~February 2nd, 140 AH~
~Joint Base Akra, Kurator Corps HQ~
Asena Shiranui woke with a gasp, desperate for air. She flung the headset off, momentarily uncaring whether she might’ve damaged expensive military equipment.
Gone was the metallic prison that had kept her completely immobile as she hurtled toward certain death. What greeted her instead was the darkened office that housed Terminal One. And as she shook and shuddered with ragged breaths, the impassive face of her supervisor—her father—swam into blurry view.
“It seems to me the session didn’t complete. Was something the matter?”
Yuito Shiranui spoke softly, leaning over the reclined seat to peer into his youngest daughter’s eyes. The brow between his glasses showed its permanent crease, though this told nothing of his true feelings. Anger, disappointment, concern—whatever it might be, Asena had spent two decades of her life guessing how her father felt about her, and that hadn’t become easier just because she’d started working for him.
“I’m sorry,” she managed between pants, clearly not ready to speak yet. “The sensations… intense… more than I—”
“Yes.” Yuito gave a barely perceptible nod, then continued in the same tone he might have used to dictate his daily reports, “Perhaps it would’ve been wiser to start with a memory fragment that didn’t involve Eidolon combat.”
“I’m sorry,” Asena said again, her embarrassment somehow helping to steady her breathing. “It wasn’t intentional. I’m still familiarizing myself with… with the subject’s imprint patterns.”
“Naturally. Are you ready to go again?”
Asena hesitated, just briefly but enough for her to know she’d hesitated too long. “Ye—”
“Clearly not,” Yuito decided for her, though even now, his voice and expression remained perfectly neutral. “I think we’re done for the day. The progress leaves much to be desired, but I daresay caution takes precedence. We couldn’t have the subject’s Kurator decommissioned too, could we?”
If she strained hard enough, Asena could convince herself that her father said this out of concern for her person. In any case, she was thankful that his advice aligned with her own state of mind.
Reliving Zelen Athelstan’s combat mission had been the most terrifying experience of her young life. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to get as far away from a Kuratorial workstation as possible.
Having settled on a course of action, the first thing she did was to disconnect the fluids from her intraosseous port. It was a routine action she’d performed thousands of times before, yet this time, she became acutely aware of the fact that her father still stood over her, watching her fumble with the tubing around the exposed parts of her sternum and collar bones.
She found her own discomfort absurd. Not since the early days of proto-Kurator training had she felt self-conscious about the necessary wardrobe concessions that came with the job. Yet in the presence of Yuito Shiranui, it felt as though everything about her had been placed under a microscope.
It was a sensation she needed to quickly get used to, considering the long-haul nature of her newest assignment.
“Before you go,” her supervisor spoke again. By now, he’d turned his permanently frowning eyes away from her and toward a loose button on the cuff of his uniform. “Make sure to check in on our subject. I need not remind you that, should our theory hold, he’s just remembered the same thing you did… and I imagine he’d be rather confused about being ejected mid-recollection. And don’t forget to submit your written report by 1600. Otherwise, you’re free to spend the rest of the day as you see fit. Dismissed, Corporal.”
With that, Colonel Yuito Shiranui, Commander of the Kurator Corps, turned and left without a second look.
He was exceptionally tall by Akropolitan standards, and nearly just as thin: traits that Asena herself had at least partially inherited. As such, even a tailor-made Joint Forces uniform ill-fitted Yuito Shiranui as a rule, yet he’d looked especially gaunt as of late.
Asena knew that he’d had his hands full the last several weeks, dealing with the fallout from the accident at the Reiter Garrison. She wondered, not for the first time, whether anyone at home cared for his health, and she wished he’d give her the chance to ask after him.
So, it was with a mixture of relief and frustration that Asena watched her father go. Both emotions only deepened her sense of self-admonishment. If her father could remain strictly professional around her, there was no reason she couldn’t do the same.
Yet as she reached for the headset again to fulfill Yuito’s instructions, she hesitated some more.
It wasn’t the memory of combat—still painfully fresh—that stayed her hand. Rather, in directly communicating with the subject himself, Asena was forced to engage with the aspect of her assignment that most unnerved her.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
More than experiencing what it was like to fight inside an Eidolon. More than flying head-first into an army of Syntropy machines. More than the very act of excavating and restoring another’s lost memories.
“Are you still there, Kingfisher?” Asena Shiranui spoke into the mic, trying her darnedest to keep her affect flat and her cadence mechanical. “This is Spiegel Delta-Upsilon. Please respond.”
A pause, and then Lieutenant Zelen Athelstan’s somewhat groggy voice cracked through the radio, “Silon? Did we just…? Was I—was I dreaming?”
Asena’s heart thumped against the IO port embedded within her sternum, and she felt herself grow hot for reasons that weren’t entirely clear. She did her best to hide the slight tremor in her voice as she continued, “Readings did show higher than normal brain activity during REM sleep, which may indicate that you were indeed in the midst of a vivid and emotionally charged dream.”
She waited for a response, but was met by only faint static. She then decided to keep pushing, though she had very little idea of how the real Delta-Upsilon would’ve behaved in this situation, “Do you remember anything from your dream, Kingfisher? Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”
“Please,” the voice that came back was startlingly weak, almost as if the speaker himself was fading away. “Please say my name.”
