Yuriko’s Nitsuda Civillian, an Aralian coupe car that cost her nearly twenty thousand Torries, pulled into the basement garage of her new apartment. After a few false starts, a couple of lost deposits, and a deeper review of the neighbourhood, Scarlett convinced Yuriko that a twenty-minute drive to school was acceptable if it meant a similar time spent driving to Winderfield.
Oakmount Estates was her new place of residence. It was a couple of leagues north of Trinity Valley, located in another coastal valley, it was a gated community for the well-off. She leased an apartment, roughly two hundred square paces, in one of the charming buildings near the ocean for five thousand Torries a cycle and the lease was paid a year upfront.
She’d already drained her funds by a fifth of what she received for the first year, and she also spent on buying better electronics, smartphone, and laptop computer, among other things, as well as an updated wardrobe.
Lilibeth’s frugal mindset warred with Yuriko’s spendthrift nature, and without a doubt, the latter won. Wealth had never been an issue for her in the long run, especially since she was powerful enough to easily acquire resources. The first few weeks in relative poverty had done little to temper her nature, though it did allow her to appreciate how others struggled for resources. With that being said, the apartment in Leafshroud Building had three bedrooms so she invited Scarlett to live with her. And since her friend was also her manager and assistant, it worked out in their favour.
It had little to do with how delicate the other girl’s features were and how Yuriko loved admiring cute and pretty features. She was also sure that Scarlett had almost overcome her internal struggles of sexuality, and proximity to Yuriko accelerated it.
She couldn’t help it. Playing with herself, even using toys she purchased off the Network, just didn’t scratch her itch. Sure, the fake phallus could reach deep inside, but the lack of warmth, and the lack of Anima, emphasised the lack of life. Her body, and her Mien, preferred living lovers.
It had been a couple of weeks since her encounter with a daemonfyre-reeking Evan, and just yesterday, her true body had fought a battle in the emptiness of the Void Ocean. That was another thing she had been mistaken about.
The Void was the space between realms, and she had thought that the emptiness of the first delve was different. It turned out that Milstate scientists were correct, and it was another nudge to temper her arrogance. While it wasn’t the full Void, it seemed the place was a sort of dumping ground for remnants that had been ground down to full inertness. It made it so that the Voidships could travel the place without getting their vital energies siphoned off, and it also meant open sources of energy were easily drained. Either way, she wondered if there were open portals into the Void or if there were only micro fissures that allowed the remnants to slip through.
The relatively vast distances between points of interest were also rather annoying, and her true body had already crossed the distance between Dragon Fall City and Bresia by this point. And now, they were a couple of days away from the rally point.
Supply was a problem, too. The Darlington Cross had enough for half a Season but the two Hallowed Echoes Voidships barely had enough supply to last their return trip to Outpost Omega. As it were, if not for some fatalities, the Cross would have been run short.
Yuriko was tempted to use the droplets of Ambrosia to create food, but Captain Finely assured her that there was a harvestable biome near the rally point and that communications assured them that this was firmly in Milstate’s hand.
She smoothly manoeuvred her car into her parking space. The basement garage was dimly lit, but with her perception aura, she didn’t really need to pay much attention. She’d only moved in a couple of days ago, and Scarlett was still waiting out her lease, so the earliest the girl could join her was in a couple of weeks.
Once she parked and locked her car, she made her way to the lift and headed to the third floor. Apartment A was hers, and there were only two apartments per floor in Leafshroud. She didn’t bother using the key and simply seeped her Anima through the door and opened it from inside. She made sure to lock everything once she was inside.
Her kinesis retrieved food from the fridge and she started cooking even as she wandered into the bathroom. She took a quick shower, cold since it was well into the hot Season and by the time she was done, dinner was ready. She turned the television on and was graced with one of her commercial ads. Not Mira-hi, but one of the sneak shots of the TV drama she got involved in.
…yes, she was now a soap opera extra.
She flushed at the thought, considering how low her opinion of the afternoon dramas were. Lilibeth enjoyed watching them a few years ago, but after breaking away from the Lawson family, she’d lost the taste. Yuriko watched some of it, not because she wanted to, but because some of the display television sets in Macy’s showed afternoon dramas.
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So why was she in one?
Pixel Fairy, of course. The talent agency wasn’t only involved with fashion models or commercial actresses, and her stated goal of becoming famous apparently meant she was open to any kind of acting gig. She didn’t say she was inept at it, so they took it to mean she could act.
Or rather, Darrel said, “You look too beautiful for your lack of acting skills to matter.” Right before he gave her the gig.
That was a week ago, and at the time, she didn’t even know the name of the drama, just that it was in a school setting and that she would be part of the crowd celebrating the male lead’s accomplishment in Battle Ball.
