Questions and Answers

Mercury had learned a lot about magic during her time with Silver Wolf. It was one of the reasons she had elected to join the guild in the first place, given their reputation and interest in researching culture and artifacts of all natures. Since she wasn’t from Earthland, being a member of the studious guild had increased her knowledge of the planet tenfold -- which was exactly what she’d needed. A lot of other guilds were certainly worthwhile and probably could have greatly helped her, but none were as well equipped to do so as Silver Wolf, and so efficiently. Mercury was constantly being exposed to all sorts of new items, weapons, languages, technology… she had plenty to keep her busy, which was just how she liked living her life.

Currently, it was about mid afternoon. She had already made her mandatory morning trek down into Magnolia to get in her training session with Vandrad, as well as the piano lessons that usually followed. Mercury had proven herself a quick study on the instrument. While she certainly was no professional just yet, it hadn’t taken her long to pick up the pattern of the keys and their different tones, translating them to which marks they represented on the sheet music that Vandrad would have her try to read. And really, learning to read the sheet music was the hardest part, but even that was fairly mathematical in its approach and easy for her to pick up. Despite it being an art, there was a clear science and structure to it that she could follow that made it easy to understand.

Granted, putting that understanding into practicality was something entirely different. It was one thing to know and another to do. Mercury had certainly struggled a fair bit at the beginning, the frustrations having shown on her face and in her words and the way she would lightly growl or  hold herself in an irritated posture. Vandrad would probably have observed that she was the type of woman who was used to being able to pick up new knowledge and skills and run with them, and not being able to do so with piano was annoying to her. But at the same time, she never complained about it. Every time it looked like she would implode from getting a section of a song wrong too many times or continuing to misread the notes and their directions, she would instead take a deep breath and dive back in, undaunted and determined in her drive to learn. True to her word, she wanted to be able to play and wasn’t afraid to have to earn the talent, even if it was hard sometimes.

But after the first few weeks, it had started to become easier. From there, she had started picking things up more and more quickly, seeming to master new tricks and learning more songs at a rather impressive rate for someone who had never played an instrument in her whole life. Oftentimes he would bring her a new song to try and she would have it all but mastered before the end of the week was up. And the more she learned, the happier she was about playing. Not that she ever said so out loud, but by the time they finished her lessons for the day Mercury was always disappointed about having to stop. Though in general it seemed she just enjoyed learning in any capacity, given that it hadn’t taken her long to offer to help with making breakfast on the days that he had agreed to do so per their arrangement, so she could learn a bit more about cooking too.

Truth be told, Mercury was simply a lot happier lately in general. She’d come to a place of understanding with herself, particularly in terms of how much she truly enjoyed Vandrad’s company and having him around. Even getting up in the mornings wasn’t so much of a chore anymore, and she often showed up to Magnolia a bit more chipper and awake than she once used to. A part of it was surely because she had adjusted and gotten used to an early morning schedule, but she couldn’t deny that a lot of the reason was just because she looked forward to every morning of being able to see him and spend the first few hours of her day with him. If anything, the chore for her now was having to leave Magnolia most days to head back up into the mountains to do her guild work.

Which, coincidentally, was what she was working on now. The last couple weeks, Mercury had been studying an odd artifact that one of the Hunters had brought back from a job. It was a curious item about four or five inches tall, in the shape of a pyramid. It was crafted from iron ore so old that she could feel its age with her magic, and its surface was covered in very digital looking designs that greatly resembled leylines on a computer motherboard or graphics chip. A dark red light glowed from behind a few small clear panels of glass in the center of each surface. The way the grooves lined up on each side led her to believe that the device would come apart and reveal what was inside if opened properly.

The problem, of course, had been in figuring out how to open it. From there, it was also about making sure that opening it would be relatively safe. Essentially, she’d been having to spend the last few weeks trying to determine what the probable result would be upon activating the artifact so that she could do so without destroying the entire guildhall. Mercury had been running tests for weeks between both the equipment owned by the guild for such matters, and the tools she’d created based off of their equipment. By now, she was fairly certain she knew what the item did, but there was only one way to know for sure. And if it did what she suspected, it wasn’t a test she wanted to run on her own.

Normally she would seek help from other members in the Scholar branch, but she felt she was going to need stronger support than that. So rather than reach out to one of the pack mates, she’d instead messaged Vandrad to ask if he had time to meet her up at Silver Wolf. This time, she made sure to clarify the meeting’s purpose, letting him know that she wanted his help with a project she’d been working on for the guild. As before, she waited for him to arrive in her room, knowing the receptionist would page her once he got there.

The Silver Wolf mage that was currently fulfilling the receptionist role in the front entrance of the guild smiled up at Vandrad as he approached, the perfect picture of friendly customer service. Before she could ask what help she could give him, however, he came right out and said that he was looking for someone. The way he worded the request quickly drained the color and smile from her face, though, leaving her sitting in open shock. She looked visibly offended, sitting up straighter in her chair and gaping at his audacity. “I beg your pardon?” she asked.

The woman honestly looked like she wanted to tear the prince’s head off, her mouth opening and closing several times in indignation over how disrespectfully he’d just been toward one of the guild aces. She seared him with a thick glare, but ultimately seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the hassle. Mercury hadn’t been with Silver Wolf for a terribly long time, but she already had a reputation as a playful and witty Beta that enjoyed getting into a bit of trouble. Without taking her narrowed eyes off of Vandrad, the receptionist hit the button to page the intercom in Mercury’s room. “Miss Arseneault? Some midget with an overinflated sense of ego is asking for you. Shall I feed him to the wolves?”

Mercury blinked and physically turned to look at the intercom panel on the wall of her bedroom, fully paused in the middle of a few last minute tests she had been running. “What?” she asked, flabbergasted with amusement. “No, it’s fine. Just tell him to stop being a pain in the ass. I’ll be down in just a minute.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the woman said, still glaring daggers at Vandrad as she released the button that kept the call live. “Oh, well. Maybe next time.” It was hard to tell if she was joking or not in her disappointment in not getting to let the wolves tear Vandrad to shreds, but either way it seemed Mercury had been summoned to collect him. Shooting him one last dark look, she waved him toward the numerous couches that were spread throughout the foyer before turning her nose up at him and returning to her work.

A couple quick minutes later, Mercury emerged from the door that led to the members’ living quarters. She was dressed in a grey jumpsuit with red stripes around the arms and a red belt around her waist. The sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and there were a set of brown leather gloves on her hands as well as a similar pair of boots on her feet. Strapped to her hips and thigh, as always, were her many pouches that people thought held all her tools and gadgets, though Vandrad knew the truth that they were little more than foils to mask her use of magic. Her short lavender hair was pushed back from her face by a pair of tinted engineer goggles that rested on top of her head.

Smirking her amusement and confusion, her green eyes glanced briefly to the woman at the desk as she approached the prince before flicking over to him. “Are you harassing my pack mates?” Mercury asked, clearly not mad though exceptionally curious. “You’re supposed to save that kind of treatment for me. I can take it.”

Her gaze fell to his outfit. It looked like his armor, but sleeker and different in color, like it had been upgraded. “Hey, this is nice,” she said, not bothering to ask before she started physically inspecting the chestplate with her fingers and turning him around to get a look at it from all sides. Lifting one of his hands up, she looked over the glove and the material of the jumpsuit on his arm with a keen eye. For the most part, the technology on this planet didn’t altogether impress her very much, but compared to the standards of their modern world the outfit was definitely above average. “Where’d you find this? Doctor Wanna-Be Girlfriend try to butter you up with some better gear?”

While she would otherwise be fighting back the stupid butterflies in her stomach she often got from being near him or touching him, those emotions were left to simmer in the background of her mind as she was fully interested in appreciating the new attire. It was definitely sturdier than his last set. “Let’s go before Lyvia decides to sick the dogs on you anyway.” Mercury tilted her head with a smirk for him to follow her, leading him back toward the door she’d come from and shooting a toothy grin at the receptionist who rolled her eyes.

Behind the door was a long hallway with a row of doors on either side at regular intervals that he could reasonably assume were rooms for the members that lived at the guild. Rather than walk down however, she immediately lead up him a staircase to the left, following it up two flights to the top floor. Here, the hallway was much smaller than on the bottom floors with only a small handful of doors. The one furthest down and to the left was the one she entered, the knob reading her biometric signature as she grasped it and unlocking to let her inside.

Her room was almost as small as she had always joked to him, at least in comparison to his own living arrangements in Bellum. As an ace she had been afforded a slightly larger room than the other members, and in a more desirable location on the top floor, but it was still little more than a studio space. She didn’t even have her own bathroom. What it lacked in size, however, it made up for in aesthetic. The room shared the rustic look of the rest of the guildhall, with nearly all the furniture being crafted from well made wooden beams and panels. A full sized bed was tucked into a raised alcove in the wall, with storage space around it that was filled with books and random gadgets. There was a window near the bed that looked out into the ever present snow of the Phoenix Mountains, and the ceiling sloped up to a height of about twelve feet at its tallest point.

Mercury clearly was not the cleanest person around, though not really in a way that was unhygienic. If anything, it was just evidence of a woman that was often so busy diving head first into her work that she left little to no time or energy toward keeping everything tidy and organized. Her desk was littered with books and tools, open notepads and an assortment of random parts from different tech she’d been working on. Mounted to the wall above it was the most eye-catching statement in the room: Four large monitors set together in a larger square, each with different screens and browsers open on them. A quick glance at her trash can would betray that the last couple meals she’d eaten in here had been cheap, microwavable dishes in throw away containers.

On the opposite wall from her bed, an electric keyboard was set up. The instrument looked as though it had been crafted through her electronic magic, though it wasn’t entirely black like her gadgets usually were. The keys, most notably, were white like a traditional piano. Still, it was more than enough evidence that she’d been practicing outside of their sessions, taking time on her own to work on the things he’d been teaching her at home where she could struggle through it in private and make more progress than she otherwise would have. The keyboard was littered with a bunch of sheet music that he’d given her, as well as some that looked like she had printed the pages off blank and had been writing in her own notes.

