Nanoha FanFiction Discussion

[Moczo]

Originally Posted by 00-Raiser

Materials no Jikan chapter 2: Such a Long Day

Chapter 1 can be found here. This chapter is much longer

Spoiler for MnJ chapter 2: Such a Long Day:

Yuuno moaned lightly as he awoke, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He attempted to rise and begin another day, but the arms tightly encircling him made that impossible. Glancing over he was met with a blast of blue resting on his shoulder.

“Not again…” He sighed as he attempted to pry Material-L’s hands away. Rai would often climb into his bed during the night despite him telling her not too. Unfortunately the girl had the strength of a gorilla, so freeing himself always proved to be a difficult task. Sighing again, he let his head roll to the other side.

There his eyes met with Material-S’s.

“Good morning, Yuuno-san.” Seikou greeted flat.

“Gah!” Yuuno jerked. “S-Seikou, what are you doing in my bed too?!”

“… My apologies.” The brunette said calmly as she sat up. “After witnessing Rai-chan do it, I decided to experience it for myself. Is it that much of a bother?”

“Err, well…”

“Hey, peons!” Material-D burst through the bedroom door, only to stop and glare at the scene before her. “And here I was wondering why you weren’t around to serve me! How dare you engage in those activities without your harem mistress present?!”

“No, Yami, you’re…” Yuuno began.

“You are mistaken, Material-D.” Seikou interrupted. “We were merely sharing the same bed, nothing more. If you wanted to join us, you had the opportunity but you are the one who decided she have her own room.”

“Like I’m going to share a room with lowly servents!” Yami huffed. “Well whatever you’re doing doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m hungry and you don’t have breakfast ready!”

“Breakfast?!” Rai suddenly shot up. “I want waffles!”

“Yes, that sounds like a grand idea.” Yami nodded and pointed to Yuuno. “Now get to work!”

Yuuno groaned. How did he end up in this mess?

X-X-X

“… I told you to teach them, not seduce them.” Chrono said flatly.

“I didn’t!” Yuuno insisted. “They just decided on this harem business on their own!”

“Well, I suppose I can’t blame you.” Chrono went on without a hitch. “Teachers often take advantage of their students, and I suppose if you can’t score the real things, their evil clones are a fine substitute.”

“How dare you!” Yuuno exploded. “I would never stoop so low! And even if it’s you Chrono, I won’t stand for you to speak of them like that! They may be copies, but they are not evil nor are they merely substitutes for the others! They’re their own unique individuals and deserve to be treated as such!”

“So you’re saying you have no intention of taking advantage of them.”

“Of course not!” Yuuno shouted.

“Then you should have no problem living with them.”

“No problem at all!”

“Good, it’s decided then.” Chrono smirked.

Yuuno blinked before it dawned on him. “… Wait, what?”

X-X-X

“Chrono that bastard…” The young archaeologist muttered as he mixed the batter. His older friend sure knew how to manipulate him, and it pissed Yuuno off. Yuuno and the Materials had been quickly set up in a house all their own after that. It wasn’t a very large residence, with only two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bath, and a living room. The original intent was for Yuuno to have his own room while the Materials all shared one, however when they arrived Yami wasn’t pleased.

“I object! Why should I have to share? As your king I demand to have my own room!”

Though Yuuno tried to fight it, Yami wouldn’t give in. It also didn’t help that the other two didn’t have a problem with Yami’s proposed arrangement. And so, Yami got the single room to herself while Yuuno had to share with Rai and Seikou.

He considered moving to the couch, but Rai wouldn’t let him.

“But I want to sleep with sensei!” She had pleaded. Yuuno wasn’t sure if he gave in to her puppy dog eyes or the possibility she might break something if he made her mad, but he ended up occupying one of the three single beds all the same.

Yuuno would always have to dash out in the morning and knock on the door before entering since Rai had no qualms about stripping in front of him. Even so, the blue haired girl often forgot to close the door so he did catch the occasional glance. At least Seikou had a sense of shame.

Sometimes he wondered about the nature of the Materials. They were copies of Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate that the Book of Darkness’s defence program had created so it could continue to survive and Yuuno theorized that their personalities were taken from the subconscious of his friends. Rai was extremely childish and prone to temper tantrums, acting like the selfish kid Fate never had the chance to be. On the other hand, Seikou was mature and polite, the kind of girl Nanoha probably aspires to be. While he doubted Hayate secretly wanted to rule the world, she had been confined to a wheelchair for most of her life. That weakness probably had her desiring more power, a desire that the darkness had amplified and twisted.

Even if his theory was true, it didn’t make them any less human in Yuuno’s eyes.

“Hey, mongrel! Stop introspecting and hurry up with those waffles!” Yami demanded.

“Yes, your majesty…” He droned sarcastically before realising it was the wrong thing to say.

“So you finally understand your place.” Yami leaned back smugly. “It’s about time!”

“Please do not mind her.” Seikou said beside him, stirring her own bowl of batter.

“I try not to but sometimes it’s hard…” He sighed before shaking his head and smiling. “Thanks for helping out, Seikou. I really appreciate it.”

“Think nothing of it.” Seikou replied. Yuuno swore he could see a ghost of a smile on her face. He honestly didn’t know how he’d handle things without her around.

“Do you like waffles, yeah we like waffles, do you like pancakes, yeah we like pancakes, do you like French toast, yeah we like French toast, do do do do can’t wait to get a mouthful!” Rai sang happily as she banged the butt of her fork and knife on the table.

“… I hope we don’t have to make pancakes and French toast too…” Yuuno chuckled nervously.

“Do not worry, Yuuno-san.” Seikou reassured him. “I am certain she shall forget about it soon.”

X-X-X

They got away with just the waffles and after cleaning up and getting ready, the four of them headed to the Infinity Library.

On top of teaching the Materials, Yuuno still had the task of organizing the library on his plate and somehow he managed to juggle both. Since he couldn’t let them out of his sight, the three girls had to accompany him to the library, much to Yami’s dismay. She found the place to be boring and unsuited for a great ruler such as herself, but she had been convinced that she had a duty to watch over her subjects.

Of course the ‘watching over’ part didn’t last long, and the silver haired girl often took what she called ‘royal naps.’ She was currently engaged in one of those.

While his magic ran its searches, Yuuno glanced over to Yami’s sleeping form sprawled out on one of the ledges. He couldn’t help but note how serene and down right cute her sleeping face looked. It was far more pleasing than her scowling visage and sharp tongue.

Next he checked on Rai, who was floating off to the side surrounded by books. Yuuno never expected the Infinity Library to stock picture books, but sure enough it did. The twin tailed girl had one open in her hands and was reading it rather intently. Yuuno was somewhat proud to note that she held the book right side up.

“Yuuno-san, here are the books you require.” Seikou announced as she floated up to him with a stack of tomes.

“That’s great, thanks.” Yuuno smiled. “You can just put them there.”

Seikou complied and when her task was complete she merely sat on the air next to Yuuno. He was aware of her closeness, but he actually found some comfort in it. His life had been rather hectic recently, so this nice and quiet moment was extremely welcome.

“I am pleased to see you all getting along so well.” A new voice noted. Yuuno turned to the recent arrival.

“Oh, hello Reinforce.” He greeted the ancient device. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Hey! It’s boobie-book-lady!” Rai bounced up and flew over, grabbing onto Reinforce and burying her face in her chest. “You’re so big and bouncy and soft!”

“I thank you.” Reinforce smiled with a soft blush. Seikou stood and bowed politely and Reinforce returned the gesture to the best of her ability. Yami continued to snooze.

“What can I do for you today?” Yuuno asked.

“Nothing, I just wanted to see how you were doing.” She replied.

“Well, I’m managing to get by somehow.” Yuuno smiled sheepishly.

“Yuuno-sensei is great!” Rai beamed. “He made us waffles!”

“I see,” Reinforce patted Rai’s head. “Thank you for taking such good care of them, Yuuno.”

“No, I’m really not doing that much…” Yuuno scratched the back of his head.

“Yuuno-san is far too modest.” Seikou noted.

“Yes, we all owe you a great deal.” Reinforce nodded. “If it weren’t for you we wouldn’t be able to continue to exist and live peacefully like this. Thanks to your research the defence program has been split up and sealed away within the four of us where it is not powerful enough to cause any more harm.”

“It was the least I could do…” He flushed.

“Oh, look who it is.” Yami yawned as she floated down. “What are you doing here?”

“You look well Material… Pardon, Yami.” Reinforce smiled.

“Call me your majesty!” Yami huffed. “Know your place you dusty old book!”

“The same as always.” Reinforce noted. “If she gives you too much trouble, please feel free to ask for my assistance.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.” Yuuno shrunk a bit under Yami’s glare.

“Hrmph, well we should be done for the day!” Yami declared. “We’re leaving!”

“But I’m not…” Yuuno tried, but Yami grabbed his arm and pulled him along.

“I said we’re leaving!”

“Okay!” Rai cheered, pulling herself away from Reinforce and following the others. “See you boobie-book-lady!”

Seikou bowed again and left as well.

“I wish you luck.” Reinforce said softly.

X-X-X

Yuuno sighed for the umpteenth time that day as he flopped down onto the couch. The moment of peace earlier had been fleeting, and his current time alone would probably prove to be the same.

“NO, I DON’T WANNA!!!” Rai’s shout rang through the house. The pounding of footsteps followed and the girl in question ran into the living room.

Completely naked.

Yuuno only had his saliva to do a spit take with as he got a full look at her young naked body. Seikou entered the room soon after, but at least she had to sense to wrap a towel around herself.

“Rai-chan, it is time for your bath.” She said calmly.

“No! I don’t wanna take a bath!” Rai ran up to Yuuno. “Sensei, I don’t have to take a bath, right?!”

“Err, you, ah, um…” Yuuno fumbled with his words as he remembered he should shut his eyes. “Yes, you have to take a bath!”

“Eeeeeh?!” Rai pouted. “But it’s not fair! Sensei never has to take a bath!”

“I do take baths!” Yuuno told her. “I’ll take mine after you’re done yours!”

“I don’t believe you!” Rai crossed her arms. “I’ll take a bath when you take a bath!”

“W-We can’t do that!” Yuuno insisted.

“Why?” Rai asked.

“B-Because, it’s not good if boys and girls take baths together…”

“Why?” Rai asked again.

“Because…”

“Yuuno-san, I do not believe she will relent on this issue.” Seikou said. “Besides, Enforcer Harlaown had informed me that you’ve bathed with girls before… Is it really so undesirable to bathe with us?”

‘Damn that Chrono…’ Yuuno chanced opening an eye to look at Seikou. It was very slight, but he saw a little sadness in her expression and it caused him to relent. “… Okay, okay, I’ll take a bath with you…”

“Yay!” Rai cheered and dragged him by the arm. “Let’s go!”

X-X-X

Yuuno hesitantly stripped himself before entering the bath. He tried to keep from looking at the equally naked Seikou and Rai, but as soon as he opened the door he got a face full of Yami.

“It took you peons long enough!” She scolded, he legs planted firmly apart and her hands on her hips. “What would you do if I caught a cold!”

“Y-Yami!” Yuuno gawked, the image burning into his eyes before he could close them.

“Hm? What your problem, mongrel?” Yami looked at him curiously before breaking out into a smirk. “Aha, is seeing your glorious ruler in the buff too much for you to handle? You should be honoured I am allowing you to see my naked form! There is no need to be embarrassed.”

Yuuno thought back to the time at the hot springs resort, causing him to flush more fiercely. At that time he was able to see the voluptuous forms of Miyuki and Shinobu, and compared to those women, these girls were nothing to blush about but it was the principle of the matter!

“What about you?” He asked. “Have you no sense of shame?”

“What a thing to say!” Yami scoffed. “Do you feel shame when dirt and dust see you changing? This matter is no different.”

“I love dust bunnies!” Rai grinned. “They’re so fluffy and cute but they make me sneeze and then I squish them!”

“Uh, that’s nice…” Yuuno sighed. Well, he should have figured he was no more than dust in Yami’s eyes.

“Now then be a good servant and wash me.” Yami declared, holding her arms out the side.

“Excuse me?” Yuuno risked cracking open an eye to see she was being serious.

“You heard me! Do you honestly expect royalty to wash themselves? We have people to do that for us!” Yami sat on one of the bath stools and gestured to her rear. “Get to it!”

Having given up already, Yuuno sat down behind her, blindly groping for the soap and wash cloth. Creating lather, he kept his eyes closed as he put the cloth against Yami’s flesh.

“Kyah!” She moaned. “My, such a bold servant washing there first!”

“I’m sorry!” Yuuno’s eyes shot open, only to see that his hand was placed on the middle of her back. Looking up, he saw Yami smirking over her shoulder at him.

“Too easy,” She snorted. “Now pay attention to what you are doing! If you mess up, heads will roll!”

Yuuno gulped, but kept his eyes open. He just hoped she didn’t expect him to wash every part of her body…

“I wanna wash some one too!” Rai suddenly decided, sitting behind Yuuno with another bar of soap. She went to work on his back, which proved to be slightly painful.

“Rai-chan, not so hard!” He pleaded. “Do it more gently…”

“Kay!” She complied some what, but it still felt like she would scrub off a layer of skin.

Yuuno beared with it, focusing his attention on washing Yami’s back without letting his eyes drift down to her butt. He felt a gaze on him, however, and he looked out the corner of his eye to see Seikou. The brown haired girl was already in the tub, the water up to her nose. She quietly blew bubbles as she watched him with half-lidded eyes.

Feeling even more self-conscious, Yuuno clamped his legs together.

“Sensei, you missed a spot!” Rai said as she leaned over his shoulder. Her soapy hand went to Yami’s back, but the action had her pressing up against Yuuno. His body stiffened as he felt two soft mounds squish against his back and rubbed gently against him as Rai fidgeted around.

Knowing full well what was going on, Yuuno felt as if he was about to burst. It didn’t help that at the moment his mind decided to remind him that the developing body currently held against him was the same as another girl he knew. He had never taken a bath with Fate before, but now he could clearly picture the pretty blond girl in his mind, completely naked and looking at him with a bashful expression on her face. He wanted to berate himself, tell himself it was wrong to think of a friend like that, but it seemed the forbiddeness of it had even more blood rushing to his head.

“Hm?” For some reason Rai chose that moment to look down at Yuuno’s front. “Hey look! It’s getting bigger!”

When that was said, steam shot out of the boy’s ears and he toppled over.

X-X-X

“Arg…” Yuuno groaned when he came to. Before his eyes opened, he mentally noted the feeling of fabric against his skin, making him relieved to realise he wasn’t naked anymore. When his eyes fluttered open he saw Seikou looking down at him.

“Yuuno-san, you are finally awake.” This time her gentle smile was noticeable.

“Seikou, what…” He tried to sit up, but when he did the dizziness hit him, causing him to fall back to his horizontal position. His head hit some kind of cushion, but it didn’t take long for it to dawn on him that the cushion was actually Seikou’s lap. “I’m sorry! I’ll…”

“Please don’t push yourself.” She softly chided. “You fainted while we were in the bath.” Her eyes made a quick dart to his midsection. “We were all… curious, but I assure you I prevented the other two from doing anything.”

“O-Oh, thanks…” Yuuno’s face turned red again. “Where are the other two?”

“They have already gone to bed. I remained here to await your awakening.”

Yuuno looked around to see they were on the couch in the living room. “Sorry for the trouble.”

“I feel as though I should be saying that to you.” Seikou said with a touch of sadness. “We are the ones who have caused you so much trouble.”

“No, it’s okay.” He replied. “It’s not that bad…”

“… You are aware that we have had previous care takers before, yes?”

“Yeah,” Yuuno said, thinking back to how he had only taught them while another Bureau appointed person took care of them at home.

“You are our seventh.” Seikou revealed.

“What? Was it really that many?”

“Yes,” She nodded. “Some lasted almost a week, others only a few days. One didn’t even make it an hour.”

“Oh…” Yuuno frowned. That certainly sounded bad.

“I cannot say I didn’t wish them gone.” Seikou went on. “It felt as though they did not care about us at all and were merely doing it for reimbursement. They treated us like objects. While there was one man who appeared to be different, it was only an act and he soon attempted to touch me in an inappropriate manner.”

“What?!” This time when Yuuno shot up he stayed upright. “Then…”

“Do not worry, he did not lay a hand on me before I… forcibly removed him.”

Yuuno’s frowned deepened. He figured the Bureau would have better screening procedures than that, but perhaps at that point they were so desperate they accepted just about anyone. Chrono’s earlier comments suddenly made more sense.

“You are a different matter.” Seikou reached out and gently laid her hand on his. “No matter how much trouble myself, Rai-chan, or Yami cause, you are still here. Despite all the hardships you have never left us and you have always treated us like humans rather than objects. On top of that earlier you were presented a chance to take advantage of us, but you did not do so. You are a kind, considerate man. Rai-chan, myself, and even Yami can all sense this and we are extremely grateful that you are here. Thank you for all you’ve done.”

“Uh, well, you’re welcome…” Yuuno went bashful at the genuine look in her eyes. “I know that none of you are bad girls either, which is why I want you to have a chance at a normal life. You have so many opportunities ahead of you and I’ll do all that I can to help you along the way.”

“I really appreciate that.” Yuuno’s heart skipped a beat when she graced him with the largest smile he had ever seen on her face.

“S-So you have any idea of what you want to do in the future?” He quickly glanced away and asked.

“… I am unsure.” Seikou admitted. “However I do know that I wish to remain with… Would it be appropriate to call them my sisters?”

“Yes!” Yuuno smiled. “I think that’s a great way to think of them.”

“I wish to remain together with my sisters.” Seikou nodded. “Also…” She looked Yuuno right in the eye. “I wish to remain together with Yuuno-san as well.”

“O-Oh…” Yuuno flushed and turned away again. “Well… I can’t promise we’ll always be together, but I’ll be here so long as you need me.”

“That is reassuring.” She said as she rose. “Now I think it is time to retire for the evening. Rai and Yami were quite worried about you and I am certain they will be happy to see you well rested in the morning.”

Yuuno nodded and they returned to their room. He wasn’t surprised at all to see Rai already fast asleep in his bed.

“This girl…” He sighed happily. It felt like it would be a shame to disturb her, so he decided to climb in with her. Just for tonight.

“Good night, Yuuno-san.” Seikou said from her bed.

“Good night, Seik… AH!” The air was squeezed out of him when Rai grabbed hold.

“I’m not letting you get away, Mr big fluffy cloud!” The long haired girl mumbled happily in her sleep.

Finally got around to reading this, and... how can I put this?

Very entertaining, as expected. But you got that freakin' Waffle song stuck in my head, Raiser, and I will make you pay. Someday, somehow.

[Kaijo]

Future Tense

Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion

In which three people are reunited that haven't been together in a long time, and a desperate plot is laid out...

Previous chapters can be found here.

