[IC][Story][Arc 1] Learning to Be Yourself

[robkelk]

Blossom Apartments, Ottawa, ON, Canada
January 21, 2017
3:33 PM


Rob walked into the common room to hear Mimi talking on her phone, on speaker. "Thank you for the offer, but I believe I'll have to decline," she announced. "Are you sure that Tohsaka-san isn't available?"

"I'm quite sure that she isn't in the building right now."

"Then I'll let you get back to whatever it was that you were doing. Good day." She waited for the answering good-bye, then hung up, and noticed Rob.

He noticed the look on her face. "I couldn't help but overhear the end of your conversation. I assume you were speaking with somebody in Montreal, and I'm guessing it didn't go as well as you had hoped."

"You're right on that guess," she replied. "I know I should have said yes to her offer to teach me, but the way Medea-san sounded so much like Kaolinite... I just couldn't."

Having watched the anime, Rob couldn't help but agree. "No, you made the right choice. You really don't want to owe Caster any favours. Her price is too high."

---

Blossom Apartments, Ottawa, ON, Canada
January 22, 2017
2:37 PM

"A giant bird that wants to eat a heart?" Ruiko looked up from the manual she was still reading. "Rob-oji, you showed us that one."

"Oh, right, he did!" Kazari nodded, turned to her laptop, clicked on one of her bookmarks, and went into the site's archives. "It was one of her earlier posts..." Page after page flashed on her computer screen. "Here it is - November 20." She scrolled down about one-fifth of the way and handed the laptop to Rob.

"Read it," Ruiko insisted.

He did, then passed the laptop back to Kazari. "And that's one of my favourites, too." Sighing deeply, he took his coffee mug and poured some water into it, then placed the mug on the floor and asked it, "Are you trying to tell me something?"

The mug did not deign to answer.

The common room's computer, however, did, suddenly playing "Philadelphia Freedom". Rob looked surprised. "Who in the Pennsylvania residence wants to talk to somebody here?"

---

Blossom Apartments, Ottawa, ON, Canada
January 22, 2017
7:27 PM


Mimi was surprised to see Rob waiting in the front lobby of the new building. "Welcome home, Mimi."

"Thank you, Mr. Donaldson. It's unusual to see you in the copy building, with the extra people."

His smile turned into a frown. "Hey - nobody here is 'extra'. At least I don't think that."

Mimi sighed. "Okay, that was a poor choice of words. What brings you here?"

"I have a message for you, from one of the other residences. Ben mentioned to the other apartment managers that you were looking for a magic teacher, and Philadelphia's resident manager called me with an offer. They have some professional mages in residence there."

"I'll have to call them back, and thank - what's his name? The manager there?"

"Her name... she calls herself 'Inquisitive Raven'." With that, Rob stopped talking for a moment.

"Hey, are you okay?"

"Sorry - just thinking about what Usagi told me I said after I took that blast of yours. And to quote Sakura Kinomoto, 'There is no such thing as coincidence. There is only necessity.' Maybe I'd better stay out of this conversation altogether."

"Sure, okay. I'll call Philadelphia from this building and let you get back to whatever you were doing in the old building."

"The old building with the old guy," Rob added with a smile.

Ten minutes later, Mimi had reheated a microwave dinner in her apartment's kitchen and was using her computer to call the Philadelphia residence. After a moment, the call connected, and an emerald-haired woman appeared on the screen. "Hi! Lindy Harlaown here!"

"Hello, Ms. Harlaown. I'm Mimi Hanyu ..."

"The girl that Mr. Rhodes said would be calling, right? You called at an awkward time - we're just about to have dinner." She held up a sandwich. "Philly cheesesteaks. You should try one, if you haven't already."

"I already have a TV dinner here."

Lindy smiled. "Then we can talk while we're eating. Call it a virtual dinner together." She turned her head and continued, "Chrono-kun, Amy-chan, don't mind me. This has suddenly become a working meal." As she turned back to look at Mimi, she put some ketchup on her cheesesteak. "Allow me to introduce myself properly: I'm Admiral Lindy Harlaown of the Time-Space Administration Bureau, sometimes called the Dimensional Administration Bureau depending on how you translate the name. I understand that you want - or need - to learn how to control your magic."