On the floor of the room was the fist sized pyramid artifact she’d been fussing with. It was set on a digital pedal of sorts, hooked up to several wires that fed information to a few tablets and other devices that loosely littered the floor around it. There was enough room to walk without having to be meticulous about where to step, but clearly her desk hadn’t been big enough to give her the space she needed to work with the thing. Bending over, she picked the pyramid up and tossed it to him. “Ever seen anything like this before?”

Mercury snorted when he referred to Lyvia as a stick in the mud. “Rest assured, that title is definitely still yours and only yours. She’s usually quite friendly and playful, so I can only imagine what you might have said to tick her off that fast. I should chastise you, but it’s kind of impressive so I’ll let it slide.” She smirked up at him.

His armor caught her interest and she wasted no time in invading his personal space to get a better look at it. He rejected her guess that Patricia had provided the goods as some kind of attempt to win him over, stating that given how impressed the doctor had been at the previous design that she could hardly have been the one to upgrade it to a level beyond that which she had already been unable to understand. In fact, Vandrad claimed that he himself had been the one to craft the outfit. “Like hell it is,” she teased, though there wasn’t any true disbelief behind her words. In fact, her tone was clearly more impressed than anything else. She was fairly certain that if he had any schooling in technology or engineering that she’d have heard about it by this point, and given how awkward he’d been at the start with the phone she’d given him there was no evidence to back up such a history. But, as he went on to explain, he’d apparently taken up a recent interest in certain aspects of engineering and had taken it upon himself to further his education on the matter.

There was no hiding his pride over his work, and Mercury couldn’t blame him for it. He looked quite smug. She smirked up at him, shaking her head a little. “Well haven’t you been a busy little bee then? You’re gonna have to show me what else you’ve been working on. We’ll see what kind of level you’re operating at and where you can go from there. Impress me enough and maybe I’ll give you some homework and let you play with the big boys.” Mercury winked at him.

The invitation was given to follow her, preferably before Lyvia decided to make mince meat out of him. The prince dryly stated how scary the prospect was. Mercury gave him a look, equal parts scolding and amusement, before leading him off. Before they even made it into the next room, he asked if Lyvia often made it a habit to let the wolves do the dirty work for her own problems, voicing the question loud enough that the other woman would hear it. Mercury smacked him on the chest with the back of her hand. “Oh, stop,” she told him through a chuckle. “I’m the one who’s supposed to get you in trouble, not the other way around.”

A quick trip up the stairs and they were in her room. She rarely, if ever, had guests inside the living space. The only other people that had been in it before were other members of the guild, and even then only briefly. Mostly that was just because she was a private person. She didn’t seem embarrassed over the moderate disarray that was her room, mostly because Mercury viewed it as an organized chaos and a sign that she was getting work done, so she hadn’t really felt the need to tidy things up perfectly just because Vandrad was coming over -- though she’d at least thrown all her trash away.

As she started focusing once more on the artifact, he glanced around and ultimately commented on the keyboard in the corner. Truthfully, Mercury had forgotten the instrument was there. Emerald eyes blinked up at him where he stood at the device and gently hit one of the keys, and as she noticed that she’d left out the sheet music -- specifically, the ones she’d been working on -- a bit of color drained from her face. She maintained her otherwise perfect facade, smirking up at him in amusement but her emotions were instantly awash in a mild panic. “Yep, you caught me,” the Xocili told him with a slightly nervous chuckle.

As casually as she possibly could, she scooped up the papers and stacked them together, slipping them into a drawer out of sight. The act was performed with the air of someone realizing their home perhaps wasn’t as tidy as it should have been for company, but her emotions were blatantly betraying her. Whatever song she’d been working on, clearly she was embarrassed that Vandrad would see it. It was already bad enough that the words she had been pairing with the accompaniment were written in her native language, whose script was quite unlike that of the tongues more common to this region of Earthland. Hopefully she’d tucked the papers away before he could notice that, but she couldn’t be confident of that.

Easier to just change the subject quickly.

She tossed him the device and he looked it over. Reaching up, Vandrad turned on a gadget around his ear that popped a small holographic screen in front of one of his eyes, examining the artifact through the device. He’d never seen anything like it before. The readings from his scanner came back with no data on its structural makeup, marking it as having a low level of magic. Mercury nodded when he asked if this was what she wanted his help with. “Take a look at this.”

Gesturing for him to hand the thing back to her, she knelt down to the ground and put it back on the pedestal. She pointed to one of the tablets resting on the ground that was hooked up to the pedestal, indicating that he should look at it. The screen showed a number of different tables and graphs feeding in real time, showing waves of energy that was being read from the artifact and listing off countless continuing numbers that had no immediately obvious means of interpretation. “So, I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to figure out what this thing is and what it does. It’s old, whatever it is, but it’s also powerful. Something that’s been lost for generations, so archaic that even Silver Wolf’s vast array of tools wasn’t able to read it properly. I had to make my own tech to start cracking it down.”

Now that they were on the subject at hand, her prior embarrassment was gone and she was in full fledged Engineer mode. While Vandrad had gotten plenty of exposure to her when she was in a learning environment, it was nothing in comparison to the excitement in her eyes and the eagerness in her tone as she focused on the piece of tech in front of her. Mercury wasn’t just good with electronics and technology, she was clearly fascinated with them like a child in giddy anticipation over going to a theme park. She was bright, a small but enthusiastic smile on her face as she leaned over and pointed at various parts on the screen for him.

“Note the wavelengths here from the magical emissions. Low speed, moderate height… plenty of space between the waves. The quantum output,” she pointed to one of the many windows spitting out numbers at a high velocity, “Evens out at about one quindecillion lacrihertz per each millionth of a second, but in a consistent pattern of thaumaturgical script that resets every half a second.” Mercury was already so ingrained back into her task that she didn’t even stop to ask if any of what she’d just said made any sense to him. The theory of what she was getting into was certainly based in engineering, but it was largely more focused on coding and statistical analysis than anything else.

Moving on, she temporarily removed the pyramid from the pedestal and replaced it with a random magical device in the room, which appeared to be an enchanted glove of some kind. Immediately, the wavelengths on the screen increased in speed with the space between the waves coming closer together, though their height remained relatively the same. The numbers spitting out on the other window changed as well, though at the speed they were running he probably wouldn’t be able to notice that as clearly. “I started comparing the readings to other items to see if I could find anything giving a similar output.” Tossing the glove to the side, she set her weapon down on the pedestal. This time, the waves went much higher and moved at an irregular pace.

She swapped the items on the pedestal out a couple more times before finally picking up a rod of some kind. “Nothing really seemed to match until I tried this.” Setting it down, the waves and numerical output returned to something very close to the same rhythm, pace, and spacing as the pyramid. She pointed at the device. “That rod allows the user to essentially teleport themselves within a limited distance from one location to another. The wave pattern is nearly identical, but the script takes longer to reset itself; once every three seconds. So, my theory is that whatever this thing is,” she picked the pyramid back up. “It’s also meant to allow a user to travel, but at a much further distance… potentially even to one singular, pre-ascribed location rather than any location the user whims.”

Holding the artifact up between them under a stand with a magnifying glass that sat on the ground nearby, Mercury conjured a thin ingot of black steel with a finely pointed tip. She used it to point out various parts of the pyramid as she said, “It’s hard to tell because of the expert craftsmanship, but if you look closely you can see thin grooves along the edges and some of the faces that makes me think this device actually opens up. And the designs on the surface? I don’t think they’re for aesthetics. If you look at the way they’re laid out and where all the lines run to, they look like traces. Like they’re meant to conduct energy from one spot to another.”

“This is where you come in and where I may need your help. I’m fairly certain I can get this thing open with the right dose of electricity, but I don’t know what will happen when I do. if my theory on what it does is correct, best case scenario is that it opens a portal of some kind that I could step through to whatever lies on the other side. But there’s also the possibility, much like your venture with Doctor Thirsty, that it could instantly toss me into an unknown location before I can stop it. Since I don’t know what lies on the other side, it seems ill advised to make the risk on my own. So naturally, I figured it best to risk your neck along with mine, cause if I’m gonna get stuck somewhere I’m gonna make sure you’re stuck there with me.”

She shot him a cheeky grin. “What do you think? Sound like enough of an adventure for you, your highness?”

Vandrad seemed to be keeping up with her. Or at the very least, if any of what she was saying didn’t make sense to him, he was electing not to voice it. She certainly didn’t pick up if he was confused or not, mostly because she was too focused once she got into the swing of it to stop and think about whether or not she was speaking in too advanced a language, carried away by her passion and interest in the field. It happened a lot, particularly when doing work like this here at the guild. Her members had to interrupt her all the time to remind her to talk in more plain, summaric terms.

But he did no such thing, so Mercury continued on, treating him like an equal in the field until he might give her some kind of reason to believe otherwise. Most of this was fairly basic, anyhow, so if he really had been teaching himself then he should have been able to grasp at least most of what she was saying to some level. The prince was silent through most of her explanations, following her guidance without interruption and only one vocalization to agree with her assessment that there was more to the designs on the exterior of the device than simply wanting to make it look pretty.

Once she’d given him the basic rundown of everything she’d been doing and where she was leading with the research, Mercury explained why she’d wanted him there. There was a wide, shit eating grin on her face as he processed the fact that he was basically just there so she wouldn’t be alone in whatever fate awaited her at the end of this project, speaking up to clarify it in such terms that pointed out the fact that she was basically just risking his life with her own at this point, for the sake of science. “Yep, that about sums it up,” Mercury told him cheerily.

He knew she was once again at the task of basically being a pain in his ass, just as she knew that he would let it happen, if only because Vandrad wouldn’t turn down the challenge of facing something so unknown and mysterious as this. The prince sighed dramatically, agreeing to help out but with the stipulation that she owed him for it, and whatever he decided to collect it was going to be a chore for her. “Oh please, don’t act like you’re not excited. This is right up your alley.” Mercury didn’t outright agree to the term, but she also didn’t tell him no, so he could assume she had no issue with his demand. If anything, she was curious to see what he would come up with. Mercury quite enjoyed when he stepped up to her level in their banter and teasing. Or well, when he stepped down to her level.

