[Comartemis]

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<.<

>.>

*Drops a package and runs*

Spoiler for From the Diary of Alexander Crestwood:

Dear Diary…

To whom it may concern…

GAH! How the fuck do you start one of these things?!

…Alright, to whoever’s reading this, if you’re not me, then prepare to have your lifespan cut drastically short as soon as I find out you’ve been poking through my stuff. And no, you’re not getting a ten-second head start before I start swinging!

Unless you’re Hayate. Or Fate. Or Nanoha, for that matter. But if this is Vita or Signum, rest assured Hayate will be hearing about this, mark my words!

…Gah, this isn’t working. Time to start over.

…

…I guess the best place to start one of these things is at the beginning.

The events of the past year started to really get to me a few weeks ago. I’ve gone from a rookie junior superhero to worthless street trash to a friend of some of the most powerful mages I’ve ever met.

…not that I’ve met too many mages period… But anyways…

People I’ve met often tell me that change is a part of life, and logically of course they’re right. In my case, however, they simply have no idea how right they are. I’ve had more ups and downs in the past year than most people have in a lifetime, and frankly I think it’s starting to get to me, hence the diary. Hayate seems to think it’ll help; Vita just thinks it’ll keep me from going mental, even if she knows damn well that Crestwoods can’t go mental… at least, not in the usual ways…

And there I go again, rambling away like some old maid at a dinner party. Okay, time to find a point to begin this little story at. I guess I’ll start with a little background information to kick things off and help with my focus.

***

My name is Alexander Crestwood, last scion of the house of Crestwood. You may refer to me as Alexander, Alex, Lex, or Xander, as all of those are pretty cool names and I can't pick just one between them. As of Earth year 2006, I’m all of eleven years old.

Yeah, I know I don’t talk much like an eleven-year old, and believe me I don’t act much like one either. ‘Course, most of my friends don’t talk or act like pre-teens either, except for Nanoha… kinda. She’s about as innocent and idealistic as you would expect a kid her age to be, but with the kind of power she has and the results she keeps getting, maybe she’s entitled to be more idealistic than usual… or maybe it’s a Takamachi thing, I dunno. Point is, the lot of us are a lot more mature than most adults for one reason or another. I have my reasons, but I’ll get to that in a few minutes.

So. Alex Crestwood, last scion of the house of Crestwood. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it, I’d actually be a bit more worried if you had. The Crestwoods are an old family that dates back to the Belkan Empire, back when they had stuff like genetic manipulation and used it to make rare skills. Waaaaay back when, the Crestwoods designed themselves over the course of a few generations to be able to turn into human machines, suppressing their emotions for short periods of time in order to enhance their thought processes; eliminate emotion and focus on logic was the idea, and it made us very efficient and very lethal killers and hired assassins. Time was there were dozens of us, but a few dozen generations later, I’m the last one left, no thanks to the Yakuza.

I have no memories of my parents since they died—excuse me, were killed—when I was still in diapers, and everything I know about them comes from data journals like this one stashed away in Scarlet Thunder’s AI core. I don’t know what prompted them to come to Earth of all places, this planet being off-limits to extradimensional travelers by TSA law… But then again, mom and dad where never the types to let silly little things like rules stop them from doing whatever they wanted, and for some reason they wanted to come here, so they did. As near as I can tell, they got mixed up with the American mafia around the time I was born, and lent out their services as assassins to the mob. If the amount of money left in my just-recently-discovered trust fund is any indication, they were pretty damn good at their jobs too. Good enough to encourage the Mafia to expand into Tokyo Japan, Yakuza turf since god only knows when.

The journals don’t say what happened, but I can probably take a fairly accurate guess; somebody screwed up. Even mages have their limits, and a barrier jacket will only stop so many bullets before it shorts out and leaves its’ wearer to the tender mercies of a lucky gunman. Mom and dad most likely walked into a trap of some kind after they and their Mafia friends pissed off the wrong gang, leaving them dead and me with just mom’s old device to remember them by.

I got placed in an orphanage and raised there until I was about six or so, when I first figured out how to trigger Scarlet Thunder and discovered that I was a mage.

Now when you’re a six-year old kid, especially when you live in an orphanage where it seems like nobody cares about your existence, suddenly discovering you’ve got what amounts to superpowers is the best thing in the world, like ten birthdays and a hundred Christmases all decided to come at once on the same day and all the presents are for you. Of course, the very first thing you’re going to want to do with those powers, especially when you’re an American kid raised on Japanese comic books, is take those newfound powers out on the streets and go all Son Goku on the asses of any evil-doers you might happen to encounter. I was no exception. Lucky for me, however, Scarlet Thunder had a good deal more sense then I had back then, and talked me into postponing my career as Mahou Shonen Son Goku, magical monkey boy extraordinaire, at least until I had, you know, learned how to cast spells.

Of course, when you’re living in an orphanage with virtually nothing in the way of privacy, practicing magic spells with Thunder’s assistance isn’t the easiest thing to do without drawing an unwanted crowd. So I started staying late after school, sticking around in the bathrooms or on the roof after hours and just practicing my spellcasting, first learning the basics, then refining the basics, then refining my control over the basics and so on and so forth until I was sure beyond doubt that I was the biggest badass this side of a Type-Moon game. Unfortunately, by the time I was ready for this, I was about ten years old and I was about to be adopted by people I was pretty sure had something to do with the Yakuza.

Well fuck that, I wasn’t about to let those punks get their mitts on me, even if I wasn’t completely sure that they actually had anything to do with the Yakuza…

Hey, it’s only paranoia if they’re not out to get you, right?

So when I was ten years old, about April of 2005, I bolted. Well, first I beat the crap out of some random street thugs and took all their money, just enough to buy me a train ticket out of Tokyo. After that... well, after that it was up to me and Thunder, wasn’t it?

I took the train south out of Tokyo into the Tokyo Greater Metropolitan Area. If you look that up on a map, you’ll see that that’s basically the whole area around Tokyo bay. With no real destination in mind, I got off the train at about… Yokohama, I think, and started heading south, beating up on punks and stealing their valuables along the way. If you’ll go back to that map, trace a path down the coastline from Tokyo down to the Miura peninsula at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. If you look reeeeeaaaally closely you’ll spot a little town on the very tip of the peninsula called Uminari City.

It was in this unassuming little town where things started to get interesting…

For the record, the first-person narrative style is going to come and go whenever the story needs a little expository dialogue instead of the usual third-person perspective. The diary entries will come and go, usually only as paragraphs inserted here and there in the story, as opposed to drawn-out chapters like this prologue was.

I'd also like to note that this is the first piece of fiction I've written since junior high, so go easy on me, 'kay?