From: @kurohawt
this is the first time i’ve participated in a Zero Escape Secret Santa and it was really fun 🙂
This is for @schrodingersorrow!!
Prompt: Diana realising Phi is her daughter (with hugs!!)
Happy Holidays! I hope you enjoy your gift!
Tag: submission
To: @gavinnersroadie
From: @theeyeofthetigger
I was a little unsure of which of your prompts I wanted to do, but then I saw the clothing/hairswap one, and I LOVE doing stuff like that.
So have Kurashiki swaps, including…semi hairstyle swap eyy~
To: @sense8lotuses
From: @waitingforztd
Merry Christmas sense8lotuses! Hey look, it’s Q team with its amnesiac robot child, its big boobs brainy lady and its “would-make-harsh-decisions-to-win-loved-ones’-approval” guy… Nothing’s changed here.
So yeah, I really liked your “ZTD but good” prompt, it gave me a good laugh. 😉 It would probably have been done better as a fic, but alas, I am no good writer. I hope you enjoy your gift anyway. Have some nice holidays. 😀
The Storykeeper
To: @silvershoelaces
From: @morisninethlion
I was super excited to get to work on this one! The question of what happened to Alice and Clover after VLR has been on my mind since i first finished, and got even more strong after I played ZTD, so I was super pumped up to finally have reason to write something out for it! I hope you like it, and I hope you have a great holiday season 😀
It had been a few hours after Sigma’s consciousness had gotten traded with the Doctor’s when she and Alice were approached by Akane inside the lounge, Clover stiffening up almost immediately. Everything about this situation was frustrating– after all the crap she’d lived through, she and Alice were now stuck forty-five years in a future without anyone they knew. They’d been completely left behind- and even Phi, who should’ve been in a similar situation, had closed herself off completely.
Tenmyouji- no, Junpei– and Quark were waiting in the B. garden for their shuttle to earth to be prepared, and Luna had been watching over Kyle while he slept. Dio was locked up somewhere, but Clover didn’t care about him. No, it was just her and Alice trying to figure out what in the world they could possibly do, when Akane walked in.
“Good afternoon.”
“Oh, uh… hey.” She still didn’t really know how to talk to Akane like this, honestly. She seemed too dignified (and not to mention old), and it was hard to really think of her like the same girl from the nonary game. “Were you looking for Junpei, or something? He’s not here, he’s-“
“No, I came to speak with the two of you.”
“Huh?” Raising an eyebrow, Clover quickly looked over to Alice, who only seemed to be sharing the same guarded confusion. “Why would you want to talk to us?”
“I have information I believe will be of interest to the two of you.”
Clover quickly tugged at Alice’s hand, the both of them turning aside from Akane to speak together for just a moment. Neither of them were really sure if they could trust her- but could it really hurt to listen at this point? There was nothing more they could possibly lose, not at this point. Eventually it was Clover taking the lead again, looking back to Akane.
“Alright then.”
Akane seemed almost vaguely amused with herself- or perhaps Clover was just reading her entirely wrong? Honestly, it was impossible to tell what Akane was thinking.
“To start, I can imagine you aren’t pleased with your situation, but-“
“Not pleased? Not pleased?” Clover rose to her feet with a huff, clenching her fists. “You bet your ass I’m not pleased! You drag us out of our own time just to dump us like this- and you think we’d be pleased with this?! You made me play another nonary game! You, of all people, should know that I am EXPLICITLY NOT PLEASED WITH THIS!”
There still wasn’t any readable change of expression on Akane’s face, but she had taken a step back- it’d seem like not even she saw Clover’s outburst. She felt herself calm slightly when Alice placed a hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her- but she could feel the same anger from Alice, just calmer. More refined.
“I do apologize, Clover. But your presence was necessary for our plan-“
“Well fat lot of good it did us! Doesn’t the fact that we’re here mean you already failed?”
“…..yes. However, that is not what I wanted to talk with you about.”
“Then what did you want to talk about?”
“A chance for you to regain your lost time.”
Clover was knocked speechless at such a ridiculous-sounding statement, so Alice began speaking instead.
“What are you talking about? Isn’t that impossible?”
“No, it is not. On earth, there’s a machine- with its use, it is possible for you to return to your lost past.” Akane shook her head gently, lacing her fingers together as she spoke. “However, there are conditions to it before I tell you more.”
“Alright then, what are those?”
“Firstly, you must accept the results given to you. You may return to the past, or you may continue on this time- your existence will continue from both points in time, so your consciousness might not be the version that moves to the past. Second, you must not abuse this machine. Continued use could have the potential for unforeseen side-effects, that not even I could understand. Finally… you cannot leave this timeline.”
Stomping her foot in frustration, Clover cut in.
“What? I thought the entire point of this was to get us off this timeline!”
“No. You must agree to simply move to a far earlier point on this same timeline- The day the outbreak began.”
“Why would we ever agree to something like that? I don’t want to live on a timeline like this-“
“It is not because I want you to suffer. It is simply because this is the only timeline where your existence will not cause a contradiction.”
“…what?”
“In past uses of this machine, people always went to timelines where the selves that originally existed there had already died. As a result, there was no potential for contradiction. I only know of one person who didn’t follow this logic- a rather foolish man, who simply avoided his past self for a year of his life.”
Despite her words, there seemed to be a slight hint of amusement behind Akane’s words. Whoever this ‘foolish man’ had been, it would seem like Akane didn’t think poorly of him- or perhaps Clover was just misinterpreting things again.
“So, you’re saying that if we moved to a different timeline and saw ourselves, time would get screwy?”
“I don’t know.”
“….what?” Clover stared blankly before looking over to Alice, who only shrugged. “What do you mean you don’t know?!”
“I mean, this isn’t something I have ever experimented with. The results could be entirely harmless, or it could result in an entire timeline’s collapse. The chances are high that you wouldn’t live through the encounter- I doubt the morphogenetic fields would know how to process the information of such a meeting.”
“So…. If I saw my double, I’d run the risk of destroying the entire world?”
“Potentially, yes.”
“…okay. Okay, sure.” Frustrated, Clover folded her arms. “So you’re telling me you know of some sort of nondescript time machine that can send us back in time, but we can only use it to move back to this timeline, otherwise we might accidentally destroy a world or something.”
“Yes, that’s how to put it simply.”
“Are you serious?” With a huff, Clover finally sat herself back down. “How could we possibly believe something like that? It’s insane!”
“You believe us about the earth-“
“That’s different! I can see that with my own eyes- it’s hard, but it’s real. This, though? There’s no way any of that’s real- just… just go away. Stop messing around, Akane. We played our part, helped you guys out… so just leave us alone. Stop doing this.”
“Well.” Seeming to realize she was no longer welcome, Akane gave a slight shrug. “I suppose I expected as much. Still, I would’ve expected you to be more the type to take the chance.”
She walked out, leaving Clover and Alice alone. The older woman sat down beside Clover, and the mood only seemed to get more depressing.
“Alice… do you think she was lying?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I can’t say it at all sounds plausible… but I didn’t think cryogenic freezing had been perfected either. And yet, here we are…”
“Yeah… but a time machine?”
“It doesn’t sound too realistic, does it…”
“No, it doesn’t.” Clover started to wring her fingers in the way she often did when nervous or thinking about things, eyes scanning the floor for nothing in particular. “It doesn’t make any sense at all, but… does she really have any reason to lie?”
“…at this point, not really.”
Both of them sighed in unison, taking a moment to pause and just think.
“Alice… I… I know I just yelled at her, but… it wouldn’t hurt to at least learn more, right?”
“The worst that could happen is nothing happening, as far as I can tell. I hardly imagine she’d plan to throw us into another game.”
“Yeah…”
“Then… do you want to talk to her about it?”
“I… I do. This might… be my only chance, after all.” She didn’t want to say it, but she hadn’t been able to get in contact at all with Light. She’d just been hoping that it was due to the resonance effect- but the chance that it wasn’t and that something bad had happened to him was all too terrifying. “I just… even if it’s a cruel joke, I… want to at least have a chance at knowing……”
Finding themselves once again at a reluctant consensus, they both got up- they’d just have to find Akane, and get more information out of her. And hopefully this all wouldn’t turn out to be some sort of horrible, horrible joke.
–
It was in this method that they’d found themselves joining Junpei and Quark on the shuttle back to earth, after having gotten plenty of detailed instructions written out by Akane, as well as precise coordinates of where they were supposed to go. They’d asked her why she wasn’t coming with them- but she’d just waved it off with an ‘its not my place anymore’, leaving both Clover and Alice to assume she simply didn’t want to be trapped in a shuttle with Junpei for many long hours.
It’d seemed like Junpei didn’t want to talk much himself, though- he’d sat down in his seat fairly quickly after takeoff and not said a word since, outside of a few words to Quark that’d been too quiet for Clover to make out.
Still, despite the somewhat awkward mood, Clover still found herself fascinated by the trip. After all, this was space– certainly not something she’d ever expected to experience! It was almost surreal to watch the moon grow smaller behind them as the ship flew, the red earth on the other side of the horizon growing slowly bigger.
“So, Quark, what was it like living with Junpei?”
“Huh? Oh, Grandpa’s great!”
Quark had gotten out of his seat to look out of the window with Clover, both of them holding onto a railing to keep from floating aimlessly.
“I still find it hard to believe… I mean, not just Junpei being old, but him actually having kids…”
“Oh, actually, Grandpa adopted me.”
“O-Oh? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-“
“It’s okay. We’re still a family.” His smile was large, although it couldn’t stop Clover entirely from feeling bad. “So, you and Alice are coming to live on earth too?”
“Well… it’s a bit more complicated than that. But… kinda, yes?”
“…okay!”
If it worked, they’d go back in time and live through the end of the world. If it didn’t, then they’d… well, probably just hang around Junpei and Quark. There was the option of going back to the moon, yes- but it was… a little awkward. Phi had shut herself off, Luna seemed to be far more awkward and reserved than she’d been before, and there was the obvious problem of Akane and Sig- Doctor Klim being around. It just wasn’t a situation that had sounded enjoyable to either of them to remain in, even if living on earth hardly sounded pleasant either.
The trip was largely uneventful, broken up only by low conversation and the sounds of Junpei snoring at the five hour mark, having fallen asleep. Alice stayed in her seat a majority of the time, but Clover found herself just fascinated by watching the window. This was… space. She’d seen pictures and videos as a kid, heard things about the space stations and stuff out there- but it had never even crossed her mind that she’d be able to actually go to space.
Junpei was woken up by a little announcement coming on that they’d soon be re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, giving a warning to buckle up as if this was a simple plane ride across the country or something, and not through space. She did as the voice said, sitting herself down and buckling herself in, looking over to Alice nervously.
The landing was rough compared to an airplane, but still smoother than she’d expected. Quark and Junpei didn’t even look too horribly put out- Quark was just bouncing in his seat, presumably from excitement.
He was the first one off the shuttle when the announcement said it was safe, jumping out of his seat with the amount of energy she would’ve expected from a kid around his age and running outside. Next out was Junpei, just pausing for a moment to see if they were following.
When they finally stepped out onto the pavement of the landing area, everything seemed to stop for a moment.
There had been a degree of plausible deniability from the shuttle, and from the moon. They could just say that the visors were faked, or the window was really a screen- but no. No, looking up at the sky with their own eyes proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that what had happened to the earth was no lie. The world truly had ended.
Junpei didn’t say anything for a while, silent as Quark ran off towards an old-looking pickup truck a short ways off. There was nothing that could truly be said to someone experiencing this for the first time- and Clover could only imagine what it had been like to live through the things that had brought the world to this point.
They stood in silence for what felt like hours until finally Junpei called them over, standing outside of the old pickup.
“I’m driving this time, Clover.” There was a grin on his face when he spoke, as if attempting to break the tension heavy in the air. “Can’t have you busting this thing up like you did that poor Jeep.”
“Hey! I didn’t break it- it just got a little dirty!”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I trust your driving.”
Clover turned to look to Alice for support, but she only chuckled and gave Clover a pat on the back. She wasn’t that bad- yeah, maybe she’d gone a little fast, but that was just because there was no speed limit in the desert! She’d drive more carefully with a kid on board… but to be honest, she didn’t really want to drive. She didn’t know this place at all, and… well, she wanted some time to take it in. Really absorb what she was looking at, because just a few moments wasn’t nearly enough.
The drive away from the landing pad was about three hours, being mostly silent as all the passengers just looked out the windows at the passing scenery. Skyscrapers were destroyed, houses and apartments collapsed in on themselves… the buildings that weren’t ruined showed clear wear and tear from the years, with weeds and shrubs overgrown and pushing through cracks in pavement.