“Right now I just need you to stand there and look pretty,” she told him and she got back up to her feet. “What I may or may not need from you after I open this up, assuming we’re both still alive… well, we’ll get to that when we get to it.” In typical Mercury fashion, she was exceptionally nonchalant over the dangerous risk she was about to take, more than ready to slap the big red button, no matter the consequences, just to sate her scientific curiosity. Wandering to her desk, she quickly strapped on the holster for Mercy before picking the weapon up and securing it. If there was a chance she was about to be instantly dumped into another pocket dimension of some kind or something, she wanted to at least make sure she was armed.

With the wave of her hand, a blue holographic force field of some kind shimmered into existence along all the walls, floor, and ceiling, connecting together by small electronic devices in each corner of the room. The field was crafted from energy not yet discovered on Earthland, an advanced plasma of some kind that his scouting radar probably wouldn’t know what quite to do with. Giving him a wink and another grin, she lowered the goggles back down over her eyes and took a stance a couple feet in front of the thing. “Here we go!” she said, removing her gloves and tucking them into her belt.

Cracking her knuckles for a moment, Mercury held up her hands in front of her, fingers pointed down at the pyramid. Black lightning shot from her fingertips and latched onto the metallic device in a steady stream. The readings on the tablet it was fixed to fluctuated, showing that the energy was having an effect of some kind, but not enough to result in what she wanted. Maybe she needed more? Mercury flexed her fingers and increased the input of lightning, the bolts becoming thicker and more powerful. Once more the radars fluctuated, but with no result.

She stopped for a moment with a thoughtful hum, rubbing her chin with her hand. “Hm. It’s clearly responding to the energy,” the woman said, more to herself than to Vandrad. Her computerized brain was running figures and looking for solutions in her head at light speed, searching for an alternative approach. “The input level is ideal, more power doesn’t seem to be the key. It’s absorbing the energy in the resistors but not channeling it through the traces. It’s not recognizing the energy. I wonder if I….”

Before she could even finish her sentence, Mercury rose her hands once more and shot out renewed bursts of lightning. This time, its color was more of a golden yellow like natural lightning, not the black that was typically indicative of her god slaying magic. The readings on the scanners jumped up noticeably higher, hovering at a rate that didn’t quite seem to be what it wanted, but was also clearly more responsive than the black lightning had been. She grinned to herself. “Oh, so that’s what you want.” Flexing her fingers one more time, the color of the lightning once again shifted, this time into a pristine, almost blinding white.

The traces on the surface of the pyramid began to glow as they filled with the energy from the holy lightning, and once it had received ample enough power the surfaces clicked apart from one another and the pyramid shot open. Mercury stopped her flow of lightning, watching as the plates of metal separated from each other and stretched out to form a large triangle that spanned about six feet wide and ten feet tall. The remnant of her white lightning zapped in a continuous line, connecting the pieces together through the air. Within the triangular space was a portal. What lay beyond was hazy and unidentifiable from this side of the barrier, but it gave off a strong wave of unimaginable heat and smelled strongly of brimstone.

Mercury lifted the goggles back up to the top of her head, examining the fruits of her labor. A satisfied smirk tugged on her lips. “I love it when I’m right,” she said. Giving him another grin, Mercury asked him, “Ready to see what’s on the other end of the wormhole?”

Mercury hadn’t really gotten the chance to tell Vandrad about the evolution of her slayer magic yet, mostly because the two of them really didn’t utilize their magic much while they were training. Even in most jobs, Mercury rarely called upon her ability to summon particular elements in such an overt fashion, typically preferring to use her abilities in more subtle ways. Even after running down the various types of electric energy available to her, she was far too focused and excited about being rewarded with success to stop and realize that he’d only just now be learning that her abilities had expanded. And since he didn’t ask about it, she didn’t stop to tell.

His odd tone did catch her attention, however. She had been far too distracted to notice the building anger and the way he grimaced at being near her newly discovered holy magic, and of course he’d gotten his face under control by the time she was done, but the lackluster way in which he answered her question didn’t go unnoticed by the Xocili. Lavender brows furrowed softly in confusion, but before she could ask him about it the prince was leading the way through the portal and to whatever fiery hellscape rested beyond.

Hellscape was an apt word. The heat in the area was immense from the fire and molten lava that pooled and flowed about the place, and the air was thick and dry with a sky full of smoke. Across the way appeared to be a building of sorts, structured out of the natural rock and metal ore of the terrain. There were great towers piercing toward the smoggy clouds, a statue of a figure with an upraised palm and lava flowing through its fingertips, and a bridge leading toward a cavernous doorway. Vandrad quipped about his foreknowledge that it was only a matter of time before Mercury had sent him to a place like this, earning a slight grin from the woman. She wasn’t all too nervous about the setting herself, of course, simply curious as to where they were and why it existed.

At the same time he started speaking commands into his scouter to determine a location, her own radars were already collecting information that ultimately drew them both to the same conclusion: This place, whatever it was, resided inside the crust of Earthland itself. “Interesting,” Mercury said, her curiosity off the charts. “I didn’t think anything could even exist this far below the surface.” Her gaze followed where he pointed out in the distance beyond the statue, where figures seemed to move and mill about the place. Before she could look too closely, however, her radars started screaming the approach of a large creature from beneath them.

Mercury whipped Mercy into her hand reflexively, but before she could do anything about it Vandrad was already assuming his empowerment form and launching himself into battle, complete with curious devices over his hands and feet very akin in nature to an energetic force field. With one hit, he smacked the creature back down to the depths below their current platform. Well, that had been easy. As Vandrad wandered over to the edge to see where it had fallen, the Silver Wolf mage used her magic to conjure a couple dozen of her drones before waving them off. The small orbs immediately split into groups, many of them soaring up through the smoke to inspect what might be beyond it, others racing ahead to inspect the curious keep before them, and more racing down below their platform to see what was below.

The prince’s words caught her interest, causing her to wander over to the edge with him. “Oh hey, look at that,” she said with a grin as her gaze fell upon quite a few more fiery looking beasts, similar in design to the one he’d just knocked away, climbing up toward them. “They have a welcoming committee just for us. How thoughtful.” There was a brief pause as she considered the curious creatures, wondering what they were and what kind of powers they controlled. Despite their demonic look, they didn’t seem to have an aura of unholy magic about them. If anything, they just seemed to be made of a mixture of fire and stone, much like the rest of the landscape.

“I’m gonna catch one,” she decided candidly. With that, Mercury summoned a few more drones and directed them to form a loose circle around one of the creatures, who barely registered the tiny devices as anything more than gnats that weren’t worth the effort of swiping at. At her wireless direction, the drones activated themselves, forming a blue field of energy between them to create a net of energy that contained the beast and scooped it up into the air. It roared its fury, completely unprepared to be lifted off its feet and left dangling in the sky, twisting and turning as it tried to break through the little devices to no avail. “Down, boy.” With another unseen command, the drones unleashed a wave of natural, golden lightning around the beast, shocking it over and over again until it fell unconscious, still alive but too weak to fight.

Between her and Vandrad, the remaining creatures wouldn’t be too difficult to fight off. They were large and looked as though they could certainly pack quite the wallop, but they were quite cumbersome and unable to move very quickly in comparison to the two smaller mortals. Mercury picked off several with a few well aimed shots of her gun, though each of the creatures were at least strong enough that they took several blasts each to knock down. A couple of them managed to make it up to the platform where they were, but they didn’t last too long. Before long, the only one remaining was the one she had netted.

Setting her drones to scan the creature, Mercury turned toward Vandrad with a smirk. “Alright, let me see,” she said, gesturing for him to hold out one of his gloved hands so she could inspect the shielding that coated the limbs. Holding the hand up with one of her own, Mercury scanned the device with her eyes, utilizing her internal sensors to gather the device’s reading and outputs. “Well, I won’t lie to you, daddy. I’m pretty impressed. These aren’t half bad for someone who didn’t spend the last several decades mastering the field. How long have you been hiding all this from me, huh?”

She shot a teasing look up at him with her emerald gaze, still inspecting the gloved hand. “You know, this kind of shit is like the one thing I’m decent at outside of killing people. If you had wanted to learn more about it, you could have asked. I’ve never tried teaching anyone anything before, but I’d have been willing to give it a shot for you.” In fact, she’d probably shock him with the advanced technological knowledge she had at her fingertips, though a lot of it she couldn’t exactly lend him without having to come up with some kind of reason or excuse as to why she knew so much beyond the limits of Earthland’s available education on such things. For his sake, she would have at least tried to pass on what she safely could. Hell, she’d already been working on a weapon for him similar to her own, though she had no earthly idea how she was going to explain it once it was finished and she could give it to him…

A notification sounded in her head, letting her know that the drones had completed their analysis of the creature. Letting him go with a slightly reluctant pang that didn’t register on her face, Mercury shook her head with amusement and wandered over to her captive, conjuring a tablet to see the readings. “Now that’s neat. Take a look at this.” Presuming he joined her, she’d show him the screen which had mapped out a diagram of the beast’s body and structural make up. “It’s basically some kind of molten fire creature with stone armor. Dense stone armor. We could pound those things all day long and barely make a dent in it. I’m not really reading any real life signatures from it. It’s animated but not intelligent, like a golem.”

Scrolling through the data, she frowned with interest at something else. “There’s something powering it in its center, though. See how intense the energy readings are at its core? I wonder if I could--” Stopping midword as her internal radars picked up an alarm, Mercury turned and looked back at the supposed corpses of the ones they had already destroyed. They weren’t moving, but her scanners were picking up increased energy from them. “Are those things coming back to life?” Her answer came in the form of the creatures beginning to stir and drag their way back to their feet, fixing their fiery eye pits on the pair with renewed intent of violence.

Mercury grinned at him as he commented that if she wanted to catch one of the golems, taking care of it would be her responsibility and he wasn’t going to help with it. “Thanks, dad,” she quipped back before capturing the thing. The two of them blasted through the remaining group with ease and as she set to scanning the thing, Mercury took the time to look over Vandrad’s new tech. He offered his hand without argument, smirking in pleasure at her praise over the items. Vandrad explained that he hadn’t really been working on the devices for too long, having only just started reading and researching into the subject a couple weeks after they’d returned from Bellum, and only getting in some practical application a number of weeks following said research. Apparently, his intent had been to surprise her with his progress in the field.

