Slayer Anderson

Mind Games - Chapter 27

Okay! Minor problem with that update I said I’d have on Saturday…

I skipped that day.

I still don’t understand fucking time zones.

Anyway! This chapter was written across two different countries, a cross-oceanic flight, and an unknown amount of jet lag.

Have fun!

Next update will be… something. Not sure. Maybe more Mind Games, maybe THWD.

The New Ron - Chapter 41

“How we flyin' Wade?” Kim asked, leaning up to check on the empty pilot's cabin in a fit of atavistic human habit.

In other words, even if she consciously knew that there was no reason to bend around backwards and stare into the cockpit, she still did it because our weird monkey brains said we should direct our voices to where the thing listening to us should be, not where it actually was. Which would be in his house, in front of his monitors, behind the controls of an advanced drone aircraft.

I twitched and forced that line of thought away.

It was one of the relatively few things Ron and I directly conflicted on.

Even if I understood the need to fly in this life, that didn't mean I had to like it.

It also didn't mean that I had to be entirely comfortable in a remote-controlled aircraft flown by a preteen boy, no matter how intelligent and capable he'd routinely proven himself to be.

I just... hadn't ever been a huge fan of air travel.

Ron Stoppable, though? Over the last three years of his life he'd logged more frequent flier miles than most professional diplomats, business tycoons, or even some actual pilots.

I had memories of flying in virtually every type of aircraft that was still in the skies, and some that really shouldn't be.

In particular, Kim and I had a very memorable experience on a jungle flight in South America on a Globemaster II. For the uninformed, that was a plane which had been officially retired from service in 1974 and had definitely earned its nickname of 'Old Shaky.' In fact, I'm pretty sure the additional quarter-century of age had probably enhanced that trait to the point that I'd almost bitten my tongue off multiple times while riding in it.

And, realistically-speaking, if that old bucket of bolts had managed to get us where we were going, a bleeding-edge drone aircraft designed by Wade shouldn't even come close to wigging me out.

But, as with all cursed monkey things, that primitive section of my brain that expected to see another human being behind the controls of anything I was riding in was just a smidge upset when I looked in the cockpit and saw a joystick moving itself as if to the invisible whims of some spirit or specter.

“Making great time, Kim,” Wade replied over the comms. “And we haven't even been hailed by air traffic control or the military. Which means the new stealth coating is working.”

“Should we be worried about that?” Tara asked, nibbling at her lip for a moment before forcing herself to stop. “I mean, isn't that illegal?”

“Only if they catch us,” Kim replied with a flash of a grin and an unexpected disregard for the rules.

I raised an eyebrow as Bonnie coughed into a fist to hide a blush.

“Kim doesn't have a super high opinion of the rules of the air,” I replied in an aside to Tara as she turned to me. “Since we tend to need a bunch of last-minute travel, we aren't usually able to file flight planes in advance like they want us to.”

“Huh, so Little Kimmie who can do no wrong actually can do a wrong,” Bonnie smirked.

Kim raised her nose and sniffed, almost pulling off the snobby rich-girl act, but not quite. “I'm not perfect, Bonnie. The one who started all that nonsense was you, if I remember correctly.”

The dark-skinned girl rolled her eyes. “Only because nothing else would stick to you. Ugh, you've got a rep like teflon, Pos-er, Kim.”

Tara gave Bonnie a small dip of her head at the correction.

“You say that like I shouldn't want people to be happy that I'm helping others,” Kim frowned, crossing her arms carefully to ensure she wasn't going to wrinkle her dress.

Bonnie snorted and did the same. “Whatevs, at least it means no one's going to figure out you're dating Stoppable and Tara together. T doesn't need the fallout from that.”

Kim's eyes shot wide. “Wh-what?! Ah-hahaheh! Don't be si-silly Bonnie! There's no way I'm-”

“KP, I love you,” I interjected, making the girl's face go even redder than it already was and her mouth snap shut, “but you can't lie to save your life. A better bet would have been an explicit confirmation disguised as a sarcastic deflection.”

“Ron!” Kim cried, throwing a pair of open hands at Bonnie with panic on her face. “You can't just-Tara! Help me out, here!”

The blond girl at my side winced. “Kim... Bonnie figured it out pretty early, about a week after the body-swap date.”

I gave the redhead a shrug. “I'd pretty much guessed she had, yeah. But given that Tara would be in the splash zone...”

Bonnie looked irritated as she looked away. “Ugh! The juiciest school gossip in a decade and I can't tell anyone! Not that they'd believe me, even, with Little Miss Perfect here!”

Kim seemed about to freak out, then took a deep breath and released it slowly. Seeming to take a moment to settle herself, she turned to the bitchy queen bee of the school and gave her a level look. “Bonnie?”

I took a hissing breath, drawing a blink from Tara.

“What?” The girl in question asked, flipping her hair and turning back to Kim irreverently...

...before catching the look in her eye.

“This isn't catty schoolyard bullshit,” Kim stated unequivocally, her tone level and her eyes sharp. “I have not once, ever seriously retaliated against the crap you've pulled on me. Not the rumors, not the petty little mean-girl pranks, not the insults to Ron-”

Huh, so she was holding a grudge over those. I'd wondered.

Tara leaned forward to interrupt, but I simply pulled her back and shook my head.

“-but this? You fuck with my life on this? I declare all-out war and start pulling in favors from world leaders, CEOs, billionaires, and nearly every person in town to retaliate.”

Bonnie swallowed.

“We clear?” Kim asked.

“Crystal,” Bonnie squeaked.

“Awesome!” Kim grinned, all pep and cheer once again. “How long until we get to the party, Wade?”

“Uhh...” The nerd-genius paused, very obviously trying to pretend he hadn't been listening in. “...about ten minutes?”

“Great!” Kim replied, clapping her hands as her malicious glee faded a bit.

“And, ahh...” Wade began slowly, his voice warbling uncertainly through the speakers. “I-um, is it a bad thing that I know about the whole you-Ron-Tara-thin-”

“Wade,” Kim spoke up, interrupting the stilted confession, “you have access to our emails, phone records, private conversations, and just about everything else. I'd be fairly surprised if you didn't know about it before now. I appreciate you being polite and not bringing it up, though, and that's part of the reason both Ron and I – Tara not quite yet – trust you so much to handle our personal deets.”

“O-oh,” Wade replied, his voice slightly thick as he coughed to clear it. “Ah, thanks Kim. That, um... means a lot.”

“Only the best for the best,” Kim replied candidly.

“Gotcha there, Dude,” I grinned up at where I suspected the camera was. “As Kim loves to say, you ultra-rock.”

“I don't recall her ever saying ultra,” Tara chimed in, looking between me and Kim. “B-but... if Kim and Ron trust you, Wade, then I will too... but-”

Tara's blue eyes met Kim's green, and the blond visibly steeled herself, looking over to a still-cowed Bonnie for a brief moment.

“-but, I want you to trust Bonnie, Kim. You too, Ron,” Tara added, flashing a nod at me. “Because I trust her... just like you trust Wade. It might not be exactly the same, but... Bonnie's my friend, and I trust her not to hurt me or the people I'm dating, right B?”

Bonnie blinked, sniffed a bit and blinked rapidly as she looked towards one of the walls of the craft. “S-sure, T.”

There was a moment's pause.

“A-and, um-thanks,” Bonnie muttered, going for her purse and extracting a tissue before reaching up and dabbing her eyes.

Kim and I pretended not to see anything as Tara smiled back.

From there, no more sudden heart-to-heart moments were had as we all busied ourselves with last minute preparations. Or, at least, the girls did as they popped out mirrors to check makeup and touch up anything that hadn't quite survived the ride. Personally, I just ran a comb through my hair and woke up Rufus.

“Alright little buddy, almost there,” I nudged the comatose weight in my pocket until it began to stir. Unlike my usual cargo pants pockets, Rufus had been forced to take refuge in an inner-vest pocket of my jacket.

“Ugh! Cheese?” Rufus asked plaintively, popping his head out only to be greeted with disappointment at the bare walls of the drone's interior.

I sighed. “Yes, Rufus, there will be cheese!”

“Woo!”

“But!” I warned him, pointing a finger between his eyes. “We're fancy tonight! That means no diving into the fondue fountain-”

Bonnie shuddered, turned to me with her mouth open to comment, then shook her head and went back to trying to fix her bra without wrinkling her dress in the process.

“-or anything crazy like that!” I pressed him. “You want something, you ask a waiter for it. Or, if they won't, get me. You'd probably be best-served by sticking with me, Kim, or Tara, though. You wander off alone and someone's going to panic when they see you. Remember Montreal?”

Rufus, who had been giving me a nasty look, suddenly shuddered and nodded. “No knives!”

“No knives,” I confirmed his squeak, “but you know how rich people are. They can get freaky about stuff. So you stick near one of us instead of trying to make a run for the kitchen to help yourself, okay?”

Rufus' head bobbed in quick jerks as he held out a small paw with a finger-claw up. “Gotcha!”

“Coming in for the landing,” Wade called out.

“Wait-wait-ah, there,” Bonnie sighed in relief, putting her shoe back in place as she was finally satisfied with the way her hose was laying. “All good!”

“Same here,” Tara replied happily.

“That makes three,” Kim stated, taking a deep breath.

“Four and five, good to go,” I nodded at Rufus, who had donned the tiny white collar and black bow tie I'd stolen off a Ken-doll's clothing line for him. The full suit hadn't fit, but this was probably good enough. “Last warning about alcohol. Anyone gets drunk, the rest of us are under obligations to write on their faces and take goofy pictures with them to teach them a valuable lesson.”

“Ugh, you sound like my mom!” Bonnie whined.

The rest of us gave her a look at that.

“Fine! Fine, only... one wine cooler, whatever,” Bonnie muttered unhappily.

Kim and I matched each other with an eye-roll. Then we felt the engines of the drone shift and momentum arrest momentarily as the craft stopped lateral motion completely. Instead, the drone-plane began slowly dropping down to Earth, once more displaying the VTOL capability that Wade had so carefully engineered.

“And... down!” Wade called out, the pneumatic doors hissing as they unsealed the cabin and opened up. “Ladies and gentleman, the plane has come to a complete stop. You're now free to egress the craft and go about your night.”

“How about the pilot?” I called back, Kim blinking at me as I flashed her a grin while Bonnie and Tara stepped out. “C'mon man, you're part of the team too!”

Wade gave a huge put-upon sigh through the speakers and, with a few lines of oscillating light, an image began to form. The young African-American boy genius that was our coordinator shifted uneasily in his holographic image, dressed to the nines in a full tuxedo and bow tie himself.

“Holy cow! Wade? Er, Holo-Wade?” Kim gushed, looking him over. “I totally thought you weren't going to make it!”

“Ron talked me into it,” Wade stated, a bit bashfully as he reached up to touch his hair. “This is, ah... I mean, I'm not actually wearing this. It's just being fed onto the holographic outline of my body, so-”

“You look great,” Kim waved him off, smiling. Then gave me a brilliant smile and a quick peck on the lips. “It means a lot to have the entire team here tonight. Thanks, guys.”

I gave her a thumbs up and flashed Wade a knowing look as he rolled his eyes.

That boy needs a bit of self-esteem work. He really thought KP wouldn't want him with us as a hologram tonight.

Sure, Kim would probably prefer a showing in the flesh, but that wasn't going to happen without some extreme situation drawing him out of his genius-cave.

“Alright, let's get to it,” I grinned, offering Kim my hand and eliciting a light blush as we walked out of the drone together.

…

“Oh, you simply must tell that story with the... what was it? Giant hotdog balloon? Yes, that one!”

I mean... it was a party.

“How delightful! There's really nothing like hearing it straight from someone who was there. I tell Gladys all the time, don't I honey?”

Snooty rich people.

“Yes Dear – sigh – You always do. Now, this intriguing creature perched on your shoulder... a naked mole rat, you said?”

Fine wines, finer cheeses.

“Interesting! And you say he helps you out on missions? Defused a bomb?! Oh my!”

I could see Bonnie out of the corner of my eye, for once actually making a show of getting alone with Kim... as per her viral interview about being my partner's BFF during the whole Adrenna Lynn fiasco. They were engaged with a bunch of people in suits and dresses that each cost more money than our individual family homes were worth. Thankfully, I could hide that particular disgust well enough.

“Oh, that reminds me of the time I took my third yacht out to the Gold Coast and some scoundrels tried to board me and take the ship! Why, my security earned their pay that day!”

Tara, next to me, made all the right noises in appreciation while looking at her juice like she wanted something a bit stronger.

“We had an incident like that in Brazil! A group of-of... why, they were practically brigands from a few centuries ago, though with none of the style! They accosted my vehicle and tried to take me hostage!”

Wade had been allowed to wander off alone given his rather insubstantial nature and had lucked into a pair of entrepreneurs who wanted to talk tech after they'd seen the remote-controlled passenger drone land. A whispered warning not to make any legally-binding agreements and he'd given me a serious nod before heading off.

“Ah, Ronald my boy!”

“Ronnie, you came!”

I felt my hackles relax a bit as the enthusiastic cries penetrated the cloying bubble of social disconnection and extravagant wealth.

Why do I want to be one of these people again?

I looked around, my eyes tracking the opulently-set tables with crystal goblets, the private grotto at the edge of the island lit with stained glass-covered candles, the elaborately decorated marble that had been carved to fit against the uneven rock shelf next to the beach...

Right, yeah... I want the money so I don't have to put up with these people ever again, right.

Offering a more honest grin, I embraced the buff younger Senior as he clapped my back in a too-friendly hug. “It is wonderful to see you again, my friend! Oh, and of course you too, little rodent pal!”

While Rufus squeaked in a half-confused, half-gratified response, Tara obligingly backed off just before the impact, blinking as she tried to work out whether or not to smile.

“Haha! Let the boy breathe, Junior!” The elder laughed in a restrained fashion as he walked more sedately to us, the crowd parting around them as he did so.

Well, except for the Seniors. I'll probably keep talking to them.

“Oh, and this must be your lovely date for the evening,” Senior smiled, looking to Tara as he extended a hand.

“Ah, I'm-um, Tara. And, yes, I'm Ron's girlfriend,” she admitted shyly, extending a matching hand to the elder senior, who took hers in his and brought it up to brush against his lips.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Tara,” Senor Senior Sr. pronounced, rising from his bow with only a bit of a wince at the movement.

Tara blushed deeply and giggled. “It's wonderful to meet you as well, sir.”

“And she is just beeeautiful!” Jr. announced, prancing over to my girlfriend and plucking at her dress affectionately. “Oh, such simple fabrics, but worn so well! I simply have to have you over for a formal fitting!”

I chuckled as Tara's eyes widened at the entirely-legitimate offer, which underlined one of the reasons I didn't actually dislike the Seniors.

Junior was, admittedly a bit much, but as far as the obscenely rich went...

Well, neither of the two men – or, the man and man-child – were actually bad people. Their capriciousness came from a complete and total disconnect with normal society that was the real problem, and that could be fixed. Especially since the two were actually curious about how the average John and Jane lived. Most of the people here would probably be horrified at the idea of being taken out to your average burger joint or Bueno Nacho-style fast food restaurant, but the Seniors struck me as... well, they probably wouldn't become regulars or anything, but they'd enjoy the experience and it might become something for special occasions.

I could deal with that type of person. People who had been born into money and never knew anything different, but weren't actively malicious about acquiring more or hurting people with it.

Even in that alternate future where they'd become villains... the Seniors hadn't actually hired all that many henchmen. They'd done their villainy themselves. Gotten their hands dirty and been branded international criminals and been sent to jail.

Don't get me wrong, I still thought the entire Supervillain Lifestyle bit was kind of stupid, but I could totally respect that level of commitment and skin in the game.

So, yeah, I'd probably keep in touch with the two of them.

Then a voice came over the loudspeakers.

A very familiar voice.

“Well, well, well... hobnobbing with the rich and famous! I suppose I should expect nothing less from my teenage arch nemesis!”

I sighed, partly in relief and partly in exasperation, downing my drink as the Seniors turned to look at the crazy blue man in a stylized labcoat who had stepped onto the scene flanked by a dozen men in red suits...

...and one woman in a green and black catsuit.

“Well, looks like the entertainment is here,” I announced, shrugging.

~~~

Hmm... well, we're finally at the party, at least. Shame about that interrupt! But, hey, did anyone expect a completely normal and average outing for our burgeoning team of crime-fighters?

Anyway, I've been preoccupied packing and getting ready for my trip, but the... uh, 'good news' I guess? Is that I have a 14 hour flight coming up. So, uh... look for a chapter by Saturday, at least? Possibly posted in a foreign nation? Wee...

First vacation in five years coming up!

Next update will likely be Mind Games with an extra-long chapter of The Hand We're Dealt coming down the pipe as well.

The New Ron - Chapter 41

Okay, new chapter - new doc!

Hmm... well, we're finally at the party, at least. Shame about that interrupt! But, hey, did anyone expect a completely normal and average outing for our burgeoning team of crime-fighters?

Anyway, I've been preoccupied packing and getting ready for my trip, but the... uh, 'good news' I guess? Is that I have a 14 hour flight coming up. So, uh... look for a chapter by Saturday, at least? Possibly posted in a foreign nation? Wee...

First vacation in five years coming up!

Mind Games - Chapter 26

Yes, I could have made this entire exercise easier and faster by using essence.

Unless I was in life-threatening danger, though, I was restricting myself to purely mundane methods of stealth, infiltration, combat, and espionage. There were multiple reasons for that. The first was simply that I hadn't had the time or space to refine my Sidereal martial arts and charms. My Apartment was a recent purchase, after all, and I needed the pocket dimension to put a wall between me and whatever nasties might sense me using a non-native supernatural energy. Despite the fact that I had a perfect intellectual understanding of the arts, I wanted (and likely needed) a little practice to holistically blend everything together.

So no voodoo kung-fu unless I met some nablies attacking some wee men.

Heh.

Still, I was cheating pretty hard even without that ace up my sleeve.

The simple truth was that most people – most Contractors, even – simply didn't understand the utility of the Apartment and its expansions. Oh sure, it was nice to have an inviolable private space to do any manner of things one needed to, but a personal pocket dimension had tactical and strategic applications that simply went over most of their heads.

One of the reasons, for instance, that I'd spent some of my thinning pool of funds to allow Himiko to generate her own portals wasn't merely because it would be good for her underdeveloped sense of personhood to have a place to grow and develop. Don't get me wrong, that was most of the reason, but it helped that I could justify the purchase beyond self-actualization for my girlfriend.

Were I to ever get in over my head, such as heading into an unmapped villain bunker that was being used to manufacture dangerous quirk-enhancing drugs...

Just as an example.

...well, were I to get into an untenable position where I simply couldn't escape or wait out the situation in the Apartment itself, I could call Himiko from the safety of the pocket dimension and have her open a portal near her house.

Untraceable, fiat-backed limited teleportation with extra steps, in other words.

Unlike my voodoo kung-fu, that was an ace I was entirely willing to use and abuse as I saw fit. Should the situation require it, at least.

My hope was that this situation wouldn't require it, the goal in essence being to get through the basement-bunker-drug lab undetected. Strapping a head-mounted camera tightly before pulling up a purple hood on the coat I was wearing underneath my leather jacket, I reminded myself that this was a recon mission first and foremost from this point on.

The upscale pawn shop above was publicly-known and could plausibly be the target of a skilled villain looking to make a quick buck or acquire some interesting trinkets.

But the secrets below?

They needed to continue to believe those had gone undetected.

Which meant no theft, no violence, and no traces I was ever there.

I pulled the gloves tight on my hands, sliding up the fabric mask over the lower part of my face to quiet the noise of my breathing. Finally, I slipped on a pair of military surplus 'sunglasses' that were made of a material that amplified ambient light, allowing increased night vision without the potential liability of a battery or an electrical malfunction.

They were the single most expensive item I'd purchased from Nakamura as well.

I could, in a pinch, substitute a bit of internal essence manipulation to see even in the pitch black, but one of the... dozen or so points of this little exercise-

Again, my Sidereal Tendencies are acting up.

-was not to rely on essence-based arts. I needed to be able to pass for a 'normal' junior superhero for UA in a few weeks. Granted, I'd be an undoubtedly talented, skilled, and mature prodigy of a 'normal' prospective student, but the people of this world liked to write off anything weird or abnormal to quirks.

And that was a blindspot in their logic I was more than willing to ruthlessly exploit.

I stepped out of the safety of my Apartment into the recently-vacated hallway and slid the card I'd just stolen into the reader before giving it a quick peek.

Good news?

Empty stairwell.

Bad news?

What lay before me was a cheap metal scaffolding stairwell made of reinforced steel that had been sloppily welded together to bear the weight of the loads that would be ferried up and down it. Cassandra remembered these with irritable displeasure and the Sidereal was familiar enough with the concept to have an equally troublesome analog in Creation. The reason they were so disliked?

They creaked.

They groaned.

They shook and rattled and clanged and attracted attention from anyone with a pair of functioning ears.

In short, these stairs were ironically the most significant and difficult-to-bypass security feature I'd come across yet.

However, just as the natural inclination of any business to cut costs was causing me problems here, the natural inclination towards human laziness proved my saving grace. Normally, a stairwell had a sloping ceiling that followed the falling angle of the stairs below, but installing anything that wasn't at a ninety degree angle on a building took a level of skill that wasn't terribly common in criminal organizations. Moreover, the prevailing reason behind a sloping ceiling, which was to prevent wasted 'dead space' in a building, didn't really matter if the business up top was simply a cover for a black-market drug operation underneath.

So they'd simply boxed out a rectangle above the stairs, the same width as the doorway, which extended until someone descending wouldn't need to duck out of the way.

Which meant that, instead of taking the rattling, noisy stairs down to a lair full of criminals who would hear me coming and see me immediately, I pressed one hand on each wall and proceeded to use the isometric pressure to crawl out into the open space above the stairs.

Then, crawling out to the furthest point, I positioned myself upside down and got a look around the space below.

Hmm... I wonder if this is what being a xenomorph is like?

Shaking off the random thought, I put my head on a swivel.

From what few records I could find, the space was going on a century now, and it showed. To the villains' credit, they'd shored up one badly-cracked wall with steel girders and ties as reinforcements. Even then, though, it looked to be one good superhuman blow away from crumbling into rubble. I allowed the camera on my head to linger over it for a few more seconds, taking special note of it. Any sort of assault on this location would need to be aware of structural instability like that or risk endangering the entire shopping arcade above.

“-I don't care, double-check it! The Boss is on my ass, so I'm on yours!” The man from whom I'd stolen the access card yelled out, and I pivoted to him.

Basic factory racks held large tanks with wires trailing from them and small screens attached along one of the walls of the room below me. Obviously the precursor chemicals they had spoken of. A few cheap desks had been set up nearby, more cords connecting the containers to electrical power as well as the computers set up there.

Looking straight down, I saw another series of shelving units, these stacked high with all sorts of glassware and boxes full of unknown supplies.

Turning my head back to the door at the top of the stairway, I knew that the longer I stayed up here, the more I invited someone to make their way through that entrance and stare straight at me.

Lowering myself to the very lowest bound, I took a deep breath as the men below busied themselves and-

-spun in place, still upside down, using the momentum of my rotating form to throw me down and between the shelving units full of random items.

I flipped once, my gloved hands impacting the bare concrete with barely a whisper before I bled off further motion by flipping again and landing in a crouch.

“You hear that?” One of the men lifting a large crate of syringes asked, turning to look in the direction of the shelves I was hiding behind. Staying low, I peered through a gap in the supplies, watching his elongated ears twitch as his black eyes probed the poorly-lit area.

Acting on impulse, I pulled out the card I'd stolen from the lead thug and sent it into a high arc.

It impacted on a corner, striking the metal and ringing it like a bell as it continued to 'roll' down the stairs.

“Shit, what was that?” The bat-looking villain asked, his head snapping away from me and towards the card as he lowered his cargo and took a few steps towards it.

“Well?” The thug-in-charge demanded.

I used the distraction to slip further into the drug lab, making sure to keep something solid between myself and the others as much as I could. With a demonstrable extrasensory quirk in the room, I couldn't rely on the darkness to protect me.

“Hah! Ah-” Bat-thug chuckled awkwardly, belatedly realizing that it might not be the smartest move to actually laugh at the guy ordering him around. “You-um, dropped your card-key?”

There was a moment of awkward silence as the lead thug slipped a hand into his pocket in disbelief, then cursed and stalked over toward the bat-heteromorph, grumbling.

Enjoying the fact that everyone's attention was very firmly aligned with the little drama unfolding as the lead figure did everything he could to paper over the momentary loss of face, I kept moving as whisper-quiet as I could.

The bunker was large, but annoyingly subdivided into hardened and reinforced rooms, throwing off my estimations of the respective size of rooms and the walls between them. It also served to date this structure, as I'd come to learn through my studies of the recent history of this world. Apparently, shelters like these were all the rage while society was imploding, for all the fact that they did very little to help. Still, as time went on and particularly prolific villains made a point of cracking bunkers, both to show they could and to enhance their own infamy, the bunkers themselves became thicker and sturdier with enhanced – sometimes quirk-empowered – building techniques.

The structure I was in right now would probably take some massive ordinance to destroy.

Or Cementoss could swing by on his off day and level it.

Which was, in a nutshell, why people had stopped building them.

As the number and variety of powers rose in the general populace, the likelihood that a hostile force would have a bunker-buster cape of some type rose to a near-certainty.

That wasn't to say fortifications had gone entirely to the wayside in the modern era, though. The ones built these days just tended to be a little more... exotic in their defensive capabilities. Of course, they were also a lot more expensive and required specialized labor to set up, so they were limited to vital infrastructure, top-level officials, and people with more money than sense.

I peeked my head into the toilet and cocked an eyebrow before closing the door silently and moving away down a dimly-lit corridor.

They still have running water down here. I'd wager this is probably tapped into a central water main and just too expensive to cut out and bypass...

I looked in the generator room briefly as well, satisfying myself that what machines were left were entirely non-functional.

Beyond the rusting detritus of ages long past, there was a truly startling amount of modern detritus... mostly of the drug-processing kind. A few rooms were either sealed or smelled so awful that I simply bypassed them entirely given they appeared to just be loaded with trash.

Then, finally someone started yelling.

“Get the fuck up here! The shop's been robbed!”

Which is what I'd been waiting for and the real motivation behind stealing everything in the secure area.

Well, besides wanting my own authentic samurai swords and taking the evil statues out of circulation.

And occluding the fact that I'd planted all of the data-taps and other surveillance equipment.

Oh, and-

Goddamn Sidereal Tendencies!

-I sighed.

Anyway, now that the two unconscious criminals/employees/villains upstairs had likely been discovered, it was an all hands on deck moment. Meaning that everyone down here was going to go up there. Which, of course, meant that-

“Not you!” The chief thug barked as I waited around a blind corner. “You stay here! Check every-fucking-thing! If someone's stupid enough to steal from us they might be stupid enough to come down here.”

“Wh-what should I do if there is someone?” A thin and reedy voice asked. I mentally matched it to the nerdy guy I'd seen running checks on the equipment.

The tell-tale sound of metal-on-metal rang out as a gun was cocked.

“Point this at whoever it is and pull the trigger, dumbass,” the chief thug growled, heading towards the stairway and stomping up the rattling mess of beams and steps.

I sighed and rubbed at my face.

Or, I guess someone could actually have two brain cells to rub together and decide to make my life marginally more difficult.

Marginally.

“And make sure that trunk stays locked!” The chief thug yelled from the top of the stairs before slamming the door behind him.

I blinked and cocked my head.

Trunk? Like you'd pack to take to wizarding school? Or...

I looked around more carefully, watching as the nerd's head pivoted and he clutched the gun so tightly I worried it might go off. Mentally, I mapped out the corridors I'd already snuck down, holding up a finger and pointing to them as I counted them off.

I came up one shy.

Specifically, the hallway that nerd-thug was moving towards, muttering to himself.

My eyes trailed upwards, orienteering myself properly according to the terrain and buildings above-ground. Frowning, I took a cautious step out of hiding and moved towards the computers, flicking a glance down the mystery path to ensure the 'guard' wasn't coming back.

“That goes towards the rear of the shopping arcade... there's a block of warehouses back there, isn't there?” I hummed to myself, the first words I'd spoken aloud since coming down here. “Damn incomplete building records.”

Disregarding my curiosity for the moment, I pulled out another set of data taps and key-loggers for the computers, carefully installing each in the most difficult to reach areas behind the devices just as I had done upstairs.

That done, I took a more detailed look at their laboratory setup, the part of the bunker that had been busiest and, therefore, most likely to result in me getting noticed. Really, it was nothing more complicated than what you'd see in most high school chemistry classrooms, though the stocks weren't anything like what you'd find in those cabinets.

I let my head-cam take a close look at several of the bottles that my inner River recognized as being particularly dangerous. Even if I was drawing a blank on the current state of law around handling chemicals like this, I was willing to bet you needed some kind of license for this shit. Especially since I could cook up a pretty killer explosive with them...

I cocked my head and listened as I heard the sound of footsteps.

Specifically, those of the nerd, now approaching as he returned.

I took a few quick steps and ducked behind a stack of sealed cases that likely contained a great deal of the finished trigger drug.

My fingers itched to disappear some of it.

But I wouldn't.

I needed them to think I'd only hit the expensive stuff upstairs. They needed to believe this place had gone completely undetected if I wanted them to continue to operate out of it. Criminals were like cockroaches... if you shone light on them, they scattered to find new hiding places. It would be better if I could guide the heroes of my choice to a complete and established distribution operation in order for them to have the maximum impact on the trade of a dangerous substance.

...and to make sure a certain someone is as occupied as I can make him.

Well, okay, two someones, actually. Or, well... three, kind of.

The plan had layers, alright?! Like an onion! Or an ogre!

Disregarding my internal diatribe against my own predisposition for Machiavellian machinations, I watched silently as the nerd retreated back to his workstation. No longer clutching his weapon quite so closely now that he'd apparently reassured himself his primary objective was holding steady, he gave the room a wide sweep...

...and failed to check behind him, satisfied that the area he'd just come through was, of course, clear of any possible threats.

Meanwhile, I silently made my way down the wide hallway-

No. This wasn't a hallway. Narrowing my eyes, I squinted through the gloom with my light-enhancing eyewear and knelt down briefly. Directing the head-mounted camera towards the tire tracks, I traced them with my finger to ensure they were properly highlighted for the future viewer, then stood and continued on my way.

From what information I'd found online, the primary entrance to this bunker had been directly above it, leveled and sealed when the shopping mall arcade went up fifty years ago or so. Apparently, though, there was a secondary entrance that was not just intact, but simultaneously large enough to move wheeled vehicles through and operational.

This was one well-organized operation. Well-funded, too.

Three guesses who was behind this and the first two don't count.

If I was counting my distance correctly, I ended up crossing the entire back street behind the arcade and getting well underneath the row of warehouses behind that before I came to the end of the long tunnel. Sure enough, at the end was a large room marginally more well-lit than the other areas of the bunker. The first thing of actual importance I noticed, though, was the pair of dark, four-door cars sitting just on the other side of a large, roll-down metal door.

“Secondary supply entrance,” I muttered, calculating the angle and mentally marking where the exit ramp to the surface must come out.

Beyond the cards, though, there was an obvious load of chemicals, glassware, and other things necessary for the continued creation of the trigger compound. I took a few moments to make sure I got everything on camera as well as ensuring that there wasn't any kind of CCTV surveillance system in here. I hadn't seen any since I'd gotten into the bunker, but it never hurt to check...

But, no. It looked like they weren't quite stupid enough to record their own crimes in progress.

Either that or the budget had only accounted for one security system.

Humming to myself, I grabbed a pair of GPS trackers and slipped them behind the rear wheels of the vehicles after ensuring they were on. They'd last for a good thirty days and give me vital information about where they were getting the precursor chemicals and other supplies.

Then, casting a cautious look back where I came from, I approached the first car and peered through the tinted windows. “Bingo.”

I'd hoped, given how clean and nondescript the vehicles looked, that they were 'company cars,' and I'd been right. On this one, at least. A common enough trend in larger criminal organizations was to keep 'clean' cars that weren't registered to anyone with warrants or criminal histories. These wouldn't provide law enforcement with a good excuse to do a stop and search. They were also traded around among 'employees' regularly, reducing the amount of personal belongings and traces if one of them needed to be burned.

Burned figuratively, as in used in the commission of a crime and having it's low profile destroyed.

Or burned literally if the crime was too significant and the vehicle itself needed to be destroyed.

That way, no one got pissy when the crime boss ordered you to set your personal vehicle on fire, drive it into the ocean, or park it in a mine shaft that they were going to collapse.

This was particularly important because given such cars switched operators regularly...

I opened the door, confident that the alarm wouldn't go off.

...they usually left the keys in the cars themselves, I grinned silently as I took note of the fob and keyring in the center console's cup holder. Twenty more seconds and I had the listening device properly planted, then stepped away to do the same. These weren't perfect, sadly, and would piggy-back on the not-bluetooth within the car itself to dump a conversation log every twenty-four hours. If they were out of range, they'd try again every hour after that. Normally, I wouldn't worry, but...

If they had any more hideouts or processing plants like this one, signal could get a little iffy.

“Okay, work's done and I've behaved myself, let's see what's in the trunk...” I stated, rubbing my hands together.

The first car was a bust. Nothing beyond a spare tire, a tire wrench, a jack, and a bag of stuff that could be easily written off as standard cleaning and maintenance supplies. Even the tarp could be explained as an emergency fix for a broken window... though its real purpose was probably more sinister than that. Being thorough, I made sure I had video evidence of the cleanup kit before softly shutting the door and trunk to the first one.

“Big money – Big money, No whammy – No whammy,” I chuckled quietly, rubbing my hands together as I hit the release for the second car's trunk.

The muffled sound of surprise clued me in before I even got around to raising the rear door up.

Looking inside only confirmed what I already knew. It also confirmed my suspicions of the tarp in the other car, given that an identical one was laid out underneath the girl in this one, obviously to catch any stray hairs, fibers, or blood.

...now if only I could figure out why she was so damn familiar.

I held up a gloved finger outside of the cloth covering the lower half of my face and made eye contact with the pink-haired girl in the skimpy costume tied up with what was probably too many ropes. She wasn’t a Bat, after all.

The girl in the trunk looked up at me, her eyes widening as she nodded fervently around the tape over her mouth, seeming to understand I wasn’t a member of the crew that had nabbed her.

Pulling out a small knife, I started carefully cutting away at her bonds.

“No noise,” I cautioned her again as I leaned down, helping her out of the cramped space. “I’ve distracted most of them, but there’s still a guard.”

She nodded again, blatantly sagging with relief as I began pulling at the tape over her mouth while she finished undoing the ropes around her wrists and legs.

“My name is Pop Step!” She hissed.  “You’ve got to help me get out of here! They’re planning to dump trigger into the city’s water supply!”