It was a bit surprising how many plants there actually were– but then again, Junpei had said the nuclear winter was seven years long, so it had to’ve ended a long time ago… there were plenty of dead trees and bushes, but not all of them were dead.
The only real noise inside the truck, outside of the rumble of the engine, was when the sound of the radio picked up. It seemed to be something generic, talking about something to do with a place Clover didn’t recognise the name of- Junpei let out a slight grunt of acknowledgement, but didn’t say anything more. Perhaps that was where they were headed, then? She hadn’t really thought about it, but the place probably had a name… but she wasn’t going to be staying there.
After a while the truck started to slow, entering a run-down looking town area. Clover didn’t pay much attention to the turns they were making until they pulled into a driveway to a rather small house, turning the truck off and getting out.
“Well? We’re here.”
“This is… the place?”
“No, this is my house. I’m tired, I’m not driving you there today.”
“Aha.. fair enough.”
Despite the look on the outside, the inside of the house was… strangely normal. Sure, the paints and wallpapers were faded, and some parts of the house looked like they had a permanent layer of dust to them, but it was just… a normal house. A place that people lived.
“I, uh, I’ve only got one guest bedroom, but I’ll sleep on the couch-“
“No, it’s fine.” Alice smiled, shaking her head. “I’ll sleep on the couch. I couldn’t impose on you like that.”
“It’s not really…” He paused when he saw the look on Alice’s face, before just shrugging and scratching at the back of his head. “Alright then. I’ll grab a couple blankets for you though, it can get cold at night.”
“Thank you.”
He left the guest room at that point, Clover seated on the bed and Alice standing by an old-looking desk.
“I could’ve taken the couch, Alice.”
“Nonsense. I’m not going to let my subordinate take the couch while I get a bed, that would hardly be fair.”
“I… Alice, I don’t think we really need to talk like that anymore, do we?”
“Hmm?”
“I mean… is there any point to it? At this point, SOIS is… gone for sure.” She sighed, shoulders heavy. “I don’t work for you anymore, not really.”
“I… suppose.” She paused, looking aside. “But still, I’m not going to let you take the couch.”
There was a long silence, eventually broken by Quark knocking at the door and announcing that there was food. The meal itself was short and simple, and they all went to sleep directly after- even if there were countless things swirling in Clover’s mind, she couldn’t bring herself to ask anything. So instead she just stared up at the ceiling until sleep finally came for her, pulling her under.
–
They were all up fairly early the next day- despite how fast Clover’s mind had been she’d ended up sleeping well, but that didn’t stop her from being up far earlier than she normally was. Junpei had already started on breakfast by the time she was there, yet another simple meal that they ate quickly, before Junpei and Quark left for about a half-hour. Quark wasn’t with him when Junpei returned- he’d dropped Quark off with a friend, it seemed. Clover couldn’t blame him for it, if she’d had her kid go through a nonary game, then she’d be taking no chances.
He’d looked… frustrated when he seemed to realize where the coordinates Akane had given them led, and Clover couldn’t say she was too fond of returning to the Nevada desert herself. It somehow looked more barren and desolate than she even remembered… and in the middle of it all was what seemed to be a hole in the ground.
“Of course it’s here…”
“What’s here?” It looked like Junpei hadn’t wanted either of them to hear it, but that wouldn’t stop Clover from asking. “Have you been here before?”
“Yeah… once. This is…. Well, this isn’t where the Mars simulation took place, but it’s where I ended up.”
“Wait, what? I, uh… back up a little there, Junpei.”
“This is where everything… the end of everything started here, from what I gather. This is where radical-6 got out.”
“And Akane wanted us to come back?”
“Apparently so.”
Junpei stopped answering questions after that, only giving halfhearted grunts in response to whatever they had to say. It was pretty clear that there was no point in saying much more- so they all stood in silence as the platform they were on started up, acting as a lift and taking them down, down, down into the depths.
Everything about the place down there looked… off. One of the walls was just a pile of collapsed rubble, another was a gaping hole where a large metal door looked like it’d been blown off- and it was faint, but along the ground were what looked like bloodstains. Junpei paid them no real mind, continuing to walk forwards, but it was clear he was bothered by something.
The instructions told them where to go inside the place, staring at the large walls of what was clearly some sort of shelter.
“Tenmyouji, what is this place?”
“I’m… not sure. I don’t remember.”
“You don’t- are you just kidding around?”
“No, I’m not.” His face grew dark for a moment, before shaking his head. “I can’t remember a thing. I’ve been trying to remember for fourty-five years now, but still… I don’t. I don’t remember a thing.”
“Oh…”
They went silent yet again, walking through the dust-covered halls. There was something decidedly uncomfortable about the place to Clover, almost as if it were a memorial, or… a tomb. But no- that was silly. Just silly.
They reached a room that seemed even more off than the rest, with the same tall structure and weird ‘pods’ that Akane had described in her letter to them. They went through the instructions that she left and got the device to power up… but was this really a good idea?
No, there was no real turning back now. They had to do this.
“Hey, Junpei?”
“Mh?”
“Thanks. For taking us out here- you didn’t have to do that, but I appreciate it. I really do.”
He simply shrugged and nodded, waving as Alice and Clover got into the pods as per the instructions. She couldn’t shake the anxiety, it was insane– but they had to do this. If they were going to reclaim those last forty-five years, then they would do this.
Closing her eyes as the pod around her started to grow bright, Clover let that be the last thought in her mind before things went dark.
–
–
“Clover? Clover, are you okay?”
“Mnnh… huh?” Clover blinked when the door to the pod opened up, realizing something off- she was in the export pod… right? Yes, there was no doubt about it, she most certainly was. “Alice, did it work? Are we- is this the past?”
“From what I can tell, yes… at the very least, this place doesn’t look nearly as dusty.”
“Well then, let’s…”
Anxiety was gripping tightly at Clover’s chest, but she shook it off. They both did- they made way back outside, back out past the collapsed wall and the blown-off door… and out to the currently fresh bloodstains.
“What… the hell happened here?”
There was a lot of blood, enough to imply that people had most certainly died. Were they… had they been the first radical-6 victims, perhaps? Or did they have something to do with that collapsed wall… no, there was no point dwelling. They couldn’t let themselves dwell.
Calling the elevator back down with held breath, Clover and Alice waited for what felt like the hundredth time that day until they were back at the surface. They were taken aback at what they saw- multiple emergency services vehicles were present, with police and ambulance and firetrucks. Before either of them could react they’d been swarmed by about ten different people at once, asking questions and demanding answers- Clover stepped back a bit behind Alice; who was far better at talking in a situation like this. She managed to clear the air on what was going on and got them a ride back to the nearest city, but now wasn’t time for that for Clover.
[Light? Light, are you th-]
[Clover! My god, Clover, what happened? Where are you? Are you alright? I’ve been trying to contact you, but-]
[It’s… it’s a long story, Light. I’m alright now, I’m with Alice, but… that’s not the thing we need to be worried about now. We need to find some place safe.]
[…safe? Clover, what are you talking about?]
[Light… it’s the end of the world.]
[No… does that mean, Free the Soul…?]
[Yeah… we were too late to stop it. What we need to do now is find someplace safe, and take care of whatever survivors we can.]
[I… I see. I’ll get in contact with the others.]
[Thanks, Light. We’ll be back soon, okay? I promise, I’ll explain everything. I promise.]
–
The two of them had gotten on a flight almost as soon as reaching the city, making way to SOIS headquarters and all of the others that they worked with. Clover ignored the concern from everyone else, though- what was most important was that she found her brother. She didn’t even wait to say hello before she’d launched herself into his arms, sobbing and holding him close.
“I’m so glad… I missed you so much, Light…”
“Clover… I’m glad you’re safe.”
“I’m sorry I worried you…”
“What matters now is that you and Alice are back. And, that we have time to figure out what will happen next.”
“Yes. About that, actually.” Alice interrupted the reunion, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. It was currently just them and the other kids from the first nonary game (sans Akane and Aoi, of course) gathered around a table, Alice standing at the head. “We need a plan. According to this, we have a general timeline of when things will happen. Our deadline is April 13th, 2029.”
She laid out the note they’d gotten from Akane, and all at once everyone was speaking on top of each other.
“How can we trust that?”
“Where did it come from?”
“Where were you guys?!”
“Is the world really going to end?”
“How could you know this, but not know how to stop it-“
“Everyone, please be quiet.” Light’s voice cut through the noise, calm and collected as always. “I don’t think there would be any reason whatsoever for Alice to want to lie about this, no? And even if that message is wrong, is preparation really a bad thing? We either be prepared for an apocalypse that doesn’t happen, or stand unprepared for one that does. And one of those options certainly sounds more pleasant than the other.”
Nobody really had grounds to argue him on that– after all, it was true. If there was even the slightest chance the note was true (as Clover and Alice knew it was), then they couldn’t take the risk. It was just too dangerous.
The meeting went on for a while after that, trying to figure out exactly what they could do. SOIS and the government had shelters prepared for the worst, in case things went wrong, so they’d decided that’s what they’d do. Each shelter would have one transmitter and one receiver to keep contact flowing in a ‘network’ of sorts… it meant they would all be split up from their siblings, but it was a pain that they would have to deal with. Besides, the shelters weren’t terribly far apart- so long as they had cars, once the worst was over, they could reunite. It would be seven long years, but… they could do it. They could handle this.
–
“Light, you… please be careful, okay? Take care of yourself?”
“I will, Clover.”
“Alright…”
She’d told him everything about the game and about the end, but she’d never mentioned one particular fact- the fact that she hadn’t been able to contact him. As far as she knew… Light would die. But so long as he lived through these seven years, it’d be fine- she just… she wanted to be there. At the very least, she figured she could deal with it if she was there.
“You’ll be careful as well, right Clover? I doubt Akane would do anything considering she has you and Alice in this timeline as well, but… don’t be careless.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
Light turned to go to the supply van that was going to take him to his shelter for the next seven years, but was stopped short by Clover throwing her arms around him one last time, hugging him tight and holding him close.
“Be safe, Light. You’re the best brother in the world, you know that? I love you. Be careful.”
“Clover…” He sighed, patting her hair for a moment. “I will, I promise. I will be fine. I’ll see- well, not me, but you’ll see me again when it’s safe again. The time will go by faster than you think, I’m sure.”
“I… Alright.” Finally letting go, Clover let him start walking away. “I will see you again, Light! I will!”
Ignoring the doubt that sat in the bottom of her mind, she let herself just believe in that. It had to be true. She’d… she’d see him again.
–
The ride to her own shelter felt long, too long, accompanied only by nervous fidgeting from Nona and he sound of Clover tapping her fingers again the armrest of her seat, while Alice drove. The thing had been stocked full as it could go, and apparently the shelter itself was already well-stocked… this was more personal belongings. Lotus (no, Hazuki) and Seven (when would he give them a real name?) had ended up at different shelters, Lotus with Ennea and Seven with Light. She was glad they’d at least be safe- but even knowing that Junpei would be alive, that didn’t mean she didn’t wish that they’d been able to find him. It seemed unlikely that he’d make it into a shelter from how he’d spoken, but still… well, she’d told everyone else to make sure it got to her if a ‘Junpei Tenmyouji’ entered any of the shelters. That was enough.
Entering the thing after arriving felt… final. There were all sorts of radios and communication devices set up, a power generator that would last for (according to Alice) at least fifty years, and walls upon walls of preserved food and huge tanks of stored water, as well as things for purifying air and… well, a ton of other things Clover didn’t entirely get but was certain they were important too.
The three of them set up pretty quick inside of the place, and then just… got ready to wait. People would find out about this place sooner or later, and they’d have to filter out the sick ones… but they could do this. Even if these shelters only ended up saving a handful of people, it was something– so she’d take it.
–
There were only 12 people in their shelter the day the reactors went off- all of the other ones had far more, from what it sounded like, but their was apparently in a bit of an odd location for people to reach. They’d had the radios going when everything got loud, and then cut to static. The whole shelter was dead silent at the knowledge of what’d happened… this was really, truly the end. Even with the knowledge that it wasn’t over, the world would recover, it would never be the same. The earth as they knew it was gone now- you’d have a better luck of finding something similar on the moon eventually, from what she understood.
[Light… you there?]
[Yes. This is… it, right?]
[Yeah… yeah, it is.]
[Are you holding up alright, Clover?]
[I’m fine. I was… I was prepared for this. Are you alright?]
[As alright as I can be. I’ll be fine Clover, you know that.]
[I do. I know. How’s Seven?]
