(Note: After a chance to get out of the house because of cabin fever and taking time to think about things, I decided to switch routes on this story and do this [correcting mistakes I made in episode #244191]. Be assured, scenes from that episode will be included [with corrections] in this and future episodes. Sorry about this and enjoy! G.)
Leipzig, Germany; the Johannapark (local time 8:22 PM)…
«Do you sense them now?»
A barely amused titter echoed in the minds of the two long range reconnaissance patrol soldiers — both women, a sergeant-major and a senior specialist — as they watched the young girl in the pretty dress sitting on a bench close to one of the fountains in the beautiful park to the west-southwest of downtown. Said girl, who looked like a young teenager, was relaxing with an iPod now in her pocket, earphones plugged into both ears. Both women watching her could barely hear Bach's The Art of Fugue echoing in their minds as they kept their telepathic link strong with their co-worker. «I do,» Annalise Garten — her friends called her "Anna" — replied as she relaxed and waited. «You know the special request for the Englishwoman, don't you?»
«We do,» the sergeant-major, Margarethe Bäcker, replied. «Silke and Anja will get her, Anna. You just take care of these monsters.»
A light yet totally mirthless smile crossed Anna's face. «But of course.»
"Well, well, well! Look what we have here, my friends…!"
Anna's eyes narrowed as she looked over her shoulder at three rather dapper-dressed men — with a fashion sense that was well over a century-and-a-half out of style — standing nearby, all with thin wooden sticks in their hands and held to their sides. "Good evening, gentlemen," she said as she calmly removed the iPod's earphones from her and moved to stop the playback before slipping it all away in her skirt.
Her eyes then glistened with an unholy fire.
"Are you prepared to die?"
Nearby…
Hidden under an invisibility cloak, Bellatrix Lestrange could only gape in shock as she watched the three men — vulgar and disgusting creatures all of them, but vital allies needed in the war against the blood-traitors and mudbloods she and her friends were preparing to fight in Britain — suddenly croak as they dropped their wands, began grasping their throats and started to levitate into the air. Surprised to realise that the muggle girl they were targeting for a revel was NO muggle, the former Azkaban lifetime inmate drew out her own wand and moved to aim at the girl…
…and then she gasped as the cloak protecting her was yanked away. "What…?!"
A fist smashed into her face, sending her stumbling to the ground as she dropped her wand. Instantly, a red-haired woman in what appeared to be strange patchwork clothing was over her, yanking off the portkey tied around her neck before she could use it to escape. "I'm afraid we have a different destination for you, Mrs. Lestrange. And please understand, I rather find it quite repulsive to strike such a beautiful woman, so I do give my apologies for the blow to your nose. Now, if you'll kindly go to sleep…"
With that, a hand grasped the intersection of Bellatrix's neck and shoulder, then squeezed hard. The witch gasped, and then she passed out. With that, the redhead's companion — a dusky-skinned woman with oily black hair and showing the markings of Turkish ancestry — drew out a small circular device and placed it on the unconscious witch's breastbone. "Activating materialiser lock," Anja Osman stated.
Bellatrix disappeared in a shower of energy. "Good," Silke Müller said with a nod before she looked over. «Sergeant-major, Lestrange is dealt with.»
«Excellent, Silke,» Margarethe replied. «Anna?»
The muffled thuds of three now-dead bodies falling onto the ground answered her. «Dealt with, Auntie,» Anna stated as she gave one of her adopted "aunts" a hopeful smile. «Now we can deliver them to the Magical Ministry.»
«I'll deal with that,» Margarethe's companion, Cristin Weber, replied.
And within a minute, there was no trace of any of them in the park…
Five hundred kilometres over Berlin…
Like many of the nations that were very eager to initially accept Avalonian help in constructing the Earth Defence Force, Germany had several large and many smaller spacedocks in orbit over its territory to act as base support for the several hundred planned starships of the Federal German Space Navy. In a curious echo of the Canadian setup, the Germans had three large stations. Two of which were poised over the main surface fleet bases at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. The third one, which served as the main space base for the elements of the German Defence Ministry committed to the Earth Defence Fleet and future interplanetary colonisation, orbited directly over the nation's capital. This station was known as Defence Space Base Command Bendlerblock, named in tribute to the old Imperial Navy headquarters down in Berlin.
