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[Strider03]

As the phone call wrapped up, Shef waited till the moment he was certain the line was dead, then began whispering irritably to Yuki.

"So you two went and revealed all this to some random person you don't even really know? And left the bioweapon with her? Jesus christ." He'd have to convince Winter and Enn to do a training session on accepting drinks from strangers or something. Like drug and alcohol safety training.

"Also! I'm not involved. . .I'm not doing any of those things that you and Noriko told her! Especially not corporate espionage. What do you take me for?"

[Twinwolf]

"Someone who takes intoxicated ramblings too seriously? Also you don't really talk about what you do so we kinda have to fill in the gaps."

[Strider03]

"Oh." There was maybe a bit of a point there.

"Well. I'm just working for Winter and Enn right now. Doing the combat stuff, with a side of Acquisitions Negotiation and such. I'm not doing anything illegal." Shef explained. At the moment. His tone retained some edge though as he continued. "It's not about the actual info you know. It's about the fact that this was allowed to happen. You could have given out any information to anyone, and not remembered it. Imagine if you'd handed over your social security number, or blackmail fodder, or the like. It's not the specifics, it's the general principle."

"There's nothing to be done now though, guess there's no point in harping on it." He conceded, lapsing into silence for a few seconds. Though, he did have that question that he wanted to ask, didn't he. . .

"By the way, how does it suit me, the. . .uh, look?"

[Chevaleresse]

"Huh? Everything's. . . fine. Now." The question sideswiped her, knocking her a bit off guard. "I don't know what I told you but my living situation is better than it's ever been, why do you ask like that?"

[Empiricist]

Noriko
The princess looks genuinely confused "Oh, I meant with all the spiders and Aramitama running around and the population stresses... I was worried the date was a faux pas and all... Cultural differences and everything."
What? The fuck's that supposed to mean? What, does she think that the only reason you can't date girls is because everyone needs to reproduce to offset all the spider and Aramitama-related murders?

Minato

Spoiler: Rolls (click to show/hide)

Minato: 2

Thousand-Faced Bodhisattva: 4, Hyper[6]

[Now Playing:

Kings

]

You blow your forgery and land on the ground. Your foe blows the forgeries encaging them and just vanishes in the blast. A plume of debris rises but well, you know how that song and dance goes. A beam rips through the cloud parting it and hey whaddya know, guy's still standing, er, floating.

"DO NOT PLAY SO CONSERVATIVELY. YOU SHOULD HAVE PRESSED THE ADVANTAGE. YOU STILL HAVE THE BOW DO YOU NOT?"

They're kinda fucked up now. Yeah uh, it wasn't just the forgeries that blew up either, the resulting chain reaction? Blew up Gleipnir too. So now not only are they battered and sparking and quite badly hurt, they're also missing their left arm too.

...Also, you're holding one of the starlight swords in their remaining hand and they've got the same aura Yuki had, a scintillating aura of air that flows like water, a haze twists their image as if it were a mirage. Well, this is gonna suck.

"DO NOT BE SURPRISED. WHO DO YOU THINK IT WAS THAT TAUGHT YOUR COMRADE HOW TO MASTER HER POWERS? LET US SEE HOW MUCH THAT MISTAKE WILL COST YOU."

Aight so this is definitely the same thing as Yuki's. Good thing you've already analyzed that by now, eh?

In that fight with Shou, Yuki seemingly moved with absurd speed and inflicted damage consistent with one of her regular cleaving strikes. But you know it could not have been simple speed. A faster strike would have had more kinetic energy. A faster strike would've inflicted more damage, besides even with less spirit energy behind it would've achieved an effect closer to shrapnel. No, there was a trick behind it.

Three possibilities come to mind: One, for an instant she became something else; a being of energy, a phantom, something like that, something that allowed her to move faster at the cost of losing that attack boost. Two, she twisted space to simulate a hastened attack. Three, she never used her Regalia at all, she simply teleported and dropped a vectorless magic strike right ontop of Shou.