[He’s doing well. People listen to him well- turns out he’s rather good at dealing with people. Never would’ve expected that.]
[Aha, yeah..]
[How’s Alice?]
[She’s doing well too. She’s a lot better at keeping the peace than I am, at least..]
[I’m sure things will be fine, Clover.]
[Yeah… yeah. They’ll be fine. I’ll talk to you later, okay Light?]
[Okay, Clover.]
As easy as it was to say, that didn’t make things any easier in reality. But things would be alright- they’d all make it through this. Things would be fine.
–
They’d made it up to 26 people after the first year, and 45 by the third. Less and less people seemed to show up with time, probably because they were… well, they were dead, or they’d gone to the moon. A handful of people had left at one point when the notifications about the Lunar Extraction Program went live, attempting to make it into the Rhizomes… and they’d never been heard from after. Clover could only hope that they’d managed to make it in, and not ended up dead… she didn’t have much reason to believe they were alive, but she had to have hope. So long as she could cling to that hope, then she could pull through.
And the years did pass by far more quickly than she’d expected them to, even within the confines of the little shelter. Times got tense far more often than she’d like, nobody was ever happy with their situations, but they could pull through. They had to pull through.
It was December of 2035, December second to be exact- the day that Clover had moved her birthday to, so she could share it with her brother. Nobody gave gifts or anything, but she still liked to keep it in mind- she and Light would always spend the day talking back and forth a little more than usual, trying to keep in good spirits. This year she would turn twenty-five, a whole six years after the explosions… and soon, it’d be seven years. Soon they’d be able to get out, to see the world for what’d happened… she’d be able to see her brother again. Things would turn out alright, they had to turn out alright.
“Clover, there you are.” She turned her head to look at Alice, moving to get up from her cot but stopped by Alice waving a hand. “I didn’t meant to interrupt your thinking. I just wanted to talk.”
“Oh… okay.”
“Well… happy birthday, Clover.”
“Yeah… thanks.”
“We’ll be able to get out of here soon. And everyone will be able to see their families again… we’ll be out of here soon.”
“Mmmh… hey, Alice?”
“Yes?”
“About… hm. Do you ever wish you’d gone to one of the other shelters?”
“Well, I mean, I wish I could check in on everyone. But that’s why we set things up like this, so we could stay in contact-“
“No, I mean… are you… you picked to stay with me and Nona. Why?”
“This is… a bit late to ask this question, don’t you think?”
“Please, just answer it. I want to know.”
“I picked it because… I didn’t want to just leave you all alone, Clover.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t have been alone-“
“That’s not it, exactly… I wanted to stay at your side, Clover.”
“Alice… I’m… I’m glad.” She smiled, looking off to the side. “Say… do you still just think of me as your subordinate?”
“Don’t you keep saying that those things are pointless now?”
“Aha… yeah, I do.” Clover laughed a little, trying to ignore the pink tinge on her cheeks. “So then… what do you think of me?”
“You’re very important to me, Clover.” Alice’s own face had a bit of a blush on it, although nowhere near as obvious as Clover’s face. “Of course I would want to look out for you.”
“Alice… please, just… can you just say it? I-I, uh, I don’t think I can say it first.”
There was a bit of a sly grin on Alice’s face now, leaning down and planting a kiss on Clover’s head.
“I love you, Clover. Happy birthday.”
“A-Alice… I-I, um… I love you too.” She knew the blush had to be painted brightly across her face by now, but that was fine. This was… it was something she’d wanted to say for a long time, but had just never had the words or the time. But now… now she did. “I love you a lot, Alice. I’ve loved you for a long time, and I… I don’t want you to be my boss or anything, I just… w-would you be my girlfriend?”
“Clover, I’d like that a lot.” Sitting down beside Clover on the bed, Alice put an arm around her and pulled her into a hug. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
–
The months until it was deemed really safe to return back to the surface seemed to pass by in a flash, everything just a little bit brighter now. It wasn’t like anything had even changed– but being able to say “This is Alice, she’s my girlfriend!” just made Clover feel giddy in a way she hadn’t felt before. Not that it was a bad thing- no, she rather liked that feeling.
Stepping out into the upper parts of the shelter, behind closed doors that had managed to avoid being destroyed by scavengers, laid the van that they’d come here with once, and two Jeeps. It certainly wasn’t enough for the sixty-something people they had in the shelter with them- but despite it being safe outside, most of them wanted to stay. In the end, there was a group of four who took the van; Alice Clover and Nona took one jeep, and they agreed to leave the other in case the others needed it. About twenty people had said they were simply going to walk for a while and see where it took them… she doubted they’d ever meet again, but that was alright. They’d survived, and they’d continue to survive- the people here were survivors. All of them were.
Clover and Nona had each been in contact with Light and Ennea, telling them that they’d go to them. The trip would take a couple days, a lot of driving to reach them both, but they’d make it.
They went by Ennea’s way first, the reunion between sisters and mother and daughter enough to get Clover to cry. Then, all piling back inside they drove off towards Light’s shelter- Clover couldn’t quell her nerves, but she knew he’d be fine, they’d been talking all day.
That wasn’t going to stop her from sobbing the moment she saw him again, launching herself into his arms.
He looked older, much like she did, but he still looked familiar. His eyes crinkled up in the same way when he smiled, his hair was maybe a hint greyer and his skin (somehow) a touch paler, but he was otherwise the same.
Clover herself looked older- she’d maybe grown a bit taller (or at least she insisted she had), and her hair had long since grown back to it’s natural auburn. She’d started cutting it shorter, too- it was more manageable to have in a little ponytail, although plenty of loose curls still managed to fall out and stay in her face.
They’d changed, yes, but now they were together again- them and the Kashiwabaras and Seven and Alice were together, and they’d find someplace where they could settle in and make things work, just like Alice and Clover had seen Quark and Junpei making things work.
–
It had taken them only about a day by car to find a place where some people were living, no more than ten people taking up residence in old abandoned houses. After assuring them that they were in fact not here to rob and/or kill them they all settled into places of their own, trying to find which houses weren’t going to collapse any time soon.
The next years were rough, certainly, but they weren’t without happiness.
They’d all found niches within the community fairly quickly, attempting to find things to do that suited them well. There was certainly a lot of change, from what life had been, it wasn’t like old jobs like ‘cop’ or ‘programmer’ really existed anymore, but they’d found ways around things. Seven just naturally made people feel safe, Hazuki had started learning more about the hardware side of things in an attempt to help keep old radios and dvd players and whatever else running smooth, and the rest of them found their places as well.
For Clover thought, that didn’t come as easily. It wasn’t like she was really good at growing things, so she didn’t try her hand at helping out there, and she didn’t really consider herself intimidating enough to keep their group safe like Alice or Seven. She spent a good deal of time just drifting around, helping whoever needed it whenever needed- and she was always accumulating stories. It quickly became known that she was the person who knew everything around ‘town’, recounting the stories of friendly travellers and able to give whatever people needed to know about where someone was, or what they were doing.
The answer seemed almost obvious when Alice one day handed her a thick-looking book and a handful of pens, as if it was something Clover should’ve known all along. She wasn’t the best writer or anything- but even if she didn’t have a computer (or even a typewriter) here, that didn’t mean everything they’d go through had to be lost forever. Telling the stories over and over from person to person, and writing them down for the future, that was something she could do and enjoy.
Time continued to pass by, same as always, but life kept moving onwards. It certainly wasn’t easy, they were always on guard for the potential of drought or famine or attack; but they’d made do for themselves.
As life moved forwards for her, Clover found herself slowly growing less worried about what would happen next. Maybe it was just age, maybe it was from living in the apocalypse, but by the time she’d gotten old she was simply accustomed to life.
“Oh, Clover. You’ll never guess who I spoke with today in town.”
“Light?” She turned to look at her brother, who had something of a pleased grin on his face. “Who was it? One of the others?”
“No, no- it was Junpei. You remember him, right?”
“Of course I- wait, what?” No, that wasn’t possible… was it? But no… it was 2064… “Well, what did you say?”
“He seemed to be in a bit of a rush, something about preparing for a trip soon… and he has a son! Never would’ve expected that of him.”
“A-Aha, yeah…”
“Clover? Is everything alright?”
“Fine! Just fine!”
–
“Say… Junpei?” Clover looked down at her knees, seated back on the couch in Junpei and Quark’s place. Alice was at the other end of the couch, looking off to the side as well. “Do you… do you know what happened to my brother?”
She didn’t know why the transporters hadn’t worked for her, she hated the fact that she was stuck here like this- but maybe, just maybe, she could at least get an answer.
“Light? Oh, I think he’s… a few hours away? Yeah, it’s only about three hours south by truck- I saw him at the beginning of the year.”
“……” Clover was dumbstruck. Completely and utterly dumbfounded- what? No, that was impossible. Her brother couldn’t be alive, she couldn’t contact him– unless… no way. That was stupid– but it had to be true. The reason she couldn’t contact her brother was because she was blocking herself, right? Did that mean a version of her had found him, and was living somewhere else with her brother right now? “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Uh… no? I guess I didn’t think about it, but we could go visit him if you wanted..”
“That, um, might not be the best idea there Junpei.”
“Alright…”
–
“Clover, could you get the door?”
“Sure thing, Alice!” Even in her old age, Clover was still quite energetic- but that didn’t stop her jaw from dropping when she recognized who was at the door. “Junpei?”
“Yeah, that’s me… wait. Clover?” He seemed equally dumbfounded, staring at her with his mouth open. “How’s that- that’s impossible, isn’t it? I thought it didn’t work- you’re old-“
“You moron!” Cutting him off, Clover folded her arms with a huff. “You saw Light just last month, and you never thought to tell me about that? I spent the last 45 years thinking he was gonna die because of that little oversight!”
“I-It didn’t cross my mind! I was a little busy, Clover!”
“That-s you- augh!” With a huff, Clover eventually just shrugged and waved him inside. “Sit down, you!”
“Clover, what’s with the noise- Tenmyouji?”
“Alice, it’s good to see you.”
“Yes, it’s been a while- or at least, it has for us.”
“Yeah, I’d imagine..”
There was a hell of a lot to talk about, and they all took a seat around the place- but hey, at least they had the time now. Going to pull out one of the many journals Clover’d kept over the years they got to talking back and forth for a good few hours before Junpei finally had to leave again, with a promise that he’d bring Quark the next time so Light could meet him.
Clover’s mind was still busy when she went to bed that night, settling in beside Alice and staring up at the ceiling for some time, just listening to the sounds of the house. Seeing Junpei again after all these years… it really had been quite a time, hadn’t it? Not easy, not what she’d expected… but she didn’t regret going in that transporter. Not when she could know that her brother was alive, and she was with the woman she loved so much… it wasn’t perfect, but they’d struggled through it to find something worthwhile.
And, she thought to herself with a smile, that was certainly good enough.
Another for the Tab
To: @kurohawt
From: @zeiscomplex
Happy holidays! I couldn’t help but write about Phi’s drinking shenanigans, the prompt was perfect and it was begging me to pick it. Phi’s such a joy to write honestly, so I hope you enjoy your gift as much as I enjoyed writing it!
“This is all your fault, you know.”
Phi was getting tired of the constant sighs from Sigma’s direction as she added another entree to his tab. It was easy enough to ignore the first many that he had let out, but as the night wore on and her buzz increased, her already low tolerance went down the drain. Down the drain like the many wasted drinks in Rhizome 9’s lounge.
“What, pray tell, did I do to deserve footing the bill on all this? You do know that I have college debt to pay off.”
Phi rolled her eyes. “Oh please, as if Crash Keys wouldn’t pay that off at the drop of a dime if you whined enough about your ‘noble sacrifice’. Besides, there is a reason: crimes against humanity, for one.” Phi shoved a handful of fries into her mouth as Sigma sputtered out his response.
“Wha- Humanity?! And that didn’t even happen in this timeline!”
“Still counts, no take backs Sigma,” she replied, mouth still half full. If any of the others had been around, she was sure they would glower at her horrible table manners, but that was one of the perks to old man Sigma: he didn’t give two shits about correcting her if he didn’t have to. All he did was sigh endlessly.
“Where do you even put all that?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Phi gave him an appropriate answer: “It gets funneled off to the billions of me’s across the multiverse, obviously.” She raised her glass in mock cheer. “To me, me, and me.”
“Someone’s egotistical.”
She ignored his snark and took a large drink, satisfied with the burn the alcohol provided. It almost made up for the wasted drinks. Almost. She figured his debt would be repaid in… 45 years. That sounded appropriate.
