Trying to starseed a super senshi during the battle at Augusta Bank, late last spring—that had been the deciding factor for General Ashanite in deciding to recommend her for promotion. Wasting too much time on gratitude felt frivolous and like a poor way to honor the trust that her General had put in her by giving her both more power and more responsibility……but all the same, Andesine was grateful. Trading in her jingle bells for the meteor hammer had certainly been a glow-up.
It wasn’t enough, though. Not in the sense that she felt she didn’t have enough power. Yes, she wanted more—really, who in the Negaverse didn’t (in her opinion)?—but because the Negaverse’s hierarchy imposed a structure of fairness on an otherwise broken and deeply unfair universe, Andesine did not want that kind of power yet. Moreover, she wanted it in a general, conceptual sort of way, but felt certain that she would have balked at anyone trying to offer it to her right now, if they did so without good cause.
Something like that—she told herself as she teleported out of Destiny City and back into the embrace of Negaspace—would have entirely undermined the very thing that she admired about the Negaverse and its organization. Yes, punishments for failure or underperformance could theoretically be severe……but if someone didn’t want to be punished so badly, then they could have tried not ******** things up in the first place. No matter what anybody thought about their tactics (necessary measures; they had to keep the lights on in order to do their work, didn’t they?), and no matter what they thought about any officer or senshi or youma as an individual, the Negaverse was fair.
Just like everyone else who’d ever held a General’s rank, Andesine would need to earn that position with hard work.
She would need to do something, then, to prove herself. To prove that General Ashanite had been right to put her name forward for promotion. To prove that she would use the power given to her for the betterment of the Negaverse and the furtherance of their cause, that she could be trusted with that power. Whatever she concocted, it would need to show determination, innovation, and nerve—all things that Andesine liked to think she had in spades.
To that end, once she dropped off the energy orbs she’d collected tonight, Andesine made her way through the castle to the library. Staring down the interior as she entered, Andesine refused to let the sight of it awe her. The looming ceilings and rows upon rows of shelves struck her with the sense that someone had taken a yawning abyss, placed it inside the Dark Kingdom’s stronghold, and then tried to make it feel marginally less intimidating. By all rights, bookshelves ought to have made the place feel a bit more welcoming, but these somewhat missed the mark.
Regardless of when the library had gone up (and moreover, regardless of her own ego and lack of desire to be pathetic or weak), as Andesine slunk off down an aisle, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that these shelves had existed long before she’d been born. As she scanned the titles available to her, as she stopped here and there to flip through pages and see what they offered her, she couldn’t shake the feeling that these walls and shelves would stand long after Andesine and everyone she had ever known were gone. Something about the place felt unspeakably, eerily timeless, as though the Negaverse library were something that should have always existed.
Unfortunately, that timeless quality made several of the books that Andesine dredged up considerably less than helpful. Records of histories so old that even their battle scars had likely faded. Mythologies from gods only knew where, inseparable from histories until you dug in far enough to find the s**t that had to be made up. Alchemical theories that seemed more than slightly suspect but had probably been akin to cutting edge science once upon a time. Much of it interesting but none of it particularly relevant to a twenty-first century officer who needed to hatch a twenty-first century scheme that addressed twenty-first century problems.
It seemed like hours had gone by before any one text stood out to her more than the others before it.
At first blush, it was nothing special. Even being on a scroll didn’t make it especially noteworthy, since plenty of the texts within the library also seemed to have been written on scrolls. But for as boring as it looked on the outside, Andesine found something new and special as she unfurled the parchment. Namely, text that she couldn’t read. The characters all looked lovely—florid handwriting full of curlicues and a style that seemed halfway between printing and cursive, though it might have been any number of things since the script obviously wasn’t English—and the illuminated manuscript-looking, painted borders not only made the scroll gorgeous, but also added an air of mystery.
Where the Hell had this scroll come from?
Where could it have come from?
Frowning bemusedly, Andesine squinted at the text as thought that would make any of it click together in her mind. This didn’t work. Neither, for that matter, did tilting the scroll all up, down, and around, trying to see if maybe she simply needed a change in perspective? If only there had been a mirror nearby, she would have checker in the reflection as well, because maybe the different characters here before her would’ve been recognizable as something—as, literally, ******** anything that a human mind could comprehend—if they got turned around and reflected back.
She did recognize the impulse to call her weapon to hand. Understand it, absolutely not—what in the library could have possibly required that? But the itch wouldn’t shut up, so Andesine summoned her meteor hammer.
As soon as she did, the scroll shimmered, disappearing into her weapon.
…………Weird. She’d have to look into what that had done to her weapon.
So, maybe the would-be study trip wasn’t a total waste of time. Still, exiting the library empty-handed felt other than rewarding and it put Andesine in a distinctly bad mood.… Bad enough to hit the town and drain some more energy off somebody else, just because she could. Maybe someone would get feisty and she’d get a chance to take her meteor hammer for a test drive.
wc: 1,081.
Quote:
Andesine has unlocked the enhancement Forgotten Spell!
“At will, Andesine whips her meteor hammer and swings it at one target within a 20-foot radius, but does not hit them physically. Instead of physical damage, they are assaulted by a powerful wave of magical force powerful enough to bowl over unsuspecting targets. A hallucination accompanies the force-wave: a powerful smell of rot, something like an uncleaned charnel house in the middle of an extremely humid August. This smell is incredibly unpleasant but illusory; it deals no extra damage and can be recognized as an illusion with focus from the target. This attack has three uses.”
“At will, Andesine whips her meteor hammer and swings it at one target within a 20-foot radius, but does not hit them physically. Instead of physical damage, they are assaulted by a powerful wave of magical force powerful enough to bowl over unsuspecting targets. A hallucination accompanies the force-wave: a powerful smell of rot, something like an uncleaned charnel house in the middle of an extremely humid August. This smell is incredibly unpleasant but illusory; it deals no extra damage and can be recognized as an illusion with focus from the target. This attack has three uses.”