Asena froze.
She and her father had devised and rehearsed numerous scripts on the possible tracks of dialogue between her and Lieutenant Athelstan. This hadn’t been on any of the scripts.
“We’re on the JFB channels, Kingfisher,” she improvised, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t stumble and betray her human self. “Convention dictates that we—”
“You’re the only one.”
It was Asena’s turn to fill the waves with silence.
“You’re the only one that would call me by my name.”
It was all she could do to stifle the gasp that nearly escaped her. She’d surprised herself with the intensity of her own reaction to the subject’s words.
For despite the fact that Zelen Athelstan was her fiancé, and that he was a war hero whose name was celebrated all across Akropolis, she knew next to nothing about the man himself.
All she knew in this moment was that he was in pain. Pain for which she could offer no relief. Perhaps no one could.
No one except Spiegel Delta-Upsilon.
“Please get some rest, Kingfisher,” Asena willed her words onto the radio, speaking faster than she perhaps should’ve in her desperation to end the conversation. “I’ll call on you again, tomorrow. Maybe then we could discuss today’s events.”
She cut the connection without waiting for a response, then fled Terminal One like it was the scene of a crime.
~February 3rd, 140 AH~
~Joint Base Akra, Kurator Corps HQ~
“You asked to see me, sir?”
Even after becoming a full-fledged member of the military, Asena had rarely been inside her father’s office.
The Kurator Corps Commander’s office was a bare and austere affair, in stark contrast to Yuito’s study at home. Where the study was wrapped in lush carpet and adorned with expensive furniture for the eyes and feet of frequent guests, the office was the same sleek metal cage that filled a hundred other corners inside the JFB. The only things that were remotely distinct were the countless medals and certificates that lined the walls and a prototype workstation that sat collecting dust in one corner: a keepsake from the early years of Colonel Shiranui’s career.
Asena thought she knew her father well enough to surmise the reason behind the mismatch.
For the Tetrarchy, ‘home’ was a private space only in name. Anyone from the other Tetrarch families could call on them at any time, not to mention the endless procession of Sehermenschen and Essentials that knocked on their doors bearing gifts and petitions.
This office, on the other hand, was where Yuito spent most of his waking hours. It stood to reason that he’d want it to be a place of comfort and reflection. And Asena’s father was nothing if not a man defined by and most comfortable in his work and achievements.
“I was comparing your written report with the radio transcripts,” he said to her now, true to form, doing away with the personal to dive straight into work, “and I couldn’t help but notice a curious discrepancy. Care to explain why you omitted this from your report?”
He didn’t elaborate on what this was, because he didn’t need to. Asena felt herself flush slightly as she answered, as casually as she could, “The subject was clearly referring to something personal he’d shared with his Spiegel. As unusual as that might be, I didn’t deem it pertinent to the mission at hand, that being an attempt at restoring the subject’s combat readiness.”
Yuito stared at her with his permanent frown, as if waiting for her to offer more. When she didn’t, his normally impassive jaws hardened just a touch as he let out the subtlest of tsks.
“It seems to me,” he said as he readjusted his glasses, “that there remains… deficiencies in your understanding of the nature of this mission. Why do you think I’ve asked you to impersonate Spiegel Delta-Upsilon in all communications with the subject?”
Asena inwardly winced, for this was quickly becoming her least favourite topic of discussion. She couldn’t fully hide a slight petulance in her answer, “To engender a preexisting sense of familiarity. To expedite the rapport-building phase of therapy, in order to—”
Asena cut herself off, for at that moment, her father had tsked again. Now she felt flustered as much as sulky, for while Yuito frequently interrupted her, he’d rarely done so with such open display of disdain.
“You seem to have it in your head that Spiegel Delta-Upsilon is only an aid to our mission: a tool we can choose to employ or ignore as the situation calls for. Understand this, Corporal.”
Yuito stood, easily dwarfing Asena as he did. Then he leaned over his austere desk and let his frown deepen with every word as he went on.
“Spiegel Delta-Upsilon is the absolute crux of our mission. Our very success or failure hinges on your ability to replicate the so-called personal relationship between Zelen Athelstan and his Spiegel. And if he expects you to call him by his name, to whisper sweet nothings into his ear, to debase yourself and answer to his every twisted whim, for all I care… you will do it. The mission depends on it.”
Asena held herself rigid and returned her father’s gaze. Seemingly every muscle in her body braced and strained to keep the tears from bursting forth.
Perhaps in response to his daughter’s stricken face, or simply because he’d remembered himself, Colonel Shiranui relaxed and lowered himself back into his seat. Then he spoke in a much softer tone, with frowning eyes that pointed to something beyond Asena—something far beyond the very room the two of them occupied.
“And there’s one more thing I must correct you on.” If Asena’s eyes and ears hadn’t deceived her, her father’s bony epauletted shoulders sagged as he let out a sigh. In two decades of her life, she’d never seen him so tired—so defeated. “The mission isn’t to attempt the restoration of Lieutenant Athelstan’s Nexus attunement. We must get him back to fighting shape. Failure is not an option. And you’re the only one, Asena.
“You’re the only one that can make that happen.”