~~~

Well, look at what we have here! A little early, for once!

Here's chapter twenty-six of Mind Games for everyone to enjoy, and I hope you do. We've got one more chapter to close out this little vigilante arc before we return to our regularly-scheduled programming.

That said, next up will likely be a chapter of something else over the weekend. Not sure what, I'm getting ready for my trip out of town and things are a little spastic right now, so we'll call it a surprise.

Hope this finds everyone having a good weekend!

Mind Games - Chapter 26

Well, look at what we have here! A little early, for once!

Here's chapter twenty-six of Mind Games for everyone to enjoy, and I hope you do. We've got one more chapter to close out this little vigilante arc before we return to our regularly-scheduled programming.

That said, next up will likely be a chapter of something else over the weekend. Not sure what, I'm getting ready for my trip out of town and things are a little spastic right now, so we'll call it a surprise.

Hope this finds everyone having a good weekend!

Paldean Knights - Chapter 3

“We very much do not believe it was any sort of assassination.”

Yeah, I knew that tone of voice. Very big, 'we have dismissed those claims' energy with this guy. I took another calming breath, keeping myself in the zen-like state I needed to maintain. Once it fell apart, I was going to crash pretty hard.

My mother, Lani, tightened her grip around me, practically pulling myself and Lehonor into her. “Caballero Augustine, with all do respect... someone released an adult, male Garchomp into a gathering of the wealthiest and most influential people of Paldea. How can you believe they did not intend for someone to die?”

Caballero Augustine was a man with a significant dark brown mustache that had been oiled to within an inch of its life and shaped into a long crescent that ended pointing upwards on either side of his cheeks. Other than that, though, the man himself was fairly unremarkable. The classic Paldean skin-tone, a face that was neither handsome nor ugly, and a build that was largely average. I'd met the man on a few occasions and wondered if he was secretly some kind of retired spy who'd grown a noticeable style of facial hair simply so that he'd be less forgettable.

The man in question cleared his throat and gave my mother a deferential tilt of his head. “Your Highness, that is the very reason we do not believe it was an attempt on someone's life. Such things are, as distasteful as it is to discuss, targeted affairs. Releasing a wild pokemon into a crowd may kill someone, but it would not be anyone in particular. It would defeat the entire purpose of the affair.”

I frowned, noticing the hole in his logic.

“Not if the target was, as you put it Caballero, 'anyone in particular,'” I spoke up.

The fullness of the knight's chest turned towards me as he looked down to meet my eyes-

Being short has its advantages, but I'm looking forward to my growth spurt in a few years...

-and frowned. “My Prince, I understand that you have been through a traumatic affair here, today, but that isn't any reason to-”

I held up a hand and shook my head. “The Exceed-Cosmos partnership. It didn't necessarily have to be anyone in particular who perished – or was even merely critically wounded – a damaging enough incident would have derailed the talks completely, wouldn't it?”

Caballero Augustine's eyes narrowed and he reached up past his mostly ceremonial bronze cuirass to stroke his chin. “That... forgive me, My Prince, you may be onto something in truth.”

“I know my son may seem young, but he's got an old soul,” mother stated, defending me. “You'd do well to listen when he speaks, more than just paying lip service to your sovereign.”

“I'll... keep that in mind, Your Highness,” the caballero nodded, his countenance more serious. “If you'll excuse me, it seems I have more work to do.”

“Big brother's really smart,” Lehonor murmured, and I could already see her flagging despite all the excitement of the day.

“Your brother is very smart, yes,” Lani nodded, smiling as she lifted the smaller girl into her arms, Lehonor's arms automatically wrapping around her neck. “And very brave. Braver than he should be, sometimes.”

I hummed, looking away and pretending that comment wasn't entirely relevant. “My sister was in danger.”

Despite the calm, I didn't have an awesome argument for my actions and defended myself with that simple claim as if it should be enough to explain everything.

Thankfully, judging by the way my mother huffed exasperatedly without voicing a counterargument, that really did seem to explain everything. “I'm proud of you, Azi. But for the good of my heart, please don't do that again.”

“I'll try to be as safe as possible, Mother,” I replied with an affirmative nod of my head, not really handing her the promise that she wanted.

But, given everything, that seemed to slip her attention.

My eyes trailed over towards the group of men wearing the abbreviated armor. Caballeros, or more generically 'knights.' They were something of an intersection between military police, federal marshals, pokemon rangers, and criminal investigators.

...who were also somewhat oathbound to the nobility, unfortunately.

Given the underdeveloped nature of the digital infrastructure in this world, or at least in Paldea, I wasn't sure what the average person thought of their position, but they were supposed to be very broadly empowered law enforcement officers with powerful pokemon at their disposal to deal with exceptional criminals.

They were usually credited, in fact, as being the reason no criminal team such as the Rockets, Aqua, Magma, Galactic, Plasma, or Flare had managed to set up shop in Paldea.

And they had tried, apparently.

“Lani,” my father called, approaching us at a brisk pace. “I think you and Lehonor should head up to bed-”

“M'not tired,” Lehonor whined, already half-asleep as she sagged in my mother's arms.

“-I'll take care of Azarno,” he nodded to her as she grimaced. “He needs to give a few statements before we wind things down and letting people see he's alright should quell any rumors.”

Mother took a deep breath, releasing it slowly, then nodded. “Very well. Please watch him carefully Enrique. Watching my son face down an adult garchomp was more than enough excitement for... a good long while, if not the rest of my life.”

My father looked down at me and nodded back to her with a smile. “I'll make sure he gets through the night in one piece, honey.”

With that, and a few more admonishments to be careful, Mom dragged a knuckle carefully under her eyes to try and wipe away a few stray tears without further scarring her makeup. Her makeup which was, unfortunately, a lost cause at this point. Her initial embrace after the rangers had applied both of their capture stylers-

Which I maintain are actually beyblades!

-on the still-sleeping garchomp, had been... messy. She hadn't wanted to let either myself or my sister go, my jacket was still stained with mascara-infused tears, and I was pretty sure the first time the caballero had approached she'd almost torn the man's throat out. Perhaps literally.

A hand clamped down on my shoulder as my father dropped to kneel beside me. He gave me the warmest smile I'd seen from the normally-restrained man in a long time and pulled me into a tight hug. “That was incredibly dangerous, never do it again.”

The sound of air being drawn up through his nose and the tight grip he had on my back told me exactly how close he was to openly crying at the moment... as if the way the words were choked and thick hadn't. I worked my mouth, trying to come up with something to say though the calm...

The moment passed, and Dad pulled away.

“I'm proud of you, Azi. No matter what, remember that, son.” He smiled at me, grinning a bit as I felt my cheeks heat and I looked away.

Like walking across too-thin winter ice, I could feel the calm crack.

“Thanks, Dad,” I replied, giving him a quick hug back and smiling as I pulled away. “I, um... I didn't really think? Lehonor was... well, it all happened so fast.”

“It did,” Enrique sighed heavily, the rims of his eyes just barely reddened as he took a moment to close them. “But you had everything well in hand before the caballero and the rangers showed up. That's something to be proud of, especially when you don't even have a pokemon yet.”

“Perhaps we should remedy that?”

Both my father and I turned to see a man in a crisp suit approaching looking none the worse for all of the commotion. “Ah,” my father spoke up, rising from his crouch to shake the offered hand. “Director Harrington of Uva Academy, wasn't it?”

Short-cropped black hair combed straight up in spikes, thick-framed glasses that made his expression look a little pinched with the way his eyebrows seemed constantly furrowed. On top of the pencil mustache hanging on his upper lip, it all gave off the appearance of someone who-

-prince, he'd make a great addition to the student body even as young as he is. Another feather in my cap, teaching a prodigy, maybe even better than his brother! Damn Clavell for stealing all the glory-

-or, maybe that was my own insight coloring my interpretation of his character.

“Indeed,” Harrington smiled. “My deepest apologies if I'm interrupting, Your Highness, but I couldn't help but overhear. If your son would like to start at Uva a year early, the Academy can be accommodating. He obviously has talent aplenty and skill with handling powerful pokemon.”

My father and I exchanged a glance... before I shrugged a careful approval and turned back to the bespectacled man. “I would prefer Uva to Naranja, father.”

“Oh?” Another new voice spoke up, making me privately bemoan more interpersonal interaction. Still, as the girl with the eevee backpack and her uncle approached, I supposed I could tolerate it. “Is that enough of a push for you to finally decide, Penny? My apologies, Your Highness, but I had hoped to speak with either Harrington or Clavell tonight to finalize my niece's registration. After seeing her hit it off with your son... well, I hope I'm not being too presumptuous.”

Standing to his side, Penny had reddened significantly as she approached, giving me a deferential bow. “Y-your H-highness, please forgive me! I didn't recognize you or I wouldn't have dreamed of speaking to you so informally! I'm so sorry!”

I sighed, feeling the calm ebb away a bit further and the coming crash draw nearer. “It's fine, Penny. You were perfectly well-mannered and polite during dinner. I usually only play the prince card when someone decides to be rude.”

“B-but I-” Penny began, bobbing back up and clutching one arm with the other nervously.

“You had good reaction time with that glaceon, too,” I commented, drawing her attention away from her previous faux-pas. If one was even inclined to call it that.

“Ah, but y-you-” Penny began, shaking her head. “I knew dragon types were weak to ice and there wasn't anyone else doing anything, so...”

“You've got good instincts,” I complimented. “If we do end up going to the Academy together, I'll be sure to look for you in class.”

Penny's eyes widened behind her glasses even as her smile did too, then she nodded apparently to herself. “You said Uva Academy?”

I could practically feel Harrington's building glee, though he kept his face clear of emotions past a polite expectation. “Either this year or next, yes. I have a bit of a sleeping condition that will need accommodation, but since my cousins all went to Naranja I'd hoped to chart my own course a bit.”

“I had thought something like that,” Father nodded minutely, tacitly admitting that he understood the real reason I didn't want to follow Ximen and Sabastian to Uva's sister school. “Hmm... well, I can't make any decisions without your mother's input, but if you really feel you're ready... especially after tonight.”

The Chairman of Macro Cosmos and my father exchanged a small nod.

This close, the feeling I got from the tanned businessman was...

-Peony would never forgive me if I pushed them together, but if it happens naturally? Though maybe there are some things I can do to speed the process-

...depressingly normal. Though the fact that he wanted his niece to be happy with the arrangement was a very small point in his favor.

Then, just as the discussion got going, someone else ran up and interrupted us.

This time, though, it was a ranger.

“The garchomp is back!” She gasped, resting her hands on her knees as she breathed heavily. “It's outside and it won't leave!”

I rubbed at my eyes and mentally hoped I would be wrong about what she would say next.

“It... ah, seems to want to see your son again, Your Highness,” she continued sheepishly.

My father's eyes widened and looked to me as I took calming breaths. “My son is not going to-”

I sighed deeply and began cataloging my arguments.

Sweet Arceus, this is the night that won't end!

Eventually, after a long and protracted argument that ended with an enlarged security detail, six caballeros, and an equal number of rangers ready to deploy a truly staggering amount of pokemon firepower should it become necessary...

I was escorted to the rear gardens where we'd released the dragon just a few hours earlier to find the monster himself looking particularly unimpressed at a quaquaval, a crabominable, and an azumarill... all of whom were looking admirably committed to a fight they would almost certainly lose despite the type advantage threat they posed.

If this was a video game battle, I know who I'd bet on.

But hard factors like type advantage, strength ratings, a given pokemon's speed...

They were lies.

Lies that amateur trainers believed meant that they should be able to beat another pokemon.

Here's some expert advice when you see a small group of pokemon going up against a fully-evolved dragon: bet on the dragon.

The Garchomp's head twisted to stare at the entourage guarding me, its eyes dilating as it readied itself for an attack. Even if the three 'mon arrayed before it wouldn't pose a significant challenge, it was old enough and smart enough to know that even if every human here only carried one additional battle-ready pokemon...

Well, there were challenges even dragons were smart enough to turn down.

“Gar! Garchomp!” It growled and snapped, muscles under its scales tightening.

I sighed and pushed past my father, “Hey! I know this wasn't the deal, but I'm a hatchling. The pack wouldn't let me wander out to meet someone as big and strong as you.”

My father's hand on my shoulder told me that I wouldn't be getting one more step towards the walking natural disaster, either.

But the garchomp seemed to take both the compliment and the explanation in stride, giving me a jerking nod. “Chomp-Gar-Gar!”

I blinked, my headache building as I felt the calm slipping away faster now. “Debt? There's no debt. No one was hurt-”

Except that guy who got tail-slapped by a dragon, but healing technology in this world is bullshit.

“-so no debt,” I waved the pokemon off.

But it shook its head, grunting again. “Garchomp! Gar-Gar!”

“For the food?!” I exclaimed, reaching up to scratch my head. “Are you fu-hreaking serious?”

Arceus I miss being able to curse freely as an adult.

“Gar!” It barked, dipping its head and reaching back into a natural fold of its scales where its arm-wings met the large fin on its back and producing-

My mind blanked as shocked inhalation sounded around me, my father's grip loosening momentarily. “Please tell me that's not one of your mate's eggs?”

Dragons are awesome, yes. But awesome in the abstract!

I did not want to be responsible for one of this world's most maltempered lines of difficult to handle monsters that were on record as eating rocks to sustain themselves if they got hungry enough. Which mean that, yes, they could and would count the earth itself as prey if they couldn't find something else to eat. How did that actually work? Fuck if I knew, probably poke-magic.

I swear the dragon fucking rolled its eyes at me before snorting. “Chomp!”

Oh, good. Evidently feeding you wasn't enough to give me the honor of raising one of your kids. Remind me to never do you any big favors!

But, thinking about it... this garchomp was a big one. Maybe a soon-to-be alpha, even. He wasn't lean, though. Thick, corded muscle lay under those scales with a healthy layer of fat. This wasn't a pokemon who had known hunger for longer than it took to hunt something down.

Which begged the question of why it had been so hungry when it'd stormed through the party's doors.

I wasn't sure if I liked the answer my mind came up with, but...

If he was being starved to be extra violent, like a tiger or lion in the Roman Colosseum...

The way his eyes wouldn't meet my own told me more than anything he could have said. The simple meal I'd given him and the restful sleep I'd put him under... well, they hadn't saved his life or anything so dramatic, but he'd woken up more sensible and, while still angry at the indignity, he'd understood we weren't the humans he should blame for it.

“Ga-chom-gar!” He spoke further, snorting as he shifted, and I felt my train of thought derail.

“So it's a pokemon egg you were going to eat?” I asked, my voice deadpan, getting a jerk of acknowledgment and a low rumble. Around me, tensions eased among the humans as I shrugged and spread my arms slightly. “Is that what you expect me to do? Eat it?”

The garchomp had the gall to shrug at me. “Gar-gar-chomp.”

Then it turned to leave, apparently satisfied that we were even now and he didn't need to owe a human a favor. Taking a few steps away from the egg it had set down, he leaped into the air and soared off into the starlit sky.

I sighed, walking tiredly to the egg and looking it over before reaching down and laying a hand on it. A faint and unready pulse of life resonated within. “I hope you take a while to hatch, because I am done with this shit.”

If my father didn't hear it, it didn't count.

Yawning deeply, I swayed slightly as I walked back to my father, the crash imminent. Strong arms caught me before I could be in danger of toppling.

“Are you alright, Azi? Is everything okay?” Dad asked, crouching down to my level.

“Stupid prideful dragons,” I muttered, leaning against him as I cradled the egg. “Tired, Dad. Gonna' nap, kay?”

“You do that son,” he murmured softly, his voice a low rumble in his chest as he laughed lightly with relief. “I suppose we don't need to worry about getting you a starter, at least.”

…

“Well, guess I didn't need to show up after all.”

Prince Enrique Braganza turned to regard the yellow-clad young woman with oversized sleeves, picking up his sleeping son and the pokemon egg he was holding in a single smooth motion.

“Regardless, Gym Leader Iono, you have our thanks for appearing so promptly,” he grunted under the added weight, positioning Aznaro more securely against himself.

The teenager grinned a set of shark-like teeth and waved a hand that was still swamped in yellow fabric. “Don't worry 'bout it, Highness. I'm Levincia's Gym Leader, after all. Shame I wasn't here for the big ruckus, but all you fuddy-duddies talk about boring stuff at these parties. Ugh... Hasse is going to be on my back about attending them even more now.”

Enrique chuckled, beginning to move towards the building as the security entourage parted and regrouped around him, the gym leader stepping up to follow him. “You have my sincere condolences. Though now that I've experienced the alternative, I think I prefer the boring ones.”

Iono hummed and nodded, her two-tone pigtails shifting against the oversized magnemite hair ornaments she wore. “So...” her eyes tracked to the man's cargo, “that's a heck of a kid you've got there. More of a Dragon Prince than a Ghost Prince, by my count.”

Enrique snorted. “Tell that to my wife. You've never tried to find Aznaro when he doesn't wish to be found. As distasteful as that nickname is, I do feel it's more accurate than I'd like sometimes.”

“Are you sure it shouldn't be Psychic Prince?” Iono asked, her tone intentionally casual.

Enrique grimaced and shot her a severe look.

The gym leader grinned again and raised her cloth-covered hands. “Not to cast aspersions or anything, Higher-ness. Just saying what it looked like to me, hehe!”

The elder prince kept the look trained on her for a moment longer, then sighed. “Neither Lani nor I have any family history of that kind of trait. Alignment to ghost-type energy, even if it makes certain interactions with the Disciples of Arceus... difficult, there would at least be precedence for.”

“Ah, the Ninnies of the Ultimate One,” Iono rolled her eyes, Enrique smothering a smile at the disrespect to the clergy. “Want me to reach out to Tulip? See if she can drop by your digs to give Lani and Her Majesty a makeover?”

Enrique pondered the proposal for a moment, then nodded. “Be discreet, of course, but it would be a great help if you could. Duchess Briceida is...”

“A bitch,” Iono filled in, throwing her arms up and behind her head, her elbows high in the air. “I hear about her all the time from Tulip, no worries. I'll keep it on the DL, Highness. Been meaning to do a face-to-face with Tulip for a bit, anyway. My little electric waverider needs some move-tutoring.”

“I only ask you please don't instigate another international incident with Alola,” Enrique muttered. “They very much do not like reminders that a number of their 'unique' pokemon breeds have been poached by Avropans over the centuries.”

“Ah-hehe, sorry about that!” Iono blushed, looking deeply unapologetic about it. “Anywho... let's see...”

Her hand reached out and caressed the egg resting on Aznaro's stomach for a moment. “Hmm, not an electric type. Even in the egg, you can usually feel a bit of voltage if you know what you're looking for. Ah well, I'll have Hasse send a trainer over with a new-model incubator for this little one, okay?”

“We'd be much obliged,” Enrique nodded at her, ignoring the impoliteness once again. Certain people were simply too useful to get angry at for their lack of airs. Iono, for all her irreverence and outright silliness at times, was one of those people.

Moreover, they both knew where her loyalties lay, without question.

And that, more than anything else, was worth quite a bit.

~~~

Alright, so the general polls are in and the result is... unsurprising? Well, slightly surprising, at least.

With how hard Mind Games won, at least. This month it took well over half the vote across both Patreon & Subscribe Star when everything was said and done.

Industrious took a solid quarter of the remaining half, and the last quarter was divided up between The New Ron, Nexus Event, and Paldean Knights.

My goal is to let everything have at least one chapter this month, let's see if I can manage it.

Next up, of course, is Mind Games.

I'll have the Awesome Tier vote momentarily.

Paldean Knights - Chapter 3

Alright, so the general polls are in and the result is... unsurprising? Well, slightly surprising, at least.

With how hard Mind Games won, at least. This month it took well over half the vote across both Patreon & Subscribe Star when everything was said and done.

Industrious took a solid quarter of the remaining half, and the last quarter was divided up between The New Ron, Nexus Event, and Paldean Knights.

My goal is to let everything have at least one chapter this month, let's see if I can manage it.

Next up, of course, is Mind Games.

I'll have the Awesome Tier vote momentarily.

May Favoritism! - Advanced Tiers

Second Verse, Same as the First!

May Favoritism!

May's here!

Jeeze, time flies... it feels like April was just starting a few days ago, but... I guess we're here now.

So, one caveat for this month. I will be going out of town for a week. However, I should have access to both a computer and internet during that interval... along with enough downtime to work on chapters. I'll keep everyone aware of what's happening and let you know about any delays.

Otherwise it should be business as usual!

Which, in this case means that, as usual, the project that gets the most votes gets the most attention. I'll also have a separate vote up for the highest tier later on to see what gets a special bigger chapter this month. So, here we go...

Industrious: Engineering Marvels - Chapter 26

“This is going too well,” I called out to Bucky as we stormed through the base.

“Don't be a jinx!” He shouted back.

“I thought you were on my side!” I replied, drawing an arrow from my quiver in a smooth motion and firing it down a long hallway, the head planting itself through the eyepiece of those anonymizing gas masks. The soldier staggered back, dead before he hit the ground a moment later. “Steve's the hopeless optimist, right!?”

“That's while he's in charge!” Bucky barked, turning and aiming his shotgun into a room before unloading on whatever – whoever – he saw. “If something goes wrong right now, I have to deal with it!”

“Ha!” I grinned, picking out another flashbang arrow and lining up the shot carefully-

The metal tip of the arrow hit solid concrete at the end of the corridor, reflected, and burst into a fury of noise and light.

“Jesus, you're good at that,” Bucky shook his head in amazement.

“Bring a bow to a gunfight and you've gotta' have serious skills,” I shrugged off the compliment, but my lips tilted up in a smirk as we moved forward in the wake of the blinding and deafening explosive, the rest of the squad right behind us.

“Don't wanna go too deep!” Bucky called out as we hit another choke point, bullets flying out from where the dark concrete hall merged into a t-shaped intersection. “Cap's coming.”

“We stall too long and they fortify,” I shot back, drumming my fingers against an explosive tag, but shrugging it off and picking up a conventional grenade instead.

“We move too fast and they could get behind us before Steve meets up; cut us in half,” Bucky shook his head and blind-fired around the corner.

I frowned, then nodded as I made a decision and turned to look Bucky in the eye. “You're the boss, we hold. I'll make a door if it comes to it.”

One of my chakra tags was in-hand now, ready to activate should I need it.

Bucky held up a hand to stall our line of men and gave them the signal to hold. Immediately, the squad began switching out magazines and reloading rifles. Others checked their gear and took quick swigs of water or alcohol as Bucky and I kept up an exchange of fire with the opposing forces so no one got brave enough to try and counterattack properly.

Pulling out a mirror, I carefully extended it on a small metal pole.

I scowled.

“They're setting the corridor to blow,” I informed Bucky, then cursed as another volley of fire rang out, pulling my mirror back.

Barnes cursed as well, turning to me. “What was that about a door?”

“You see Steve yet?” I asked in reply.

This time, it appeared that fate or whatever was on my side as the sound of a shield impacting a body rang out from behind us. Spinning, guns were raised in alarm, then lowered as Steve led his small squad up from behind us, stepping over the slumped body.

“You guys missed one,” Logan pointed out, slipping a pistol out of his holster and unloading two shots into the soldier's body.

Nina grimaced and looked away from the casual violence and death.

“Sloppy,” Victor agreed, grunting the word.

“So what's the situation?” Steve asked, implicitly moving to take back command.

“We were holding to wait for you so you didn't get cut off and to reload,” Bucky replied. “Hydra's setting up the next area to blow, though. Ray says he's got a way through.”

Steve turned an expectant gaze on me, and I held up a small piece of paper with a sealing glyph on it. “Just waiting on you slowpokes.”

“Well, we're all here, now,” Bucky stated, turning back to me. “How about that door, Ray?”

“Coming right up,” I nodded.

I rolled up a sleeve and slapped the tag on the corresponding ink I'd placed on my own skin. Another change I'd made to my loadout was a series of 'receptor seals' to better moderate the energy I was shoving into my chakra system using these things. I also hoped that the secondary functions of the receptor seals would bleed over any excess energy into healing chakra, though I hadn't had time to exhaustively test that function.

The principle was easy enough to understand, though. Instead of simply tossing a bucket of current into a circuit like I had – stupidly – been doing until now, I'd placed a seal on each of my four limbs and neck that would serve to properly modulate the amount of 'current' that was seeping into my body at any given time. That amount, it has to be said, would be very small given the fragile nature of my chakra network, but along with the receptor seals, I'd added a kind of bracing on strategic places all over my body.

If I wasn't a master contortionist thanks to my other skills, the ones on my back would have been particularly difficult.

Primary chakra points, a few of the larger secondary clusters, and most importantly my gates were all now better supported my a network of seals that would both help take the strain off my body and soul as well as use the residual energy – again, hopefully – to speed up the healing process.

It was something I should have done from the very beginning, but I'd been too enthralled with the idea of affecting real change at such a crucial point in history that mimicked my real world. Everyone had wanted a piece of my time when I wasn't on the battlefield-

Which was another stupid course of action on my part.

But I was...

I remembered being, at least... a soldier.

Satsuki's parting gift had set in more than I liked to admit, changing me from someone who was more comfortable sitting out conflict to someone who made their home on blood-soaked fields as much as in the forge I'd always preferred.

It wasn't something I liked thinking about, truthfully.

For all that my ego was relatively malleable and I wasn't prone to existential crises...

Uchiha were. Their ocular blood-limit came with engineered points of failure as activation codes for higher levels of strength. And it was Uchiha Satsuki who had dreamed up a version of me that would better be able to serve in the shinobi forces. It made too much sense that there was probably some small part of her within that dream that I'd unintentionally consumed when I'd merged with my illusory doppelganger. The entire process had changed me, that was undeniable, and one of those changes was an unwillingness to confront those very changes themselves.

I breathed in, centering myself.

Now wasn't the best time to have this particular epiphany, but I could return to the topic later when there was time.

Strength flowed through me with the energy of the chakra tag, the power feeling as though it was a quenching rain on a raw, hot, cracked desert as cool relief seeped into my very soul. The crest of the flood was lesser, the high of my power nothing like what I'd reached fighting the vampire weeks ago, but...

It was more contained.

More controlled.

More controllable.

There was also the added benefit that my body didn't feel as thought it was about to buckle under the strain of that selfsame power. It was energy, yes, but it didn't make me feel like I'd just dropped combat stimulants. There was no jittery near-pain as muscles twitched and fought random stimuli.

I felt... good.

My moment of luxuriating in the soothing power of becoming more whole faded, and I opened my eyes.

Back on the clock, soldier.

My hands began flashing through a series of signs, fingers contorting in ways other people would find painful, if not downright torturous.

“Earth Style: Liquid Stone Form,” I stated, ending the formula for the technique and pressing my palms against the concrete next to the hallway.

Uttered oaths to deities, curses, and shocked inhalations from the rest of the Commandos rang out as the stone indeed ran like liquid, rearranging itself to my desires as a new tunnel opened up that bypassed the now-trapped hallway.

Thankfully, that neither burned all of the juice running through my system, nor did it exhaust the full reserves in the tag.

Instead, I was left feeling a bit weaker than when I'd put it on... but still a great deal stronger and more energetic than I had been normally.

“Goddamn,” Dino muttered.

“See, told ya' the kid's magic,” Dougan snorted.

“Enough standing around, let's go,” Steve barked, raising his shield and leading the charge.

“Follow Cap!” Bucky cried, raising his own oversized rifle.

The squad cheered and ran past me as I took a moment to collapse my bow and pull my sword from its sheath... and take a quick drink from my canteen.

Regardless of my superhuman status, I was still human at the end of the day, after all.

What followed was a massacre, no two ways about it.

The ambush that the Hydra grunts had set up, in their defense, was pretty foolproof. They'd fallen back to a chokepoint specifically designed to funnel invading soldiers to their death without any possible way around it. Any normal force working with conventional weapons and tactics would have been forced into the narrow space, blown up, and the ones that survived buried under tons of rubble after the initial blast.

Backtracking would have been almost as bad, since it would have given the enemy even more time to prepare and reconstitute their forces. Which was the ultimate weakness of our group. We were a small, mobile, and lightly-armed double-strength squad without any real logistical chain of supply or reinforcement. We had what we had and that was it.

Our primary strengths, on the other hand, were stealth, surprise, and the disproportionate damage even small packs of explosives could do to infrastructure and concentrated formations. Once the surprise of our initial attack wore off and the base began to properly mount a defense, things became incredibly dangerous for our unit.

Which was why we desperately needed to keep up the momentum after our initial push.

“This branch is clear!” Jim called out.

“So is this one!” Dougan yelled back.

The two had each taken a pair of soldiers with them and formed small fire teams that had swept the barracks of the base while our main group continued to push further into the base.

“Whoa! Hold!” Steve called out suddenly, one fist upright as he looked around a corner.

“What's wrong?” Nina asked, taking a deep breath and pausing. “I smell blood.”

“We did just... ah, kill a lot of people,” Nick muttered, a rifle in his hands and his camera hanging from his neck.

Logan snorted noisily, stilling. “Not that, punk. Up ahead.”

“Which doesn't make sense,” Bucky replied, shouldering his rifle again. “Since we haven't been there, yet.”

“But we've got bodies anyway,” Steve confirmed.

I hummed, swinging my sword in a smooth motion to sweep the blood from its blade. Pulling the wakizashi from its sheath, I stepped up next to Steve. “You and me take point, Cap?”

Steve paused, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. Dino, you and Dougan hold position here in case we need back. Bucky, take Logan and Vic and keep pushing.”

The dark-haired man opened his mouth to argue, then snapped it shut before nodding. “Roger that, Cap. Be careful.”

Turning to go, he paused to meet my eyes, the only exposed part of my face in my hooded balaclava. We exchanged a mutual understanding in that moment. Bucky momentarily surrendering the mantle of boy scout babysitter to me.

“Keep an eye for anyone trying to be clever and sneak up on us from the way we came,” I advised Dougan as Steve and I stepped past them. The rest of the men – and Nina – hurried off ahead.

“What do you think?” Steve asked me in a low tone as we stepped over the corpses.

I flicked a glance towards the downed bodies of the Hydra soldiers. “Whoever took them out was using a blade, not a gun. That kind of limits our list of potential suspects.”

“Someone like you?” Steve asked curiously, giving me a raised eyebrow.

The thought that there was 'someone like me' was both amusing and alarming. “Probably not as good as me, for all that's probably indulging in a little pride. But... they were killed with stabbing motions. See those wounds? Sharp, thin blade. Something like a stiletto... or maybe a sai?”

“What's a sai?” Steve asked.

I opened my mouth to make a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles joke that he wouldn't get when Steve's shield snapped up to block a hurled piece of glinting metal.

Raising up my own blade in an immediate action with the smaller one moving in tighter to guard myself. The thrown object that had deflected off Steve's shield had dug itself into the nearby wall, the aging concrete apparently no match for an expertly-wielded blade.

“That, Steve,” I muttered. “That's a sai,” I gave a quick nod towards the oriental weapon.

“Indeed, it is. My apologies for assuming you were hostile.”

Both Cap and I turned to see another figure stepping out through an open doorway. The figure was small and cut a feminine build that was only barely discernible through the dark green hooded cloak they wore. A white mask that looked like a bare skull over their face drew attention away from the various blades and weapons attached to the woman's body I could glimpse through the parting of her cloak. I took especially close note of the pistol grip I caught sight of on her hip... with a likely mate on the other side.

“If we're not going to fight, we should exchange names. A bit rude not to,” Steve tried.

“I go by Taskmaster,” she replied, a trace of humor in her tone. “And I hardly need to ask you to identify yourself, Captain Rogers. Or do you prefer America?”

Steve huffed a partially-faked laugh. “I usually go by Steve, actually. And this is Ray.”

“If we're using our funny-mask names, you can call me Snake Eyes,” I quipped. “Mind if I ask what a woman like you is doing in a place like this?”

The question had layers to it, but she wouldn't know that.

Couldn't know that, really.

Well... unless time travel, and I hoped not.

The woman looked to be wearing gear that was period-appropriate, at least, for all that such a thing mattered in this world. She could entirely be carrying a ray gun and simply have lifted it off of Hydra here in the nineteen-forties. Still, 'Taskmaster' was a name I was familiar enough with. A natural martial artist and omnidisciplinary master of weapons. A relatively low-tier combatant on the superhuman scale for the setting, but a dangerous one nonetheless...

…though I had thought the character was male.

Eh, it's not like I'm going to raise a stink over a genderbent identity. It matters a lot more if she's going to try to kill us than if she's got a penis or a vagina.

“Charmed to meet you,” she replied, her voice echoing slightly behind her mask but the underlying toneless quality of the words implying a lack of care regardless. “If you'll excuse me, I need to retrieve more information from this outpost.”

“If you're fighting Hydra, we could help,” Steve offered, stopping her in her tracks as she made to move further down the hallway.

My shoulders slumped as I sighed, just a bit. Steve... dammit.

“Without even knowing my own aims and goals? That seems like an oversight in a potential ally,” Taskmaster noted.

“Playing Devil's Advocate here, but we are allied with the Soviets right now-” I carefully didn't react as tension crept up her spine at the words leaving my mouth. “-and I doubt you're quite as bad as them, so beyond whatever Cap here thinks... we could at least exchange contact information?”

“I very much doubt you'd have any useful information, 'Snake Eyes,' even if you are hitting Hydra bases,” she replied, a trace of sarcasm in her voice as she walked away.

“How about the secret society you work for?” I asked, making her jerk and still. “Do you think they would be interested?”

Steve turned a curious look on me with narrowed eyes, even as I could feel the tension in the corridor ratchet up.

“Perhaps you are better-informed than I'd thought, especially for someone that I have no dossier on myself,” Taskmaster stated, staring at us. “Which would normally indicate you're no one of consequence.”

She was right that I knew more than I had any right to, but...

I was actually winging it completely here, though. Still, the guess had been an easy one to make, simply due to the world we were in. Like with the Hellfire Club, this world was awash in conspiracies, secret societies, and immortals pulling mystic strings behind the curtains.

Simply put, Taskmaster was almost certainly in the employ of either one of those or, instead, just a simple mercenary.

Let's see... another leap of faith, then? Why not...

“You're here to retrieve something that Hydra stole, aren't you?” Again, another easy guess. Hydra was the kind of organization that pissed off virtually everyone in their attempt to out-Nazi the Nazis.

Taskmaster stared at me, then nodded slowly. “Perhaps... we can work together.”

Because you now think I know things I shouldn't about you and your employers, and you're going to interrogate me on how that can be and what my sources are, right?

“Ray...” Steve prompted, trailing off intently.

I rolled my eyes and sheathed my wakizashi before reaching out to grab the sai still embedded in the concrete. Yanking it free, I gave it a lazy toss in Taskmaster's direction. “Don't worry about it Steve. If she's working for who I think she's working for... well, at least they're not Communists.”

Again... that tension. Ties to the Russians? Maybe the White Army? Or Russian Nobility?

Or, hell, she could be Ukrainian or Polish for all that it really mattered. Having a grudge against the Soviets didn't really mean all that much given how many groups and people they'd pissed off. Or brutally massacred.

Still, it was a clue.

And if she really was working for a secret society... well, Tsarist Russia had been littered with the things. In this world, you probably weren't able to turn over a fucking rock without a few of them scurrying around, either neophyte and mundane or legitimately ancient and magical.

“Have you already gotten everything you need at this base?” I asked, my guard still up as she sheathed her sai.

There was a pause as she visibly contemplated the answer she would give, then shook her head. “No. There was a small, faceted spherical gem that was being held here. Red in color. I was instructed to bring it back.”

“Haven't seen anything like that,” Steve stated, reaching up to rub at his chin. “Any idea where they might have been keeping it? Maybe in a safe somewhere, if it's valuable?”

Taskmaster scoffed and I shook my head with a thoughtful hum as I looked up towards the corner of the hallway. Just like the castle, the base had been modernized to suit the needs of the modern mad scientist and military equipment. “I'd bet good money on the gem being used as a power source-”

Taskmaster drew a startled breath and one of her hands went for a weapon under her cloak.

“-which means we need to follow those wires,” I stated, gesturing with my katana towards the large conduit running through the corridor.

“Then let's do that,” Steve nodded, giving me another significant look.

Man, he's either going to be pissed at me or think it's the funniest thing ever when I tell him I'm just bullshitting my way through all of this on stupid movie logic.

There was always a secret society behind things and the shiny rock was always a secret source of unlimited power.

That was just how things worked.

Once Steve called in Dino and Dougan, who were warily following along on our quest to help our new friend in the mask, we started moving again.

“We're going to have a talk about stuff when we get a chance, Ray,” Steve warned me in an undertone as we ran, the green-cloaked woman leading our smaller squad.

“I figured,” I nodded, Taskmaster stopping in front of a door and giving it a firm kick.

She cursed when it refused to yield and knelt to remove a series of small tools from her belt, then stilled at my approach. “Excuse me.”

Even if the energy flowing through me was ebbing now, I still had more than enough for something like this.

My blade swung, slicing through the seam between the door and the wall in a precision cut.

It swung open.

“At least you know how to swing it,” Taskmaster commented as she pushed through to the other room.

“Never hold a tool you don't know how to use,” I riposted, then almost ran into the woman as she stopped suddenly. “Wha-”

“-the fuck?” Dougan asked, stepping up to stare with the rest of us.

The small corridor had ended up leading us to an immense open space that looked like some sort of aircraft hanger. All around, people in Hydra uniforms were running about, urgently carrying machinery and equipment as they desperately attempted to finish…

(This - But Nore Swastikas)

“Steve.” I called bluntly, my disbelief warring with my irritation and frustration as we looked at the giant mechanical figure lying prone on the hanger floor.

“Yeah, Ray?” He asked, his voice faint.

“You think holy water will work on giant robots?” I asked, my tone deadpan.

Steve gave me a disappointed look at that, shaking his head as someone finally looked up long enough to notice our motley band up on the catwalk and shouted.

I sighed, sheathed my katana, and grabbed for my bow. “I'm glad I chose violence today, because we're going to need a lot of it if they get that thing moving.”

