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Magical Detective Ayase Yue; Someone had to write it
Topic Started: May 28 2012, 11:34 PM (1,777 Views)
rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

Danke. Dang OpenOffice spellcheck, not having that in it.
Let's Watch Nanoha
Wits, magic, and hardboiled monologues.
My other claims to fame.
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Neep
Red
Shipping Yue with a girl who is not Nodoka. Is this (check one):

[] Heresy
[] Double heresy
[] So heretical. Heretical as balls.
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Archivist10
Red
Not even Haruna?
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rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

^^I have assurances, backed by Paru-sama Scent of Love™, that Yue is attractive to a bafflingly large number of ladies.

Crap, Haruna's a heretic, isn't she.

Edit: They actually did have a mutual-rebound hookup at one point, but Yue broke it off come the morning, on the grounds that adding that dimension to their relationship just made things too weird.
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Archivist10
Red
Between Yue and Haruna or Yue and Nodoka?
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rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

Yue and Nodoka.
Let's Watch Nanoha
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rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

Quote:
 
In Which There Are Unusual Suspects

If I was going to find an outsider to the network of alliances and feuds that passed for a club system in this school, I'd need to turn to the Go-Home Club, or the Club That Is Not as Torako more pretentiously named it. It wasn't particularly large, even given the normal social pressures keeping kids in clubs that actually existed. The apathetic drifted towards nominal membership in something or other just for safety's sake, even if they rarely darkened a club room door. Given that, the Go-Home Club was limited to a mercenary toughie here, a die-hard antisocial there...

And Yuuki Yuka, serial cultist.

Yuuki went through obscure fringe religions like Misora went through running shoes. For a few weeks she'd be a devoted follower of Harsihar, a desert god of justice. Then without warning she'd abandon him for an equally fervent devotion to mighty Kraken. After a month of that she'd be a sincere and devout believer in a maiden who undid her human existence to become hope itself. And all without ever seeing anything odd or untoward in her religious inconstancy, which had apparently been one of the few constants about her since elementary school. The Powers That Were shrugged their selective shoulders over it, as she'd thus far avoided any faiths that would require her to violate any school rules, including the decades-old ban on blood sacrifice. Even when she went around proclaiming that the Lord Dragon had broken all bonds and undone all oaths, in practice she generally did as she was told.

Still, her shifting devotion rendered her erratic and just plain weird. She might join a club and prove its most dedicated member, only to abandon it along with the deity who had demanded her diligence. If there was anyone in Mahora unbound by the mores and laws of the after-school clubs, it was her. That was the lighter side of my decision to investigate her next. The darker aspect was that if a nefarious agency wished to infiltrate the school for likewise nefarious purposes, she'd be the one to start with. Yuuki lacked even a consistent strangeness from which deviation might be noted. So it was to her domicile, a solitary thing once built by the church to serve as an abbreviated nunnery, that Torako and I wended after our meal.

My first impression was that she'd broken the rule against blood sacrifice.

Well, strictly speaking that's not true. My first impression was blood. It took my second impression to form a coherent sentence about that observation. My third impression noted Yuuki's body; no not Yuuki's body – Yuuki herself she wasn't a body yet; and the black-cloaked figure slipping out the window. I was already moving after the latter by the time impression number four suggested that that was a worryingly large volume of blood to have come all at once from a lone schoolgirl.

Torako! I sent. Use your artif-

Use my artifact to keep the kid from dying until a proper healer, who I am contacting now, can show up, she finished. And teach your granny to hunt, schoolgirl.

I eschewed further banter entirely because I wanted to focus on my quarry and not at all because advising my Ministra on how to use the artifact she'd had since before I met her was one of my dumber impulses.
Sorry SCM, no Sakuraism in this verse.
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Shadow Crystal Mage
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OVERLORD OF ALL CRACK!

You are forgiven since you mentioned The Lord Dragon, but I tut in disappoint at you neglecting to mention Harmony, the Sliver of Infinity, and being a Jedi. Jedi is technically an actual religion in some Commonwealth countries.
I AM THE OVERLORD OF ALL CRACK!!!!!!
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rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

Jedi is therefore too mainstream to be appropriate. And I can only shoehorn in so many references at a time.
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rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

Quote:
 
My target was swift and agile, and seemed to know the terrain well. Even augmented by magic, it took me a little time before I had a clear stretch to request that the suspect halt. This command was pronounced “Sagitta Magica,” that being the phrasing I had found most effective in these matters.