Spoiler for Future Tense, Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion:

MGLN: Future Tense
Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion

Xx~~*~~xX

Nanoha emerged from the short tunnel into a large cavern, lit by the soft green bio-luminescent glow of fungus growing over several crystal deposits. In the middle of the cavern loomed the still waters of a large lake, small pieces of ice floating upon the surface, but no sign of any oracle, or anyone else for that matter.

Growing frustrated at everything that had happened, and what she had gone through thus far, Nanoha raised her voice, no longer caring who heard. "I'M HERE! That's what you wanted, right? You wanted me to come here, so here I am! Why are you hiding?"

No reply was immediately forthcoming, and at first Nanoha wondered if Agito had been wrong or Rio and Corona had been misled; perhaps it all was a sick joke or perhaps the oracle was no longer here. The then waters of the lake began to churn, twisting and spiraling into the center, as a green light emerged from the center of the whirlpool and formed a sketchy image of an old man whose physical features were mostly obscured by a robe; all she could see were was a beard protruding from the darkened hood.

"Welcome, Takamachi Nanoha," a somewhat distorted voice echoed around her, making her wonder at how her full name had been used. "I have been awaiting your arrival."

Someone was projecting this holographic image, she realized, but it wasn't enough to impress her. "So now what? Are you going to tell me what's going on?" Her voice had started low, but slowly gained volume as the questions continued to burst forth. "Why I was cloned in the first place? What was so important that so many had to be sacrificed just for me? You're supposed to have all these answers, right?"

The hologram was silent for a moment, but when he spoke again, his voice was heavy. "I am truly sorry for what you had to go through, and if it wasn't so important, I wouldn't have had done so. But all the hopes of the people, those still living, are depending on you. I cannot make you do anything, but if you desire answers, step into the pool; you shall find them at the bottom."

Nanoha raised an eyebrow as she glared at him, the offer was tempting, but for some reason she found herself hesitant. "Why not explain right here and now? And why hide yourself like that from me, Carim?"

"Bureau soldiers approach, and our time here is limited," the oracle told her as the image began to fade. "Enter the pool for your answers, or walk away. The choice is yours."

Growling in frustration as she began to hear voices echoing from outside, she glanced at the ice floating in the water and strengthened her auto-barrier. As tired as she was dancing to someone else's tune, she realized there was only one thing for her to do, and thus entered the lake. She could still feel a bit of the chill from the near-freezing water though her barrier protected her from most of it, but continued to wonder what exactly she was supposed to find down there.

Eventually the water reached her waist, and she took a breath and dove, using her magic to keep her body temperature up while swimming through the near crystal-clear water. There, at the bottom of the lake she found what she suspected; a device of some kind, probably the hologram emitter. Curious, she alighted atop the platform and begin to check for controls, but finding none and with her lungs starting to burn, she considered surfacing. However, the platform suddenly began to suddenly glow, and before she could even begin to wonder what was going on, she felt the familiar twist of teleportation.

And then it was over and Nanoha was gasping for breath while stumbling sideways and grasping onto a railing on the teleportation pad, inhaling heavily to catch her breath while the light died off, finding herself in a dry room.

“Welcome, Nanoha,” the oracle's male voice came again, but this time without any distortion, the tone familiar, while a pair of strong hands steadied her. “You can release your barrier jacket, as you are safe here. And we can treat your wound.”

Her head came up as her eyes adjusted to the slightly darkened room, and in particular to the supposed oracle while his hands began to heal her side, things clicking into place in her mind. “You're....”

One of his hands went up to pull back the hood, baring his face, eyes twinkling as he smiled. Nanoha's mouth dropped open; even with the beard, she recognized him in a heartbeat

“Yuuno-kun!”

x~~*~~x

"Carim!" Schach cried as two Enforcer's brought the woman into the brig, carrying her limp form between them by her armpits and then tossed their prisoner into the cell next to hers. "Don't hurt her!"

The Enforcers ignored Schach's protests, however, and sealed the cell door after depositing Carim, leaving afterward. Schach figured that they brought the two together to see if they could overhear any information, but at this point she didn't care.

"Are you alright?" Schach asked.

"Twilight approaches, the shadows move...." came the weak, delirious voice. "The demon has stirred...."

The combat nun was fine taking whatever Fate dished out since she was used to being hurt in combat, but having that happen to Carim was almost more than she could bear. "What did they do to you?”

"It's okay, sister...," Carim's voice told her, approaching a moment of lucidity "Everything will be okay.... Have faith...."

Schach grit her teeth. "Dammit, Carim, why?"

"Fate...." was the only response, before Carim seemingly went unconscious.

Left alone again with her thoughts, Schach wondered what Carim meant by that. Was she referring to the Enforcer Fate? Or to a sequence of events that would happen regardless of what one did? Did she really think what was happening was unavoidable? Or had she just slipped back into delirium?

Schach slammed her fist against the wall, almost hating times like this when faith was all she had to go on.

x~~*~~x

"You're the oracle!?" Nanoha questioned in disbelief. "I thought it would be Carim, because of the whole twice a year future reading... Wait, does that mean you were the one who contacted Jail to have me cloned...?"

He nodded. "And I'm sorry for that. If there were another way, I would have let you rest in peace. But due to one of Carim's prophecies, I realized we'd need your help so I gave Jail your genetic material in order to have a clone made. In the meantime, I've been relaying Carim's messages to Rio's resistance group in the form of intel.”

Her eyes widened at the realization. "Oh wait, Rio and Corona are still back there, probably prisoners of Hayate! They diverted enough of the Bureau army that I was able to get here. We have to save them!"

"I'm afraid the teleportation is only one way, and the other pad was disabled once you used it," he told her. "It was programmed to recognize your DNA and activate, then self-destruct. Even if they are prisoners, Hayate will keep them alive for interrogation, so you'll have a chance to rescue them."

"But not Agito," Nanoha told him darkly.

"Why?" he asked, his voice full of concern. “What happened?”

Nanoha felt her hands clenching. "She gave her life to enable me to get here. So it's time you told me everything. If Carim saw things, why didn't she see Rio's resistance group falling? Why didn't she see what would happen to Agito?"

“She couldn't see everything,” Yuuno replied softly, sorrow in his tone. He turned and took several steps away, a door opening on the far side that brought light into the room. "But if you'll walk with me a bit, I'll try to answer all your questions."

The light enabled her to see that the room was some sort of workshop and communications room, probably darkened to enable the holographic transmitter to work better. Nanoha sighed, realizing that she had been pushed along this far already, so she might as well continue that for now.

"Alright," she said at last, taking up a position beside him as he led her out and down a hallway, feeling a sense of warmth and nostalgia as she glanced at his wizened face. "It is good to see you again."

He half-smiled, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. "It's good to see you, too. Your loss affected us all greatly. Now, where do you want to start?"

Nanoha suddenly realized she had so many questions, that she didn't know where to begin, either, but settled on one of the more prominent ones in her mind. "Why me? Why bring me back from the dead and have Jail do it?"

"Despite how far technology has come, Jail is still the best at cloning, and for our plans to work, we needed as exact a clone as we could get," he informed her. "Especially with strengthened magic powers."

"Uno told me I was somewhere above SSS rank, though I don't feel any different," she admitted as they turned a corner, her attention partially noting the candles and paintings that occasionally dotted the walls. "But I don't see why."

Yuuno appeared to hesitate for a second. "Partly because of how you died."

His statement made her realize that she had never really heard exactly how it happened. "It had to do with some lost logia, right?"

He nodded. "One that was going out of control in Clanagan, that would have engulfed the whole city and probably would have taken out a good portion of the planet as well, if you hadn't stopped it. Before it went off, though, we had received an anonymous report that it was there, somewhere, and 'good luck trying to stop it' as the warning message said. I wasn't on planet at the time, but Fate told me later that you were the one to find it, although it had already 'exploded' at the time into a slowly-growing white dome cloud of mana. Based on what they could learn, the lost logia was collecting the mana, and when it had enough, it would detonate. A very potent magical bomb."

"And I stopped it?" Nanoha deduced. “How?”

"You volunteered to go into the concentrated mana cloud come and use Raging Heart to gather the magic for a continuous Starlight Breaker," he explained, pausing as they reached a staircase that led up. "Essentially, bleed off all the explosive power the device was building up until it was small enough that it could be sealed. If it was sealed off too soon, before the mana was drained away, there was still a chance it would have gone out of control and destroyed most of Clanagan.

His smile turned sad as he gazed upward. "And you did it. But by the time you drained the last of the mana away, enough for the device to be sealed... well, they said your body was beyond recovery. At the time, we assumed it was because you processed so much mana, but some of Shamal's later examinations didn't quite fit with that. To this day, we don't know exactly what happened in there."

There was a moment of silence, then he ascended the staircase and Nanoha numbly followed him, her body tingling strangely. It all sounded like something she would do, but it was somehow strange to hear about the circumstances of one's own death.

"So why clone me?" Nanoha asked at last as they reached the top of the stairs, exiting out of what looked to be a basement.

Yuuno paused again, turning to gaze at her seriously. "Because you'll need to take her place, when you travel back in time."

x~~*~~x

"Commander, I think we have something."

Fate turned to the holographic screen as it opened up, displaying one of her Enforcers. "Report."

"The computer system itself is well-scrambled, with almost everything of importance deleted and overwritten, but they didn't get everything," he replied. "Some of the communication encoded log headers were still recoverable, and although the messages themselves are gone, we may be able to trace where they came from once we decode them."

"Send me what you have," she told him, analyzing the data stream. He was right, the data was mostly gone, scrambled, but there did appear to be quite a few pieces and she could almost detect some patterns. "Continue working on this, and let me know when you have something."

"Yes, sir," he replied, promptly signing off.

Something about those message headers continued to bug her, as if she had seen them before. Closing her eyes, she allowed her mind to drift with the topic of the headers just lightly hanging on the edge of her thoughts, a well-rehearsed mental technique for tracking down isolated bits of information. An image of a message screen appeared in her mind's eye, the header's scrambled, but still having that tinge of familiarity. Then the image clarified as more was added to it; the picture of a room, in a house, and the sender's face.

Her eyes flashed open while she frowned and reopened the communications link to her Enforcer; she knew who it was, and had a pretty good idea how to decode it and thus tell where they came from.

x~~*~~x

"Time travel?" Nanoha wondered aloud, disbelievingly. "That's impossible!"

"Improbable, but not impossible," came a new female voice, drawing attention to the side. "And incredibly difficult. But don't worry, I had the same reaction when he told me."

Nanoha turned to find the female speaker standing in the doorway, smiling while pushing a pair of glasses up her nose. "Shari!"

The elderly woman closed the distance to hug her. "Hello, Nanoha, long time no see!"

"Likewise!" Nanoha echoed, pulling back to look at her, having a thought. "Is there anyone else here? Carim or Vivio perhaps?"

Shari's face dropped a bit, the enthusiasm being replaced by a solemn silence. "No, just us two, I'm sorry. But speaking of Carim, perhaps you'd better explain first, dear."

Nanoha raised an eyebrow. "Dear?"

Yuuno finally turned around, and Nanoha was surprised to actually see an embarrassed smile on his face. "Well, yes, we've been married for 25 years after all, right before the war. Long before that, though, I had actually gone underground to do my studies, and later got Shari to help."

"Working side by side for several years in secret, I guess we sort of naturally fell in love," the device technician added with a gentle smile. "Well, I suppose since we were both scientists, we kinda operated on a similar-enough wavelength. But anyway, dinner is ready, so let's continue the conversation in the dining room."

Nanoha wanted to ask more about them as the trio sat down to eat, but decided to let the explanations proceed at their own pace; there was still a lot she didn't know, and right now, she was having a hard time forming useful questions. Instead, she just found herself noticing the small looks and ease the couple had around each other; it reminded her a lot of Vice and Alto, and brought her a bit of warmth to know that at least some people were finding happiness. But with the thought of the latter couple, her heart dropped back down as she didn't know what had happened to them. Did they survive? Were they captured?

Nanoha picked up her silverware and began to eat, trying to push those questions out of her mind for now and focus on the present.

"Anyway, as I was saying, it was actually Carim's unique skill that got me thinking all those years ago," Yuuno started up again as they ate. "You know how she gets her readings twice a year, when the moons align?"

"Yes, and it takes the form of ancient Belkan poems," Nanoha confirmed, recalling the explanation she had received so long ago. "I remember you helped with the translation of the one dealing with the Cradle and JS incident."

He nodded. "Well, I became curious about it, and so began to look up Carim's genealogy and the history of her family. Quite a few members of her family tree had the ability, but they didn't all take the exact same form. While Carim's specific form interprets it as Belkan poems, others went into seizures and blurted things out, while one particular person was blind from birth and could actually see future events from time to time. The common thread in all of them was gaining knowledge of future events. Or to phrase it another way, interpreting knowledge sent back from the future during times when the two moons of Mid-Childa aligned."

Nanoha begin to see what he was getting at. "So, you're saying their information actually comes from the future? How does that help time travel?"

"That's where he got me into this," Shari interjected at Yuuno's nod. "I helped analyze Carim's linker core when she used her special skill. Strictly speaking, since time and space are related, time travel isn't impossible. For instance, you can travel rapidly into the future if you can approach the speed of light, but the amount of energy required is astronomical. Standard hyperspace travel simply bypasses the speed of light limit."

"Which makes it improbable like you said before," Nanoha realized, as she cut off another piece of cooked meat, unsure exactly what animal it came from. "But you're talking about sending me back through time."

The two glanced at each other, before Shari continued again. "It appears to be a natural event unique to Mid-Childa. The two moons possess a lot of mana, and twice a year they align, one behind the other, and combine their effects on the surface of Mid-Childa. My readings indicate a small tear in the space-time continuum is opened at that time, enough for information to magically flow back and forth. My best theory to date seems to fit the idea that information encapsulated in magical data packets travels into the rift and is sent back through time, emerging in the past. Carim and her ancestors were sensitive to this, their linker cores allowing them to make some sense of what was coming through."

Nanoha set her silverware down, her meal half-eaten. "So you think you can send me through this rift to go back in time? That it can take a person instead of just information? Is that even possible?"

Shari pushed her glasses up on her nose and half-smiled. "If my theories are correct, it should be possible, with some modifications and if done in the right spot under the right conditions."

"First of all, you'll need this," Yuuno told her, bringing out a small jewelry box, and pushing it across the table to her before Nanoha could ask what the conditions were.

She look at him in confusion, then picked up the box and opened it, her breathing catching in her throat as she beheld the spherical red jewel within, attached to a cord. "Is this...?"

"Hello, my master," Raging Heart intoned as Nanoha picked it up. "It is good to see you again."

"Raging... Heart," Nanoha breathed, not realizing until this very moment how much she had missed her device; a single tear appeared in her left eye as she clutched it to her chest. "So you had it all this time? Thank you, Yuuno-kun."

Yuuno blushed a bit as he scratched the back of his head. "Technically speaking, it still belongs to the Scrya tribe, which is where ownership returned when you.... passed away. I was able to reacquire it so Shari could make the necessary programming additions for the time jump."

Her head came up as she wiped her eyes. "Yes, about that; how exactly am I supposed to do this?"

Yuuno brought up a holographic screen and typed a few buttons, and the lights dimmed as a holographic Mid-Childa hovered over the table along with its moons. "In two months time, the moons will align again and the rift will open. Raging Heart has the necessary information programmed in to identify the rift and guide you into it. After that, it will be up to your will and your magic to get you to the right point."

Nanoha looked back and forth between the couple, realizing something. "You don't know what will happen when I go into it, do you?"

"Not exactly, no," Shari admitted, apologetic. "I've been running simulations and calculations for the past ten years, but as far as I know, no one has attempted anything like this."

"It may very well come down to you keeping a date and time firmly in mind when you enter," Yuuno added, hopefully. "With any luck, it will just be a short hop and you'll barely realize anything has happened; almost like a teleport. All I can say is keep the destination firmly in mind."

Nanoha understood something else about all this. "You said I was to take the place of my younger self, so I suppose that means I die in her place so she can live."

"I know," Yuuno told her softly, putting his silverware down. "It means you'd end up sacrificing your life to change history, so that none of this would happen. No one will have died. It's a long shot, but we'll leave the choice up to you."

"Up to me?" Nanoha questioned, closing her hand around the jewel in her hand, the familiar warmth offering a strange comfort after all this time. "I already gave my life for everyone once, and you already know me well enough to know I'd do it a second time if it meant saving everyone. But will this actually work? You don't know. You had me cloned, gave the people a hope that I would solve everything, and several have died for me... all for me to go back and time and make it so nothing happens!

Her head came up. "Wouldn't this cause a paradox? If I save my younger self so that this doesn't happen, doesn't that mean I won't exist to go back in time? What if I go back even farther? I could really change history!"

"There are a number of theories, but no one really knows," Shari answered softly. "Don't get too mad at him, as this is my fault, too. I thought he was crazy at first, but I eventually went along with it, because I don't see any other way. I hate seeing what has become of our world, and our friends, and I can't help but feel this was never supposed to be. But in answer to your concerns, it's possible that you going back in time will simply create an alternate timeline, and this future will continue as is. Or after you save yourself, you'll cease to be, but everyone will experience the new alternate reality. In short, this is a last ditch effort, a gamble. That's why we recommend you focusing on the moment you died, and not attempt to go any farther back."

Nanoha's head lowered again as she thought about that; sacrificing her life to save others was a given, if there was no other way. But what if it did form an alternate timeline and Hayate continued ruling here? That would make her efforts all for naught, regardless if there was a new second timeline where this was prevented. In any case, temporal mechanics was beyond her understanding.

"There's one other thing, that will influence your decision," Yuuno said at last, which brought Nanoha's head back up and her focus to the holographic planet. "The place on Mid-Childa where the moon's focus their energies is always the same, and is probably a reason why Clanagan was built where it is. Not only does the rift form in the city, but it does so in a very specific place; due to the lensing effect of our atmosphere, the effect is concentrated at a single spot."

As Yuuno spoke, the hologram began to shift, zooming in on the spot where the moon's were concentrating their effect to showcase the city, and then to the specific point indicated by a flashing red dot. The location made Nanoha's eyes widen; it was the top of the central spire in Clanagan. She turned to stare at him upon realizing the implications.

"Yes," he answered to response to her unspoken question. "Before you'll be able to even think about using the time travel option, you'll have to conquer Clanagan, the bastion of Hayate's Bureau, first."

x~~*~~x

Nanoha leaned back in the hot water, watching the steam drift upwards, glad that Shari had suggested a bath after dinner; the cloned woman hadn't really had one this nice since the few days she spent at Neyra's restaurant, which seemed like ages ago. She had been able to get a short shower and wash-down at the rebel base, but nothing like the clean and well-kept furo she found herself in now. She figured Yuuno probably had it installed, as he had come to like them during his stay at the Takamachi household.