~~~

Pretty close to on-time with this one.

Sorry it wasn't out yesterday, but... well, one of my family's dogs died. I needed to take a minute for myself and get out of the house.

At any rate, next chapter is a giant robot fight, so look forward to that.

I'll have the polls for May up in a few hours, likely after I get a little rest.

Industrious: Engineering Marvels - Chapter 26

Pretty close to on-time with this one.

Sorry it wasn't out yesterday, but... well, one of my family's dogs died. I needed to take a minute for myself and get out of the house.

At any rate, next chapter is a giant robot fight, so look forward to that.

I'll have the polls for May up in a few hours, likely after I get a little rest.

Mind Games - Chapter 25

There's a common misunderstanding among society at large that all criminals are stupid.

Law enforcement would have a much easier time doing their jobs were that true.

That said, crime does tend to attract people who, while not unintelligent are often unwilling to apply their intellect. Or, and these are particularly annoying, people who believe themselves smarter than 'the system' and deliberately position themselves in opposition to it to show that off. What I'm getting at, in other words, is that there's an emotional component to crime that the average salaryman or housewife usually ascribes to simple malice instead of properly understanding.

After all, if all criminals are simply uniformly evil then you don't have to feel bad when the human washing machine with super powers punches one of them in the face and breaks their jaw.

In reality, malicious criminals only make up about a third of the total population of evil-doers.

The other two-thirds are composed of people who are simply desperate to provide for themselves and/or their families any way they can. Legality tends to be a secondary concern when your mortgage is due and your children need food. The final third, as aforementioned, are the egotists. The ones who consider themselves above the status of the common cog in the corporate machine and seek 'freedom' by sticking it to the man.

Any single member of these groups can be as stupid or intelligent as any other member of a given occupation.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that the smart criminals tend to be as far away from the crime as possible.

Which was why I wasn't going to get anything more than a lieutenant from the local villain gang during this raid.

Moreover, turning over a lieutenant from a gang to the authorities rarely yielded actionable intelligence for several reasons. The first was the threat of retaliation, especially towards that person's family. The second was simply the feeling of brotherhood that most gangs evoked in their members. Another was the idea that doing time behind bars would demonstrate commitment and earn a higher place once you were released. Oh, and a general hatred and distrust of police and heroes, can't forget that. Given that most people who became gang members had at least semi-legitimate reasons to distrust authority figures, well...

No, if I wanted to make an actual dent in the operations I'd discovered, I needed to be a bit more circumspect than simply breaking down doors and bashing in skulls.

Which was what saw me walking through the doors of a small-time high-end gadget store operating out of an alleyway in Akihabara.

Stereotypes got started for a reason, I suppose.

The walls of the admittedly small and somewhat cramped store were lined with everything from specialty batteries to the not-ethernet cables the modern world used to various replacement components for small motors. My eyes slid towards the glass cases with 'spy gadgets' sequestered away from teenagers grubby hands with price tags that were suitably intimidating for what were generally cheap pieces of crap made out of even cheaper plastic.

The middle-aged man behind the counter looked up lazily from the military hardware magazine he was reading...

...and instantly slid back down, losing interest once he registered the fact that I had breasts and was visibly too young to hold a stable job that could pay for the products that decorated his walls.

“We don't do phone repairs, kid,” he muttered. “Or computer repairs. Or whatever shit you broke but can't ask mommy and daddy to buy you a new one of. There's a place down the street-”

“I'm Venus Barbata,” I interrupted him, giving him a snort of mild disdain. “I hope the stuff you said you had is better than what you've got behind the counter.”

The man visibly blinked, sitting up properly to study me. “You're Venus Barbata?”

I rolled my eyes and stepped up to the counter to pull out my phone and show him the chat log from the forum I'd found him on. The middle-aged man studied the text for a moment, bringing out a pair of glasses and squinting brown eyes as he cursed lowly. Reaching up to scratch at his black hair, he huffed in mild disbelief, but leaned back in his chair to study me with new eyes.

“Money?” He asked, raising an eyebrow.

I pulled out an envelope from my jacket and flipped the top open, letting a stack of bills slide a quarter of the way out. “Five-hundred-thousand, like we agreed on.”

He squinted at the money suspiciously before swiveling his chair and aiming his mouth towards the back of the shop. “Hodu!”

Crash!

“Ah-shit! Sorry Nakamura-san, I was just-” A voice called out from the back, noticeably younger than the man in front of me.

“Nevermind that! Get Barbata's order out here, pronto! She's here to pick it up!” He yelled back, still overly-loud.

I heard a faint and disbelieving, “She?” from the back, but shrugged it off when the shopkeep held out a hand and snapped his fingers.

I flipped through the bills and found where I'd folded the corner of one, pulling that stack off from the bulk and handed it over. “Half now, half after I look everything over.”

The man grunted and accepted the fat stack of cash that was roughly equivalent to two and a half thousand dollars American. He immediately reached over to the side and grabbed what looked like a highlighter, uncapping it with his teeth and fanning the bills before running a line over at least half of them. He eyed the ink for a long moment as it failed to change color, grunted again, and capped the marker before stacking the cash and beginning to count it carefully.

A moment later, a brown-haired hafu with red eyes and... I'd wager Indian descent stumbled out of the back room with a large paper bag in his hands. A few years older than me, he had the look of someone who'd missed a few meals here and there, his clothes hanging off him a bit too much.

“Oh teri!” He muttered under his breath as he caught sight of me.

'Oh shit,' in the local parlance.

I raised an eyebrow and replied in Hindi. “That the way you greet all your customers?”

Nakamura paused, gave me another measuring look, then reached out and grabbed the bag before placing it on the counter between us. “Check it, then cough up the rest of the cash.”

I nodded and unceremoniously opened the bag before pulling out all sorts of interesting little toys. Nothing was the kind of quality engineering that one of my past lives jokingly referred to as Bat-Grade, but they were still a cut above anything on the civilian market. None of it was exactly pretty, either, with rough 3-D printed casings and hand-soldered pins in many cases, but it was all at least clean and fairly neatly done.

“I did it all myself,” Hodu spoke up, his voice breaking around a noticeable accent. Flushing, he cleared it and tried again, holding up a finger as a tiny flame emerged from it. “It's my q-quirk. Flame Fingers. It might not be very flashy, but it makes me great with stuff like this.”

I hummed and nodded, snapping the casing of one of the devices closed and turning to the store owner. “I'm missing the battery-powered solder knife.”

Nakamura turned a foul shade of puce and rounded on Hodu, who winced.

“I had it on the charger! Sorry!” He yelped, then turned on his heel and sprinted into the back, something falling and hitting the ground as he vanished.

“Sorry, the kid's new,” Nakamura grunted, looking even more displeased with having to offer any sort of apology.

I handed him the rest of the money, which seemed to appease his temper. “S'fine. That's why I check. Shit happens.”

As the kid emerged from the back again and offered me the missing piece of equipment, Nakamura nodded after ritually checking the other set of bills. “Smarter than the usual lot I get in here. Anyway, your money's good and you didn't show up drunk or high out of your mind. Plus you didn't whine like a bitch over something stupid. You're welcome back anytime, don't make me regret it.”

I nodded at the man, already packing away the contents of the bag into my own pockets and shoulder bag.

“Uh-hey, that's a lot of serious stuff,” Hodu began tentatively, fidgeting in place as I looked at him. “What all do you want-”

His boss reached up and dope-slapped him. “Idiot! You don't ask those questions! Fool!”

I snorted and nodded at the man, then moved my gaze to the teen. “Listen to your boss. Whatever I'm going to do with a bag full of surveillance gear like this is going to inevitably piss someone off. If I was doing white-hat work there'd be other places I could pick up gear like this from a brand name supplier that produced a paper trail I wouldn't need to hide.”

Nakamura grunted again and stacked the bills to put back in the envelope. “Stupid kids... unless you're going to buy anything else, you know where the door is.”

I paused. “Stun-gun, Taser, Bear Spray, and a pair of Extendable Batons.”

Nakamura frowned. “I don't carry weapons. Just tech.”

“Would you be willing to source them for me?” I put my hands in my pocket. “Or if you won't act as a reseller, how about introducing me to someone who does?”

The older man hummed, reaching up to rub at his five-o'clock shadow before nodding slowly. “I know someone. I'll send you a selection of their products over the chat. Tell me the ones you want and you can pick them up two days from then. Make sure to let me know if you want extra battery packs for the first two.”

I dipped my head. “Thank you for your service.”

Then I left, hearing the first faint echoes of the store owner berating his employee... if less severely and more affectionately than he'd been willing to do in front of a stranger.

I grinned a bit at that. The two had enough features in common that the boy was likely some kind of relation... probably a nephew or a younger cousin of some type. I'd also put good money on the boy being one of the lesser forms of an illegal immigrant or refugee who'd simply let his paperwork lapse and faded into the background. In the grand scheme of things, though, doing off the books electronic work for hackers and scammers was a less-severe crime than I was really looking to prosecute at this point. Besides, the old man was cautious enough in his selection of clientele from our online interactions that I doubted he knowingly dealt with anyone serious.

Once I took down the major trigger-smuggling ring I'd found traces of, then I'd evaluate exactly what kind of threat they might be if that proved to be necessary.

As for now, though?

I had a pawn shop to visit.

…

I sighed as I walked away from the train station, shaking my head.

“I have got to get that fucking bike soon,” I muttered with a grimace.

As convenient as the Japanese rail system might be, and speaking as an American it is a fucking godsend, it just wasn't ideal for a vigilante to rely on public transit. It was acceptable at the moment because it let me keep my head down as well as pretend to be a civilian, but it simply wouldn't work in the long term.

The problem was that I'd shelled out for the Pocket Apartment, then again to give Himiko access to the space without needing me there to open the way for her. I still had eleven credits left, but those were both a rainy-day fund and a reserve for a potential template for Himiko... something that she and I still needed to discuss. As long as it was ironed out before the entrance exam to UA took place – or before any formal quirk evaluation if Fuyumi raised a fuss – it wouldn't be a serious issue, though.

The issue was that, very soon, I'd need a level of independent transportation that I simply didn't have.

Which was why I was here, walking into a pawn shop.

“Hello, welcome!” A man in a suit called as he stepped out from behind a counter with a bow. “Welcome to our humble store. May I help you with anything?”

I smiled at the attendant, a man who probably wasn't even ten years older than myself. “Yes, I'm part of the A/V Club at my school and we're looking to pick up a few occult items for use in a film project. I'm sorry to show up so late, but my cram school just let out an hour ago.”

“Not a problem, not a problem!” The man assured me with another bow, waving me over. “We don't have the best selection of items fitting your request, but we do have a few! Come this way, please!”

I followed the man through the pawn shop.

Or, in Japanese, shichiya... which held a different connotation than the term 'pawn shop,' really. While a great many western-style pawn shops carried a number of goods of questionable quality and were generally kind of, well... sleazy, the Japanese version focused on catering towards a higher-end customer looking for good condition used luxury goods.

So instead of heading into a rundown strip mall, I'd entered an upper-middle class shopping arcade with large front windows that showed off a variety of restored antiques, jewelry, and the classier kinds of media merchandise. Everything was well-lit, the floors were clean, and the employees were bright and attentive to anyone who walked through the door.

Japan, after all, was a society that traded on the reputation of its members.

It was almost unthinkable that anyone would be breaking the law in such an upright and prosperous establishment with the kind of carefully-documented inventory this company had.

Which was what made it a great choice for doing so.

Because, unbeknownst to most, there was an old Dark Age bunker underneath this shopping arcade. This store, of course, possessed an access corridor into said bunker, though it had been officially sealed three decades ago according to government documentation. Which, in turn, meant there was no need to worry about anyone moving anything into, through, or out of said bunker.

Especially trigger.

As the clerk led me through the main displays, I let my eyes trace over the general structure of the building, looking for dead space that couldn't be accounted for.

Let's see... that's too contained to be anything but a closet... I think that's the office area, good to keep in mind. Hmm... they'd probably want it near the loading area...

“Here we are,” the employee stated, walking me through a doorway into a rear display room that was a bit smaller and more cluttered with various objects that weren't as easy or compact to sell. “I'm sorry for the lack of showmanship, but these items are commensurately cheaper than the ones out front, I assure you.”

“I suppose occult paraphernalia isn't exactly a hot-selling segment of your merchandise,” I commented idly as I was directed towards a specific wall of goods.

“Ah... there are perhaps a few... though those are likely outside of a student's budget,” the employee hedged.

“My budget might surprise you,” I replied candidly, narrowing my eyes at a lacquered box. “May I?”

“Please, allow me,” he bowed slightly, pulling a pair of white gloves from his pocket and lifting the top of the box.

Honestly, I was surprised the cards hadn't been thrown in the trash with how worn the contents were. The individual cards were scratched, rubbed raw in places, and had the occasional tear that had been patched.. admittedly, the repairs were quite good, though. Some of the ink on the original designs had also been restored closely enough that the colors matched quite closely. The differences could be put off to some fading from age.

I glanced at the price again and understood these people had no idea what they had.

Granted, even I didn't exactly know what they were without a closer look. But, still... I couldn't exactly leave these lying around, either, given the way they felt to my senses. “I'll take them.”

“Excellent, young miss. Over here we have a crystal sculpture of a skull...” The employee stated, flipping a switch and turning a small LED from blue to red.

In the end, I bought several things I didn't need. Both to camouflage my true purpose in scouting the store... and because I was apparently still a shitty impulse shopper when put in front of weird shit that I'd otherwise have no use for.

“Have I spent enough to trouble you to look at the more select collection?” I probed bluntly as he counted out the cash and boxed up my purchases.

The twenty-something paused for a moment, frowning lightly in thought, before nodding his head. “A brief glance, I suppose. Perhaps something to aspire to?”

I smiled obligingly and was led further into the back of the complex, even as I marked the excessive number of security cameras discreetly mounted behind black globes. In and of themselves, those wouldn't be an issue if I was planning to rob the place, but if I was planning to plant the devices...

Looks like I'll have to get more creative than I thought. Glad I checked for the fucking solder knife, ugh...

Absently, I noticed a large stretch of paint that was just a bare shade off the color of the rest of the building.

Yeah, that wall was deliberately installed to hide something. Or, at least, obscure the fact that the dimensions of the rooms around it don't line up...

That was it.

“Now, I will ask you to be especially careful around these items. Many of them are both valuable and antiques of significant rarity. A few of them do have legends attached to them which might make them appealing to you, but their value is predominantly historical.”

Sliding a key card into the slot, he opened the door and bowed at me as I entered the room before him.

My gaze immediately snapped to the small series of idols set on the shelving against one wall.

Internally, I sighed.

Small, ugly, crude things made with skill, but... obviously ancient, the crafting marks worn smooth with the age of uncountable eons. Their shapes were foul things that scraped at the senses and made me wonder how anyone... Ah, I belatedly realized those items in particular were behind smoked glass, tinted to make the objects barely visible.

I was just both more sensitive and more resilient.

I turned in a smooth movement to appreciate the swords on the wall and make small-talk with the employee. There were other items in the room that had lesser auras about them, bare wisps of accumulated power I couldn't be sure were intentional creations or happy accidents. Legends of tsukumogami weren't always just fanciful tales, after all. Still, nothing had the primal energy of those small statues.

“And these?” I asked, eyeing the price, which was... a bit rich for my blood, what with all of the things I'd already bought.

“Oh, those are quite interesting!” The employee smiled. “Authentic early Jomon era pottery figurines! Very rare! We keep them under protective tinted glass to preserve the glazing they used.”

The way the man's smile stretched a little thin and how he avoided looking directly at the items in question told me that was a lie.

The tint is so that you can't feel them looking at you when you get too close.

“I see. Well, they're certainly interesting. I can see what you meant by these items being both expensive and fitting my needs. Still, I think you were right. I've already made too many purchases today to fit something like this in.

The employee's shoulder relaxed as we stepped away from the tinted glass.

From there, I managed to talk my way into using the facility's private restroom, giving me another glimpse of the layout and how it differed from the official documents I'd pulled from the neglected servers in the city's administration.

Then I left without incident, my purchases wrapped up neatly and ready to be deposited at the Apartment. Stepping into an alley and through the portal, I reappeared in my bedroom and dropped my bag off before pulling out my phone and shifting to my male form.

“Hey Dad,” I spoke into the phone. “Yeah, just wanted to let you know I'm almost done. Nope, no danger, just needed to look into a few things for my other employer. I should be home in an hour-ugh, yeah, we can have a late dinner. You lost track of time again, didn't you?”

I shook my head, told my dad to get cleaned up and prep what he could for dinner when I got home.

Then I slipped back into my female form, grabbed the bag full of surveillance gear, and stepped back out from whence I came. This time, though, I continued on through the alley towards the rear of the shopping arcade I'd just left. Counting buildings, I picked out the back entrance and loading dock of the shichiya and looked up to trace the various wires affixed to the exterior...

“Hmm... yeah, looks like I was right, they installed the security system recently. Or upgraded it,” I hummed, estimating the range of the cameras and carefully avoiding them. “Which meant that they got lazy and didn't do it the right way.”

Although that may not have been an option if they're leasing the space. Some landlords get pissy about drilling holes in the walls to feed wires through.

“Now, if I just wanted to cut the feeds, I could cut the wires, but...” I chuckled and made my way to the exterior breaker box, flipping it open.

The problem with simply cutting the wires would be leaving an obvious and immediate trace that would alert anyone who came to investigate. However, while the breakers weren't labeled...

Since the CCTV system had been installed later than everything else...

I pulled out a small power screwdriver and took the face of the breaker box off, exposing the insulated wires plugged into the breakers themselves. The style was a little different from what I remembered, but... “There you are.”

I took a calming breath, then flipped the master breaker and turned the whole panel off.

Okay, five minutes max... more than enough time, but let's see if I can do it in under one.

I popped the breaker that was attached to the CCTV system first, then used the hot solder knife to render it inoperable. Then, to obscure my path, I popped two others out and did the same to them, simulating a set of burned out breakers. Replacing all three as well as the outer panel, I glanced at my watch as I crouched behind a stack of discarded panels and pulled up my hood to hide most of my purple hair.

One minute and thirteen seconds. Close, but I guess I need practice.

Unfortunately, it proved that the staff was particularly slow on the uptake and it took them ten minutes to finally send someone out.

While the three men with flashlights, all of which bore significant bulk and tattoos, walked around to find the breaker box, I slipped in behind the door they'd left open and got to work. The next two minutes were blessedly dark as I made my way through the backrooms towards the office section I'd seen earlier, grinning as I dodged into the room and pulled out a set of key-loggers and taps for the hardline connections.

My eyebrows rose as I saw a phone on the desk, prompting me to retrieve the most expensive device I'd purchased from Nakamura's illicit shop.

A moment later, I had a clone of the phone and the original was riddled with spyware.

Unfortunately, no one else had been stupid enough to leave theirs unattended in the office.

As a last-ditch fuck-you, I smirked as I put my hands on the office safe and shunted the entire thing into my Pocket.

The lights finally snapped on and I bit back a curse as I kept moving, snatching a lanyard off someone's desk and dragging the key-card along with it. That was the most important part of the mission done, at least.

Next, though... almost as important...

I ran for the antiquities room, using the key-card I'd stolen to access it before slipping in with a quick check to make sure no one had seen me.

Again, the name of the game was obfuscation. I'd planned on stealing valuables from the place anyway, just to cover my tracks, but the statues made it jump up my priority list. Still... this was a criminal organization...

Two authentic four-hundred year old blades from the shogunate era, authentic Ming Dynasty vases, neo-classical ink paintings from the mid-twenty-first century on the burning of Tokyo... all of it went into my Pocket. And, of course, the statues. Anything with a faint spiritual aura was snagged, too.

“Almost done, almost done...” I hummed, moving quickly towards the door and taking a peek out-

“Oh, hey-”

My hand lashed out, grabbing one of the men's faces and pushing his cheeks between his teeth. I struck the other in the solar plexus, then used my grip on the first to bash his head against the door, knocking him unconscious while I threw him into the antiquities room. The other man followed shortly as I dragged him in under a sleeper hold as he gasped for breath.

The door shut and I pulled out a set of zip ties to secure them.

Then, quickly, pulled their phones out and cloned them, implanting spyware as I did.

Oh, and I pulled the cash from their wallets while taking snapshots of their photo IDs.

Checking the time, I clicked my tongue in dissatisfaction.

Faster, faster, need to move...

I was out in the hallway again, moving towards the walled-off section of the building. Finding the card-reader, I slid the stolen card and-

The light went red, emitting a soft buzz.

Damn, I didn't get someone important enough to have access. Let's see, I could...

“-just get down and check on things! I don't care if power was only out for a few minutes! Make sure the refrigeration is still going!”

“Fuck!” I muttered, looking around-

My head snapped back the way I'd come, looking for a way to-

I almost smacked myself and opened a portal, stepping into my Apartment just as the figures rounded the corner.

Taking out my phone, I pressed it to the very edge of the invisible gate and turned on the recording function-

“-down to check on things, just cool it. So what if we had a few breakers blow, everything down there should be fine!” A mountain of a man stated, glowing rocks showing through his bulging skin.

“I don't want to hear 'should,' Taireki! It's not your head on the chopping block if these people get angry because an entire batch of the precursors went bad because the power went out!” Another man in a suit, an admittedly suave-looking blond man shouted, his hair cut short and spiked as his eyes glowed black. A neon green snake tattoo crawled up his neck as he mouthed off to the larger man.

“Fine, Fine!” Taireki responded, waving the man off as he slipped his card into the reader and reached to put it back in his pocket-

My hand slipped out in the brief instance where the door opened and their attention was absorbed.

Stepping back from the portal, I grinned as I held up my new key-card with a grin.

