The blue glow of the teleportal dims and fades, and Victor One breathes a steady sigh of relief behind the visor of her helmet and the comforting wrap of her service armor. It’s clean but shows signs of battles of the past on her plate armor, which bears the customary brass and silver colors, and golden runes of defense adorned on her gauntlets and greaves. Even with this many years under her belt. Her pistol sidearm sits within reach but is fastened to the soft-shell outer Kevlar wraps that serve as rigging for her gear.
Even as often as she uses the teleport to get to and from her dedicated craft and calling, she still prefers walking or driving.
Unfortunately, when you're a Valkyrie who's in an organization of some of the finest women and men from across the planet, you don't always get to choose what you want to do, and practicality takes precedence. She's greeted by Victor Six, slightly out of regulation with her hair not tied back. Nothing's worse than getting blinded in your helmet or someone grabs it in a brawl. “Misha, hair please.”
“Oh! Sorry ma’am!” She scrabbles across the desk just adjacent to her workstation and pulls out a scrunchie to tie back her brown hair, and she does her best to do it quickly. She stands at attention and salutes her superior. “Aye, didn't expect you back so soon!”
Victor One smiles behind her visor–about the only thing people can see is the flicker of the arcane HUD projected on the inside, and maybe her azure eyes and raven-black hair. Despite the bulk, the helmet is quite cozy and light, and the wingtips of the helm serve as additional sensors and radio frequency antennae. It still restricts her peripheral too much for her liking though, and R&D has been working on addressing that. Becky, one of their more recent recruits is a genius with magitech systems, and she's probably working even this late at night with Carolyn. An even more robust power armor set would go a long way to increasing their field effectiveness–and it’s already higher than even SAF’s most elite units.
One of the advantages of private funding and generous donations from those that seemingly found their way to them–they could afford the best, pick the brightest and most determined, and not have to worry about a huge army. The Valkyries are a smaller organization that punches monumentally higher than their numbers would suggest. Victor one knows that record goes back millennia, even. At least the Conclave hasn’t had the audacity to put them under the regulations of other PMCs. That respect has been earned for countless generations.
“At ease, Misha. I tied up some errands a little early, and we've got new assignments. Something is brewing in my hometown, and I think it's big.” She gets straight to the point and has Misha walk with her, past the workshop and down the hall to the briefing room.
“Elaborate, ma’am,” Misha says with a quick nod, and her soft brown eyes are still filled with that flicker of youth and daring that all recruits started with. Most kept it. The seasoned veterans, though, dimmed a bit when they dealt with the worst of humanity and eldritch horrors from beyond the world. “Victor Three was saying you've been on edge. Your kid might be Awakening?”
“She's smart enough to dig where she's not supposed to, that one,” Victor One says with a slight chuckle. “That conversation is coming sooner rather than later, I just hope I'm not missing the mark and she calls me all frantic about scales, claws, and wings. Actually, knowing her, she'd be wearing a beaming smile, that little radiant ray of sunshine that she is.”
“You never talk about your kid,” Misha says. Victor One nods.
“You know why.”
“Right. Personal deals. Sorry. I know some of the knights talk about family, but we don’t know everything about each other,” Misha apologizes and gets a gentle tilt of the head from her. She pulls out a datapad. “I got a report Sunday night, just came in–there was a Talons operation that got blown sky-high, according to a report from SAF. They’re sending a team to investigate, by one of their top guys that earns his paycheck. Dillenger.”
“Dillenger?” Of course, she knows his name. He’s been one of the best and brightest SAF agents of the past decade, a man who is deep into his career and could be command material, but chooses to stay in intelligence analysis, and some covert actions where sensitivity in Kin/human relationships is key. Dillenger is a man of integrity and decency she has personally worked with twice now, in different operations. Divorced, but a loving, caring family man whose wife couldn’t live with the notion that there were a few nights he almost didn’t come home alive. He also had a daughter–Mystra? Victor One is usually sharp with names. Misha answers her before she ponders further.
“The Talons had a deep-cover operation in the Mount Syren Mine of Opechea Falls, Colorado. According to the field operative, they have a device that can trigger Awakenings. There are other notes but it’s crazy, ma’am. Sorry, technician's words, not mine,” she says with a blush on her rosy cheeks. “There’s also a mention of local talent that went in and investigated–but nothing else on that.”
“I’ll follow up with Dillenger,” she responds suddenly. In my own backyard? The brazenness of these monsters is escalating. First the school graffiti, now this? What else are they up to? “Keep the techs going on this. Report back when additional reports become available. The Talons have been increasing ground operations and their equipment has been getting better. Find out who’s funding them.”
