by C. S. Cooper
“You sent for me, Father?” he mumbled. “And you asked me not to bring Liz and Patty, so I can only assume you have another diplomatic mission for me.”
“Ever so astute, Kiddo, m’boy,” said the Reaper. “It seems the Alchemic Regiment has pooped things up again.”
Kiddo buried his palm in his face. “Again? First Restigouche, then Victor, and then Nathan Grant! What is it this time?”
“Well, this isn’t entirely their fault,” said the Reaper. “It’s ours too.”
“How so?” asked Kiddo, offended by the notion.
“You remember Shaula Gorgon?” asked the Reaper. Kiddo grit his teeth at the mention of the Witch who attacked their school and killed several innocent people, including two girls. He motioned for his father to continue. “It seems that, since we didn’t catch her – what with, ya know, Ol’ Nyarlie attackin’ us and all – she went and teamed up with some old friends of the Regiment … You know, the L.X.E.?”
“The League of Extraordinary Elects?” said Kiddo with a raised eyebrow. “Witches hate homunculi. Why would one join with them?”
“To run a heist on a Regiment facility in Australia,” said the Reaper. His shadowy form quivered as he added, “They stole a very important relic that the Regment was studying, known as the Silver Key.”
Kiddo didn’t recognise the name, having carefully studied every ounce of his father’s lore.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Not sure,” said the Reaper. “Might’ve been something humans created before my kind came to Earth. I do know that humans had some pretty amazing powers long ago, but lost ’em well before I found ’em.”
Kiddo shrugged and returned to the issue at hand. “So the Alchemic Regiment messed up, and they want us to fix the problem?”
“Not exactly,” said the Reaper. “They want to run a joint-operation, to find the Shaula and the L.X.E., and reclaim the Silver Key. I want you to meet with them and discuss terms of cooperation.”
“Should I not take Liz and Patty with me?” asked Kiddo. “I could probably handle these flesh-eaters with ease.”
“Nope, I want to keep you in reserve in case things go south,” said the Reaper. “If the Regiment will cooperate, then I’ll send in Maka and Soul.”
Kiddo coughed nervously and muttered, “Aside from myself, they’re your best meister and weapon. Perhaps one of the other meisters. Black-Star and Tsubaki might be a better team. Or even Kim and Jackie.”
The Reaper waved a large cuboid finger at his son and said, “Tsk-tsk, Kiddo. When you take over the job from me, you need to always put your best foot forward. Understand?”
Kiddo pursed his lips and sighed, “Very well. Send the itinerary to me, and I will meet with these charlatans. If they are willing, I will inform you.”
The Reaper snapped his fingers with delight and watched his son leave. As the doors closed, the Reaper hunched and moaned, “The ball really is rolling, isn’t it?”
Chapter 5: A Shaky Alliance
A tense mood settled upon the conference room. The generals of the Alchemic Regiment took their seats, though they could not relax their tightly knitted brows. Even the usually flippant General Shantanu Vasuman of the Middle-East Branch couldn’t keep a frown from his face. Each general and their aides fidgeted nervously as the appointed time approached.
About a minute before the briefing was supposed to begin, the doors opened, and three figures entered. General Piers Rodrigo of the Oceania Branch took a seat near the head of the table, and introduced the taller of his two companions.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Commander Tristan Costable of the Australian division,” he said. “Call sign: Captain Bravo.”
Bravo stepped forward and addressed the leadership. “Thank you for allowing this meeting at such short notice.” He referred to the young woman behind him. “This is Warrior Astrid Rachelle, call sign: Spartan Valkyrie.”
The Chinese general sneered at the girl’s salute.
“So you’re the one who put us in the mess with Nathan Grant and Victor,” she muttered.
Astrid grit her teeth but said nothing.
“Nobody is here to assign blame,” said Rodrigo firmly. The other generals nodded resolutely, though some still shot the evils at Astrid. Rodrigo motioned for Bravo to sit, and Astrid took her place behind his seat as an aide. The other generals moved closer to the table, with their aides behind them at the ready.
There was something odd about the arrangement of the conference room, Astrid noted. There were an equal number of men and women, separated evenly across the table. The genders and numbers of people were identical on both sides of the room.