"That's right," Mimi replied while shaking some powdered cheese onto her microwaved pasta.

"Do you mind if you're trained as a combat mage while you learn to control your magic?"

Mimi thought for a moment as she chewed and swallowed the first bite of her dinner. "I suppose not," she finally answered. "I used to go up against Sailor Moon quite a bit, in a previous lifetime, but never in a magic-to-magic duel."

"A previous lifetime? Before you became a displacee?"

Mimi shook her head. "Before I died and was resurrected."

"Oh." She did did her best to hide her surprise, but Mimi could read the subtle tells she was giving off. After a moment, Lindy continued. "Gil Graham and I are at your disposal, then. We have an interest in finding and training mages, before somebody like the Death Eaters around here, the Unseelie in your part of the world, or the Mazoku that Clef guards against in New Jersey find you. We want you to stay alive, sane, and on the side of the angels."

"Believe me, Ms. ... sorry, Admiral Harlaown, I very much want to try 'sane and on the side of the angels' in this lifetime. I tried the alternative last time and I don't like it now that I have a second chance."

---

Philadelphia, PA, USA
January 23, 2017
3:08 PM


"In my last lifetime, I had a magical rating of level 40," Mimi whispered to the four other people in the room - a human female, a human male, and twin catgirls, who had been introduced as Amy Limietta, Gil Graham, and his familiars Aria and Lotte, respectively.

"I don't know your scale, but that doesn't sound too bad," Graham replied.

"Eudial had a rating of level 78. Cyprene was level 999."

He raised an eyebrow. "Does that mean that level 40 is very good, or ...?"

Mimi sighed. "Everybody else in the Witches 5 was more powerful than me."

"According to the source material, everybody else in the Witches 5 ended up dead," Lotte replied. "You didn't. That has to count for something."

"All that means is that Sailor Moon brought me back from the half-dead state I was in."

Graham looked surprised to hear that. Aria leaned over and whispered into his ear for a few moments. Finally, he said, "I see. I'd very much like to meet Ms. Moon some time. But for now, Ms. Hanyu, let's see where you rate on the Bureau's scale."

"We have all of our Devices hooked into the sensors that Washuu-chan connected to her virtual environment chamber," Lindy added. "We should be able to get at least a rough idea of your ranking on our scale."

"I'll get more than a 'rough' idea, or my name isn't Amy Limietta," announced Amy. Everybody smiled at that - including Mimi.

---

Lindy and Gil looked at the screens showing Mimi's examination, while Amy paid closer attention to the readouts in front of her. Nobody was happy with what they were seeing.

"It's pretty obvious that she isn't an Old Belka Wizard, like Hayate," Gil finally commented.

"Or a Knight, like Signum. She wouldn't even qualify for Rank F on any of the Belka scales."

"Some people simply aren't cut out for hand-to-hand combat."

"True. Amy, switch over to the Midchilda test as soon as it's safe to do so."

"Yes, ma'am!" She tapped a few light-patches on her console, in a sequence she knew so well that she didn't bother looking at the panel.

After a few minutes, Lindy had lost her frown. "She has a bit of skill, but it doesn't translate into very effective attacks."

They watched Mimi easily disable a crowd of attackers that were trying to rush her en masse. "She's good with that wide area attack version of her Charm Buster spell, though - much better than I expected. She handled that zarg rush quite well."

"It's called a 'Zerg rush', Admiral Graham," Amy offered the correction. "The Zarg are from a different story altogether."

"I'm not an admiral any more, Amy."

"Oh, right. Sorry."

Not being able to hear the discussion on the other side of the magical barrier, Mimi simply kept trying to stay alive in the holosuite that looked and worked just like the one back in Ottawa. At least the opponents in the Bureau's version of what Rob said the New Jersey apartment manager called a Million-Mook March weren't rushing her any more, and she could finally defend herself the way that Kaolinite had taught her a lifetime ago.