It also gave her a chance to collect her thoughts and reflect on all that she had been told since she arrived at the hidden Finieno home; she didn't know why, but it brought her a bit of amusement to realize Yuuno had taken Shari's name, rather than the other way around. But the nagging concerns from earlier still remained.

Time travel.

Sacrifice.

A number of people had already sacrificed themselves for her, some making the ultimate offering of their life itself, and now she was expected to give up her life to possibly undo all that. In doing so, they never would have died, but those who hadn't died would never have lived, like Amos and Givo. And who is to say Vice and Alto, or Yuuno and Shari would have ever gotten together? Could she be the sole judge and take that choice away from them? Obviously, Yuuno and Shari were prepared to take that route, but what about everyone else? Making extreme decisions regardless of people's feelings was something Hayate had been doing.

[Would I be any better if I did this?] she finally asked herself the question that had been forming in her mind. [Perhaps the right path is simply to end the dictatorship and return freedom to the people living now.] The cloned mage didn't quite know what she expected to find at the end of her journey, the reasons for her creation and the purpose she was to fulfill, but somehow she didn't expect time travel.

"And that's what I am," Nanoha said softly. "A clone; a sacrifice. A spare part to fix something gone wrong."

"Master?" Raging heart chirped, floating nearby.

"I'm not the real Nanoha," she informed her device. "She died years ago. I'm a substitute. And we're being asked to sacrifice ourselves; are you okay with that?"

"I do not understand," Raging Heart replied. "You are my master. We will fight together as we always have. I will assist you however you desire. That is all."

Nanoha stared at the device, a million thoughts going through her head, then smiled. "Thank you, Raging Heart."

She decided she had been in the bath long enough and got out, drying herself off and dressing in the loose shirt and trousers Shari had left for her while her other clothes were washed. Nanoha wanted more; she wasn't sure if she'd exercise the time travel option, but the original problem still remained: Hayate's Bureau. It needed to be brought down first, and had to be done within two months if she was going to do this. As she dried and combed her hair, she realized that since Yuuno and Shari seemingly plotted this much out, they had to have some idea of how to accomplish that.

She hook Raging Heart's necklace cord around her neck and left the bathroom, searching through the corridors looking for her hosts. As she approached what looked like an indoor arboretum, voices lightly drifted through the trees.

"Are you going to tell her?" came Shari's voice.

Curious, Nanoha paused, listening in.

x~~*~~x

"I'm not sure, actually, but I don't think it makes a difference, honestly," Yuuno replied as the two sat together under their favorite cherry blossom tree. "At the most, it might just hurt her more. And that's not something that I want to do; I've already hurt her enough."

"You still have feelings for her," Shari stated, still leaning against him. It was a fact, and not a question; she knew him too well.

"Which is why you know I hate doing this, but it's the way things have to be, I think," he told her, his arm around her, gently rubbing her far shoulder. "And I told you why."

Shari smiled. "I know, because you saw her for a brief moment that one morning. And you're right, you know. The one you saw, and this one... they both have short hair. But it still doesn't mean she succeeded; and if one of those theories is true, it means she didn't."

"But I have to believe that it did," Yuuno replied, adamant as he closed his eyes, remembering that time.

He wasn't sure what it was about that morning, only that he sensed someone else in the room, other than his first wife in the bed next to him. He turned as his eyes opened, and that's when he saw her, standing next to the bed and gazing fondly down at him. At first he thought he might have been a ghost or just a hallucination especially since the figure promptly faded from sight, but two things stuck in his mind that morning, the first being her short hair. Why would he hallucinate that?

He spoke the second thing softly. "She smiled...."

x~~*~~x

Nanoha's eyes widened at the revelation, not sure how to take it; did that mean she didn't have a choice, and would end up taking the time travel option? She wasn't quite sure, but she wasn't about to take anyone withholding information on her now. She strolled into the arboretum and approached the pair.

"I need to know everything," she told them as she gazed at them evenly, hands on her hips. "How am I supposed to take down Hayate? I'm guessing you know already."

The pair glanced at each other, then Yuuno sighed, nodded, and stood up. "You're right, we do have an idea. Come with us."

Curious, she followed them as they headed down another side passage and Yuuno glanced at Shari, an unspoken signal traveling between them.

"During the war, Carim kept trying to see exactly how it was supposed to end, but it was never very clear," Shari began to explain as they walked. "Since Yuuno brought me in to help study her ability, I eventually made a device for her, which helped her better control her 'future-gaze' for lack of a better term. Because so much information comes out of the rift, her linker core is mostly overwhelmed, which is why her prophecies were always pretty vague and limited. But the device I made for her assists her linker core to filter through the terabytes of data that comes through, partly allowing her to actively look for specific things, if they exist. It's mostly junk data, but major events affecting Mid-Childa come through stronger than the rest, which is what she usually picked up on."

Yuuno continued for her as they entered a side room. "Shortly before the end of the war, Carim finally found the prophecy she was looking for, the one that would signal the end of the dark times and return what she was looking for; "The long night ends and a new day dawns when one who has returned from the grave leads the army of the d-”

An explosion to Nanoha's right cut off Yuuno's words, and sent her her flying against a wall where she felt her head hit something, and then the world became blurry, while the bang from the blast had left her ears ringing. But she cold make out a new person standing in the wreckage from the newly formed hole, someone with long golden object that matched her hair, and that surprised her almost as much as the following discussion that she could just barely understand.

x~~*~~x

“I figured I'd find my ex-husband here, but not my old aide as well,” Fate stated, glancing back and forth between the two as the dust settled and she took stock of the situation. “You're both under arrest for aiding and abetting an enemy of the state. My enforcers are covering all exits; there is no escape.”

She noticed subtle apprehensive glances pass between the two instead of responding to her which left her wondering what it could mean, until a feminine groan sounded to her left. The figure her peripheral vision detected forced a second look as the world around her stopped.

Fate's skin tingled and her mouth dropped open as the woman slowly tried to sit up, a ton of feelings and emotions pouring through her in a fraction of an instant. “Nano...ha?”

“Fate...chan?” Nanoha questioned blankly, holding her head while staring back.

“Nanoha!” Fate exclaimed, beginning to run in her direction; but before she got to the other, green chains ensnared her arms and legs, and her head snapped around with a snarl. “Yuuno!”

His hand outstretched and glowing the same emerald green, Yuuno shifted in front of, his face showing visible strain to maintain the spell. “Shari, do it!”

“Right!” the other woman agreed, quickly moving over to help Nanoha up.

“Yuuno, what are you...” Fate started to say, slowly breaking the binds, gripping the handle of Bardiche's Zanbar form tighter. “Stop it!”

“This is the first time in a long time the three of us have been together in the same place,” Yuuno reminisced with a sad smile, as the sounds of boots running in the halls got louder signaling the approach of her Enforcers. “But I'm sorry, I can't let you stop her. Hurry, Shari!”

A clearly dazed Nanoha had been helped up by Shari, who had draped one of the former's arms across her shoulders and was now leading her across the room to a teleporter. Fate grit her teeth, realizing what they were up to, and in Yuuno's eyes she could see that he had come to a similar conclusion: it was a race as to whether Shari could get Nanoha out, Fate would break the binds, or that the Enforcers would back her up. Fate had a barrier setup over the place, but Yuuno was an expert in teleportation and Shari was a master technician; between the two of them, they might very well be able to get out.

The bonds finally dissolved the instant Enforcer's appeared in the door, but Yuuno leapt back and cast his next spell. “Steel defense!”

Fate's golden blade met the barrier covering Yuuno, Shari, Nanoha and the teleportation pad, the same moment her Enforcers opened fire. “Nanoha, stop!”

Nanoha looked up from where she sat on the platform, as Shari activated the machine. “I'm sorry... Fate-chan. I-”

The whole building shook, and lights began blinking out all over the room.

“The generator is down!” Shari announced in alarm. “There's not enough power to send her all the way!”

Yuuno grunted under the strain of maintaining his shield. “Do the best you can, Shari! Nanoha, find your daughter; find Vivio!”

“Vivio!” Fate exclaimed, her eyes widening, feeling a surge within her as the barrier began to crack under the strain of her sword and the Enforcer's fire, and the teleportation machine began it's start-up whine. “STOP!”

The shield finally shattered as Nanoha vanished in emerald light. Fate whacked Yuuno aside with her blade and then bound Shari as she reached the control panel, but the coordinates of the transfer weren't listed; the database appeared to be blank.

“You won't find her, as the machine doesn't record where it sends people,” Shari informed her. "Neither of us knows exactly where Nanoha is now. I know it probably pains you, but it has to be this way; Yuuno told me how close you were to her and your daughter.”

Fate turned her glare on the woman. “You have no idea what I'm feeling right now, but you'll soon find out.” She turned around and strode towards her Enforcers, pausing to bind Yuuno. “And for both your sakes, you better hope I find them.”

x~~*~~x

“[Linker core completion at 100%,]” Rein intoned from within her mistress. “[All magic particles have been gathered, but there is some minor distortion I cannot account for.]”

“Steady,” Hayate stated, as the glowing crimson sparkle grew brighter in the center of the elaborate magic circle. “Just focus on the restoration. Reinitialize Signum program.”

The hovering sparkle in the middle of the room flashed once and a crimson Belkan magic triangle spun underneath, a transparent form rising from it and materializing around the core. With a final push, Hayate completed the spell, then leaned on the nearby book podium to rest, as Signum blinked her eyes open.

Hayate allowed herself a smile. “Welcome back, Signum. I thought I'd lost you there for a bit. Are you okay?”

“I seem to be intact,” Signum stated, glancing at her hands. “Though as before my memories seem to have-”

Her sentence was interrupted by an exclamation from behind. “What the hell!?”

x~~*~~x

Nanoha suddenly found herself face down upon soft grass after the teleportation. Her mind head still felt a bit cloudy, but she could feel the cool water against her legs as her loose trousers slowly soaked up water, making her realize she had materialized partially into a babbling stream; but most of her thoughts were on Fate, Yuuno, and Shari, wondering what had become of them. The former, in particular, seemed as shocked as Nanoha, to see the other, and genuinely appeared to be distressed at Nanoha having to leave so abruptly.

She blinked her eyes, suddenly feeling saddened for some reason, and attempted to get up. She was only moderately successful, getting her hands underneath her body before the dizziness made her collapse again.

As her vision began to go dark, she thought she spied a rather tall individual approaching her through the bushes and trees, dressed in tanned leather.

Xx~~*~~xX

Author's notes:

Raiser knew about the Yuuno/Shari angle back when I told him about this fic and showed him my very early notes, but it was only coincidence that he had started work on his own Yuuno/Shari fic. So neither of us copied the other; it was just random happenstance, heh.

Just a note about the time travel angle: it may or may not be the solution, or may only be partially the solution. I'm not telling at this point. =)

I'm expecting to get raked over the coals for this, so don't let me down!

[Megaolix]

Originally Posted by Kaijo

Future Tense

Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion

In which three people are reunited that haven't been together in a long time, and a desperate plot is laid out...

Previous chapters can be found here.

Spoiler for Future Tense, Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion:

MGLN: Future Tense
Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion

Xx~~*~~xX

Nanoha emerged from the short tunnel into a large cavern, lit by the soft green bio-luminescent glow of fungus growing over several crystal deposits. In the middle of the cavern loomed the still waters of a large lake, small pieces of ice floating upon the surface, but no sign of any oracle, or anyone else for that matter.

Growing frustrated at everything that had happened, and what she had gone through thus far, Nanoha raised her voice, no longer caring who heard. "I'M HERE! That's what you wanted, right? You wanted me to come here, so here I am! Why are you hiding?"

No reply was immediately forthcoming, and at first Nanoha wondered if Agito had been wrong or Rio and Corona had been misled; perhaps it all was a sick joke or perhaps the oracle was no longer here. The then waters of the lake began to churn, twisting and spiraling into the center, as a green light emerged from the center of the whirlpool and formed a sketchy image of an old man whose physical features were mostly obscured by a robe; all she could see were was a beard protruding from the darkened hood.

"Welcome, Takamachi Nanoha," a somewhat distorted voice echoed around her, making her wonder at how her full name had been used. "I have been awaiting your arrival."

Someone was projecting this holographic image, she realized, but it wasn't enough to impress her. "So now what? Are you going to tell me what's going on?" Her voice had started low, but slowly gained volume as the questions continued to burst forth. "Why I was cloned in the first place? What was so important that so many had to be sacrificed just for me? You're supposed to have all these answers, right?"

The hologram was silent for a moment, but when he spoke again, his voice was heavy. "I am truly sorry for what you had to go through, and if it wasn't so important, I wouldn't have had done so. But all the hopes of the people, those still living, are depending on you. I cannot make you do anything, but if you desire answers, step into the pool; you shall find them at the bottom."

Nanoha raised an eyebrow as she glared at him, the offer was tempting, but for some reason she found herself hesitant. "Why not explain right here and now? And why hide yourself like that from me, Carim?"

"Bureau soldiers approach, and our time here is limited," the oracle told her as the image began to fade. "Enter the pool for your answers, or walk away. The choice is yours."

Growling in frustration as she began to hear voices echoing from outside, she glanced at the ice floating in the water and strengthened her auto-barrier. As tired as she was dancing to someone else's tune, she realized there was only one thing for her to do, and thus entered the lake. She could still feel a bit of the chill from the near-freezing water though her barrier protected her from most of it, but continued to wonder what exactly she was supposed to find down there.

Eventually the water reached her waist, and she took a breath and dove, using her magic to keep her body temperature up while swimming through the near crystal-clear water. There, at the bottom of the lake she found what she suspected; a device of some kind, probably the hologram emitter. Curious, she alighted atop the platform and begin to check for controls, but finding none and with her lungs starting to burn, she considered surfacing. However, the platform suddenly began to suddenly glow, and before she could even begin to wonder what was going on, she felt the familiar twist of teleportation.

And then it was over and Nanoha was gasping for breath while stumbling sideways and grasping onto a railing on the teleportation pad, inhaling heavily to catch her breath while the light died off, finding herself in a dry room.

“Welcome, Nanoha,” the oracle's male voice came again, but this time without any distortion, the tone familiar, while a pair of strong hands steadied her. “You can release your barrier jacket, as you are safe here. And we can treat your wound.”

Her head came up as her eyes adjusted to the slightly darkened room, and in particular to the supposed oracle while his hands began to heal her side, things clicking into place in her mind. “You're....”

One of his hands went up to pull back the hood, baring his face, eyes twinkling as he smiled. Nanoha's mouth dropped open; even with the beard, she recognized him in a heartbeat

“Yuuno-kun!”

x~~*~~x

"Carim!" Schach cried as two Enforcer's brought the woman into the brig, carrying her limp form between them by her armpits and then tossed their prisoner into the cell next to hers. "Don't hurt her!"

The Enforcers ignored Schach's protests, however, and sealed the cell door after depositing Carim, leaving afterward. Schach figured that they brought the two together to see if they could overhear any information, but at this point she didn't care.

"Are you alright?" Schach asked.

"Twilight approaches, the shadows move...." came the weak, delirious voice. "The demon has stirred...."

The combat nun was fine taking whatever Fate dished out since she was used to being hurt in combat, but having that happen to Carim was almost more than she could bear. "What did they do to you?”

"It's okay, sister...," Carim's voice told her, approaching a moment of lucidity "Everything will be okay.... Have faith...."

Schach grit her teeth. "Dammit, Carim, why?"

"Fate...." was the only response, before Carim seemingly went unconscious.

Left alone again with her thoughts, Schach wondered what Carim meant by that. Was she referring to the Enforcer Fate? Or to a sequence of events that would happen regardless of what one did? Did she really think what was happening was unavoidable? Or had she just slipped back into delirium?

Schach slammed her fist against the wall, almost hating times like this when faith was all she had to go on.

x~~*~~x

"You're the oracle!?" Nanoha questioned in disbelief. "I thought it would be Carim, because of the whole twice a year future reading... Wait, does that mean you were the one who contacted Jail to have me cloned...?"

He nodded. "And I'm sorry for that. If there were another way, I would have let you rest in peace. But due to one of Carim's prophecies, I realized we'd need your help so I gave Jail your genetic material in order to have a clone made. In the meantime, I've been relaying Carim's messages to Rio's resistance group in the form of intel.”

Her eyes widened at the realization. "Oh wait, Rio and Corona are still back there, probably prisoners of Hayate! They diverted enough of the Bureau army that I was able to get here. We have to save them!"

"I'm afraid the teleportation is only one way, and the other pad was disabled once you used it," he told her. "It was programmed to recognize your DNA and activate, then self-destruct. Even if they are prisoners, Hayate will keep them alive for interrogation, so you'll have a chance to rescue them."

"But not Agito," Nanoha told him darkly.

"Why?" he asked, his voice full of concern. “What happened?”

Nanoha felt her hands clenching. "She gave her life to enable me to get here. So it's time you told me everything. If Carim saw things, why didn't she see Rio's resistance group falling? Why didn't she see what would happen to Agito?"

“She couldn't see everything,” Yuuno replied softly, sorrow in his tone. He turned and took several steps away, a door opening on the far side that brought light into the room. "But if you'll walk with me a bit, I'll try to answer all your questions."

The light enabled her to see that the room was some sort of workshop and communications room, probably darkened to enable the holographic transmitter to work better. Nanoha sighed, realizing that she had been pushed along this far already, so she might as well continue that for now.

"Alright," she said at last, taking up a position beside him as he led her out and down a hallway, feeling a sense of warmth and nostalgia as she glanced at his wizened face. "It is good to see you again."

He half-smiled, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. "It's good to see you, too. Your loss affected us all greatly. Now, where do you want to start?"

Nanoha suddenly realized she had so many questions, that she didn't know where to begin, either, but settled on one of the more prominent ones in her mind. "Why me? Why bring me back from the dead and have Jail do it?"

"Despite how far technology has come, Jail is still the best at cloning, and for our plans to work, we needed as exact a clone as we could get," he informed her. "Especially with strengthened magic powers."

"Uno told me I was somewhere above SSS rank, though I don't feel any different," she admitted as they turned a corner, her attention partially noting the candles and paintings that occasionally dotted the walls. "But I don't see why."

Yuuno appeared to hesitate for a second. "Partly because of how you died."

His statement made her realize that she had never really heard exactly how it happened. "It had to do with some lost logia, right?"

He nodded. "One that was going out of control in Clanagan, that would have engulfed the whole city and probably would have taken out a good portion of the planet as well, if you hadn't stopped it. Before it went off, though, we had received an anonymous report that it was there, somewhere, and 'good luck trying to stop it' as the warning message said. I wasn't on planet at the time, but Fate told me later that you were the one to find it, although it had already 'exploded' at the time into a slowly-growing white dome cloud of mana. Based on what they could learn, the lost logia was collecting the mana, and when it had enough, it would detonate. A very potent magical bomb."

"And I stopped it?" Nanoha deduced. “How?”

