nanoha on Vita, and Fate on Signum. On the surface, it seems that everyone is evenly matched... only that with the exception of Ryoko, all the others know their Wolkenritter counterparts quite well. And even with Ryoko, she simply and completely out-classes Zafira.
As they fight, memories from before are slowly reawakened, and just when everyone has each other on the metaphorical ropes, the Wolkenritter suddenly understands what has happened, and the true master that they are betraying. With that, they turn their attention back ground-side.
Inside the Witch's Lair, Alice has gotten a head start on everyone, using her movement abilities to close the distance between herself and the Witch. And has discovered an abomination.
A horrible, twisted, and disgusting parody of little Alicia, reclined in a gothic bed, its body that of a mature woman, but its face that of a child still - one with black, soulless eyes that only communicated a ravenous hunger. Its belly was horribly distended as unborn things writhed under the skin and small versions of the Witch, like horrible ghoulish toddlers, climbed out from her skirt one by one. The Book of Darkness hovers ominously overhead, pulsing with an evil intent.
"You're not mommy..." hisses the abomination. "Only mommy is allowed here!"
And then Reinforce Eins's voices comes from the BoD itself: "RUN ALICE! RUN!"
And so she does, with a horde of chittering, giggling, and squealing with delight as they chased her. This is about where she runs into Ben - much to her surprise. After making sure she's alright, Ben goes to work on the familiars using a basic beam-saber weapon given to him by Washu. His AMF makes them vulnerable enough to kill easily. Alice snaps out of her BSOD moment, gets her magic rifle, and starts helping.
Once the others start showing up, Ben takes a moment to explain to her how important it is that she protects her Soul Gem. Naturally, she sticks to the middle of the group for safety's sake.
"Is it always like this!?" she asks Nanoha.
"I don't know. This is only my third Big Bad... well, fourth if you count Precia twice!"
(As a side note, Ben can tell that Fate is being squicked out by having to fight horrible perversions of her sister, but she's being a real trooper about it. All the same, he makes a note to make sure Fate and Alicia have some cuddle time later.)
Once they get to the Witch itself, Ben takes a shot at it - his time in the hyperbolic time chamber having given him the opportunity to practice lowering the yield of his M/AM projectiles to much safer levels. Of course, the BoD reacts, but Ben just keeps right on hammering the abominations until he's all spent. With the Witch weakened, a risky gamble is put into play.
Hayate is teleported in. She may not have had the BoD in her possession when she arrived, but she still has its backdoor access keys. With a bit of effort, she is able to wrest control of the BoD from the Witch, turning it back into The Tome of the Night Sky once again, and expel the malignant code that had developed (again).
And then everyone just unloads on the Witch. Ben, of course, makes a grab for the grief seeds before the get the hell out of dodge.
Once it's all over, Ben calls another big pow-wow, this time calling in the Takamachis, the Lowell-Bunnings, and Tsukimuras. It's decided that Alice will stay the night with Washu since they need to see if they can fix what's been done to Alice, or at the very least, make it so she's in no danger.
Alice, however, makes it clear that she does not want to go back to how things were. She wants to remain as a Mahou Shoujo and stay with Nanoha and Fate. Suzuka stands by her side out of solidarity - besides, as a vampire, albeit a young one, she's actually no slouch herself. Shinobu sighs and says that it looks like she's gonna have to teach her sister how to use her abilities effectively in a scrap.
Ben jokingly says, "Oh great. Yet another mouth to feed!" with a wink and a grin.
In the meantime, Hayate is having her reunion with the Wolkenritter... And Eins. And then once the subject of the BoD's self defense program comes up, Ben shuts them down flat. He will not see Eins going that route again. They have Goddesses and quite possibly one of the most brilliant minds in the multiverse, along with enough quantum computing power to disassemble the BoD's programming code like a cheap watch.
They absolutely CAN fix her.
The only question is now, would Eins like a little sister named Zwei?
A few more things are sorted out. Lindy spends some watching how Nanoha and Fate interact with Ben before confronting him: she has decided that she will leave Fate in his capable hands. Besides, how could she take the girl away from him now when it's obvious that she's in love with him? (And not to mention how Nanoha seems to be right there with her~...) Lindy doesn't mean for it, but it does make Ben a bit uncomfortable having that pointed out by someone new to the situation.
It's also decided that Hayate will stay there as well. Washu has already repaired her body and Hayate is taking great glee in being able to walk, run, jump, and dance. And then she causes a bit of ruckus and teasing by kissing Ben on the cheek for the help he's been.
Admiral Graham will stay at Westwoods with Aria and Lotte. Together, they'll be starting training for the young ones.
Later on, Ben is still up, and so is Washu. Fate, Nanoha, and Alicia are staying in his spare room for the night - they're already conked out and snuggled up together in one big futon. It is adorable.
Ben has just fired off the report to the other Apartment Managers, letting them know what's happened so they can stay in the loop. Tea is shared and Ben admits to Washu that maybe he's not technically human anymore... but he'll be damned if he's gonna let anyone tell him otherwise. But what's really troubling him is The Girls.
For the time, he's simply going with it, but he is worried about other people finding out. And regardless, this is going to be almost a decade of walking on eggshells for him if they never grow out of this. He is fine with being like an adopted brother, but the romantic aspects of their relationship worry him.
Washu isn't going to tell him about what she and Momoko talked about. Everything is up in the air, still, as far as she's concerned. But Washu does comfort Ben in reminding him that Nanoha's parents approve of him... and so does Lindy. And Ben grudgingly agrees... for now.
Somewhere on the south side of town in the half-abandoned industrial sprawl that was once Kelly Air Force Base, a group of Kyubeys appears. They are herding a pair of the Familiars from earlier into a secluded alley, and it is here they begin to make another Witch's Lair.
And in the San Antonio Children's Hospital, Akemi Homura's eyes snap open.
She knows already.
Something is incredibly wrong.
The End....?
<mingthemerciless>OH-HO-HOH-HAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! AHH-HAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!</mingthemerciless>