---
-3rd POV-
Hayase Yuuka did not have time for this.
She had a budget review at four. She had three unapproved expense reports from the Engineering Department sitting on her desk, one of which listed "one (1) emotionally necessary drill press." She had a stack of complaints about the Game Development Department's electricity usage that was taller than her calculator. And she had a running total in her head of how many minutes she'd lost this week to things that were not her job.
The running total had just gone up by four.
And yet here she was, walking briskly down the main hall of Millennium, holding a transfer student by the hand.
'Why am I doing this?'
She ran the numbers, because that was what she did.
A transfer from a closed school. A gap of a few months. One sentence from a teacher. Grades placed so neatly in the middle of the curve that they looked like someone had aimed for them. On their own, none of those things meant anything. Students moved around Kivotos all the time. Schools closed. Teachers were lazy.
Put together, though, they made a shape. Yuuka didn't like shapes she couldn't name.
And then there was the girl herself. Frazure Christina. White hair, blue eyes, a plain dark blue halo, a coat a size too big. A face you'd forget in a crowd. Except Yuuka had come up behind her in a busy hallway, and the girl had turned around before Yuuka's hand ever reached her shoulder. Not startled. Not fast, even. Just... ready.
'Normal students don't do that.'
That should have made her suspicious. It did make her suspicious.
But underneath the suspicion was something else, something that didn't add up at all, and that was the part bothering her the most. It was a feeling. Yuuka did not trust feelings. Feelings didn't balance.
The feeling was that she knew this girl.
Not her face. Not her name. Something about the way she stood. The way she tilted her head when she was thinking. Yuuka had felt it the moment their eyes met, a faint tug, like a number on a page that you were sure you'd already added.
'Ridiculous. I've never met her before in my life.'
So she kept walking, and kept holding on, and told herself it was about paperwork.
. . .
Behind her, the transfer student was having a very different internal crisis.
'It's been two minutes. When is she going to let go?'
Melissa, or rather Christina, was being towed down a hallway at a steady four kilometers an hour by the most frightening accountant in Kivotos, and she had no exit strategy. Every plan she'd made in the last three days had assumed she'd be ignored. She had not planned for Yuuka.
Nobody planned for Yuuka.
She let out a small sigh before she could stop it.
Yuuka glanced back. "What's the sigh for?" she asked politely, with a smile.
To Christina, the smile seemed off. It was the smile of someone holding a red pen. So she produced a cramped little smile of her own, and the most reasonable excuse she could find.
"I still don't know where my classroom is..."
Staaaaare.
Yuuka looked at her for a long moment, eyes narrowing by a millimeter at a time. Then she shrugged.
"Follow me. I was informed about your transfer, and which class you're in." She finally let go of Christina's hand and started walking again. "But you're getting the short tour on the way. If you're going to be a Millennium student, you need to know where things are. And where not to go."
Christina stood in shock for a second, flexing her freed fingers, before she hurried after her.
. . .
-Melissa POV-
The short tour was not short.
"Cafeteria," Yuuka said, pointing without slowing down. The room beyond the glass was huge, bright and loud, with automated counters along one wall and a robot in a chef's hat flipping something on a grill with mechanical precision. "The set lunch is cheapest. Don't buy from the vending machines on the third floor. They were modified, and nobody has admitted to modifying them."
"What do they do?"
"Sometimes they give you a drink. Sometimes they give you a drink and a lecture on thermodynamics." She sighed. "Sometimes they give you change in a currency that doesn't exist."
'Engineering,' I thought. 'Definitely Engineering.'
"Main library." A tall building with glass walls and rows of shelves that went up so high they had little rolling ladders on rails. "It's open all night during exam season, which is when you'll find half the school asleep in there."
"Labs." A whole wing of them, doors marked with warning signs, some of which I recognized and some of which I really didn't. One door had a sign that just said "PLEASE KNOCK. SERIOUSLY." with a scorch mark under it. "Sign in before you use any of the equipment. If you break something, you fill out a damage report. If you fill out a damage report, it comes to me."
"So don't break things."
"So don't break things," she agreed, with the deep sincerity of someone who had read a lot of damage reports.
She took me past the Seminar's building, a sleek white tower near the center of campus, and pointed at it the way a person might point at their own house. "That's where the student council works. If you ever have a budget request, bring it there. Bring it with receipts."
We passed a long corridor, and she slowed down for the first time.
"Down that way are some of the clubs," she said. "Most of them are fine." There was a very slight edge on "most." "The Game Development Department is at the end. If they ask you to play-test anything, say no. If they ask you for money, say no louder. And if anyone in a maid outfit tells you to get out of the way, get out of the way."