"You volunteered to go into the concentrated mana cloud come and use Raging Heart to gather the magic for a continuous Starlight Breaker," he explained, pausing as they reached a staircase that led up. "Essentially, bleed off all the explosive power the device was building up until it was small enough that it could be sealed. If it was sealed off too soon, before the mana was drained away, there was still a chance it would have gone out of control and destroyed most of Clanagan.

His smile turned sad as he gazed upward. "And you did it. But by the time you drained the last of the mana away, enough for the device to be sealed... well, they said your body was beyond recovery. At the time, we assumed it was because you processed so much mana, but some of Shamal's later examinations didn't quite fit with that. To this day, we don't know exactly what happened in there."

There was a moment of silence, then he ascended the staircase and Nanoha numbly followed him, her body tingling strangely. It all sounded like something she would do, but it was somehow strange to hear about the circumstances of one's own death.

"So why clone me?" Nanoha asked at last as they reached the top of the stairs, exiting out of what looked to be a basement.

Yuuno paused again, turning to gaze at her seriously. "Because you'll need to take her place, when you travel back in time."

x~~*~~x

"Commander, I think we have something."

Fate turned to the holographic screen as it opened up, displaying one of her Enforcers. "Report."

"The computer system itself is well-scrambled, with almost everything of importance deleted and overwritten, but they didn't get everything," he replied. "Some of the communication encoded log headers were still recoverable, and although the messages themselves are gone, we may be able to trace where they came from once we decode them."

"Send me what you have," she told him, analyzing the data stream. He was right, the data was mostly gone, scrambled, but there did appear to be quite a few pieces and she could almost detect some patterns. "Continue working on this, and let me know when you have something."

"Yes, sir," he replied, promptly signing off.

Something about those message headers continued to bug her, as if she had seen them before. Closing her eyes, she allowed her mind to drift with the topic of the headers just lightly hanging on the edge of her thoughts, a well-rehearsed mental technique for tracking down isolated bits of information. An image of a message screen appeared in her mind's eye, the header's scrambled, but still having that tinge of familiarity. Then the image clarified as more was added to it; the picture of a room, in a house, and the sender's face.

Her eyes flashed open while she frowned and reopened the communications link to her Enforcer; she knew who it was, and had a pretty good idea how to decode it and thus tell where they came from.

x~~*~~x

"Time travel?" Nanoha wondered aloud, disbelievingly. "That's impossible!"

"Improbable, but not impossible," came a new female voice, drawing attention to the side. "And incredibly difficult. But don't worry, I had the same reaction when he told me."

Nanoha turned to find the female speaker standing in the doorway, smiling while pushing a pair of glasses up her nose. "Shari!"

The elderly woman closed the distance to hug her. "Hello, Nanoha, long time no see!"

"Likewise!" Nanoha echoed, pulling back to look at her, having a thought. "Is there anyone else here? Carim or Vivio perhaps?"

Shari's face dropped a bit, the enthusiasm being replaced by a solemn silence. "No, just us two, I'm sorry. But speaking of Carim, perhaps you'd better explain first, dear."

Nanoha raised an eyebrow. "Dear?"

Yuuno finally turned around, and Nanoha was surprised to actually see an embarrassed smile on his face. "Well, yes, we've been married for 25 years after all, right before the war. Long before that, though, I had actually gone underground to do my studies, and later got Shari to help."

"Working side by side for several years in secret, I guess we sort of naturally fell in love," the device technician added with a gentle smile. "Well, I suppose since we were both scientists, we kinda operated on a similar-enough wavelength. But anyway, dinner is ready, so let's continue the conversation in the dining room."

Nanoha wanted to ask more about them as the trio sat down to eat, but decided to let the explanations proceed at their own pace; there was still a lot she didn't know, and right now, she was having a hard time forming useful questions. Instead, she just found herself noticing the small looks and ease the couple had around each other; it reminded her a lot of Vice and Alto, and brought her a bit of warmth to know that at least some people were finding happiness. But with the thought of the latter couple, her heart dropped back down as she didn't know what had happened to them. Did they survive? Were they captured?

Nanoha picked up her silverware and began to eat, trying to push those questions out of her mind for now and focus on the present.

"Anyway, as I was saying, it was actually Carim's unique skill that got me thinking all those years ago," Yuuno started up again as they ate. "You know how she gets her readings twice a year, when the moons align?"

"Yes, and it takes the form of ancient Belkan poems," Nanoha confirmed, recalling the explanation she had received so long ago. "I remember you helped with the translation of the one dealing with the Cradle and JS incident."

He nodded. "Well, I became curious about it, and so began to look up Carim's genealogy and the history of her family. Quite a few members of her family tree had the ability, but they didn't all take the exact same form. While Carim's specific form interprets it as Belkan poems, others went into seizures and blurted things out, while one particular person was blind from birth and could actually see future events from time to time. The common thread in all of them was gaining knowledge of future events. Or to phrase it another way, interpreting knowledge sent back from the future during times when the two moons of Mid-Childa aligned."

Nanoha begin to see what he was getting at. "So, you're saying their information actually comes from the future? How does that help time travel?"

"That's where he got me into this," Shari interjected at Yuuno's nod. "I helped analyze Carim's linker core when she used her special skill. Strictly speaking, since time and space are related, time travel isn't impossible. For instance, you can travel rapidly into the future if you can approach the speed of light, but the amount of energy required is astronomical. Standard hyperspace travel simply bypasses the speed of light limit."

"Which makes it improbable like you said before," Nanoha realized, as she cut off another piece of cooked meat, unsure exactly what animal it came from. "But you're talking about sending me back through time."

The two glanced at each other, before Shari continued again. "It appears to be a natural event unique to Mid-Childa. The two moons possess a lot of mana, and twice a year they align, one behind the other, and combine their effects on the surface of Mid-Childa. My readings indicate a small tear in the space-time continuum is opened at that time, enough for information to magically flow back and forth. My best theory to date seems to fit the idea that information encapsulated in magical data packets travels into the rift and is sent back through time, emerging in the past. Carim and her ancestors were sensitive to this, their linker cores allowing them to make some sense of what was coming through."

Nanoha set her silverware down, her meal half-eaten. "So you think you can send me through this rift to go back in time? That it can take a person instead of just information? Is that even possible?"

Shari pushed her glasses up on her nose and half-smiled. "If my theories are correct, it should be possible, with some modifications and if done in the right spot under the right conditions."

"First of all, you'll need this," Yuuno told her, bringing out a small jewelry box, and pushing it across the table to her before Nanoha could ask what the conditions were.

She look at him in confusion, then picked up the box and opened it, her breathing catching in her throat as she beheld the spherical red jewel within, attached to a cord. "Is this...?"

"Hello, my master," Raging Heart intoned as Nanoha picked it up. "It is good to see you again."

"Raging... Heart," Nanoha breathed, not realizing until this very moment how much she had missed her device; a single tear appeared in her left eye as she clutched it to her chest. "So you had it all this time? Thank you, Yuuno-kun."

Yuuno blushed a bit as he scratched the back of his head. "Technically speaking, it still belongs to the Scrya tribe, which is where ownership returned when you.... passed away. I was able to reacquire it so Shari could make the necessary programming additions for the time jump."

Her head came up as she wiped her eyes. "Yes, about that; how exactly am I supposed to do this?"

Yuuno brought up a holographic screen and typed a few buttons, and the lights dimmed as a holographic Mid-Childa hovered over the table along with its moons. "In two months time, the moons will align again and the rift will open. Raging Heart has the necessary information programmed in to identify the rift and guide you into it. After that, it will be up to your will and your magic to get you to the right point."

Nanoha looked back and forth between the couple, realizing something. "You don't know what will happen when I go into it, do you?"

"Not exactly, no," Shari admitted, apologetic. "I've been running simulations and calculations for the past ten years, but as far as I know, no one has attempted anything like this."

"It may very well come down to you keeping a date and time firmly in mind when you enter," Yuuno added, hopefully. "With any luck, it will just be a short hop and you'll barely realize anything has happened; almost like a teleport. All I can say is keep the destination firmly in mind."

Nanoha understood something else about all this. "You said I was to take the place of my younger self, so I suppose that means I die in her place so she can live."

"I know," Yuuno told her softly, putting his silverware down. "It means you'd end up sacrificing your life to change history, so that none of this would happen. No one will have died. It's a long shot, but we'll leave the choice up to you."

"Up to me?" Nanoha questioned, closing her hand around the jewel in her hand, the familiar warmth offering a strange comfort after all this time. "I already gave my life for everyone once, and you already know me well enough to know I'd do it a second time if it meant saving everyone. But will this actually work? You don't know. You had me cloned, gave the people a hope that I would solve everything, and several have died for me... all for me to go back and time and make it so nothing happens!

Her head came up. "Wouldn't this cause a paradox? If I save my younger self so that this doesn't happen, doesn't that mean I won't exist to go back in time? What if I go back even farther? I could really change history!"

"There are a number of theories, but no one really knows," Shari answered softly. "Don't get too mad at him, as this is my fault, too. I thought he was crazy at first, but I eventually went along with it, because I don't see any other way. I hate seeing what has become of our world, and our friends, and I can't help but feel this was never supposed to be. But in answer to your concerns, it's possible that you going back in time will simply create an alternate timeline, and this future will continue as is. Or after you save yourself, you'll cease to be, but everyone will experience the new alternate reality. In short, this is a last ditch effort, a gamble. That's why we recommend you focusing on the moment you died, and not attempt to go any farther back."

Nanoha's head lowered again as she thought about that; sacrificing her life to save others was a given, if there was no other way. But what if it did form an alternate timeline and Hayate continued ruling here? That would make her efforts all for naught, regardless if there was a new second timeline where this was prevented. In any case, temporal mechanics was beyond her understanding.

"There's one other thing, that will influence your decision," Yuuno said at last, which brought Nanoha's head back up and her focus to the holographic planet. "The place on Mid-Childa where the moon's focus their energies is always the same, and is probably a reason why Clanagan was built where it is. Not only does the rift form in the city, but it does so in a very specific place; due to the lensing effect of our atmosphere, the effect is concentrated at a single spot."

As Yuuno spoke, the hologram began to shift, zooming in on the spot where the moon's were concentrating their effect to showcase the city, and then to the specific point indicated by a flashing red dot. The location made Nanoha's eyes widen; it was the top of the central spire in Clanagan. She turned to stare at him upon realizing the implications.

"Yes," he answered to response to her unspoken question. "Before you'll be able to even think about using the time travel option, you'll have to conquer Clanagan, the bastion of Hayate's Bureau, first."

x~~*~~x

Nanoha leaned back in the hot water, watching the steam drift upwards, glad that Shari had suggested a bath after dinner; the cloned woman hadn't really had one this nice since the few days she spent at Neyra's restaurant, which seemed like ages ago. She had been able to get a short shower and wash-down at the rebel base, but nothing like the clean and well-kept furo she found herself in now. She figured Yuuno probably had it installed, as he had come to like them during his stay at the Takamachi household.

It also gave her a chance to collect her thoughts and reflect on all that she had been told since she arrived at the hidden Finieno home; she didn't know why, but it brought her a bit of amusement to realize Yuuno had taken Shari's name, rather than the other way around. But the nagging concerns from earlier still remained.

Time travel.

Sacrifice.

A number of people had already sacrificed themselves for her, some making the ultimate offering of their life itself, and now she was expected to give up her life to possibly undo all that. In doing so, they never would have died, but those who hadn't died would never have lived, like Amos and Givo. And who is to say Vice and Alto, or Yuuno and Shari would have ever gotten together? Could she be the sole judge and take that choice away from them? Obviously, Yuuno and Shari were prepared to take that route, but what about everyone else? Making extreme decisions regardless of people's feelings was something Hayate had been doing.

[Would I be any better if I did this?] she finally asked herself the question that had been forming in her mind. [Perhaps the right path is simply to end the dictatorship and return freedom to the people living now.] The cloned mage didn't quite know what she expected to find at the end of her journey, the reasons for her creation and the purpose she was to fulfill, but somehow she didn't expect time travel.

"And that's what I am," Nanoha said softly. "A clone; a sacrifice. A spare part to fix something gone wrong."

"Master?" Raging heart chirped, floating nearby.

"I'm not the real Nanoha," she informed her device. "She died years ago. I'm a substitute. And we're being asked to sacrifice ourselves; are you okay with that?"

"I do not understand," Raging Heart replied. "You are my master. We will fight together as we always have. I will assist you however you desire. That is all."

Nanoha stared at the device, a million thoughts going through her head, then smiled. "Thank you, Raging Heart."

She decided she had been in the bath long enough and got out, drying herself off and dressing in the loose shirt and trousers Shari had left for her while her other clothes were washed. Nanoha wanted more; she wasn't sure if she'd exercise the time travel option, but the original problem still remained: Hayate's Bureau. It needed to be brought down first, and had to be done within two months if she was going to do this. As she dried and combed her hair, she realized that since Yuuno and Shari seemingly plotted this much out, they had to have some idea of how to accomplish that.

She hook Raging Heart's necklace cord around her neck and left the bathroom, searching through the corridors looking for her hosts. As she approached what looked like an indoor arboretum, voices lightly drifted through the trees.

"Are you going to tell her?" came Shari's voice.

Curious, Nanoha paused, listening in.

x~~*~~x

"I'm not sure, actually, but I don't think it makes a difference, honestly," Yuuno replied as the two sat together under their favorite cherry blossom tree. "At the most, it might just hurt her more. And that's not something that I want to do; I've already hurt her enough."

"You still have feelings for her," Shari stated, still leaning against him. It was a fact, and not a question; she knew him too well.

"Which is why you know I hate doing this, but it's the way things have to be, I think," he told her, his arm around her, gently rubbing her far shoulder. "And I told you why."

Shari smiled. "I know, because you saw her for a brief moment that one morning. And you're right, you know. The one you saw, and this one... they both have short hair. But it still doesn't mean she succeeded; and if one of those theories is true, it means she didn't."

"But I have to believe that it did," Yuuno replied, adamant as he closed his eyes, remembering that time.

He wasn't sure what it was about that morning, only that he sensed someone else in the room, other than his first wife in the bed next to him. He turned as his eyes opened, and that's when he saw her, standing next to the bed and gazing fondly down at him. At first he thought he might have been a ghost or just a hallucination especially since the figure promptly faded from sight, but two things stuck in his mind that morning, the first being her short hair. Why would he hallucinate that?

He spoke the second thing softly. "She smiled...."

x~~*~~x

Nanoha's eyes widened at the revelation, not sure how to take it; did that mean she didn't have a choice, and would end up taking the time travel option? She wasn't quite sure, but she wasn't about to take anyone withholding information on her now. She strolled into the arboretum and approached the pair.

"I need to know everything," she told them as she gazed at them evenly, hands on her hips. "How am I supposed to take down Hayate? I'm guessing you know already."

The pair glanced at each other, then Yuuno sighed, nodded, and stood up. "You're right, we do have an idea. Come with us."

Curious, she followed them as they headed down another side passage and Yuuno glanced at Shari, an unspoken signal traveling between them.

"During the war, Carim kept trying to see exactly how it was supposed to end, but it was never very clear," Shari began to explain as they walked. "Since Yuuno brought me in to help study her ability, I eventually made a device for her, which helped her better control her 'future-gaze' for lack of a better term. Because so much information comes out of the rift, her linker core is mostly overwhelmed, which is why her prophecies were always pretty vague and limited. But the device I made for her assists her linker core to filter through the terabytes of data that comes through, partly allowing her to actively look for specific things, if they exist. It's mostly junk data, but major events affecting Mid-Childa come through stronger than the rest, which is what she usually picked up on."

Yuuno continued for her as they entered a side room. "Shortly before the end of the war, Carim finally found the prophecy she was looking for, the one that would signal the end of the dark times and return what she was looking for; "The long night ends and a new day dawns when one who has returned from the grave leads the army of the d-”

An explosion to Nanoha's right cut off Yuuno's words, and sent her her flying against a wall where she felt her head hit something, and then the world became blurry, while the bang from the blast had left her ears ringing. But she cold make out a new person standing in the wreckage from the newly formed hole, someone with long golden object that matched her hair, and that surprised her almost as much as the following discussion that she could just barely understand.

x~~*~~x

“I figured I'd find my ex-husband here, but not my old aide as well,” Fate stated, glancing back and forth between the two as the dust settled and she took stock of the situation. “You're both under arrest for aiding and abetting an enemy of the state. My enforcers are covering all exits; there is no escape.”

She noticed subtle apprehensive glances pass between the two instead of responding to her which left her wondering what it could mean, until a feminine groan sounded to her left. The figure her peripheral vision detected forced a second look as the world around her stopped.

Fate's skin tingled and her mouth dropped open as the woman slowly tried to sit up, a ton of feelings and emotions pouring through her in a fraction of an instant. “Nano...ha?”

“Fate...chan?” Nanoha questioned blankly, holding her head while staring back.

“Nanoha!” Fate exclaimed, beginning to run in her direction; but before she got to the other, green chains ensnared her arms and legs, and her head snapped around with a snarl. “Yuuno!”

His hand outstretched and glowing the same emerald green, Yuuno shifted in front of, his face showing visible strain to maintain the spell. “Shari, do it!”

“Right!” the other woman agreed, quickly moving over to help Nanoha up.

“Yuuno, what are you...” Fate started to say, slowly breaking the binds, gripping the handle of Bardiche's Zanbar form tighter. “Stop it!”

“This is the first time in a long time the three of us have been together in the same place,” Yuuno reminisced with a sad smile, as the sounds of boots running in the halls got louder signaling the approach of her Enforcers. “But I'm sorry, I can't let you stop her. Hurry, Shari!”

A clearly dazed Nanoha had been helped up by Shari, who had draped one of the former's arms across her shoulders and was now leading her across the room to a teleporter. Fate grit her teeth, realizing what they were up to, and in Yuuno's eyes she could see that he had come to a similar conclusion: it was a race as to whether Shari could get Nanoha out, Fate would break the binds, or that the Enforcers would back her up. Fate had a barrier setup over the place, but Yuuno was an expert in teleportation and Shari was a master technician; between the two of them, they might very well be able to get out.

The bonds finally dissolved the instant Enforcer's appeared in the door, but Yuuno leapt back and cast his next spell. “Steel defense!”

Fate's golden blade met the barrier covering Yuuno, Shari, Nanoha and the teleportation pad, the same moment her Enforcers opened fire. “Nanoha, stop!”

Nanoha looked up from where she sat on the platform, as Shari activated the machine. “I'm sorry... Fate-chan. I-”

The whole building shook, and lights began blinking out all over the room.

“The generator is down!” Shari announced in alarm. “There's not enough power to send her all the way!”

Yuuno grunted under the strain of maintaining his shield. “Do the best you can, Shari! Nanoha, find your daughter; find Vivio!”

