Never mind the all too obvious possibility of things that she could not predict.
Heading onto the crystalline floor of the Hall of Shadows, Andesine briefly held her breath—but she let it go before too long. Kept her head high and her shoulders square. Confident posture, a set jaw. She couldn’t tell if the dark guardians within the walls particularly cared that she was present or that she made her way to the Rift. She hadn’t spent much time around them or tried to learn what any of their odd behaviors meant. Most of her duties required heading out into the city—Destiny City, that was—rather than traipsing around in the Dark Kingdom for too long. Sure, long enough to deliver reports as necessary, long enough to drop off energy orbs and any starseeds that she turned in rather than stashing in her subspace.
(Overall, Andesine still preferred to avoid pulling anybody’s starseeds, if she could help it. Wasted human resources to do so without good reason, just as she’d written in some of her reports for General Ashanite. Nevertheless, she had a stash of them tucked away, just in case.)
As she met the perpetual, cosmic darkness and whirling, colored haze, Andesine squinted. Nothing, at the moment, needed to come into clearer focus. Rift crystals illuminated the current wide expanse of nothingness—or, well. Not exactly nothingness, but for the moment, Andesine walked alone. That was, after all, part of the point in coming down here tonight, venturing into the Rift by herself and seeking out a youma with whom she could bond. None, as yet, made themselves apparent, but……well. Maybe a lot of them had ventured up into Destiny City. That was their hunting ground as much as it was Andesine’s, if not more so because youma needed to feed on human energy. Couldn’t hold it against them that they needed to eat.
This place could make good inspiration for a realm in a video game, Andesine mused silently, peering over the edge of some deep fissure that her wandering brought her to. As she sized up whether or not she could jump across it—maybe, but probably not, and better not to risk it when she couldn’t see the bottom—she tried not to let her brain get crushed by its own recollection of all the research she’d done about different games like the ones her brother played.
The ones into which her brother poured countless thousands of dollars without even thinking.
The ones that he wasted so much time and effort on, all so he could collect the exact right cute anime-looking characters, then the materials that he needed to level them up, and then the right weapons to best maximize their “build.” Whatever that meant. Something about making sure the fighters did the most damage possible, the healers provided the most healing that they could, and the defenders blocked enemy attacks with maximum efficiency. Or at least that was what Andesine had gathered from her own research, since her brother had proven himself incapable of explaining anything without going off on tangents about what made Yoimiya-whosit different from Diluc-Or-Whatever-His-Name-Was, and all kinds of other game-specific nonsense that helped Andesine exactly not at all.
There had to be a way to make something like those games that would also drain energy for the Negaverse. Andesine hadn’t come up with the exact right way to do it yet, but on the other hand, the more she poked at any ideas, the more it felt like she would need to talk to General Ashanite. Too many aspects of what she kept thinking, they felt like something she would need his cosign on—and quite likely, his larger influence within the Negaverse. People respected Andesine’s General. People listened to Andesine’s General. He had worked hard to earn such high regard from his peers among the other Generals and from the General-Sovereigns, and as for Andesine……
She did her job, yes. Whenever she powered up and went out to harvest energy and/or starseeds for Metallia, she tried to give it her best efforts. Andesine worked hard, because the Negaverse deserved nothing less than the best from its officers at all times.
But she needed to make more of a name for herself, and wasn’t it just so perfectly fitting that her best idea to do so was too big for her to pull off on her own? Not only would she likely need General Ashanite’s influence behind her, authorizing several aspects of what went into creating one of these “gacha” games, but she would also need people to help design the characters, the world, and the story. She would need people to develop the coding and the gameplay (or at least to somehow cobble together something from all the deep-dive harvested game codes on the Internet and make it not immediately clockable as any of the games from which the codes had been pulled). She would need voice-actors for any important cut-scenes, since these games seemed to put so much of their stories into said scenes, and fans always seemed to lose their minds in a good way when the scenes were well-executed.……
At least there had to be ways of somehow making all that a positive aspect of the plan (such as any of Andesine’s ideas could be called, at the moment). Idly kicking a small rock further down the path she’d gotten onto, Andesine thought of how she could spin all this as a means of building up camaraderie within the Negaverse, strengthening intra-community ties so that more people would have better support networks, and maybe even reducing the chances of anybody purifying (more people paying attention to each other’s comings and goings, more people to notice if anybody else seemed off or like they might have been having doubts).
Noticing that she’d found her way to one of the safe-houses that agents came out here to restock, Andesine sighed and slouched against the wall. As she stared up into the cosmic darkness of the Rift, with its ominously dancing lights that didn’t entirely look like stars, she folded her arms across her chest. What she really needed, at least in the short term, was a partner. Somebody she could discuss ideas with while working on a proposal that she could eventually take to General Ashanite.