It was a smug comment, but not one lacking in its sincerity. Oddly, it sent a feeling of warmth through her to know that he’d taken actions with the specific desire to give her a pleasant surprise. Mercury held his hand a little bit longer than she probably needed to, continuing to look the device over and smirk up at him as he explained that, while he’d certainly come quite a good way on his own, there was clearly much more he could stand to learn. He understood that he had only dabbled with the tip of the iceberg, so some lessons from her would surely send him down a much more enlightened path… Presuming that she was willing to spend even more time with him in Magnolia than she already did between training and piano lessons.

Green orbs eyed him playfully, as though she were considering turning that statement around into some kind of implication that he was just trying to keep her around more often. Instead, after a moment of thought she told him, “How about this. During the week we continue our schedule as normal, but on the weekends you come up to Silver Wolf and we spend a longer portion of the day going over tech work. A couple hours really isn’t always enough time to get any decent work done in a field this delicate, and frankly Silver Wolf’s facilities are probably better geared toward it than Fairy Tail’s since this is literally what we do for a living. Normally only guild members are allowed in our labs, but since Fairy Tail is an ally I think I can work out a special pass for you… and then you can use all the special, flashy equipment.”

Mercury grinned up at him, her eyes dancing behind her impish expression as she waited for him to agree to or deny her suggestion, though truthfully she couldn’t think of a reason for him to say no. Besides, she came all the way down to Magnolia almost every day of the week to work with him -- surely he could spare the remaining two days to come up to the Phoenix Mountains instead. “What do you think, killer? Think you can spare the tolerance to put up with me on a full daily basis?”

Not long after that, her scanners finished their report and the two of them looked over its readings. She probably should have noticed the revival of the creature sooner than she did, but admittedly she’d gotten a little distracted from him standing so close to her. Even in this inferno, Mercury could still feel the heat of his body near her, her nose picking up his unique scent even through the overwhelming smell of brimstone. They both turned to see the golems surging back to life, with Vandrad commenting on the creatures being tougher than they’d originally believed. Unsurprisingly, all that did was excite him. He coated his hand in some of his energy and shot it in a single beam, piercing one of the creatures right through the core that Mercury had been in the middle of pointing out. The golem truly died at that point the flames that made its center extinguishing completely and leaving its stone shell void of animation.

“Looks like it,” she said with a slight smirk, waving her tech away and rearming herself with Mercy once more. They went through the creatures again, this time taking special care to do more than simply render them unconscious, aiming toward their fiery cores and obliterating them from the inside. In truth, the second round of combat with them didn’t take that much more time or effort than the first round, except this time they were more certain that the end result was the creatures actually being dead. Or well, as dead as a golem could get when it was never really alive in the first place.

As they got ready to move on, Mercury pulled her tablet back and picked up the readings that her initial drones were giving back to her. By now, they had formed a near complete digitized blueprint of the greater shape of the cavern they were in, and were starting to map out the man made structure before them on the other side of the bridge. The readings included shapes of the various rooms within what was quickly appearing to be some kind of keep, as well as the locations of other pinpoints of intense heat that they could likely be sure were more golem creatures. “Looks like we have some more fun ahead,” she told him with a smirk.

She was about to ask him where he wanted to go once they got through the entryway into the makeshift building when something else caught her interest. Toward the far end of the keep, her drones were picking up a much larger heat signature that was running numbers more intense than the temperatures of the golems littered throughout the place. “Ooooh,” Mercury cooed with interest. “Hey, I’ll bet that’s where we’ll find whatever is in charge of this place. Or maybe whatever it is these things are all guarding and protecting. Could be whatever fuels them with life, or maybe they’re trying to keep something in.” That would be exciting, if this artifact had been meant to be the only means of transportation into a place where something dark and dangerous was being held prisoner -- just the kind of adventure that the two of them would be interested in.

They reached the opening in the wall after only a short walk across the bridge, the stony wall reaching so far above their heads that it hurt her neck to look up at. Without wasting any time in wonder, they passed into the rough tunnel that led beyond, following it for several dozen feet until it opened up into a large entry foyer of some kind. There was only one door ahead, but it was flanked on either side by two stone statues that were skeletal in structure, their shape akin to demonic and dire looking bones. Mercury was about to make a joking bet about the chances of the statues coming to life and attacking them when sure enough a fiery core burst into existence in both of them, fire consuming their bodies as their inflamed eyes turned to stare at the intruders.

“Uh oh, I think we made them mad.” Aiming Mercy’s sights on the core, she didn’t get the chance to fire before she realized something was vastly different about these golems than the last ones. The heat in the already burning room picked up intensely, and so did the light coming from one of the golem’s bodies. Mercury’s eyes widened a hair in surprise before her instincts sensed the danger and kicked her into overdrive. She threw herself out of the way just in time as the golem unleashed a powerful beam of fire from its belly, scorching the wall behind where she’d just been standing. While she was fairly certain she would have survived the attack, it surely wouldn’t have felt good. “At least take me to dinner first,” she told the thing as she straightened herself and squared up to it, getting ready for what was sure to be a bit more of a fight than the last golems.

“Okay, well sometimes a lady likes to be wooed a little before letting a guy nut on them,” Mercury quipped back, smirking despite the rather serious circumstances. These giant creatures were not going to be easy to take down, even knowing their weakness. The core readings she was getting from them were much larger than the previous golems, understandably, and it was going to take a lot more power to fry them. The thing was emitting a heat so intense Mercury was honestly shocked her clothing hadn’t caught fire yet.

While Vandrad took to the air to fight the golem that had gone after him, Mercury kept to the ground for now. The last thing they needed was for either of them to accidentally get caught in a blast or attack from the other’s fight by accident, so she thought it best to stay low while he worked the high ground. Mercury started blasting at the golem’s core with Mercy. She knew the weapon’s base attacks wouldn’t be enough to defeat him, but it would help her get an idea of how much energy she would need to do so. As the plasma slammed into the creature’s body and was absorbed, Mercury read the minor fluctuations in the golem’s power readings to gauge how the core reacted.

As her computerized brain quickly did the math on how much more of a power output she would need to destroy it, the golem lifted an arm toward her as more than enough of a show that it was about to send another attack her way. Mercury started sprinting across the vast room at a breakneck pace as soon as the flames jettisoned out of the golem’s raised palm and spewed along the ground behind her. When she ran out of space to run forward, she used her cleat spell to run up the side of the nearest wall and kick herself over the top of the fiery beam, just narrowly arching her back over it and flipping in the air to fall on the other side. Hover discs from her magic preceded her descent, giving her temporary stepping stones for her to slow her fall and land gracefully on her feet back on the hot ground.

With a flick of her wrist, she growled and summoned a massive golem of her own. A runic circle opened up in the air far above her head and a cybernetic kaiju as tall as her target dropped from it. It was robotic in nature, covered from head to toe in plates of dark metal like armor, with veins of purple light surging along its limbs to its eyes, and coalescing into a bright violet core at the center of its chest. The room shook as it slammed onto the ground feet first in a slight crouch before straightening up and staring the golem down.

Mercury shoved Mercy back in its holster and took a fighting stance, the robot kaiju mimicking her movements. The golem had only a moment to recover from its previous blast attack and process the presence of a new enemy the same size as itself before the kaiju was upon it, body slamming the infernoed creature and wrestling with it for dominance. The metal of her drone’s body began to turn red hot from the direct exposure to the golem’s molten form, but somehow it managed not to warp or melt. Mercury was vaguely aware of Vandrad’s own struggle against the other golem, her heart racing as it shot a beam of searing hot fire and lava directly at him and up toward the ceiling. But, as during the last time she’d pulled out a drone of this scale during their fight with the sea serpent, Mercury couldn’t afford to take her eyes off her own battle for even a second, particularly as the kaiju was being controlled by her own movements -- though she was at least idly aware of the color change in the atmosphere as the flames of Vandrad’s golem began to change into a darker hue.

Gritting her teeth, she dug her heels into the ground as the golem fought back, trying to free its arms from her. Digging deep into her martial training, she struggled with the creature until she was able to find enough leverage to trip the thing onto the ground on its back. Without giving it enough time to get its bearings and recover, Mercury lifted a foot. The kaiju followed suit, stomping down on the creature’s sternum hard. The bone line stones that covered its body easily broke under the weight of the robot’s foot until it was able to crush the core, stamping it out of existence in a single step.

Once the light was extinguished and she knew the thing was dead, Mercury quickly turned to check on Vandrad, ready to assist with his own fight through the use of her colossal sized drone. Unsurprisingly, he’d already managed to defeat it moments before, the second golem’s lifeless stone corpse crumpled to the ground in a heap. Only then did the Silver Wolf ace finally relax, easing up her stance and releasing her active control over the drone. It stood still in an idle rest, awaiting her next directions, as she wiped a bit of sweat from her brow. “You know,” she told Vandrad, her voice a little tired but otherwise in her normal cheerful spirit. “After this, I think I might just go sleep out in the snow tonight.”

The heat was just awful. At least the wintery mountains around Silver Wolf didn’t leave her feeling sticky and gross. She looked down at herself and grimaced, a face Vandrad would have long since learned to recognize from the female mage, who utterly detested feeling dirty and grimy. The honest truth was that Mercury was quite vain about her hygiene. Already, she was thinking about going back through the portal to her room and taking a shower before continuing on. That would be a fruitless endeavor, however, as she would surely get just as sweaty and nasty upon returning. Her nose wrinkled in irritation as she pulled a clean cloth from her pocket, usually more for grease than sweat, and used it to wipe her face down a little better.

Rather than summon a small swarm of her smaller drones to perform the task, she connected herself once more to the kaiju and guided his arm to stretch toward the fallen stone warriors. A cone shaped laser in a green color shot from its palm and slid along the corpses, scanning them from head to toe and forwarding the readings to Mercury. She couldn’t catch a live one of these, unfortunately. Even if it had been possible to capture it successfully, there was no way it would fit through the portal into her room, or really anywhere inside the guild hall. However, that didn’t mean that she couldn’t learn anything from its remnants that could be used for experiments of a much smaller scale.