“Vivio!” Fate exclaimed, her eyes widening, feeling a surge within her as the barrier began to crack under the strain of her sword and the Enforcer's fire, and the teleportation machine began it's start-up whine. “STOP!”

The shield finally shattered as Nanoha vanished in emerald light. Fate whacked Yuuno aside with her blade and then bound Shari as she reached the control panel, but the coordinates of the transfer weren't listed; the database appeared to be blank.

“You won't find her, as the machine doesn't record where it sends people,” Shari informed her. "Neither of us knows exactly where Nanoha is now. I know it probably pains you, but it has to be this way; Yuuno told me how close you were to her and your daughter.”

Fate turned her glare on the woman. “You have no idea what I'm feeling right now, but you'll soon find out.” She turned around and strode towards her Enforcers, pausing to bind Yuuno. “And for both your sakes, you better hope I find them.”

x~~*~~x

“[Linker core completion at 100%,]” Rein intoned from within her mistress. “[All magic particles have been gathered, but there is some minor distortion I cannot account for.]”

“Steady,” Hayate stated, as the glowing crimson sparkle grew brighter in the center of the elaborate magic circle. “Just focus on the restoration. Reinitialize Signum program.”

The hovering sparkle in the middle of the room flashed once and a crimson Belkan magic triangle spun underneath, a transparent form rising from it and materializing around the core. With a final push, Hayate completed the spell, then leaned on the nearby book podium to rest, as Signum blinked her eyes open.

Hayate allowed herself a smile. “Welcome back, Signum. I thought I'd lost you there for a bit. Are you okay?”

“I seem to be intact,” Signum stated, glancing at her hands. “Though as before my memories seem to have-”

Her sentence was interrupted by an exclamation from behind. “What the hell!?”

x~~*~~x

Nanoha suddenly found herself face down upon soft grass after the teleportation. Her mind head still felt a bit cloudy, but she could feel the cool water against her legs as her loose trousers slowly soaked up water, making her realize she had materialized partially into a babbling stream; but most of her thoughts were on Fate, Yuuno, and Shari, wondering what had become of them. The former, in particular, seemed as shocked as Nanoha, to see the other, and genuinely appeared to be distressed at Nanoha having to leave so abruptly.

She blinked her eyes, suddenly feeling saddened for some reason, and attempted to get up. She was only moderately successful, getting her hands underneath her body before the dizziness made her collapse again.

As her vision began to go dark, she thought she spied a rather tall individual approaching her through the bushes and trees, dressed in tanned leather.

Xx~~*~~xX

Author's notes:

Raiser knew about the Yuuno/Shari angle back when I told him about this fic and showed him my very early notes, but it was only coincidence that he had started work on his own Yuuno/Shari fic. So neither of us copied the other; it was just random happenstance, heh.

Just a note about the time travel angle: it may or may not be the solution, or may only be partially the solution. I'm not telling at this point. =)

I'm expecting to get raked over the coals for this, so don't let me down!

You are SO getting another behind-the-scenes moment from me on this. Just le me think about it for a while...

[RadiantBeam]

Originally Posted by Tempy

I said I'd write more, so I did.

Side Dish 1

Spoiler for Side Dish 2: Anxiety:

It would be absurd to assume that a “family” tethered together by legal documents would live
“happily ever after.” Indeed, even with the newly acquired living space (to which they were all
thankful for) everything was not wonderful, just as Kevin expected it to be. The girls seemed to
have trouble settling in, raising a ruckus and threatening to break down the walls just for minor
things. At least, that’s what Material-L, now Lilia, did whenever something she wanted was
denied (usually a sweet of some sort). Material-D, Diana, was a mouthy sort and complained
about every little thing, from the lack of silk bedsheets to wanting champagne to go with dinner.
Material-S, Shana, was the quietest of all three, the most polite and pragmatic of them, but she
was also the most mysterious. It was difficult to tell what she wanted, often giving that blank,
stoic look to every situation. Fortunately, she was also good at corralling her sisters into behaving.

And how thoughtful Shiro and Momoko were to give him the week off, so as to allow him time
to help the girls adjust. But now, Kevin was wondering if one week was enough.

5:40AM

Habit made the chef an early riser, and despite his body’s desire for more sleep, Kevin crawled
out of bed as the sun peeked over the urban jungle of Uminari City. Brushing teeth, a quick
shower, a struggle to get some clothes on, he was still drowsy when he half-stumbled-half-
walked into the kitchen area. There, he found an increasingly common sight.

“Oh. Shana, you’re up early again.”

“Good morning, Father,” the girl greeted, looking up from the morning newspaper. It was an
unusual habit she picked up, but this way she was learning about current events and society.

Kevin blinked, still unused to that title. “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes. Lilia continues to sneak into my bed at times, however.”

“Heh. That’s adorable,” Kevin chuckled quietly. “She’s not bothering you, though?”

Shana shook her head. “No, but sometimes she sneaks into Diana’s bed, and she is less than
appreciative of the disturbance.”

“I wonder if she has a cuddling issue…” Perhaps visiting the toy store for a bear or something
similar would be prudent. For that matter, a trip to the clothing store would be a good idea too.
For now, the girls had a few borrowed sets from Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate, but his newfound
daughters would want to establish their own sense of fashion.

“I think we will go shopping today, to buy you three clothes of your own,” Kevin announced,
looking at Shana for approval, “Does that sound good?”

“The others must be awake by now,” she slipped out of her chair. “Please excuse me. They
have… difficulties dressing in the morning.”

“They do?” Kevin looked at Shana with a raised eyebrow. “Why would they have issues?”

“Diana is lazy, and Lilia is a dunce. Neither are capable of doing it themselves,” Shana gave her
adopted father a flat, completely unamused stare, one that invoked a slightly stronger chuckle.

“Alright. Go wake your sisters. I’ll prepare breakfast. Does muesli sound good?”

“I have trust that whatever you make will be good.”

Kevin blinked again, watching his adopted daughter walk off. The girl was difficult to read, but
she seemed to accept him well enough. It was heartwarming, in a way, to have Shana’s trust so
quickly, as well as the title of “father.”

Well, it would do no good to ruin that trust, would it? If there was one thing he could do well, it
was making sure that the girls stayed well-fed.


4:30 PM

“I’m bored.”

“Yes, Lilia. You have said that many times now.”

“But I’m bored!”

“We were just at the department store. Go try on those clothes we bought.”

“But~ I’m~ Bored~!”

“Cease your complaints! I cannot hear myself taking over the world!” Diana screeched, her
patience at its end. The silver-haired girl sat in front of a desktop computer, the gaily colored
screen showing some sort of terrain with various submenus overlaying the land. Upon the fertile-
looking land, tiny men labored to build a town. This “game” was rather entertaining, the potential
for taking over land from opposing cultures rather befitting a king.

There were several footsteps, and Diana felt someone watching her over her shoulder.

“You’re not even out of that peninsula! How are you taking over the world?”

“One does not dominate all of existence in a blink, fool. A kingdom rises from humble roots and
grows into magnificence.”

“…Like a tree?”

A sigh. “Yes, Lilia, like a tree. A great, big, world-conquering tree.”

“That’s a weird tree.”

Indeed.

Diana tolerated her sister’s presence for a while, though her presence gradually bore down on
her. The incessant questions and occasional bad advice about what to build or develop next
didn’t help to sooth her rapidly deteriorating patience either. Finally, the clone tore her eyes
from the screen and glared at Lilia, “Do you have anything else better to do?”

“Nope!” Lilia answered with a smile.

If she could, Diana would have buried her face in her hands, but as it was her base was under
attack by pagans, and that was not cool. “Why don’t you go bother Shana?”

“Kay!” the blue haired girl skipped off to another part of the apartment. Whereas Diana busied
herself with being a 400 BC Alexander, Shana was found in the kitchen, cautiously stirring a pot
of… something.

“Whatcha doing, Shana~?”

“I am preparing soup,” the short-haired one replied in monotone.

“What kind?”

“Father calls it minestrone. He told me to stir it ‘every now and then.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“I do not know. I have decided to stir every fifteen minutes.”

What a serious and hardworking girl.

“No, I mean ‘mee-na-sta-lo-ne,’” the poor girl butchered the foreign word.

“It is ‘minestrone,’” Shana corrected her sister, tapping the spoon a few times on the pot’s edge
before setting it aside. “Father describes it as an Italian soup with seasonal vegetables and a rich broth. It smells good.”

She was there when the soup was just started, a pot of broth and uncooked vegetables. Over
time, Shana bore witness to the gradual transformation from simple, cut up ingredients into a full,
rich soup. The smells, especially, were the most dramatic.

“Is it done yet? I’m hungry!”

“No, not yet. Father said to let it simmer until supper time.”

“Why do you call him ‘father?’ He’s not your real dad.”

“He is our legal guardian, and since he has adopted us, he is our father.”

“But he’s not related to us, right? Not even Diana thinks so!”

“Bow before my army!” came the distant reply. “Bow before Diana the Great! Ohohoho~!”

… Well, at least she was getting megalomania fix.

The two stared at their sister for a moment before returning to each other, Lilia speaking up first,
“See? She doesn’t even accept him yet!”

“The fact that she refers to herself as Diana means she has accepted him,” the short-haired girl
peered into the gently bubbling pot. “Had she not, our situation would be not nearly as peaceful
as it is.”

“You sound like you like him!”

“Gratitude and respect can infer ‘liking,’ if that is what you meant. You too should be thankful; we may have easily have become tenants of the state, rather than citizens.”

“What do you have against him, Lilia? Do you not like him?”

“I just… I don’t know,” the girl’s shoulders sagged, as if she were carrying a heavy weight. “I just don’t want to be left alone… I don’t want to be separated… I heard someone talking about that on the ship, you know? It’s so scary…”

Lilia was shivering.

“Silly girl,” Shana pulled the blue-haired girl into a hug. “Remember what he said? He would not leave us alone. I, for one, trust him on that.”

“…” Lilia was slow to return the hug, but tightly her arms wrapped around her sister. “…I hope so too.”

“FOOLISH BARBARIANS! THIS LAND IS NOW MINE! BOW BEFORE ME!”



6:30 PM

“I’m hungry~!”

“Why must you complain about everything?”

“Because I’m hungry~!”

Click-clack! The front door’s lock unlatched, opening to reveal the sole male of the house.

“I’m back~” Kevin announced as he stepped into his abode, a brown paper bag cradled in one
arm. “I brought dessert~”

He was slightly disappointed that only Shana came to greet him, but that was to be expected.
Diana was a little too engrossed at dominating cavemen, while Lilia was strangely silent. Not
even the mention of dessert had her excited, which was a little disconcerting.

“Welcome home, father,” Shana greeted, earning a smile from the older man. The thoughts about
Lilia were pushed to the side.

“Shana, how’s the soup?” Kevin stepped towards the kitchen, breathing in deeply the room’s
bouquet.

She copied the older man’s actions, “It smells good.”

He set the bag down on the counter, chuckling at the girl’s Spartan response, “How does it
look?”

“It looks good.”

A small white box came out from the brown bag. “Heh, you worked hard on it, didn’t you?”

She nodded, “It will taste good.”

“Fantastic,” Kevin mirrored Shana’s nod and pulled out a crusty loaf of bread, still warm from
the oven. “Get your sisters. We’ll eat dinner now.”

“Yes.”

Meals were usually a quiet and uneventful time of the day. Kevin quickly picked up on the little
quirks that each of his girls had. Lilia was the easiest to figure out: though not picky with her
food, she disliked bitter things and adored sweets. Desserts were a part of a complete meal,
even at breakfast and lunch, and God forbid you deny her cake. On the flipside, restricting
dessert was a good deterrent for misbehaving. She also had a propensity towards poultry,
especially chicken. Fried, roasted, baked, she loved that bird; pot pie night was her favorite.
Shana was almost clinical in her analysis and deconstruction of food, though truth be told meals
were exotic adventures in taste and texture. Every flavor, every sort of cuisine amazed her.
Nary an ingredient did she not question and examine, a trait that Kevin found endearing. Being
born into the world as is, Shana’s experience seemed incomplete, though this likely meant the
same for her sisters. Diana seemed to be the pickiest of the three, but fortunately her tastes
were not excessive. Too hot, too cold, too spicy, there was always something wrong with
whatever food was given to her. Yet, eat she did, grudgingly accepting that what she had was
all that was available. She never seemed completely pleased, but never wholly disappointed
either.

Tonight’s meal, minestrone with fresh bread, made for a surprisingly active conversation. The
girls were happy that they had gone on that shopping trip, secretly eager to try on their new
clothes, especially Lilia. Shana tried a number of ways to change how her soup tasted, be it
dipping the bread in the broth, eating soup then bread, even bread straight. An extra dollop of
extra virgin olive oil, a sprinkle of pepper, her curiosity seemed to have no bounds. Diana
boasted of her exploits, having crushed a number of burgeoning civilizations and merged them
with her own. Apparently the entire east coast of what would be known as North America was
in her control.

What strange daughters he had, but better as girls than warriors.

Dessert, a cake from the Midoriya, was well accepted, and the following clean-up was usually
a team effort (Diana took position as quality inspector). Afterwards, Kevin made an
announcement:

“It took some time and a little work, but we’ve managed to finish your paperwork for Earth,”
the cook announced as he placed a towel down. The girls’ attentions were all drawn to him.

“As such, starting next week, each of you will be transferred to Seishou Elementary School.
You’re going to school.”

The reactions he got were close to what he expected: indifference from Diana and muted
interest from Shana, but Lilia’s was slightly off. Off as in she suddenly transformed into her
Barrier Jacket and summoned her device to her hands. Though her sisters watched in alarm,
Lilia hefted her weapon rather threateningly, causing Kevin to take an unconscious step back.

“You’re just sending us away?!” the girl shrieked, her eyes wide.

“Hey, calm down,” Kevin spoke as calmly as he could. Though outwardly he seemed only
slightly worried, his heart was thundering a mile a minute, and he was struggling to not shake at
all. The girl in front of him appeared only nine-years-old, yet she was the most terrifying thing
the chef had ever seen.

“I am calm!”

“Not while swinging that thing around,” Kevin eyed the axe-like device, something that could
break him in half easily. “Put that away.”

“No! I don’t want to go! You can’t make me!”

A worried Shana took a step towards her sister, “Lilia, please stop this. You are overreacti—”

“Back off, Material-S!” Lilia spat, briefly pointing Vulnificus at Shana, “I don’t

“You’re not going away forever, Lilia,” the older man had his hands out placatingly as he took
a step towards her. “It’s just during the day, and you’ll be with everyone else—”

“Shut up! You’re not my dad!” she screeched, Vulnificus lashing out viciously. Though she was
a tiny girl, her arms were not even as thick as the older man’s wrists, her strength was still
incredible. For that reason, Kevin found himself scrambling to avoid being struck by the device.
For the most part, he did dodge the bladed axe-head of Vulnificus. However, a small part of
the weapon clipped him in the ribs. He was knocked off his feet, set bodily head over heels into
the wall behind him. Crash! The wall groaned as Kevin bounced off the wood and plaster,
leaving a sizable crater in the wall.

“Nnngh,” he groaned, a sign that he was still alive.

The indifferent Diana, silent earlier, uncharacteristically rushed over to the fallen man, beating the
shocked Shana to their guardian. A quick look-over, then she whipped her head over to give
Lilia a rather scathing glare, one that the girl flinched at, “What were you thinking?! He’s a
human, completely unlike us! What you even thought of what could happen if he were to die?!”

“I-I…”

“You fool! What are you doing raising a hand against—”

“Stop. Don’t yell at her,” Kevin’s voice, though weak, could still be heard.

Diana turned her attention back her guardian, her brow furrowed in indignation and… worry?
“But—”

“It’s fine. I’m fine,” he muttered, shakily pushing himself off the floor, “Ugh, that was tough.
Don’t worry, really. It just hurts a bit.”

A warm viridian glow encompassed the silver-haired girl’s hand, “Sit still, then. I will heal you.”

“No, it’s okay. Let me deal with this,” Kevin said, looking at Diana, “Please.”

A number of emotions were visible on Diana’s face, changing from confusion, to frustration,
then finally at tired acceptance, “If you stop interrupting me, fine. But don’t blame me if you
ache in the morning. Really, rejecting my help after I so graciously offered! You had better
appreciate my generosity, servant!”

“Thank you,” the man smiled and patted Diana’s head, causing a blush to form on her cheeks.
With one final push, Kevin managed to stagger to his feet. His steps were unsteady, though
Shana quickly came to support.

“Father, I am sorry, I could not…” she trailed off, looking pleadingly at Kevin. “Please do not
be too harsh on her.”

“It’s alright. I just want to talk to her,” he patted her on the head as well.

“A-ah…” Lilia, speechless, could only watch as Kevin limped towards her. A limp that she
caused…

When he stood in front of her, he kneeled down so he could close to eye level. Though Kevin
tried to look at her in the eyes, she couldn’t meet his gaze. Material-S, Material-D, they
seemed to side with him instead of her. Was she wrong? Or were they blind? She didn’t know.
What she did was that she harmed someone she shouldn’t have, and everyone was angry at her.
Head bowed, looking away, Lilia was ready for whatever punishment this man would bestow.
But to her surprise, Kevin pulled her into a hug. “You don’t need to fight anymore. Do you
remember what I said when I adopted you? You are not alone, I won’t let you be alone ever
again.”

“S-Shana said the same thing…”

“I did say that I wanted to try and be a family, but if you do not want it, that’s fine too. I just
want what any parent would want: the best for their child. While blood does not bind us, and
our time has been short, I view you all as more than mere children. You are my children,
and my hopes and dreams are yours. I am not a mage, nor am I rich and famous, but I will do
everything in my power to ensure each of you live happily and how you wish.”

Ah. This must be why Material-S, Shana, accepted him so readily, and why Material-D, did
not rebel. He truly meant what he said. And if he had to give his life, he probably would. Is this
what a father is? Could this be what a family is? Fighting and magic was all she knew, and yet…
this was something she desired even more.

“I’m sorry…! I-I didn’t mean to—” her voice was muffled as she pressed her face into Kevin’s
shoulder, her tears soaking into his shirt. Sighing with a smile, Kevin brushed Lilia’s hair with a
gentle hand.

“Shh. It’s alright. Everything is all right.”


7:45 PM

Following a good cry and a cup of hot tea, Lilia finally calmed down. The four of them now sat
at the dinner table, quietly discussing the expectations, responsibilities, and what it meant to be a
“family.” So deep into their conversation they were, that they were all surprised when their
doorbell rang.

“Who could that be?” Kevin wondered out loud as he unlocked the door and opened it.
“Yuuno?”

“Err, good evening, sir,” the blond boy bowed. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

Kevin shook his head, “No, not really, but what are you doing here? Did Nanoha kick you out
or something?”