I blinked at her. "Maid outfit?"
"You'll see." She started walking again. "Just do what they say."
'C&C,' I thought, and a little thrill went through me. Neru. Asuna. Akane. Karin. The school's very own team of maids who solved problems with gunfire. I wanted to see them so badly my fingers itched.
Then a second thought chased the first. 'And they're exactly the kind of people who'd notice a fake student.'
The itch went away.
. . .
The walk got awkward somewhere around the second floor of the main building.
Yuuka had run out of places to point at, and I'd run out of polite questions to ask about them. We walked side by side in silence for a while, which neither of us seemed to like, until we both decided at exactly the same time to fix it.
""So, um...""
We stopped.
""You first...!""
We stopped again.
We both made the exact same flustered little gesture with one hand, the "no, please, go ahead" wave. Then we both noticed we were doing it, and stopped that too.
There was a short, deeply embarrassing pause.
"...You first," Yuuka said firmly, in the voice of someone who had settled the issue by authority.
"No, no, you're the senpai."
She gave me a look. I gave her a look. She sighed.
"Fine." She paused, and it was the first time I'd seen her search for words. "What... are your hobbies?"
It was a perfectly ordinary question. A lot of characters in a lot of stories would have stopped dead and overthought it, wondering what she meant by it and what she was really asking. I was a twenty-something office worker who had answered "what are your hobbies" in at least four job interviews. I knew how this went.
"I like math," I said. "And making things. Taking something old and building something new out of it. Like..."
I stuck my hand in my coat pocket. My fingers closed around the one thing I'd put in that pocket on purpose. A real pocket, not Storage. Things appearing out of thin air was not a trick I planned on doing in front of Yuuka.
"Oh! This."
It was small. Smaller than a deck of cards. A flat, matte-gray disc with a single button in the middle and a little ring of blue lights around its edge. I'd built it late on the second night, after I'd sent in the transfer application and couldn't sleep, out of a broken phone, its cracked little battery and some other bits from a crate I'd decided not to look into too closely. My hands had done most of the work. I'd mostly watched, and occasionally said 'wow' out loud to an empty warehouse.
I pressed the button.
Fwmm.
A bubble of faint blue light bloomed out of the disc and settled into a dome about the size of a beach ball, shimmering gently, sitting on my palm like a soap bubble that had decided to take its job seriously.
"It's a little barrier projector," I said. "I made it out of spare parts."
Yuuka stopped walking.
She looked at the bubble. She looked at the disc under it. She looked at me. I could practically hear the calculator in her head.
"What's it rated for?" she asked.
"Rated?"
"What can it stop?"
"Oh. Um. Bullets, mostly." I tilted my hand and watched the light ripple. "Small ones. For now."
Yuuka's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "And how do you know it works?"
Something in me, something smug and a little bit dangerous, took over the controls before I could stop it.
"Why don't you shoot it and find out?"
. . .
-3rd POV-
It wasn't the words. It was the smile.
Christina said it with a little lift at the corner of her mouth, the look of someone who already knew exactly how this would turn out, and for some reason it went straight under Yuuka's skin like a splinter. Yuuka was the calm one. Yuuka was always the calm one. She was the calm one when the Game Development Department set a lab on fire. She was the calm one when the Engineering Department asked for funding for a "sentient toaster, phase two."
She was not, for some reason, calm right now.
"Fine," she said. "I'll see, then."
Her hand moved on its own, quick and practiced, and one of her submachine guns came up from her side.
Christina's eyes went to it, and for one heartbeat, they changed. They didn't change color. They just sharpened, the way a camera lens does when it finds its focus.
. . .
-Melissa POV-
'Black SIG MPX. Short barrel, collapsing stock, blue on the handguard, Millennium insignia on the magwell. Nine millimeter. She has two of them, a matched pair. "Logic & Reason."'
The tap in my head poured it all out the moment she drew. Weight, rate of fire, how far the stock would extend, how she'd hold it. Her grip was clean. Her finger was off the trigger. She'd been trained by someone who cared.
I memorized every inch of it in a glance, because apparently, that's another thing this body does now.
And I waited for the shot.
It didn't come.
Yuuka stood there with the gun half-raised, aimed somewhere around the floor near the little blue bubble. She looked at the barrier. She looked at the very clean, very expensive white hallway around us. She looked at the security camera in the corner of the ceiling, which was looking right back at her.
Very slowly, she lowered the gun.