“We should be heading back soon, you know Diana will worry,” Sigma said, squinting at the time on his phone. Phi was hard pressed to feel any sort of irritation towards her, but she couldn’t help the disappointment of her night out being cut short.
“She’ll be fine for a little while longer; at least let me get a to go box and another drink.” It came out as more of a plead than Phi would’ve liked, but the buzz was starting to hit her and she found she didn’t really care.
“You’re beginning to sound like an alcoholic, if I didn’t know you any better. Fine, but no more fries. If I have to see you eat another one…” He shook his head, some sort of disapproval on his face.
Phi looked him dead in the eye and ate another one just to spite him.
It took longer than she had expected for him to get fed up and drag her out of the restaurant. By then, it was approaching the hour where everything was dead silent, once they got away from the hustle and bustle of Drunkard Central. She couldn’t say she necessarily trusted Sigma behind the wheel of his car just yet, but she had to admit there was something soothing about his overly slow old person driving. It certainly didn’t upset her stuffed stomach that was finally acknowledging her overeating, so that was a plus. She could do with less grumbling though.
“Who even taught these people how to drive?” Sigma glared at the car that cut him off. “And you guys think I need to go back to driver’s ed.”
“Because you do, old man.” Phi covered her eyes with her arm, tired of the blinding car lights in her face. “If you drove like a normal person we’d be home already.”
She couldn’t see his face, but given his track record she imagined he wasn’t looking at the road. “Would you rather be late or dead? There’s nothing wrong with going slightly under the speed limit. It’s called a limit for a reason.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She waved her free hand dismissively. He mumbled something she couldn’t make out under his breath but shut up for once. Though she complained, she was glad that being overly verbose and feeling the need to comment on everything was something that he shared with his younger self. She sort of missed him, even if he was kind of a dick and flirted with anything vaguely female shaped. She could cut him a little slack; flirting aside, he wasn’t awful.
The car suddenly stopping was the only sign Phi got that she had dozed off momentarily. She blinked wearily, squinting to make out her surroundings. She was relieved to see that the sudden stop was due to them arriving home rather than his poor driving.
“Hey, grab my stuff,” Phi ordered, biting back a yawn as she opened the car door. When he began to protest, she pulled out the big guns. “You said Diana would worry, right? Shouldn’t I go tell her we made it back safely?”
Hook, line, and sinker. Phi knew how to play him like a fiddle. At least she used her powers for good, well, non-harmful demands. She wasn’t an Akane-level manipulator hosting Nonary Games and masterminding complex plans to alter timelines and that was a fact she would easily hold over their heads if confronted.
True to her word though, she swiftly made her way inside, fumbling with the keys aside. To her surprise, Diana didn’t immediately greet her; in fact, she wasn’t even downstairs. Phi frowned.
“Hey, did Diana get called out tonight?” Phi called back at Sigma, who responded with a “no, why?” She ignored him, going farther into the house and glancing at the couch where she expected her to be sitting. She hadn’t accidentally fallen asleep on it, so where was she?
Just as she was about to worry, a door upstairs opened and Diana’s voice floated down. “Welcome home, did you have a good time?” She sounded calm, which made Phi relax.
“Yeah, old man grumbling aside,” she called up, looking over to the entrance where Sigma stood with her leftovers. He rolled his eyes at her remark. Diana softly made her way downstairs as he went to put her food away. Phi allowed her a hug as she passed.
“Sorry we’re back so late, I hope you weren’t too worried,” Sigma apologized, forehead creased with worry himself. Out of the two, he was clearly the one more distressed by their late night out.
“It’s alright, Sigma. You told me you were going to be late.” She gave his arm a loving rub, and as Sigma moved to give her a hug and kiss, Phi noped it out of there. They were family to her in more than simply their shared blood, but that didn’t mean she was comfortable with their PDA.
Besides, she had more important things to do. Like sleeping. And digesting her food so she could eat her leftovers in peace, and thus giving her the power to make Sigma go out and buy her stuff. With her extremely important to-do list created, she dragged herself off to her bedroom, satisfied with her day and herself. Life was good.
(For the Holidays You Can’t Beat) Home Sweet Home
To: @hardcoreprince
From: @pomegranate-belle
This was some of the fluffiest fluff I have written all year and I hope you like it! Happy holidays!
It was 9:23am when Carlos heard the knock on his apartment door. He had been cleaning and gathering ingredients since 7:15 in preparation for that knock, and although two hours and fifteen minutes had certainly seemed like plenty of time at the start of it, the truth was that he was still trying to get everything organized.
With an unopened bag of flour still tucked beneath his left arm, Carlos tugged open the door to reveal Junpei and Akane, both of their faces flushed adorably from the cold. He smiled.
“Hey, guys.”
“Hi Carlos!” Akane chirped.
“Hey,” greeted Junpei with a crooked grin.
“You know, my place is pretty far for you two,” Carlos pointed out, quirking a brow as he leaned against the doorjamb. “Why did we do this here and not at one of your apartments, again?”
“Think of it like… A test run!” Akane said pleasantly, her arms piled high with bags of Hershey kisses.
Carlos laughed.
“What, so if you guys like my kitchen enough you’ll finally move in with me?” he joked as he held the door open for her.
“Pretty much,” agreed Junpei, sweeping past with a massive bowl of chilled cookie dough cradled to his chest.
A glance out at the street revealed that Junpei’s junky red car was still stuffed to bursting with baking supplies. And so, after dropping his sack of flour onto the kitchen table and dropping a kiss on each of his partners’ foreheads, Carlos headed down to the car to help transfer things to his kitchen. Even with all three of them, it took two round trips to get everything. The kitchen was overtaken, and the less messy ingredients like bagged candy, pretzels, and nuts were tossed onto Carlos’s bed to make room. Then the three of them washed their hands carefully.
“You couldn’t convince Maria to join us?” Akane asked as she cleared a space on the table to roll out cookie dough.
Carlos shook his head.
“No. Apparently the Klim family is doing a little holiday baking today too, and Phi invited her over. Can’t compete with that,” he explained with a wink.
“Are they actually dating yet, or are they still fucking around ‘not labeling things’?” wondered Junpei.
“Between you and me, I think Phi might ask her out today,” Carlos said. “With any luck. I’m sure we can trust Sigma to be pushy and embarrassing in our place.”
Then he picked up his bag of flour from before and opened it and began ladling flour onto the table with a measuring cup. Junpei pulled the cookie dough out of Carlos’s fridge and began peeling off the Saran wrap covering it. Meanwhile, Akane dug through one of the boxes and produced a plastic bag of metal cookie cutters.
She unsealed the bag and dumped them on a corner of the table that wasn’t covered in flour.
“That’s quite the collection,” Carlos noted, sifting through the pile. “Bells, wreaths, snowflakes… Are these gingerbread people?”
Side-by -side sat two vaguely humanoid cookie cutters, one of which seemed to be wearing a dress.
“It’ll be great!” Akane enthused. “We can make little cookie people that look like us!”
“I dunno,” said Junpei, studying the cookie cutter critically. “Don’t you think it’s a little disingenuous to make gingerbread people out of sugar cookie dough?”
“What I think is that you two are putting way too much thought into this,” Carlos said with a laugh.
That seemed to end the discussion. With the cookie dough unwrapped, Junpei went to lift it out and onto the table, but when he tried to release it globs stuck stubbornly to his palms.
“Ah, jeez, just—!”
Junpei flailed his hands, trying to shake the dough off.
“And that’s why we use flour, Jumpy,” Akane said primly, her palms already caked in a layer of it.
She carefully took the majority of the dough out of his hands. Though the dough didn’t come off onto her palms in big chunks like it had for Junpei, it still seemed to want to stick to her. Carlos dipped up another half-cup of flour and sprinkled it over the dough. Akane shot him a grateful smile. After coating the rolling pin in flour too, Akane began rolling out the cookie dough.
“Why don’t you two work on the cookies while I start some of the other things?” Carlos suggested.
Then he detoured into his rooms to grab two bags of pretzel rings and two bags of Hershey kisses. While Akane and Junpei cut out sugar cookies and placed them on baking sheets, Carlos set to work filling another with pretzel rings in careful rows. Then he unwrapped the Hershey kisses and set each one in the center of a pretzel. Almost the moment he had filled the tray, the oven dinged to alert him it was preheated.
Popping on a pair of oven mitts, Carlos slid his tray and one of the trays of cookies into the oven. When he turned back to start filling another tray with chocolate and pretzels, he caught sight of a head of brown hair coated liberally in white.
“Junpei,” Carlos said with a fond sigh, “you’ve got flour in your hair.”
“Ughhhh! It’s not my fault it gets everywhere!” complained Junpei, trying and failing to brush it out with his equally floury hand.
After a few seconds of his flailing, Carlos finally took pity on his boyfriend and, from his higher vantage point, ruffled Junpei’s hair until all the flour was out – or at least, as much as would be dislodged without a shower. There was still a faint stain of whiteness in his hair that reminded Carlos of snowflakes.
Smiling softly, Carlos set the microwave timer for two minutes and an egg timer for twenty, and set back to work filling a baking sheet. Two minutes later, the microwave beeped at him insistently and he turned it off, slipping on his oven mitts again.
“Could someone get the M&Ms?” he asked, pulling open the oven door.
“Got it!” cried Akane, wiping her floury hands on her jeans and leaving stark white handprints behind.
She hurried into the bedroom and returned, ripping off a corner of the M&M bag in her hands. Carlos slid the tray from the oven and held it out for Akane, who carefully pressed one M&M into the center of each melted Hershey’s kiss, squishing them flat and filling the small pretzel rings. After the final one was finished, before Carlos could turn away to set the pan on a cooling rack, Akane stretched up and pressed a kiss to the tip of his nose.
Despite himself, Carlos could feel his ears burn with heat at the unexpected kiss. He was comfortable with them, certainly, but having spent so much of his life single and not interested in more, he was still sometimes startled by such displays. While he was distracted, Akane drew a little heart on his cheek with the flour coating her finger. Then she danced away to do the same to Junpei, though he protested halfheartedly while cutting out a sleigh-shaped cookie.
Their morning continued in such a manner, filled with flour and silly kisses and the ding of timers, until at last the dough had all been used up. The chocolate pretzel rings were cooling on the counters, and Carlos was cooking a pot of caramel to coat their homemade Chex mix. Akane had rolled their dough for thumbprint cookies into evenly sized little balls.
It was only then, as Junpei went to gather supplies to mix up frosting for the cookies, that they realized something was missing.
“We forgot the powdered sugar?” groaned Junpei. “No way, I double-checked everything!”
“I don’t have any in the house either,” Carlos added sheepishly from the stove. “And with this much cooking at once I don’t know if we can afford to send someone out to buy more without burning something.”
The three of them fell silent.
“Two choices lie before us,” Akane said solemnly, her eyes closed, though neither of her boyfriends knew if she was truly consulting the morphogenetic field or not. “We could call Aoi for help and potentially invite disaster, or we could not call for help, in which case we will definitely invite disaster.”
Junpei and Carlos glanced at each other, and then back at Akane.
“Uh… I’m going to go with my gut and pick potential disaster over certain disaster,” Carlos replied.
“Ditto,” agreed Junpei.
Akane’s shoulders slumped.
Ten minutes and one embarrassing phone call later, there was a knock on Carlos’s front door.
But when Junpei opened it, instead of Aoi Kurashiki, in through the door stepped Santa Claus with a gray Wal-Mart sack slung over his shoulder.
“Uhhhhhhh…”
Junpei glanced from the Santa Claus in the doorway back to Akane and Carlos to see if they were seeing what he was. By their expressions, they were.
“I heard there was a good little girl around here who needed some baking supplies?” the red-clad stranger asked in a false-deep voice, and Junpei realized that they weren’t dealing with Santa Claus at all, but another Santa entirely.
There was a smack, and Junpei’s eyes darted to Akane again to find her hand pressed to her forehead.
“Ugh, please tell me you didn’t go to the grocery store dressed like that,” she muttered.
Aoi smirked back, though his sister wasn’t even looking at him.
“How else would I go?”
“It’s December fifth, Aoi!”
“I think you mean Christmas fifth,” he retorted, handing off his shopping bag to Carlos.
The bag was rifled through quickly to make sure it contained what they needed, and then set in the kitchen. Instead of rejoining the group, though, Carlos moved past them into his bedroom.
“I do not mean Christmas fifth,” Akane complained, making her way back into the kitchen with Aoi and Junpei on her heels. “Why do you have to be so embarrassing? I’m grown up now, you don’t have to pretend to be Santa anymore, you weirdo.”