Seeing what looked like a safe place on a balcony on the wall beside her, she looked for a staircase or ladder that she could use to reach it. That was the only reason she was looking up when a brown-haired girl who looked to be Chibi-Usa or Mimi Misaka's age flew into the testing area. "Oh, that's just not fair! People can't fly! The aerodynamics are all wrong!"

The girl smiled. "You've been ignoring the laws of thermodynamics by firing off energy bolts for the last sixteen minutes, and you're complaining about aerodynamics?"

"Fine, fine, I get what you're saying," Mimi replied as she dodged an attack from one of the ground-based drones and returned fire, disabling it. "It's magic."

"That's right! My name's Hayate, by the way." She pulled a book out of thin air and opened it. "And I'm your final obstacle in this test. Can you defend against me?"

"I'm Mimi. Let's find out."

"I'll start with a spell I learned from a friend of mine. Divine Buster!"

When Mimi regained consciousness, the holosuite was in its default configuration and everybody - including Hayate - was gathered around her. "Did anybody get the license number of the truck that hit me?"

Hayate grinned sheepishly and put one hand behind her head. "Sorry about that. I thought you'd be tough enough to take a little blast like that."

"That was a little blast?"

Lindy looked crossly at Hayate while answering Mimi. "Only if you're a Class A or higher mage. Hayate, you know you don't have that much control over your magic. You were supposed to start with a Bind."

As Lotte helped Mimi get back on her feet, she whispered, "That girl's got all the power in the worlds, but she really sucks at controlling it." Mr. Graham cleared his throat meaningfully, and Lotte added "I mean, she really needs help in controlling it."

"If anybody's interested," Amy interrupted, "I have the test results."

Mimi sighed. "How badly did I do?"

"For a beginner, you did remarkably well," she answered. "You don't rank at all on any of the Belkan hand-to-hand scales. You rank at Midchilda Wizard Ground Rank F, except that you're Rank E in wide area magic. You have no rank at all as an Air wizard - but that's okay; neither do I. Your mana capacity is Rank C, though, and that Charm Buster of yours looks like it's a Rank B spell," Amy finished.

"What does all that mean?"

Lindy smiled. "It means you're a beginner with a professional mage's stamina and one very good attack." Then she stopped smiling. "Unfortunately, it's your only attack, which makes you a one-trick ferret."

"Pony," Amy corrected.

"Is that how the idiom goes here?" Amy nodded, and Lindy continued, "You learn something new every day. Since you are a one-trick pony, anybody who can block your trick can attack you with impunity. We need to give you a better grounding in magical theory than what you already have. It'll take us a few days to put a curriculum together for you."

"Oh, thank you!" Mimi stepped toward Lindy and almost hugged her, then remembered that they were about to start a student-teacher relationship. No hugs.

Lindy smiled. "I like it when a new student is enthusiastic about her studies. Now, I have one more offer for you. We can seal or limit your ability until you have control over it."

Mimi wasn't sure she liked the sound of that. "Just what does that mean?"

"If we seal it, you won't be able to use magic at all," Aria replied. "You wouldn't have to worry about hurting anyone, but you wouldn't be able to practice, either."

"I don't like the sound of that."

Aria nodded. "I didn't think you would. If we put a limiter on your magic, then you'd be restricted to a maximum amount of power you could use for any one spell."

"From what I saw during the test," Amy added, "limiting your Charm Buster to Rank F would set it so you could only daze a single person with it, not knock him out."

Mimi frowned. "But I might need to knock somebody out again, to save somebody else's life."

"Rank E, then," Gil suggested.

Mimi thought for a moment. She loved using magic, but her magic right now was too dangerous to use without some sort of limit put on it. "Okay. Let's do that. And thank you."

"You're welcome," Lindy replied. "We'll call you later this week when we have a curriculum ready for you."

---

Mimi's story will be continued... but not now, and not in this thread. There's a reason why people skip over the classes and homework in most school stories, after all, and it's time for me to put the spotlight on other characters.