In this case, I might have had better luck with a more traditional method, as a hardwood pole spinning through the air managed to take out all three arrows. I would have wanted to admire the skill that took if another pole hadn't rammed into my side at nearly the same moment, knocking me to the ground and my staff out of my hand. That sort of thing tends to make one reassess ones priorities.

“Typical mage,” sneered my assailant, a redheaded girl attired in what looked like some Western military dress uniform. Shirogami Hitomi, Fencing Club. “You can command the forces of the universe, but can't take a gah!”

I'd thrown a handful of dirt at her face and a kick at her knee. It seemed the thing to do. That bought me the time to grab my staff and get to my feet, but she recovered quickly. “Did you really think such simple tricks would make me let you hunt them down?” she asked as she launched a lightning-swift series of strikes.

“If they be innocent, let them come and be judged so!” I said, managing to parry the blows. I might have been fighting longer, but this was her specialty and not mine. “Else they but distract the eye of justice from the guilty!”

“The argument of tyrants!” Shirogami returned. Damn everything, a combatant of Ala Alba should not be struggling so against some fifteen-year-old amateur.

“The argument of the rule of law, greatest inoculation against tyrants!” And what was I accomplishing as a fifteen-year-old amateur?

“Tyrants always claim to be backed by the rule of law!” Why, snarky inner commentary, I was accomplishing less than I could nearly eight years later.

“Hardly! Some claim to be freedom fighters, tearing down tyrants like Robespierre!” Was I completely sure about that?

I was spared further argument with the most Chisame-like portions of my brain by Torako contacting me. Okay, good news is that the girl's alive. I don't think most of the blood was hers, don't ask me where it came from. The bad news is the bit of contour map in her hand with 'Ares,' spelled like the god this time, written on it.

I think we've found your outsider.
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rikalous
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Decided the scrap of paper clutched in the victim's hand was a bit too...something. Can't think of the word. Too fictiony. Rewriting that last bit accordingly.
Quote:
 
I was spared further argument with the most Chisame-like portions of my brain by Torako contacting me. Good news, the girl's alive. I don't think most of the blood was hers, don't ask me where it came from. Also weird is that her room's full of what looks to be maps of Mars, as the c. I recognize some of the mountains.

It seemed I'd found my force external.

Combat while bantering is easier to maintain than combat while reeling from a dramatic revelation, and Shirogami took advantage of my lapse to clock me soundly and then send my staff flying from my hands. Fortunately my staff is far from my most dangerous weapon.

“Have you noticed how your bosses need to rely on 'mudborns' to get any fighting done?” I asked. “Not very superior of them.” Hopefully she'd be as choleric as Anya was. A chancy proposition, considering how choleric Anya was before anything else joined her in her skull.

Shirogami blinked. “You wanna mulligan that one? Because I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Huh,” I said, displaying my keen wit and advanced vocabulary. “Does the name 'Ares' mean anything to you?”

“What, like the horoscope?” See, it's an easy mistake.

“No. Not like the horoscope,” I said, keeping commendably calm. “I just got sent a tip that makes them the prime suspect for two assaults on Mahora students. If you stop attacking me now, maybe I can still make sure that there isn't a third.”
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Darkenning
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Pervert. Also, Witch.
"as the c."?
"Hello! I'm Rurin, the Magical Mouse! My favorite food is cheese! My favorite pastimes are tormenting cats and facilitating romance! I have the power to bind the souls of guys who mistreat women to the depths of hell and subject them to everlasting karmic suffering! Isn't that cute? Pleased to meet you!" -- Rurin, the Magical Mouse, Magical Patissiere Kosaki-chan.
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rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

I...don't remember what that was supposed to be, so I'm pretty sure I meant to edit it out. Maybe I should try being less tired when I write.
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rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

And the last segment of the chapter.

Quote:
 
She paused for long enough that I very nearly abandoned diplomacy and tried something rash. Then she shrugged and lifted her stick so that it wasn't pointing menacingly at me anymore. “Whoever you were chasing,” she said as I went and retrieved my staff, “they know the system we have for anonymously hiring a little sword work. The dead drops and stuff.”

I didn't respond, being too busy heading off to resume my aborted chase. By this point, though, the trail could have substituted for a freezer. The culprit had been inconsiderate enough not to leave any footprints, out-of-place DNA, or signed notes bragging about their wicked deeds. I suspected Shirogami knew she'd delayed me long enough that letting me go wouldn't matter, and I resolved to share these suspicions with Rina before the child teacher decided how much detention to give her.