“Boom, Baby!”

~~~

As promised, here's the next chapter of Mind Games!

Join Hitoshi as he starts in on a quick jaunt undercover to find out the details of a trigger smuggling ring.

Which is, of course, all a side quest for the real goal. But these things have an order to them.

I hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Next up is going to be a chapter of the Marvel side of Industrious! I'll also try to get something else out before the month ends, too. So look forward to that!

PS: Higher number of errors this time around, so I updated the post. It's usually too much trouble, but apparently I spazzed out this time around

Mind Games - Chapter 25

As promised, here's the next chapter of Mind Games!

Join Hitoshi as he starts in on a quick jaunt undercover to find out the details of a trigger smuggling ring.

Which is, of course, all a side quest for the real goal. But these things have an order to them.

I hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Next up is going to be a chapter of the Marvel side of Industrious! I'll also try to get something else out before the month ends, too. So look forward to that!

Paldean Knights - Chapter 2

Full disclosure...

I stopped paying attention to Pokemon during generation four.

Gen IV, for the uninformed, was the Sinnoh Region. As I have learned during my eight years here in this wonderful world of pokemon, that region is far to the east. Which means, as far as my metaknowledge goes, I'm in the part of the map that reads, 'Here There Be Dragons.'

Which turned out to be a very rough analogue of Europe.

Also, unlike the usual applications of that metaphor?

There are actual dragons running around.

Whoopee.

Also, outside of that one movie with the Lucario in it, I can’t remember the franchise having much to do with royalty.

But given that I was apparently in the poke-world version of Europe, which was locally known as Avropa, I guess that made a bit of sense. Even if I didn't recall Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, or Sinnoh having any sort of explicit government. In particular, I had been born into the royal family of the Paldea Region... which somewhat resembled the nation of Spain from my previous life.

It was at least, just as dysfunctional as its analog, so that checked out.

“Presenting, His Royal Highness Prince Enrique of House Braganza! Consort-Princess Lani Lahuna-Braganza! Prince Aznaro Braganza and Princess Lehonor Braganza!”

As the uniformed crier called out our names, my family and I paraded ourselves down the main entrance in a show of poise and grandeur befitting the royal family. Dad had taken Mom's arm to lead her down the main staircase just as I had my little sister's, given that we were both preteens and, as a result, too young to be expected to have actual companions for a fancy dinner party.

My eyes brushed over the faces I'd been heavily incentivized to memorize.

Ortega Ignacia, the young scion of Ignacia Vehicles was entertaining a small coterie of devoted sycophants, as usual. Having just entered the academy and a year-mate of Ximen, the two had quickly come to despise each other. Personally, I suspected that any given room was simply too small to contain both their egos at the same time.

Agostin Dorado, heir to a banking fortune, was holding court around a table, a deck of cards predictably being shuffled. I pitied the family fortune if he gambled as frequently and poorly as I'd heard. Still, given that he was Sabastin's age and one of my cousin's friends, I could no more speak on his habits than I could change the moon for the sun in the sky.

I glimpsed Director Cervantis of the Exceed Corporation making a beeline for my father, his son Amethio following in his footsteps escorting his mother. Tragically, the woman had apparently been in a car crash some years prior and was confined to a wheelchair. The scuttlebutt around the various noble houses implicated a faulty design by Ignacia Vehicles, though nothing was ever confirmed. Still, there was bad blood between the two families to this day, presumably because of that.

I also glimpsed a few foreign faces, too.

A handsome older man who was putting too much effort into being suave with graying stripes in his hair with a matching suit was schmoozing with a series of primarily-Asturian nobility from North Three. Give that the province was the closest major port to Galar, I wasn't all that surprised, though it was curious why they'd chosen to host this party here in Levincia instead of on the northern coast.

Maybe I can ask dad later... I'd put good money on trying to round up support for changing import/export customs, though.

After all, Levincia was another major Paldean port city. While they wouldn't see much traffic out of a trade deal between Macro Cosmos and Exceed, their interests converged in opening up oceanic trade whenever possible. I'd probably find a few Alfornado and Porto Marinada officials here as well, if I cared to look. Granted, due to ill-tempered aquatic pokemon, that was a political stance not without hazards, but with great risks often came great rewards.

“Brother, the snack table,” Lehonor whispered, drawing me out of my musings with a slight tug on my arms.

I hummed and kept directing us towards our parents. “Not yet. We have to go say hello to people first. I told you to eat a few crackers on the way over.”

“I did, but they were just crackers,” Lehonor whined, and I sighed.

“You'll be able to eat as much as you want, just give me a few minutes to make a circuit of the room, okay?” Lehonor blinked sky blue eyes at me and I discreetly rolled my own. “Walk around in a circle.”

Given that I was eight and Lehonor was six, we could get away with a little rudeness here and there, her more than me of course.

Which was why I used her as an excuse in situations like these.

As we walked along in our parents' shadow, I caught my father's eye at the ten minute mark and tilted my chin towards my sister's deteriorating mood. His Mediterranean-style features softened and gave me a single direct nod even while he complimented Marquis he was speaking to.

“My apologies,” I gave a slight inclination of my head towards his twelve year old son I'd been speaking with. “My sister is eyeing up the buffet and may eat my arm instead if I don't finally let her at it.”

A slight dip of the boy's – I think his name was Argento – shoulder and a more natural smile showed he was just as happy to excuse himself from the conversation as I was. “I'll accompany you, if you don't mind, your highness?”

The boy's father flicked him a nearly identical glance to the one I'd gotten before giving a similar nod as well.

“Thanks for getting me out of there, Prince Aznaro. I thought I was never going to get to the food at the rate Father was talking,” Argento gave me a dip of his head.

“You're quite welcome,” I nodded at the boy, then looked to my sister and unlatched my arm. “No running and be careful of spills and crumbs or mom will have both our hides. But go eat.”

“Eee!” Lehonor gave a small squeal and set a brisk pace towards the table.

I sighed in relief, momentarily bemoaning the fact that these stretches of interpersonal activity at parties were only going to get longer and longer as we both got older. It was ten minutes now, but next year it would likely be half-again that. Or even double it. Soon enough, we'd be expected to make a circuit of the room independent of our parents that would last an entire hour before we got to do anything else.

“She's cute,” Argento offered, reaching up to self-consciously adjust a wisp of curly dark hair, then he blushed. “Ah, I'm sorry if that was out of line, your highness.”

I snorted and shrugged. “It's fine. Casseroya, I'm guessing?”

If anything, he colored slightly darker. “That obvious, huh?”

“We have a vacation home on one of the islands,” I replied, not knowing if he needed to be reminded or informed at this point. “I actually like the attitude of the nobility there, for what it's worth. Too much formality can get a little...”

I made a vague motion.

That seemed to relax the boy a bit more. “Thanks. I was surprised my dad ended up attending this, actually, but it turns out the family holds a big share in Exceed even if we probably aren't going to see any development from the deal.”

I hummed thoughtfully. “Are you taking lessons at the academy?”

“The Uva side, yes your highness,” Argento smiled. “I'm still working on badges two years in, though, so I don't think I'm going to be a competitor or anything. And my duties to my family's town take a lot of time.”

“As long as you're happy with the way things are turning out, that's fine. I wouldn't want any of Paldea's most promising students to miss out on potential opportunities,” I stated.

His dark eyebrows rose high above his eyes in surprise. “Man... you've really got the knack for talking like that. I'm still trying to get it down.”

“You have your duties, I have mine,” I stated with a wink.

He chuckled as we finally got to the long table full of food and grabbed a pair of plates. “So you haven't gotten your starter yet, have you? What are you thinking about as your main partner?”

See, this is why I like the Casseroya nobility. They might be country hicks by the accounting of the rest of Paldea's upper class, but they understand pokemon better than anyone else.

'Partner' instead of 'status symbol.'

Ugh.

“I'm not sure. Family tradition is to take one of the regional breeds, though my cousin Ximen bucked things a little so I have a bit of wiggle room,” I explained.

He winced. “Right, you're Ximen's cousin. I... see him around sometimes, when we have inter-school battles and stuff.”

I read his tone easily enough.

“As my mother always says... 'If you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything at all.'” I gave Argento a significant look. “I don't talk much about Ximen.”

He barked a quiet laugh, giving me a grin. “Good one, highness. Good one.”

“So, which pokemon was your starter?” I asked as I continued to pick and choose cuts of meat. A little of it was, admittedly, pokemon meat. In particular the slow-roasted slowbro tails, which still sat a little weird with me, but there were also higher-grade cuts of non-pokemon meat such as fish, beef, and chicken. Those types of foods were more expensive in this world given how vulnerable domesticated herds could be to wild predators that could breathe elemental blasts and tear through most barriers with brute strength, but the whole world's ecology wasn't just pokemon.

“My family actually breeds maschiff, so I've had a partner since... well, probably half my life. It wasn't official or anything, but basically everyone understood that I was going to be taking Watson with me when I started training a team,” Argento explained.

“A Paldean classic,” I praised, and his chest swelled up slightly.

Comparatively speaking, maschiff was nothing to write home about as far as starters went. Still, they were one of the most even-tempered breeds of canine pokemon. Canines themselves being a subsection of pokemon that were generally held up as the idea companion pokemon for non-battlers who needed an escort while traveling. They were also something of a regional point of pride given that they were provably Paldean in origin and one of the best guard dogs in all of Avropa.

“Thanks,” he demurred a bit, his hand going to his trainger's belt where four red and white spheres sat, locked in place. “I know he's not all that impressive, but I hope I can at least get Watson to evolve before I graduate. It's kind of... expected, since I'm the heir.”

One of the oddities of the maschiff line and, especially, their evolved form mabosstiff was that, despite being mono-typed as a dark breed, they focused the type's rather infamous viciousness entirely on those who threatened their 'pack.' Because they tended to pack-bond with humans almost automatically, this made them a preferred pokemon for families with children. They were overall incredibly loyal, very protective, good with young kids, and extremely low-maintenance with a simple diet. As long as you gave them enough exercise and loved them, they were some of the most simple pokemon to care for in the entire region.

Add on to all of that was the fact that their evolution was based purely on strength, didn't necessitate an expensive evolutionary stone or some esoteric and poorly-understood requirement, and their threshold for evolving was fairly low in comparison to more traditionally 'powerful' pokemon...

Well, those doggos were some of the bestest boys.

Arcanine might be more impressive overall, granted, but a dog the size of a grizzly bear required food to match.

“Th-thanks,” Argento repeated, smiling softly as his hand went to his pokeball once again. “I only ever hear people from my House talk about maschiff like that. It really means a lot to know that a prince thinks that highly of our breed. Do you think... I mean, I think you're supposed to be starting at one of the academies, soon...”

I chuckled at the leading question and shook my head. “If I had my way, maybe I'd pick up a maschiff, but I'm supposed to be 'impressive.' So I'll likely be expected to take a standard starter and train them to win a wrestling match against a dragon-type or something.”

Argento pulled a face. “Right, if I've got it bad for expectations, you probably...”

I hummed and nodded as we reached the end of the buffet.

“We'll see what happens when I get to the academy and how much my cousins have managed to accomplish,” I temporized.

“Ah... excuse me? I don't mean to interrupt, but are you talking about the academies?” A young female voice spoke up.

Argento and I turned to regard a girl who only looked a bit older than I was wearing something that even I could tell was badly out of fashion. To her credit, she wore it well, but it was still readily apparent that whoever had dressed her was going for a particularly poor combination of doll and maid given the frills, poofy sleeves, and the headband. As much as I hated the kind of people who would do it, I could entirely see someone mistaking her for 'the help' instead of a guest when the only thing that marked her as the latter was an out of place eevee backpack.

Whatever statement she was going for, her appearance was that of a child playing dressup, and poorly at that.

She fidgeted nervously under our mutual and mildly disbelieving gaze, adjusting her glasses nervously and reaching up to brush her two-tone red-blue hair. “I just... I'm starting there in a few months and wanted to ask... for some advice?”

I stepped forward and smiled. “Of course. My name is Aznaro and this is my associate Argento. If I don't miss my guess, your accent is... Galar?”

The girl blushed a bit more and nodded, one hand clenching on the plate she'd filled. “Y-yes. I just finished learning the language, so my pronunciation might be a bit off. Sorry.”

“You actually speak Paldean quite well,” I complimented her. “I hope you've been acclimating to the region? The climate alone can be a bit of a shock, especially in our more arid regions.”

“It's taking some getting used to,” she sighed, then perked up. “Oh, I didn't... ah, my name is Penny. Penny Cosmos.”

A quick glance at Argento told me that answered the big question of who she was related to since, in all fairness, she didn't seem like she particularly wanted to be here.

Which was something all three of us apparently had in common.

“You're Chairman Rose's daughter, then?” Argento asked, the obvious rebuttal.

Penny smiled and shook her head. “No, Uncle Rose is... well, he's my uncle. My father and sister are on an expedition to the Crown Tundra and were worried I was too young to look after myself. Uncle Rose volunteered to get me situated here in Paldea at the academy since he had a business trip.”

I nodded slowly. “Well, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Penny Cosmos. Tell me, any pressing questions that are making your life harder than it needs to be? You've got the ear of two seasoned Paldeans here to tap for expert knowledge.”

The boyish grin I gave her got me a giggle, so I chalked up the wordy joke as a win. “Let's see... I guess the main thing that's been confusing me is the maps? It seems like... well, Area One is in four different places, isn't it? And none of them are connected? Am I using the wrong map or...”

Argento and I traded another look and chuckled at the mutually-knowing expression on our faces.

I held up a hand to forestall whatever response Penny was going to give as she crossed her arms in front of her and looked a little irritated. “Ah, we're laughing because it's a common complaint, not because of anything specific you said.”

“Oh,” she blushed slightly and adjusted her glasses. “Umm... so what's with that, I guess?”

“Let's get a table and I'll explain,” I offered, waving towards a free one with my free hand. Shortly after that, we were seated and I flagged down a waiter carrying glasses of assorted beverages. Penny took a soda, Argento had plain water, and I availed myself of a small glass of wine while I glimpsed Lehonor chatting with a few children her own age at a table nearby. I also caught sight of one of her security detail nearby, so I allowed myself to relax a bit.

“Alright... the map of the Paldean Region,” I sighed, taking a sip of my wine. I'd have to ration it carefully. My new taste buds really enjoyed the stuff, but I was still an eight-year-old, so this glass was it for the night. The last thing I wanted to do was get tipsy in front of my father. “There isn't much of a story to tell, but what there is starts – as most things here in Paldea do – with the Old Empire.”

“I've read about it,” Penny interjected. “Or, at least, the colonies the empire had in Galar hundreds of years ago.”

“I could digress quite a bit, but to save us all quite a bit of dry historical melodrama... when the Old Empire broke up, regional warlords emerged from the old nobility and laid the groundwork for most of the modern noble families of Paldea that exist today. With political fragmentation came social fragmentation and, eventually, linguistic drift. It wasn't significant, mind you. Even the most distant Paldean dialects in Legnami, Afortunada, or the other distant islands are all closer to each other than, say... Kalosian or Galaran.”

“But there were differences, sometimes significant ones, in how local communities referred to specific landmarks,” Argento picked up from me as I reached for a glass of water and a few bites of food to pace myself on the wine. “Many of those compounded over hundreds of years until it became a point of local pride to refer to a given canyon, river, or other area by one name instead of another.”

“Eventually... about two hundred years ago, we were at the point where agreeing on a single name for virtually anything was an exercise in futility,” I continued, giving Argento the chance he'd given me to eat and drink. “Because it had become the official policy of the warring nobility vying for control of Paldea as a whole not to surrender any name-claims to what they felt were their people's justified territorial claim on whatever it was that was being fought over.”

“Keeping in mind,” Argento cautioned, trading off once again. “That the places we're talking about had changed hands probably dozens of times over the centuries between the noble families of Paldea as their individual fortunes rose and fell. So no one really knew what the 'right' name was or if there even was one before the wars stopped and we really started doing research into the Old Empire.”

Penny stared ay us for a long moment before picking up her fork and beginning to eat as well. “That... that all sounds completely absurd. So the reason you all call these 'Areas' is...”

“Because they're neutral names that forgo all of the old noble grudges. Area One is effectively the parts of Paldea that owe fealty directly to the King himself. Areas Two, Three, and Four are all pledged directly to the three most powerful Paldean Dukes... with a few exceptions for personal fiefs owned by the royal family. Areas Five and Six are pledged to dukedoms that are nominally less powerful.”

“Then what about the places that still have names, like Casseroya Lake, Glaseado Mountain, Asado Desert, and the Tagtree Thicket?” Penny asked, frowning.

“Montenevera City is basically the only settlement worth talking about on the mountain and Cascarrafa is likewise the only substantial population center in the desert,” Argento replied. “Those are effectively 'Free Cities' that are overseen by a council of nobles that own pieces of each. Casseroya and Tagtree are similar, for that matter, both controlled not by a single noble, but a loose alliance of influential local ones.”

“Even Casseroya Lake, with its recent developments for tourism is fairly unpopulated,” I stated, sending an apologetic look towards Argento, who shrugged it off. “These are rural areas with a lot of wild pokemon that have been traditionally very hard to govern in any centralized way. They've also been – historically, at least – full of bandits and thieves.”

Penny stiffened slightly, her eyes widening.

“Historically,” Argento emphasized. “After the founding of the academies and the Act of Unification, everyone worked together to put a stop to that. Outside of the wild pokemon, the vast majority of Paldea is perfectly safe these days.”

“Argento is actually from the Casseroya area, so he knows what he's talking about,” I affirmed. “And my family has a few properties there as well, it's quite a beautiful place these days. I recommend visiting if you get the chance.”

“It sounds-”

Something roared.

Someone screamed.

The room dissolved into chaos for a few moments as a door and part of a wall was knocked free, a huge pokemon lumbering into the party's venue, the dust clearing as it-

“Sweet Arceus! That's a Garchomp!” Argento breathed, rising to his feet and turning white as a sheet.

A Garchomp.

One of the fully-evolved lines of a the 'pseudo-legendary' pokemon and one of the most vicious and territorial dragons of the Paldea region. No one was sure if the Old Empire had imported the beasts before they'd gone wild and turned into an invasive species, or if they were simply so capable of traversing great distances and eating whatever they wanted that they had migrated to Paldea from the east.

This particular pokemon was a full eight feet tall, large for its breed as I distantly recalled from some textbook I'd skimmed. It roared again and smashed against a chandelier as its tail swept through the air and struck a table that went flying into one of the security personnel going for his pokemon belt.

Lehonor!

The thought rang through my mind as the masonry dust cleared and people began overcoming their shock to run away. I was standing and moving before I could think consciously about anything else, my feet carrying me towards the last place I'd seen my sister.

A flash of blond hair caught my eye as I glimpse her pulling her friends towards a wall-

“Glaceon, go! Icy Wind!” Penny's voice momentarily rang out among the chaos.

I cursed as the frost-dog pokemon conjured up a biting wind that drove the Garchomp back-

-back towards my sister!

“Penny!” I barked loudly. “Stop! Call Glaceon off!”

Which served the dual purpose of deescalating the situation and drawing the dragon's attention away from the cowering girls nearby.

It was just a shame that it was looking at me right now.

Dilated yellow eyes filled with anger, confusion, and hunger stared at me and-

I took a deep breath, feeling calm wash over me as I stared right back.

-whereamI?whatisthis?catchers?takers?whereisnest?hungry-hungry-hungry-

“There, there,” I spoke, my voice loud, but calm as I held up a hand towards the wild pokemon and braved a step forward.

It gave an aborted lunge at the motion, only for my focus to intensify and stop it in its tracks.

“None of that now,” I stated, distantly aware that the room had gotten a lot quieter behind me. “You're angry and want to go home. I understand. Someone interrupted a meal and moved you here. That was rude of them.”

I took another step, letting my instincts guide me as I radiated calm-calm-calm.

The Garchomp twitched, but bobbed its head towards me.

I reached out with my free hand, the one not being held palm-out towards the pokemon, and snagged a few thick slices of roast from a vacated table. I instantly had the pokemon's attention as I held up the meat.

Now that it was focused on the food, I dropped the hand I'd been using to calm it and slipped it around my back, hoping that someone would notice I was pointing towards Lehonor and her friends.

“That's right, that's right,” I cooed, coming closer to the dragon. “There's plenty of food here and you can eat your fill. No one needs to get angry or scared. Everyone should just calm down.”

There was movement out of the corner of my eye and the Garchomp's neck twisted-

I threw a cut of meat into the air and it bent back to snap the food out of the air, the three little girls completing their escape as I held its attention.

“Shh... that's a good dragon. You're a big one aren't you? I bet you're the strongest of your area,” I complimented it, throwing another slice of meat for it to catch as it bobbed its head again at my words.

“Gar! Garchomp!” It cried.

“I mean, it's obvious. You're bigger and stronger than average,” I stated, my tension slowly easing as I walked past the last table between us and restocked my treats with a plate full of turkey legs and berries some helpful glutton had left behind in their haste to run.

“Chomp! Gar-gar!” It echoed, eyes locking on the new plate of meat I was holding.

We were close, now.

I held up a turkey leg and it was instantly snatched out of my hand by a hungry maw. I heard gasps behind me.

Garchomp jerked.

“Nuh-uh,” I spoke, my voice soft yet firm. “They're not important. It's just you and me, buddy.”

I set the plate down and Garchomp refocused on the meat as I reached out to stroke it.

Another jerk, but a softer one as it growled.

I sank deeper into the all-consuming calm.

The growling subsided as it chomped down on another piece of meat, my hand finding its neck as I ran it along smooth scales. “That's right. Just you and me. You wanna get out of here, right? This isn't your territory, is it? We should get you home...”

-agreementskiesflyhomemate-

“You're going to have to do me a favor,” I spoke calmly. “I can get you out of here, but you're going to need to take a nap.”

Despite everything, a soft growl.

“I know, I know,” I whispered. “I promise I'll keep them away from you. It'll just be me and you and I'll get you back outside so you can fly straight to your territory, okay?”

A low grumble as I found apparently found an itchy spot.

“Yeah, that's it. You up for a quick nap now that you've eaten?” I asked, stroking its back.

-calmcalmcalmtiredsleepycalmntiredsleepycalmn-

The Garchomp gave a jaw-crackingly wide yawn and grumbled ascent to my request, slowly curling up as I sat down on the floor with it, careful to maintain contact.

I only dared to look away from the dragon when I was sure it was fully asleep. Turning only my head and keeping up the smooth strokes on its neck, I met the eyes of a pair of Rangers and a Knight who were standing a dozen feet away, pokeballs in hand as they stared at the sleeping Garchomp in a blank stupor.

I sent them a look and carefully jerked my head.

One of them startled enough at the motion to snap out of his daze, turning to begin ushering the people out of the room as the other two carefully and quietly approached.

Humming under my breath to help me keep up the calm was projecting, my only concern now was...

...what the hell kind of utter psycho tried to use a Garchomp to assassinate someone?!

~~~

Well, my birthday festivities delayed things a bit, but the good news is that you get a longer chapter out of it.

So here's the second part of a potential Pokemon SI I've been cooking up.

Hope everyone enjoys it, there will be a new Mind Games chapter up over the weekend.

Thank you again for all your support!

Paldean Knights - Chapter 2

Well, my birthday festivities delayed things a bit, but the good news is that you get a longer chapter out of it.

So here's the second part of a potential Pokemon SI I've been cooking up.

Hope everyone enjoys it, there will be a new Mind Games chapter up over the weekend.

Thank you again for all your support!

Entrepreneurial Spirit - Chapter 5

“And that's it?” Mark asked me, frowning at the digital screen.

“That's it,” I confirmed. “Your parents should get the email soon. Completely untraceable and entirely confidential. This isn't even my first rodeo.”

“Really?” Mark asked, quirking an eyebrow. “You send messages between planets often?”

I looked up from where I was putting away the oversized desktop computer with the internal thaumaturgical array and laughed. Izuku, my part-timer, was focused on scraping up the residue that used to be a damaged component of the derelict rover Mark had cannibalized. Now it was just slag, a result of the intense energy that had been shoved into it during its short tenure as a resonance beacon.

“Mr. Sterling is actually sending a message for someone else soon, too,” the green-haired boy chimed in. “There's this girl named Luz who's stuck in another world called the Demon Realm and-”

“Demon Realm?!” Mark squawked, suddenly alert and looking between myself and my employee with wide eyes. “That, uh... “

“Relax,” I waved him off. “That particular 'Demon Realm' is fairly tame by most standards. “It's not a particularly nice place, but neither is Earth. I'd rate it about on par with the usual content of a low-level Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting.”

Mark quieted, blinking thoughtfully as he processed that. “Huh... okay, I'm still concerned, but... I guess I have to trust that you know what you're doing.”

“There are some dangerous entities in that realm, for sure,” I replied, boxing away the last component of the machine I'd set up for Mark once he finally worked up the guts to ask about sending a message home. “But this is my sanctum, where my power is based. And I have the home field advantage.”

Mark sighed, nodding slowly. “Alright, you're the expert. I just hope my parents do what I asked them to in the letter...”

…

“-and then, once the circle of coins is complete, you place the copy of Wealth of Nations in the middle and ritually burn it!” Camila chuckled at the instructions compiled on the text, shaking her head at them. “Is this your idea of a joke, mija? I thought you'd grown out of this magic stuff?”

The young Hispanic girl sitting in the other chair at the table swallowed nervously, reaching behind her head as she scratched at a persistent itch. “Ah... yeah! A joke! Haha! J-just like old times, huh?”

Carmila continued to laugh as she prepared dinner while the shapeshifter pretending to be her daughter stewed in her guilt and anxiety.

Experimental Test Subject Number 5 knew that this happy little life of hers would end one day, she'd just always hoped that day would be far in the future...

...or, secretly, never come at all.

A dark part of her hoped that the stupid human girl who'd given up her perfect life here with a loving mother would get eaten by something while wandering around in the Demon Realm. Or maybe Emperor Belos could pay back a small part of the horrors he'd inflicted on her and solve the problem that Luz Noceda represented for her.

It didn't come as any real surprise she wasn't lucky enough for that to happen, though.

Still... it seemed like Luz was stuck in the Demon Realm, which honestly served her right. If Camila's real daughter couldn't come back to Earth, there was nothing stopping Number 5 from filling the role indefinitely. It was likely that the girl would eventually find her way home, but... that could take a lot longer if Number 5 was willing to cast doubt on these messages.

Maybe she could even convince Camila to get a new cell number?

It was a tempting idea for the basilisk to consider, but...

The problem was Camila Noceda herself.

The human woman was the only person who'd shown her any degree of love and kindness in her short life, and she was repaying that generosity with deception and malice towards Camila's real daughter.

Worse was the fact that, continuing to live like this now that she knew for certain Luz was both alive and trying to return would make her no better than Luz herself.

That stupid, stupid girl who had no idea how good she had it here on Earth.

The girl who wasn't Luz Noceda took a deep, steadying breath and looked up from the woodgrain of the table, wiping away the tears building in her eyes. “Mo-er... Camila? I... I have something to tell you.”

Camila turned, and saw Number 5 for who and what she truly was.

…

“This is just... a lot to take in,” Camila sighed, staring mournfully down at the drink on the bar in front of her.

“Kids can be like that,” George Watney nodded, patting her on the back as his eyes lingered on his own son as the contingent of NASA doctors looked him over. Nearby, a green-haired boy attended to the needs of a thoroughly-depressed young girl, her friends, and a younger girl with a mix of blond and blue hair.

“Though I don't know what we would have done if Mark had runaway to Mars when he was still a teenager,” Samantha Watney affirmed, also still keeping her red-rimmed eyes on her son, occasionally sniffling as he smiled and waved off the concern of the staff.

Camila Noceda gave a helpless chuckle. “Another planet would be one thing, mierda. The Demon Realm, though? I have to wonder if I did the right thing when I stopped attending mass.”

“For what it's worth, those demon kids seem just like regular people,” George commented idly. “I'm not sure of the particulars of what the good book says about this, but I really don't see them trying to eat souls or damn us for eternity or anything like that.”

“...and, not that my input is all that warranted, but judging by the way she and that purple-haired girl are holding hands, I think you probably dodged a bullet on the whole Catholicism-thing,” I commented slyly.

Camila jerked upright, her head almost snapping over to where her daughter and Amity Blight were trying not to be obvious about their cuddling. Which, given that they were teenagers... they were pretty obvious. Still, the most incriminating part of the affair was when they noticed Camila staring and instantly leaped apart, once again trying and failing to look innocent, though this time with deep blushes on their cheeks.

“Oh, Luz...” Carmilla sighed, returning her gaze to her drink. “What am I going to do with that girl?”

“A grounding sounds good,” George replied dryly, a smirk showing beneath his mustache. “God knows Mark's going to be grounded when he gets back. Absolutely no leaving Earth for any reason for at least a decade.”

Samantha and Camila both laughed at that, even if the sound was a tinge manic.

Then Camila downed the liquid in her glass and pushed it forward to me. “Another one, cantinero. Tequila, straight, two fingers.”

“I've got classic, wormwood, and rotgut if you're feeling particularly like drinking yourself into a stupor,” I replied with a grin.

That made Carmila hesitate, then sigh again. “I really shouldn't. I'm not young enough to roll out of bed with a handover and I have work tomorrow-”

“I also offer hangover cures for five bucks,” I added, my grin widening.

“Hell, I might take a few of those,” George muttered, reaching for his wallet.

“George,” Samantha warned, and the man wilted before continuing to take out a few bills from his wallet.

Giving me a tired and disappointed look, the older man stated, “Cream soda.”

“I've actually got authentic butterbeer,” I offered, making the two Watneys perk up and Carmila frown curiously. “It's a little bit more pricey than my usual fare, imports being what they are, but I can do half-off for the first glass.”

Money quickly changed hands and, after assurances there was no alcohol in it, Camila had one as well.

“Oh, that's sweet,” Samantha hissed as she took her first sip, “but... wow, it really does go down easy and makes you feel warm. Huh.”

“So this is from a book series you've read?” Camila asked, her eyes going wide as she tried her own sip. “That's good!”

“Harry Potter series, yeah,” George nodded, nursing his own glass. “It's kind of hit-or-miss from the original books, but I think it's so ingrained into the culture now that there's no going back.”

Samantha giggled. “Even going on thirty years after the last book was published, kids these days still know what 'expecto patronum' means.”

Camila nodded slowly, then turned to look at me. “So... you can get things from fictional worlds, then?”

“Everything is real somewhere, somewhen,” I replied. “But, yes, I can get items that you would consider 'fictional' to sell in my store.”

“Okay, Mr. Snarky,” Camila snorted, drumming her fingers in a nervous motion. “Do you have anything from... Cosmic Frontier?”

“Never heard of that one...” George commented with a frown. “It a Trek clone?”

“Trek?” Camila asked, frowning herself. “No, I don't think so. Cosmic Frontier was a book series that came out in the nineties, when I was in middle school – ugh, that makes me feel old – about a group of brave space explorers. It was... pretty popular. There were conventions and merchandise and... a lot of stuff.”

Camila blushed.

“It certainly sounds like Star Trek,” Samantha stated, reaching up to pull a long lock of red hair from her face and rest it over her ear.

“Never heard of it,” Camila riposted with a smirk.

“Keep in mind that some worlds simply don't have some media, or develop replacements in odd ways. Camila's Earth could have seen Gene Roddenbery die in a car crash or something,” I told the bickering adults.

“Roddenbery...” Camila stated slowly, turning to me with an odd look on her face. “You mean like Eugene Roddenberry? The writer of Cosmic Frontier?”

There was an odd moment where all of us looked at each other, then shrugged, and broke out in chuckles. Eventually, the laughter cooled down into an admittedly interesting discussion about divergences in various material, which lead to Camila bemoaning the fact that a lot of the 'authentic' Cosmic Frontier merch I had was a bit out of her price range.

Private, I resolved to inform Luz that she now had a great gift for her mother's birthday.

“Ugh... now that I'm done distracting myself from the fact that I apparently destroyed my relationship with my daughter to the point where she felt comfortable running away to another world instead of going to the summer camp I'd enrolled her in...” Camila paused and rubbed at her head. “Then I didn't notice when a shapeshifter took her place and acted completely differently than Luz would for weeks...”

Sam and George exchanged a meaningful glance.

I cleared my throat, drawing all of their attention, but looking directly at Camila. “Keeping in mind that I don't have any children of my own, but... the way I see it, you have three options here.”

“I'd love to hear them, cantinero,” Camila snorted.

“The first is... well, to cut your daughter loose,” I stated bluntly, and to her credit, Camila displayed nothing but shock and revulsion at the suggestion. “I know it seems harsh, but... Luz did knowingly and willfully disregard you explicit orders, run away from home to another dimension, and establish a new life for herself. Even putting the religious connotations aside, any number of parents have gone a lot further than telling their children they're on their own for a lot less than what Luz has done here.”

“I-I can't just cut her out of my life,” Camila whimpered, lowering her gaze.

“And I'm not saying you have to,” I shook my head, getting into the 'bartender' role by picking up a glass and a rag to busy my hands. “But it would be entirely reasonable for you to treat Luz like an adult from now on rather than a child. She's obviously proven herself capable of fending for herself, you shouldn't feel a need to keep providing room and board for her. Be friends with her, have her over every now and then, but make it known that she's hurt you too much for things to go back the way they were before she left.”

Camila grimaced, but the way she lingered on my words told me the pain she was feeling was more than just skin deep. Having your child do as Luz had done was a fundamental betrayal on multiple levels. More than that, it was frightening in a way Luz could barely comprehend.