As the kaiju did its thing, Mercury couldn’t stop herself from flicking a glance over toward the prince, giving him a quick appraisal. He was up and standing, and didn’t appear to be too terribly wounded, but sometimes there was more than the naked eye could see from the surface. Or well, a human naked eye. Hers was actually quite capable of reading his life signs and body temperatures and stuff to make sure he wasn’t hiding any more serious injuries, whether willingly or not. He and his equipment both seemed fine, though his gear was certainly under a bit of strain from the rather stressful test run he was putting everything through. Her gaze lingered on him a moment or two longer than she’d meant it to before she put her focus back on the kaiju and the scans it was sending her.

“My pups are gonna get quite the kick out of all this data,” she mused out loud, a slight smirk on her face as she took a quick glance through the information on her tablet. “I have a feeling the next time you make the trip up to Silver Wolf, the hall is probably going to be guarded by a bunch of golems of various elements. They can get a little crazy in the development field.” Chuckling, she minimized the screen and brought back the blueprint that her other drones had steadily been building since they got there. Mercury showed it to him. “Looks like they’ve just about mapped out the whole place. There’s a couple different routes to that big heat signature. Which do you want to take?”

Well, he looked… far more pensive than usual.

He had a strange violet fire engulfing his hands still, looking at the limbs like they were some kind of puzzle to be deciphered. Mercury watched curiously as he knelt down to the floor and placed a gloved hand upon the scorching surface. Her brows furrowed softly as she observed. While she couldn’t necessarily sense magic the same way other mages could, she still knew Vandrad well enough at this point to recognize that he was doing something more than just thinking. And sure enough, a moment later the severe heat in the room suddenly began to cool down quite a bit, with the fiery essence that fueled the place settling down into a ember, and then to nothing at all. The temperature had dropped dramatically, and while Mercury was grateful for that she was also confused as to what he’d done.

Was there ethernano in their magic he could connect with? It was the only explanation that made sense to her, but why then did he look so unsure of what was happening? In fact, for once there was no mask at all on his face, his true emotions bold upon his visage. The odd mannerisms had been more than enough to catch and hold her attention past the original length of time she’d planned on actually observing him, and after a moment of self contemplation he looked up and met her eyes with an unease that was not like him at all. And then in a blink, his expression returned to his more normal neutral look.

Before she could get the chance to say anything, he commented on her kaiju and the lengths to which her magic had clearly been growing. Mercury smirked a little wryly, though her concern over his behavior a moment ago hadn’t quite left her eyes. “Yeah, Jadus has been really working me overtime lately. Apparently, my magic has evolved into something that even he isn’t quite sure what it is anymore. So he’s been pushing me like crazy during our sessions trying to stress test the energy, and it’s yielded some… unexpected results.” She realized then that she hadn’t exactly taken the chance to explain those changes to Vandrad. He’d probably been pretty confused by her channeling both mundane and holy electricity earlier, though he hadn’t exactly asked about it. Then again, Vandrad rarely pushed her for information, even if he had taken steps to try and get to know her better ever since Bellum. She nodded to the kaiju. “This guy was more of a split second reactionary creation just now. Honestly I’ve never made anything this big before, but apparently I can do it if I try.”

The prince snorted at her comment about the rest of the Scholars at Silver Wolf taking the data she was collecting and using it to make more golems of their own design and nature. He was right, of course -- one could never have too many preparations and protections in place, though Silver Wolf was hardly ever on anyone’s radar. Out of the three main independent guilds, they were the least scrutinized by the Council and the Rune Knights given that their aims were almost purely academic in nature. And even then, it was impossible for anyone with ill intentions toward the guild to find their location due to the magic that permeated the mountain and their pact with the wolves, which was a closely guarded secret. Honestly, any golems that were made would probably be put more in serving tasks in the restaurant and spas, an image which greatly amused her.

But it was time to move along as neither of them necessarily wanted to stay any longer than they had to in this literal hell hole. She pulled up the layout for him and inquired his opinion. Vandrad studied the map for a moment with a keen eye and suggested an indirect approach to have Mercury send a couple of her droids down the quickest path and drawing attention while they came in from another, less expected angle. “Wow, you’re going with the sneaky route?” she asked him with a mildly teasing smirk. “That’s new. Sounds like fun to me, though. As for a distraction…”

Her expression took on a look that was caught partway between mischievous and musing. Handing him the tablet for a moment, Mercury cracked her knuckles and held up her hands, wiggling her fingers a bit to flex them for some seriously detailed tech work. Two runic circles in a faint yellow light appeared on the ground before her. Over each of them, a pair of feet began to materialize from the soles up to the ankles and then beyond. The end results would be apparent before they were done, as the clothing was a dead giveaway, but it didn’t take away from the impact of the spell’s completion. By the time it was done, there were two cybernetic lookalikes of them standing before them, both carrying themselves with the same smug and playful expressions that she and Vandrad typically carried.

Oddly, they looked rather convincingly made of flesh despite the fact that they were fully synthetic in nature. Mercury had decided to chance using some of the more organic metals of her own body to make the clone droids more convincing, another nature of her magic that she hadn’t mentioned to him yet for obvious reasons, but the intent of his strategy was reasonable enough and if she was going to provide a distraction she wanted it to be a believable one. “How’s that?” she asked him with a devious grin, knowing that the realistic results would probably surprise even him, given how they weren’t as stereotypically cybernetic in appearance. “They’re programmed with enough commands to get into the room and hold a decent, if basic, conversation without needing my direct control. They can even use some minimal powers and abilities, though obviously since I can’t recreate your magic they’re limited to the types of energy I can harness.”

“We’re also anatomically correct,” the Vandrad clone stated in a smug tone that matched Vandrad’s perfectly.

The comment elicited an impish grin from both Mercurys, with the original looking up at the real prince with a look of self satisfaction. “He’s not wrong.” Assuming they were satisfactory, Mercury waved them away and the pair ambled toward the door that lead forward. She took a moment to drape one of her arms on his nearest shoulder, draping herself on him casually like she was wont to do from time to time, and pointing at the Vandrad look alike as it walked away. “And that is what earned you the Vandaddy nickname, by the way,” she told him playfully, pointing at the taught ass of the clone that left very little to the imagination through the spandex like material of the body suit he wore underneath his armor. As if to emphasize her point, she reached out and wiggled her fingers briefly and the last thing they saw before the dopplegangers disappeared through the door was the Mercury clone lightly slapping the Vandrad clone’s ass.

Giggling to herself, she plucked her tablet back and opened it up to the connection from the clones, setting up the screens so they could see what was in their vision and hear the audio of their idle chatter. “Ready when you are, killer.”

As usual, her witticisms drew a reaction out of him as she teased him over electing for an indirect route rather than his typical charging in head first and straight forward approach. He informed her that he still planned on striding right into their destination without necessarily stopping to scope or survey the area first, but his desire here was apparently to test what else the two of them were capable of as a team. While he preferred an honest fight, sometimes subtlety was necessary and it was good to practice that together so they could use such tactics more fluidly in the future. He was right, of course.

But that wasn’t gonna stop her from teasing him when he presented her with easy ammunition.

“Pretty sure we’ve already had a couple trial runs of our ‘flexibility’,” Mercury told him with a deep smirk, quite unable to help herself. Shortly after that she conjured up the two rather impressive lookalikes of themselves to acquiesce to the prince’s suggestion of a distraction. He was so caught by how realistic the droids were that he walked over to the one that was meant to be him to examine it more closely, commenting on how she’d clearly been working on her imitation talents. “Yes and no. I wouldn’t really say I’ve been working on imitations so much as just working on the details and nuances of the cybernetics that I craft. Really, making anything like this is just about having a good blueprint to follow, which is easy enough -- particularly for you, since we work together so much.”

He teased her about not being able to craft his mimic to have his own magic, even going so far as to say that Patricia had the upperhand in that scenario. Mercury snorted. “Please. Unlike certain other scientists, I adhere to the concept of originality. Though if you really want me to make him more true to the real deal, I could probably make it happen with a sample of your DNA.” She shot him a wicked grin, entertaining herself with the thought of following him around for the next couple days trying to get a snippet of his hair or pocketing one of his rags at training or something.

Vandrad 2.0 spoke up at that point about the precise accuracy of its body, and it took the prince a moment to understand what he was getting at, having to look toward both impish Mercurys for it to finally dawn on him. Her grin widened even further as he gave her shit over it, sarcastically congratulating her on her ability to craft a penis though he was clearly entertained by the revelation. Mercury giggled to herself as he shooed the mimics away, and as they made their way out of the room she took the opportunity to admire his own ass with him and enlighten him on what had birthed the origins of his favorite nickname. As Mercury 2.0 swatted at Vandrad 2.0’s ass, the real Vandrad glanced down at her and informed her that she was an incorrigible whore. “It’s part of my charm,” she told him with a wink.

Soon, they were following the other pair out of the foyer and down the alternate route he suggested they take. The clones chatted idly to one another though Mercury really wasn’t paying much attention to what they were saying so much as what they were seeing, which so far was just a lot of continuous hallways. As the original pair walked in relative silence, Vandrad was scanning the composition of the walls around them. He spoke up with his thoughts that whatever was in the main room was mostly likely the source of the keep’s structure, which appeared to be crafted from cooled volcanic rock. She glanced up to see where he indicated, scanning the stone with her own sensors. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mercury affirmed. “Clearly whoever, or whatever, lives here has an affinity for molten manipulation of some variety. Otherwise they’d be insane to live here. We’ve been here maybe fifteen minutes and I’m already thinking about a cold shower and making love to the snow.”

Speaking of sex, it seemed Vandrad had some inquiries about her ability to conjure very real mimics of himself with her magic. Namely, he wanted to make sure she wasn’t using them for “other reasons” as he so poignantly put it, misusing them to make him look like an idiot even when he wasn’t actually around. “Why? Would you be jealous of yourself?” Mercury shot him an impish smirk before laughing lightly. “Relax, this is the first time I’ve even made one, and I’m not so thirsty -- or desperate -- that I need to make sex dolls to pleasure myself. Besides, making the real you look foolish is far more satisfying.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him suggestively before playfully giving him a light hip check.