Two seats, at the end of the table, were conspicuously empty.
Before anyone could complain about those who were tardy, the full-length mirror adorning the nearby wall lit up. It outshone the lights in the conference room, before fading out. In front of it stood the son of the Reaper.
“Death the Kid, thank you for coming,” said Rodrigo.
Despite her excitement at meeting this legendary meister, Astrid leaned down to Bravo and mumbled, “He’s shorter than I’d expected.” Bravo shushed her.
Kiddo pursed his lips to hide his distaste for present company. He then moved toward his seat at the head of the table. His yellow eyes scanned the room, and went bloodshot when he saw the empty seat to his left.
“This is unacceptable!” exclaimed Kiddo. “Why is there an empty seat?”
“We are waiting on one more speaker,” said Rodrigo. “I must ask that you be patient.”
Kiddo, however, refused to begin the meeting until the seats were filled.
“What is your problem?” scoffed Astrid.
Every eye turned to her with dismay, and she immediately chastised herself for her outburst.
I’ve spent too much time around Nathan, she concluded.
The son of the Reaper stood up and marched right up to her. His nostrils flared and he bellowed, “My problem is with your organisation’s absolute disrespect of order and symmetry. Do you not understand that? You are careless, so much that you let a homunculus get away, only to join forces with a Witch –”
“That you let get away,” interjected a Scottish voice that made Astrid’s hair stand on end. Both she and Kiddo glanced over at the source of the voice: an eighteen year old with a reddish tinge to his hair. He wore a grin that Astrid well knew meant trouble. The young man addressed the table, “Sorry for my being late, eh.”
“Eriol Lamperouge,” Rodrigo announced. He worked hard to hold his own bile back. “Thank you also for coming.”
Eriol motioned to the woman following him. “This is my personal assistant, Ruby Moon. I hope it is acceptable for her to be present also.” The young black-haired woman bowed.
“Of course!” exclaimed Kiddo to the exclusion of anyone else. “Now, there is symmetry.” And he promptly returned to his seat at the head of the table.
“Oh, Kiddo, you really should get that issue looked at,” said Eriol as he sat at the table. He glanced around with a giddy look. His gaze fell on Astrid. He shot up and yelled, “Oh, Triddy! Been a while, girlfriend!”
“Do not hug me,” snapped Astrid. She glared at Bravo. “Why didn’t you tell me he was going to be here?” Bravo feigned ignorance.
“He contacted us,” said Rodrigo.
“And I freely offer my services in finding the Silver Key,” said the Scotsman.
Rodrigo drummed his hands on the table and said, “Then let’s begin.” He addressed everyone. “We are facing a crisis. Never before have the Witches joined forces with homunculi, until now.”
“You are certain it is Shaula who has joined with these L.X.E. remnants?” asked Kiddo.
Rodrigo motioned the woman behind him, who saluted the generals. She spoke with a loud voice and said, “I am Warrior Hannah Peterson, previously stationed at the Cunnamulla research outpost in Southeast Queensland. At approximately twenty-two-hundred hours, three days ago,
the outpost was attacked. They used high explosive to break through security and breach the underground lab. Then they stole the Silver Key and the lead researcher, Doctor Franklin Avalon.”
Eriol gasped, “Do you mean, Franklin Kinomoto? As in, the father of Sakura Kinomoto?”
“We did not refer to him by his married name,” Bravo interjected. “We used his original name in our system, so that nobody could connect him to the Cardcaptor without a lot of digging.”
Eriol looked right past him to Rodrigo. “I told you to leave her out of this.”
“No, you said, almost a year ago, she wouldn’t be able to assist us with Victor just yet,” Rodrigo insisted. “Besides, we didn’t recruit her. We recruited her father.”
The Chinese general leaned forward. “I feel as if I should have been informed of this. Japan is under Asian jurisdiction. One of its citizens being recruited without my knowledge is serious breach of protocol.”
“We needed him to decipher the Silver Key,” Bravo put in.