Standing in a reception hall near one of the medical stations scattered throughout this giant complex, Sirius Black could only sigh as he gazed through the viewing ports in this gallery on the very large ship floating in the airless dockyard beyond. While the former Azkaban inmate and heir apparent to the leadership of his magical house back in Britain had found it quite easy to accept his transformed godson Harry Potter as his goddaughter Harri Evans, he still found what Harri was also associated with way too overwhelming at times to accept. Case in point: the space aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin in the holding bay of the space base before him, which had just returned from post-commissioning workups in two of the nearer solar systems to Earth alongside the American space carrier Saratoga and the British carrier Furious.
Still, he would not allow himself to allow his feelings to affect his better judgement. These Avalonians — who had been through a living hell that made his own stay in Azkaban seem like a picnic at times — were not just determined to ensure they would never again face enslavement, but would also ensure that the lone race trapped between some very big space powers would never face that either. And it was a lucky thing that the Urusians who had just come to Canada a couple days before had been so sportsman-like when they challenged Earth to a tag game. Then again, he had seen the CBC broadcast of what just happened down in Welland. Clearly, the father to the Niphentaxians' unwilling "goddess" was a very honourable and decent man deep down. He had even taken his daughter being married to none other than Moroboshi Tariko herself with some grace even if he did panic about the whole Tip'heng thing. Remembering what Harri had told him about the Noukiite summer star festival, Sirius laughed. Damn, if he had the chance, he'd have to find some way to get to that planet to join in, preferably with a nice hot witch like Hestia Jones at his side…
"Mister Black?"
"Yes?" he said as he turned around, nodding politely to the smiling nurse in the uniform of the German Air Force — she was a captain — standing nearby. "How is she?"
"We've finished the soul-transfer right now and are incinerating her old body as we speak, sir," the nurse stated as she walked up to hand him a cup of coffee, which he gladly accepted with a smile and nod; he would definitely not argue about the hospitality these people showed to visitors. "She should awaken within a couple hours. Preliminary psionic scans indicate that whatever influence Mister Riddle had pushed onto her soul is broken, but we are prepared if the guilt that might appear because of it drives her to do something rash. The Master Healer states she'll be ready to be returned to England through Her Majesty's Starbase Whitehall within a week."
"Thank you. Oh, may I ask, who was it that captured her? A special team of Unspeakables from the German Magical Ministry?"
A shake of the head. "No, sir. It was a squad from the 20th Special Surveillance and Reconnaissance Battalion; they're based here at the station."
Sirius blinked. "What sort of people are they?"
"Are you aware of the Special Air Service in your own country?"
A nod. "Yes."
"The 22nd Regiment of that unit is tasked to do things our 20th Battalion does."
He nodded. "Counter-terrorism, you mean."
"Especially if it deals with a metahuman matter. Magical affairs would fall under that category." The nurse then perked on hearing the door open, and then she turned to accept the offered salute from the just-arrived sergeant, presently dressed in garrison clothes. "Sergeant Garten, welcome back. This is Sirius Black, Mrs Lestrange's cousin and Miss Evans' godfather. He came to us to await his cousin's awakening."
Sirius blinked. "Um…how old are you?"
Anna gave him a tired smile. "Four months shy of my fourteenth birthday, sir."
The wizard tried not to drop his coffee on hearing that! "Bloody hell…"
Later…
"So this girl — who would be a third-year at Hogwarts — is some sort of muggle version of a hit-witch?" a dazed yet quite happy Bellatrix asked.
"Yeah," Sirius stated. "She was actually born with psychokinetic powers; that's what muggles call the type of power where you can either move or destroy things with your mind or completely transform something into something else, either temporarily or permanently. A mix of conjuration, transfiguration and battle charms."
His cousin's eyes widened. "Merlin! You're kidding me…"
"No joke, cousin," he shook his head. "She was adopted by an Avalonian couple after her parents got killed in an airplane crash a couple years ago. They discovered her skill, and then started training her. Germany's one of those places that don't mind accepting underage Avalonians into their forces to boost their efforts into helping all of Earth get into space; Britain's the same way. Once the German special forces got their hands on her, they turned her into something that would give even Mad-Eye Moody nightmares." He took a deep breath. "If you had been on an actual raid in Germany, Bella, she would have probably been the one sent to kill you. And she could do it without leaving a mark. That thing in Leipzig you were involved with today was the last step she and her people had to do to wipe out the senior pureblood fanatics in the country. Voldemort…" — he ignored the slight wince she made on mentioning that name — "…won't be getting any sort of continental support if he tries to take over the Ministry."
