[closed] Episode 2 - Harbingers Gaiden

[nashiramods]

Who: Shellustria, Nellacqua, and Mistiluxia
What: Shellustria returns to the ship to boast about his new captives; Mistiluxia's priorities lie elsewhere.
When: May 31
Where: The Dark Ocean

The emergency lights in the corridor leading from the airlock winked on and off again in rapid procession, matching the pace of the booted feet all but dancing across it. This time, when Shellustria burst into the bridge of the Dark Ocean, he forewent the mopey couch crash landing and strode confidently to the mission control dashboard. He slapped a hand down on its surface with a loud smack.

“You’ll never believe what I brought home.”

There was no one in sight on deck; Shellustria just assumed that if he was loud enough, one of the other two people on the ship would hear him. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to curb such obnoxious behavior, he was right.

Mistiluxia seemed to materialize out of thin air at his elbow. He failed to suppress a yelp of surprise and jumped back a step, but all she did was smile sweetly at him with a sparkle in her eye.

“Welcome home, Master Shellustria. Is it Niangniang you’ve brought with you?”

Shellustria let out a triumphant laugh. “Ha, no. It’s better than Niangniang. I’ve got Nova Knights, plural. Two of them, in fact.”

“Whoa, for real?” Nellacqua, not encased in her massive egg for once, poked her head through a doorway. She seemed to have come from the galley, based on the stacked food containers, and...were those orange slices? Shellustria’s nose wrinkled in disgust. Certainly they were here to conquer the planet, but there was assimilation and there was assimilation. She was carrying a datapad and a couple of plastic flimsies for writing on, a light pen wedged precariously between two fingers. “Did you put them in the Oubliette already?”

“Not yet,” said Shellustria smugly. “I’m seeing what I can extract from them first. It seems they know even more than Nova Zenith did.”

Nellacqua unceremoniously dropped all of her packages on top of the dashboard, wedging various containers so they fit between the asymmetrical arrays of buttons and switches. Once everything was arranged to her liking, she flopped onto the vinyl seating in front of the dashboard with the datapad in her lap.

“Well, for once your timing’s perfect. I’ve been compiling all the data we’ve got on these guys so far so we can figure out our next move. You know, in case your monster strategies keep bombing.” Nellacqua grinned unpleasantly at him, punching a few things into her datapad. “So lay it on me. All I’ve really got is on that Nova Zenith guy, and he was pretty boring. Kinda thought we’d get more out of him before he went into the Oubliette.”

Mistiluxia let out a regretful sigh. “I’m afraid his mental resolve was such that if I were to press any further, his mind may have fractured entirely. Some things will break rather than bend.” She brightened with a smile. “And he could still come quite in useful in the future! For the time being, he’ll do just fine in the Oubliette.”

She seemed to be about to say more, but Nellacqua was already jumping in, jotting down the beginnings of some kind of diagram on a flimsy with her light pen. “Okay,” she said, “so who’ve we got in there now?”

“Nova Pandora and Nova Glimmer,” Shellustria said with a condescending little flutter of his fan. “I suppose their magic has some interesting properties, but they’re so...touchy-feely. And if I’m honest? Terribly weak. They’re already losing their way in there.”

“Nice,” said Nellacqua, then stuck her light pen between her teeth to type something into her datapad. “Homayh?”

Shellustria stared at her with lip-curling confusion, then said, “Binding and Spirit.”

Nellacqua switched to furious scribbling with her light pen. Shellustria glanced around the darkened bridge with uncharacteristic appreciation.

“You know, it’s incredibly convenient that this ship has a pocket dimension generator,” he commented, sounding pleased. “Even with the Royal Sea Crest, this would have been no small feat of magic.”

“Yeah, ’cause asking me for help to run your little mind torture scenarios would ruin the whole cool loner thing you totally have going for you,” Nellacqua snickered, her mouth now free of writing instruments. Mistiluxia hovered ever closer.

“And what about Niangniang?” she asked with a patient smile.

“Oh,” Shellustria said, “the cat. She got away.”

Mistiluxia’s smile widened. “Excuse me?”

“The Nova Knights somehow got past Vaporpilia.” He frowned. “Her orders were quite explicit, and I’d authorized deadly force. She should have had no trouble with them, and yet...”

“It’s a poor commander who blames his troops, Master Shellustria,” Mistiluxia said reproachfully. Shellustria’s lips pulled back in an unpleasant snarl. “As I’ve said before, the monsters we summon are of the highest quality!”

“Well, apparently the idiots have figured out teamwork!” Shellustria huffed out a breath through his nose. “Who cares about the cat? We’ve got two Nova Knights.”

Mistiluxia was suddenly quite close, her nose nearly touching Shellustria’s. Her eyes were dark with a fury that seemed to belong to someone else entirely.

“We needed the cat, you imbecile,” she hissed, but she was just as soon out of Shellustria’s personal space and smiling again so quickly that he questioned for a second whether or not it had actually happened. He jumped back as though he’d been shocked all the same. Nellacqua, her eyes on her datapad, had apparently missed it.

“She had crucial information about the Star Map, after all,” Mistiluxia continued with a little tee hee that left Shellustria feeling oddly chilled. “We knew that much from Nova Zenith. And why do you think only the cat had that information? It’s not because it was top secret. It’s because it was data. Data that none of the Nova Knights have. Data that we could have retrieved. Why do you think I had you looking for the cat in the first place?”