“You know, Akane,” said Aoi, “insulting Santa Claus is a good way to get coal in your stocking. You might have to shift to a different timeline to get any presents.”
“How about I shift to a timeline where you’re not so annoying?” Akane huffed.
“Good luck finding one.”
Aoi and Junpei startled at having spoken in unison, then shared a quick fistbump. Akane groaned piteously.
“Please just take the beard off,” she said to Aoi. “I’m begging you. God is begging you. The entire morphogenetic field is begging you.”
“It’s not in the spirit of Christmas to ask Santa to take off his beard.”
“Aoi…!”
“No, no,” he protested. “Call me Santa!”
“You are the worst!”
Aoi planted his hands on his hips.
“If I was the worst, would I have brought you that powdered sugar you needed?” he asked, taunting his sister by shaking his head to wave his fake beard at her.
Akane puffed her cheeks out angrily. And then she shoved him.
“Whoa—!”
Aoi toppled backwards with a yelp.
Luckily for him, Carlos stepped back into the kitchen just in time to catch him under the arms.
“Hi Carlos,” Aoi said, looking up at Carlos with a grin that even the floofy fake beard couldn’t hide.
“Hey!” Akane protested. “No flirting with my boyfriends! I never flirt with your dates!”
Aoi didn’t deign to give that claim a verbal response. Instead, he leveled Akane with the flattest stare he could manage while wearing a Santa costume and still half-draped against Carlos. Akane glanced away, and had the decency to look a bit ashamed of herself.
A loud beep filled the kitchen.
“That was one time,” she muttered, turning back to get the paper bag of caramel Chex mix out of the microwave. “And she was really cute.”
Akane shook the bag violently, pretending it was her brother. Setting Aoi upright, Carlos cleared his throat and placed the bag of pecans he’d gone to get on the counter. As he did, his eyes glanced over the microwave’s digital clock, and he did a double-take. It read 1:03pm.
“It’s that late already?” he murmured.
Then Junpei was at his shoulder looking too.
“No wonder I’m starving. We should break for lunch.”
On cue, Akane and Aoi’s stomachs growled loudly. Junpei laughed.
“Want to join us for lunch, Aoi?” offered Carlos.
He shrugged in response.
“What’re you guys having?” he asked.
A glance around the kitchen told them all that, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be homemade.
“We can just order something from that burger place downtown,” suggested Junpei. “Cheap, quick, convenient. I don’t really care as long as I get food.”
“Oh, I want their crispy chicken sandwich!” Akane said. “But no tomato. And a small order of French fries?”
“They got wraps there, right? I’ll just take one of those with chicken in it, I guess,” Aoi added.
“Double cheeseburger and fries,” said Junpei.
Carlos nodded, rubbing his chin.
“They still have that burger with the swiss cheese and the mushrooms, don’t they? That sounds good to me, so I guess we’re all in agreement. But who should go order?”
“I’ll go get it, you lovebirds keep cooking,” Aoi insisted.
“No!” Akane raced past him and blocked the door, her arms spread wide. “No way! You’re not going out there dressed like that again!”
“And are you going to stop me, little sister?”
“Yes!”
The argument only devolved from there, into childish insults and mocking nicknames. Junpei watched with interest, nibbling on a leftover pretzel stick that hadn’t made it into the Chex mix. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to intervene. Which, Carlos realized, meant it was up to him.
“I’ll go,” he said, then louder when the bickering siblings didn’t hear him. “Hey! I’ll go.”
“I will take the ring to Mordor,” Junpei stage-whispered in falsetto.
Carlos bit his lip to cover up a smile.
“Seriously. I’ll get the food, you two,” he said, placing a hand on each of the Kurashikis’ shoulders. “Just keep going with the thumbprint cookies for me, alright?”
Twenty minutes of work later, the caramel Chex mix was drying on wax paper, the small batch of thumbprint cookies had all been baked and thumbprinted, and the chocolate pretzel rings were boxed up in the fridge. Aoi had just finished pulling a tray of sugar cookies out of the oven when Carlos returned with a huge paper bag in his arms.
“Sorry I took so long,” he apologized. “The line was huge.”
“Just gimme the food,” Junpei replied, making grabby hands.
Aoi stripped off the Santa Claus beard at last, so he didn’t end up getting food in it.
“Let’s see…” said Carlos, digging through the massive paper sack and pulling out meals. “A crispy chicken sandwich for Akane, hold the tomato. A double cheeseburger for Junpei. A chicken salad wrap for Aoi… And a mushroom swiss burger for me.”
Akane went up on her tiptoes, peering into the bag.
“And one, two, three orders of fries,” she counted, pulling out her own little box of French fries. “That’s everything.”
Satisfied that everything was as it should be, they settled in to eat.
“Trade you a bite of my sandwich for a bite of yours,” Akane bartered five minutes into lunch, holding out her half-eaten chicken sandwich.
“Tempting,” Junpei replied sarcastically. “Unfortunately, I am already too… Chicken.”
The pun, paired with Junpei’s deadpan expression, caught Carlos so off guard that he snorted soda up his nose and started coughing.
Thankfully that was the only mishap, and once they had all finished eating and thrown their trash in the garbage can, Akane lugged Carlos’s mixer onto the table and started mixing up the frosting. It took several adjustments to get the balance of powdered sugar and milk right for the perfect frosting consistency, but in the end everyone was satisfied with it.
“And now,” declared Akane as she lifted the spatula in the air, “we frost!”
“What colors should we do?” Carlos asked.
“We have to have red and green!”
“Blue,” suggested Junpei, digging through the tiny box of food coloring for Akane’s picks and his own. “And yellow.”
“White,” Aoi said. “You should just leave some plain.”
Carlos nodded, accepting the little bottles from Junpei.
“And what about brown?” he asked.
The other three paused, and then looked at him with equally skeptical expressions.
“Who wants to eat brown frosting?” Junpei demanded, sticking out his tongue.
“But, you know it… I mean… For reindeer and tree trunks and stuff…?” fumbled Carlos.
Akane squinted at him. There was definitely something weird… Carlos could be a hell of an actor, but he also wasn’t good at keeping secrets from the people closest to him. What kind of secret he could have involving the color of frosting was beyond her, but something told her it would be a good surprise so she didn’t ruin it by trying to take a glance downstream in the timeline.
“That makes sense!” she chirped instead.
There was no brown food coloring, of course, so in the end they mixed a few different colors to get it. Carlos was oddly specific about the shade he wanted, and Akane reminded herself very firmly not to cheat with her ESPer powers.
Once five bowls of frosting had been mixed with color and the sixth left plain, Carlos rummaged around in his lower cupboards and pulled out a box filled with white piping bags, plastic rings, and metal tips. Quickly and efficiently, Carlos fitted six bags with the icing tips and secured them with the plastic couplers.
“Wait, you actually have piping bags?” Junpei asked. “What are you, a cooking channel chef?”
“How do you think I frosted Maria’s birthday cake?” retorted Carlos, spooning a glop of red frosting into the bag.
“Uh, I thought you bought it, like a normal person.”
Nonetheless, Junpei pitched in by filling another bag with green frosting. Akane grabbed a spoon and helped out with blue, while Aoi, predictably, filled another piping bag with white frosting. With all four of them working, all six colors were soon bagged and ready to frost with.
“Gonna help us frost cookies, Santa?” Junpei asked with a smirk.
Aoi snorted.
“No way in hell, I’m out. Santa eats cookies, he doesn’t make ‘em. I did my part and now I’m gonna go home and hibernate.”
With a quick half-hug around Akane’s shoulders and a wave for her boyfriends, Aoi was out the door with his Santa Claus beard in hand.
“I’d file that under not-disaster, I think,” Carlos said optimistically.
Akane gave an irritated huff, but made no verbal protest. Then she, Junpei, and Carlos sat down to begin frosting the sugar cookies.
Only a few minutes in, it was clear that the task would not be as easy as it sounded.
“Will it just…! Oh, come on!” Akane muttered, swiping another glob of yellow frosting off the tip of the icing bag with a finger after it refused to stick to the cookie.
Moodily, she stuck the finger in her mouth and ate the frosting off so it didn’t go to waste or make a mess. Junpei, sitting across from her, wasn’t doing much better. But instead of trying to get his designs as pretty as possible like Akane, he had embraced his lack of icing skill and just scribbled lines of blue across several of the cookies nearest him. Carlos, of course, was completely in his element, which Akane found particularly unfair. Still, even he had to occasionally scrape clumping frosting off the tip of his piping bag.
“We definitely made too many cookies,” Junpei groaned after a full hour, massaging his cramping hand. “We’ll never finish frosting them all.”
“If you need a break, you could take the red and start filling the thumbprints,” suggested Carlos. “The red frosting is kind of thin,” he gestured at the cookies with red frosting oozing off them and onto the plastic tablecloth, “so it should be the easiest to use.”
With a worn-out sigh, Junpei got to his feet and picked up the piping bag with the red frosting. But he didn’t complain as he started to fill the divots in the pecan-speckled cookies – Carlos had been right, it was easier. His fingers were still sore from trying to squeeze the blue frosting onto the sugar cookies earlier, but the ache started to ebb. And standing at the counter with the cooling rack full of thumbprint cookies gave him the perfect vantage for looking at his boyfriend and girlfriend. Akane, who faced him straight on, had a cute and familiar concentrated look on her face, the tip of her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth. And from the side he got a view of Carlos’s forearms, bared by his rolled-up sleeves and flexing as he worked. Junpei grinned.
Ok, he thought, maybe this was worth a little ache in his hands.
It didn’t take long to finish up with the thumbprint cookies, and Junpei settled back down between Carlos and Akane and dutifully continued frosting sugar cookies.
The next time any of them looked at a clock, it was after 7:00pm.
Carlos sighed, leaning back from the table.
“We should eat supper,” he murmured.
“Ehh, I’m not really hungry,” Junpei admitted.
“Me either,” said Akane. “I guess we’ve been snacking all evening, so…”
In truth, they all just wanted to be done. Seeming to realize this, everyone returned to frosting – this time with a little less creativity and finesse. Carlos even ate a few unfrosted cookies as he worked just to trim down the number they had to finish.
When the final cookie, a bell, was frosted, all three let out a sigh of relief and stood to stretch.
“That… Was a lot of cookies,” Junpei sighed.
Carlos nodded in agreement.
“Maybe next year we only need a half batch of dough.”
“But we did such a good job!” offered Akane. “We should at least take some time to admire them and show each other our favorites.”
Junpei smiled indulgently, leaning back into Carlos’s chest as the blond slung an arm around his shoulders.
“Why don’t you go first then, Kanny? Since it’s your idea.”
Akane gestured to a small forest of green tree cookies in one corner of the table, covered in red and blue garlands and yellow stars.
“Look how good they got!” she said proudly.
“That’s really something,” agreed Junpei, looking impressed.
“Yeah, they’re great!” Carlos said with a smile. “You picked up icing pretty quick, Akane.”
She beamed at them both.
“How about you, Jumpy?”
In reply, he leaned forward and pulled out a cookie from the lineup with a flourish. It was splattered with blue and white frosting in a seemingly random pattern.
“Uh… What is that?” Akane wondered.
“It’s a Funyarinpa, Kanny,” Junpei explained impatiently.
Akane squinted and tilted her head, trying to find any familiarity in the scribbles of icing.
“If you say so Jumpy,” she said at last.
“I think I can see it,” Carlos told them. “It looks good, Junpei. The frosting is really even.”
They all stared down at the Funyarinpa cookie for a few more seconds, thoughtfully.
“And which ones are your favorites, Carlos?” asked Akane.
At that, he moved closer to the table, blocking the cookies from view. After a little bit of shuffling, Carlos stepped out of the way to show the other two.
“Taadaa?” he said with a shrug, splaying his hands.
“Ohhhh, Carlos, they’re so cute!” exclaimed Akane, clapping and bouncing on her toes.
There, in a line, sat three gingerbread-person sugar cookies, carefully frosted. The first had several streaks of brown hair and a grumpy face; it wore a red shirt with a blue vest and blue pants. The second cookie-person was the kind wearing a dress. It also had brown hair, though it fell over the front of its little cookie shoulder in a ponytail, and its face was neutral, almost thoughtful. It wore a white dress with a brown belt, and blue pants underneath. The last cookie had yellow hair, a smiling face, and a simple green shirt with blue pants.
“Of course you blew the rest of us out of the water,” Junpei scoffed, but he was smiling too.
Together they packed up all the cookies into Tupperware and put them into the fridge so they wouldn’t get stale, then bagged the Chex mix. Though there were still plenty of baking supplies and tools scattered around, the kitchen looked kind of empty without the results of their work laid out everywhere.