“Ahaha, no, nothing like that,” he laughed weakly, scratching the back of his head. “Actually,
Chrono told me to come here. I got slated for a job…”

“Is that so…” the older man had an idea as to the boy’s task. “Well, come on in. Did you eat?
There’s still a lot of minestrone left.”

“Oh, no, but thank you very much for the offer. I ate just before coming here,” Yuuno seemed
almost regretful that he couldn’t have any, though imagine his confusion when he entered and
took notice of the crater in the wall, “Um, what happened here?”

“A misunderstanding and an accident. Don’t worry, it’s been resolved. Anyways, am I correct
to assume that you are the person the Harlaown boy forced to help in the rehab?”

“He didn’t really force me,” (Note, yes, he did. With blackmail.) “But, yes. I am here to help in
rehabilitation.”

“Hmm,” Kevin looked over to his girls, who all gazed back with curiosity. “Well, we were
expecting this. How long is it going to take? Do you have all the materials?”

“Yes! This should only take a couple of hours, tonight. I intend on just an orientation and
introduction of sorts. Then we could establish a regular schedule.”

“Hmm, alright. Let me just tell the girls…”

The sisters seemed rather interested, though portrayed in varying degrees. Kevin almost pitied
the boy, considering Lilia and Shana’s sudden excitement. Sudden, with Shana, due to the fact
that she had an expression different from the usual stoic look. And Diana, well, she seemed to
accept Yuuno as a new slave/servant, so that was close enough. (Why is she always
mentioned last, anyways?)

“Work hard, you three,” he waved the little group off as they marched into the next room,
leaving Kevin in the living room with his tea, his book, and peace. Maybe he’d bring up some
snacks later on.

Ahh, this isn’t too bad after all…

The teacup came up to his lips, a fragrant jasmine oolong, though before he could take a sip, a
thought entered his mind. He had just now allowed a boy into a bedroom with three girls,
unsupervised.

…

…

Ehhh. It was Yuuno, one of the most harmless guys he knew. And if he tried anything,
everyone would hit him with enough beamspam to make that ship of theirs look silly.

....

Damn, Diana. Just... damn. I sense she's going to be a lot of fun.

Very sweet to see Kevin trying so hard to be a good father to the girls, even if at times he doesn't really know what to do for them. The way he comforted Lilia after she hurt him was incredibly heartwarming. Also, ouch, poor Yuuno. Poor guy just can't win. Either he's considered too nice to try anything, or any girl who doesn't want him can beamspam him.

[Megaolix]

Here's my omake for the new chapter of Future Tense.

Spoiler for Behind the Scenes of Future Tense, 2:

Nanoha: “...”

Fate: “Nanoha?”

Nanoha: “I knew it... I knew that as soon as Yuuno was done helping me, something would happen! Why is this happening to all my allies?!”

Yuuno: “Well, at least I’m not dead yet.”

Nanoha: “Yuuno! ...Wait, why ‘yet’?”

Fate: “...”

Yuuno: “It’s rather obvious, considering how much I know, that Fate will have to interrogate me and get everything out of me.”

Nanoha: “Fate-chan...”

Raging Heart: “Charging...”

Fate: “Wait wait wait! Even if I wanted to interrogate him, I’ll probably be out again soon to search for you and Vivio.”

Yuuno: “I’ll have to agree on that.”

Raging Heart: “Abort.”

Nanoha: “Then... if not Fate,who?”

“That would be me, naturally.”

Nanoha: “Haya... te?”

Fate: “I know you still like that hobby, but aren’t you a bit old for it now?”

Hayate: “Hey! Who decided what we had to be like here? Nanoha didn’t even comment on your appearance Fate!”

Yuuno: “Because there was no point to comment on it?”

Hayate: “And now you’ve ruined my entrance. For the sake of readers picturing the scenes in their minds, can’t we just be at the age of... Well, as old as when you’re supposed to return to? It’s between Vivid and Force, right? That should be good enough. Let’s redo this.”

*Take Two, Action!*

“That would be me, naturally.”

Nanoha: “Hayate!”

Yuuno: “Graglekd.”

Fate: “I’m not sure this is better than before...”

Hayate: “Well, I thought it was a good time to try out the Evil Queen costume I had. Does it look good on me?”

Yuuno: “Gruernt.”

Nanoha: “What he said.”

Hayate: “I’ll that that as a yes. Moving on, I’m afraid that even if he knows nothing about you Nanoha, he has information on the Resistances group that I simply can’t afford to pass on.”

Nanoha: “But! ...But...! ”

Hayate: “And after what he did to the Library when he left...”

Nanoha: “Yuuno?”

Yuuno: “I’m afraid I can’t say it yet. And chances are that it isn’t important enough for us to learn it.”

Nanoha: “But you always liked it... Why would you do something to it?”

Yuuno: “It occurred to me that Hayate would use the Library to learn how to use certain Lost Logia against others. Sadly, we don’t even know if I did anything at that point.

Fate: “And that means?”

Yuuno: “At worst, I just left and Hayate lost her best librarian. At best, I put the books exactly as they were before I took over as Head Librarian.”

Nanoha: “...How is that supposed to be the best you could.”

Yuuno: “If only you knew Nanoha... Let me explain it simply: it took YEARS with me supervising ALL of the reorganisation to put most of it in order. I would pity whoever is the current Head right now if I did mess up everything.”

Fate: “Current?”

Yuuno: “I’m certain my immediate replacement quit just before going insane.”

Hayate: “You know, shouldn’t we be discussing the main topic of the chapter? Nanoha, how do you think this time travel will go?”

Nanoha: “What? How can I possibly imagine? Messing up with time is like asking for anything to go wrong in any number of ways imaginable.”

Fate: “...And your personal opinion on how this will end considering the author? If the time travel will work?”

Nanoha: “The original me will die, forcing me to replace my original in the past while trying to live with all the tragedies I’ve seen. The most recent ones would be Fate sacrificing herself to help me defeat Hayate and Vivio dying as she make sure I make it across time after the inevitable screw-up arrives. And, of course, I would have found Yuuno either already dead or with his mind shattered beyond healing before all of that.”

Fate & Yuuno & Hayate: “...”

Nanoha: “Can you not see it?”

Yuuno: “...I actually can.”

Fate: “You’re becoming rather pessimistic Nanoha...”

Nanoha: “How can I NOT!? Ever since I woke up, it’s been one bad thing after another, no real moment to rest and now... and now...” *cries*

Fate: “Come here... I’m sure it will end well. It’s always the darkest before dawn, right?”

Hayate: “And since I’m supposed to be the Mistress of the Night Sky, it’s going to be really dark.”

Nanoha: *cries*

Yuuno: “Was that supposed to help?”

Hayate: “I’m supposed to be the evil last boss right now, remember?”

Yuuno: “For Nanoha’s sake, I hope it will be bright soon... Like she said, with no real time to clear her mind, she’s probably going to snap very soon.”

Hayate: “Then hope the new one appearing is an ally... then again, it’s probably 95% certain.”

“Yuuno: “Well, let’s see how this go... and please don’t hurt me too much when you get to interrogate me?

Hayate: “I make no promise.”

I'm thinking of doing this for each new cruelty on Nanoha you come up with. Which probably means one for every chapter up until the end.

[00-Raiser]

Originally Posted by Nanya01

And, no, no soap opera stuff here...

Uh, you already got evil twins, sex, and now brainwashing. You're knee deep in soap opera territory already

There's quite a bit of mood whiplash with this fic. First it was a fun, wacky misadventure and now it's become a dark journey into the realms of magical mind control date rape

Originally Posted by Tempy

I said I'd write more, so I did.

Side Dish 1

Spoiler for Side Dish 2: Anxiety:

It would be absurd to assume that a “family” tethered together by legal documents would live
“happily ever after.” Indeed, even with the newly acquired living space (to which they were all
thankful for) everything was not wonderful, just as Kevin expected it to be. The girls seemed to
have trouble settling in, raising a ruckus and threatening to break down the walls just for minor
things. At least, that’s what Material-L, now Lilia, did whenever something she wanted was
denied (usually a sweet of some sort). Material-D, Diana, was a mouthy sort and complained
about every little thing, from the lack of silk bedsheets to wanting champagne to go with dinner.
Material-S, Shana, was the quietest of all three, the most polite and pragmatic of them, but she
was also the most mysterious. It was difficult to tell what she wanted, often giving that blank,
stoic look to every situation. Fortunately, she was also good at corralling her sisters into behaving.

And how thoughtful Shiro and Momoko were to give him the week off, so as to allow him time
to help the girls adjust. But now, Kevin was wondering if one week was enough.

5:40AM

Habit made the chef an early riser, and despite his body’s desire for more sleep, Kevin crawled
out of bed as the sun peeked over the urban jungle of Uminari City. Brushing teeth, a quick
shower, a struggle to get some clothes on, he was still drowsy when he half-stumbled-half-
walked into the kitchen area. There, he found an increasingly common sight.

“Oh. Shana, you’re up early again.”

“Good morning, Father,” the girl greeted, looking up from the morning newspaper. It was an
unusual habit she picked up, but this way she was learning about current events and society.

Kevin blinked, still unused to that title. “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes. Lilia continues to sneak into my bed at times, however.”

“Heh. That’s adorable,” Kevin chuckled quietly. “She’s not bothering you, though?”

Shana shook her head. “No, but sometimes she sneaks into Diana’s bed, and she is less than
appreciative of the disturbance.”

“I wonder if she has a cuddling issue…” Perhaps visiting the toy store for a bear or something
similar would be prudent. For that matter, a trip to the clothing store would be a good idea too.
For now, the girls had a few borrowed sets from Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate, but his newfound
daughters would want to establish their own sense of fashion.

“I think we will go shopping today, to buy you three clothes of your own,” Kevin announced,
looking at Shana for approval, “Does that sound good?”

“The others must be awake by now,” she slipped out of her chair. “Please excuse me. They
have… difficulties dressing in the morning.”

“They do?” Kevin looked at Shana with a raised eyebrow. “Why would they have issues?”

“Diana is lazy, and Lilia is a dunce. Neither are capable of doing it themselves,” Shana gave her
adopted father a flat, completely unamused stare, one that invoked a slightly stronger chuckle.

“Alright. Go wake your sisters. I’ll prepare breakfast. Does muesli sound good?”

“I have trust that whatever you make will be good.”

Kevin blinked again, watching his adopted daughter walk off. The girl was difficult to read, but
she seemed to accept him well enough. It was heartwarming, in a way, to have Shana’s trust so
quickly, as well as the title of “father.”

Well, it would do no good to ruin that trust, would it? If there was one thing he could do well, it
was making sure that the girls stayed well-fed.


4:30 PM

“I’m bored.”

“Yes, Lilia. You have said that many times now.”

“But I’m bored!”

“We were just at the department store. Go try on those clothes we bought.”

“But~ I’m~ Bored~!”

“Cease your complaints! I cannot hear myself taking over the world!” Diana screeched, her
patience at its end. The silver-haired girl sat in front of a desktop computer, the gaily colored
screen showing some sort of terrain with various submenus overlaying the land. Upon the fertile-
looking land, tiny men labored to build a town. This “game” was rather entertaining, the potential
for taking over land from opposing cultures rather befitting a king.

There were several footsteps, and Diana felt someone watching her over her shoulder.

“You’re not even out of that peninsula! How are you taking over the world?”

“One does not dominate all of existence in a blink, fool. A kingdom rises from humble roots and
grows into magnificence.”

“…Like a tree?”

A sigh. “Yes, Lilia, like a tree. A great, big, world-conquering tree.”

“That’s a weird tree.”

Indeed.

Diana tolerated her sister’s presence for a while, though her presence gradually bore down on
her. The incessant questions and occasional bad advice about what to build or develop next
didn’t help to sooth her rapidly deteriorating patience either. Finally, the clone tore her eyes
from the screen and glared at Lilia, “Do you have anything else better to do?”

“Nope!” Lilia answered with a smile.

If she could, Diana would have buried her face in her hands, but as it was her base was under
attack by pagans, and that was not cool. “Why don’t you go bother Shana?”

“Kay!” the blue haired girl skipped off to another part of the apartment. Whereas Diana busied
herself with being a 400 BC Alexander, Shana was found in the kitchen, cautiously stirring a pot
of… something.

“Whatcha doing, Shana~?”

“I am preparing soup,” the short-haired one replied in monotone.

“What kind?”

“Father calls it minestrone. He told me to stir it ‘every now and then.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“I do not know. I have decided to stir every fifteen minutes.”

What a serious and hardworking girl.

“No, I mean ‘mee-na-sta-lo-ne,’” the poor girl butchered the foreign word.

“It is ‘minestrone,’” Shana corrected her sister, tapping the spoon a few times on the pot’s edge
before setting it aside. “Father describes it as an Italian soup with seasonal vegetables and a rich broth. It smells good.”

She was there when the soup was just started, a pot of broth and uncooked vegetables. Over
time, Shana bore witness to the gradual transformation from simple, cut up ingredients into a full,
rich soup. The smells, especially, were the most dramatic.

“Is it done yet? I’m hungry!”

“No, not yet. Father said to let it simmer until supper time.”

“Why do you call him ‘father?’ He’s not your real dad.”

“He is our legal guardian, and since he has adopted us, he is our father.”

“But he’s not related to us, right? Not even Diana thinks so!”

“Bow before my army!” came the distant reply. “Bow before Diana the Great! Ohohoho~!”

… Well, at least she was getting megalomania fix.

The two stared at their sister for a moment before returning to each other, Lilia speaking up first,
“See? She doesn’t even accept him yet!”

“The fact that she refers to herself as Diana means she has accepted him,” the short-haired girl
peered into the gently bubbling pot. “Had she not, our situation would be not nearly as peaceful
as it is.”

“You sound like you like him!”

“Gratitude and respect can infer ‘liking,’ if that is what you meant. You too should be thankful; we may have easily have become tenants of the state, rather than citizens.”

“What do you have against him, Lilia? Do you not like him?”

“I just… I don’t know,” the girl’s shoulders sagged, as if she were carrying a heavy weight. “I just don’t want to be left alone… I don’t want to be separated… I heard someone talking about that on the ship, you know? It’s so scary…”

Lilia was shivering.

“Silly girl,” Shana pulled the blue-haired girl into a hug. “Remember what he said? He would not leave us alone. I, for one, trust him on that.”

“…” Lilia was slow to return the hug, but tightly her arms wrapped around her sister. “…I hope so too.”

“FOOLISH BARBARIANS! THIS LAND IS NOW MINE! BOW BEFORE ME!”



6:30 PM

“I’m hungry~!”

“Why must you complain about everything?”

“Because I’m hungry~!”

Click-clack! The front door’s lock unlatched, opening to reveal the sole male of the house.

“I’m back~” Kevin announced as he stepped into his abode, a brown paper bag cradled in one
arm. “I brought dessert~”

He was slightly disappointed that only Shana came to greet him, but that was to be expected.
Diana was a little too engrossed at dominating cavemen, while Lilia was strangely silent. Not
even the mention of dessert had her excited, which was a little disconcerting.

“Welcome home, father,” Shana greeted, earning a smile from the older man. The thoughts about
Lilia were pushed to the side.

“Shana, how’s the soup?” Kevin stepped towards the kitchen, breathing in deeply the room’s
bouquet.

She copied the older man’s actions, “It smells good.”

He set the bag down on the counter, chuckling at the girl’s Spartan response, “How does it
look?”

“It looks good.”

A small white box came out from the brown bag. “Heh, you worked hard on it, didn’t you?”

She nodded, “It will taste good.”

“Fantastic,” Kevin mirrored Shana’s nod and pulled out a crusty loaf of bread, still warm from
the oven. “Get your sisters. We’ll eat dinner now.”

“Yes.”

Meals were usually a quiet and uneventful time of the day. Kevin quickly picked up on the little
quirks that each of his girls had. Lilia was the easiest to figure out: though not picky with her
food, she disliked bitter things and adored sweets. Desserts were a part of a complete meal,
even at breakfast and lunch, and God forbid you deny her cake. On the flipside, restricting
dessert was a good deterrent for misbehaving. She also had a propensity towards poultry,
especially chicken. Fried, roasted, baked, she loved that bird; pot pie night was her favorite.
Shana was almost clinical in her analysis and deconstruction of food, though truth be told meals
were exotic adventures in taste and texture. Every flavor, every sort of cuisine amazed her.
Nary an ingredient did she not question and examine, a trait that Kevin found endearing. Being
born into the world as is, Shana’s experience seemed incomplete, though this likely meant the
same for her sisters. Diana seemed to be the pickiest of the three, but fortunately her tastes
were not excessive. Too hot, too cold, too spicy, there was always something wrong with
whatever food was given to her. Yet, eat she did, grudgingly accepting that what she had was
all that was available. She never seemed completely pleased, but never wholly disappointed
either.

Tonight’s meal, minestrone with fresh bread, made for a surprisingly active conversation. The
girls were happy that they had gone on that shopping trip, secretly eager to try on their new
clothes, especially Lilia. Shana tried a number of ways to change how her soup tasted, be it
dipping the bread in the broth, eating soup then bread, even bread straight. An extra dollop of
extra virgin olive oil, a sprinkle of pepper, her curiosity seemed to have no bounds. Diana
boasted of her exploits, having crushed a number of burgeoning civilizations and merged them
with her own. Apparently the entire east coast of what would be known as North America was
in her control.

What strange daughters he had, but better as girls than warriors.

Dessert, a cake from the Midoriya, was well accepted, and the following clean-up was usually
a team effort (Diana took position as quality inspector). Afterwards, Kevin made an
announcement:

“It took some time and a little work, but we’ve managed to finish your paperwork for Earth,”
the cook announced as he placed a towel down. The girls’ attentions were all drawn to him.

“As such, starting next week, each of you will be transferred to Seishou Elementary School.
You’re going to school.”

The reactions he got were close to what he expected: indifference from Diana and muted
interest from Shana, but Lilia’s was slightly off. Off as in she suddenly transformed into her
Barrier Jacket and summoned her device to her hands. Though her sisters watched in alarm,
Lilia hefted her weapon rather threateningly, causing Kevin to take an unconscious step back.

“You’re just sending us away?!” the girl shrieked, her eyes wide.

“Hey, calm down,” Kevin spoke as calmly as he could. Though outwardly he seemed only
slightly worried, his heart was thundering a mile a minute, and he was struggling to not shake at
all. The girl in front of him appeared only nine-years-old, yet she was the most terrifying thing
the chef had ever seen.

“I am calm!”

“Not while swinging that thing around,” Kevin eyed the axe-like device, something that could
break him in half easily. “Put that away.”

“No! I don’t want to go! You can’t make me!”