Returning to the scene of the crime proved slightly more fruitful, as I there discovered that the bulk of the exciting red liquid festooning the area was prop blood. Yuuki's only injuries were a few shallow cuts and a bruise to the back of the head. As an act of fakery, it was somewhat less impressive than Ares's spiriting away of Arika or Anya, but perhaps it would have been improved without my interruption. It was nice to think that the visit hadn't been an utter waste of time.

I was entirely unsurprised to hear the next day that the Drama Club wanted my aid in looking over the evidence of a break-in that had left them short a not inconsiderable amount of prop blood. Less expected was the distinctly increased level of tension among the student body, but the reason was soon made clear. Once again, last night's incident adorned the front page of the student newspaper, complete with Yuuki's bloodied picture. Maybe the school should just hire the damn Newspaper Club to do my job.
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rikalous
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Creature of the Deep

Quote:
 
In Which There is a Trial by Combat

Torako and I had decided to split up to cover both leads we had at the same time. Since debriefing Yuuki would require my deductive expertise less than investigating the break-in at the prop room, to her bedside Torako went and to the theatre went I.

The break-in was by all appearances a perfectly mundane job. Lock picked, loot purloined, and larcenous person gone without leaving behind any identifiable trace of their presence. In fact, nothing at all at the crime scene was identifiably unusual, at least for a prop room. I took some small comfort in the fact that I could provisionally rule out anyone notably reliant on magic or brute force.

Granted, I could likewise rule out anyone without a motive to steal prop blood, which by my reckoning removed the entire populations of all three worlds from consideration. This did not strike me as satisfactory progress. Oh for thieves who committed their crimes out of cupidity, or spite, or any motive at all comprehensible to an outside party. Hopefully Torako had had better luck on her end.

“Hopefully you've had better luck on your end,” were Torako's first words to me back at my office. Of course they were. “Your medical people didn't find any signs of the tampering, mental or physical, the Cocolova girl had. Our victim wasn't paying any attention when someone snuck in and knocked her out from behind, she doesn't know anything about Ares, Aegis Kai Doru, or the Magic World, and we can't trace the person who got her into her newest cult back to anything because there is no contact. She gets her dogmas from a website, look.”

Torako held up her smartphone, currently viewing the main page of something called “Sectpedia.” I examined it, and for one horrible moment I understood what Chisame feels like constantly.

“This is a wiki. For cults. There is a wiki for cults,” I said.

“'Small-scale religions' is the term your girl prefers. And just gimmee a second to have it on the one she's into now...Here we are. The Truths of Bennett.”

“Discovering and cataloguing knowledge will lead humanity into peace and harmony, it says. I can certainly see the attraction...Wait. This page discusses at length the spiritual importance of mapmaking, how it helps make the world understood by humanity, but there's nothing about Mars. Are you telling me that the Mars maps weren't important because they were of Mars-”

“But because they were maps, yup. This planet's pretty well mapped out, so she figured mapping out the one next door might help. Ares might not be involved at all.”

I remembered my Meditations. The cucumber is bitter, throw it out. There are brambles on the path, turn aside. A lead reduces the amount of sense the case makes, pursue another one. A full understanding would reveal that these things were not faults, and screaming incoherently at the heavens over them would be unmeritorious. Letting my face slump to my desk might be permissible, however.

“Maybe she was lying?” I asked, lifting my head up enough to be coherent. “Trying to send us off on a false trail?”

Torako shrugged. “If she was, she's a damn good actor. I've seen a lot of frightened people in my life, and I'd bet anything she was sincerely scared by what happened to her. You could always go back and question her yourself.”

I grunted a declination and resumed slumping.

“I'm picking up subtle cues from your body language that you didn't get anything useful from the prop room break-in,” Torako said after a moment.

I sighed and sat back up. “Just that they can pick a lock, which doesn't reveal much.

“Wait. We did gather valuable information. Every piece of evidence we've been able to obtain points to the culprit possessing more stealth than strength. They're a sneak-thief, an attacker from behind. When I caught them in the act, they ran and enlisted a mercenary to attack me rather than engaging in combat personally. Whoever they are, their talents don't lie in brawn. Even if we don't know what they're trying to accomplish or why, we can use that.”
There's your Scadriel religion, SCM.
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My other claims to fame.
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