Mia

I had just finished orchestrating the recovery of the clinic's equipment, luckily none of it had been damaged. I let out a long sigh, the whole thing really was my fault. I hadn't seriously upgraded the security since I had installed it, when I was a class two.

I had always in the back of my mind thought that anyone who would actually try and mess with the clinic wouldn’t have the necessary gear to succeed. After all, anyone with the kind of resources to pull something like this off wouldn’t go after a clinic whose only goal was to help people? But it had happened and people could have gotten hurt.

Freya might have been right all the times over the years when she had called me naive. Which brought me to the other thing I was worrying about, Freya. Where do I even begin to start with Freya? She had been awake for barely 24 hours but already I could tell she was different, but at the same time she was the same as ever.

I have always been able to read people well, especially Freya, which was why one of the first things I noticed was the change in how she carried herself and observed the world around her. Before she had always been a suspicious person and watched the world around her like she expected something to jump out from around the corner at her, while at the same time she wore a permanent half smirk in a hope of appearing confident.

Now while she did still scan the world around her, it was like her eyes could never truly focus on anything constantly jumping around even if she was talking to someone.

Also the smirk was still there but if anything it felt too genuine now before while it was probably good enough to trick most people it had always been a kind of front Freya put up. Now though it felt like she was truly amused by a joke only she understood.

Her personality had changed too, it seemed like she jumped from opposing emotions without anything in between. Like when I had told her off for not telling me her plan to deal with the hive beforehand and making me find out after the fact from a video, which had made Freya look absolutely crushed by the fact I was upset with her snapping out of it like nothing ever happened.

In other ways though she was the same, she was still an incredibly loyal friend, willing to go to incredible lengths to help me. This was evidenced by Freya’s immediate willingness to help with my issue with the clinic. As soon as I had mentioned the issue Freya had immediately given me her full attention pointing both her eyes and ears on me, and had immediately volunteered her help, my initial thought had been to say no that it could be dangerous, but I had to remember that Freya was a Vanguard too now. A class five at that! Which I still couldn’t quite get over. So it was extremely unlikely that she would encounter anything that could prove dangerous to her at all. Also Freya had just looked so excited at the idea I had accepted her help.

Which had turned out to be a good call, as I was pretty sure it had taken more time for us to finish their breakfast, Freya to figure out how to fit in my car with her wings which had been hilarious to watch, and for me to drive us over here than it had for Freya to find the stolen equipment, and disable the security on it. She had said she had one more thing to wrap up before she would be back and would fill me in on the specifics.

I decided to turn on the tv while I waited and found a very interesting story about Lively Corp which just so happened to be the same corp that my Ai, Griffin, had determined owned of the warehouse we had recovered the stolen equipment from and was one of the primary suspects he had pointed out at the start of this.

It seemed that the company and several of its investors had found themselves without a single credit in any of their bank accounts. Which I would have had to be pretty dumb to not guess was Freya’s handy work.

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Then came the other half of it in the form of a breaking news segment in which it covered the break in at my clinic along with the fact that equipment was taken. Instead of that being the end of it they continued

“The real interesting thing here today folks was instead of a response from Stitch, It was instead the new vanguard Fallen Angel, who has been quiet ever since their heroic actions in the last incursion. In retaliation for the break in at Stitch’s clinic they completely wiped out the gang that carried out the break in. Along with Blake Lively, Ceo of Lively Corp, who organized and equipped the gang. If you ask me this whole ordeal just goes to show what anyone with any sense already knows which is don’t mess with a vanguard.”

They went on for a while mostly showing images of Fallen Angel, if you could even call them that all the images they had were just of a black, gray, and purple streak.

But I wasn’t really paying that much attention, the fact that Freya had killed the gang was probably something I should have expected. More than likely they had tried to kill Freya first and she had just retaliated. The fact that Freya had killed Blake Lively bothered her a little bit because that felt like a revenge killing. Freya had always been very protective of those she was close to, so I guess it is not even that out of character for her, which made me feel better.

The whole thing didn’t bother me too much and most other vanguards wouldn’t think twice about Freya’s action. The thing is the psyche that causes one to be picked as a vanguard is not what most think, one of the things looked for is a capacity for violence. Even when a fresh vanguard has to kill another person for the first time they won’t be affected by it much, not to say we don’t value human life, as I have not met another vanguard who would hesitate to put themselves in great danger to rescue someone. Freya was an example of this too; she had sacrificed her sanity to save hundreds of thousands, and I still don’t know what that truly entailed.

A little after noon Freya came strolling into my office between the two giant swords and humongous wings meant that she took up much more room then I was used to seeing her occupy. Freya traversed across the room and plopped face down on the couch that was against one of the walls and offered a simple

“Hey”

I returned her greeting

“Hey, so how did it go? I caught a news story about it but just want to double check with you.”

What she told me sounded a lot like the story the news was reporting she also didn’t tell me any specifics, just that she had tracked down the gang taken care of them which is also where she got the information that let her find my equipment, and after that she had made a visit to Blake Lively. After she finished I replied

“Thank you for this, you really are such a good friend. I was able to get all the equipment set up again and I updated the security so there won’t be a repeat of this.”

She asked

“So are you done here today?”

The clinic was designed to be run without me there I had been hanging around to help smooth the nerves of my people, so I replied

“I can be, why?”

She then sat up and looked at me seriously and said

“I am meeting Helena at six and have no clue what to wear. I don’t even know how to dress, all I know is that she mentioned dinner.”

I barely managed to keep from laughing, Freya was an absolute wreck when it came to dating or flirting. She was extremely pretty and anytime we went somewhere these last few years it was almost a certainty that someone would try and flirt with her. Guys would ask her out more often and she would tell them she was a lesbian and most of the time that would be the end of it, and if they didn’t take a hint I would obviously never use the fact that I am a vanguard to intimidate a civilian. Also that one time I almost fought a church is completely irrelevant.

However I pitied the girls that had flirted with her as unless they straight up told her they were flirting with her there was a ninety-nine percent chance she wouldn’t notice. So despite numerous opportunities her dating experience was nonexistent. So when she actually went on a date she would stress like crazy about it. I still wasn’t convinced that she didn’t think that Kitsune wasn’t just being nice.

Speaking carefully to keep from bursting into laughter i asked

“Do you have any clothing catalogs? It might be worth getting a class one because you never know when you are going to need different clothes.”

A moment later Freya seemed to light up before happily stating

“That’s it! Ok so I just bought three clothing catalogs, I got the comfort, formal, and neomilitarism clothing catalogs, but you see my current clothes are actually my armor but it is made of nanites and can replicate any other clothing even the texture perfectly. So with these catalogs providing the design we can come up with a few different options and no matter what I will be prepared.”

I guess I would be spending the rest of the day I sighed and said

“In that case we should probably head back to the tower.”