There came a time when a child put you through so much grief as a parent that enough was enough and the parent had to look out for themselves. Unconditional love might be all well and good, but just because Luz loved her mother didn't mean she couldn't also hurt the woman. And she had, very badly. I meant what I'd said when I observed that I'd seen parents cut ties entirely over a lot less.

“My other two options?” Camila asked quietly.

“Sit down and explain to your daughter exactly what she did and how much it hurt you,” I informed her quietly, but gravely. “You'll need to understand why she felt she was justified in doing so, but... you'll also need to put your foot down about this. Something like this... hiding this much from you? It can't happen again, Camila. That's no foundation for a healthy relationship. You'll just start building resentment towards each other and eventually part on much worse terms than I previously recommended.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Camila snorted, looking away.

“Easy? Hardly.” I scoffed. “The other part of that is confronting the reasons why Luz felt the need to run away in the first place and that will probably involve a long, hard look in the proverbial mirror. More than that, though... you're going to need to reckon with who your daughter is now. Not who she was when she left.”

“What do you mean?” Camila asked, chancing a look at where Luz, Amity, Gus, and Willow were chatting.

“Take it from someone who's talked up more than a few heroes in his time,” I smiled and shrugged self-deprecatingly. “Doing what Luz did changes you. You become... not necessarily different; she'll always be your daughter, but... more. She's overcome challenges, learned about herself, made friends and enemies... you can't do all of that and just head back home for high school.”

Camila frowned and looked back down at her mug, taking a deep pull.

“That goes for you two, as well,” I advised the Watney parents, who stiffened in surprise at being addressed. “Mark's been through a lot. He's not going to be the same person as he was when he got on that rocket to go to Mars. Trying to make him that person won't end well, for any of you.”

Samantha and George looked at each other with trepidation.

“But the good news, for all three of you...” I began with a snort. “Is that your children cared enough about you, about talking to you and seeing you again, to bend the rules of space and time by sending you the instructions on how to meet them here in a place beyond either.”

That, at least, seemed to perk all of the adults up.

Although Camila deflated almost as quickly. “Do... you think Luz even wants to come home? Permanently, I mean? You were right when you said she has friends... apparently a mentor, too over there. It... did she want to see me again just to say goodbye?”

“Oh, Honey...” Samantha whispered, moving around her husband to capture the Hispanic woman in a tight hug. “Oh no. No-no-no... that hug sure didn't look anything like that. I'm sure she isn't planning anything like that.”

“If that's what she wanted, it would have been easier and simpler to just send a message saying goodbye,” I stated with a shake of my head. “I won't pretend that Luz is going to magically return to who she was before she left... and she's almost certainly intending to keep a presence in the other world, but it's much more common for her type of kid to believe that with enough willpower and spirit, things will turn out okay.”

“Her type?” Camila asked, coming out of her funk even as the tears in the corners of her eyes were wiped away.

“Like I said, heroes,” I chuckled. “The only mean bone in that girl's body is the one in her fist labeled 'righteous justice.'”

Camila stared at me for a moment, then spazzed out in a giggle fit. “Oh mierda! I can see my Luz saying exactly that! Oh, hahahaha! I needed that!”

I shrugged. “I've met more than a few in my time. Luz just strikes me as... well, the kind of person who would stand up for others without blinking an eye.”

Camila's giddiness slowly evaporated at that and she nodded. “That's... how she got into a lot of the fights she was in at school. She said it was standing up for other kids who were being bullied, but... the staff...”

“Teachers don't always have any idea what's going on with the kids,” George sighed, shaking his head. “When they run into kids brawling in the halls, it usually devolves into a he-said-she-said thing unless someone actually caught it on video.”

Camila grimaced. “I objected that Luz wasn't like that, but... it's been so hard ever since Manny died. Trying to stand up to so many teachers who all seem to agree that Luz is the problem...”

The awkward silence at that confession hung between our small group.

“It probably won't do you any favors to tell you this, but...” I sighed. “In my experience, there are people who don't fit the world they've been born into. Or the time, for that matter. Sometimes that's for the better. A random officer worker could lead a more fulfilling life as a viking raping and pillaging, but they're stuck in common daily drudgery instead. Other people... well, they only shine when put up against a terrible foe and the encroaching darkness.”

“You're right... that doesn't make me feel any better,” Camila muttered. “What was... you said there was a third option?”

“Have the same heart-to-heart talk, but do it with both your daughters,” I said pointedly.

Camila looked as if I'd smacked her in the face with a fish as she took a deep, startled breath. “O-oh... I, that... is a good point, isn't it?”

Samantha had given me a bit of a look at the inclusion of the shapeshifter, but I'd simply shrugged. Before she could speak, though, a man in a suit took a few brisk steps forward and extended his hand. He had the look of a professional and no-nonsense man who had, nevertheless, been run over a few times by the public relations-mobile.

“Dr. Theodore Sanders, Director of NASA,” he stated, looking me in the eyes and only flicking a glance to my ears once or twice.

Admirable.

We shook briefly, exchanging firm grips.

“As I informed Dr. Vincent Kapoor,” I stated, “My name is Nova Sterling. A simple interdimensional proprietor of goods and services.”

“Also, effectively, our world's first contact with alien life,” Dr. Sanders nodded with a small smile. “If somewhat differently than anyone at NASA anticipated. I've been instructed to offer Earth's warmest greetings from our government and the President of the United States.”

“It's a pleasure to be acquainted with both your government and your president,” I replied, then pulled out a data slate from behind the bar. “Here is a catalog of goods and services my store provides. Please feel free to ask for any clarification you feel are needed.”

Dr. Sanders blinked, accepted the data slate, and pursed his lips as he tucked it under an arm. “Thank you, I'm sure the president will enjoy being made aware of your... ah, selection. I'd hoped to engage in more... diplomatic negotiations.”

“No,” I replied with a smile.

“Like an exchange of infor-” Teddy blinked awkwardly and stared at me. “I'm sorry?”

“No. I don't do diplomacy,” I replied, still smiling. “I run a store. I sell goods and services. The one and only reason I tolerate politicians is if they're a paying customer.”

Teddy, Camila, George, and Samantha all collectively stared at me.

“So... you won't be providing any kind of information as a token of goodwill?” Teddy asked, somewhat disappointed.

“I've already saved your astronaut,” I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “I didn't particularly mind giving Mark a little preferential treatment here and there, as much as my Rules allow, anyway. I even extended him a line of credit when he asked to send you a message. I have no interest in providing 'freebies' to a world-spanning superpower that can easily procure funds or resources to exchange.”

“And the United States thanks you for that. Both NASA and humanity at large are humbled by the efforts you've gone to for Mark Watney,” Teddy replied, his voice remarkably even. “But you do represent our world's only gateway to the supernatural – that we know of – at the present. We'd appreciate any contribution you can make to give us a little... context about our place in the larger multiverse.”

I snorted and turned to refill the butterbeers of my paying guests. “I offer a basic primer on the top-tier powers of a given universe's local powers that I know of. The price is listed in the catalog I've just given you and you would do well to pay it instead of attempting to negotiate something for nothing. You very much would not like what the result of that course of action is.”

George rubbed at his face while Teddy stewed in momentary frustration. “Mr. Sterling, it might not be a good idea to threaten the head of NASA, if only for Mark's sake.”

I rolled my eyes. “I'm not threatening the man, I'm informing him of the consequences of his actions. My little corner store at the back end of nowhere has Rules. Powerful ones that even I have to obey. One of those is equivalent exchange. If the only thing you're offering is annoyance, the only thing you're going to get is frustration.”

Teddy seemed to realize what I was saying and chuckled. “For what it's worth – probably not much – I tried telling the intelligence community this was a bad idea, but it's hard to tell people they need to fork over more money when they're already putting down millions to send supplies to Mars by way of such a... novel method as you represent, Mr. Sterling.”

“Send them my way. I'll tell them to sit and spin with no need for you to bother,” I offered. “Because, fortunately and unfortunately for you... I'm potentially the worst kind of alien you can come into contact with.”

“Oh?” Dr. Sanders asked, raising an eyebrow.

“A capitalist who doesn't give a damn about politics,” I replied with a fanged grin.

Teddy broke out in a laugh with all of my other guests.

…

“It's just so hard to believe that there are more human worlds out there than Earth!” Gus cried, pulling at his short-cropped hair.

Luz shrugged, awkwardly avoiding the gaze of the basilisk who'd taken a rather innocuous human form sitting slightly apart from the group. “What's so hard to believe? I didn't know anything about the Demon Realm until I followed Eda through the portal. Doesn't it stand to reason that there could be a bunch of other worlds out there that even witches and demons don't know about?”

“Luz, sweetie... there's a lot of theories about things like that,” Amity hedged, “but nothing confirmed. Or, at least, nothing that's survived the wild magic purges.”

“But he's talking about humans with powers! Heck, he's a human that can do magic!” Gus cried, his body shaking with repressed energy.

Izuku chuckled and scratched the back of his head. “Ah... it's not that big of a deal. At least, not compared to some of the stuff I've helped Mr. Sterling with.”

“Oh, this sounds interesting! We'd love to hear a few stories!” Willow interjected with a grin.

“Ah... well, let's see...” Izuku mumbled, rubbing his chin as he was put on the spot. Unfamiliar with being the center of attention in a way which didn't involve mockery or scorn, he stumbled for words for a moment, then nodded. “So... it was a week ago that we got an actual dragon who came into the store.”

“Is that like a hand dragon?” Gus asked, cocking his head.

“Uhh...” Izuku stopped, furrowing his brow. “What's a hand dragon?”

“Oh, I got this,” Gus grinned, twirling a finger and summoning up an illusory image of a long serpentine beast with wings and various protrusions that looked as though they might be fingers or thumbs jutting out from it. Holding out the miniature copy that fit in his hand, Gus replied, “Like this, but bigger and meaner usually.”

“Huh,” Izuku blinked. “That's... uh, no. It was more like... oh, I can pull up the security tapes. One moment.”

Pulling up his sleeve, Izuku revealed a forearm-mounted device with various small screens, lights, and an overall very technological feel to it. “This is an omnitool. The Boss gave it to me to access some of the store's more tech-heavy systems. It's supposed to interface with some of the more friendly magic systems, too, but I'm not trained for that yet. Now, let's see...”

“There,” Izuku muttered, grinning as jaws dropped all around his small group.

“Now that's a dragon!” Luz crowed, then winced. “Not that the hand dragons on the Boiling Isles aren't awesome or anything! It's just that these are usually what humans think of when they hear the word 'dragon.'”

“Those look like they could wipe out an entire town...” Amity shuddered. “And you had one in the store? In here?!”

Izuku laughed awkwardly. “Ah, well... this specific type of dragon is actually a natural shapeshifter? The picture was taken when it left the store and turned back to its real form, but-”

“A shapeshifter?” The lone girl standing slightly outside the group asked, taking a tentative step forward-

-then she met Luz's eyes and stopped in her tracks.

Izuku cleared his throat and altered the image to show a comparatively normal-looking person wearing simple robes standing in the store proper. “Yeah, this is what they looked like when they shifted.”

“Whoa... that's a huge size-change. I'm not sure if I could do something like that,” the concealed basilisk whispered as she approached.

“The basilisk from Hexside wasn't anywhere near as big as that, either,” Willow frowned, looking between the image and the apparent girl. “Do you think you'll get bigger when you're older? I mean, you're just a kid right now, maybe you'll be able to turn into one of those dragons in a few years?”

Despite herself, Izuku watched Luz's eyes sparkle at the thought.

“Uhh... probably not?” She muttered with a frown. “Or, at least... not without eating a lot more magic stuff... and that might not be good. I think that was what caused a lot of the basilisks Belos created to go crazy.”

Izuku scowled mightily at the implications, but kept his mouth shut. He'd ask Nova if there was anything they could do about that later. Right now, it seemed like the shy girl was finally interacting with the others.

“So it's kind of like eating too much or too little food, then,” Gus stated, perking up thoughtfully.

“A-are you getting enough?” Luz began awkwardly, rubbing one arm with the opposite hand. “Magic, I mean. Living with Mom?”

“A-actually... your teacher? Eda the Owl Lady has left a lot of magic junk around the town. I've still got two stacks of Hexas Hold'em cards stashed for emergencies,” the basilisk revealed with a blush.

The teens all shared smiles at that, Luz in particular giving an exasperated groan and palming her face. “Yeah, that sounds like Eda alright. So, um... Mom didn't say anything about a name when she introduced you...”

“I'm... thinking about going with 'Vee,'” the basilisk replied tentatively. “I'm not sure yet, but... it feels right. Taking the number five and turning it into a Roman Numeral... then treating it like a letter. It's like... turning something bad into something good. An actual name, to call my own. A lot of basilisks would never get that.”

As the chatting continued, Izuku reflected that he really would have to ask Nova if they could do something about this 'Belos' guy. If anything, Luz had been too generous with her initial descriptions of the man.

~~~

Happy Easter!

Or Happy Just Another Sunday! For those who don't celebrate Jesus Rabbit Day.

Anyway...

A chapter of Entrepreneurial Spirit, as promised. And it's been... a hot minute since I've gotten one of these out. I don't think I'll be rolling over a chapter this time for this story, so this will be a buffer chapter. Next one will go public, though. Which just means everyone here on Patreon and on SubscribeStar gets to feel special about having access to it longer! Woo!

Next update.... hmm, I think I'll probably be working on a chapter of Padean Knights and another one of Mind Games this week. It's my birthday on Wednesday, so a chapter of the weird pokemon SI is my present to myself.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Entrepreneurial Spirit - Chapter 5

Happy Easter!

Or Happy Just Another Sunday! For those who don't celebrate Jesus Rabbit Day.

Anyway...

A chapter of Entrepreneurial Spirit, as promised. And it's been... a hot minute since I've gotten one of these out. I don't think I'll be rolling over a chapter this time for this story, so this will be a buffer chapter. Next one will go public, though. Which just means everyone here on Patreon and on SubscribeStar gets to feel special about having access to it longer! Woo!

Next update.... hmm, I think I'll probably be working on a chapter of Padean Knights and another one of Mind Games this week. It's my birthday on Wednesday, so a chapter of the weird pokemon SI is my present to myself.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Mind Games - Chapter 24

I put my feet up on the table and sighed, long and loud, the odd and impossible living room of my pocket apartment blessedly empty of anyone save myself and Himiko. It had been a long day, after all, and my inner introvert was exhausted after dealing with the collective interpersonal bullshit I'd been subjected to.

Himiko, cuddled up against my side, practically melted into me.

There was silence as we simply enjoyed each other's company.

Then...

“You're still mean.” Himiko muttered into my shoulder. “Totally uncute.”

“The looks on their faces were pretty nice, though,” I chuckled, remembering the expressions of shock I'd glimpsed while dismantling my girlfriend on the mat with my wrists and ankles cuffed.

“Did I do it right?”

I looked down, into the surprisingly vulnerable golden eyes as they watched me, the tension plain on her face slowly relaxing as she read me like an open book.

She sighed, nodding. “Good.”

“You did very well,” I praised her, just to drive the point home, shifting slightly and running my hand through her hair. I almost thought she'd start purring for a moment, but no such luck. “You impressed everyone and served as a good measuring stick for my own abilities while coming off as approachable and friendly while you weren't wearing my face.”

Himiko giggled. “It was funny seeing them freak out when they noticed the permanent marker dots.”

“Accomplishing your bonus objective as the infiltrator has earned you some spending money,” I informed her. “As well as Hot Ice's backing for the recommendation exam.”

“Is that going to be hard? Is that why you need a pro-hero to vouch for you?” Himiko asked sluggishly, her mind obviously slowing down as I ran my fingers over her scalp.

“Actually, it's much easier than the normal exam,” I replied with a soft chuckle. “A pro-hero's word holds significant weight. If they're vouching for you, it's assumed that you have some level of experience in using your quirk at the very least, if not in actual combat.”

Himiko cocked her head and looked up at me, her eyes slightly dilated, but her expression thoughtful nonetheless. “What if someone just signs off on their kid or their friend's kid getting the job? Father complains about that happening sometimes. Especially when they hire women to do important stuff.”

“Of course he does,” I muttered, then sighed. “If that happens then the hero school in question has the right to stop taking recommendations from the hero in question, if I understand things correctly. That is, of course, if they turn out not to be as skilled or competent as the recommendation implies.”

Which, as Todoroki Enji's children showed – all his children – receiving a recommendation from a parent and proving worthy of it was something that both could happen pretty regularly and could result in impressively skilled and powerful professional heroes.

That's the issue with nepotism sometimes. In niche careers that require substantial training, kids can pick up a lot of the prerequisite skills and mentality required for the job simply by osmosis while growing up. Just like how your parents being college graduates made you, yourself, more likely to be a college graduate, a higher level of skilled education in specific sectors made a child more able to succeed in a given area than one who didn't have parents working in the same sector.

...and that's before you get into the mess of friends and connections and favor-trading that tilt the scales in their favor.

“That makes sense,” Himiko nodded, drawing me out of my thoughts. “Should I start dinner now?”

I blinked, momentarily taken aback by the question. “We'll cook it together in a few minutes. My dad doesn't expect me home for a while since I told him we'd be going out briefly after work.”

“I can make something if you're tired,” my girlfriend proposed, a trace of anxiety in her voice.

“Hmm... your mother tell you to do that?” I guessed, my tone carefully neutral.

Blond hair bobbed against me. “It's my job, when we get married and start living together. I didn't tell her about... all of this, since you told me not to, but... since I'm wearing a binding now... we're married, right?”

My arm tightened around her slightly and I considered my reply, then sighed deeply and leveraged myself away from her slightly so that we could really look each other in the eyes. “Okay, I think we need to have a talk about expectations, roles, and boundaries.”

Himiko's face went blank as she stared at me. “Did I do something wrong?”

I shook my head and reached up to rub at my eyes tiredly. “No, you didn't. This isn't a conversation about designing rules and boundaries so that I can punish you for doing the wrong thing. This conversation is designed to make sure we both feel happy with the arrangements between us moving forward. That way if one of us does something that causes strain in our relationship we have a baseline set of behaviors to fall back on and an established way to open a dialogue between us if we need to talk about something new.”

The blond girl nodded slowly, her face still completely blank. “I understand, but... what boundaries are there? You're my husband and I'm your wife.”

Would crazy serial killer Himiko be harder or easier to deal with than brainwashed normie trad wife Himiko?

“First off, even if the power dynamics are skewed between us because of you being bound to me,” I established, reaching out to run a thumb over the collar on her neck. “I nevertheless want to give you as much freedom and support in making your own decisions as is feasible. Part of why you decided to stay with me even when I warned you about the consequences is because you no longer wanted to stay in the same kind of household your parents provided, isn't it?”

Emotion, now. A grimace and a look away. “I... shouldn't discuss family business outside the home. It's a rule.”

It's too late to kill the parents, Hitoshi. You've already put them on Endeavor and Hot Ice's radar, man.

I took a calming breath. “You don't have to discuss anything you don't feel like. I'm not going to force you to talk about something unless lives are at stake or our relationship is straining to the point that it has negative consequences for our public lives.”

Some of the tension flowed out of the blond and she nodded, though the relief didn't really register on her face.

“The one thing I'm going to insist on is that you inform me when you start feeling like you need to feed your quirk,” I stated bluntly, and Himiko blinked in surprise, a tremor of trepidation running through her body. “Given what you've told me about it and what I've observed, your physiological need for blood appears to correlate roughly with both the amount of physical activity you're undergoing in your day to day life and how much stress you're under at any given point in time.”

“The-um... it's gotten a lot better,” Himiko offered, her eyes trailing downwards in shame. “I... between the rations the hospital gives me, your candies, and... what happened, I don't feel like I need any right now.”

Regret was plain to see in the set of her arms and the way she fought back against holding herself. I could read the desire to curl up plainly and, instead of allowing it, I pulled her to me again. “I'll believe you if you say that right now and let it go, but know that if you deny yourself a biological need over a long enough period of time, what happened at the paintball range will happen again and this time... it will be where people you know can see it.”

Himiko shivered, unable to stop the creeping wave of revulsion and denial that ran up her spine. “I-I... understand.”

I nodded slowly, then bent down slightly and pressed my lips to her forehead.

Himiko's breath caught and she melted against me.

“Okay... that's something that I wanted to talk about. Is there something that you wanted to talk about?” I asked her.

She was silent for a few moments, then... “I want to cook for you. And do the laundry. And the dishes. Those are my chores. I... if you do them, I'm not sure I know what I'm supposed to be doing.”

“We won't be cooking and eating meals here all the time, but I can agree that you'll at least be involved in any meal preparation that occurs,” I stated, releasing her from the tight hold I had on her. “I cook for my father often, he's not very good in the kitchen, and I enjoy making some western-style dishes. So I'll want to share some of that responsibility.”

“Then let me do the laundry, the dishes, and the dusting,” Himiko entreated me, a certain desperate need in her.

I opened my mouth to deny her... then sighed. “Alright. I should compromise to. I don't really like the idea of foisting all of the housework on you and I want you to tell me if you feel overwhelmed, but I can let you do the dishes, laundry, and dusting if you really want.”

A tiny flash of white teeth broke through Himiko's lips as she flashed me a relieved smile.

“It's, um... your turn? I think. What did you want to talk about next?” She asked, a certain level of blankness returning to her expression.

“Now that you're my companion, you'll need to be able to access this place on your own,” I waved my hand around demonstratively, then pulled out my phone and felt only a slight twinge of regret as I dropped ten credits into the new perk. “There, now you'll be able to.”

“What's that?” She twisted her neck to look at the screen, then relented as I turned it towards her. “All Roads Lead to Home.”

Her eyes widened as she looked up to me in surprise and a shade of alarm. “You didn't have to-!”

I raised a hand. “Yes, I did. This place is as much your home as it is mine. Given that I understand why you wanted this relationship, I want to do my best to provide you a refuge from the problems you're having. If you consider me to be your husband, then that's part of my job: providing for you.”

Himiko stilled for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “I understand, Dear.”

I hid my grimace, hearing the echo of her mother's tone in that address. The word she'd used, specifically, was 'anata.' By virtue of a strict translation, the word meant 'you' in English, and that was it. However, as a form of address it held a strong cultural connotation. No one used that specific version of address on a street corner or in a casual environment. It was a term of affection that was best rendered as 'my darling' or 'dear.'

Himiko's mother had often used it in the short time I'd known her and had a particularly uncanny intonation to the word.

Part of me wanted to fight that battle right now.

The other parts of me knew it would take more than a single conversation to completely remake Himiko's worldview on the subject of gender roles and power dynamics in relationships.

Treat this as a scouting mission. Determine the lay of the land, locate problem zones, and make a plan of attack for later deprogramming operations.

“You may call me that while we're inside the apartment,” I stated with a slow nod. “I'd prefer you simply call me Hitoshi, but most forms of affectionate address are fine. In public, you should maintain the illusion that we're still merely boyfriend and girlfriend. Now, I need to show you something...”

Himiko blinked, then rose with me as we walked out of the living room and down a set of stairs that ended in what appeared to be a vertical shaft of a hallway. However, taking the step over the threshold where the stairs ended, gravity reasserted itself and the column of empty space reoriented itself into a normal hallway.

Himiko followed after me without a care in the world.

I put another item on the list of problems to address eventually. The trust she had in me was both flattering and convenient, but also worrying. Most people wouldn't take for granted that such a thing was safe simply because someone else did it.

I stopped in front of one of the doors in the hallway, inserted a key into the lock, and opened it to reveal a relatively simple-looking bedroom. “This is your room. You're free to decorate it however you like.”

Himiko walked into the space slowly, looking around with a kind of low-key surprise that probably wouldn't have registered were I anyone else. “We won't be using the same room?”

“I want you to have your own space,” I replied, holding out the key for her to take. “This room locks. I have an emergency key hanging on the rack in the living room, but I won't use it unless it's an emergency.”

Giving her the key, I walked over to the computer set up at her desk and opened The Company's browser before selecting the proper page. Seeing that Himiko had followed me and was looking curiously over my shoulder, I gestured to the screen. “You get one free kit to personalize the room, time-locked to be redeemed within one week of purchase, so you've got five days to select what kind of furniture, electronics, bedding, and clothing you want before the offer expires and you're stuck with what you can buy.”

“What should I pick?” Himiko asked, frowning lightly.

I shook my head. “That's your choice. This is your space. I'm fine if you want to stay with me in my bedroom when we're using the apartment, but this will primarily be your room. Just as that will primarily be mine. I want... I'd like us to move a little slower and get used to each other, especially living together, okay?”

Himiko frowned slightly, then nodded. “I... that's okay? I guess? I... didn't think this would be what it was like, being married.”

I huffed a laugh. “What did you think it would be like?”

She paused, crossing her arms and then bringing one hand up to tap her mouth with a pointer finger. “I... don't know? Something like my parents. My husband would go to work, I'd go shopping if I needed to and buy cute things for him and me, then I'd come home and make dinner? Before we went to sleep together.”

I nodded along. “Some of that will come later, when you've started UA with me and you're officially living in the apartment that the Endeavor Agency will facilitate for you.”

“But I'll really be living here,” Himiko stated with a nod.

“Unless you have an objection to it, yes. You'll be living here,” I nodded.

“When will you move in?” Himiko asked, once again showing that unnerving fixation.

“My situation is a bit-” I stopped myself from saying the word 'complicated' given the specifics of Himiko's own living arrangements. “-different. In some ways, I'm my father's primary caretaker. So I'll need to keep some presence there. I also live in Saitama, which is only thirty minutes out by train from UA at worst, so there's less reason for me to move out fully. Given that you live in eastern Gunma, it's a bit more plausible for you to want to move out.”

“That makes sense,” my girlfriend-wife stated, even if her body language stated rather blatantly she didn't like it.

“That said, I'll likely be moving most of my things into my room once I have it properly set up,” I stated, making her perk up. “I'll need to have a conversation with my father and stick around to make him meals occasionally and make sure he's not living off cheap energy drinks-”

Do as I say, not as I do.

“-but I'll likely start spending a lot more time here once we get into UA just like you,” I finished, watching a bit of tension release from her.

“That... that's good. Can I see your room?” She asked instead, jumping to a new topic.

“Once it's done,” I replied, stopping her fairly obvious play for a complimentary design sheme in its tracks. To soothe the frustration, I gestured towards the computer again. “I'm not going to be monitoring your internet usage here or anything and you can look up whatever you want to use as inspiration. The Company's browser links to their interdimensional internet service and the normal browsers will let you get onto our world's standard internet.”

A spark of interest lit up in her eyes as she realized she was going to get unpoliced internet access for, likely, the first time in her life as she sat down in the chair in front of the computer.

I took a step away to let her explore, but added one more thing. “Oh, when you're using the computer here in the apartment and are on the normal internet, you'll have an incognito mode option. That switch will make it so that no one on Earth will be able to track your location no matter how good of a hacker they are. It's essentially fiat-backed.”

Himiko blinked, looking away from the screen and up at me. “Fiat-backed? What's that mean?”

“It means that it's an inviolable rule imposed upon the world.” I stretched lazily and expounded upon it. “Theoretically, if you combined the exact right kinds of quirks you might be able to track down where the connection is coming from, but even that would just look like nonsense unless you understood the metaphysics of pocket dimensions. Unless you're accessing your social media profiles, though, I'd recommend keeping incognito mode on just as a precaution.”

“Yes, Dear,” Himiko nodded obediently, then paused as she looked back at a few of the options. “Ah... some of these cost 'credits.' That's money, right?”

I nodded. “Try to avoid any of those for now. You don't have access to spending permissions given I'm on a budget at the moment, but if there's anything really important you think the apartment needs, I'll be open to discussions about it.”

“Mother and Father often discuss things like that. I think Mother wants him to purchase a new car soon,” Himiko stated softly, her eyes scanning the various augments for the living arrangements The Company provided. “Will we be getting a car?”

I snorted. “I'll have to upgrade the apartment to a house first, but... yes, in theory, I'm open to the possibility of purchasing a car later on. A priority purchase as far as vehicles go is probably going to be a motorcycle, though. One for my vigilante identity.”

Even if various members of the Bat Family had, on occasion, taken the Gotham Subway in-costume during absurd situations, those were the exceptions that proved the rule.

“Michiko and Arupaka say that only bad boys ride motorcycles,” Himiko replied idly. “And that I shouldn't go near them. They're dangerous.”

I shook my head. “I'm pretty sure you're much more dangerous than any thug on a motorcycle. Besides, I'll be in my vigilante identity, so I won't exactly be a bad boy.”

Himiko paused, catching the emphasis I'd put on the last word as she turned to me. “Wait! Hitoshi's vigilante identity is a girl? You can transform?”

I blinked.

Hadn't I... no, I hadn't. We'd had to start heading back home on Sunday to get ready for dinner at her place, so there'd been no time for a full briefing. Then Monday had been busy, too.

I palmed my face. “I only told you I had a vigilante identity. I didn't tell you what it was... right. That's my fault.”

Himiko bounced towards me, her eyes wide. “Can I see? Please? Hitoshi as a girl would be so cute!”

Groaning, I rubbed at my face. “Ugh... fine. Just remember, you aren't supposed to know this girl if you see her on the street. Some of the heroes at the agency have encountered me in that form as a vigilante, so you can't slip up and indicate you're acquainted, right?”

Himiko's head bobbed rapidly. “I promise!”

There wasn't really anything else to discuss and... well, there was no real need to hide my other identity from Himiko. Beyond needlessly complicating things with more superhero shenanigans, there could easily come a time when I needed Himiko to cooperate with some plan that would require her to interact with my alternate persona in some specific way. There was also the fact that even as good as I was, more experience in that form would never be a bad thing and Himiko was perhaps one of the most naturally skilled sparring opponents available.

I shifted.

Himiko's eyes widened as she took me in. I busied myself with shifting my clothing ever-so-slightly to accommodate parts of my body that were on time share. While I did that, the blond girl traced a path around me, looking me up and down.

“Do you wear a bra when you go out like this?” Himiko asked bluntly.

“I usually wear a kind of unisex rash guard that has flexible support,” I explained with a shrug, my voice making Himiko pause in surprise again. “That way I can shift back and forth as-needed and just swap a jacket to change my entire look.”

“That's why you knew what I should wear when going as the infiltrator,” Himiko muttered to herself, still looking me over. “Transforming gets my clothes all icky, but something like a swimsuit makes it really easy to clean the mud off.”

“Pretty much,” I nodded. “I don't like wasting money on specialty stuff for this body since I only use it when I need to go undercover, but I have a few sets of dedicated women's clothing just to make sure any fabric I leave behind can't be connected to Shinso Hitoshi.”

Himiko nodded again, looking up at me sharply. “I wanna see Hitoshi in cute outfits!”

I held up both of my hands and crossed the forearms into an 'X.' “Denied.”

My girlfriend pouted. “Mean! I deserve a treat for doing a good job today!”

I gave a long-suffering sigh. “When we have some free time I'll try on a few outfits you pick out, okay? But I've actually got some work tonight I need to do. I finally managed to track down this guy I've been looking for now that I have a full computer to do work on with an untraceable internet connection.”

Seemingly mollified by my appeasement, Himiko cocked her head. “Who is it? A villain? Or a monster?”

I shook my head. “It's actually just a small-time pit fighter. He's part of a group called the Underground Masquerade, which is an illegal fighting organization that operates around Japan for people who want to engage in quirk combat and gamble on it.”

“Whoa... places like that actually exist outside of Ami's manga...” Himiko muttered, then smiled. “You're going to arrest him?”

“Putting aside the fact that vigilantes can't actually arrest anyone... no,” I replied, much to her surprise. “I need him free, for now, at least. I just... need to set some things up.”

~~~

Nice-sized chapter, even if it's late due to my little health crisis during the weekend. Once again, thank you for your patience and I hope you enjoy the chapter. This is a bit of a 'bridging' update, meant to serve as downtime between things happening. Especially given how much is happening in Hitoshi's life.

Next chapter will return to a more extended vigilante arc that I'll be sneaking in 2-3 chapters before we get into the quirk assessment and the Office Hero Exam.

That's the plan, anyway.

I also plan to have a new chapter of Entrepreneurial Spirit up over the weekend, so look for that, too.