Course problem with possibilities is, you're not entirely sure which it is, and all of them have annoyingly different properties. For instance, a vectorless strike would easiest to dodge but could very well ignore your armor whereas an energy form would be real hard to dodge but real easy to block if your armor's tough enough. You'd consider just fucking kicking the guy as they went to move in but uh... yeah they're not making it that easy: they're not just readying to charge you down, they're re-engaging their armor and ricocheting that beam to try and tag you first. Simple fork move: either you dodge the beam and get nailed by a blindingly fast charge as you dodge, or... you get nailed by the beam and eat the charge anyways. Not pleasant.

"LET EVERYTHING THAT'S BEEN PLANNED COME TRUE. LET THEM BELIEVE. AND LET THEM HAVE A LAUGH AT THEIR PASSIONS. BECAUSE WHAT THEY CALL PASSION ACTUALLY IS NOT SOME EMOTIONAL ENERGY, BUT JUST THE FRICTION BETWEEN THEIR SOULS AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD. AND MOST IMPORTANT, LET THEM BELIEVE IN THEMSELVES. LET THEM BE HELPLESS LIKE CHILDREN, BECAUSE WEAKNESS IS A GREAT THING, AND STRENGTH IS NOTHING."

Goddamnit, you really should've just gunned them down when you had the chance. Okay what can you do? Well, you could try and guess how that move works and counter it, do something like a dodge for a vectorless strike, an armor boost for an energy form, an explosive counter a spacial distortion... or you could try and summon something that lets you counteract all three, be it by letting you tank it all, or by letting you counter several at the same time.

Spoiler: World Lines (click to show/hide)

Minato
Status: Hurt, Gandiva, 4 healing potions
World Line: 2 5 4 6 1 4 4 5 5 4
Alterations: 2
Resolve: 1

Thousand-Faced Bodhisattva
Status: Very badly hurt, left arm is destroyed

Spoiler: Notes (click to show/hide)

[Powder Miner]

Faith licked her lips as she approached the ice cream stand -- going after ice cream like this was a bad habit of hers, honestly, but right now she didn't give a shit, she really liked ice cream. There were all kinds of exotic ice creams and, well... maybe it made her boring (and an American stereotype, but to hell with it, that's what she'd been TRYING to be when she first showed up in Japan, after all), but fried ice cream was good, she knew she liked it. So she was gonna have it! Maybe she could just try the other kinds afterwards.

Faith didn't hesitate to go up to the counter and purchase some of that fried ice cream.

And, yeah, Sol and Luna still might go after her, but she kinda guessed that was just gonna keep happening, so whatever. As long as they didn't explode her ice cream or something. She'd be mad if they exploded her ice cream.

[Empiricist]

Faith
Right so it just turns out to be literally just fried icecream but marginally better. The main improvements have to do with the coating, it's fluffier and crunchier, lacking any noticeable trace of oil but not being dry either. The inside, well it's icecream.

[Powder Miner]

"Mmm!" Well, this was surprisingly nice! Not surprisingly as in its being good in the first place, she'd expected that, but  this was definitely the best that she'd ever had. Admittedly, she'd only had it a couple of times, but there was something special about this one -- it was probably enchanted in some way to make the coating better. Nice! The ice cream, well, it was ice cream, but it was good nonetheless -- vanilla first, and that was the classic for fried ice cream, of course she enjoyed that, and then it was chocolate, of course Faith loved that, who didn't like chocolate?

She had gone for a pack of flavors that started at the mundane and got progressively more and more exotic, going from the most basic flavors to moderately uncommon ones, to rare ones that did exist on Earth, and then evidently to some kinds of flavors not found on Earth. She wasn't so sure about those but... what the hell, she could live a little. But what were the other ten flavors?

[Empiricist]

Faith
You try in order:

• True Coffee: Like coffee flavored ice-cream but it encaptures the whole coffee experience a lot better with a layered construction consisting of a foamy exterior lightly dusted with chocolate and a denser coffee interior. Though the ice-cream itself is cold it emits the rich aroma of hot coffee.
  