A worried Shana took a step towards her sister, “Lilia, please stop this. You are overreacti—”

“Back off, Material-S!” Lilia spat, briefly pointing Vulnificus at Shana, “I don’t

“You’re not going away forever, Lilia,” the older man had his hands out placatingly as he took
a step towards her. “It’s just during the day, and you’ll be with everyone else—”

“Shut up! You’re not my dad!” she screeched, Vulnificus lashing out viciously. Though she was
a tiny girl, her arms were not even as thick as the older man’s wrists, her strength was still
incredible. For that reason, Kevin found himself scrambling to avoid being struck by the device.
For the most part, he did dodge the bladed axe-head of Vulnificus. However, a small part of
the weapon clipped him in the ribs. He was knocked off his feet, set bodily head over heels into
the wall behind him. Crash! The wall groaned as Kevin bounced off the wood and plaster,
leaving a sizable crater in the wall.

“Nnngh,” he groaned, a sign that he was still alive.

The indifferent Diana, silent earlier, uncharacteristically rushed over to the fallen man, beating the
shocked Shana to their guardian. A quick look-over, then she whipped her head over to give
Lilia a rather scathing glare, one that the girl flinched at, “What were you thinking?! He’s a
human, completely unlike us! What you even thought of what could happen if he were to die?!”

“I-I…”

“You fool! What are you doing raising a hand against—”

“Stop. Don’t yell at her,” Kevin’s voice, though weak, could still be heard.

Diana turned her attention back her guardian, her brow furrowed in indignation and… worry?
“But—”

“It’s fine. I’m fine,” he muttered, shakily pushing himself off the floor, “Ugh, that was tough.
Don’t worry, really. It just hurts a bit.”

A warm viridian glow encompassed the silver-haired girl’s hand, “Sit still, then. I will heal you.”

“No, it’s okay. Let me deal with this,” Kevin said, looking at Diana, “Please.”

A number of emotions were visible on Diana’s face, changing from confusion, to frustration,
then finally at tired acceptance, “If you stop interrupting me, fine. But don’t blame me if you
ache in the morning. Really, rejecting my help after I so graciously offered! You had better
appreciate my generosity, servant!”

“Thank you,” the man smiled and patted Diana’s head, causing a blush to form on her cheeks.
With one final push, Kevin managed to stagger to his feet. His steps were unsteady, though
Shana quickly came to support.

“Father, I am sorry, I could not…” she trailed off, looking pleadingly at Kevin. “Please do not
be too harsh on her.”

“It’s alright. I just want to talk to her,” he patted her on the head as well.

“A-ah…” Lilia, speechless, could only watch as Kevin limped towards her. A limp that she
caused…

When he stood in front of her, he kneeled down so he could close to eye level. Though Kevin
tried to look at her in the eyes, she couldn’t meet his gaze. Material-S, Material-D, they
seemed to side with him instead of her. Was she wrong? Or were they blind? She didn’t know.
What she did was that she harmed someone she shouldn’t have, and everyone was angry at her.
Head bowed, looking away, Lilia was ready for whatever punishment this man would bestow.
But to her surprise, Kevin pulled her into a hug. “You don’t need to fight anymore. Do you
remember what I said when I adopted you? You are not alone, I won’t let you be alone ever
again.”

“S-Shana said the same thing…”

“I did say that I wanted to try and be a family, but if you do not want it, that’s fine too. I just
want what any parent would want: the best for their child. While blood does not bind us, and
our time has been short, I view you all as more than mere children. You are my children,
and my hopes and dreams are yours. I am not a mage, nor am I rich and famous, but I will do
everything in my power to ensure each of you live happily and how you wish.”

Ah. This must be why Material-S, Shana, accepted him so readily, and why Material-D, did
not rebel. He truly meant what he said. And if he had to give his life, he probably would. Is this
what a father is? Could this be what a family is? Fighting and magic was all she knew, and yet…
this was something she desired even more.

“I’m sorry…! I-I didn’t mean to—” her voice was muffled as she pressed her face into Kevin’s
shoulder, her tears soaking into his shirt. Sighing with a smile, Kevin brushed Lilia’s hair with a
gentle hand.

“Shh. It’s alright. Everything is all right.”


7:45 PM

Following a good cry and a cup of hot tea, Lilia finally calmed down. The four of them now sat
at the dinner table, quietly discussing the expectations, responsibilities, and what it meant to be a
“family.” So deep into their conversation they were, that they were all surprised when their
doorbell rang.

“Who could that be?” Kevin wondered out loud as he unlocked the door and opened it.
“Yuuno?”

“Err, good evening, sir,” the blond boy bowed. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

Kevin shook his head, “No, not really, but what are you doing here? Did Nanoha kick you out
or something?”

“Ahaha, no, nothing like that,” he laughed weakly, scratching the back of his head. “Actually,
Chrono told me to come here. I got slated for a job…”

“Is that so…” the older man had an idea as to the boy’s task. “Well, come on in. Did you eat?
There’s still a lot of minestrone left.”

“Oh, no, but thank you very much for the offer. I ate just before coming here,” Yuuno seemed
almost regretful that he couldn’t have any, though imagine his confusion when he entered and
took notice of the crater in the wall, “Um, what happened here?”

“A misunderstanding and an accident. Don’t worry, it’s been resolved. Anyways, am I correct
to assume that you are the person the Harlaown boy forced to help in the rehab?”

“He didn’t really force me,” (Note, yes, he did. With blackmail.) “But, yes. I am here to help in
rehabilitation.”

“Hmm,” Kevin looked over to his girls, who all gazed back with curiosity. “Well, we were
expecting this. How long is it going to take? Do you have all the materials?”

“Yes! This should only take a couple of hours, tonight. I intend on just an orientation and
introduction of sorts. Then we could establish a regular schedule.”

“Hmm, alright. Let me just tell the girls…”

The sisters seemed rather interested, though portrayed in varying degrees. Kevin almost pitied
the boy, considering Lilia and Shana’s sudden excitement. Sudden, with Shana, due to the fact
that she had an expression different from the usual stoic look. And Diana, well, she seemed to
accept Yuuno as a new slave/servant, so that was close enough. (Why is she always
mentioned last, anyways?)

“Work hard, you three,” he waved the little group off as they marched into the next room,
leaving Kevin in the living room with his tea, his book, and peace. Maybe he’d bring up some
snacks later on.

Ahh, this isn’t too bad after all…

The teacup came up to his lips, a fragrant jasmine oolong, though before he could take a sip, a
thought entered his mind. He had just now allowed a boy into a bedroom with three girls,
unsupervised.

…

…

Ehhh. It was Yuuno, one of the most harmless guys he knew. And if he tried anything,
everyone would hit him with enough beamspam to make that ship of theirs look silly.

Another tasty Tempy fic You must do even more now, you do realize I'd like to see your take on Yuuno and the Materials.

Originally Posted by Moczo

Very entertaining, as expected. But you got that freakin' Waffle song stuck in my head, Raiser, and I will make you pay. Someday, somehow.

Fufufu! Oh you can try, and I look forward to seeing you fail!

Originally Posted by Kaijo

Future Tense

Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion

In which three people are reunited that haven't been together in a long time, and a desperate plot is laid out...

Previous chapters can be found here.

Spoiler for Future Tense, Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion:

snip

I'm expecting to get raked over the coals for this, so don't let me down!

Finally! I've been waiting for this for so long! I remember Kaijo telling me Yuuno was supposed to show up around chapter 10. Now it's chapter 15 Knowing this was coming is the reason why I worked on Location of Happiness so much. I wanted to get it finished and have Yuuno/Shari before Kaijo did. Both of us thought it up independantly so like he said there's no stealing of ideas going on It's nice to see some one else do the pairing all the same.

So great chapter! It didn't disappoint The time travel thing works, as you've grounded it within canon via an established plot point (Carim's prophesies). It just figures that Yuuno gets cut off right when he's about to say something important Now I'm looking forward to when you delve into Fate and Yuuno's past relationship. What Clonoha thinks about that should be interesting.

[shiroi mahotsukai]

It's time to play storm the cast-er i mean bureau eh Kaijo. Time travel huh? Not the route I was expecting, this could throw a whole new twist to the storyline.

The best thing that could happen is for the spacae time continuem rift to expand and transport all characters born after the tragedy to the good timeline that Nanoha creates by replacing herself with increased magical powers to avoid dying, Hayate is de-throned, everybody lives happily ever after with a communication network with the alternate timeline.

The worst thing U can see happening is Nanoha succesfully timetravelling to the past and changing history causing the disintegration of the current world. Sice her origins came from the future of that world Nanoha begins to disappear. The alternate timeline turns out to be ten times worse than the current one onnly there's no Nanoha to save it, as she watches the devestation while slowly fading away she curses the day she ever agreed to time travel.

That the worst I can see, anybody got any other ideas. These are overly optimistic and (probably) over pessimistic so...yeah.

[Kaijo]

Originally Posted by Megaolix

Here's my omake for the new chapter of Future Tense.

Spoiler for Behind the Scenes of Future Tense, 2:

Nanoha: “...”

Fate: “Nanoha?”

Nanoha: “I knew it... I knew that as soon as Yuuno was done helping me, something would happen! Why is this happening to all my allies?!”

Yuuno: “Well, at least I’m not dead yet.”

Nanoha: “Yuuno! ...Wait, why ‘yet’?”

Fate: “...”

Yuuno: “It’s rather obvious, considering how much I know, that Fate will have to interrogate me and get everything out of me.”

Nanoha: “Fate-chan...”

Raging Heart: “Charging...”

Fate: “Wait wait wait! Even if I wanted to interrogate him, I’ll probably be out again soon to search for you and Vivio.”

Yuuno: “I’ll have to agree on that.”

Raging Heart: “Abort.”

Nanoha: “Then... if not Fate,who?”

“That would be me, naturally.”

Nanoha: “Haya... te?”

Fate: “I know you still like that hobby, but aren’t you a bit old for it now?”

Hayate: “Hey! Who decided what we had to be like here? Nanoha didn’t even comment on your appearance Fate!”

Yuuno: “Because there was no point to comment on it?”

Hayate: “And now you’ve ruined my entrance. For the sake of readers picturing the scenes in their minds, can’t we just be at the age of... Well, as old as when you’re supposed to return to? It’s between Vivid and Force, right? That should be good enough. Let’s redo this.”

*Take Two, Action!*

“That would be me, naturally.”

Nanoha: “Hayate!”

Yuuno: “Graglekd.”

Fate: “I’m not sure this is better than before...”

Hayate: “Well, I thought it was a good time to try out the Evil Queen costume I had. Does it look good on me?”

Yuuno: “Gruernt.”

Nanoha: “What he said.”

Hayate: “I’ll that that as a yes. Moving on, I’m afraid that even if he knows nothing about you Nanoha, he has information on the Resistances group that I simply can’t afford to pass on.”

Nanoha: “But! ...But...! ”

Hayate: “And after what he did to the Library when he left...”

Nanoha: “Yuuno?”

Yuuno: “I’m afraid I can’t say it yet. And chances are that it isn’t important enough for us to learn it.”

Nanoha: “But you always liked it... Why would you do something to it?”

Yuuno: “It occurred to me that Hayate would use the Library to learn how to use certain Lost Logia against others. Sadly, we don’t even know if I did anything at that point.

Fate: “And that means?”

Yuuno: “At worst, I just left and Hayate lost her best librarian. At best, I put the books exactly as they were before I took over as Head Librarian.”

Nanoha: “...How is that supposed to be the best you could.”

Yuuno: “If only you knew Nanoha... Let me explain it simply: it took YEARS with me supervising ALL of the reorganisation to put most of it in order. I would pity whoever is the current Head right now if I did mess up everything.”

Fate: “Current?”

Yuuno: “I’m certain my immediate replacement quit just before going insane.”

Hayate: “You know, shouldn’t we be discussing the main topic of the chapter? Nanoha, how do you think this time travel will go?”

Nanoha: “What? How can I possibly imagine? Messing up with time is like asking for anything to go wrong in any number of ways imaginable.”

Fate: “...And your personal opinion on how this will end considering the author? If the time travel will work?”

Nanoha: “The original me will die, forcing me to replace my original in the past while trying to live with all the tragedies I’ve seen. The most recent ones would be Fate sacrificing herself to help me defeat Hayate and Vivio dying as she make sure I make it across time after the inevitable screw-up arrives. And, of course, I would have found Yuuno either already dead or with his mind shattered beyond healing before all of that.”

Fate & Yuuno & Hayate: “...”

Nanoha: “Can you not see it?”

Yuuno: “...I actually can.”

Fate: “You’re becoming rather pessimistic Nanoha...”

Nanoha: “How can I NOT!? Ever since I woke up, it’s been one bad thing after another, no real moment to rest and now... and now...” *cries*

Fate: “Come here... I’m sure it will end well. It’s always the darkest before dawn, right?”

Hayate: “And since I’m supposed to be the Mistress of the Night Sky, it’s going to be really dark.”

Nanoha: *cries*

Yuuno: “Was that supposed to help?”

Hayate: “I’m supposed to be the evil last boss right now, remember?”

Yuuno: “For Nanoha’s sake, I hope it will be bright soon... Like she said, with no real time to clear her mind, she’s probably going to snap very soon.”

Hayate: “Then hope the new one appearing is an ally... then again, it’s probably 95% certain.”

“Yuuno: “Well, let’s see how this go... and please don’t hurt me too much when you get to interrogate me?

Hayate: “I make no promise.”

I'm thinking of doing this for each new cruelty on Nanoha you come up with. Which probably means one for every chapter up until the end.

Heh, I'd deserve it. With any luck, there shouldn't be too many more cruelties... maybe... depending on how you look at it...

Originally Posted by 00-Raiser

Finally! I've been waiting for this for so long! I remember Kaijo telling me Yuuno was supposed to show up around chapter 10. Now it's chapter 15 Knowing this was coming is the reason why I worked on Location of Happiness so much. I wanted to get it finished and have Yuuno/Shari before Kaijo did. Both of us thought it up independantly so like he said there's no stealing of ideas going on It's nice to see some one else do the pairing all the same.

So great chapter! It didn't disappoint The time travel thing works, as you've grounded it within canon via an established plot point (Carim's prophesies). It just figures that Yuuno gets cut off right when he's about to say something important Now I'm looking forward to when you delve into Fate and Yuuno's past relationship. What Clonoha thinks about that should be interesting.

She'll have time to think about it, that's for sure. And possibly receive more information from other sources; possibly Fate herself. ;p And thanks again for your Beta reading, too.^^

Originally Posted by shiroi mahotsukai

It's time to play storm the cast-er i mean bureau eh Kaijo. Time travel huh? Not the route I was expecting, this could throw a whole new twist to the storyline.

You remind me of a scene from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride:

Miracle Max: Goodbye, boys! Have fun storming the castle!
His wife: Think it'll work?
Miracle Max: It would take a miracle. Good bye!

Anyway, we'll see how well your good and bad predictions turn out. ;p Thanks for the comments!

[Tempy]

Originally Posted by 00-Raiser

Another tasty Tempy fic You must do even more now, you do realize I'd like to see your take on Yuuno and the Materials.

Ahh poop. Was hoping you'd all be satisfied with that

Incidentally, my plans for Yuuno was going to be similar to how you had him, but now I may have to rethink it a bit just to keep things fresh.

[Megaolix]

Originally Posted by Kaijo

Heh, I'd deserve it. With any luck, there shouldn't be too many more cruelties... maybe... depending on how you look at it...

Trust me: my imagination will do the job. If you had any idea how many different scenarios for Material Days on Mid I ran in my mind...

[Nanya01]

Originally Posted by Tempy

I said I'd write more, so I did.

Side Dish 1

Spoiler for Side Dish 2: Anxiety:

Snip

Heh, that was really good, Tempy. You should do more.

[00-Raiser]

Originally Posted by Tempy

Ahh poop. Was hoping you'd all be satisfied with that

Incidentally, my plans for Yuuno was going to be similar to how you had him, but now I may have to rethink it a bit just to keep things fresh.

Hm... I think Kevin being the over protective dad when his daughters start crushing over Yuuno would be very enjoyable

[Tempy]

Originally Posted by 00-Raiser

Hm... I think Kevin being the over protective dad when his daughters start crushing over Yuuno would be very enjoyable

Heh, the Papa Wolf path would definitely be amusing, though I actually have plans on something else happening. He has known Yuuno for a while though, so the overprotective part maybe be a bit more subtle than expected.

Hmm. Need an epic speech...

[Rising Dragon]

Considering the situations Yuuno was put in prior to his revealing his true form in the first season, Kevin would likely have to be more worried about the girls putting the poor boy in compromising situations. I'm not sure he could take another round at the bathhouse.

[Nanya01]

Originally Posted by Kaijo

Future Tense

Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion

In which three people are reunited that haven't been together in a long time, and a desperate plot is laid out...

Previous chapters can be found here.

Spoiler for Future Tense, Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion:

-snip-

I'm expecting to get raked over the coals for this, so don't let me down!

Hmm... Didn't see this coming, nope. But, still... Arrrgh! Now I have to wait for more chapters!

Assault the base! Row Row! Fight da powah!

Is Nanoha going to have to use her power to pierce through destiny?

Guess we'll find out.

[vic-vic]

Originally Posted by Kaijo

Future Tense

Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion

In which three people are reunited that haven't been together in a long time, and a desperate plot is laid out...

Previous chapters can be found here.

Spoiler for Future Tense, Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion:

MGLN: Future Tense
Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion

Xx~~*~~xX

Nanoha emerged from the short tunnel into a large cavern, lit by the soft green bio-luminescent glow of fungus growing over several crystal deposits. In the middle of the cavern loomed the still waters of a large lake, small pieces of ice floating upon the surface, but no sign of any oracle, or anyone else for that matter.

Growing frustrated at everything that had happened, and what she had gone through thus far, Nanoha raised her voice, no longer caring who heard. "I'M HERE! That's what you wanted, right? You wanted me to come here, so here I am! Why are you hiding?"

No reply was immediately forthcoming, and at first Nanoha wondered if Agito had been wrong or Rio and Corona had been misled; perhaps it all was a sick joke or perhaps the oracle was no longer here. The then waters of the lake began to churn, twisting and spiraling into the center, as a green light emerged from the center of the whirlpool and formed a sketchy image of an old man whose physical features were mostly obscured by a robe; all she could see were was a beard protruding from the darkened hood.

"Welcome, Takamachi Nanoha," a somewhat distorted voice echoed around her, making her wonder at how her full name had been used. "I have been awaiting your arrival."

Someone was projecting this holographic image, she realized, but it wasn't enough to impress her. "So now what? Are you going to tell me what's going on?" Her voice had started low, but slowly gained volume as the questions continued to burst forth. "Why I was cloned in the first place? What was so important that so many had to be sacrificed just for me? You're supposed to have all these answers, right?"

The hologram was silent for a moment, but when he spoke again, his voice was heavy. "I am truly sorry for what you had to go through, and if it wasn't so important, I wouldn't have had done so. But all the hopes of the people, those still living, are depending on you. I cannot make you do anything, but if you desire answers, step into the pool; you shall find them at the bottom."