A beat later, an increase in volume and chaos from her tablet caught her attention. “Ooh, I think they got something.” On the screen, from both of the clones’ various perspectives, they were greeted with the sight of what appeared to be an immense forge of some kind. At the center of the room was a miniature volcano, though “miniature” in this instance was just in comparison to the normal mountainous size of traditional volcanoes. It was still very large, at least a hundred meters high and easily twice as tall. The volcano appeared to be the source of the immense heat signature she’d been reading before. Molten lava pooled around it from steady streams of magma that dripped over the sides of its tip. There were piles of stone and steel ore off to one side, as well as a work bench with a few smithing tools and a large anvil.

Really, the only thing that was surprising about the area was the lone, seemingly human woman that was currently confronting the clones, who were already sassing her in typical Mercury and Vandrad fashion. She had dark hair and wore equally dark clothing with thick steel and leather gloves that had claw like fingertips. The woman questioned them rather aggressively about how they’d managed to get there, and when she found their vague answers unsatisfactory a fight inevitably broke out giving Mercury and Vandrad the chance to observe how she fought. Mostly it involved throwing golems at the clones to keep them busy, but she also seemed to be able to draw from the lava running from the volcano, flinging it at them in large globs.

It didn’t take her very long to overwhelm the mimics. They hadn’t exactly been built to last anyway, just cause a commotion, and they could only channel so much of Mercury’s magic. By the time they had fallen, the real Mercury and Vandrad had managed to enter the room from another angle, currently not in view of the strange woman who was now standing over the defeated drones and inspecting them. “Well, that was rude,” the real Mercury said, causing the woman’s gaze to snap toward the pair with open surprise, dark eyes flicking back and forth between them and the dead mimics in an attempt to understand what was happening. “Honestly, I expected a much warmer welcome than this.”

Mercury snorted. “Doing my laundry?” she asked him, giving him a playfully incredulous look as though the thought were silly. Then, after a moment of consideration, the possible implications hit her. “Actually, you know… now that you mention it, that’s not a half bad idea. Thanks for the suggestion.” She shot him a wide grin, the one she typically gave when she’d decided to take something he’d given her and use it for a completely different purpose than he’d intended.

But the confrontation between their mimics and the woman in the forge quickly caught their attention. It didn’t take very long for the clones to be completely wiped out, and by the time Mercury and Vandrad had made it into the chamber from the backside the hostile woman was already inspecting the “dead” bodies and was completely unaware of the paid approaching from behind her. Mercury commented on the rather cold reception the woman had given their mimics, with Vandrad following up a mild quip of his own regarding the temperature. The perplexed mage looked back and forth between the pairs before she questioned if they were also golem makers. The prince gave her only a vague answer before commenting that it didn’t matter as, clearly, she had already proved herself aggressive and everyone knew this was going to be a fight -- though this fight would be much more difficult than the one the other woman had just had.

Vandrad offered her a quick death should she comply with answering some question, but as usual no one ever took up that kind of offer. Instead, she chose to attack them, reaching out toward the volcano and causing it to burst forth with molten lava at them. The prince reached up in his empowered form and shot a beam of raw energy at the oncoming tide, carving it in two and allowing the searing magma to fall harmlessly on either side of them. Their enemy looked surprised by the turn of events but didn’t let it slow her down, immediately turning to summon forth a couple more of her fiery golems from the pools of lava around them. The horrific looking creatures looked as though they had just crawled out of someone’s nightmares, though it did little more than send a rush of excitement through Mercury’s veins.

As the prince quickly dispatched the Reaper nearest him with a two punch finish, Mercury whipped out Mercy and swapped it to one of her more high powered settings. Flipping down her goggles, a red beam of high energy laser shot from the weapon’s muzzle, easily boring away a hole through the beast’s stony armor and piercing the core within. There was a pregnant moment as the fire of the core began to expand in a way that was surely rather uncomfortable for the golem before it exploded violently, spraying the immediate area with the shrapnel of its dead carcasse. Satisfied with herself, Mercury turned just in time to observe Vandrad rushing the other women. She was working on calculating her own trajectory into the fray when the first golem he had attacked recovered and knocked him off target.

Mercury watched as the woman lifted a hand toward Vandrad as if to cast something toward him. Before she could complete the magecraft, however, Mercury raised Mercy up and shot the other woman’s hand, causing her to cry out in pain and snap her attention on the Xocili in rage. “Ah, ah, ah,” the Silver Wolf ace chastised mockingly. “That’s not very good sportsmanship.” She didn’t even watch as Vandrad retaliated against the golem, her emerald eyes locked on the other woman though her radars did pick up the new holes that the prince and his prey knocked through the stone walls.

Furious, the other mage conjured a few more golems from the depths of the volcanic floods, the creatures crawling their way out of the pool. With the wave of a hand, Mercury crafted a couple oversized machine guns set on large tripods, facing the creatures. They whirred loudly to life and began riddling ammunition into the constructs. “Really? More golems? Do you handle any of your fights yourself?” Mercury teased condescendingly. The woman growled with anger as her creations were sufficiently distracted and being pulverized with Mercury’s arsenal, realizing that continuing to summon more golems was going to do her little good if her opponent could materialize just as many toys to fight them back.

So, she smartly switched strategies. Reaching her hand toward the floor, the woman grit her teeth and ripped a large boulder out of the ground. The giant stone was rippling with heat and fire from the lava that ran beneath the floor. From the moment it was ripped from the ground and briefly held in the air as the other woman took aim, Mercury was already reading it with her internal sensors. Despite the heat signatures coming from the surface of the rock, its core was exponentially hotter, nearly on the same par as the volcano. She probably had it filled with magma, hoping that Mercury would meet the stone head on and be met with a molten surprise once the thing burst on her.

The woman hucked the boulder across the space between them and Mercury sprinted to the side, moving closer to the woman at a slightly forward angle to throw off the trajectory of the attack. At the same time, she pointed her pistol at the woman and fired shot after shot at her. Her enemy blocked each shot with small walls of lava yanked up from the floor to intercept the blows, even as the boulder crashed to the ground somewhere behind Mercury and exploded with red hot plasma. The Silver Wolf mage swapped out her ammunition type to her grenades before the woman could catch onto the change, and as soon as she blocked it with her lava the more volatile ammunition exploded on contact, dispersing the magma and throwing the volcanic mage back several meters.

As Mercury sprinted toward the area where the mage had landed, the woman sat up with a vengeance and quickly summoned another golem, this one smaller than the rest so far -- though still quite tall at twelve feet in height. This one burst from the ground quicker than Mercury could avoid it, right in front of her, already swinging down on her. There was a brief look of victory on the other woman’s face as she had assumed that Mercury was a ranged fighter between all of her guns. The look was quickly dashed as Mercury skidded to a halt and snapped Mercy into blade form, bringing it up just in time to stop the downward swing of the soldier’s own bright sword.

She dug her heels into the ground, holding back the weight of their locked weapons, though not necessarily easily. It made a second swing at her with its other hand, which held a heavy looking mace that she could sense was definitely crafted from metal, not stone or magma. With a grin, Mercury kept the swords locked with one hand and reach out with her free one, catching the weapon’s swing by its head and blocking it from hitting her, even if the force of it caused her feet to slide back a little along the stone. “You’re going to have to do better than that,” Mercury informed the other woman before twisting out of the sword lock, dancing to the side and ripping the mace out of the creature’s hand.

It stumbled forward, suddenly off balance as Mercury raised the new weapon to her face, gave it a small sniff to get a taste for its flavor, and took a bite straight out of the metal -- much to the other mage’s horror. “A slayer…” she breathed as she watched Mercury quickly consume the weapon in just a few quick seconds. It wasn’t enough to trigger the slayer’s force form, but it certainly left her feeling rejuvenated and a bit more empowered. This time, when the golem came at her again she easily parried its sword to the side and began to exchange an elegant series of blows with the creature. It’s core was a little more difficult to find because it was almost completely buried beneath a layer of plate armor and skeletal looking black steel. Thankfully, Mercury could control that element and thus she used a hand to bend the metal back bit by bit as they fought until the core was exposed and she could shoot another laser beam into it, causing it to overcharge and explode.

As the bits of metal sprayed down around her, Mercury cast a smug look at the enraged woman. “Is this really the best you can do?” she asked, taking a moment as she usually did to toy with her “food”, taunting the other mage. “Even here in the literal heart of your element, you can’t even--” Her voice was cut off as the ground beneath her feet buckled violently, an earthquake shaking the entire keep so hard that it cause the ground to fracture into several pieces that rose and fell independently as the volcanic mage screamed her fury and slammed her fists on the ground.

Mercury quickly conjured her hover disc before her, aiming to quickly get off the ground and into the air where the quakes would have no effect on her. But, as she braced herself to jump up, the spot beneath her gave way causing her feet to slip and for her to lose her balance. As she took a quick step back trying to regain it before she could fall on her ass, she was stopped short by a sharp and intense pain shooting through her side. Before she could stop herself, Mercury let out a rather loud shriek in agony. Looking down, her green eyes went wide with horror as she realized that jagged and pointed piece of the ground had shot up in just the right spot to lacerate her, gouging out an entire piece of her side just above her right hip, leaving her non-human innards exposed and causing the black oil that acted as her blood to start to well up.

“Fuck..!” she gasped, dropping Mercy and falling onto the ground, clutching at the excruciating wound in a desperate attempt to cover it as an intense panic quickly set itself into her mind.

It had been a long, long time since Mercury had been hurt this badly. Not that it was a grievous wound. Even before she’d picked up magic, a wound like this would have naturally healed itself within a day, maybe two. But Mercury took a certain amount of pride in rarely getting serious wounds, and she’d needed to be especially careful of such on Earthland because the instant anyone would see her bleed they’d know she wasn’t human, and that was something that no one could know.

The blood continued to pour out, and Mercury was blinded by the pain for several seconds before her body released the antibodies that would dull much of the pain and numb her side. And during that time, she’d been faintly aware that she was in danger, that she was quite vulnerable to a finishing blow. Somehow, she’d found the wherewithal to grab Mercy and aim it shakily back up at the woman who was getting ready to hurl another giant boulder of lava at her, but before either of them could release their attacks Vandrad roared with a fury unlike anything either of them had ever heard from him before. The area around them shifted in hue from red to purple and he released a shock wave that knocked the other mage back onto her own ass.