“Done. We’ve hit snags–they’re covering their tracks. Their money laundering has been stepping up their game this time.” Misha taps in notes while they open the comm room, where Victor One sees other valkyries in armor, but unhelmeted and working at their stations, preparing equipment, looking over charts and intelligence, and a few opening up a 3D arcane hologram of schematics of a facility deep in the forests of Canada. “Victor One, we’ve got the Menazari base on visual–SAF ground teams are on standby, waiting for us to port in. They say the site is as cold as a grave.”
“Nonsense. That's what they want us to think. The Menazari are thieves and pilferers, except now they’re killers who took on the wrong arms shipment.” Victor One glances at the displays and talks to the command leads before they head to the teleportal after a briefing. This task should be a cakewalk–SAF rarely called them as backup, and when they did, it usually was a truly dire situation.
It felt nice to be needed–even as thankless as this job is, She felt immense pride in what they did, and how they contributed to the safety of the world, even if no one ever really knew about it in the long run. That was the way of the Valkyrie–to stay out of the spotlight of history, as best as they could.
That didn’t always prove to be the case. Little boys and girls would occasionally ask them to sign stuffed dolls in some of the places they visited, and she obliged a few times–the smiles on their faces were all the payment she truly needed, fighting the monsters of their world.
With the briefing and the daily updates out of the way, she heads to her personal office, at the end of the hall, and enters the security codes–one could never be too careful, even in the heart of Valhalla. She clicks the door closed, and powers on her laptop from her pack, and has to take the armored greaves off. Power armor does have some practical limitations, and she settles down her helmet–while making sure the glass is polarized.
It wasn’t that everyone didn’t know who she was. It’s window dressing. She’d been thrown into this position several years ago after an unprecedented tragedy, and there were secrets she’d had to keep buried in her heart as a result of that.
Secrets she would take to her grave to protect others.
Secrets that would be unbearably painful if revealed to the wrong people. She knows that secrecy can't last forever. She glances at the picture on her desk of her daughter, who looks just like the spitting image of her. Her husband got the short end of the stick–she got his hellcat ferocity and electric personality, but she really is her mothers’ daughter, she thinks with a smile.
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Well, time to get started for the day–she checks her secured email for any urgent messages, but there isn’t anything even remotely close to crisis mode on her cover job. Nursing and traveling to conferences might last a while longer, but her daughter is smart–uncannily smart. She doesn't know how one of her other friends did it with her son for so long, that must have been difficult. She still doesn’t even know why she never even mentions her husband–it must have been a very terrible relationship, prior to her involvement in the Valkyries.
A ping comes in on the arcane communicator. She quickly puts her helmet back on, if only to protect her identity. Clark Kent glasses aren’t going to cut it for this. They couldn’t chance their identity being leaked again.
Certainly not after the last incident. That had been an unprecedented disaster, and she suspects the Talons had a hand with it, with a bunch of freelance, highly trained, highly funded murder army that had been thrown their way.
That murder army had been effortlessly slaughtered by her predecessor, and she has truly lived up to her title. The only survivor of that battle had been their leader–a monstrosity of a man in magitech armor they’re still trying to find, almost six years later. A wayward glance to the other frame on her desk has her thinking, when she looks at the woman in the picture.
Did we do the right thing, Trisha?
The arcanlink waits for her response, and she clicks the activation button after a second. “Dillenger? To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asks calmly when his image pops up, slightly fatigued. He's been likely working without a break.
“Victor One, I must apologize for the unorthodox nature of this call. This is the most secure line I’ve got. King is helping co-opt the Talons. This is big.” Her eyes widen slightly.
“Our enigma? He’s personally involved?”
“That is all I can say over this line. My counterpart on the ground is working with others on this to get to the bottom of their activities, because they’re as low profile as we can get.” Levine lets out a sigh over the call. This weariness he's trying to wear subtly isn't like him. “They’re using kids in their experiments. Kids. They’re conscripting child soldiers out of the newly Awakened drakensouls and half-dragons. I’ve got four recorded instances of runaways in the last week thanks to my counterparts’ sharp eyes. This is the tip of the iceberg. I need your help finding King, and who he’s working with.”