"...I'll test it later," she said. "After class. In the shooting range. Like a reasonable person."
I couldn't help it. I was a little disappointed. "You're sure? It'd only take a second."
"If I fire a gun in the main hall," Yuuka said, holstering it, "someone files a report. And who do you think the report goes to?"
"You?"
"Me." She turned and started walking again. "After class. Don't think I'll forget."
'She won't,' I thought. 'She absolutely won't.'
I let the bubble fade and slipped the disc back into my pocket.
We'd gone maybe ten more steps when Yuuka spoke again, quieter this time, without looking at me.
"Christina."
"Yes?"
"This is going to sound strange." She hesitated. Yuuka didn't hesitate. "But it feels like I've known you for a long time. Do you... feel that too?"
I almost tripped.
For a second, the calm in my chest went very, very still. Not alarmed. Listening. Like someone in another room had said a name they hadn't heard in years.
Then it settled again, and gave me nothing.
"Well..." I scratched my cheek, buying a second. "I feel like we've gotten along really well for how short a time it's been. So, yeah? Maybe?"
Yuuka nodded once, like that was an acceptable answer, and didn't say anything else about it.
But I kept thinking about it all the way to the classroom.
'Is that another thing this girl has? Some kind of... charm? Or is it just me, and how I act? Or...'
There was a third option. I didn't like it, so I didn't finish the thought.
'I'll find out the more I talk to people.'
. . .
Yuuka stopped in front of a classroom door in the first-year wing, knocked twice and slid it open without waiting.
Thirty heads turned.
At the front of the room stood the teacher, a tall robot in a neat gray suit with a screen for a face. The screen was showing a small, polite smiley face. It changed to a question mark when it saw Yuuka.
"Seminar," it said in a mild, pleasant voice. "Is there a problem?"
"No problem. New transfer student." Yuuka put a hand on my back and moved me one step into the room, gently but firmly, like placing a chess piece. "Frazure Christina. She's on your roster as of today."
The screen face checked something. "Ah, yes. Welcome, Frazure-san."
Yuuka turned to me. For a moment, she looked like she was about to say something else. Then she just said, "After class," in a tone that was half reminder and half threat, and left.
The door slid shut.
Thirty students stared at me.
'Okay. You're a background character. You've done public speaking before. You've done quarterly reviews in front of the regional director. This is a room full of teenagers with guns. You can do this.'
"Um," I said. "Hello. I'm Frazure Christina. I like complex equations and building new devices. Please take care of me."
I bowed.
There was a scattering of polite applause and one person who said "ooh, devices" in a tone of genuine interest. The teacher pointed me to an empty seat by the window, second from the back. The classic protagonist seat. I tried very hard not to take that as an omen.
. . .
The lecture was applied mathematics.
That should have been a problem. The last time I'd done serious math was in college, and most of what I remembered from that was how bad the vending machine coffee had been. But the moment the robot teacher put an equation on the board, the tap in my head opened, and the answer was just... there. Not just the answer. The steps, the shortcuts, three different ways to get to it, and a mild sense of disappointment at how easy it was.
'Oh no. She's a math genius too.'
Halfway through the lesson, the teacher's screen face turned to me.
"Frazure-san. Would you like to try the next one?"
Every head in the room turned again.
I got up and walked to the board. The problem was a nasty one, the kind designed to make students sweat. My hand picked up the marker and started writing before I'd even finished reading it. The solution flowed out in clean, neat lines, line after line, and I watched it with growing horror, because it was much too good. It was elegant. It used a trick I'd never seen in my life. It was the kind of answer that got a student noticed.
'Good but not suspiciously good. Good but not suspiciously good. That's what your file says!'
I stopped writing.
I looked at the board. Then, very deliberately, I made a small, believable mistake in the second-to-last line, a minus sign I "forgot" to flip, and finished the problem with the wrong answer.
The teacher's screen showed a thoughtful face. "Very close, Frazure-san. A very interesting approach, too. Just check your signs on line six."
"Oh! Right. Sorry." I fixed it with an embarrassed laugh and went back to my seat.
Somewhere behind me, a girl muttered, "Huh, that was actually really clever." I kept my head down.
'Background character. Background character. Background character.'
. . .
For the rest of the lesson, I went through the motions: nodding at the right times, writing in my notebook, looking out the window when the robot wasn't facing me.
But I wasn't really listening. I was planning.
In the back of my notebook, under the day's notes, a second list grew. To anyone looking over my shoulder, it would have just looked like a doodle-filled to-do list. To me, it was the start of everything.