Mind Games - Chapter 24

Nice-sized chapter, even if it's late due to my little health crisis during the weekend. Once again, thank you for your patience and I hope you enjoy the chapter. This is a bit of a 'bridging' update, meant to serve as downtime between things happening. Especially given how much is happening in Hitoshi's life.

Next chapter will return to a more extended vigilante arc that I'll be sneaking in 2-3 chapters before we get into the quirk assessment and the Office Hero Exam.

That's the plan, anyway.

I also plan to have a new chapter of Entrepreneurial Spirit up over the weekend, so look for that, too.

Paldean Knights - Chapter 1

“Aznaro Makoa Altar de la Braganza!”

It wasn't the shout that woke me up, actually. Nor was it the promise of impending doom should I ignore it. No, it was the door opening. Which might strike some people as odd, but... the more things change, the more things stayed the same, I suppose. It was an especially old habit, is what I'm saying.

“I'm awake!” I cried, throwing off the blanket and pulling bed hangings apart only to be hit by a wave of glaring midday sun.

“I should hope so! It's after noon!” The tanned woman yelled as she marched into the room, arms crossed over her chest. “You're still in your nightclothes, though! Look at you!”

My head dipped and I sighed. “Mom, please... I was up late using my telescope. Besides, you know I'm practically nocturnal.”

“Yes, yes... I know,” she huffed, shaking her head as her blond hair flowed with the motion. “But you need to be day-turnal, Aznaro. You know your grandfather likes that we all meet together for breakfast and your absence was noted.”

I would have winced, but... well Past-Azarno had really pulled through on that decision. No breakfast meant no cousins for the day. Still, the fact that abuelo had remarked on it... “I'll try to make it tomorrow.”

“You'll do better than that,” Mom threatened promised. “Court ran long today, so Julian is gathering everyone for a late lunch. One which you'll be attending. Your tutor has already been alerted and we've moved your lessons to later in the day.”

I twitched. “Yes, Mother.”

“Now shower and dress yourself, Azi.” She gave me a significant look. “Or I will.”

Muttering another affirmative, I slipped out of bed as my mother left the room and quickly stripped, throwing my nightclothes into a hamper for the maid to retrieve. That was something I still felt awkward about, but had resolved to deal with it on my own. Even if I didn't particularly like having a personal attendant, if someone's job was at stake, I could swallow the irritation.

I took a quick shower and came out with a towel around my waist and an outfit laid out on my overstuffed and oversized reading chair.

I sighed, “Must we?”

“As always, My Prince, there are rules I can bend and there are ones which I cannot.”

I looked over to where Alice was smoothing out the sheets and shook my head at the three layer's worth of clothes I'd be wearing through the fading heat of the day. At least the frock coat would cover the dark patches where my sweat would bleed through the first two.

“At least they're in black,” I muttered, pulling my towel free and finishing drying myself off before flinging it sloppily to the bin.

Regardless of the older woman's presence in my room.

Soon enough, I had pulled on my smallclothes, the sleek black button-down dress shirt with frilled cuffs and the matching silk pants, topping things off with an admittedly very suave-looking coat that looked as though it was pulled from the nineteenth century.

“Let me do your hair, at least, My Prince,” Alice sighed, stepping over quickly with a brush.

“If you must,” I sighed, allowing her to help me with both that and my shoes.

Then came the jewelry, though thankfully not much of it. A silver chain with a sapphire to match my eyes bound the sides of my coat closed. Likewise, a silver ring was slipped on my right ring finger, though this one – regrettably – had a diamond set in it. Finally, a navy handkerchief was folded for my front chest pocket and a platinum pocket watch with a stylized lugia carved into it.

Looking into a mirror, I would have looked as though I was ready for a full formal dinner and a run at the nearest eligible bachelorette.

If I weren't all of eight years old.

“I look like someone's idea of a life-sized dress-up doll,” I sighed, accepting the pair of dragonair cufflinks without comment.

They, like the watch, had been a gift, if from different people.

“Nonsense, Your Highness. You don't even have a tie,” Alice chimed in from where she was dusting my clothing off of any clinging lint. “No dollmaker would tolerate such an omission.”

“Sweet Arceus, woman. Don't give them any ideas,” I shook my head in disgust.

Alice gave a barely-imperceptible chuckle. “Well, it looks as though you are ready, sire. Just in time, too, by my watch.”

I looked at the clock and nodded. “That it is. Prepare a change of clothes, please. If you'd leave it at the usual spot?”

Alice sighed, sweeping a hand through black hair and shaking her head. “As My Prince wishes.”

Passing through the door, I stopped briefly to pet the deerling sitting next to it with a pair of small saddlebags thrown across its back. “Hey there, Prancer. You can go in and help Alice now, if you'd like.”

The pokemon perked up instantly and gave me a nod of acknowledgment before scooting into the room. I knew that Mom didn't necessarily like the staff using pokemon in my room, but it was my room. And I trusted both Alice and Prancer. The pokemon I didn't trust...

I turned to look at the large brown wolf-dog sitting patiently on the opposite side of the corridor. “You can go tell Mom that I'm dressed and will be there shortly, Lycanroc. You didn't even have to drag me out of bed today, okay?”

The old dog gave me a snort of amusement and a brief nod before setting off down the hallway at a trot. Something of a relic from her trainer days, Lycanroc was past his battling prime, but still one hell of a guard dog and doubly protective besides that, especially of Mom and myself. I probably would have liked him a bit more if he wasn't so stiff... an odd combination considering my mother was a bit of a free spirit even these days.

Idly, I supposed someone had to keep her on-track back when she was a trainer.

I blinked, seeing a figure out of the corner of my eye before giving the long corridor a sweeping glance and stepping over towards it.

“Aunt Francisca,” I greeted in a quiet undertone.

The red-haired woman smiled at me from where she stood in the shadows. “Aznaro, I see you're doing as well as always.”

“I do try,” I stated with a nod. “Will you be joining us for lunch?”

Real sorrow flashed across the woman's face for a moment. “No, I don't think so. My boys are growing up so fast...”

I sighed, not having really expected anything different, but feeling I had to offer. “Ruberte is a fine young man, I think. He's doing you and his father proud at the academy, from what I hear.”

Francisca smiled wanly and nodded. “Thank you, Aznaro. It's always good to hear such things. Do keep an eye out if they have any trouble, won't you?”

I kept the grimace off my face. No need to cause the woman any more grief. “I'll do what I can.”

“Good,” she nodded, glancing down the small side hallway and sighing. “I should go before anyone sees you talking to... well, I've already caused you enough problems.”

“Feel free to find me anytime you need,” I told her before shaking my head as the older woman disappeared down the corridor, her companion pokemon close behind.

Heaving a heavy sigh, I turned and made for the family dining room.

The scowl I got from Francisca's youngest two boys just underscored the problematic situation I'd found myself in. Ruberte, my eldest cousin, gave me a smile at least, but his two younger brothers Sabastian and Ximen looked as though they'd smelled something displeasing as I made my way into the room.

“Ah, and there he is!” The man at the head of the table chuckled good-naturedly, his silver-gray hair still holding a few strands of the midnight-blue it had once held. “Aznaro, my boy! Burning the midnight oil again?”

“Astronomy, Abuelo,” I replied with a smile, greeting my grandfather calmly. “I apologize for missing breakfast this morning regardless.”

“You could have at least sent warning instead of simply being absent,” Sabastian commented coolly.

“My apologies,” I tilted my head towards the slightly older boy of twelve.

“No more of that, now. As long as Aznaro doesn't make a habit of it, I'll let things slide this once,” the aging king stated, his voice making clear that the matter was settled.

“You're too tolerant Julian,” Aldonza, his wife and my grandmother, commented with a sigh. “Lani, for the last time, please try to do something about Aznaro's sleep schedule. There's being a noctowl and then there's waking up after the noon bells chime.”

“My primary concern is Aznaro's health, Mother,” my own mother stated, her voice level as my father grimaced beside her, trying to sink into his chair. “Forcing him on a daylight schedule just makes him exhausted.”

See, when it's just you and your own kid in the discussion, blame the kid. But when someone else decides they want in on that game? Mama Luxray gonna' take a bite out of you.

“Enough,” Julian stated more firmly, looking between his wife and his daughter-in-law. “My family is sitting down to eat a meal together, I will not have fighting at the table. Ruberte, I've seen your scores from the academy. You're doing quite well.”

“Ruberte is doing very well, Father, yes.” Leonis spoke up, taking a drink of his wine and nodding towards his eldest son, continuing the grand tradition of talking around rather than to the child. “He's passing all his courses this year with nearly perfect scores.”

“Befitting an heir to the throne,” Aldonza nodded, her tone. “It seems both of my children have been, themselves, blessed with remarkable children.”

I grimaced.

Not this shit again, Abuela.

“Big Brother,” the small blond at my side whispered, “does that mean I'm special too?”

Which, because she was six, her whisper was not actually a 'whisper.' Immediately, the eyes of our two younger cousins slid over to us.

Our father, Enrique, reached behind me and patted my sister on the head. “It means you're very special, yes, Lehonor.”

Sabastian muttered something that was, thankfully, too quiet for most of the table to start an argument.

I merely sighed internally as my father and little sister began acting affectionately with each other.

“So, when is Aznaro going to be continuing his own education?” Aldonza asked primly, once again demonstrating that she had a gift for spiking tension at the dinner table.

“If he can't wake up for breakfast, there's no way the ghost would be up for classes,” Ximen, unlike his brother, spoke loud enough to be heard by the entire table.

Which meant I could sigh externally instead of just keeping it to myself.

“Ximen.” Leonis barked out, beating all other authority figures to the punch as he turned his intense gaze on his youngest. “You will not speak of your cousin that way. Apologize, now.”

The boy's face went pale and red at the same time from the dual embarrassment of being called out publicly and the inherent threat in his father's voice. “I-I'm sorry. Aznaro.”

“Apology accepted,” I demurred, with a tilt of my head, my voice as neutral as normal-type energy. “It's just an unflattering nickname, Uncle Leonis. I'm aware of what the staff calls me behind my back.”

Ximen's expression could best be described as 'constipated' as I dared to speak up in his defense. Leonis scoffed. “Uncultured lechonk might insult you, but you should not tolerate it from your own family, Aznaro, no matter how calm your temperament might be. Especially not at the table.”

“As my elder brother says,” my father Enrique spoke up with a serious look directed at me. “The next time you hear someone call you that, you come to me. Am I clear, son?”

“Yes, Father,” I nodded.

Lani breathed a long sigh herself as the tension in the room calmed. “To return to the topic at hand, Mother-” Aldonza grimaced slightly at the title. “-the fact that my son has completed much of the academic coursework that the academies offer generally means he is better served by tutoring, even before accounting for anything else.”

“It would be better for Aznaro to associate with some peers, though,” my grandmother argued. “Why, there's a society gathering in Levincia just next week. Most of the children who will be in attendance are somewhat older than Aznaro is, but he's very mature for his age.”

Hmm, yes, 'maturity' matters in interactions with other children. Right.

“Ah... the soiree being hosted by Exceed for their joint venture with Macro Cosmos?” My father asked, his tone speculative... which wasn't really a good sign for me. “I was considering attending, actually.”

“That would be extremely helpful, actually,” Leonis chimed in with a nod in his brother's direction. “They sent me an invitation, simply as a matter of courtesy I'm sure, but affairs of state are set to occupy my time. If you'd attend, Brother, it would give me more than enough room to make polite excuses.”

Uncle, this is why you're having the problems you are...

My mother and father exchanged glances.

“Can I come, too?” Lehonor asked, looking between the adults. “If Daddy and Azi are going, I want to come!”

“It will run a little bit late into the evening for a six year old,” Aldonza stated cautiously.

“We'll make a trip of it together,” Mother stated. “Lehonor and I can at least attend the opening ceremonies before we retire early, and that way I can be there if you need help handling any spur of the moment negotiations, dear.”

My sister's face lit up at the offer, and I gave her a quick smile.

Sabastian sniffed disdainfully, and I could almost hear the thoughts in his head.

Ah, yes... let the half-breeds and the second-in-line for the throne play with the nouveau-riche! My father has more important work to do!

Arceus, I wish someone would give those boys a proper lesson about where political power actually stood in this day and age. We weren't living in the days of yore where Paldean knights would ride pokemon into battle with lance and shield.

“Then it's decided,” Julian nodded at my father and uncle, much more pleased at the turn the conversation had taken. “Enrique and his family will attend the party and Aznaro-”

I nodded to show I was listening.

“-do try to make some friends, won't you?” Julian asked, a hint of a plea in his voice.

“I'll... try, Abuelo,” I promised.

He smiled. “Good, now I've been meaning to discuss the agricultural yield in Area Three with both of you-”

I partially tuned out, already plotting the steps I'd need to get ready for the party, especially avoiding the worst of the crowds. Perhaps I'd see if the Royal Guard would forward me the building's floor plan? They might, most of them rather liked me. As opposed to the staff. It was probably because I gave the guards the fewest headaches out of my entire family...

...that they knew of, at least.

Lunch was, thankfully, over without further incident.

Which meant I could push the hidden compartment in the wall open and pass through into the secret corridor the moment I broke line of sight with the rest of the group leaving the dining area.

“Aznaro? Honestly, where did that boy go this time?!”

I grinned silently at my mother's question and took quick, silent steps as I directed myself through the pitch dark corridor with the ease of long practice. Eventually, I came to the ladder I needed and climbed up one floor to reach the exit I needed. Before opening it, though, I stepped up onto a wooden stool I'd hidden in the passage just for such an occasion.

Popping open the false eyes in the painting of one of our illustrious ancestors, I gave the hallway outside a quick once-over before opening the concealed door and grabbing the bag full of clothing.

Which was when I felt a cold chill run down my spine.

“Nice try, dude,” I whispered, reaching into the bag I'd just recovered and pulling out a belue berry, which immediately vanished from my grasp with the invisible sounds of snacking. “Are all Haunters such berry fiends, or is it just you?”

“Hunt-haunt-haunt!” The echoing voice chortled, the pokemon still remaining invisible even after I'd paid the toll.

Which, to be honest, I felt some kind of way about being charged to use the secret passageways in my own home-castle. Then again, judging by the layers and layers of dust I'd discovered when first accessing these areas, they'd been disused for so long that it was fairly unsurprising a colony of ghosts had moved into them.

Ultimately, the choice was to either make a nuisance of myself by invading their territory – their home – whenever I wanted to move about unseen, or simply paying them off.

And, frankly, I had the pocket change for the kinds of exotic berries they preferred.

Which they would just steal from the kitchen when no one was looking anyway.

With my dues paid, I stripped down and swapped out to the more rugged set of clothes in the pack, carefully folding the expensive ones and replacing them on the small table outside the door for Alice to pick up. My duty done, I slipped the bag over my shoulder, closed the hidden peepholes, and set off for the nearest exit...

...which, as always, was a large stone manhole cover that opened up next to a gargoyle.

“Rook! Rookidee!” A blue-black-yellow bird squawked in surprise, then immediately calmed from an aggressive stance as I emerged.

I gave the pokemon a level glance. “Seriously, who else would be using this exit? Who?”

The Rookidee chirped in offense at my insinuation and hopped back a few paces to...

My eyes widened as I took in the egg in her nest and I dipped my head. “My apologies. I didn't know you'd already laid. Here, take this as a token of my regret for offending you.”

I pulled out another berry, this one a comn berry, one of this particular Rookidee's favorites. The ghosts weren't the only ones I occasionally needed to bribe around here, after all.

“Ki-dee!” She chirped happily and snatched the berry from my hand, returning to her egg with a few quick hops.

I smiled, said my goodbyes, sealed my exit, and threw myself over the stone guttering to climb down the vine-covered trellises.

“Seriously, the things I do for a little freedom,” I muttered, dropping to the ground in a secluded part of the castle's courtyard.

~~~

So, I worked myself into a fit of heat exhaustion on Friday and have been at basically zero energy to do anything for the past few days. That includes writing. I am recovered now and am back on the horse as far as writing and working goes. I'm still hammering away at the next Mind Games chapter and should have it out soon.

Hopefully this experimental piece will tide people over in the meantime. I had the first chapter nearly finished and polished it up last night when I started feeling up to doing stuff again.

Hope everyone else's weekend went better than mine.

Thank you for your support and patience, both.

Paldean Knights

So, I worked myself into a fit of heat exhaustion on Friday and have been at basically zero energy to do anything for the past few days. That includes writing. I am recovered now and am back on the horse as far as writing and working goes. I'm still hammering away at the next Mind Games chapter and should have it out soon.

Hopefully this experimental piece will tide people over in the meantime. I had the first chapter nearly finished and polished it up last night when I started feeling up to doing stuff again.

Hope everyone else's weekend went better than mine.

Thank you for your support and patience, both.

Mind Games - Chapter 23

“This is humiliating,” Todoroki Enji sighed as he leaned back in his chair, the metal groaning under his weight. Despite that, he delicately reached out and nabbed a few potato chips from the open bag on his desk.

“I don't precisely agree, but it is at the very least a damning assessment of our agency's non-quirk combat skills,” Sato Kenji stated bluntly.

“What, precisely, is the difference?” Enji asked, giving the man a side-eye from the screen.

“It's only humiliating if this information gets released publicly,” Kenji nodded at the feed.

A few stray embers followed the gusty snort the Flame Hero released at that. His eyes wandered to me, taking care to keep the monitor in the edge of his vision. “Shinso. You maintain you haven't taught her anything?”

I shook my head, an amused smile playing at my lips while I watched Himiko dismantle seasoned and professional hero staff. I sucked in a hiss between my teeth as she, wearing my body, gave a quick feint only to tap the ankle of the sidekick rushing her with her toe. The result sent the man into an off-balance tumble that left her free to respond to the other man pressuring her.

“Nope,” I replied with a shake of my head, one hand reaching for an already-open energy drink to bring to my lips. “I knew she was talented. I just... didn't know she had this innate level of skill.”

...because what I'm seeing isn't instinct.

Cassandra's eyes could tell the difference. Talent was unrefined and raw in a way that practiced motions couldn't quite mimic. Skills, even deeply-ingrained ones, produced planned responses. A person relying purely on talent, on the other hand, tended to make things up as they went along.

What Toga Himiko was doing?

This is entirely too polished to be unplanned.

My body stepped around a blow, the empty space allowing the opponent to overextend himself and invade another fighter's space, tripping both of them up. The situational awareness needed to pull something like that off intentionally wasn't something 'talent' got you. Judging by the way that she capitalized on it and twisted one man into a hold while on top of the other, pinning them both to the ground in a single fluid motion...

“I'm docking their pay,” Enji grumbled, reaching for a bottle of chilled water.

“My advice on behalf of your legal department is an official reprimand before formal disciplinary action is taken,” Kenji shrugged, reaching up to adjust his loose tie. “Docking their pay is only a valid response after multiple warnings have been given.”

“Two seasoned and experienced sidekicks with three and five years on the job are being destroyed by a completely untrained junior high school student,” Enji reminded the man bluntly.

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, watching Fuyumi's growing frustration and displeasure as she tapped her foot. “Ah... she's upping it to three at a time, that's not going to work.”

“You think so?” Kenji asked, stirring his ramen and slurping some of it up before swallowing. “Why?”

“Quirks,” I replied shortly, eyeing up a piece of chocolate before shrugging and going for it. “They're trained to-”

“-to employ their quirks as a weapon of first resort once deescalation has failed,” Enji nodded, giving a rumbling sigh. “They're conditioned to understand physical combat as an extension of their quirks' use, not as a separate matter in and of itself. The three here are a perfect example of what that means in physical combat.”

Kenji made a humming noise deep in his throat. “Ah, I see what you mean. Flame Snake's transformation is a no-go and they're used to CQC in that form over martial arts. Even if they were able to, though, his allies aren't fireproof. So Hot Shot and Steam Cannon would be injured. In a full-use scenario with quirks in combat, Flame Snake would have rushed the opponent in their alternate form while Steam Cannon stayed back to provide support and Hot Shot ran interference with her speed.”

“Exactly,” Enji stated. “They aren't used to quirkless combat. An oversight the agency will need to correct.”

“They're also getting emotional,” I added, pointing out how Flame Snake in particular was getting sloppy and too aggressive. “Especially against an opponent who knows how to use that against them? Even when they've seen her do it before... it's a bad combination.”

The fiery facial hair on the older hero's face flared for a moment as his eyes narrowed. “A dimension of the fight I hadn't considered. Thank you, Shinso... for more than just that, too. Your little request is highlighting several areas where my agency can improve.”

“Not to speak above my station, but have you considered hiring some kind of nullifier for mock combat?” I asked with a shrug, finally popping the piece of chocolate in my mouth.

Endeavor reached up to rub at his chin despite the flames. “Nullifier quirks are rare; ones that I would be willing and able to subject my staff to, rarer still. Perhaps Eraserhead would be open to a consultation, though.”

“I'll run it through the necessary channels,” Kenji affirmed, wiping his hands briefly with a handkerchief before reaching for his PDA.

“Good,” Enji grunted, then pointed at the screen. “Shinso... you've given me some of this girl's... background, but that doesn't explain how she's doing this.”

We watched as Himiko judo-threw one of the men into the woman, using the kneeling motion to continue her momentum into another trip.

“It's... complicated,” I stated haltingly, flipping through my mental codex to make the final decisions on how much I would disclose. “And I'm not a trained psychologist or anything, so take what I say with a grain of salt.”

“My background is in psych, so I'll at least tell you if you're completely off-base,” Kenji stated.

I raised an eyebrow and Endeavor nodded at me. “It's one of the reasons I asked him to sit in. Sato-san is a trusted employee who went to UA with me, though he was in the business track. I often use him as a sounding board for both his legal advice and his knowledge of the human condition.”

I hummed, turning to the man. “How much have you been briefed about my girlfriend's homelife?”

Kenji grimaced, reaching up to adjust his wire-rim glasses. Even if he looked every inch the salaryman, he'd managed to pull off the 'artfully disheveled' look, landing somewhere between hot older dude and unimportant background character. I didn't know if it was intentional or not, but he looked natural and human in a way that Toga Daiki would never be able to pull off.

“I've been sufficiently read into the situation to be deeply concerned should the representation of circumstances be accurate,” the older man answered with a professional demeanor and a deep frown.

Oh my gods...

Blinking, I turned to look at the gruff and unflappable Enji before looking at the office-nerd equivalent. There was a pause as I turned to look between them again, my attention slipping from the screen as Himiko took a tumble from a lucky hit that failed to do any damage.

Kenji blinked, looking at me fully as well. “Is something the matter?”

I snorted and shook my head... then decided to hell with it. My careful depiction of a young up-and-coming hero needed to act his age to some degree. “Nothing... it's just, I never thought of Endeavor having a friend before. Maybe I'm just guilty of thinking of him as a hero rather than a person, but... I guess it just hit me at once that he'd have to have someone to hang out with in his personal life.”

Kenji blinked at me for a moment as Enji cleared his throat and turned away, reaching for his water and draining it while trying to hide the flush on his face. I had to admit, the flame-goatee did wonders for concealing embarrassment.

Finally, the salaryman chuckled. “I like this one, Enji. Even if he's pants at the job, he'd be fun to keep around to rub a little shine off that pedestal people put you on.”

“I'll-uh, I'll take that under advisement,” Enji muttered, dropping the empty bottle into a bin and reaching for another one with the same desperation another man would go for a bottle of whiskey. “If you'd answer his question, though, Shinso?”

I sighed and leaned back, returning my mind to the topic at hand as I drained my energy drink. “Are you familiar with the concept of zen archery?”

Kenji hummed and nodded slightly. “Not overly, but I trust you're going somewhere with this?”

“A proper kyudo-ka – a practitioner of archery – completes a series of meditative steps prior to releasing the bow. It's... well, I'm butchering it, but it's a type of self-reflection that uses the technique of shooting the arrow as a tool to clear the mind and heart, shed worldly concerns, and create a perfect moment where the practitioner becomes one with the world around them.” I sighed and gestured towards Himiko wearing my form. “What you're seeing is someone who lives in that state.”

Good is not nice, evil is not mean, and enlightenment can be cruel and vicious.

“While fascinating from a philosophical perspective...” Kenji stated, frowning thoughtfully.

I acknowledged the invitation to elaborate with a single nod. “When you're put under the kind of stress that Toga was at home, you start... losing pieces of yourself. Not-”

Making a vague motion with my hands, I shook my head.

“Not walling them off, suppressing, or repressing them. Just... losing them. Forgetting them. Excising parts of yourself to conform to the expectations around you,” I explained tiredly.

“That's... honestly a terrifying thought, but it's something that is at least partially supported by theory,” Kenji muttered.

“I imagine it's easier if you're a child,” I replied softly, shaking my head to clear it. “But... if you do it enough, if you cut enough out of yourself... you eventually get to a point where-”

“There's nothing left,” Enji stated, his voice momentarily raw with emotion that cut through the room like a searing wave of heat to my senses. His eyes were locked on the screen, but not seeing it. The unfocused distant stare spoke of something deeply painful.

Hiding my grimace at the sudden flare of sensation, I nodded.

“Toga Himiko isn't really a person, not like we would recognize other people to be,” I explained bluntly. “She's lost too much. But... with as the Buddha teaches, with emptiness comes clarity. Clarity of thought, of emotion, of movement... and especially of her quirk.”

“A vampire-themed shapeshifting quirk,” Kenji grimaced. “That's... not an ideal basis to form a personality around.”

“It's more foundational than that,” I stated. “Her parents unintentionally made her own existence align with her quirk on a conceptual level. She may be empty, but she yearns to be filled. Her quirk focuses on blood, but Himiko herself... like an empty mirror, she reflects the things which stand before her.”

“In line with the idea that her quirk is focused on mimicry and predation, not just transformation,” Kenji stated, looking more displeased as the information added up. “Enji... I don't like this. If what the boy here is saying is true... this girl is literally capable of anything to satisfy a kind of need that you or I can't really understand.”

Endeavor was quiet for a long moment, staring at the screen. “Shinso. Do you believe this girl is dangerous?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Do you believe I am dangerous?”

Enji snorted, then nodded. “Point made, but I still have significant concerns. The information you've given me points towards a severely disturbed child with a natural talent and skill at deception, infiltration, and an unflinching willingness to meet violence with violence.”

“Nothing you've said is incorrect, sir,” I replied, then weighted my words more significantly. “Would you rather she become a hero or a villain?”

“Personally, I'd rather she have intensive psychological counseling in a secure facility,” Kenji muttered. “But given her spotlessly-clean record, her parents' good standing in the community and their own connections... it would take action that I couldn't term as anything short of a severe abuse of power to see that happen. Even if it could, though, given her experience with quirk counseling, I don't think it would be all that productive.”

“Do you think she'll make it as a hero?” Enji pressed, looking over my head towards the office worker.

“Frankly, if young Shino's assessment is correct – and I'm legitimately afraid it is – she could make it as anything she wants to,” Kenji replied. “The question is whether or not she wants to. Not whether or not she can.”

Endeavor turned to me. “You think she wants to? You're sure of that.”

“She doesn't want to be a hero,” I denied. “She needs to be close to me and she'll become a hero if it allows her to accomplish that goal.”

Enji blinked, frowning. “You sound sure of that. Relationships... at your age...”

I shook my head. “When she met me, the mirror in her heart reflected someone who wasn't afraid of her for the first time. Who accepted and understood her. She can no more walk away from me than a mirror can stop reflecting the image of what's before it.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“I'm hitting the bars tonight and getting drunk enough I might forget all of this,” Kenji muttered lowly, reaching up to remove his glasses and massage his eyes.

“You have a gift for poetry and philosophy, young Bootstrap,” Endeavor rumbled, “but that still doesn't fully explain Himiko's skills. She moves with a precision and grace that I expect from seasoned heroes and soldiers, not junior high school students.”

“Part of it is, admittedly, her quirk,” I repeated. “But... due to how she was raised, she takes people in as they really are. She understands people at a glance. She truly sees how they move, which muscles they use, where their eyes go. From what I understand, it was a survival strategy adapted to avoid her parents noticing her in a negative way. She's hypersensitive and hyperfocused on the people around her, and her quirk enhances those qualities.”

“So when she's in combat with someone...” Enji speculated quietly.

“You might as well be fighting yourself,” I confirmed. “She is a mirror. She knows what you're going to do before you do it. If you're able to defeat her, she'll just avoid contact. If you're in contact with her, you've already lost.”

“That's objectively horrifying from a psychological standpoint,” Kenji noted absently. “Regardless of her functionality, she needs counseling, Enji. So does Shinso, for that matter.”

I huffed and rolled my eyes.

Now's the part where you force me to do something I'm not actually against so I can treat it like a concession, giving you a win and letting you control the narrative. C'mon...

“You're already under contract, so we can't make it a condition of your employment,” Enji stated, sucking down more water. “But I can tell my daughter and she is every centimeter as stubborn as I am.”

Kenji snorted, smothering a grin as he turned to me. “I'd advise just taking the counseling sessions. If nothing else, it'll give Himiko another reason to go along with it.”

I grunted, my lips twisting downwards. “Fine.”

Enji hummed, obviously trying not to visibly enjoy his victory over a teenager.

“That means you'll support her though, right?” I asked, tilting my head and narrowing my eyes suspiciously at the pro-hero like a child unsure of what was being said.

Enji snorted. “The way you've set things up, there really is only one choice I can make as a professional hero unwilling to make a mockery of the law and imprison an innocent girl victimized by her own parents. Kenji, if you'll begin looking into alternative housing solutions for the next school year?”

The salaryman grinned, adjusting his glasses to catch the light of the monitor in a move that simply had to be practiced. “We'll attach a rider saying that we want her close to the Agency given that we'll be subsidizing her UA tuition fees. I'll have to look at where exactly she lives to see how much I have to work to make it believable, but unless her parents are willing to really fight us on it... I think we'll be able to work something out.”

“Emphasize the normalcy of the option you're presenting,” I advised him. “And Endeavor's position as a representative of the social order. Presenting the contract as a function of those, rather than an exception to them, will strengthen your case in their eyes.”

Kenji's glee flickered, but he nodded seriously.

Then Endeavor stood, slapping his hands together as he knocked them free of crumbs. “Bootstrap, you're with me. I've seen enough and Himiko has accomplished her objective. It's time we shut this farce down.”

I hummed as I stood up as well, emptying the last of my drink and dropping it in the recycling bin next to the man's desk. “I was wondering if you were keeping count.”

Enji's severe blue gaze pierced me. “The girl may be good, make no mistake, but she's still a few years too early to get the drop on one of Japan's Top Ten.”

“She and I both need a good bit of formal training,” I admitted.

“Ah... if the boy could go ahead and start down? I have something I'd like to briefly discuss with Endeavor.”

“I'll see myself out, then,” I bowed slightly to the two older men and did just that.

…

“Enji.”

The Flame Hero's shoulder slumped and he nodded. “I know.”

“I still need to say it, if only for my peace of mind,” Kenji replied. “Those kids are not okay. Neither of them.”

Despite how much water he'd been drinking, Todoroki Enji still swallowed dryly as his throat constricted. “I know. Hitoshi... he reminds me of Touya, a bit. Towards the divorce, when Rei stopped letting me train him... how quiet and serious he became.”

Kenji grimaced, remembering the painfully-quiet melancholy of that long-past year nearly a decade ago. “I was thinking of Natsuo.”

Enji sighed, nodding. “He always was better at hiding things from me than Touya. At least I can get Natsuo to come home for the holidays...”

“Just... I don't want to see you blame yourself if something happens again, Enji,” the salaryman warned him, his tone grave.

“I'll... I'll get Fuyumi to help me keep a watch on them,” Enji promised, rubbing at his chin ruefully. “Maybe even get Shoko in on it. She could use a friend or two that won't treat her like the child of the Number Two Hero.”

Kenji paused at the door. “For what it's worth... I think it's the mark of a real hero that you're not just dumping both of them into the system and calling it a day.”

Enji scoffed. “To have survived all they did, as intact as they have? They deserve nothing less than a Plus Ultra effort on their behalf.”

Kenji snorted and shook his head. “I don't care what the PR department says, I think people should hear you talk like that more.”

The bulkier man blushed and turned away. “Let me know when you have something on Shinso Hinako's case.”

“Will do, Boss,” Kenji replied.

…

Fuyumi saw me as I entered the expansive private gym, her eyes glancing over me.

Then she stopped abruptly and her head snapped over to me again before shooting towards the mat.

Himiko's eyes widened and she pointed. “The intruder! Get him!”

I crossed my arms and gave her a deadpan stare. “Hah. Hah.”

“Uhh... which one is which?” One of the side-kicks asked, looking between us as everyone began to move about tensely into striking positions.

Then the door opened behind me and Endeavor stepped through in his full costume, looking none-too-happy. “It doesn't matter at this point. The infiltrator has succeeded in their mission and the Endeavor Agency has failed its penetration test.”

The assembled heroes, sidekicks, and staff all collectively groaned. Fuyumi in particular palmed her face and muttered something under her breath that wasn't too polite. After a moment's consideration, she brought her head up and pointed at Himiko. “This one's the fake, aren’t they?”

The shapeshifter stiffened, turning a frown towards Fuyumi, but never breaking my traditional monotone. “What? But I've been here the whole time. How would I have accomplished the objective?”

Fuyumi shook her head. “You oversold when Bootstrap came in. He wouldn't have tried to take control of the situation like that. Plus, now that I'm thinking about it... some of the things you've said have been off. Cadence, word choice... nothing I would notice specifically, but taken altogether...”

“A little late, but good catch,” Endeavor rumbled, making his daughter duck her head.

Himiko grinned widely, her canines hidden behind her disguise still as she threw both hands up in a big stretch and then curled them back behind her head to leave her elbows pointing skyward. “Hehe... I'll have to watch out for that! Hitoshi! Hitoshi, I did it! I tricked everybody and my disguise didn't even get damaged! Hehehe!”

The various heroes and sidekicks around the room twitched at the overt shift in personality as my duplicate skipped over to me and clung to my arm.

Brazier got it first, pointing at the impostor. “Wait, hold up! That's your girlfriend?!”

“What?” Flame Snake asked, whipping his head around.

“The hell?” Onibi echoed.

“The kid said his girl might be auditioning for a recommendation for UA's exams,” Brazier explained. “I heard him talking about it yesterday!”

“Toga Himiko, everybody,” I shrugged with a tiny smirk, holding out my free arm to gesture towards the limpet at my side.

“Hi-Hi!” Himiko waved giddily, still wearing a gleeful grin on my face, then abruptly stilled and wiped the expression clean as she released me, stepped forward, and bowed. “I'm sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused. Please forgive the disruption to your normal work schedule and any imposition I may have forced upon you.”

The sudden deployment of tactical politeness jarred everyone out of their surprise and frustration, forcing their minds onto a predefined cultural track as small polite bows were handed out and reassuring lies were voiced.

Fuyumi, being of stronger will than most and capable of withstanding the taboo, noticeably did not. “Alright, fine. We failed the penetration test. Great. But Da-er, Endeavor... Bootstrap still needs his CQC certification for the Agency evaluation. None of this counts if it wasn't actually him going through it.”

A few surprised and gleeful expressions erupted as various people exchanged smirks about that, realizing that they would be able to get one over on me, at least.

“Which is why Bootstrap will be facing off against Toga Himiko,” Endeavor rumbled, and I blinked in actual surprise as Himiko stiffened next to me.

We weren't the only ones, eyebrows rising throughout the room.

“Given your performance against the infiltrator,” he continued, “I don't think anyone will have an objection if Bootstrap is able to win... say, three out of five bouts? Should he accomplish that, will anyone here contest a CQC certification?”

“What if he loses?” Fuyumi asked, looking directly at her father.

“Just like anyone else, Bootstrap will be forced to undergo remedial CQC training and an evaluation under myself and a senior instructor,” Endeavor stated.

Faces that had been resentful and nearly mutinous when the traitor had been revealed were now outright gleeful. Even without knowing the details, I could guess that 'remedial training' was the stuff of nightmares to these people. Given that I was now faced with the task of either triumphing over their previous tormentor and redeeming the honor of the Agency or losing and suffering righteous retribution for my role in the entire affair...

Clever Boy.

With one stone, Endeavor was going to kill a half-dozen birds. First, with the tacit approval of the rest of the staff in attendance, he'd make them complicit in the approval of my CQC cert. Second, whichever party won the bouts, his employees would experience catharsis by way of seeing the loser taste defeat. Third, he'd get to test my own skill against an opponent he knew had substantial skills of their own.

Fourth, he no-doubt wanted to see if I'd go easy on Himiko or be willing to fight her all out knowing exactly how dangerous she could be. Even beyond that, though, I'd be able to test her skills to their utmost, something he hadn't seen in the interim yet. Fifth, how would Himiko act in the fight? Was she truly as self-controlled as I'd argued she was? Or was she a loose cannon waiting for something to happen to snap? How strong was the relationship I purported to have with her? Pitting her against me was by no means an exhaustive test, but it was a good step in the right direction for greater understanding.

Sixth... he was punishing me.

Not overtly. 'Punishment' might even be the wrong word for it. Whatever one wanted to call it, he was demonstrating that my actions had consequences. I'd wanted something from him and explicitly used his own code of conduct as a professional hero against him to force him into making the decision I wanted. Regardless of whether he would have cooperated or not without that, such conduct necessitated a response. A warning, more like, that the next time I pulled this shit he wouldn't be as nice as making me fight my own girlfriend for the cathartic validation of his employees.

...and that's before the other minor things this accomplishes.

The Sidereal in me approved a bit too much for my liking.

I really can believe this man has over a decade of leadership experience. Very nice.

I met Endeavor's gaze and gave him a single nod.

Himiko, likewise, gave another nod... and I think I caught a glimmer in her eye that said exactly how impressed she was with Endeavor just now. Which was good.

“And, of course, Bootstrap and our infiltrator will be joining us for the security briefings given that they will be our newest employee and intern respectively,” Endeavor went on, driving the point home that neither Himiko nor I were getting any sort of favoritism or special treatment.

Truly, ours is a kind and just kami, handing out blessings and punishments in equal measure.

Both Himiko and I looked appropriately disappointed by the announcement, even if I was actually interested in the content and she...

Actually, Himiko would probably be interested in it, too, if only as a how-to guide to sneak around secure places better.

“You're dropping the transformation before we fight,” I informed Himiko, who slumped slightly and gave me an exaggerated pout... that look strange and alien on my face. “C'mon, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.”

Himiko blinked my purple eyes, then giggled as she bounced over to the bag she'd brought with her and pulled out a small tarp, unfurling it much to the interest of the rest of the crowd. There was a flicker of self-consciousness before I gave Himiko a firm nod of support. That was all she needed to go through with it as skin turned to mud and began sloughing off her true body.

A few of the agency's staff looked away in brief disgust, though I was pleased to note that the majority merely watched with interest as a petite blond girl with a pixie cut emerged from the muck wearing a one-piece swimsuit. Really, I'd call it an abbreviated wetsuit with quarter-length sleeves and legs of the same material as the body of the suit.

It was a little – a lot – conservative to wear on a public beach these days, but for the purposes of wearing to a gym full of professionals, it worked perfectly.

“Whoa... you done good, Kid!” Charcoal rumbled at me, offering me an oversized thumbs-up even as a woman next to him smacked him.

Himiko giggled and bounced, doing interesting things to her chest. “Thanks! I think he did pretty well, too!”

More than one of the sidekicks and heroes snorted at that, while I just shook my head and kicked off my shoes while I headed towards the practice mat. Himiko shook off the last of the mud from her transformation and bounced over to meet me...

Then stopped cold as she caught sight of me.

Her eyes dilated, her throat clenched...

...and she took a step back.

“What's wrong?” Fuyumi asked, her eyes narrowed as she watched the two of us closely.

“Uhh... he wins,” Himiko stated, pointing at me weakly. “I... um, it's not really fair?”

I raised an eyebrow and cocked my head. “Was it fair for you to pick on all the heroes and sidekicks? At least you know what's coming.”

Muttering broke out in the small crowd as Himiko pouted at me.

I sighed and rolled my eyes, then turned to Endeavor. “Sir, do you have a pair of handcuffs and ankle cuffs? Apparently my girlfriend needs a handicap.”

If anything, Himiko's pout got worse.

Endeavor's eyebrows rose, but he nodded slowly, “I'm willing to allow it if you're that confident in yourself, Bootstrap.”

“Endeav-” Fuyumi began, opening her mouth to protest.

“Hot Ice,” he interrupted, removing the restraints from his belt. “This will either be an informative lesson on the subject of pride for young Bootstrap or a lesson on how dangerous even a restrained villain can be for the rest of the agency. Either way, I am curious.”

His daughter frowned, but nodded slowly as he lobbed the cuffs underhand to her and she approached me. Without prompting, I placed both of my hands behind my back, and she paused again, staring at me.

“Only way to make it fair,” I stated in an undertone.

“I really hope you know what you're doing,” she muttered, kneeling down to cuff my ankles.

I tested both sets as she moved away, nodding as I firmly planted the length of the chain in my head. Turning to Himiko, I nodded. “Ready.”

Himiko watched me warily, her instincts too good to allow her guard to drop as she stepped back on the mat. “Ready.”

“Rules are knockout or capitulation,” Fuyumi stated, looking between us. “No serious injury or I'll throw you in the holding cells to cool off.”

Both Himiko and I nodded, not taking our eyes off each other.

“Begin!”

Himiko shot forward, all pretense of play gone as she leaped to make a straight punch towards my midsection and put me out of the fight as quickly as possible. Even with all of the instincts, talent, and skill she possessed... even with how it had grown as she'd learned from the various heroes and sidekicks during the last two hours...

She was still inexperienced.

I dropped back, my fingers spread as I caught my weight, dispersed on ten different points before my palms took the lessened impact. It was a move that, on concrete or asphalt would have resulted in bruised or broken fingers, but the padding of the mat helped.

Now effectively on my back, my feet swung up in a vertical line.

Himiko's eyes widened and she shifted to the side-

-but I wasn't aiming for her directly.

My feet spread as much as they were able, the chain between them caught her extended wrist, my feet crossing as I flowed with the motion of my kick and her strike. My ankle cuffs pulled her along as my legs completed their upward arc and kept going, only releasing their grip on her arm when I had moved past the point where they were directly over my head.

Himiko went flying to the far end of the mat, landing in a messy and surprised jumble.

I continued the motion and rolled into a flip, curling my body in a brief moment at the apex of my jump to let my hands slide under my ass, past my legs, and over my shackled feet.

Landing with my hands in front of me now, I popped my neck and worked my limbs.

David Cain... I hope you're burning in hell, but your lessons will be well-used.

“Well?” I prompted Himiko. “You were frustrated I didn't take you seriously the other day. This is your chance.”

Yellow cat's eyes stared at me as I bounced lightly on the balls of my feet.

Himiko whimpered.

…

Todoroki Enji sighed as he threw back a cup of sake and relaxed for a brief moment of peace and quiet in his lounger at home. In the kitchen, he could hear Shoko beginning to set up the kitchen for dinner and he knew that if he didn't get up and confront her soon, she would make the entire meal by herself.

He just... needed a moment.

“At least I don't have to worry about the problematic elements hazing Hitoshi now,” he muttered, shaking his head.

