damned_institute | Day 28; Bus 3

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Day 28; Bus 3

There was, Naomi decided, some sort of cosmic irony in all of this. Not that she was trapped in a deranged and possibly other-worldly asylum with a man she'd idolized for years and a boy who was being investigated for - among other things - the murder of her fiance. No, at this point, those were perfectly normal occurrences. Rather it was the soft, pretty, feminine pink sweater dress she'd been stuffed into in the morning. A chance to wear normal clothes, and she looked like a soccer mom. The white blazer and white boots only made her look like a soccer mom who maybe hadn't given up gogo boots.

It was humiliating. Why couldn't she have jeans and a sweater? And sneakers? Something she would conceivably wear? Not this damned pink monstrosity. And her nurse kept saying how pretty she was.

She didn't care if she looked pretty.

Grumbling to herself, and taking it out on her muffin, Naomi was shoved onto an empty bus and told to 'sit tight'. Oh, she'd sit tight alright....

At least she was relatively certain L was alright. She'd spent the whole night with him, and other than falling on his ass, nothing had happened to him. And hopefully nothing would happen to him in town, either....

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Add another interventionist god to her tally. The Saint was starting to look awful plain by comparison. "That's the sort of thing I meant by 'incompatible magics'. There's nothing like that, on Earth or anywhere else, in my experience." And more importantly, the experience of the TSA, which existed to find such things. "There are a few mages from Earth, but there's no native magic system. They've all learned from offworlders."

She wondered if these 'Akuma' were anything like Momo's hollows. Gods seemed to come with increased opportunities for spiritual peril.

Rinali nodded slightly. It was difficult to believe that innocence didn't exist on earth in another reality when it was such an intricate and fundamental element of her own life. "That's very strange, I'll admit," she said. "Of course, the idea of magic at all as something real beyond fairy tales is hard to swallow as well."

It would make sense that anyone to learn magic would have to learn from off-planet, though. There was whatever the noahs did, but that couldn't be magic, could it? And the effects of the innocence often seemed magical, but there was a scientific explanation for how they functioned.

"Is it?" Signum asked. She plucked the straw from her juice-box, and the thin plastic promptly withered into a charred black mess between her fingers.

"The word 'magic' prejudices you. Forget the word as you know it and let the evidence of your own eyes take its place."

That was more or less how she avoided going insane while hanging around a bunch of functionary gods. The idea still made her a little crazy, but when you ignored all the baggage that went with the word 'god' and just reacted to their personalities and powers in a purely practical fashion, they weren't hard to deal with. At least, no harder than any other group of people who thought they were more important than everyone else.

Rinali glanced back out the window as she pondered Signum's words. To the uneducated person, her innocence probably came across as magic, didn't it? How else would they expect a woman to be able to fly through the air if not through magic? Maybe it really was an issue of semantics and not an issue of what actually existed. The concept of saying a few words and waving your fingers was ludicrous. The concept of a technology or power that had not been fully fathomed and seemed magical could make sense.

"It's just a lot to take in," she admitted at last. "The idea of space travel was only just being dreamed by a few novel writers." Edgar Allen Poe came to mind and his story about a trip to the moon. It was a flight of fancy, but looking around her at people like Signum who weren't even from Earth."

"I won't argue with that." That it was a lot to take in, she meant. Signum was relatively fortunate... there seemed to be a few patients who were even familiar with alternate timelines or something similar, but short of that she'd come about as well-prepared as she could be. As a a guardian of the Book and as an officer of the TSA, she'd been exposed to a very big universe. In some ways it made it harder to accept that there was even more out there she knew nothing about, but for the most part such wide-ranging experience and knowledge made it easier to accept a little more and cut down on the amount of time she spent dumbfounded.

Rinali nodded slightly in silence. Signum was a relatively nontalkative person, it seemed. That wasn't a bad thing, but it did mean that she was talking a lot more than she was accustomed. She liked talking to people, but she didn't usually carry the conversation on her own. Still, she liked Signum. She was stern like Kanda, but a lot less violent and more reserved. Maybe she could get signum to open up a little, or maybe they would end up sitting in silence for the rest of the trip. Either would be fine, but she'd certainly prefer the former.

"Would you mind telling me about your 'world?'" Rinali asked politely. "I probably won't understand everything, but I'd be interested to hear."

So she was to be the textbook after all.

"Midchilda?" It wasn't really hers, per se. And she hoped Rinali liked hearing about the military, because that was what Signum knew best. "It's the capital world of the Spacetime Administration Bureau, and is preeminent among the dimensional-spacefaring worlds. It's been that way for the last 73 years. Almost the entire technological base was shifted over to magical systems in the fifty years preceding. The reforms and political power have made it prosperous and compared to most worlds it is considered utopian. The Spacetime Administration Bureau draws most of its recruits, does most of its research, and contracts most of its manufacturing in Midchilda, so they're considered synonymous by many, but many elements of the TSA, especially the newer generations of the Dimensional Navy admirality, are more impartial and have created rifts between the Bureau apparatus and the Midchildan central government."

And break for leading questions. Signum was sure the girl had some preferences in what she heard about.

