AN: Here it is. Finally, I know, right?
— — —
Lightning arched across the room, and slammed into a target dummy on the far side of the space. In the past, that would’ve been it. I pushed my control harder to deliver a conscious arc of electricity. Even a high powered, but short shock could be harmless. Continuous jolts, though?
I held the beam of electricity for a solid three seconds before my internal charge flagged, and the beam dissipated. The air where it passed through smelled of burnt ozone, and there was almost a still visible path from the bright bolt.
”Again.” Akito, my instructor, mercilessly ordered from his cozy spot on the couch. He had a cup of steaming tea in one hand, and didn’t seem like he was fully paying attention.
”Need a break.” I huffed for air, and sat back on my haunches. It’d already been thirty minutes, and my charge had been drained entirely several times throughout the training session.
“Fine.” He waved a hand, and sipped the tea. Usually, he’d take this time to discuss the properties of my electrokinesis, but this time he just remained silent.
I jumped up onto the couch opposite him, and collapsed. Already, I could feel my electrogenesis going into overcharge to fill me back to the point of overloading with raw power.
My leg bobbed rapidly while I lay on my side to speed up the recharge. “Something on your mind?”
“Hmm?” He distractedly looked up. A moment later, his expression cleared and he shook his head. “Just… thinking about my younger sister.”
“Oh.” We never talked about our personal lives. To him it probably wouldn’t matter since I looked like a sprite, but I didn’t want to abuse our relationship like that.
“Chek.” He sighed and pulled out a cigarette. Just before lighting it, he stopped. “You mind? Learned a new trick.”
My nose crinkled up, and I shook my head. “Fine.”
He nodded and snapped his fingers. The heat of the air intensified, and the end of the cigarette caught fire. Smoke trailed up, but was immediately whisked away out the window by his Kinetic ability.
He took a drag, and held the cigarette loosely dangling in his fingers. “You heard of dimensional instability?”
“A bit. I was given a compass to track them.” Crow’s Celestial Compass had mostly gone unused. Instabilities, from what I could grasp, were quite rare in cities. Or, rather, the places they were common had long been abandoned. They weren’t exactly publicly documented for me to track.
“That’s nice. Would’ve killed for one of those back then.” He shook his head, and stuffed the cigarette back into his mouth. We settled into silence for several minutes.
“She fall into one?” I asked after a while.
“Never saw her again.” He flicked his cigarette, and the ash billowed in the wind out the window. “That was ages ago, though. A… familiar face made me start thinking about her again for the first time since her memorial.”
The way he said that—“not a friendly face, I take it?”
”No.” He flicked his cigarette, and it was likewise blown out the window. Nine Peaks would rapidly become a garbage dump if Fox didn’t get on that. “A speedster. You deal with them before?”
”They like speedware users?” Because I had dealt with a few of them. Even just recently, Tex had gotten in a nasty combo of shots on me thanks to his speedware.
”Like that but on crack. Usually kinetics. They’re a massive pain in the ass to deal with.” Akito groaned, and rubbed his hand across his forehead. “I’d kill for an easy solution.”
A speedster, huh? Never thought about dealing with them. I knew they were out there, ‘course, but as far as I knew Aythryn City wasn’t home to any so it never crossed my mind. What would I even do? “What do others usually do?”
“Pen them in with superior tactics. Massive AOE attacks work sometimes. Mental attacks can work on the slower ones. Tripwires.” Akito shrugged, and pulled out another cigarette. He didn’t light this one, and instead just chewed on the tip. “Usually, they’ve got the survival instincts of a rat, though.”
“I could ask around.” Theoretically speaking, of course, how would I even approach a speedster? Maybe I could do something with kinetic energy? Speedsters had a ton of the stuff, so some kind of compound that reacted with it might be possible.
”If I had your power, I could just lower the friction around the guy. Doesn’t matter how fast he runs if he can’t run.” He said. “Or I heard Sentinel’s got some kind of foam that works exceptionally well against speedsters.”