“People!” bellowed Kiddo. “I’d like to know what you intended with the Silver Key in a minute, but could we get back to the issue at hand, please?” The conference room settled down, but still simmered with heightened nerves. Kiddo motioned for Hannah to continue her testimony.
“I was buried under rubble, and luckily the homunculi didn’t sense my presence,” said Hannah. She stammered as she fought down her resurfacing trauma. “I clearly saw a woman with blue-red eyes and purple hair. It was short, and a bit stumpy at the back. She utilised magic to restrain the researcher.”
“Shaula Gorgon,” Kiddo concluded. “Maka Albarn sliced off Shaula’s braid a few months ago. It was through that she was able to brainwash people. I assume then that she lacks that power now, otherwise she’d not have needed to restrain him.” He raised his eyebrows at Hannah, asking for more.
“I saw another man,” Hannah went on. “A homunculus, with yellow skin. He liked to say ‘Moon’ a lot.”
“That’s definitely Moonface,” said Bravo. “He managed to escape Warrawul when Victor incapacitated me.”
“When response teams reached the site, the hostiles were already gone,” said Rodrigo.
“Do you have any intelligence on where they are now?” asked Kiddo.
“We’ve compiled a list of L.X.E. safe houses across Australia and New Zealand, but none of them are occupied,” said Rodrigo.
“Same in the Middle-East,” said Vasuman.
The other generals were similarly empty-handed.
“I will speak with my father,” said Kiddo. “Perhaps the other Death Scythes supervising Oceania will know something.”
Rodrigo voiced his appreciation.
Eriol raised a finger as if he was in kindergarten. “Question: how did you get the Lee Clan’s approval to study the Silver Key?”
Every face in the room lit up in shock.
“What do you mean?” asked Vasuman.
“We found the Silver Key in Antarctica, right where Doctor Avalon said it was,” said Bravo.
At that, Eriol’s eyes widened with horror, amazement, admiration, and resentment, all at once. “You found the other one?” he intoned. Not even Kiddo knew what he was talking about. “The Silver Key is in two parts,” Eriol explained. “It’s a device that only works when the two parts are combined. I … or rather, Clow Reed, found one half in the Gulf of Bothnia.”
The room suddenly erupted into a chorus of screaming and fingers pointed at Eriol. The Scotsman just shrugged and waited for them to quiet down, being well acquainted with such treatment.
The Reaper’s son slapped the table loudly and hollered, “Hey! Everybody calm the Hell down!” The room quieted down, giving Kiddo a chance to ask, “What does this Silver Key do? Not even my father knows of it.”
Eriol shrugged cryptically as he turned to Rodrigo. “Why don’t you tell us, Rodrigo?”
Rodrigo opened his mouth, but choked on his words and closed it again.
Bravo quickly interjected, “We don’t know what it does either. That was why we were researching it.”
The Scotsman gave a look partway between a sneer and a knowing smile. He finally gave another shrug and said, “Well, if Clow knew, I didn’t get those memories. But I do know two things. One, you got one half of the key, you can locate the other half pretty easily, ’cause they’re connected.”
“We studied it for months and didn’t detect any connection,” exclaimed Bravo.
“That’s ’cause you don’t have magic, ya bawheid,” retorted Eriol. When asked about the second thing he knew, he said, “The Lee Clan has the other half of the key. They keep it in their compound in Hong Kong.”
The group immediately moved to discussion of contacting the Lee Clan. It wasn’t long before an argument broke out over jurisdiction. Some wanted to go and take the Silver Key fragment by force, others wanted to bring the Lee Clan into the fold. Eriol spoke against either action, but his own suggestions fell on deaf ears. Kiddo remained silent, and started to feel as if he’d been invited only as a courtesy. He stood from the table and walked toward the mirror, drawing the gaze of all the generals.
“This is why you never work,” growled the Reaper’s son. “You spend less time fighting homunculi and more time bickering amongst yourselves.” Then, he activated the mirror portal and disappeared through it.
The conference room went back to arguing after he left. The discussion went to tabulating votes for different courses of action, and then eventually devolved into lumping all the blame for the situation on Rodrigo and Bravo. That only led to more arguing and yelling.