Mercury managed to look over at him as his empowerment form took on a brand new shade, his hair and eyes turning a pure sapphire. His aura was the same hue, and pulsing so strongly in the room that it was causing the entire room to shake almost as violently as the forgemaster’s earthquake had, crackling like lightning in a thundercloud. Rip shit didn’t even describe the look on his face. His expression was so intense with anger that Mercury was at a loss for even trying to process it, and the other woman was quickly beginning to realize her end was upon her. She shakily summoned a few more golems at the prince, the constructs throwing themselves at him with the intent of skewering him with the crystals that grew in sharp, jagged spikes from their skin.

For one crucial moment, Mercury was horrified when he didn’t even move out of the way, allowing them to strike him and pierce his flesh without any attempt to stop them. What the hell was he doing? His own blood was running freely from his body through his chest and arms and all she could do was stare at him like he was crazy, momentarily distracted from her own injury as she suddenly began to worry about him instead. But then the air shifted again as the crystals in the constructs changed the color of their glow, taking on a deep pink color. Suddenly they pulled away from him and turned their sights on their maker in an ominous way that no one in the room was unable to interpret.

The instant the golems began to attack the other woman was when Mercury finally looked away and put her attention back on her injury. This was bad. Not because she was worried about the wound itself, but because she needed to find a way to hide it from Vandrad. He couldn’t see her, not like this. Not with the black oil of her blood dripping out onto the open ground and marking her for the imposter that she was. If he found out what she was, she would have to kill him. Mercury didn’t want that, nor did she want him to resent her for lying to him all this time about who she truly was -- even though she would have told him the truth, if she could.

“Come on, stop bleeding,” she whispered to herself frantically, trying to will her plasma into clotting enough that the active flow would stop. Maybe if she got it cleaned up and wasn’t bleeding anymore, she could explain away the oil by the time he got there as something else. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew it was already too late to try and come up with a cover up, but the truth was desperately being buried underneath several layers of denial and panic. She needed to find some way, any way, to cover this up.

Nothing came to mind. By the time he finished, presumably, killing the forgemaster, not a single reasonable excuse had found its way to her head before he was already moving over to her. The panic inside skyrocketed straight into fear as he drew closer, and she turned her body to the side in a feeble attempt to hide the injury from him. Her gaze was lowered to the point where she could only just see him out of her peripheral vision, and she openly flinched when Vandrad knelt down and reached out to put his hand on her chest. Mercury hadn’t thought he would hurt her, of course. In fact she wasn’t very surprised when a cool, soothing sensation began to take over her body as he flooded some of his healing magic into her. She’d pulled back from him reflexively, afraid to acknowledge the burning, obvious truth that was now out in the open for him to see.

And she was afraid. Her entire form was trembling, and not from the pain. At this point, between her own natural stimulants and his healing magic, she barely felt the injury as anything more than a mild ache, but Mercury was radiating with trepidation to the point where she was practically quivering with it. “I-I’m fine,” she told him, more than a little too forcibly, still doing her best to keep her hand over the wound in a useless attempt to hide it from him rather than to keep any innards or blood from spilling out. “I’ll be okay, I just need a couple minutes.”

It wasn’t a bold faced lie. Truthfully, she would be okay. She’d survived wounds much bigger than this, and with the aid of his healing magic her body would knit itself back together within probably a few hours. But it was still a lie. Mercury was fine physically, all things considered, but emotionally she was going off the rails from the impending realization that everything about their relationship and understanding of one another was about to change, and probably not for the better. Even without his ability to sense her emotions, which Mercury still didn’t know about, he would be able to see right through her.

So it wouldn’t take long, or much, for him to convince her to stop trying to cover up the mess that was already spilled. They were past the point of no return already, whether she liked it or not, whether she was afraid of it or not. And so, Mercury would slowly pull her hand away from the wound, revealing it for him to see in full. Her palm and fingers were coated in the dark grease, as was the injury itself and her engineering suit around it. Inside, everything looked normally in regard to fleshiness, but the color was all wrong. Silver and copper colors rested where pink would normally be, and there were tiny, mild sparks of blue-white electricity occasionally jolting from one spot to another.

“My slayer magic manifested itself the way it did for a reason,” she told him softly, still trembling and scared though a great deal of sorrow and guilt was starting to worm their way into her psyche as well. Mercury refused to meet his gaze, her head down toward the ground and her eyes almost closed as she stared in plaintive resignation at the rocky floor. “The magic Jadus gave me… that the other creature in the artifact gave me… it just enhanced what was already a part of me.” She knew she didn’t have to explain that she was an alien, nor that she wasn’t from Earthland. That much would be obvious enough at this point, and probably for the better. Mercury was fairly sure she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to say it outloud anyway.

“I’m sorry.”

Vandrad chastised her firmly, and rightly, for continuing to hide the obvious from her instead of letting him work his magic to heal the wound. Though his tone wasn’t without compassion, he sternly ordered her to knock it off and to calm down, and for once she didn’t argue with him. How could she? He was right. She was being a fucking moron. And so she’d relented, if shamefully, and let him do his thing. His other hand hovered over the injury and she felt his energy seep into it, coaxing the metallic cells to quicken their regrowth even more than they usually would on their own until the flesh began to knit itself back together before their eyes. All the while, Mercury knew he was probably inspecting the wound for more than just medical purposes, though he kept his face fairly straight.

Not that she was looking at him anyway. The silence was killing her, which was probably what had prompted her to give him some kind of an explanation. She needed to say something, but she didn’t know what to tell him. A large part of her wanted to believe and trust that he wasn’t going to look down on her for not being human. After all, he’d already come into contact with other non human beings like Beira and expressed a neutral, if not accepting stance on them. But this was different. By both Vandrad’s own accounts, and his mother’s, Mercury was the first person in a long time that he’d shown any genuine interest or care for since he was a young boy. He had never trusted anyone before her on a deeply personal level, and she couldn’t help but feel like this secrecy of her heritage would be viewed as a betrayal of some kind, particularly given their past intimacies.

Mercury apologized, knowing that he would understand everything that was encompassed with the two small words without having to list them all in detail, though truthfully he deserved specificity from her. Unfortunately, she couldn’t bring herself to list out all of her wrong doings. The amount of shame that overwhelmed her wouldn’t allow her the strength to do so, no matter what she thought him entitled to. At first when he spoke up and affirmed that she did have to be sorry, she sank a little lower where she sat, her head hanging with all the more dejection as she emotionally numbed herself for the ire that was sure to come her way. And it did come, though not in the guise she had been expecting. Instead of chewing her out for all the lies and secrets she’d been keeping, he gave her grief over letting herself be injured in such a stupid way, particularly when he’d been working his ass off for the last several months to have that particular honor.

It was a statement that had a two fold result. On the one hand, she understood his intent behind the approach. It was his way of brushing off the revelation of her heritage to inform her that he wasn’t perturbed by the knowledge that she wasn’t human. She wasn’t entirely sure if he was doing that because it was true, or just for her sake to keep her from freaking out again. Mercury liked to think it was the former, but her anxiety was making it difficult to think clearly which was what brought her to the second result: frustration. It was mild, but it was there, whether she meant it to be or not. Brushing the matter aside and almost making light of it wasn’t necessarily out of the norm for either of them, but what was out of the norm was her being this vulnerable. Couldn’t he see how difficult this was for her? In a way, it almost hurt more that he wasn’t acknowledging it for as big a deal as she felt it was, to the point where she didn’t even take the bait to quip back at his suggestion that he should spank her.

There was a brief moment where she struggled with an intense wave of mixed emotions, straining to settle herself down on some chosen state of how she truly felt. And then, like before, a lot of it simply just… died off, leaving her more in a state of emotional numbness than anything else. By then, her flesh had closed up completely and while there was still a bit of internal repairs to make, her body could finish it off on its own from there. There wasn’t even a scar, despite the fact that there probably should have been one for an injury that big, even with magical healing. But the pink skin that showed beneath the rip on her jumpsuit was as flawless as a newborn babe’s, as clean as the rest of her body was, save for the one on the back of her neck.

She was left in a state of almost morose resignation before he finally offered his hand to her and suggested that they leave. Her sad emerald gaze flicked softly over to the extended limb, looking at it without taking it right away. Despite everything, Mercury was at least somewhat comforted in the fact that he was still willing to act like everything was the same as before. Plus, she couldn’t deny that a shower sounded like an absolute dream. Mercury had already been longing for the facilities back at the guild even before they’d run into the forgemaster. Now that she’d actually gotten injured, and her suit was sticky with the grease that acted as her blood, all she wanted to do was soak in a bathtub until kingdom come and forget that this whole day had even happened.

From the corner of her eyes she could see the soft smirk on his face, though she still couldn’t quite bring herself to actually look at him or even really talk. Finally, Mercury just nodded gently and took the offered hand, her grip on it not as sure as it had been in times in the past. She held it only as long as it took for him to help her onto her feet, with only a slight wince to betray that her wound was, at the least, a little tight still. After that she picked up Mercy and slid it back in its holster before walking silently beside him back to the doorway that led them back to her room. Once they had returned to the small, blissfully cooler space, Mercury pulled her energy back into her body that had been keeping the portal open, and it closed behind them, the parts of the pyramid reconnecting to one another and leaving the artifact intact once more.

It was only then that she finally found her voice, sounding more confident than she felt even if it was still on the quiet side. “Do you want to get cleaned up too?” she asked. “I can have your gear cleaned if you want. In the meantime we probably have a guest robe you can use, or I can probably find some spare clothes for you if needed.” If he decided he wanted to shower as well, and that he would appreciate a change of clothes so he wouldn’t have to go back into his gear that was currently grimy and covered in his blood, she would buzz down to the receptionist and ask Lyvia to have a set of spare clothes in Vandrad’s size left outside of her door. Then, she slowly slipped out of her jumpsuit and rolled it up tightly so the evidence of her wound was buried deep inside the rest of the fabric. Rather than put it in her laundry basket, she shoved it in a corner behind some other things where it wasn’t easily noticeable.