She nodded, feeling a rush of fatigue overcome her. "You saved me…"
"If we can, cousin, we'll try to save everyone," Sirius promised. "We'll try to go after Cissi next. Draco as well. But I can't say when."
She nodded. "Thanks…" she whispered as her eyes closed.
He grinned. "Thank Harri when you meet her," he whispered as she fell asleep…
Watching this from a security monitor in her own quarters, Anna could only sigh as she felt a tear in her eye as she gazed on the two adults in the recovery room. After reading up on Bellatrix Lestrange thanks to her unit's working ties with the German Magical Affairs Ministry's Department of Mysteries, the young Avalonian psychokinetic could only shake her head in wonder. Had this woman come to Germany fighting for that Voldemort monster, Anna would have killed her without a second's thought or hesitation. And, given how much she had changed from when the day her adopted parents had found her in the wake of her real parents' death, that she was able to feel that much surprised her.
"I…need…Mai…" she whispered.
Reaching over to close off her link to the base's mainframe, Anna rose and proceeded to undress. Once nude, she walked into the washroom to take a shower. The water — on Bendlerblock Space Base, there were massive water recycling and purification machines the size of the old airship Hindenburg to handle the needs of everyone on the station — always soothed her and allowed her mind to get into the right sort of mood for when she went to sleep and drifted into what Avalonians called "the Dreamscape," a sort of border-land between the living realm and the Te'a — the Realm of the Gods as Anna herself defined that strange energy field all her kind could sense both consciously and sub-consciously — that the bioroid race used as sort of a dream version of the Internet.
And while Kujū Mai was herself not an Avalonian, she had two Avalonian best friends in her middle school class in Tōkyō who had helped expand her own understanding of the great gift she inherited from her late mother…
…and, by some odd quirk of the Te'a, given Turm Annalise Stefanie Garten the means by which she could grasp onto a humanity she feared every day she was losing.
«Mai…»
On the Jōetsu Shin-kansen between Tōkyō and Takasaki…
"Anna-chan…"
Hearing that come out of his daughter, Kujū Shūichi blinked before he stared at her. "What is it, Mai?" he asked as he walked over to gently grasp her shoulder.
Mai blinked as she felt that warmth touch her mind, and then her cheeks began to flush as her two best friends, Sugimoto Yumiko and Ikenami Rie, gazed knowingly at her. "You have to tell him, Mai-chan," Rie then stated as she reached over to pat her shoulder.
Shûichi blinked. "Tell me what?"
"Oji-chan, it's part of the reason that we're coming with you to protect Mai-chan from whoever those goons were back at Ueno," Yumiko stated as she smiled at him. "You'll find it hard to accept at first even after knowing about Mai-chan's powers. But believe me, if this works out like we hope it will, it will do Mai a lot of good."
"And her life won't be as sad as you just tried to make it out as," Rie added.
The executive winced on hearing that — he had been quick to sense the icy disapproval in Rie's voice when she said that — and then he sighed as he gazed once more on his child. He hadn't want to get the other two girls involved, but he couldn't deny that there was something quite unique about them. Not Mai-type unique, but still unique. Appearing like they did when Shûichi had forced Mai to run for Ueno station…and they had been welding futuristic energy pistols that came straight out of a sci-fi movie. And after they had helped take down that old swordsman's thugs with those weapons, they had gladly grabbed him and yanked him away for Ueno station to rejoin Mai, clearly unbothered by the fact that they had attacked a group he suspected were none other than agents of the Kaiete Information Research Group. A group he knew was directly affiliated with the Wisdom Alliance.
"So who is Anna?" he then asked.
Mai smiled lightly. "Her name is Anna Garten. She's like me, Otō-chan…and more, too. She's also like Rie-chan and Yumiko-chan." She gazed at him with happy tears in her eyes. "She's almost fourteen. And believe it or not, she's a trained special forces soldier in the German Army, a part of their elite reconnaissance patrol force." As the executive's jaw dropped in shock, she then sighed. "She wants to be my lover, believe it or not."
After hearing that, Shūichi tried not to collapse on the floor as he barely kept himself from fainting. As Rie and Yumiko gave him sympathetic looks, we…
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(Posted Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:03)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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