“That…” It was a good idea, actually. I wasn’t good enough to control friction yet, though. Hadn’t even really tried. I was scared I might accidently split an electron or something and set off a nuclear explosion.
Akito pushed the cigarette back into his box, and nodded to me. “You recharged?”
“Enough.” I stood up and shuffled back to the target.
— — —
As soon as I got back to my workshop, I swapped my title to Child of Fox to mess around with it. I honestly wasn’t expecting too much, but it’d be a good idea to get an idea of what each of them could do.
With that set, I started working on the gravitic metal once more. If I could just figure it out, it’d push my tech leaps and bounds above where I was at currently. Hell, even with just the metallurgy stuff, I could already improve durability, weight, and resilience massively.
Unfortunately, getting it all working wasn’t a smooth process. I was getting the metal to mix, but it wasn’t merging quite like I wanted it to. Instead of becoming one solid, it kept turning into metal ingots with gravitic chunks sticking out of it.
I managed to get by the singularity issue by venting my nuclear reactor as a heat source to melt the gravitic and metal. What I was trying to do wasn’t something I could look for precedents, either. Crystals stopped being crystals when they were melted down since they lost their atomic structure.
What I was trying to make was basically the holy grail of metallurgy—one that not even Owl knew how to do. I had a few things helping me with getting the crystal and metal to merge. Namely, gravitic didn’t react like other crystals. I wasn’t sure how the other Aether materials would…
“Ah!” I pulled back away from my latest failed experiment. Other Aether materials—why didn’t I think of that sooner? The issue was getting material from one realm to merge with material from another. So far I’d just been using binders from the material world, and not the Aether.
I shifted my approach, and dug around my scrapyard of a workshop for stuff I’d set aside ages ago. There, under the torn apart chassis of a robot, I found a box full of crystals that Corvid had brought to me back when he showed up consistently. There were kinds of all shapes and sizes, and most of them I had no idea what they were.
With my new materials, I moved back over to get to work. I had a lot of things to test, and all of that would take an incredible amount of time.
— — —
A few days later, I left my workshop for the first time since I’d started testing Aether materials. I was seeing some progress—enough that I had to drag myself away from my workshop to go do something else. Being so close, yet forcing myself to do something else was a bit torturous.
It was needed, though. I hopped off my Roughrider, and grabbed a bundle of flowers from one of my saddlebacks. It was mostly the flamboyant pinks mutant hibiscus plants and the soothing purple lavender that I’d been growing in my speakeasy. I… I should look at getting some other kinds.
I took a breath, and stepped off the roof I parked on. Rain and wind blitzed past my face for a moment before the Drop Chutes kicked in and set me gently on the ground. I fixed my hat, and crossed the street to a familiar building of marbled gray.
Lightning flashed in the skies above, and thunder rumbled over the dark streets. It was well past dinner-time. When I say I had to force myself away, I meant it. I was supposed to come out several hours earlier.
The Jade Columbarium hadn’t changed since the last time I’d come by, and yet it felt entirely alien to me as I walked through the heavy halls. It wasn’t this place, but me that’d changed so much. I brushed a lock of silver hair out of my eyes, and steadily moved through the place.
Their alcove was just as I remembered it. I approached, and set the bundle of flowers down alongside the silent urns. The old vase of synthetic flowers, and the wilted remains of the real ones I brought last time had been thrown out at some point.
I tidied up the flowers, and my hand brushed the silver of my mother’s flute. I would kill to hear her play it just one more time… maybe I should start playing the flute? It would’ve made my mom so happy back then that I followed in her footsteps. I could even start up a band with Mira…
”Sorry I’m late,” I muttered to the interlocked urns. The dragon handles of the two shimmered in the light. I lightly dusted off the framed photo sitting off to the side of the urns.