ABYDOS. 'They're going to need help, and they're not going to ask for it. I'll have to show up as someone else. Something simple. A helmet and a different gun, maybe. Plenty of gangs wear helmets out there. Nobody looks twice at a helmet.'
TRINITY. 'Once Chris is settled in here, make a second identity for Trinity. Watch the Tea Party from the inside. Keep an eye on Mika.'
ARIUS. That one still had a star next to it. 'Find out how to get to them. Saori first. If I can get her and her squad on my side early, before things go wrong...'
I didn't finish that line either. I just pressed the pen down harder.
ARIS. A little drawing of a big sword-shaped railgun. 'She's going to end up with a very big gun. If I can get my hands on it while it's being built, I can make it better. And make sure nobody has a back door into it. Nobody. Not even Rio.'
And, last, underlined twice:
ROBOT DOUBLE.
'If I'm going to be more than one person, I can't be in more than one place. Unless something else is being one of them for me.' I tapped the pen against the page. 'Chris needs a stand-in. Something that can sit in class, walk the halls, say hi to Sumire and survive five minutes of Yuuka.'
'That last one might be impossible.'
'And every identity after Chris is going to need one too. One for Trinity. One for wherever else I end up. A whole set of me.'
'I'll need parts. A lot of parts. And a workshop. And somebody who won't ask too many questions about what I'm building.'
Which brought me, as all roads at Millennium apparently did, to the Engineering Department.
The bell rang.
I blinked. An entire hour had gone by. The robot teacher was saying something about homework. Students were getting up, stretching, talking. My notebook had more plans than notes in it.
I closed it and started packing up, still half in my head, already sketching servo layouts in my imagination.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder.
. . .
This time, I didn't turn around before the tap landed. I was too distracted. My body let it happen, which told me the calm in my chest didn't think the person behind me was a threat.
It was right.
The girl standing next to my desk had messy, bright orange hair cut in a bob with bangs, and a little braid on her left side. Bright red eyes behind black glasses. A navy-blue furry winter coat that she wore even though it wasn't cold, over a white shirt with a loose blue tie, and a black pleated skirt held up by straps, with white socks and black sneakers with blue laces. She was holding a notebook against her chest like a shield, and she was vibrating, very slightly, with barely contained excitement.
Above her head, an orange halo: a triangle inside a bigger triangle, with little arrows along its edges.
Toyomi Kotori.
The Engineering Department's first year. The Walking Encyclopedia.
'Oh, she's in my class.'
"Hi!" she said. "I'm Toyomi Kotori! First year, Engineering Department. Yuuka-senpai messaged me during class and said you're interested in making things, is that true? She said you made a barrier projector out of spare parts. What kind of spare parts? What's the power source? Is the field shape fixed or adjustable? What's the energy draw on impact? Is it a kinetic-reactive field or a constant field? How long have you been building things? What materials do you usually work with? Do you prefer welding or bolting? How many hours a day do you spend on it? What was the first thing you ever made? What's your favorite tool? Do you have a favorite..."
She went on. And on. She didn't seem to need to breathe.
Several of my classmates, I noticed, were very quietly gathering their things and leaving the room faster than necessary. One of them gave me a sympathetic look on the way out.
But here's the thing.
I liked it.
I'd spent years in an office where nobody cared about anything they said, where every meeting was people saying words so they could say they'd said them. Kotori cared about every single word. Every question was a real question. She actually wanted to know the answers.
Listening to her felt like standing next to a little bonfire.
When she finally paused to take a breath, I took my chance.
"I'm Frazure Christina! Chris is fine. First year, transfer, it's my first day. The parts were from a broken phone and an old battery. The power source is the battery, but I changed the discharge curve so it can take a spike on impact without browning out, and the field is kinetic-reactive, which is why it's so efficient. It's fixed-shape right now, but I want to make it adjustable. I've been building things for, um, a while, mostly with whatever I can find, and I prefer bolting because you can take it apart again later. And I don't really have a budget at home, so I've been wondering where I could get proper parts. Also, you said 'Engineering Department'? Is it possible for me to join? Because I really, really like making things, and I've heard..."
Now it was my turn to go on and on.
The calm in my chest had stepped back at some point and let me drive, and I wasn't even acting anymore. I was just excited. I was talking to Kotori from Blue Archive about the barrier I'd built with my own two hands, and she was listening.
Kotori stood there with her mouth slightly open. For what might have been the first time in her life, someone else was doing the talking, and she didn't seem to know what to do with it.