The glowing numbers on the microwave clock told them it was 9:35pm.
“You can go, if you want to,” Carlos said, suddenly a little hesitant. “I’ll clean this up in the morning, it shouldn’t take too long, so you don’t have to stay if—”
“There’s no way in hell I’m driving home tonight,” Junpei declared.
And so, with floury stains all over their clothes and hands tinted by smears of colorful frosting, the three of them piled into Carlos’s bed for a good night’s sleep.
“… Love you,” Carlos said quietly, in lieu of a goodnight.
A soft yawn filled the air.
“We’re gonna move in,” Akane answered.
“Mmm,” agreed Junpei. “Yeah. But you have to cook breakfast. That’s what firefighters do.”
Too tired to laugh fully, Carlos just let out an amused whuff of air, smiling.
“It’s a deal.”
Pandora’s Box
To: @siggyklim
From: @chessanator
One very very smart Alice and one very very smart Lotus coming right up! I hope you like maths, and Merry Christmas!
(p.s. Please try and pretend that the prime numbers are bigger than they are. I realised half-way through writing that I didn’t have easy access to 19 industrial-grade prime numbers for fanfic-purposes)
25th November, 2029
Alice knew that, technically speaking, Hazuki Kashiwabara fell under the purview of the ‘If I tell you, I’ll have to shoot you’ Protocol. She also didn’t much care. After the Nonary Game she had been kidnapped for and with both her daughters working for the Special Office of Internal Security, Hazuki already knew most of everything worth knowing, and knew why it was important to keep it all secret. More importantly, Hazuki was actually a really useful lady to have around. You didn’t just find her sort of genius standing by the side of the road. So Alice didn’t much care for anyone saying she wasn’t allowed to invite her friend into the Office whenever she felt like.
Of course, when an officer of the SOIS doesn’t care for something, it doesn’t actually matter.
So, one blatantly forged ID badge later, Hazuki was comfortably situated in Alice’s office, swinging the swivel-chair by the computer gently around. Alice settled for lounging on the sofa opposite. One of the key tenets of SOIS operations was matching intelligence assets to the task they were best suited for, and despite the electronic warfare training all agents went through Alice could be confident that with Hazuki at the computer there was little more she could contribute.
“So how are Nona and Ennea doing these days?” Hazuki asked. After nearly losing her two daughters a decade before, that question was always her first when she and Alice met.
“Overseas, at the moment,” Alice replied. She followed it up with her usual thin smile that said, ‘and you don’t need to know anything more.’
“‘Overseas’? Really?” Hazuki scoffed, “Wasn’t this supposed to be the office of internal security?”
Folding her arms and smirking, Alice said, “America’s internal security starts as far as possible from our borders. The earlier we catch the bastards, the safer we all are.”
“Yup, I guess so.” With that, Hazuki swung around in her chair, half way towards the keyboard. “So what’s up today, Alice? Who are we going to hack apart this time?”
Alice shrugged. “Maybe I just wanted to talk to an old friend.”
“You know, for a top secret agent of the most clandestine agency in the world, your lies are just awful. If you just wanted to chat, there are plenty of cafés around here where we could have met. About half of which are entirely staffed by patsies of yours, if you really needed to discuss something confidential.”
“That’s not true!” Alice exclaimed. She held her mock-outraged expression for a couple of seconds, then relaxed. “After Light quit his harpist job, we haven’t got any leverage on his replacement yet. That makes the number of cafés we control half-minus-one by my count, thank you.”
Hazuki chuckled lightly. Then, she continued, “Still, I know I’m right. We wouldn’t be meeting here if you didn’t need my skills. So tell me, Alice: what’s up?”
“Nothing world-ending,” Alice said, getting to the point, “Just this mafia group that’s resurfaced. The one that tried to take over the Las Vegas strip a couple of years back. We thought that we’d eradicated them back then, but it looks like we only managed to weed out all the stupid.” Annoyed as Alice was that the previous mission hadn’t been a complete success, it wasn’t a complete washout. At the very least, it had been a relatively proving ground for Light and Clover to win their spurs.
“Smart mafiosos? Rue the day.” Hazuki gestured avidly towards the computer she was sitting at and said, “Just general hacking disruption, then? Or are you after something in particular?”
Alice considered it. “We’d like to know where they are getting their money from. They couldn’t have recovered this fast without outside help.”
Hazuki grinned. “Can do.”
After five minutes of preparation, Hazuki was ready to go. Alice had done her part, aiming the computer at the closest thing the Office had to an entry-point to the gang’s computer network; now she could step back and just let Hazuki get to work. Hazuki cracked her knuckles and stretched out her back, ready to type.
Hazuki glanced at Alice.
Alice nodded.
The hacking began.
Green lines of code swept across the screen as Hazuki’s fingers swept across the keyboard. The screen flashed with one window full of data then another; Hazuki gave each only a moments glance, absorbing the information then dismissing the window in favour of the next. Each snippet of data informed the next piece of code, and without quite understanding what was going on Alice could feel them spiralling in and in towards their target. At the very least, Hazuki was grinning in anticipation.
And then the screen went blank.
“No!” Hazuki gasped. She slammed her hands onto the desk, rattling the keyboard.
Alice stared at the dark empty screen. “W-What happened?!”
“I was this close,” Hazuki hissed. She tapped the left mouse button a couple of times, bring the last few windows of data and code back onto the screen. “Look here. This group has set up their network by using a regularly updating schedule of private and public cryptography keys for an RSA system. After random intervals each computer in the network chooses a new private key, constructs the new public key, and distributes it to all the other trusted computers on the network. I had just set up a buffer-overflow past their final layer of defences, and I was this close to injecting code that would trick those computers into thinking we were part of the trusted network, when someone human noticed and scrubbed us out.”
Alice knew far more than the basics of computer security and infiltration, but even so she’d never heard of a cryptosystem complicated as that. “What’s with that? Surely that’s a bit excessive, especially compared to what this group had the last time we beat them.”
Hazuki let out a wry bitter chuckle, then said, “It’s probably worth it, if they knew we were after them. It was reasonably well-programmed, at least, and it had to have been the reason your in-house guys couldn’t break in. Even if you brought all your processing power to bear, you couldn’t break through. I found out that this was the public key just before we were kicked out –” Hazuki elegantly indicated a number – 599725548175349234588407 – at the bottom of the window she had restored “– but by the time you can get SOIS’ supercomputers into action to factorise it, they’ll have already moved onto another key.
“God help us. So even though we know it’s 599746013723 times 999 965876309, we still can’t…” Alice trailed off.
Hazuki sat there, frozen by complete disbelief.
Alice snapped her fingers in front of Hazuki’s face. “Hello? Hazuki Kashiwabara? Are you still with us?”
Hazuki murmured, “That’s… That’s not possible.”
“Thank god. I thought I was going to have to say that Seven had called you an old lady.”
Alice’s flippant comment went nowhere. Hazuki still stared at her, but her eyes showed none of the anger they should have. To be honest, Alice was rather concerned.
“Hazuki…? Lotus?”
“That’s completely impossible,” Hazuki said again. She turned back to the computer screen, furiously typed some code; she stopped and turned back to Alice only when another number had appeared on the screen. “Alice,” she said, concern filling her voice, “Can you look at this, please?”
Alice looked at the number: ‘724677698895304108732301’. “It’s 803065408993 times 902389382957,” she replied.
Hazuki pressed ‘enter’ on the keyboard; another number appeared. “And this?”
Alice didn’t need to study ‘668089868878852858021373’ for even a second. “769945710559 times 876710358947.”
Hazuki murmured again, “It’s completely impossible…” She tapped out a long string on the keyboard, then pressed enter again.
Alice stared at the number ‘90591875222471336864959701060623807145969394309’. “What the hell, Hazuki?”
“Thank goodness.” Hazuki sighed, her relief almost filling the room. “You can’t actually solve –”
“It’s obviously 324270473809 times 465783271379 times 599886421037 times 999836357587. Why are you wasting my time with simple things like this?”
“What the HELL?!”
Once Hazuki had recovered, she explained. “Alice… every single bit of computer security in the entire world depends on our inability to easily factorise primes. We can produce numbers in a couple of minutes that can’t be broken in centuries. Shouldn’t be broken in centuries. But you were doing it instantly.”
Alice shrugged. “I’ve told you. I’ve always been good at math.”
“I know. But this isn’t just ‘good-at-math’ good at math. This is ‘you could walk into any bank in the world and walk out with all their money’ good at math.” Hazuki paused, staring at Alice inquisitively. “Alice… Are you an esper?
“Huh?”
“I should have realised with Nona and Ennea,” Hazuki said, “I should have noticed the signs, when they started to get twice as good at school tests without needing to revise, and when one of them would know all the spoilers for a series that only the other had watched. If I’d noticed, maybe I could have protected them, or at least worked out why they had been taken. I decided that I would be more observant next time. So, Alice: are you an esper?”
Alice folded her arms sternly. “No. I’m not.”
At that moment, Clover leaned through the office door, her pink hair bouncing eagerly as swung on the doorframe. “Yep she is!”
“Clover!” Alice snapped.
“What? We’ve known all year: me, Light, all of us! Anyway, see you later!” Clover swung away and skipped down the corridor before Alice could reply.
Alice scowled, but she couldn’t avoid the truth. Everyone she’d demonstrated it to had been convinced that there was something extraordinary about her mathematical abilities. She hadn’t become a highly-ranked officer of SOIS by failing to look past her own biases. She took a deep breath and accepted the facts in front of her. “Interesting. I’m sure there’s some way the Office can use this.”
Hazuki nodded slightly. “You can break pretty much any encryption in the world. I’m sure your bosses will find something for you to do. But…” She trailed off, glaring at her computer screen. “Doesn’t help us much with this, though. The mafia group we were trying to hack were updating their keys too regularly. By the time I’ve given you one, you’ve factorised it, and I’ve hacked in, they’ll already have changed to another one. That’s for every single one of the 37 nodes of their network. And even if I do break through, the person who caught me last time will probably force me out again. If we could automate your ability, of course I could hack them. But…”
‘If we could automate your ability.’ Alice thought about those words, and a spark lit in her mind. She was still getting used to the idea of being an esper herself, but she was comfortably familiar with esper abilities as a concept and in practice. She had recruited Light and Clover, Nona and Ennea, and all the rest of the Nonary Game espers. She had trained them, seen them in action, carried them through their first missions. Mentoring those espers and making them useful to SOIS and the country had been the declared goal of the unit she led. But it hadn’t been the only goal.
“I think I have an idea.”
– 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –
Hazuki watched as the technicians clustered around the sofa where Alice lay, fiddling with wires and waving scanning devices. It didn’t look to Hazuki like the bustling activity was actually making any progress at all, but eventually the techs decided they had completed what they had set out to accomplish and backed off, letting Alice sit up. Hazuki looked Alice over.
“Well congratulations, Alice,” she drawled, “You’re winning first prize at the next cyberpunk convention you go to.”
Alice really would have won such a prize. If the metal casing that covered the right side of her head wasn’t enough, and the flashing lights that spun around the surface didn’t seal the deal, then the fact that the wires – which sprouted in a chaotic rainbow-coloured nest above the device – also appeared to bury their way into her head would have convinced anyone that she was a technologically-enhanced agent for a clandestine government conspiracy. Correctly, as it happens.
“I have to ask: what is…” Hazuki carefully pointed at the device, making sure that her finger didn’t get caught in the tangle of wires or touch anything important. “… that?”
Alice tilted her head, testing out the weight of the thing that had been attached to it. “SOIS has been working on this for quite a while now. In fact, we’ve been developing this for… two years, now.” Alice said that last part as suggestively as possible. She hadn’t said, ‘from the moment we recruited the survivors of the Nonary Games,’ but she might as well have. “Ever since we found out that the morphogenetic field existed and that there were espers who could use it, we knew we had to employ it to protect the nation. We recruited every esper brave enough to join us, of course, but we couldn’t just leave it to chance. I wouldn’t rest if we were just leaving it to chance. So from the beginning we’ve wanted to see if we can automate esper abilities. Working with the gentlemen down at Area 51 who were researching… well, it’s classified. But this…” Alice pointed – far too calmly – at the contraption that had been wired into her brain. “This is the prototype for the device we came up with.”