• Ignian Cookie Dough: It's like regular cookie dough ice-cream, but the cookie dough cooks itself and soaks up the vanilla ice-cream before uncooking itself and releasing it, this process happens in uneven patches giving it a unique consistency.
  
• Rehardening Vanilla: So it's vanilla ice-cream but whenever you take a bite out of it, the exposed icecream hardens and puffs out into a nice crunchy exterior so that every bite has that nice satisfying crunch.
  
• Foxfire Delight: Sort of like chili chocolate except instead of chili it's actual fire with some globs of what are best described as flavored napalm, all of which feel very very hot despite not actually being able to burn you. Thankfully the cool chocolate icecream quickly neutralizes the heat.
  
• Liquid Delirium: An energetic substance that ebbs and flows with fresh cream flowing through its roiling coils. Its exact physical properties seem to alter as you eat it as if pre-programmed in some manner. Its flavor is pretty simple but in an elegant and efficient way, though you do feel like something is watching you.
  
• Nolstalgia: Shockingly mundane in flavor. It tastes exactly like an ice-cream you had a long time ago, back when your father gave a damn. Those were happier times, you can almost feel the hot Miami sun and taste the hints of sea spray...
  
• Ephemeral Bliss: It tastes amazing. It tastes like the best thing you've ever tasted, but it's fleeting, oh so fleeting, the moment it leaves your tongue you can't even remember the taste, leaving you feeling almost a little empty.
  
• Astral Storm: A chilled swirling mass of energy with a texture closer to a dense gas than a solid, the flavor is indescribable though not unpleasant either, with the intricate hints in it changing with its turbulence and discharges of energy sending jolts of flavor tingling into your tongue.
  
• Air Conditioning: Utterly flavorless and insubstantial, but while eating it you feel the cold wind of an air conditioner blowing down on you, and it actually does seem to cool you down.
  
• Beethoven's 3π + 9i^th in Anarcho-Republican Green: It tastes like nothing you've ever tasted before. Guess this is what Beethoven's 3π + 9i^th in Anarcho-Republican Green tastes like, whatever the hell Beethoven's 3π + 9i^th in Anarcho-Republican Green is.
  

[Chevaleresse]

"It. . . I mean it's. . . ugh." Noriko's forehead prompted a small clatter of utensils as it landed on the table in front of them. "It doesn't have anything to do with any of that," she mumbled into the boards.

[Empiricist]

Noriko
"Sorry! Sorry! I just thought that with all the Aramitama and spiders and emus..." Wait, emus? "...Anyways, um, just for my sake would you mind telling me if um, what we did last night was um, acceptable? I don't really know a lot about Earth beyond what General Holt told me..." Holt? Like, the guy in that statue from earlier? The former Prime Minister of Australia?

[Twinwolf]

"Oh." There was maybe a bit of a point there.

"Well. I'm just working for Winter and Enn right now. Doing the combat stuff, with a side of Acquisitions Negotiation and such. I'm not doing anything illegal." Shef explained. His tone retained some edge though as he continued. "It's not about the actual info you know. It's about the fact that this was allowed to happen. You could have given out any information to anyone, and not remembered it. Imagine if you'd handed over your social security number, or blackmail fodder, or the like. It's not the specifics, it's the general principle."

"There's nothing to be done now though, guess there's no point in harping on it." He conceded, lapsing into silence for a few seconds. Though, he did have that question that he wanted to ask, didn't he. . .

"By the way, how does it suit me, the. . .uh, look?"

"Well I wasn't planning to get drunk! I asked if the drink had alcohol in it and they said no." Yuki said indignantly. Then the actual question came up. "Ooooh, it looks really nice! You give off that kinda 'cool girl' vibe."

[Strider03]

"Oh. Thanks." He mentioned, apparently pleased and a bit surprised. Why, he wouldn't have been able to say. "But I meant more, it doesn't stand out as, well, me right? No issues with posture, nothing too revealing of who's underneath?"

[Twinwolf]

"Ooooh, that's what you meant. No, I don't think I could've been able to tell it was you if you hadn't told me."

[Strider03]

"That's reassuring."