When I finally stopped, she was silent for a full three seconds.
Then her eyes started to sparkle.
. . .
-3rd POV-
Toyomi Kotori had been called many things. "Walking Encyclopedia." "Please, Kotori, not right now." "Is she still talking?" Once, memorably, by a senior in the library, "a podcast with legs."
She had never, not once, met someone who talked back at the same speed.
She grabbed both of Christina's hands in hers, notebook and all.
"I can take you to the Engineering Department!" she said. "Right now! Today! You'll love it, everyone's so smart, and Utaha-senpai builds the most amazing things, and Hibiki-chan is a genius, and we have so many parts, and..."
"KOTORI."
Both of them jumped.
Yuuka was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed.
"After class," Yuuka said, looking at Christina. "I said I'd test it. The shooting range is booked for ten minutes. I booked it." She looked at Kotori, and then at their joined hands, and something in her expression went faintly tired, the look of a treasurer watching two expense reports fall in love. "And you're coming too, apparently."
"Can I?!" Kotori asked.
"Could I stop you?"
"No!"
"Then yes." Yuuka turned. "Hurry up."
. . .
-Melissa POV-
Millennium's shooting range was underground, clean and quiet, with long white lanes and targets on motorized tracks. Yuuka marched straight to lane three, checked the booking on the screen, pulled on a pair of ear protectors and held out her hand.
I set the disc down on the bench at the far end of the lane, pressed the button and stepped back.
Fwmm.
The blue bubble bloomed and settled.
Kotori had her face pressed so close to the safety glass that it was fogging up. "Kinetic-reactive," she whispered to herself, the way some people say a prayer.
Yuuka raised Logic.
This time she didn't hesitate. She fired a short, clean burst. Ratatatat.
The bullets hit the bubble, and the bubble lit up. Not much. Just a ripple of brighter blue across its surface, spreading out from each point of impact, as if someone had skipped stones across a pond. The rounds stopped dead an inch from the disc, hung in the air for half a second, and dropped onto the bench with a series of small, sad clinks.
The bubble wobbled. Then it settled again, exactly the same size as before.
Yuuka lowered the gun.
Then she raised both of them and emptied a magazine from each.
RATATATATATATATATAT-
The bubble flared bright, rippling and shuddering. Bullets bounced. Bullets stopped. Bullets fell. The little ring of lights on the disc flickered from blue to yellow. Then the guns clicked empty, and the barrier faded back to a soft, steady blue.
It held.
There was a little pile of flattened copper and lead on the bench, glittering under the range lights.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Kotori made a noise like a kettle reaching its boiling point.
Yuuka slowly pushed her ear protectors down around her neck and stared at the disc. Her lips moved. She was doing math. I could see her doing math.
"That battery," she said finally, "shouldn't be able to do that."
'Ah.'
"It's a very good battery?" I offered.
"It's a phone battery. A cracked one. I can see the label from here." She turned and looked at me, and her eyes were narrowed all the way now. "Even if you adjusted the discharge curve, the energy you'd need to stop that many rounds..."
"Kinetic-reactive," Kotori said dreamily. "It only spends energy on impact. Stores it in the field and releases it... no, it couldn't store it, the capacitance would... unless it's redistributing the... oh. Oh. Chris. Chris, how did you..."
"Trade secret," I said, smiling, with the calm in my chest standing firmly behind me like a bodyguard. Because the honest answer was, 'I don't know. My hands did it. I watched.'
Yuuka looked at me for a very long time.
Then she let out a breath, put her guns away and pinched the bridge of her nose.
"The Engineering Department," she said, "is going to love you."
"You think so?"
"Unfortunately." She picked up the disc carefully and handed it back to me. "Which means I'm going to be seeing your name on expense reports."
"I'll bring receipts," I promised.
Something in Yuuka's face twitched, very slightly, at the corner of her mouth. It might have been the start of a smile. It disappeared too quickly to be sure.
"See that you do," she said, and walked out.
Kotori grabbed my hands again.
"Okay," she said, eyes shining. "Now can I take you to the Engineering Department?"
I looked down at our hands, then at the door Yuuka had just walked out of, then at the little pile of flattened bullets on the bench that I was definitely going to put in Storage the second nobody was looking.
My first day at Millennium Science School. I'd been noticed by a named character within twenty minutes, interrogated by the treasurer within forty, nearly outed myself at a whiteboard, built a barrier that defied math, and made a friend who talked faster than I did.
So much for being a background character.
"That'd be great!" I said.
And just like that, another bond was formed.