~~~

Here we are! I had to go down a rabbit hole looking some stuff up for a future chapter and, well... it turned into a hell of a wiki-walk. But I think I've got the info I need for both this and another project now.

This chapter features a confirmation of what many people already guessed regarding Hitoshi's appearance at the training session with Fuyumi. I think it turned out well, and is a return to form to a slightly longer chapter as you've been getting.

Next up for the weekend... will probably be more Mind Games. Probably. I'm putting together something else that I might get done before then and the winner of the Awesome Tier poll this month will be Entrepreneurial Spirit. So we'll get to look in on what Nova is doing as well.

Hope everyone enjoys the chapter and is having a great week! Thank you again for all of your support!

Mind Games - Chapter 23

Here we are! I had to go down a rabbit hole looking some stuff up for a future chapter and, well... it turned into a hell of a wiki-walk. But I think I've got the info I need for both this and another project now.

This chapter features a confirmation of what many people already guessed regarding Hitoshi's appearance at the training session with Fuyumi. I think it turned out well, and is a return to form to a slightly longer chapter as you've been getting.

Next up for the weekend... will probably be more Mind Games. Probably. I'm putting together something else that I might get done before then and the winner of the Awesome Tier poll this month will be Entrepreneurial Spirit. So we'll get to look in on what Nova is doing as well.

Hope everyone enjoys the chapter and is having a great week! Thank you again for all of your support!

The New Ron - Chapter 40

“The name's Stoppable.” I paused, raising an eyebrow to myself in the mirror. “Ron Stoppable.”

“Sean Connery, you are not,” Kim smirked, looking me over as she plucked a few pieces of lint from my suit.

“I thought I pulled off the accent pretty well,” I replied, my voice rising to mock-offense.

Kim rolled her eyes. “Uh-huh. Well, Mr. Secret Agent Man, I think you're good to go. It looks like this might be the last outing for this suit, though.”

“It does feel a little tight here and there,” I nodded, extending one of my feet and watching the pant leg ride up just a bit too far. “How's your dress feeling?”

“Just as swanky as the last time I wore it, but... like you said, a little tight here and there,” Kim hummed as she continued to do... woman-things to my clothes in a vain attempt to make them fit or look better.

 “In the chest in particular, huh?” I asked dryly, looking her over.

It was a sleek black number that had been a gift from a high-class socialite we'd saved once upon a time last year. In hindsight, it had been a pretty obvious ploy to dodge owing Kim a favor, but the dress and suit we'd gotten out of it were a cut above what our parents would have been comfortable paying for and they'd helped us blend in for several missions and dinner invites.

Which was something that the series never showed...

Kim and I weren't exactly socialites ourselves, being grounded suburbanite teenagers firmly in the upper-middle-class for all that it mattered, but we so regularly interacted with the rich and powerful that it would be a massive snub to refuse every invite we received.

Parties, though, unlike missions had firm rules.

Firstly, no school nights. Full stop. The 'rents just wouldn't allow us flying to New York or San Fran to attend a millionaire's soiree if they weren't being targeted by a mad scientist or some type of mutant monster if we had school the next day.

Not for the last time, I was sure, I recognized that the Possible and Stoppable clans had strange priorities.

Second, no alcohol. At all. Not even wine coolers, near-beer, or other super-light beverages. That was a rule that, admittedly, Kim and I had... bent once or twice, more out of ignorance than any willing conspiracy. Still, we were American teenagers and both in families that weren't quite teatotalers, but came close. So regardless of how puritanical it seemed by other cultures, Kim and I tried to abstain as much as possible unless it would be unspeakably rude to refuse.

Third, we kept each other in line of sight as much as possible. Again, Kim and I had bent this rule due to necessity, but largely stuck close to it. I suppose it said something that we likely obeyed this one even more than the one about alcohol. While it was strange to consider, I often felt safer around Drakken and Shego than some of the 'very important people' we'd been introduced to at the parties we'd attended.

It really puts Ron's hostility towards Kim's potential romantic targets in perspective when you consider the smarmy sacks of shit who've hit on her.

Most of them, at least, were the teenage children of the elites we'd come to rub shoulders with.

Most of them.

A few of them seemed honestly interested, but the majority very obviously considered Kim Possible to be a notch in their belt or a one-night stand. The ones who were easily a decade older than Kim likely considered worse.

There were other rules in addition to those three, especially about keeping in contact, but those were the big ones.

“And the butt,” Kim admitted, blushing as she self-consciously slid a hand over her backside. “Ugh, I'm going to have to ask mom for a shopping trip soon.”

I considered what I was about to say, then decided to bite the bullet and accept it as an inevitability. Dating two girls at the same time, both of whom were on the popular side of the equation and, therefore, liked to dress the part...

“I could be convinced to tag along,” I stated slowly, Kim's green eyes blinking as what I was offering sank in. “I'm a growing boy too, so there's a bunch of stuff I need to pick up as well.”

A lot of my clothes were still 'legacy items' in one form or another and, even if some of Kim's good taste in fashion had rubbed off on Ron over the years... his wardrobe still needed a lot of work. Too much of it was, frankly, juvenile. Points where deserved, though, those shirts were very comfortable and I'd be keeping a few of them for house-wear. I just didn't need the full stock of two or three dozen that Ron had squirreled away. All but a handful, along with stuff that just no longer fit my more muscled frame, were going to a Goodwill or equivalent whenever I actually got around to boxing everything up.

“You really mean that?” Kim asked, eyes wide and shining as she grinned. “You, Ron Stoppable, are offering to come shopping with me?”

I sighed deeply. “I need clothes, you need clothes, and I should at least try to pretend I'm an attentive boyfriend.”

“Plenty of the girls on the squad bitch about their boyfriends never coming shopping,” Kim informed me bluntly. “It's like they're scared or something.”

“Shopping for clothes is a losing proposition for guys,” I informed Kim with a shake of my head.

Kim blinked. “Oh? How so?”

“Men's fashion is a lot simper than women's, first off. So we're mostly aiming for comfort rather than appearance. Looks-wise, almost anything goes that isn't too loud or too plaid. Bonus points if it has your favorite brand of whatever on it.” I stopped briefly in my explanation, reaching for my bow tie and beginning to wrestle it into place. “That means that when men go shopping, we're not really interested in the clothes or colors or styles... we're looking for something that fits, is reasonably tough, and won't give us a rash. For most guys, shopping isn't a fun activity one does with friends, it's a chore. A means to an end so we don't end up indecent one day.”

Kim sucked in a breath. “That... makes a lot of sense.”

“Not done yet,” I informed her as I continued trying to tie the stupid thing around my neck. “Fashion is also usually a girl's thing. Paying too much attention to your appearance, knowing too much about clothing... those are traditionally pretty... well, effeminate things.”

“It frustrates me that I can't say you're wrong about that,” Kim muttered irritably, her eyes narrowed. “Being able to look good isn't just a girl's thing! We like guys who don't look trashy!”

“I feel like the Mad Dog has been around enough cheerleaders to know that you girls also like guys who do look trashy,” I commented idly.

“You'll lose those privileges if I tell the girls you're listening in on our gender's trade secrets,” Kim replied with a smirk.

I snorted. “Anyway... yeah, so if a guy willingly goes shopping and extends actual effort picking out clothes, they're emasculated by their peers. If they don't go shopping and expend effort, they're bitched at by girls who care about that stuff for being oblivious.”

I paused and turned to Kim. “No offense.”

The redhead narrowed her gaze, but was smirking still. “Some taken, but... yeah, I can get that. It sucks, but I understand it. I guess if you're going to let me in on the guy secrets you can keep listening in on the girl ones, too. Just don't tell other boys at school, okay?”

I nodded absently. “Because they'd use their understanding of your cliques, fads, and interpersonal relationships to manipulate the cheerleaders for their own nefarious purposes.”

Kim blinked, cocking her head and looking at me oddly as she leaned against the door frame to her closet. “Yeah, they would. Thanks for understanding, Ron.”

Shrugging, I tried to play it off casually. “Don't worry about it, I just like using the word 'nefarious' in casual conversation. It's fun.”

Tension in her shoulders eased and Kim giggled. “Now, if only Tara would finish getting ready!”

“Almost done!” The other girl called from down the wooden staircase. “Bathroom's all yours, Kim!”

“-and that's my cue!” Kim stated, picking up a bag of cosmetics and heading towards the stairs, stopping only to plant a kiss on my cheek. “That's for being sweet and insightful.”

 “I aim to please,” I replied with a grin.

 As Kim hurried off towards the bathroom to make herself ready for our night out, I heard her gasp and shower Tara with compliments. Internally, I reflected that it was probably for the best that Jim and Tim were still laid up downstairs. Both of them only had hairline fractures, but they'd still be wearing the casts for another two weeks minimum, which meant they were largely confined to the couch downstairs. Even Tim, who'd broken his arm instead of his leg, was 'grounded' from their shared room in the name of preventing them from making a bigger mess in the meantime and injuring themselves further.

Which meant Kim got to quietly rejoice in having her own personal bathroom for a month.

“You're a vision of loveliness, Tara,” I smiled as she climbed the short flight of stairs.

The blond girl giggled and blushed. “You really think so? I don't have anything fancy like you and Kim. This was just something Mom bought me for a cousin's wedding a few months back.”

It definitely wasn't on par with Kim's slinky 'little black dress,' but that didn't make it anything less than beautiful. Sky blue with white accents, it was a bit more modest with embellishments that hid the fact it clung to her form fairly well. The bust-line was a little risque with how low it dipped, but Tara wore it well enough to call it stylish rather than... well, anything else.

“Definitely looking good,” I grinned and approached her, pulling her into a soft hug to ensure I wouldn't wrinkle her dress. “Absolutely beautiful.”

Tara giggled and hugged me back with equal tenderness. “Careful, you'll make me tear up and ruin my makeup.”

“That would be absolutely awful,” I smiled at her. “The only time you're allowed to cry is when I'm spanking you.”

“But you haven't spanked me!” Tara squeaked.

“Not yet!” I replied with a grin, poking her forehead lightly. “So no crying, right?”

Tara stared, then began giggling wildly, almost doubling over. “You're such a dork, Ron Stoppable!”

“If the hero thing ever falls through, I was thinking about dorking professionally,” I confided in her, making the girl snort and spaz out in more giggles.

“You're such a big dork you probably could make a career out of it,” Tara admitted, only a pleasant flush to her cheeks hinting at the recent bout of humor as she checked her watch. “Let's go ahead and head downstairs. Bonnie said her mom should be dropping her off soon.”

“And that's something to look forward to,” I nodded obediently, my voice as dry as the desert.

“You promised you'd behave,” Tara pouted at me, crossing her arms.

I raised my hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, I'm behaving! This is me behaved!”

Tara gave me a lingering stare with a frown, her expression doubtful.

“Seriously. You think Bonnie is going to be okay with Kim and I just letting her bulldoze over us. You know her. She thrives on the witty repartee. If she doesn't get it from us, she's going to piss off someone with a lot of money where we're going.” My explanation made Tara blink, then frown.

“You're a lot smarter than you let on most of the time, Ron,” Tara commented idly.

“I mean... Kim's got her thing and I've got mine,” I shrugged. “She sees the best in people and I... well, I see the other things.”

Tara's look turned soft. “That's a depressing way to look at it.”

“I call it pragmatic,” I replied with a grin. “Besides, if what I see lets me help protect the people I care about... that's a happy thought, isn't it?”

Tara breathed in, her expression lightening as her eyebrows rose. “How in the hell do people think you're a loser?”

I winked. “Because I let them?”

Tara blinked, staring at me. “You...”

Flipping up one finger, I brought it to my lips and gave her a small smirk. “Kim gets it, a little bit at least, but don't let other people in on the joke, okay? Though I wouldn't be surprised if Bonnie has figured something out...”

“You know... I think you and Bonnie would have made great friends if you'd met her before Kim,” Tara commented oddly.

This time it was my turn to pause in surprise, cocking my head as the thought percolated. “Huh... now that's a thought. Promise that I'll be there when you pitch it to Bonnie?”

I wonder if that's actually happened a few times out there in the wild, wild multiverse?

It wasn't as though I didn't know there were other worlds out there. There was, as I recall, an episode where one of Drakken's inventions allowed Kim, Ron, himself, and Shego to jump through various television channels. That, plus my own experiences... well, I could entirely imagine a world where Bonnie Rockwaller and Ron Stoppable became the best of friends.

Would that Ron naturally be closer to 'me' than a Ron who grew up with Kim as his friend?

It was... certainly a thought.

“You're horrible!” Tara giggled, the mood broken.

“-don't you brats dare get anything on me!”

Both Tara and I sighed as we heard a voice echo through the house, simultaneously turning towards the stairway to belatedly descend to meet up with Bonnie.

“Ron, you got that?” Kim called from the bathroom.

“In the process of getting,” I confirmed.

“And helping!” Tara called back.

“Be out in five!” Kim replied.

Thankfully, we arrived to see that Mrs. Dr. Possible had Bonnie sitting in a chair at the dining table instead of allowing her to linger in the living room.

“Whoa, lookin' sharp Ron!” Tim shouted, waving his good arm.

“Oooh! Tara's looking pretty!” Jim chimed in. “Ron and Tara-”

“Sitting in a tree!” Tim caught the rhythm.

“K-I-S-S-” Jim returned, before Tara rolled her eyes and rose up on her toes and gave me a quick peck on the lips, silencing them.

“Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go check my lipstick,” Tara smiled at the stunned boys, and I just grinned as I followed her out.

“Finally!” Bonnie sighed as we entered the dining room. “Let's get to this party already!”

I caught Anne Possible's eye and gave her a quick nod of thanks as she rolled her own green orbs in exasperation. “Kim's going to be a few more minutes, actually. I know my way around the Possible kitchen, though, can I get you anything to drink?”

“Water! I don't want to risk anything getting on my dress!” Bonnie demanded imperiously as Tara stepped forward to run interference.

“As you wish, your majesty,” I mock-bowed and turned towards the kitchen area.

“Let's hope Kim finishes up fast,” Anne muttered to me out the side of her mouth as I passed.

“You and me both,” I replied in an undertone.