Hazuki had a horrifying flash of images go through her mind; Ennea having that device clamped onto her head and Nona having that device clamped onto her head and both of them being wired into machines to be extracted from. “That sounds far too similar to what Gentarou Hongou and his Cradle goons were trying to accomplish. You wanted to put my daughters in –”
“Please,” Alice interrupted, “We weren’t planning on forcing anyone into it. Just like when Nona and Ennea joined us in the first place, it would have been entirely their choice. If we couldn’t have tested this with willing volunteers, it wouldn’t have been worth it at all.” Alice paused. “I’m rather glad I’m the one who is testing the prototype out. We hadn’t used it yet because we were concerned about the possibility of it affecting both siblings through their connection. If I’m not an esper, it shouldn’t cause me any harm, If I really am… I’ll have to learn maths from the ground up again. Probably.”
Hazuki could at least respect that her friend was willing to put own life on the line before involving anyone else. “Yup. Anyway, what are we supposed to do with this?”
“It should be wirelessly connected to that computer,” Alice explained, “You send me numbers; I’ll factorise them and send them back to you. If it works the way I imagine it will then I won’t even need to consciously think about it: it’ll just happen.”
Alice seemed perfectly comfortable having that device connected to her brain, and Hazuki trusted her friend to weigh up the benefits and risks and make the best choice. If so, then they were ready to begin. Hazuki sat down at the computer and began her usual pre-programming stretches, loosening her muscles and getting a feel for where the keyboard lay in front of her. Once her back muscles were fully exercised and supple she was ready to go.
“Let’s kick some ass.”
It really was too good to be true. In fact, it was a hacker’s dream in digital form. Hazuki barely had to do anything at all once the original program was written. The code just did the work for her. As the attack encountered each obstacle, Alice would hum to herself and numbers would fly across the screen as the encryption key was factorised to shreds. At one point the enemy sysadmin caught her like before and reformatted one hacked computer. Then another. Then a third. It didn’t matter. Hazuki had complete control over every other computer on the network, and the freed computers were reinfected with malware faster than Hazuki could blink. Overwhelmed, the enemy gave up.
Nothing could stop her.
With the hack successful, it was time to make use of the access she had. Hazuki started by scouring the databases for every picture of gang members she could find, downloading them to the SOIS servers. That would help the police find and arrest every last one of the bastards. She looked up information about the routes they used to smuggle in drugs and victims, and plotted them as best she could on a map. Then, with the obvious stuff done, Hazuki went further.
A politician who the mafia had been blackmailing: his details and proof were anonymously slipped to a local newspaper. Irregularities in the accounts of the casino the gang had laundered money through highlighted and sent to the IRS. Emails to two hit-squads edited to direct them away from their at-least-probably-more-innocent targets and at each other’s hideouts. With her all-encompassing presence on their computers, Hazuki could do to them whatever she wanted.
Finally, because it was what Alice had originally asked her to find, Hazuki went for the money. She didn’t know anything about how criminal syndicates organised their cashflow; her career before she had met Alice had only been at boringly respectable companies. But looking at it from the position she occupied, it was clear as day. One by one, the accounts were drained, frozen, and involuntarily donated to missing-children charities. After five minutes, the only trace left of all the gang’s crime-earned cash was the database of transactions that Hazuki had downloaded.
Hazuki pressed escape. The attack program ended, closing every window but the one that showed the financial documents.
“Bullseye!” Hazuki called across the room, “Alice, I did it! We won’t see those bastards anytime soon.”
When Hazuki glanced round, Alice was tapping the esper device bemusedly. “Really? It hardly felt like anything was happening on my end. Hmm… I guess they were telling the truth when they told us this was safe.”
“I guess they were,” Hazuki replied. She paused. “Still, test it out one someone else before giving my daughters one. I’m sure Clover would be an eager guinea-pig.”
“Yup!” Clover had stuck her head through the door again as she skipped back down the corridor. She stared at the protruding web of wires coming from Alice’s head. “Woah, that looks awesome! Is this the new SOIS thing? Tell me when I get mine!” Before Alice or Hazuki could give Clover a reply – sensible or otherwise – Clover had skipped away again.
Alice shrugged elegantly. “I guess so.” She stretched, then stood up from the sofa she had been resting on while the hack was in progress and walked over to Hazuki, reading the screen over her shoulder. “Those are the accounts of all those criminal’s money, then? Did you manage to find out who was funding them?”
As far as Hazuki was concerned – and she knew that Alice felt the same way – accounting was the job of people who went to work in suits, not those who could wear whatever they damn well pleased. But there were some simple macros she could set to work that might just do the job for her. She started one, searching for any name that appeared too often in the list of transactions she had taken.
To her surprise, it worked. One single name, belonging to one single organisation, appeared in the list ten times as often as anything that wasn’t one of the mafia’s own accounts. Practically every single cent the mafia had owned had at some point in its life passed through the wallet of this one particular company.
“Alice,” Hazuki murmured, “Have you ever heard of a company called Epsilon Derivatives Ltd?”
Alice frowned. “No. I’ve never heard of it. But… Something about the way it sounds famil–”
Before Alice could finish, every single klaxon in the SOIS building went off at once.
“Alert! Electronic warfare attack in progress! Electronic warfare attack in progress! Turn off all non-necessary computerised equipment until an all-clear announcement is made. Electronic warfare attack in progress!”
“No.” Alice’s voice came out as a slight determined hiss.
Hazuki didn’t need to be told once. “I’ll see what I can do.” Drawing in more of the SOIS processing and network resources than she was technically supposed to have access to, Hazuki started to explore how the attack was targeting SOIS. It was easy enough: she quickly found some malicious code that had been injected into an obscure section of the operating system. Weirdly, it would have activated the fire-prevention sprinklers the next time Light Field used his voice-controlled computer. Hazuki quickly removed it; she didn’t want to get wet.
Then she noticed another thing: pieces of malware and viruses and trojans being inserted into files across the parts of the system Hazuki could access. She scoured out each one she could directly alter, directed the antiviruses towards the ones she couldn’t, and then came back to find even more malware in the spaces she had previously cleared.
Something about the whole thing seemed disturbingly familiar.
Defending mindlessly wasn’t going to be enough. Hazuki left the antiviruses to search for malware as best they could and turned her attention to the channel of incoming attacks. The attacker was redirecting their attacks via thousands of decoy computers around the entire internet and Hazuki couldn’t work out where the attack was originating from. But it was all arriving at the same place, and Hazuki was able to intercept some of the incoming packets as they streamed. She read them.
Lines of obviously malicious code, all cryptographically signed as though it had come from inside SOIS, each one naïvely accepted by the system because of that forged verification.
Hazuki hoped that the fact that she had just used the same technique herself wasn’t the only reason she worked it out so quickly. Someone with her skills and experience should have been able to puzzle it out even from scratch. That was all academic, though; SOIS encryption had been broken, the attack was underway, and Hazuki had to get that information out as quickly and as clearly as possible.
“Alice! They’ve broken our encryption!” she called out. After a pause, she added, “Just like we did.”
“How many of our keys have been broken?” Alice asked.
Hazuki glanced at the incoming packets of malware again. One said it had come from the head of SOIS’ research department, another claimed to have come from the Vice-President, a third one had been forged to appear as if Alice herself had authorised it.
“All of them.”
Alice stayed stoic; her voice stayed level and controlled. “Their target will be the top-secret information we have stored in the databases here. Our resources, our current missions, our agents’ identities.” Nona’s and Ennea’s faces flashed before Hazuki’s eyes as Alice said that. Alice continued, “What’s our defence?”
There was no defence. “We have to unplug everything,” Hazuki replied, “Literally everything. I’d tell you what to prioritise, but if I knew what the most important things were you’d probably have to shoot me. Just… Just rip the cables out of the servers if you have to. It’s the only way.”
Alice nodded. “Okay. Stay here.” Alice darted for the door of the office, stopping only to turn and slide a small earpiece across the desk towards Hazuki. “I’m heading to the server room. Do the best you can to delay, and contact me if anything changes up here.” Then, Alice was gone.
Hazuki focused all her attention back on the computer screen. Delay. That was what she had to do. She couldn’t defend, but if she programmed as hard and as smart as she ever had before, she might just be able to slow the enemy down.
As the attacker extended their control over the SOIS network Hazuki followed, watching where their attention was directed. Alice knew what she was talking about: the databases had to be the target. Hazuki made use of that, laying false trails and setting up decoys that would appear to be the main database up until the moment they were accessed. After the first two decoys were found and quickly left behind, Hazuki filled the third with false information, constructing profiles of non-existent agents from photos of celebrities and fictitious mission reports from the most ludicrous of Alice’s bar tales.
The attacker paused there for two and a half extra seconds.
The decoy tactics had been spent. From there, the attacker headed almost directly for the true database. Hazuki threw her last-ditch attempt into the ring, obfuscating the directory pathway by breaking every last rule of data-retrieval good practice in the books. That bought maybe one more second.
The attacker reached the database.
Hazuki’s computer monitor went black. The alarms suddenly stopped. Silence fell across the office. Hazuki held her breath, not knowing what the result had been.
The silence was broken by a tinny voice coming through the earpiece on the table. Hazuki desperately scrabbled it up and clamped it to her ear. “Hello?” Hazuki asked into it. She realised at this point that Alice had never taught her about radio protocol.
Fortunately, it was Alice speaking. “Hazuki? What’s happening? How far did the opposition penetrate? Did they find anything that could compromise us?”
“I have no idea. They’d just reached the database when everything went down…”
“If it went down just now, then it was when I disconnected the rest of the servers.”
Hazuki sighed with relief.
“Hazuki. Give me your professional judgment,” Alice continued, “about how much damage has been done. Could they have extracted any sensitive information?”
Hazuki considered. She was sure that a data-dump of the system’s process history would reveal that the enemy hacker had accessed the main database. She was also sure that it had only been for a couple of milliseconds. After watching the enemy smash through every electronic defence SOIS had, it would be all too easy to ascribe an almost-infinite amount of power and ability to them. But that could only lead to paranoia. No-one human could have understood anything from the database in that miniscule amount of time. Hazuki replied. “They couldn’t. You stopped them just in time.”
“Good.” Alice paused, and the silence crackled through the radio. “There’s a lot of details for the higher-ups to sort out here… and they will want to assign blame. If it comes to a tribunal, I’ll vouch for you. You did more to protect us than anyone in our own department. If it was up to me, you’d get a medal, but… somehow I don’t think they’ll be thinking about that.” Another pause, another crackle. “Wait there. I’ll sort things out as best I can and get back to you.” The earpiece fell silent.
Hazuki slunk back into her seat. So that was it? The bad guys hadn’t broken anything too much, so all was good? No. Hazuki couldn’t just sit there passively.
She leaned back towards the computer. Without the full infrastructure of the SOIS computer system behind her she wouldn’t have a connection quite as versatile as the one she had before: a great shame. But without it she was blind, and even after she has reworked the SOIS network protocol to allow her further access it shouldn’t allow the enemy hackers any more chances to attack the SOIS system.
Besides, she was curious.
Even through the very limited connection she could muster, Hazuki could at least do something. Since she and the computer she was sitting a had been key in the defence of the SOIS network, some details of the attack were stored on the computer’s own memory rather than anywhere else. Hazuki looked up the proxy computers the attackers had used. She wasn’t going to actually hack them, of course: most of them were personal computers of innocent, if annoyingly stupid, people who had managed to allow malware in that turned them into parts of the botnet. But she could follow the signal traffic.
For a few minutes, the traffic statistics were pretty typical, for normal computer-illiterate users. But then the computers were driven into action once again. Their processing power wasn’t being aimed at SOIS this time. Instead, all the internet traffic was being sent to another target. Though that target shouldn’t have had security and encryption in anyway correlated with that of SOIS, the attacker began to break it apart after only a short pause.
For some reason, that address of the new target looked worryingly familiar. Hazuki looked it up its address from the information SOIS had available.
That IP address was labelled only by a single symbol: a bright yellow circle, with three symmetrical protruding wedges.
Hazuki grasped the earpiece, yelling into it in a panic. “Alice! Alice! They’re going–”
– 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –
5 minutes earlier…
“Alert! Electronic warfare attack in progress! Electronic warfare attack in progress! Turn off all non-necessary computerised equipment until an all-clear announcement is made. Electronic warfare attack in progress!”
“No…” Alice almost couldn’t believe it. No-one had been brave or reckless or stupid enough to try to hack SOIS since computers had been invented. Still, drills had been prepared for this. First step: consult the experts.
‘Experts’ had officially meant the slowpokes down in IT in those drills, but Alice had an actual computer expert on-hand.
“They’ve broken our encryption! Just like we did!” Hazuki announced. She was already busy at work managing the attack, so Alice just asked the one most important question.
“How many of our keys have been broken?”
“All of them.”