It’d been a long time since I came by. The last time… the last time I came by was just before I went after the original Cold Moon, wasn’t it? That entire time I was distracted with thoughts about what I’d do. It felt like such a small issue now, but I really panicked over it back then, huh?
This time around I had no ulterior motives. I moved back to a bench, and dropped down onto it. My eyes naturally fell to the floor, and memories replayed in my mind once more. The predominant one was mom cooking delicious soup for me. Hunger must’ve been driving my memories.
I rubbed my eyes, and shook my head. I pulled one of my legs up, and leaned forward on my knee. Would you be proud of me, seeing who I’ve become? Or would you be sad seeing what I’ve had to do?
The two urns were just as silent as they always were. I stared at the picture of the three of us enjoying happier times. After all this time, seeing them still made my chest ache. Though… weird. I could’ve sworn mom had green hair?
I scratched at my head, and tried to remember back. My memories of before the interface were admittedly fuzzy. So much had happened since then that it made pre-interface life feel like a completely other person. In the photo, though, she had black hair like me. I must’ve been mistaken.
“Made some new friends.” They were always so worried I’d grow up lonely. Aside from Mira, it wasn’t like I made a ton of friends in my early years. I was… a bit of a brat back then. Being the granddaughter of a fairly well known CEO had an effect on me. Not that I’d ever blame my grandfather.
“You’d like Luna.” I smiled softly. Though my dad would probably fly into a rage at Saint. Just seeing how Uncle Ezra reacted was enough to remind me of that. The two were so different, and yet quite similar in other ways.
“Then there’s—well, you know…” Fox… what would they say about me being on fairly good terms with an eidolon of all things. Did they ever think that I’d one day being hopping dimensions as easily as driving down the street?
I settled into a silence, and pushed an earbud into one of my ears to listen to music. The soothing beats—
“Shiro?” A familiar voice called from behind me.
”Chek?” I glanced over my shoulder just in time to get startled by a contingent of Kage grouped around a familiar girl. “Yuki?”
She forwent the kimono this time around, and was dressed in a simple rain jacket, croptop, short-shorts combo. Her raven locks spilled around her face. The white lock of hair had faded at some point into a dull gray. She smiled, and her chrome collarbone pulsed.
“You actually remember me this time?” She waved to her guards, and approached. When she spoke, it was that same respectful soft that I used in this place. She waved a hand toward the seat next to me. “You mind?”
”Go ahead.” Not like I was going to tell the soon to be Jade Fang matriarch she couldn’t sit next to me in the Jade Columbarium.
Behind us, the Kage split up and took positions around the room. At a glance, they were just moving out of the way. In actuality, they carefully watched every single angle that someone could approach from. Being around the chrome brutes sent a pulse of tension down my spine.
She didn’t speak immediately, and instead eyed the rows and rows of urns. “Your parents?”
“Yeah…” I pulled the earbud out, and let it drop onto my lap. “You?”
”Elder Toro was just interred.” She tilted her head back to one of the halls. Her voice had a certain… disappointed quality to it. “The Matriarch couldn’t come, so I did.”
“I see.” I returned to silence, and slowly wrapped up my earbuds.
”Sorry… am I a bother?” Her voice dipped even lower, and her eyelashes trembled in a disarming way.
“It’s fine.” I shook my head, and stuffed the earbuds back into my pocket. I was planning on just spending a bit of time here, anyway. It was about time I got back to my workshop to iron out the final details. “I was just about to leave, anyway.”
“Mmm.” Yuki slid to her feet, and offered her hand down to me. “Want to go get something to eat? I was just on my way out, too.”
”I’m not—“ My stomach chose that exact time to grumble. I… I might’ve skipped my usual smoothie this morning… and not slept.
“I know this great sushi place.” Her hand bounced lightly, and the dragon tattoo peaking out of her sleeve glowed almost as if to draw my attention to it. “On me.”
”I… fine.” I accepted her hand, and she pulled me up to my feet. Spending the night with the Jade Fang princess wasn't how I thought tonight would end.