A ding on my team communicator alerted me to the arrival of another piece of the puzzle as well. “Looks like our ride is here, too.”

~~~

Okay, this one is just a short chapter to bridge the events before the rich-people party with the Seniors. I'm not entirely happy about it, but I'm willing to see what people think of it.

If there's any feedback, I'll consider a little revision on this one.

Otherwise, of course, I hope everyone enjoys it.

Winners for this month are Mind Games, of course, with Industrious taking up second place, and The Hand We're Dealt bringing up a surprising third. The New Ron got barely beaten out and took fourth, while Where Your God Is took last place at fifth.

I'll have the Awesome Tier poll up in a few hours as well.

The New Ron - Chapter 40

Okay, this one is just a short chapter to bridge the events before the rich-people party with the Seniors. I'm not entirely happy about it, but I'm willing to see what people think of it.

If there's any feedback, I'll consider a little revision on this one.

Otherwise, of course, I hope everyone enjoys it.

Winners for this month are Mind Games, of course, with Industrious taking up second place, and The Hand We're Dealt bringing up a surprising third. The New Ron got barely beaten out and took fourth, while Where Your God Is took last place at fifth.

I'll have the Awesome Tier poll up in a few hours as well.

Mind Games - Chapter 22

Kirishima Eijiro fiddled with the settings on his computer, frowning thoughtfully. “Let's see, Hitoshi said that the best way to get the bug out of the audio was...”

Pushing the little slider as far as it would go, he saved the settings and pulled the mic up. “Testing, testing, one-two-three... Crimson Riot is the best hero!”

“I don't know, I'm still partial to Ryukyu.”

Eijiro blinked, turning and slapping his face with his hand. “Ugh, I left the door open again, didn't I, Ma?”

Flashing him a sharp-toothed grin, she nodded in his doorway. “That you did, boy. Gearing up for another stream?”

Eijiro hummed, stretching. “Yeah, Hitoshi's finally got things with his agency sorted out, so he's going to be on for an hour or two with me tonight.”

Kirishima Reiko's smile broadened. “So you're up to given names already, huh?”

The teenager felt his cheeks heat, “Ma, come off it. He's got a girlfriend already, it's not like that. Hitoshi... he's just... informal with friends. I don't think he's had many.”

His mother's smile faded and her expression sobered as her son's tone took a turn for the contemplative and melancholic. Eijiro himself frowned. It was one of those things that Hitoshi had occasionally mentioned in the more academic side of their hero training. 'Conspicuous by its absence.' It wasn't a phrase he'd been familiar with before that, but a neat one to have in his pocket for special occasions.

Occasions like noticing his friend had never spoken about his own friends even once in the months they'd been hanging out together.

Not even when prompted.

Eijiro nudged Hitoshi with an elbow. “Oh, c'mon man! You've gotta' have at least one or two stories from school. I told you about the time me and my buds made fools of ourselves at the talent show during the cultural festival last year. Gimme sumthin!”

Hitoshi frowned as he leaned back against the park table they were taking a break on. “Hmm... I guess there was this time last year two guys got in a fight over a girl...”

His stories were always like that.

Nothing that included him, just events that had happened around him. It was as if he was a silent observer to his own school life. Eijiro felt awkward about prying further, but the only thing he could really do was resolve to show Hitoshi all the perks of having a best bud that he'd missed out on!

It was the manly thing to do, after all!

“People judge by the kind of quirk you have, Eiji,” Reiko sighed, rubbing at her head. “Sometimes there’s something to it, I've seen a lot of really nasty quirks in my time, but usually it's more about the person than whatever they can do with their power.”

“Hitoshi's good people, Ma,” Eijiro nodded, smiling. “You've heard the way he talks.”

Reiko snorted, grinning again. “I have. And I've seen the effect he's had on you, which is why I'll remind you again that you should bring him by for dinner. Maybe he'll wise up and dump that girlfriend once he's had a taste of your mom's home-cooking!”

This time Eijiro felt like his cheeks were actually on fire, not just hot. “Ugh, Ma! Just... I'll see about it, but cut the jokes while he's here, alright? I don't even know if he'd be cool with knowing about that, okay?”

The muscular woman sniffed pointedly. “If he's not, then he's not the type of person you should be associating with, Eiji. Much less the type who should want to be a hero.”

Eijiro opened his mouth to respond, but his mother shook her head and held up a hand. “I know, I know... just, be careful. Even if he's got an unlucky quirk, don't pin your hopes too high on him. I don't want to see you hurt.”

Eijiro chewed on that advice for a moment. “That's why you want me to bring him over, isn't it? To see you and Mom and find out what he thinks?”

Reiko blinked, then gave him an assessing look. “Huh, well he can't be all that bad if he's finally got you using your brain.”

Eijiro rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah... I'll... I'll see about maybe next week? He really has been busy.”

Reiko nodded. “I'll see about asking Suki to buy some good stuff for next week then. I'll let you get onto the streaming stuff.”

“Thanks, Ma. I'll try to remember to close the door next time,” he called as it shut behind her.

Sighing, he rubbed at his face before reaching for the mask and slipping it on. The cursor for Bootstrap was already lit up, so all he had to do was join this time instead of starting it up.

“-and it looks like Buster's joining us now,” Hitoshi called out across the channel as Eijiro joined, the other masked boy stretching languidly that hinted at the defined musculature-

No, Bad Eijiro. He's taken.

“Yo Party People, who's ready to get Manly!?” Kirishima shouted into his mic, flexing as much as he could while still seated in his chair.

Hitoshi's head dropped to his desk, impacting the wood with a solid thunk. “Oh my gods. It was a joke. I can't believe you're sticking with that as your intro phrase.”

Eijiro laughed and scratched at the back of his head, inwardly reflecting that the best part about full-face masks was that no one could see you blush. “I-is it that bad, really?”

NerfHerder: It is. It really is.

Bobox42: Nah, dood, keep it. You can pull it off.

Alskdfj: Hate to agree with Nerf up there, but it is really bad. If you were less of a cinnamon roll, it wouldn't work.

Bobox42: But he is. So it works.

Yukkkun: Not a cinnamon roll, Buster reminds me of a puppy. Like a corgi or a terrier. Adorable.

Kerry: Buster = Doggo. New headcanon.

SunrakuRizzer: No. Buster = Best Doggo.

“Welp, that's not going away anytime soon,” Hitoshi chuckled. “Oh, know what? I'll take a reasonable request from the first person who uploads Puppy-Buster art.”

“Noooo...” Eijiro felt himself whine. “Aren't you the one who told me not to encourage them, Bootstrap? C'mon Dude!”

“Heh. I said not to encourage them when they're making fun of ME. I didn't say anything about you,” his friend gloated, leaning back and cradling his hands behind his head.

“You suck so much,” Eijiro muttered, unable to fight off the smile on his face and once again grateful for the mask. “Ugh! Okay, what are we supposed to be doing with this one, anyway?”

“For all my many sins, I have been burdened with the immense weight of announcing we will be doing a karaoke episode for the stream in a week or two,” Hitoshi sighed audibly. “I'd say I didn't know what I've done to deserve this, but that would be a lie.”

“Aw, it won't be that bad, man! Karaoke's fun! I bet you'll sound great!” Eijiro cheered him on, playing the happy-go-lucky character Buster needed to be in order to properly foil Bootstrap's deadpan cynical melodrama. Admittedly, Kirishima found it a naturally-easy role to fall into, even if it was somewhat tiring throwing off the quieter side to his personality that had dominated his middle school life so far.

“Karaoke isn't about sounding good. It's about sounding terrible together,” Hitoshi replied so dryly that Eijiro had to laugh.

OMJezuz: Holy shit! Someone finally gets it! Praise be Bootstrap!

UTUTUT: I think that's another quote for the quote pit.

LOL365+/-1: Hey, are we just gonna let Bootstrap's first showing in a week go by without asking him about the internship!?

booty: Yeah! Woo! Internship news!

FlameFan86: What's Endeavor like?! Have you met him!?

“Oops, someone remembered why you haven't been around, Bootstrap,” Eijiro chuckled, his friend taking a put-upon pose as if the sudden influx of questions were literally weighing him down.

“Okay, yeah-yeah, I'll answer...” Hitoshi took a moment to compose himself in front of the camera, grabbing a bottle of one of those nasty energy drinks he'd been chugging lately and maneuvering his mask so he could draw from it through a straw.

“Endeavor's Agency... so, I've been there a week and there's a lot I can't talk about. In addition to active cases that I'm very, very peripherally involved in by virtue of filing paperwork for a few pro-heroes, there's also a lot that goes on with the Big Boss in relation to coordinating with government departments, foreign hero teams, and high-level stuff like that.” Hitoshi paused for effect as the chat was suitably appreciative. “So any questions like that? I'm going to either ignore or ridicule you over. You've been informed, enjoy the roast.”

CALLOUT: Fake. It's all fake. Now way some no-body is entering at Endeavor's Agency. Especially a shill like this fucker!

Dude-DOOD-Dude: Not this nut again.

HzelnutDonot: Bootstrap Buster Ban this guy PLEASE?!

Eijiro began to instinctively for the moderator functions Hitoshi had briefed him on, but the other teenager held up a hand.

“Now, now, just because someone's being an idiot I'm not going to ban them. I'm going to mock them. I'm especially going to make fun of them for thinking my photoshop skills are good enough to fake the pictures of me and Hot Ice or me and the three amigos.” Hitoshi took another pull from his neon sewer water before continuing lazily. “I'm also going to mock him for thinking that Endeavor wouldn't have sent a cease and desist order by now if I really was indulging in stupid bullsh-pit. Stupid Bullspit.”

“What's up, man? I've heard you say worse on the channel before,” Kirishima asked, unable to contain his curiosity.

Hitoshi sighed and rubbed at his exposed eyes. “So, yeah... one unfortunate part of being formally affiliated with the Endeavor Agency is that I had a sit-down last week with one of their press teams. I have been told – in no uncertain terms – that I am a naughty boy with a dirty potty mouth and need to clean up my act.”

Eijiro shuddered once, twice, then three times before exploding in laughter so hard he fell out of his chair. Proving that his friend's off-screen quirk training was working, his body reflexively hardened enough to easily take what might have been a bruising fall, leaving him free to continue rolling on the floor, laughing.

(.)(.): LOL ROLF even.

Touchette: ROFL literally. Look at Buster!

CALLOUT: Laugh all you want you sheeple! There's no way a shill like you is working with the Endeavor Agency! If you are they've truly joined the ranks of the FALLEN HEROES!

“While Buster is trying not to choke to death on his own laughter, I'll further say that I'm genuinely confused whether this guy – or girl, I don't discriminate – is an Endeavor Stan or just a complete whackjob.” Eijiro heard Hitoshi comment, driving more wheezing laughter from him. “Okay, okay, I'll stop with the jokes before I need to find a new streaming partner. You okay over there, Buster?”

Eijiro let out a few more breathless chuckles before gripping the side of his desk to slowly leverage himself up. “D-dude... you've got to warn me before you drop a bomb like that. Holy crap. They're really making you watch your mouth, huh?”

“That's what they told me to do, but I had to explain that I wear a full-face mask, so that makes it hard to watch my own mouth,” Hitoshi hit a key and a rimshot sounded, then canned laughter rang out.

Eijro laughed a bit, more at the overblown effect than the humor itself. “Okay, but for real, what's the internship stuff like?”

“Surprisingly boring?” Hitoshi offered with a shrug, raising his arms to emphasize the gesture. “A lot of it is down to my age. There's a lot of legalese and insurance stuff that prevents me from going out on patrol with anyone since I'm not part of a formal hero school. That means I'm stuck doing a lot of internal scut work and learning how the agency itself operates. Oh, and to answer the question, I have met Endeavor, but he cuts a very intimidating figure and I don't know how he'd react to a photo request.”

“Eh, fair,” Eijiro commented, even as a number of people in the chat started posting chicken emojis. “Anything else you can tell us?”

“Hmm... while I can't go out on patrol, I am going to do a physical assessment tomorrow to see if I'm in the kind of shape a hero needs to be in. Granted, I'm still in junior high so I don't need to do anything crazy like take down a seasoned hero in one-on-one combat or anything, but there will be some sparring involved.” Hitoshi paused, then snapped his fingers. “Oh, and I'm going to be getting my quirk reassessed!”

“Why's that?” Eijiro asked, putting his chin on one hand contemplatively, as if he didn't already know the answer to the question. “I thought you knew what your quirk did?”

“I mean, I did too!” Hitoshi replied, holding empty palms skyward. “But they're the pros and they said my quirk doesn't work like I think it does, so I'm gonna take their word for it. Apparently I missed a doctor's appointment a few years ago to spot any development problems with my quirk and that's bad juju.”

“Any chance you'll let us know what your quirk is, finally?” Eijiro asked teasingly, as he was supposed to do once every few streams to build up the hype, mystery, and frustration.

“Like I've said before... it's a psychic quirk. I can't say anything beyond that, especially now since it looks like I might need to testify a teeny-tiny bit in court?” Hitoshi rambled out, and the chat exploded.

CALLOUT: BULLSHIT-BULLSHIT-BULLSHIT!

Joy8881: Our boy's goin' ta court!? He in trouble?!

PauperPrince: Nah, he's a hero-wannabe. Odds are he psychic'd up some evidence.

Touchette: You bastard, you scared us there! Thout you were going to jail!

“Hmm... gotta' side with chat on this one, Boss,” Eijiro grinned, even if they couldn't see it. “That was bait.”

“It was. That was bait,” Hitoshi replied unashamedly. “PauperPrince has it right. I ran into a suspect under questioning and accidentally figured some stuff out, but that's literally all I can tell you. For the unlucky bas-er, PERSON assigned to watch my streams... please report to legal that I am obeying their edicts!”

Eijiro chuckled again and redirected the conversation. “So, what kind of songs do you wanna' sing at karaoke next week?”

“We'll probably leave a few slots open for a top five vote so that chat can pick the most embarrassing or popular stuff they can think of, but for my choices? Two hundred year old Disney songs.”

Kirishima blinked as his phone vibrated and he pulled it from his pocket.

Pink Trouble: So when's the karaoke?

The worst part was that Hitoshi ended up being all for it.

…

Todoroki Fuyumi had not slept well.

She hadn't slept poorly or anything, just... not well.

She was a Pro-Hero, after all, and knew how to compartmentalize well enough to get enough rest to be functional the next day. It wasn't the healthiest outlook, she knew, but part of being a hero meant putting the needs of others before your own, at least to a certain extent.

'I'd rather be functional than healthy.'

But only to a certain extent.

And Shinso Hitoshi was treading such a line so thinly that she couldn't help but feel that he was going to cut himself on it, sooner or later.

“I swear to the gods, kid. You better be getting at least four hours of sleep,” Fuyumi growled, then shook it off as she threw down her morning cup of coffee perhaps a little too quickly. Even then, the almost-scalding liquid didn't do any damage; one of the things she had her father's side of the quirk she'd inherited to thank for.

Most cryokinetic quirks and their users didn't respond to excessive heat well.

Fuyumi, though? She had to walk into a blazing building before she'd break a sweat on temperature alone.

Hot Ice.

A name she'd earned.

 Today, she'd taken a break from the costume, though. Instead of the armored firefighter's coat, helmet, and boots, she was wearing a set of sweats over some of the better elastic supports she had. Having put in a patrol earlier, she had to admit it was nice – if unusual – to be walking around the Agency out of 'uniform.'

She'd also swapped a shift or two around and gotten the 'three amigos' as Shinso had referred to them on his stream last night, in on the action for today.

Even if they were a B-Team by the agency's classifications, they had the most experience with dealing with Bootstrap and she wanted the familiar faces on tap given how many new ones she was introducing to the kid today. Which... wasn't really about Bootstrap himself so much as the rest of the agency, really.

Shinso was the new wonder-kid, by all accounts, and it was rubbing a few people the wrong way. She wasn't sure if he knew it, but his early admittance to the internship program, then being offered a contract at fourteen as a 'reward' for involving himself in a human trafficking case in an act perilously close to vigilantism...

Well, to the outside observer, it reeked of favoritism.

Granted, it was somewhat unbelievable that the kid was fluent in over ten languages at the age of fourteen and increasing that count weekly now that he had access to their resources. Or that the kid had the kind of photographic memory usually only found in bad fiction. Or that he had the kind of traumatic backstory that was both horrifying and utterly astounding it hadn't turned him into the worst kind of villain.

The kind that had a legitimate grievance.

“Hey, Hot Ice, they find the infiltrator yet?” Brazier asked in a low voice as he walked over, the man looking a lot more casual in a t-shirt and baggy pants.

...and to top the day off, she had this to deal with.

“No such luck,” she replied, her tone equally soft as she looked around the room. “I understand the need for a penetration test every now and then given our government contracts, but I wish Da-er, Endeavor wouldn't pull this on us last-minute.”

“Isn't that kind of the point?” Charcoal rumbled, crossing his arms over a wife-beater stretched to its absolute limit by his gigantic size. “To catch us off-guard?”

“Shitty day to do it. Normally we wouldn't be caught up in the mess,” Onibi hummed, stretching in her own gym outfit even as Fuyumi sent a few glares towards the more obvious agency workers eyeing up the woman.

Really, you could at least wear something over that halter-top.

“Any day would probably be a shitty day,” Fuyumi sighed and ran a hand through her hair.

“Wow, everyone's here for little old me?”

Turning to the person who asked the question, Fuyumi's breath caught in her throat. Without the loose-fitting costume and clad in a pair of martial arts gi-pants with a tight piece of black exercise clothing that did precisely nothing to hide the chiseled abs on display or the sculpted physique of his arms. Seeing her looking, he flashed her a confident smirk as he paced slowly over to their group.

“Damn, that is one amazing cut of meat,” Emiko – Onibi – whispered in her ear.

“He's fourteen,” Fuyumi whispered, outraged and shocked.

“And, last I checked, you're nineteen. Tell me that isn't an age gap worth crossing,” Emiko rejoined, grinning widely.

Fuyumi took a deep breath and shrugged Emiko off, shaking her head to clear it. Her first instinct was to reply with the fact that Hitoshi had a girlfriend, but that would imply that she'd consider it even if he didn't, which she wouldn't. Even if the laws around the age of consent in Japan were... well, they had more holes in them than swiss cheese, really.

Some quirks gave people unfortunate appearances, after all, and other quirks gave different people extremely young appearances.

Even before someone got into the weeds with the actual application of laws, her position as a figure of authority, and the existence of the famously-saucy Midnight... well, she could. In theory. If she wanted to. Even if word got out, it would be one of the less salacious news stories of any given cycle. The worst part would be her father's disappointment.

That would sting even more than the disappointment she felt in herself.

Because Hitoshi had enough decency to turn down an easy cheesecake shot that the PR department had tried to pressure her into doing.

He deserved better than being treated like a notch on her lipstick case.

...even if there were few enough notches there to begin with.

Mentally setting aside her frosty love life, Fuyumi smiled as she approached Hitoshi. “Glad you could make it on time. I hope the security checks weren't too bad?”

Bootstrap shook his head, an amused smile on his face. “Nothing awful. Why'd they double-down today?”

Fuyumi sighed. “Don't tell anyone, but we're having a penetration test done today. Apparently they're an infiltrator that's going to be running around the agency today at some time. Department heads and active pro-heroes are on alert, but the rank and file haven't been made aware of the test.”

Bootstrap's eyebrows rose. “Huh. So, a test then? What do you get if you pass?”

Huffing a quiet laugh, she replied. “Well, first we don't have to sit through more security briefings, that's a prize in and of itself. Then whoever actually makes the catch gets a bonus and time off.”

Hitoshi whistled lowly, laughing. “Well, for what it's worth, I hope you catch them.”

“I'd like to, believe me,” Fuyumi sighed, drooping slightly. “It would really help my rep in the agency as someone other than just the boss' daughter and I'd love a bit of time off. Anyway... where's your girlfriend, anyway? I thought you said she was coming?”

“She ended up not feeling well today,” Hitoshi frowned and looked away, obviously a bit embarrassed. “I think... her time might have come early, this month.”

Fuyumi grimaced in sympathy. “Yeah, I could see why she might not be up for physical exercise like this. Still... if she really is interested in a job like this, she'll need to learn to work through the pain sometimes.”

“I'll talk to her about it. Maybe we could reschedule?” Hitoshi asked hopefully, an uneasy grin on his face.

“Maybe. I've gotten really busy with the trafficking case and arranging your early license, but we might be able to make something work. Honestly, I'm relieved though. Given what you implied yesterday... I'm just glad it's a normal problem keeping her away and not something more seriously.”

There was a flash of emotion too quick to catch on Hitoshi's face, but it was gone before it really registered. “Yeah... me too. Ah, by the way, do you know if the infiltrator is supposed to be doing something too? Like, does she have an objective to finish before you catch her?”

Fuyumi frowned. “Why do you ask?”

Hitoshi paused, then smirked. “Well... wouldn't I get the bonus too? Now that I'm under contract? Plus, I could take Himiko out somewhere nice with a little time off.”

The white-haired girl barked a laugh. “Hah! I suppose you would. Yeah... the infiltrator is supposed to get something from each of the Pro-Heroes' offices to prove that they were there and, apparently, they get a bonus if they leave actual marks with a permanent marker somewhere on a hero's body.”

Hitoshi nodded slowly. “That's... difficult. Well, maybe I'll catch them and give you the credit?”

Fuyumi rolled her eyes. “If you catch them, you deserve the credit, but don't get too bit a head just because you're our newest prodigy. Now, let's get started!”

~~~

...and here it is! The last chapter of March! In the early hours of April 1st!

No Fooling here, though! Or maybe there is?

Anyway, hope everyone enjoys the new chapter and there should be some The New Ron out in a few days. After the poll completes, we'll see what shocking and totally unexpected new front-runner gets the most chapters this month.

Thank you again for all of your support. It really means a lot to me.

*P.S. - Yes, I know there are typos in the chat-post sections. Those are intended as a mark of authenticity.

Mind Games - Chapter 22

...and here it is! The last chapter of March! In the early hours of April 1st!

No Fooling here, though! Or maybe there is?

Anyway, hope everyone enjoys the new chapter and there should be some The New Ron out in a few days. After the poll completes, we'll see what shocking and totally unexpected new front-runner gets the most chapters this month.

Thank you again for all of your support. It really means a lot to me.

April Favoritism! - Advanced Tiers

Second Verse, Same as the First.

April Favoritism!

Alright, here comes April!

I'm still working on that last chapter of Mind Games from March, which should be posted in a few hours. But I decided to go ahead and kick off the new polls in the meantime.

I'll also change things up a little bit with the vote and see how much support The Hand We're Dealt has in the mainline voting instead of just the Awesome Tier.

For those of you who are new, this poll decides which project gets the most attention this month from me and, therefore, the most chapter. I may stray a little bit here or there, but I have a pretty good track record on keeping to the results.

Thanks again for all your support and I hope to see you sticking around for another month!

Mind Games - Chapter 21

“-but she just casually shrugged off our offer and then jumped away across the windowsills of the building!” Brazier cried, finishing his story as he threw his hands up in agitation.

“I mean, props for the cool exit, but still... vigilante shenanigans, not cool,” Onibi muttered.

Charcoal simply nodded along with the story.

“Uh-huh,” I hummed, my fingers dancing across the keyboard as I continued to work on my own project. “And you decided to come tell me this... why?”

Charcoal snorted and Onibi grinned as Brazier crossed his arms, looking down on me from the other side of my desk.

I sighed. Right, office politics. “I honestly don't mean to be insulting, really I don't. It's simply that this isn't my case. Moreover, I don't have any experience dealing with vigilantes. In point of fact, actually, I don't have much experience dealing with... well, anything, really.”

The self-deprecation at the end, coupled with the faux-helpless shrug took the fire out of Brazier's stance as he subconsciously mirrored the way my arms had spread open, releasing the tight hold he had on his own posture.

Hmm, another data point in the little experiment I'm running. Productively channeling the Sidereal's manipulative tendencies is an interesting challenge.

“I know, but you have good information last time and we're kind of running into a brick wall as far as this girl is concerned,” Brazier sighed, rubbing at his face.

Charcoal rumbled, “Anything would help, kid.”

I sighed and leaned back, flexing my muscles and generating a series of sharp pops in my vertebrae, then tilting my head to the right and left to do the same there. With a last longing glance towards the work I'd rather be doing, I turned my gaze directly towards the small band of heroes. “Okay, she gave you an email? Have you tried contacting her? Maybe get someone down in IT to see if they could package a worm into an attachment or find her IP?”

Onibi nodded. “They gave it their best shot, but the email is internationally-registered in some European country we'd never heard of. They also said something about a 'ghost-server' or whatever. It got really technical.”

I hummed and rubbed at my chin. “Okay, so she knows what she's doing on the tech-side. That's rare enough. High-end martial skills, good physical fitness, young age, at least some degree of technical knowledge...”

Making a show of mulling over the list of skills, I frowned. “And she's a vigilante.”

Brazier narrowed his gaze. “That's why we're here, yes. She's a vigilante. She's breaking the law.”

“I'm more concerned with the fact that she's in the occupation to begin with than the legal ramifications,” I replied, drumming my fingers on the desk.

“What do you mean?” Onibi asked, preempting whatever Brazier was about to say – which was likely impolite – given the way his mouth snapped shut and he glared at her.

“She has marketable skills, training, intelligence, shows forethought and planning, wants to keep a dialogue open between her and a nominally hostile force intent on bringing her in for flagrantly violating the law,” I stated thoughtfully. “You don't see that in... most people, let alone ones her – our – apparent ages.”

“Kids are pretty stupid,” Charcoal stated, his voice like gravel, then turned to me. “No offense.”

“Some taken,” I replied, shooting him a grin to take the stingsing out of it. “Anyway... my point is, is that something doesn't add up. I see two – no, three, possible scenarios. The first is that she's either naturally intelligent or has some form of secondary application of her quirk that enhances her thinking process and allows her to perform at a level of skill and insight that is inconsistent with her age. In this scenario she's ultimately still young and inexperienced and treating this entire thing like a game to show off how smart she is.”

“That doesn't fit with her leaving before the press arrived,” Brazier pointed out.

“True,” I nodded. “But she's not showing off for them, she's showing off for you. The heroes.”

All three blinked as that theory sank in.

“It's conceivable she might have a grudge against heroes in particular or the broader concept of authority,” I speculated. “She understands how the system works, but doesn't want to involve herself in it because of ideological reasons. She's using her power to do good, but on her own terms and tweaking your nose in the process. Tactics like giving you an email address are as much about being able to alert you to a potential crisis as they are being able to rub your face in her being better than you.”

“So your first idea is that she's a prodigy with a chip on her shoulder,” Onibi sighed. “What are the other two?”

“My second hypothesis is that you can't find anything on her because she's not local,” I replied. “Even if she's visibly Japanese, that doesn't mean much in this day and age. My advice would be to prod her with a foreign language or two the next time you see her, attempt to determine if she has any habits or mannerisms that might point to an overseas education or upbringing. If she's just some Japanese girl with an ax to grind against the system and a desire to do good, you'll be looking at the very rich or the very poor for her to have slipped through the cracks so completely. If she's foreign-born, though, there will be a paper trail somewhere out there.”

Brazier was nodding now, his shoulders relaxing their tension. “Okay, that-that's good. That's useful. Contacting foreign hero agencies is tedious, but it might just net us something. What's the third idea?”

“I had dinner last night with my girlfriend,” I stated, raising a hand to forestall any objections, “and her parents. Her mother has a quirk called 'Enhanced Blood.' It gives her a slight regeneration factor, keeps her looking fifteen years younger than she would otherwise, and at a high degree of physical fitness with minimal effort. She's also exceptionally intelligent and perceptive due to heightened senses brought upon by secondary effects of her quirk.”

Charcoal whistled lowly, the sound like wind hurtling through a cavern's mouth.

Onibi snorted and crossed her arms, “Some women get all that luck.”

Brazier, though, for all of his prickliness, was scowling at me thoughtfully. “You think our vigilante might be older than she looks.”

“It's a possibility,” I granted with a shrug. “It's not impossible for someone our age to develop the kinds of skills she'd need to perform at the level she is, I can personally attest to some of that, but it is statistically unlikely. Anomalous, even.”

“And if she's been active under the radar for a while, she might have been running under an alternate identity or have a way to change her form,” Brazier muttered.

Onibi shook her head. “She's not wearing a mask so she'd have to alter her appearance pretty radically. Shapeshifter quirks like that are vanishingly rare, Haruka.”

I perked up slightly, shifting my focus away from playing my little game with the three as I interwove truth and lies for a multiple choice backstory. “Oh? I'd have thought they were more common than that. Transformation quirks are effectively a third of the Japanese classification system, after all, and they always feature highly in movies and tv shows.”

“Just another lie about the glamour of the hero industry, kid,” Charcoal chuckled. “Transformation quirks are pretty common, it's true, but that's technically any quirk that lets you change any physical aspect of your body into another.”

Onibi chimed in. “So if you can change the color of your eyes? Transformation quirk. Change the size of one or more of your limbs, or your entire body? Transformation quirk. Most of them are... well, the person only gets a set number of forms they can take. Like, Ryuukyu for instance. She's either a human or a dragon and, yeah, there's some in-between stuff she can do, but it's all basically on that spectrum.”

“Most transformation quirks aren't particularly...” Brazier struggled for a word, then snapped his fingers, “-dynamic, that's true, but it's not impossible. True shapeshifters are notoriously hard to document unless they're caught young or involved in a sufficiently high-profile incident.”

“Even then, though, they're mostly snapped up by movie studios and government spooks,” Charcoal huffed loudly. “That kind of quirk basically sets you up for life.”

Distantly, I was reminded of the X-Men Notoriety Problem, as I liked to call it. I didn't know if it had a formal name or anything, but it was the seldom brought-up fact that Marvel mutants had a significant population in most timelines and the X-Men, Brotherhood, and Hellfire Club only represented... probably point-one percent of that group. Xavier, Storm, Cyclops, Magneto, Avalanche... to say nothing of Scarlet Witch or Jean Grey, were the most powerful of their kind. The majority of mutants just had shitty powers that didn't lend themselves well to climatic battles or grand sweeping narratives.

And that wasn't even bringing up the Morlocks.

It's all well and good to argue that quirks are a muscle and that, conceptually, there's no such thing as a 'weak quirk,' but realistically there's a significant power divide when one person starts out being able to grow prehensile eyebrow hair and another person can make objects weightless by touching them.

 “-and I'm not necessarily arguing that our vigilante is a high-end shapeshifter,” Brazier stated, bringing me back into the conversation from my ruminations. “You heard Bootstrap. His girlfriend's mom had a secondary quirk effect that rejuvenates her. We could be dealing with something like that and our teenager could actually be an old hag-”

I suppressed a twitch.

“-or we could be dealing with a more limited transformation quirk,” he continued, talking with his hands as he gesticulated. “Something like... I don't know, clay skin? Only being able to make changes that are skin-deep, but with an enhancement property to physicality? That would fit with a lot of what we've seen.”

“I think we got what we came here for,” Charcoal rumbled, shaking his head as he stood. “Theorizing is all well and good, but we don't have enough evidence to speculate on a detailed quirk write-up. Thanks for the food for thought, kid.”

As Brazier grunted and Onibi gave me a bow, I stood up as well.

“One last thing,” I stated, holding up a hand as they began to leave. “None of my theories are necessarily mutually-exclusive. You should feel free to mix and match from them if need be. They're just ideas, after all, so don't get married to them.”

“Always a good idea to keep perspective. Thanks for the reminder, Bootstrap,” Onibi hummed.

“I'll follow you out, if you don't mind. Hot Ice wants to see me downstairs,” I stated, shutting and locking the door behind me.

“Good to see you're getting used to locking up. Hate to see you get caught with the door open, that's a write-up,” Charcoal nodded at me before ambling off.

It was, apparently, a rule that unless you were physically present inside your office, the door had to be shut and locked. This included maintenance closets, janitor storage rooms, and other such areas. The only rooms that weren't locked as a matter of course were the bathrooms and that was only due to the sheer impracticality of it. Though, even if you were just going down the hall to use the toilet, you still had to lock up behind you unless someone else was in your office monitoring it for you.

All of which was to prevent an infiltrator from being able to simply dodge into an unoccupied room to get out of line of sight or prevent someone from accessing a workstation they weren't supposed to be using. There were random checks to ensure that you were following procedures, too.

Grabbing one of the shitty energy drinks from the vending machine, I popped the can as I made my way towards the level Hot Ice had directed me to, using my badge to access the elevator as I did so.

Finally turning around one of the corners in the labyrinthine building, I rapped my knuckles against a door before opening it.

“Hey Boss, what's-”

“Bootstrap!”

I blinked, juggling my open drink as I caught the juvenile body that came flying at me. “Ooof! Be more careful there, Tye! You almost turned your new clothes into a sticky mess.”

“Tyelovuyo! Don't make a menace of yourself!” The boy's mother called out, stepping up to pry her son off me while giving an awkward bow. “Deepest apologies, Warrior. Our son was simply too excited. Please excuse him.”

I shook my head and patted the boy's chitinous skull. “It's fine, Xgaiga. As you say, he is simply full of energy. There is no harm.”

“Everything good?” Hot Ice asked from across the room, where she and a pair of suits were sitting, going over papers. “You're a little late.”

“Brazier and his team wanted my insight on Perspicacious Mauve Avenger,” I replied, waving her off. “Feel free to blame them.”

Fuyumi scoffed under her helmet. “I will. You were useful in the initial appraisal of that weirdo, but there's no reason to expect you have any kind of special insight into her.”

Hmm... I feel both called out and seen. I wonder if that's a problem?

“Anyway,” she sighed. “We need to get some more statements today and get more details on the trafficking operation. I would have given you the full details, but I thought seeing Tye would be a good surprise and a break from whatever you're working on.”

“If that's a polite way of asking if I'm finished filing the forms you handed off earlier, I did,” I grinned behind my mask, working my body language to give off that impression. “I was just killing some time by finishing up my practical submission for the Office Hero test next week.”

Hot Ice chuckled. “So studious, I'm impressed you're not waiting until the last minute.”

I rolled my eyes. “Since I handed in the signed contract this morning, that makes it official, right? No point in putting it off if my job depends on it.”

“Just make sure you don't overwork yourself before Thursday. Remember that your quirk re-assessment is coming up,” she teased lightly.

I made a show of cupping my chin and tilting my head. “Ah, that reminds me... any chance I could have a quick word with your father about tomorrow? I'm supposed to do the Agency's CQC test, right?”

Hot Ice frowned. “If you need to ask about something, I'm ready to make myself available/ Having second thoughts about the contract?”

I pursed my lips, visibly hesitating to show my reservations before responding. “It's about your potential endorsement of my girlfriend for the recommendation exam at UA.”

The pro hero frowned, then cast a glance towards her compatriots and rose before beckoning me to follow her to a corner of the room. “Is everything all right, Shinso?”

“No,” I stated bluntly, “but explaining the situation would cause you a substantial amount of emotional pain and frustration, and I don't want to do that. Least of all to someone who is a decent and kind person such as yourself.”

Fuyumi's eyes narrowed. “Shinso... as an individual who is now employed by the Endeavor Hero Agency, you have both a societal and professional obligation to report any crimes you bear witness to or have knowledge of. You understand that, correct?”

I nodded once. “No crime has been committed.”

“You're sure, because the way you're talking leads me to believe that you should be reporting something to me,” Hot Ice stated severely.

I stared at her for a long moment, weighing my words once again. “There are... certain decisions one can make as a parent which are entirely legal, but utterly abominable nonetheless.”

There was another pause, then the pro-hero reached up to remove her helmet and stared at me with her bare face. “I like the way this conversation is going now even less than I did before.” She looked away and sighed deeply. “There's nothing I can do?”

“Taking legal action at this point in time would needlessly complicate an already-delicate situation. I'm currently handling it to the best of my ability, but will seek advice and help in the event there is something that can be done,” I stated formally, and Fuyumi grimaced openly.

“If you fully explained the situation, I'd only get angry and frustrated?” Fuyumi asked, the question almost a growl.

“If you actually understood the full depth of the situation? You'd likely implicate yourself in assault or outright murder,” I confessed.

“I honestly don't know if it's more disturbing that you think I'm capable of doing something like that or how sure you sound that I would resort to doing so,” Fuyumi muttered, taking a deep breath. “Alright. I'll arrange a meeting before you leave today. Dad's working late anyway, anyway and I'll need to drag him home for dinner, so it's not too significant of a request.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

“Don't thank me,” Fuyumi stated, then turned a serious look back towards me. “I mean that, really. I don't like what little you've told me about this situation with your girlfriend. I really don't like it. It... brings up bad memor-”

She cut herself off and shook her head violently to clear it.

“Bootstrap! Are you done talking now? Can we-” Tye began, only to be shushed by his mother.

“We'll talk more when we have time,” Fuyumi promised with prejudice. “For now, we have work to do.”

The conversation with Tye and his mother was something of a relief even with the heaviness of the subject at hand. Their ordeal was, for the most part, over. They were safe. Even if their refugee status was taking time to process and approve, Endeavor was putting some weight on it in a discreet way. Given that and the fact that the shadowy forces behind the entire affair were still under investigation, I couldn't say there were no further complications waiting in the wings, but...

They were safe, and that was the important part.

Seeing justice done would be my duty, now.

In more ways than one.

I knocked on the door, given it was after hours, and was rewarded with a deep baritone voice calling out, “Enter.”

I opened the door and stepped into the room, giving the older hero a short bow. “Thank you for taking the time to see me, Endeavor.”

His beard extinguished, he looked at me with an expression that was no less grave and severe than it had been in days prior. “My daughter implied that it was both significant and urgent. She said that it involves your girlfriend?”

I nodded. “I'll explain the situation in as much detail as is feasible. Given the particulars, I didn't want to needlessly involve your daughter, which I hope you'll understand the reasoning for once I've clarified matters. After that... I'd like your permission to make an unreasonable request.”

“An unreasonable request?” Endeavor asked, setting his elbows on the desk heavily and leaning forward. “I've extended a great deal of trust in you already, Bootstrap. I strongly believe you'll develop into a hero worthy of the title, but the level of investment I can devote, even to one so promising, has its limits. It will be an uphill battle to convince me you're valuable enough to expend further time and resources on you.”

I smiled. “Then it's a very good thing I'm not asking you to go to further trouble on my behalf.”

Endeavor snorted and waved me on.

~~~

As promised, the next chapter of Mind Games is here!

Not much to say other than that. I'm hoping to get one more chapter out before/with the end of the month Monday night. Likely, it'll go up with the new poll for April, so look forward to that.

As for what it's going to be? I'm thinking either more Mind Games or The New Ron.

Not sure right now, but I'll start later tonight. The one that doesn't get chosen will start off the new month while the poll runs.

Thank you again for all your support and know that I'm extremely grateful for it.