Rinali was quiet as she listened to Signum's story. It was a lot to take in...dimensional-spacefaring worlds, shifting from technological to magical 'systems', and the Spacetime Administration Buraeu and TSA. She latched onto a single point Signum had mentioned that sounded like it could use at the very least a little clarifying.

"What's the TSA?" she asked, trying her best to keep all of the details straight in her brain to report back to Komui. "I'm guessing that's a government..."

"Time/Space Administration. Just another shorthand for the Bureau." Signum explained. "They're charged with managing interworld navigation and crises, especially those involving powerful magic. Besides the Navy they have their own research and investigations arms, and because many powerful magics have survived the fall of older civilizations that created them they maintain a network of archaeological sites and resources as well. But as I said, because the Bureau was created by and is so tightly bound to Midchilda there's a growing tension between those who want them to be impartial, those who see them as interfering with Midchildan affairs, and those who want them to identify more closely with Midchilda."

"So...are you a member of this organization?" Rinali asked tentatively. She knew some organizations kept a lot of things private, and it was entirely possible that this was an area Signum didn't want to touch on. The rest of it sounded complicated, much like the Church's relationship with all of the nations. People wanted God on their sides, while some governments just wanted the church out of their affairs entirely. It wasn't anything like the renaissance had been, but the church still had their pull.

"I'm in the Midchildan Army. The planetary defense force." She frowned. Again this feeling like that was all in the distant past, when Hayate's unit had only just been set up. "...though our unit is pretty autonomous. It took a lot of string-pulling to assemble all of our resources under the radar, but we're set up so that by the time anyone in HQ reads about us we're just a block of logistical data."

The frown disappeared and was replaced by a smirk as she related this. GFHQ was going to be pretty unhappy when they found out a few TSA personnel and kids fresh out of basic masquerading as an advanced training unit had been doing their jobs for them, but they deserved to get shown up. Holing up in a big shielded tower and building a few anti-orbital weapon emplacements and thinking their jobs were done... as a Knight, she had plenty of disdain for that kind of lazy attitude towards war.

Military concepts were a little foreign on Rinali, as she worked with the church, but bureaucracy was always an issue, and keeping low to the ground wasn't always a bad idea. Allen's mentor was the kind of man to fly under the radar...unfortunately, that turned out to be a source of immense frustration for the rest of the exorcists when they sought out the generals to protect them. All the things that happened to her, Allen, Ravi, and the others came out of their efforts to find Cross. She might even have her innocence...

But no, it was silly to think of those things. Silly and selfish. She shook off the notion. "That sounds like an interesting organization." She commented.

Signum wasn't sure it was interesting in the sense of being something exceptional or unusual, but it certainly engaged her talents. When your sole skill of note was running towards things and chopping them up it paid to have a job that made you enemies.

"So what did you do?" The institute mostly seemed to collect outstanding types, so she figured the girl would probably have a few good stories. Maybe she'd had her hands in this Innocence business.

"Oh, I'm an exorcist," Rinali replied. Or was...without her anti-akuma weapon she wasn't much of an exorcist anymore. The thought of not being able to help Allen, Ravi, and the others was a disheartening one, but she did her best to ignore the thought for now. "We use innocence to make anti-akuma weapons, which we use to save humanity from the Earl of the Millennium and his Akuma...spirit-powered weapons built for the sole purpose of killing humans."

That was a decent enough explanation. She wasn't sure what Signum knew about Akuma, Exorcists, or the Earl of the Millennium, but she anticipated Signum would ask if she had any questions.

That sounded fairly crazy to Signum, though she at least had the perspective to realize that if you went up to a human of 'her' Earth with that and the job description 'I'm a Knight, I use magic to make magical weapons and save interdimensional civilization as we know it from Scaglietti and his harem of cyborgs' they'd probably play about the same.

"Earl of the Millenium?" She decided to focus on the big name. Improbable substances aside, weapons were weapons. It was the people who wielded them that made things interesting.

Okay, that was a lie, she found the mechanics of the weapons and the implications for combat tactics fairly interesting too. She might be a one-trick Knight, but it still paid to know what else was on the battlefield. But best to get the big picture and work her way in.

Rinali didn't know her story sounded somewhat crazy to Signum. She had grown up in the church, and as such all of her stories seemed perfectly normal to her. "The Earl of the Millenium," she repeated. "I don't know a lot about him or where he comes from, but he comes to people who are in mourning over the loss of a loved one, and offers to bring them back to life. If they accept his offer, he brings their soul back and uses that soul and the person's body to make an Akuma...a weapon designed specifically to kill humans. He has a lot of power and actually has control of a country called Japan, where there are few humans remaining, and all that's left are Akuma."

She paused briefly. Undoubtedly there were further questions in her explanations about all of this.

"He can't do it unless they agree?" Signum raise an eyebrow. That seemed awfully limiting for a threat to humanity. Of course, if they were powerful enough and the weapons used to fight them rare enough a few might be enough. The Wolkenritter had been four and they'd been a pretty big threat...

Rinali nodded. "Well, most people are so desperate to have their loved one back that they do agree. He doesn't tell them he'll make them an Akuma...he only promises to bring them back from the dead if they want. It's a cruel and malicious trick. As far as I am aware, there are now hundreds if not thousands of them in the world today." She corrected herself. "Well, in my today."

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Day 28; Bus 3

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