She’d been dressed in clothes that were similar enough to Trinity U’s uniform that she could have worn that and still fit in. She had been placed in a hallway along with about a dozen other teens, male and female. Lockers were on one side of the hallway and she was to stand next to it, blocking the male lead, a handsome enough actor with baby blue eyes, soft golden locks and a winsome smile, from his locker accidentally. She was supposed to swoon.
Her thoughts returned to the scene, and she couldn’t help but grumble at how long the take took. The male lead, Zachary Russell, had fumbled several dozen times.
She remembered the first take. She faced her locker and fumbled with the tumbler. She had to retrieve some of Lilibeth’s memories to understand how to open the thing since it had a spin dial with numbers from zero to sixty, labelled in fives. Well, she didn’t actually know the combination since it hadn’t been given to her, so she idly spun the dial.
Her perception caught Russell as he walked towards his locker, which was next to hers, that she was blocking with her shoulder.
Bang!
His hand slammed on the metal.
“You’re in the way,” was what he was supposed to say.
Instead, when she turned around, startled by the loud noise, he opened his mouth and froze. There was an awkward silence for a couple of seconds before the director yelled, “Cut! Zach! She’s the one who’s smitten, not you!”
“I…uh, yeah, uhm, sorry,” he muttered even as his face turned completely red and highlighted the freckles he had over his nose.
That scene repeated several times, not quite in the same way, but it was Zachary who always lost his aplomb.
“Lilibeth, you’re supposed to be stunned silly, and infatuated. Fix your expression!” the director yelled afterwards when Zach actually got the line and expression right, yet she kept her usual cold expression.
“Alright,” she answered calmly, and for a moment, it looked like the director would explode on her, but he only took a calm breath and had the scene reset.
On the repeat, Yuriko copied the expression of one of the other bystanders, and while she felt it looked stiff, and the director agreed, he didn’t call for a retry, so that was that.
The episode aired later that week, and Scarlett told her that fans clamoured for her presence, she was written a part as a secondary love interest. She only had a few scenes, and mostly as the protagonist’s, Lev Wyler, fangirl. Not a part she could really relate to, so she mostly copied the expressions and body postures of the ensemble.
Then, she had a commercial shoot for the drama, which had her participating as part of the crowd in a Battle Ball game. The process didn’t actually include what Battle Ball was or showed anything other than an empty studio, so she had to find out what it was through the Network, and actually, through the television.
Well, it was a competitive sport involving getting a ball from one end of the field to another, with two opposing teams clad in padded armour and wielding padded staves to whack away at each other. The better players were expert stavesmen while the weaker players relied entirely on brute force.
Curious, Yuriko watched the country’s best players, and she thought that the top ones were close to touching upon an Ennoia. Perhaps it was a miracle they weren’t accused of being Altered Humans since she found no mention of Ennoias or anything similar in any of the literature she explored.
Hmm, for some odd reason, her face in the commercial was the focus of the camera over the several dozen others in the same place. Shaking her head, Yuriko changed channels to one that had the news, and she passively listened to it while eating her dinner.
Upon her arrival, she’d thought that Altered Humans were despised, but that was just a narrow point of view. Trinity University and the surrounding Valley were almost intolerant of Altered, but the rest of the country, scattered amongst the varied states that spanned several dozen leagues across and made up the Astorian Republic, opinions varied. Some celebrated costumed superheroes as much as celebrities, while others vilified them. Oddly enough, a perusal of crime rates didn't show any correlation to how accepted such people were, only that costumed superheroes were often matched with similarly costumed supervillains. And where one appeared, the opposite soon followed. A curious phenomenon.
There was no news about daemon incursions and she supposed that little bit of news was concealed. It had been several weeks since her initial contact with the Protectorate heroes, but as she noted before, it was as if they had forgotten she existed. She took Lightfoot’s contact details as well as Lance Hiller, Weavemaster. But when she messaged them, they didn’t reply. Did they want to cut ties or was something stopping them?
She wondered if Lilibeth’s family had something to do with it, considering that wealth was also power. She couldn’t see what the point was though. Well, she still wanted to scout out the daemon portals, but she’d been so busy with her new career that it had fallen by the wayside. And it wasn’t as if she could use Manifestation to scout. She couldn’t cut her Anima to create a Manifestation through her incarnation body anyway.
On a better note, she’d managed to increase her Swordlight by five. She had a total of six now, but the problem was that making more strands to combine with her core grew more difficult. It took more lumens to create a long enough strand to spin around the core, which meant she needed to devote more and more time to her meditation.
Well, her other option was to create an external reserve, and she wondered if there was imperial jade in Astoria.
A quick check through the Network revealed that there was, though each piece was quite expensive. Well, her money had to go somewhere.