“This wasn’t in the report–”
“Victor One, there are reasons for certain small omissions in the reports,” he says with his usual professionalism. “I can’t reveal much, because I think King has men inside SAF. I’m moving my operation to Opechea Falls tomorrow, and I may need Valkyrie resources to aid us in staying off the radar. King is dangerous. Beyond any other adversary we’ve encountered, he is the first one to give me a true sense of respect for his skill. And worse, Robespierre Crosomer has been confirmed alive and co-leading the Talons again.”
Her cup of coffee nearly gets fumbled out of her hands–useless, considering she’s still got her helmet on. That man should have been dead and buried seven hundred years ago. His war against the Conclave had led to the loss of more Valkyries in five years than the previous several hundred. “How can he be alive?”
“Resilient Sphere. Some kids found it when they reported it to my counterpart on the ground, among other things, he's been out and free for a few years now, at least. We may even have a partial identity match with the other leader. A woman named ‘Val’. I’m still tracking leads on my end discreetly, but I’m operating under the assumption King is three steps ahead. They’re getting massive funding from somewhere, and I think it has to be a corporate sponsor. A damn big one.”
“Which kids?” She latches onto that particular little detail–what were they doing exploring a mine, of all places? Dumb teenagers on a dare? No, the fact that they got out alive at all and she wasn’t reading a casualty report is telling enough that this was a truly set of unique circumstances.
“Sorry Victor One, I’m protecting their identities for now. But they did a damn fine job getting intelligence–”
“They flattened the mine,” she says in a raised tone. “Was that Deshandrea’s doing?”
“Incorrect. The Talons had the site rigged with demolition charges. The destruction was pre-planned to cover their involvement, and eliminate all traces of their presence, and Deshandrea found out they extracted massive hordes of mana crystals from the mine, too. We’re talking low billion-dollar valuation if the shipping manifests were converted from silver to mana crystal prices. Victor One, if the Talons aren’t blowing smoke, if they can Awaken two million dragons and undo Ascension, we are looking at a complete and utter shattering of Veil protocol. We won’t be able to live in the shadows anymore. And that might be just the start. Treat this as a true crisis.”
She sits back in her seat and processes this. Dillenger would not call them unless he believed the evidence was there to support it. He had called them only once before this. And that had been a truly dire situation. “How sure are you?”
“Ninety-five percent. The Talons lack energy resources to pull it off at scale, and they’re missing translations that work to activate the rune matrix on the device, based on the photos we were able to get. It’s ancient. It’s nothing any mage ever produced. Hell, there’s even an early depiction of Gaia on it–the oldest one we’ve ever found. I’m not a historian and I know this is important.” She glances down at the datapad from earlier. Something is bothering her–who exactly had helped the groundside agent? Who could have crossed paths with him? She’d heard of Deshandrea, he was posing as a student in the same high school that–
Oh there is no way that–no, actually, knowing my luck, it's exactly what happened.
“Dillenger, I’m going to ask a very cryptic question. I don’t suppose any of these ‘helpers’ you aren’t naming happened to have Awakened into a male Maridian and Azure hybrid recently, or if one of them is a female Auran goldback?”
That five seconds of silence that follows leaves her shaking her head. “Um…how do you know that?” Dillenger can’t see it behind her visor, but her instant reaction pretty much spells out her feelings on the matter.
“Oh shit.”
“Why do I feel like you know these two?” Dillenger sighs.
“Dillenger, tell Deshandrea that if what I think has happened, has happened, I will personally be hanging his wings in my office if he lets either of those two get hurt. And if you breathe a word to either of them about this conversation before I can talk to them personally by the end of the week, you can forget about the next coffee not-date.”
He leaves a rather telling pause. “...It wasn’t a date, was it?”
“Dillenger, you’re a smart man, but yes, it was. I’ve got operations to plan and the Talons are mobilizing on new operations we’re tracking, keep me in the loop. The second things look like they’re about to dive out of control, call me, and ring every alarm bell from here to London.”
“Done.” With that simple acknowledgment, the call ends, and she practically tears her helmet off and rubs the bridge of her nose. This couldn’t be any worse timing.
Either Drenar, Julia, or both of them have already Awakened.
And now, they’re right in the middle of a brewing conflict with the Talons. And she can’t do a damn thing to intervene without looking extremely suspicious and compromising her position.
This week is just snowballing downhill. But, if there is one silver lining, she knows one thing for certain: They're in the hands of two of the best and brightest of SAF. Dillenger she trusts, based on his unwavering professionalism, either behind the data analytics, or his guile on the field of battle.
The downside is, it's going to be one massive headache waiting for her back at home after her ‘conference’ wraps up.