The rest of herself she covered with an emerald colored silk robe that only covered up to about halfway down her thighs before grabbing her toiletries bag and leading the way to the bathroom. It was a space as comforting and luxurious as the rest of the guild, though not in a flashy way. Since it was a shared bathroom for only the aces of Silver Wolf, it sported a small handful of sinks and individual shower and toilet stalls. There was a table laid out with fresh and neatly folded towels, as well as clean and generic white cotton robes. There was also a basket with some neutrally scented cleaning products for use. She would offer him to use whatever he wanted between that stuff and what she had, though most of Mercury’s stuff was a bit on the girly, frilly side.

Once that was sorted, she ambled into one of the shower stalls, closing the door behind her and stripping back down to nothing. Her robe she hung on a hook that had been placed for such things before turning on the water to a luke warm setting and stepping under the flow. The stalls themselves were larger than the average shower, still on the luxurious end of design, but not so big as to be overkill. Dark tiles like stones wrapped around the space from floor to ceiling with a drain at the center of the space for the water to run out, and a wide showerhead fed water from high up on the wall with various available settings for water pressure preference.

Despite the fact that there was a stone seat in the corner where she set her showering items, Mercury elected to sit on the floor for a few minutes before even starting any cleaning. With her knees tucked up to her chest and her face against her knees, she wrapped her arms around the back of her head and just sat there for a couple long minutes, wrestling with her emotions and her anxiety. Just like before, when she was no longer in the prince’s direct sight she immersed herself fully in the uncertainty that plagued her, allowing herself to feel all the guilt and the sorrow and the trepidation that was pulling her apart.

What was she going to do? Vandrad would have questions after this, and she knew she would have to give him some answers. Or, more to the point, that she wanted to give him answers. How had they reached this point? Mercury was never supposed to get close enough to anyone to let them find out that she was different, and any who found out were to be executed, but she couldn’t do that. Not to Vandrad. The thought alone made her heart feel like it was being ripped in two and set a pit in her stomach the likes of which she’d never felt before. She didn’t want to kill him. Not after all this, not when he meant so much to her. If she took his life, she’d just be alone again… right when she was starting to get used to and appreciate having someone real in her life.

But that wouldn’t matter. Even if he accepted her for what she was, it wasn’t going to stop their relationship from changing anyway. Even if it was just in small ways, things were doing to be different now. How could it not be? There was no way he would treat her the same after this, even if it wasn’t a conscious choice. Not that it really mattered when she didn’t even really know what their relationship was in the first place. They were friends, close friends, confidants, allies, partners… and sometimes more. Or at least, twice it had been more. Mercury hadn’t expected anything more to happen again in that respect as the first two times had already been out of place enough, but there had been the odd time here or there when she had thought back to those moments fondly and ruminated on how it wouldn’t be so bad if it happened again. But her days of daydreaming were gone, now, and she only had herself to blame for letting him get this close in the first place.

Eventually, she found the energy to stand back up and actually clean herself, getting the sweat and grime out of her hair and off of her body. Mercury wanted to sit in that shower forever and ignore the problems that would surely lay on the other side of the stall door, but she couldn’t ignore her fate forever. So she scrubbed herself down at a pace only slightly slower than what she normally did before shutting off the water, drying her body off and slipping back into the robe. She collected her things and met Vandrad back in the communal area of the bathroom. Once he was ready, she took them back to her room without even bothering to dry her hair, which he’d know she always took the time to do after having observed her daily shower routines while in Bellum.

If he’d requested it, a pair of fresh and neutral clothes in his sizes would be set outside her door by the time they got back. When they returned to the room, Mercury set her things down and looked around for a brief moment. Aside from the chair at her desk, the only real sitting space was her bed, so she gently sat down on the edge and scooted herself back into the alcove a bit, leaving plenty of room on the other side in case he didn’t want to sit on the chair. Mercury still hadn’t really looked at him once since she’d gotten injured, and while her emotions were wrangled back into some semblance of control since her momentary breakdown in the shower, all the negative emotions still lingered beneath the numb surface of her mind. She sat with her feet up on the bed, knees slightly bent with her hands tucked beneath them, unsure of what to say or do and still scared of the incoming conversation.

“Are you hungry?” she asked him dumbly. “Or thirsty? I don’t really have much in here, but I can have something brought up from the kitchen…”

Well, this was easily the most awkward situation Mercury had ever been involved in. It was even more embarrassing than losing her cool in front of Vandrad’s entire family back in Bellum. Neither of them said a word on their way back to Silver Wolf, with Mercury only speaking up again to make sure if he wanted to rinse off as well. She wasn’t going to avoid the incoming conversation, no matter how much she wanted to. That would only make things worse, though she was also scared of what would come from the discussion itself. Vandrad must have understood that his earlier attempt to lighten the mood hadn’t been enitrely well received by her. She wasn’t upset with him, really. After all, up until this point all they ever did was make fun of things when neither of them knew how to handle or approach what was going on. She couldn’t blame him for that. But at the same time it had hurt her a bit, no matter his intentions, and Mercury couldn’t stop herself from feeling that way even if she wanted to.

They showered separately, each of them using the time and the space to deal with their own insecurities, though Mercury wasn’t wholly aware of how much Vandrad was beating himself up. Even as they came back out and made their way back to her room, she didn’t exactly catch his own inability to meet her gaze because she still wasn’t looking at him, either. They went back inside, with the door locking silently behind them as she’d programmed for it to do long ago, and then she tucked herself more or less into a corner of her bed, convinced that he probably wanted some space from her to digest the new knowledge and everything that was happening. Unsure of how else to break the silence she’d brought up sustenance thinking he was probably starving from all the energy he’d used up. Vandrad ate like no human she’d ever seen before, particularly after a fight, and frankly it was a last ditch effort at trying to delay the inevitable.

Apparently, it had been enough to finally loose his thoughts. He assured her he was fine, that he wasn’t hungry. There was a brief pause as he steeled himself, finding his words, and then the prince went on. He explained that he didn’t care if she was an alien, that it hadn’t changed his stance on her. Or, as he’d put it, how he “felt” about her. Mercury wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, mostly because she really didn’t know how he felt about her. It probably just meant that he still viewed her as his partner and his friend, no matter where she came from. He still planned on being by her side no matter what, even if it involved a few surprises along the way. Vandrad also seemed to think she wouldn’t believe the sincerity of his words since he’d already gone ahead and made light of the situation before, but really he just wanted to make sure she was alright.

As he spoke to her, there was a… twisting of some kind in her chest. A tightness that she didn’t know how to interpret, that was beginning to happen more often around the prince. Right now,  she could feel it more strongly than she ever had, as he more or less iterated for her how much he cared about her. A new wave of emotion surged through her, threatening to burst through the rather tight dams of self control she’d erected long ago. She managed to keep herself in check, her mind churning over her response and all the possible things she could say. It would be so easy to just assure him she was fine and try to brush past everything else. He probably wouldn’t press it if he felt that she wanted to retain her privacy.

But she couldn’t bring it in herself to do that. “Physically, I’ll be fine,” she told him softly. “Even without the healing, a wound like that would have corrected itself within a day. Everything else…” Mercury paused a moment there, before shaking her head. “If I’m being honest, I probably won’t be okay. But that’s not your fault. That’s my own problem; problems that stem from long before you and I ever met.”

Her fingers twisted slowly beneath her knees as she sat there in thought, formulating her words and trying to decide where to begin. How could one simply sum up a lifetime of constant war and hardship? Furthermore, how could she do that without also giving away pieces of information that she still wasn’t ready to tell him? That she couldn’t tell him? “I come from a planet called Xocil. Or, well… my people do. Our planet was destroyed some years before I was born in an invasion. We were hunted to near extinction. I don’t really know much about what happened. By the time I was born, we were making our final stands for survival. That’s when my mother died… and I presume my father, and other family I might have had. I was only about a year old, but somehow I managed to… slip through the cracks, I guess.”

It wasn’t a total lie. She really had been lucky, if one could call it that, to not have been killed. One might argue that the fate she’d suffered in life was worse than death, and to a point Mercury would agree with that, but she still couldn’t say that she’d rather have died at such a young age than never get the chance to live at all. “The atmosphere I grew up in was… well, hostile. There was no safe place I could hide in… anyone who might have been able to protect me had been killed. I know there were some other survivors, but I’ve never met any of them. And it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us share the fate of the people that went before us.”

Mercury was careful to word things so that there was no blatant indication that she’d been kidnapped by the enemy and forced to endure their cruel patronage for the entirety of her life. Instead, she spun things to make it sound more as though she had been on the run and fighting for survival for over two decades, which really wasn’t untrue. But she wasn’t ready to tell him everything else, the more shameful parts of her story that would reveal the real, sobering truth about who she was. “I didn’t want to lie to you. Well, at first I didn’t care…” she admitted. “I had every intention of not getting attached to anyone here. Even if I had wanted to, I wouldn’t have really known how. When we first met, you were so… ornery, and mysterious. I could tell you wanted absolutely nothing to do with me right off the bat, and all I that made me want to do was go out of my way to annoy you, to use you and your strength to accomplish things I needed to get done.”

If it had been difficult admitting her selfish behaviors from the start of their relationship to his mother, it was ten times harder to do so to Vandrad’s face. Her face fell forward all the more in shame, and her voice became slightly hitched from emotion as she went on. “But then you just… you kept sticking around. Or I did. I don’t even know anymore. You had every reason to kick me to the curb, or tell me to fuck off, or kill me, but you didn’t. Somehow in the middle of all my carelessness and cruelty you became the only person who’s ever meant anything to me… but I still couldn’t tell you what I was because every minute you spent with me was already putting you in danger. I should have walked away from you months ago, for both of our sakes.”

“But I didn’t want to.” She reached up a hand and wiped away a stray tear that had forced itself from her eye, clamping down hard on her self discipline and doing whatever it took to not completely break down in front of him. “By the time I realized how much you meant to me, I knew it was already too late to try pushing you away, and I wouldn’t have had the strength to try. But I was scared to tell you what I was, because I knew once you found out things would be different, and I didn’t want them to change… or to lose it…”