Eventually, Eriol rose from the table and sauntered over to Astrid, who had remained silent throughout the meeting. The Scotsman could see the irritation mounting on her face, and rested a hand on her shoulder. She almost jumped three feet in the air when he touched her, but maintained her calm in the presence of the infuriating Scotsman.
“Bunch o’ tadgers, jockeyin’ for position,” he mumbled. “It’d be much better if you had a leader who just said, ‘We’re doin’ this!’”
Astrid glanced at him, wondering what he was insinuating. Of course, Eriol hid his meaning behind that smile of his. He beckoned Ruby to follow him out of the room, offering a wink to the survivor of Moonface’s attack.
Astrid turned back to the rabble of generals, who had been arguing for at least ten minutes and had gotten nowhere. She rested her hand on Bravo’s shoulder and said, “I don’t think you’ll need me here. I’ll go and see Nathan.”
“Keep outta trouble,” mumbled Bravo, irritated that he couldn’t run from the meeting.
Astrid left the room. As she departed, she brushed past Hannah. She caught a whiff of something that made her hair stand on end. She looked back at the woman, who offered a smile and asked if she was all right. Astrid reached out with her senses a second time, but felt nothing out of the ordinary.
Just my imagination, she thought as she exited the room.
Chapter 6: The Great Escape
Nathan had paced so much, there were wear marks on the floor beneath the one-way mirror. He’d done little more than that since finishing Astrid’s Anzac biscuits. Occasionally, he asked the supervisors if Bravo had organised the visit from his family, as promised. He always met with a negative answer.
Astrid entered the room to see the boy in a fretful mood. He threw his arms around her and bellowed, “Tell me, you’re gonna get me outta here.”
“Not yet,” sighed Astrid. Nathan saw her agitated mood and inquired. “I just came from a really annoying meeting, so I’m obviously a little miffed.”
“What happened?” asked Nathan.
Astrid explained what happened at the meeting. She glossed over Death the Kid and Eriol, not wishing to sidetrack Nathan with more exposition about the strangeness of their world. When she finally finished, she found herself sitting on Nathan’s hospital bed. The boy sat next to her and took her hand in his.
“You know what might make you feel b
etter?” he asked lasciviously.
Astrid tried to pull her hand away.
“Not a chance,” she snapped.
Nathan held her hand and whispered, “Didn’t mean that.”
“Then what do you mean?” asked Astrid suspiciously.
“I meant escape!” exclaimed Nathan. He leapt onto his bed and bounced on it. “Let’s bust outta here and go to Hong Kong. We’ll get the Silver Key and kill Moonface and this sheila chick before anyone knows what’s what!”
“Oh, Nathan, don’t be an idiot!” snapped Astrid.
Nathan leapt off the bed and stood in the middle of the room.
“I ain’t being an idiot,” he proclaimed. “I think we should break out and save the world, just like we used to. Remember you and me against Burrumering? And, of course, kickin’ arse against the L.X.E. and Tao and Shu, and all that? Let’s go!”
Astrid rose to still him. She tried to hold him down by the shoulders and chided him. But he was too strong for her, thanks to the Black Kakugane and his own cabin fever.
“Come on, Astrid!” he yelled. “It’s you and me! Starlight Lancer and Spartan Valkyrie! Let’s be badass!”
The room’s intercom whined, and a voice trickled through it.
“Ahem, I’m afraid you won’t be able to bust out of here, Mister Grant,” said the supervisor. “You don’t seem to realise that I can hear everything you say.”
Nathan nodded facetiously and chimed, “Well then, since I’m busted, I might as well break out anyway.”
“Nathan, don’t do it!” exclaimed Astrid. “I am begging you, don’t do it!”
“Too late!” screamed Nathan as he launched himself at the one-way mirror. The glass caved inward, as if it were water and Nathan were an Olympic swimmer. He landed in the control room and was greeted by half a dozen flabbergasted faces. He upended a table on three of them, smacked two of them unconscious, and hurled another across the room. Then, he saw the guards at the entrance to the lab. The two men placed their hands to the Kakugane strapped to their chests and bellowed, “Arms Alchemy!” The guard to the left materialised a pair of jutte7, while the other summoned a halberd.