damned_institute | 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....

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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."

Day 28; Bus 3

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