ROOOO-RAU-RAU-RAAAAAAAAH.
Andesine flinched at the sound that crashed into her otherwise pleasant thoughts.
Alert, she pushed herself off the wall she’d leaned onto. Her fingers curled tight around the handle of her meteor hammer. The safehouse door burst open. Stepping back, Andesine readied herself. If she’d accidentally found her way to trouble, then she would—
RAAAAUGH-RAAAAUGH-RAU-RAAAAAAAU~
While still loud, the sound got……less threatening, with the door open.
Probably made sense: the source came toddling out soon enough, and whatever the youma thought it was doing right now, it sounded like absolutely piteous wailing.
Wrinkling her nose, Andesine tilted her head down at the strange little creature. Overall, it looked like some kind of corgi, albeit one with a unicorn horn protruding from its temple and fur that seemed almost iridescent beneath the glow of the nearby Rift crystals. But, like all youma, this creature looked……different from the base idea of a corgi, for more reasons than the shiny fur and the glittering horn. Most corgis, as far as Andesine knew, did not have long, swishy tails that, all decked out in smooth-looking scales, would have belonged on a snake, had they not ended in a tuft of violet fur. Likewise, the ears seemed too big for the youma’s head and looked more like a bat’s ears than a puppy’s.
Without an apparent care outside whatever it was wailing about, the youma toddled around in a few circles. Then, as abruptly as it had burst out of the safe-house, it flopped over one one side. Andesine had seen videos of rabbits doing something similar on Youtube. Apparently, when they did this, it meant that they felt especially safe and comfortable, so much so that they didn’t mind exposing their soft, vulnerable underbellies.
Maybe that could’ve been true for this youma under other circumstances. But tonight, the poor creature devolved into whimpering.
I could turn around and walk away right now, Andesine thought to herself, brow arching so high, it could’ve easily escaped her forehead. I came out here to find a partner, not to do ******** charity-work, and I am perfectly within my rights to just leave this youma by itself.……
Except……the whimpering sounded too much like a dog’s.
Andesine didn’t make it two steps before she turned back toward the pitiful creature.
Stifling the impulse to sigh, she stood close to the youma, but not too close—not yet. “Hey,” she said, “can you understand me? Can you speak?”
Although the whimpering didn’t really stop, the youma wiggled its little legs. Spun itself around so it could see Andesine better. Violet eyes wide—with reptilian-looking pupils, Andesine noted as a curiosity—the youma nodded.
“My name is Andesine,” she said, coming two steps closer and crouching down. Better to get on the youma’s level, to not make it feel talked-down to. “What’s yours?”
The youma sniffled (how it managed to sniffle, Andesine did not want to know). “This one is called Amylthia.”
“……Does this one call themself Amylthia?”
Briefly looking quite perplexed, Amylthia nodded.
……Fair enough. Maybe Andesine had read too much into the phrasing.
“Nice to meet you, Amylthia,” Andesine went on. “But what’s wrong? Why are you so upset?”
“This safe-house always has really tasty snaaaaaacks,” Amylthia whined, kicking their little legs at nothing in particular, a gesture that only made her look more pathetic (but……in a way that grew increasingly endearing). “But when Amylthia went in there tonight? No snacks!! None! Other youma stole them all again!”
Or maybe *Agents* ate them while down here on missions, Andesine thought but did not say, sensing more than a little bit of distress on Amylthia’s part. Easily enough distress that she might not have been amenable to hearing out somebody who wanted to be reasonable. You know, the people whom those snacks are actually *FOR*. What does it even matter to you? It’s not like youma *need* to eat food or anything.
Instead of saying anything that could’ve caused a fight, Andesine reached into her subspace pocket. When she held her hand out before Amylthia, the Rift crystal-light glittered off the surfaces of two starseeds. One, brilliantly turquoise interspersed with little whorls of blue and the other, sugar pink and innocent as a cabbage.
Amylthia perked up at the offering, then looked to Andesine in confusion and disbelief.
“Not as fresh as they could be,” Andesine conceded, “but I’ve been saving them for a special occasion. The senshi and Neptune Knight I stole them from didn’t make the retrievals easy. Seemed a shame to waste such hard-won starseeds on just anything. Do you want them?”
Nodding, Amylthia flicked out a long, forked tongue……and laved it over their eyes. Only then did Andesine truly notice that the youma had not blinked once since letting Andesine see their eyes.
Soon enough, though, it didn’t matter: that tongue scarfed up one of the starseeds, and then the other. As they wolfed down the proffered treats, Amylthia got a little bounce in their step. It looked utterly ridiculous, but Andesine’s lips curled in a smile anyway. At the risk of being cliché—
“You know, Amylthia,” she said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
wc: 2,000.
