A curvy brunette in a white lab coat stared at her computer, and then shook shook her head. Something like this shouldn't be possible, she thought. But the data didn't lie. With something this big, Ryoko Sakurai needed to inform the others. If she wanted to learn more, there was really no way around it.
She stood up and exited her lab into a wide windowless corridor. She opened a door on the right, and confidently strode onto the top level of the command center.
The command center was structured like a Japanese battleship, with the Captain's office elevated a story above the two tiers of officers working their stations below. Much unlike a battleship, this room lay half a kilometer underground.
She walked up to a burly, redheaded man who really didn't need to be a story higher to look over everyone's shoulder. "Commander, I've completed my analysis."
He turned to face her. "Ryoko, report?" His lieutenant Ogawa, who wore the suit-and-tie uniform of a idol's talent manager, stepped forward to listen in.
She began tentatively, "The Aufwachen waveform we recorded was highly unusual. The American must have been using a Relic even outside the predictions of Sakurai theory."
"What?" Commander Kazanari decided something must truly be awry if Ryoko would criticize her own theory.
With a few keystrokes, Ryoko brought up a waveform analysis screen, explaining, "It doesn't match any Relic currently recognized, so I had a bit of a hunch, and ran the waveform through the CODA system. There was a match: to an obscure twentieth century song,
Lightning's Hand. Such a close match that I couldn't detect the underlying Relic at all, just that song and phonic distortion. Either his synchronization was so high that his phonic gain completely controlled the Relic, or they've synthesized an entirely new Relic."
After a short pause, Ogawa chimed in, "What on Earth has the F.I.S. been up to?"
Commander Kazanari answered, "I suspected they'd been keeping data from us, but this is ..."
"We need to find out much more."
Ryoko adjusted her thick-framed glasses, and suggested, "How about I just ask the American? Handsome and mysterious. Maybe he's my type?"
--------
"You damn sure look American to me. You sure you're not with the F.I.S.?"
"The what?" I searched my mind's list of the alphabet soup agencies, and the best I could come up with was something like the Foreign Intelligence Service. "No, I'm not a spy, or anything like that."
The silver haired girl put her hand across her eyes. "I only believe you because that's the about stupidest thing I've ever heard." I am really going to have to learn more about the political system in this world.
"OK, fine. I just want you to know that I'm fighting because I see some sort of magical simulacra reducing people to ash, and those people need our protection. But what the hell was that stunt you pulled with those... girls in the orange and blue?" I had almost said "metahumans", but if they were anything like Chris here, they were likely ordinary girls using an arcane focus similar to hers.
"It's simple: I'm trying to bring world peace." This train of thought could go really good or really-- "And the only way to do that is to beat the shit out of anyone who has the power to fight." -- really bad.
"Chris, that's not really going to work."
"I thought that was so simple that even a adult could understand, but I guess I was wrong. Let me make it easy: you fight, you die. You can't fight, we have peace."
"No Chris, I understand the theory, because I've heard it out of the mouths of so many other people. All of them tyrants. All of them who got a little gift of power, and got it in their heads that the way to peace was to destroy everyone who dared to challenge them." I was still getting louder. "And I've been fighting against people like them for most of my life. Are you really telling me you want to be another tinpot dictator?"
Chris looked stunned for a minute, and then a fury coalesced in her eyes. She screamed, "I knew you wouldn't get it. Adults are all the fucking same." And then she jumped out the third story window, and activated her magic crystal; a red and black armor wrapped around her body. She took a few quick leaps off of nearby buildings (clearing them with a single bound), and she was gone.
Well,
that could have gone better.
It would actually be nice to see a longer step in this universe -- it does the musical combat thing very well. If only the second season had been as good as the first.
-- ∇×V