Shellustria’s brow furrowed, and then one corner of his mouth tugged down in an unhappy frown. “I didn’t realize the information we’d gotten from Nova Zenith was so...comprehensive.”

Nellacqua, too, was looking up with interest. “Wait, data? As in someone wrote something directly into her brain?”

“Mmm...well, judging by what we know about the Nova Knights already, it might have been something a little less direct,” Mistiluxia said, puffing out her cheeks. “But now that we’ve lost our only opportunity at retrieving that data, I suppose we’ll never know!”

“Why didn’t you share any of this before?” Shellustria demanded, snapping open his fan in indignation. “Don’t you think this would have been useful for me to know?”

“Why, Master Shellustria,” Mistiluxia said with a doe-eyed look, “don’t you read the mission briefings I prepare for you?”

Shellustria closed his teeth on a grimace. “I...skim them, sometimes. They’re long, Mistiluxia. Can’t you just give me a single page with the important information in bullet points or something? I can formulate my own strategies, you know.”

“I wonder,” Mistiluxia said in a sing-song tone. “And what about the energy you were supposed to harvest for the ship? When I checked the power cells earlier, their levels were still dreadfully low.”

His gaze slid to the side at that. “It...was not as successful as I’d hoped.”

“Yeah, the bath salts thing seemed kinda shaky to me from the start,” Nellacqua said with a snort. “What was the play there? Seems like it all kinda went up in steam.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Shellustria bit out, but Nellacqua was already snickering at her own joke. Mistiluxia’s smile stretched dangerously wide.

“Master Shellustria, it seems as though you’ve failed at all your assigned objectives!” Despite her reproachful words, her tone was as bright and cheerful as ever. “Yet another of your monsters has been defeated by the Nova Knights, and we have lost any chance of recovering whatever data was stored with Niangniang. Are you sure you’re really suited to the task at hand?”

Her expression morphed into a plaintive pout, and she tapped one finger to her chin. “Perhaps I ought to let Miss Nellacqua take over if this is proving too...taxing for you.”

“No! I can handle it,” Shellustria said with hasty confidence, though half his face was obscured by his fan. “I just need more time. And — information. Pandora and Glimmer will bend before they break, I guarantee it. And I’ll use whatever I get from them to nail down these meddling Nova Knights and eliminate them for good.”

The vitriol in his voice surprised even him — but hell if he was going to let a bunch of magical idiots ruin his chance at ruling an entire planet. And hell if he was going to hand a single victory over to Nellacqua. If he wasn’t the one to take them down, then no one would ever take him seriously.

“If you insist,” Mistiluxia said, though her eyes remained uncharitably doubtful. “But remember: the Dark Ocean is providing us with a new source of magic. If you cannot provide the ship with the energy it needs, then perhaps you will simply have to give some of your own.”

She beamed at him with a little titter, then straightened her skirts and shook out her hair. “Well, if that’s all you have to report, I have other matters to attend to. Miss Nellacqua, kindly do remember not to leave any food out when you’re done. That’s how you get ship vermin!”

She trotted off to the lift with little clacks of her heels. As soon as her silhouette was out of sight, a strange tension finally eased.

“Ship vermin,” Shellustria muttered in a tone that suggested that he thought of her as the ship vermin but wasn’t actually brave enough to say it out loud.

“Yikes,” Nellacqua said, picking at the last few bits of an orange slice with her teeth. “Sucks to be you right now.”

Shellustria just made an unpleasant little noise in the back of his throat and snapped his fan shut. He was a Lalixian Prince, dammit. He shouldn’t have to bear such indignities, let alone at the hands of his own kin. Well, when he finally had rule of this planet...

“Hey, where’re you going? You’ve still gotta tell me about Pandora and Glimmer.” Nellacqua knocked her foot into his side to slow his progress to the door. She picked up a flimsy and waved it at him. “I’m making a relationship chart.”

Shellustria’s dignity had taken enough of a beating for one evening, and he was ready to divest himself of all company and lie facedown in his bed for the next several hours. He gave her a look of mild disgust, knocking her foot aside but coming to a stop all the same.

“I’m not doing this with you right now.”

“Hey! You wanna make some progress, or are you not bored yet of being humiliated on a biweekly basis by a group of idiots who look like none of them is old enough to drive a jet ski? ‘Cause the only way you get past these culty teamwork types is by finding the first weak link and chipping away. You mess with the relationships, you can pretty much control the team.”

Shellustria’s lips pressed into a thin line. “...What do you want to know?”

Nellacqua grinned and picked up her light pen with the air of a diligent scribe. “Whatever you’ve got so far. Abilities, strength, stamina... How do they fight? Do they work better as a team or is there some conflict there? Do you think they’re kissing?”

“Never mind,” Shellustria said abruptly, starting for the door. “I am not doing this with you right now.”

“Documentation is a critical part of any research process!” Nellacqua called after him as he hurried for the door that led to the galley. She settled back down on the mission control sofa with a mean-spirited chuckle. Well, she could compile the little data she had and hassle him for the rest of it later. It wasn’t like he’d ever pass up a chance to show off the spoils of his conquests. In the meantime... Nellacqua picked up her light pen and drew two bubbles on a flimsy, writing PANDORA and GLIMMER in them respectively. She drew a single line between them, and above that line, three really big question marks. For now.