With a co-ordinated all-out attack on SOIS like this, there was only one place the attackers could be going: the main database. Almost everything that America had declared officially Top-Secret, as well as everything that had been kept actually top-secret by not officially being declared so, was kept there. Alice explained it.
“We have to unplug everything,” Hazuki replied, “Literally everything. I’d tell you what to prioritise, but if I knew what the most important things were you’d probably have to shoot me. Just… Just rip the cables out of the servers if you have to. It’s the only way.”
Alice leapt towards the door. She stopped only to slide a radio earpiece along the desk to Hazuki, and then she was off.
The server room was three floors down from Alice’s office. Alice vaulted over the railing in the stairwell to drop the first level, but stumbled as she landed. Alice had lied somewhat to Hazuki when she had claimed to have hardly felt anything from the hacking esper device still attached to her head. Really, she had been given a throbbing headache, and it was only getting worse as she went along. If Alice wanted to ensure she reached the server room at all, she’d have to accept taking a longer time and go down the stairs normally.
Later than she would have hoped, and perhaps later than she could afford, Alice arrived at the server room. She stared at the banks of servers that ran all the way along the walls, further than Alice could see through the dimmed lights. These were what the attacker had come to steal from. These were what she had to protect.
Alice couldn’t tell which servers could access the most sensitive blocks of data just by looking at them; through the knotted forest of cables that connected them she could barely tell the different servers apart. It didn’t matter. She had to disconnect everything, and deciding where to start would waste more time than it was worth.
She started pulling out the cables from their sockets, yanking out several at a time, as many as she could grasp at once. It was too slow.
She pulled out her combat knife from her holster and switched to slicing through the wires with its brilliantly sharp edge. It was much faster than just pulling them out. It was still too slow.
Alice took a gamble. There had to be someway of disconnecting everything at once, for precisely this situation. Turning her attention away from the servers right in front of her, she sprinted down the room searching for some sort of master switch.
As Alice ran, her headache grew and grew. With her training, it was easy to force herself to ignore it. Her own personal comfort could come later, after the Office was safe. She continued to run.
Someone less alert would have missed it, or over-shot. The master switch had been buried between the servers, so that you couldn’t even see its alcove from the aisle. But Alice noticed the break in the pattern, skidded to a halt, and dived her hands in.
Alice yanked down the lever.
The lights in the server room went out completely.
The alarm died.
Alice couldn’t rest yet. She was completely in the dark – literally and figuratively – about whether she had been in time… or not. That needed to be rectified. Alice spoke into her earpiece, contacting the one she’d left for Hazuki. “Hazuki. Sit-rep?” Alice asked.
There were a few moments of silence before Hazuki replied. “Alice?”
Of course. Hazuki didn’t know what ‘sit-rep’ meant. “What’s happening? How far did the opposition penetrate? Did they find anything that could compromise us?” Alice asked, more explicitly.
“I have no idea. They’d just reached the database when everything went down…”
“If it went down just now, then it was when I disconnected the rest of the servers.” From Hazuki’s description, it had been close: very close. There was nothing on any of the servers that Alice could see that would indicate whether or not they had been accessed. Of course, they were all entirely dormant. So Alice had to ask. “Hazuki. Give me your professional judgment about how much damage has been done. Could they have extracted any sensitive information?”
Silence. Then, finally, an answer. “They couldn’t. You stopped them just in time.”
Alice slumped back against the rack of servers opposite the master switch. She had the answer she needed; she had succeeded. Now, the aftermath.
She could, at least, focus her entire mind on considering that aftermath. Her headache, which had reached its thumping migraine-like zenith as she’d found the master switch, had begun to quickly subside as she relaxed. That left room to think about the important questions.
Like the most important question of all: how had the enemy hacked SOIS with such insulting ease? Had someone been turned, blackmailed, or persuaded into giving up the encryption keys? Or merely been sloppy, and exposed them by accident? Either way, the result for that person would be the same. They’d told someone they shouldn’t had, and the consequences had been dire, and Alice or whichever of the other fully-trusted agents found them first would have to shoot them.
But what if that hadn’t been the scenario? What if…? What if…? Considering all the various possibilities was starting to bring Alice’s migraine back with a vengeance.
Alice’s radio earpiece crackled, the sound almost painful with how sensitive Alice’s headache had made her. Then Hazuki’s voice yelled desperately from it, adding worry and concern to the purely physical pain. “Alice! Alice!”
“Hazuki,” Alice said, trying her well-honed best to not show any weakness, “What is it?”
Hazuki’s reply chilled Alice to the point where she would show weakness whether she wanted to or not.
“They’re going for the nuclear codes!”
The nuclear codes. The ability, for good or more likely ill, to control and launch America’s entire nuclear arsenal. That was what the enemy was seeking. If they succeeded… everything was over.
“How are the defences holding up?” Alice asked.
“They aren’t!” came Hazuki’s tinny reply, “They’re breaking through the encryption as quickly as they did ours. I hate to say this, but there’s no way they’re doing this without the same ability to factorise primes that we were using.”
‘The same ability to factorise primes’? Alice could recognise something that very definitely wasn’t a coincidence when it was right in front of her. A resurfacing nuisance funded by a single shady source? An encryption system that practically required automatic prime-factorisation to break? A widespread co-ordinated attack on SOIS and then the nuclear infrastructure immediately after? This had been planned.
The hacking esper device must have been compromised. That was the only conclusion.
Alice tried to wrench the device from her head. That failed; it had been clamped on perfectly. She changed tack, returning her combat knife to her hand – she ignored the way her hand tremored with feelings of déjà vu – and raised it towards the side of her head. She prised the device up as far as it would go. With a single motion, she sliced through all the wires that went into her head.
Blinding pain ran into her brain. The device fell away from her, but she could barely see it; she couldn’t hear it at all as it clattered on the floor. It was a miracle that she stayed standing, and conscious.
The pain was worth it, though. Without the device, the enemy’s attack wouldn’t be able to continue.
Alice almost heard something coming through her earpiece. Hazuki? She sounded concerned about… something. Alice couldn’t hear what, and couldn’t pay attention to it, anyway. The headache consumed her mind. It wasn’t the pain from violently removing the device, though that was still there. It was the same headache as before. The very same headache that had formed when she and Hazuki had first tried using Alice’s new-found esper abilities. Through that headache, and from that headache, Alice realised.
It wasn’t the esper device that the enemy had targeted, though that had tried to make it appear that way to anyone who noticed the first layer of their scheme. It was Alice herself. That was their true trap.
Alice couldn’t stop this just by removing some equipment. She raced out of the server room and stumbled in the direction of the medical bay. Now that she had learned what to focus on, she could see the prime numbers flying through her mind: 324143286479 and 803205935663 and 867527277251 and 902450929507 and 599770933939 and 465836618921 and 324330453487 and 999999999899 and 770009701301 and… Alice knew that these numbers were her side’s numbers, but she couldn’t help but factorise them anyway.
She’d never been so violated: not even the year before when she and Clover had been captured and then unceremoniously released because they were no longer needed. How the hell were those bastards doing this to her? Subverting a piece of hardware like the device that she had used was worrying, given that SOIS security should have prevented it, but at least she understood how that could happen.
A phrase rose out of Alice’s recollection, from something she had read in a speculative report. The veracity and trustworthiness of that intelligence had been considered incredibly dubious at the time, but it had been as good as information got about Alice’s greatest and most hated enemy. So when the phrase ‘Mind Hack’ returned to her mind, she gave it more credence this time around.
God, no. Fuck no! Alice wasn’t going to let Brother and Free the Soul and their damn Myrmidons do whatever they liked with her mind. Alice might have fallen into the trap they had set by funding the mafia, and she might have taken until then to unravel it, but it would end right there.
Alice burst into the medical bay. She found the stocks of Soporil Beta quickly. No need to measure out the dose: with Alice’s resistance it would need to be the entire vial or nothing. She slotted it into the injection gun.
The one thing that Brother needed to complete his plan and take control of the country’s nukes was Alice’s esper abilities. The one thing Alice could take from him was her own consciousness. Alice gladly took the injection gun and shot it into her own leg.
Blackness descended over Alice’s sight, but she could taste her victory. It tasted… bittersweet.
– 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –
25th December, 2029
Hazuki made sure that she was there when Alice was allowed to return to the land of the conscious. She’d learned over the past month that if you were bold enough and unique enough, SOIS employees just accepted that you were supposed to be there. And when looking like the perfect model of a SOIS agent wasn’t enough, the still-technically-fake ID card that Alice had given her was.
Alice still lay on the bed. Thick, many-times wrapped bandages replaced the device in covering her head. Just cutting the device out like that had been utterly ridiculous, and they said that it was a miracle that Alice had survived it. But Hazuki’s friend was tough to the core, so Hazuki hadn’t been entirely surprised when the doctors had told her that not only was Alice still alive but she hadn’t even suffered any brain damage.
Those doctors now crowded around, examining the monitor of her brain activity and the IV line that dripped in more Soporil, second by second. That was just like every other time Hazuki had visited. But this time the anaesthetist began to fiddle with the intake, preparing to reduce the level and gradually wake Alice up. Holding up the value on the IV line, she glanced at Hazuki expectantly.
Hazuki took her position: a computer that had been set up in the medical bay specifically for this moment. This wasn’t anything like the jury-rigged construction Hazuki had used after the main servers had gone down during the attack on that day. This computer had been tailor-made, completely separate from the main SOIS network – which would be deactivated again, in any case, until they knew it was safe – containing an excessive armament of malware to aim at anyone who decided to make it a target, and with its own hard shut-down switch in case it was hacked.
Hazuki returned the anaesthetist’s glance, and nodded.
The IV slowed, dripped, dripped, dripped, and then stopped. Alice began to stir, her eyelids flickering and her breathing growing stronger. The head doctor leaned over, checking her vital signs.
Alice’s eyes snapped open. She reached up and twisted the doctor’s hand away from her, sitting up in one smooth motion. “Where am I?!” she demanded to know. Before she could be given an answer she looked around the room, her head and eyes moving in measured precise jolts. “Not our radiation shelter,” she muttered, “And you don’t look like you’re all cultists. So I guess the world hasn’t ended; thank goodness.”
“It hadn’t ended last time I checked,” Hazuki said, “I can look again, if you want.”
“Hazuki!” Alice gasped, before regaining her composure. She stared at Hazuki’s computer, a slight frown of concern forming. “Is it safe for me to be conscious? Is there any chance of the Myrmidons trying to use my abilities to break encryption again?”
Hazuki checked the monitor of her computer. None of the decoy computers that hackers had used previously had activated, and more importantly there was no suspicious extra traffic at either SOIS or the nuclear codes or anywhere else that SOIS considered sensitive.
“I don’t think so,” Hazuki replied. She paused, appreciated the sceptical look on Alice’s face, then explained, “It must have taken them all year to assemble the botnet and the processing power they needed to attempt this. When we did, we were able to track down all the computers they had infected and get them cleaned out. Plus, when they got desperate and overextended themselves…” Hazuki swivelled the monitor to show Alice a particularly pleasant video she had saved. On screen, Ennea, Nona, Clover and Light escorted a half-dozen handcuffed blonde-haired identical complete monsters into SOIS’ cells. “The Myrmidons had one shot at this. Thanks to you, that one shot failed.”
“Good,” Alice stated. Now more relaxed she looked around the medbay again, this time noticing the lines of tinsel that lined the walls, far enough away from anything that needed to be kept sterile. “So, already Christmas? What present did you get for me?”
“It’s a secret. If I told you, I’d have to shoot you.” Hazuki laughed.
Alice scowled. “So it’s not Brother’s head on a platter? With extra salt, for his wounds? No?” Alice leapt out of her bed. She stumbled slightly, testing muscles that hadn’t been exercised for a month. But then she was standing tall and proud, just as Hazuki had always known her, before striding towards the door. “I guess we’d better get started, then! Come on, Hazuki. Let’s kick some ass.”
Hazuki carefully shut down her computer, then stood up. It had been a long dread-filled month, but she could still smile.
“That’s right, Alice. Let’s kick some ass.”
To: @aoiasahina
From: @deathdesu / @destinydraws
Clover/Alice, working a case….. CASE CLOSED.
~Secret…. AAAAAAAAAGENT SANTAS~
To: @zeiscomplex
From: @gavinnersroadie
“really anything with Quark honestly” for zeiscomplex! Let the boy have a good and happy holiday.
(On one hand, no one would ever gift wrap a root beer float. On the other hand, if any sentient being would ever gift wrap a root beer float, it would be his grandpa, probably after a bit too much scotch, )
ZEcret Santa 