Nanoha raised an eyebrow as she glared at him, the offer was tempting, but for some reason she found herself hesitant. "Why not explain right here and now? And why hide yourself like that from me, Carim?"

"Bureau soldiers approach, and our time here is limited," the oracle told her as the image began to fade. "Enter the pool for your answers, or walk away. The choice is yours."

Growling in frustration as she began to hear voices echoing from outside, she glanced at the ice floating in the water and strengthened her auto-barrier. As tired as she was dancing to someone else's tune, she realized there was only one thing for her to do, and thus entered the lake. She could still feel a bit of the chill from the near-freezing water though her barrier protected her from most of it, but continued to wonder what exactly she was supposed to find down there.

Eventually the water reached her waist, and she took a breath and dove, using her magic to keep her body temperature up while swimming through the near crystal-clear water. There, at the bottom of the lake she found what she suspected; a device of some kind, probably the hologram emitter. Curious, she alighted atop the platform and begin to check for controls, but finding none and with her lungs starting to burn, she considered surfacing. However, the platform suddenly began to suddenly glow, and before she could even begin to wonder what was going on, she felt the familiar twist of teleportation.

And then it was over and Nanoha was gasping for breath while stumbling sideways and grasping onto a railing on the teleportation pad, inhaling heavily to catch her breath while the light died off, finding herself in a dry room.

“Welcome, Nanoha,” the oracle's male voice came again, but this time without any distortion, the tone familiar, while a pair of strong hands steadied her. “You can release your barrier jacket, as you are safe here. And we can treat your wound.”

Her head came up as her eyes adjusted to the slightly darkened room, and in particular to the supposed oracle while his hands began to heal her side, things clicking into place in her mind. “You're....”

One of his hands went up to pull back the hood, baring his face, eyes twinkling as he smiled. Nanoha's mouth dropped open; even with the beard, she recognized him in a heartbeat

“Yuuno-kun!”

x~~*~~x

"Carim!" Schach cried as two Enforcer's brought the woman into the brig, carrying her limp form between them by her armpits and then tossed their prisoner into the cell next to hers. "Don't hurt her!"

The Enforcers ignored Schach's protests, however, and sealed the cell door after depositing Carim, leaving afterward. Schach figured that they brought the two together to see if they could overhear any information, but at this point she didn't care.

"Are you alright?" Schach asked.

"Twilight approaches, the shadows move...." came the weak, delirious voice. "The demon has stirred...."

The combat nun was fine taking whatever Fate dished out since she was used to being hurt in combat, but having that happen to Carim was almost more than she could bear. "What did they do to you?”

"It's okay, sister...," Carim's voice told her, approaching a moment of lucidity "Everything will be okay.... Have faith...."

Schach grit her teeth. "Dammit, Carim, why?"

"Fate...." was the only response, before Carim seemingly went unconscious.

Left alone again with her thoughts, Schach wondered what Carim meant by that. Was she referring to the Enforcer Fate? Or to a sequence of events that would happen regardless of what one did? Did she really think what was happening was unavoidable? Or had she just slipped back into delirium?

Schach slammed her fist against the wall, almost hating times like this when faith was all she had to go on.

x~~*~~x

"You're the oracle!?" Nanoha questioned in disbelief. "I thought it would be Carim, because of the whole twice a year future reading... Wait, does that mean you were the one who contacted Jail to have me cloned...?"

He nodded. "And I'm sorry for that. If there were another way, I would have let you rest in peace. But due to one of Carim's prophecies, I realized we'd need your help so I gave Jail your genetic material in order to have a clone made. In the meantime, I've been relaying Carim's messages to Rio's resistance group in the form of intel.”

Her eyes widened at the realization. "Oh wait, Rio and Corona are still back there, probably prisoners of Hayate! They diverted enough of the Bureau army that I was able to get here. We have to save them!"

"I'm afraid the teleportation is only one way, and the other pad was disabled once you used it," he told her. "It was programmed to recognize your DNA and activate, then self-destruct. Even if they are prisoners, Hayate will keep them alive for interrogation, so you'll have a chance to rescue them."

"But not Agito," Nanoha told him darkly.

"Why?" he asked, his voice full of concern. “What happened?”

Nanoha felt her hands clenching. "She gave her life to enable me to get here. So it's time you told me everything. If Carim saw things, why didn't she see Rio's resistance group falling? Why didn't she see what would happen to Agito?"

“She couldn't see everything,” Yuuno replied softly, sorrow in his tone. He turned and took several steps away, a door opening on the far side that brought light into the room. "But if you'll walk with me a bit, I'll try to answer all your questions."

The light enabled her to see that the room was some sort of workshop and communications room, probably darkened to enable the holographic transmitter to work better. Nanoha sighed, realizing that she had been pushed along this far already, so she might as well continue that for now.

"Alright," she said at last, taking up a position beside him as he led her out and down a hallway, feeling a sense of warmth and nostalgia as she glanced at his wizened face. "It is good to see you again."

He half-smiled, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. "It's good to see you, too. Your loss affected us all greatly. Now, where do you want to start?"

Nanoha suddenly realized she had so many questions, that she didn't know where to begin, either, but settled on one of the more prominent ones in her mind. "Why me? Why bring me back from the dead and have Jail do it?"

"Despite how far technology has come, Jail is still the best at cloning, and for our plans to work, we needed as exact a clone as we could get," he informed her. "Especially with strengthened magic powers."

"Uno told me I was somewhere above SSS rank, though I don't feel any different," she admitted as they turned a corner, her attention partially noting the candles and paintings that occasionally dotted the walls. "But I don't see why."

Yuuno appeared to hesitate for a second. "Partly because of how you died."

His statement made her realize that she had never really heard exactly how it happened. "It had to do with some lost logia, right?"

He nodded. "One that was going out of control in Clanagan, that would have engulfed the whole city and probably would have taken out a good portion of the planet as well, if you hadn't stopped it. Before it went off, though, we had received an anonymous report that it was there, somewhere, and 'good luck trying to stop it' as the warning message said. I wasn't on planet at the time, but Fate told me later that you were the one to find it, although it had already 'exploded' at the time into a slowly-growing white dome cloud of mana. Based on what they could learn, the lost logia was collecting the mana, and when it had enough, it would detonate. A very potent magical bomb."

"And I stopped it?" Nanoha deduced. “How?”

"You volunteered to go into the concentrated mana cloud come and use Raging Heart to gather the magic for a continuous Starlight Breaker," he explained, pausing as they reached a staircase that led up. "Essentially, bleed off all the explosive power the device was building up until it was small enough that it could be sealed. If it was sealed off too soon, before the mana was drained away, there was still a chance it would have gone out of control and destroyed most of Clanagan.

His smile turned sad as he gazed upward. "And you did it. But by the time you drained the last of the mana away, enough for the device to be sealed... well, they said your body was beyond recovery. At the time, we assumed it was because you processed so much mana, but some of Shamal's later examinations didn't quite fit with that. To this day, we don't know exactly what happened in there."

There was a moment of silence, then he ascended the staircase and Nanoha numbly followed him, her body tingling strangely. It all sounded like something she would do, but it was somehow strange to hear about the circumstances of one's own death.

"So why clone me?" Nanoha asked at last as they reached the top of the stairs, exiting out of what looked to be a basement.

Yuuno paused again, turning to gaze at her seriously. "Because you'll need to take her place, when you travel back in time."

x~~*~~x

"Commander, I think we have something."

Fate turned to the holographic screen as it opened up, displaying one of her Enforcers. "Report."

"The computer system itself is well-scrambled, with almost everything of importance deleted and overwritten, but they didn't get everything," he replied. "Some of the communication encoded log headers were still recoverable, and although the messages themselves are gone, we may be able to trace where they came from once we decode them."

"Send me what you have," she told him, analyzing the data stream. He was right, the data was mostly gone, scrambled, but there did appear to be quite a few pieces and she could almost detect some patterns. "Continue working on this, and let me know when you have something."

"Yes, sir," he replied, promptly signing off.

Something about those message headers continued to bug her, as if she had seen them before. Closing her eyes, she allowed her mind to drift with the topic of the headers just lightly hanging on the edge of her thoughts, a well-rehearsed mental technique for tracking down isolated bits of information. An image of a message screen appeared in her mind's eye, the header's scrambled, but still having that tinge of familiarity. Then the image clarified as more was added to it; the picture of a room, in a house, and the sender's face.

Her eyes flashed open while she frowned and reopened the communications link to her Enforcer; she knew who it was, and had a pretty good idea how to decode it and thus tell where they came from.

x~~*~~x

"Time travel?" Nanoha wondered aloud, disbelievingly. "That's impossible!"

"Improbable, but not impossible," came a new female voice, drawing attention to the side. "And incredibly difficult. But don't worry, I had the same reaction when he told me."

Nanoha turned to find the female speaker standing in the doorway, smiling while pushing a pair of glasses up her nose. "Shari!"

The elderly woman closed the distance to hug her. "Hello, Nanoha, long time no see!"

"Likewise!" Nanoha echoed, pulling back to look at her, having a thought. "Is there anyone else here? Carim or Vivio perhaps?"

Shari's face dropped a bit, the enthusiasm being replaced by a solemn silence. "No, just us two, I'm sorry. But speaking of Carim, perhaps you'd better explain first, dear."

Nanoha raised an eyebrow. "Dear?"

Yuuno finally turned around, and Nanoha was surprised to actually see an embarrassed smile on his face. "Well, yes, we've been married for 25 years after all, right before the war. Long before that, though, I had actually gone underground to do my studies, and later got Shari to help."

"Working side by side for several years in secret, I guess we sort of naturally fell in love," the device technician added with a gentle smile. "Well, I suppose since we were both scientists, we kinda operated on a similar-enough wavelength. But anyway, dinner is ready, so let's continue the conversation in the dining room."

Nanoha wanted to ask more about them as the trio sat down to eat, but decided to let the explanations proceed at their own pace; there was still a lot she didn't know, and right now, she was having a hard time forming useful questions. Instead, she just found herself noticing the small looks and ease the couple had around each other; it reminded her a lot of Vice and Alto, and brought her a bit of warmth to know that at least some people were finding happiness. But with the thought of the latter couple, her heart dropped back down as she didn't know what had happened to them. Did they survive? Were they captured?

Nanoha picked up her silverware and began to eat, trying to push those questions out of her mind for now and focus on the present.

"Anyway, as I was saying, it was actually Carim's unique skill that got me thinking all those years ago," Yuuno started up again as they ate. "You know how she gets her readings twice a year, when the moons align?"

"Yes, and it takes the form of ancient Belkan poems," Nanoha confirmed, recalling the explanation she had received so long ago. "I remember you helped with the translation of the one dealing with the Cradle and JS incident."

He nodded. "Well, I became curious about it, and so began to look up Carim's genealogy and the history of her family. Quite a few members of her family tree had the ability, but they didn't all take the exact same form. While Carim's specific form interprets it as Belkan poems, others went into seizures and blurted things out, while one particular person was blind from birth and could actually see future events from time to time. The common thread in all of them was gaining knowledge of future events. Or to phrase it another way, interpreting knowledge sent back from the future during times when the two moons of Mid-Childa aligned."

Nanoha begin to see what he was getting at. "So, you're saying their information actually comes from the future? How does that help time travel?"

"That's where he got me into this," Shari interjected at Yuuno's nod. "I helped analyze Carim's linker core when she used her special skill. Strictly speaking, since time and space are related, time travel isn't impossible. For instance, you can travel rapidly into the future if you can approach the speed of light, but the amount of energy required is astronomical. Standard hyperspace travel simply bypasses the speed of light limit."

"Which makes it improbable like you said before," Nanoha realized, as she cut off another piece of cooked meat, unsure exactly what animal it came from. "But you're talking about sending me back through time."

The two glanced at each other, before Shari continued again. "It appears to be a natural event unique to Mid-Childa. The two moons possess a lot of mana, and twice a year they align, one behind the other, and combine their effects on the surface of Mid-Childa. My readings indicate a small tear in the space-time continuum is opened at that time, enough for information to magically flow back and forth. My best theory to date seems to fit the idea that information encapsulated in magical data packets travels into the rift and is sent back through time, emerging in the past. Carim and her ancestors were sensitive to this, their linker cores allowing them to make some sense of what was coming through."

Nanoha set her silverware down, her meal half-eaten. "So you think you can send me through this rift to go back in time? That it can take a person instead of just information? Is that even possible?"

Shari pushed her glasses up on her nose and half-smiled. "If my theories are correct, it should be possible, with some modifications and if done in the right spot under the right conditions."

"First of all, you'll need this," Yuuno told her, bringing out a small jewelry box, and pushing it across the table to her before Nanoha could ask what the conditions were.

She look at him in confusion, then picked up the box and opened it, her breathing catching in her throat as she beheld the spherical red jewel within, attached to a cord. "Is this...?"

"Hello, my master," Raging Heart intoned as Nanoha picked it up. "It is good to see you again."

"Raging... Heart," Nanoha breathed, not realizing until this very moment how much she had missed her device; a single tear appeared in her left eye as she clutched it to her chest. "So you had it all this time? Thank you, Yuuno-kun."

Yuuno blushed a bit as he scratched the back of his head. "Technically speaking, it still belongs to the Scrya tribe, which is where ownership returned when you.... passed away. I was able to reacquire it so Shari could make the necessary programming additions for the time jump."

Her head came up as she wiped her eyes. "Yes, about that; how exactly am I supposed to do this?"

Yuuno brought up a holographic screen and typed a few buttons, and the lights dimmed as a holographic Mid-Childa hovered over the table along with its moons. "In two months time, the moons will align again and the rift will open. Raging Heart has the necessary information programmed in to identify the rift and guide you into it. After that, it will be up to your will and your magic to get you to the right point."

Nanoha looked back and forth between the couple, realizing something. "You don't know what will happen when I go into it, do you?"

"Not exactly, no," Shari admitted, apologetic. "I've been running simulations and calculations for the past ten years, but as far as I know, no one has attempted anything like this."

"It may very well come down to you keeping a date and time firmly in mind when you enter," Yuuno added, hopefully. "With any luck, it will just be a short hop and you'll barely realize anything has happened; almost like a teleport. All I can say is keep the destination firmly in mind."

Nanoha understood something else about all this. "You said I was to take the place of my younger self, so I suppose that means I die in her place so she can live."

"I know," Yuuno told her softly, putting his silverware down. "It means you'd end up sacrificing your life to change history, so that none of this would happen. No one will have died. It's a long shot, but we'll leave the choice up to you."

"Up to me?" Nanoha questioned, closing her hand around the jewel in her hand, the familiar warmth offering a strange comfort after all this time. "I already gave my life for everyone once, and you already know me well enough to know I'd do it a second time if it meant saving everyone. But will this actually work? You don't know. You had me cloned, gave the people a hope that I would solve everything, and several have died for me... all for me to go back and time and make it so nothing happens!

Her head came up. "Wouldn't this cause a paradox? If I save my younger self so that this doesn't happen, doesn't that mean I won't exist to go back in time? What if I go back even farther? I could really change history!"

"There are a number of theories, but no one really knows," Shari answered softly. "Don't get too mad at him, as this is my fault, too. I thought he was crazy at first, but I eventually went along with it, because I don't see any other way. I hate seeing what has become of our world, and our friends, and I can't help but feel this was never supposed to be. But in answer to your concerns, it's possible that you going back in time will simply create an alternate timeline, and this future will continue as is. Or after you save yourself, you'll cease to be, but everyone will experience the new alternate reality. In short, this is a last ditch effort, a gamble. That's why we recommend you focusing on the moment you died, and not attempt to go any farther back."

Nanoha's head lowered again as she thought about that; sacrificing her life to save others was a given, if there was no other way. But what if it did form an alternate timeline and Hayate continued ruling here? That would make her efforts all for naught, regardless if there was a new second timeline where this was prevented. In any case, temporal mechanics was beyond her understanding.

"There's one other thing, that will influence your decision," Yuuno said at last, which brought Nanoha's head back up and her focus to the holographic planet. "The place on Mid-Childa where the moon's focus their energies is always the same, and is probably a reason why Clanagan was built where it is. Not only does the rift form in the city, but it does so in a very specific place; due to the lensing effect of our atmosphere, the effect is concentrated at a single spot."

As Yuuno spoke, the hologram began to shift, zooming in on the spot where the moon's were concentrating their effect to showcase the city, and then to the specific point indicated by a flashing red dot. The location made Nanoha's eyes widen; it was the top of the central spire in Clanagan. She turned to stare at him upon realizing the implications.

"Yes," he answered to response to her unspoken question. "Before you'll be able to even think about using the time travel option, you'll have to conquer Clanagan, the bastion of Hayate's Bureau, first."

x~~*~~x

Nanoha leaned back in the hot water, watching the steam drift upwards, glad that Shari had suggested a bath after dinner; the cloned woman hadn't really had one this nice since the few days she spent at Neyra's restaurant, which seemed like ages ago. She had been able to get a short shower and wash-down at the rebel base, but nothing like the clean and well-kept furo she found herself in now. She figured Yuuno probably had it installed, as he had come to like them during his stay at the Takamachi household.

It also gave her a chance to collect her thoughts and reflect on all that she had been told since she arrived at the hidden Finieno home; she didn't know why, but it brought her a bit of amusement to realize Yuuno had taken Shari's name, rather than the other way around. But the nagging concerns from earlier still remained.

Time travel.

Sacrifice.

A number of people had already sacrificed themselves for her, some making the ultimate offering of their life itself, and now she was expected to give up her life to possibly undo all that. In doing so, they never would have died, but those who hadn't died would never have lived, like Amos and Givo. And who is to say Vice and Alto, or Yuuno and Shari would have ever gotten together? Could she be the sole judge and take that choice away from them? Obviously, Yuuno and Shari were prepared to take that route, but what about everyone else? Making extreme decisions regardless of people's feelings was something Hayate had been doing.

[Would I be any better if I did this?] she finally asked herself the question that had been forming in her mind. [Perhaps the right path is simply to end the dictatorship and return freedom to the people living now.] The cloned mage didn't quite know what she expected to find at the end of her journey, the reasons for her creation and the purpose she was to fulfill, but somehow she didn't expect time travel.

"And that's what I am," Nanoha said softly. "A clone; a sacrifice. A spare part to fix something gone wrong."

"Master?" Raging heart chirped, floating nearby.

"I'm not the real Nanoha," she informed her device. "She died years ago. I'm a substitute. And we're being asked to sacrifice ourselves; are you okay with that?"

"I do not understand," Raging Heart replied. "You are my master. We will fight together as we always have. I will assist you however you desire. That is all."

Nanoha stared at the device, a million thoughts going through her head, then smiled. "Thank you, Raging Heart."

She decided she had been in the bath long enough and got out, drying herself off and dressing in the loose shirt and trousers Shari had left for her while her other clothes were washed. Nanoha wanted more; she wasn't sure if she'd exercise the time travel option, but the original problem still remained: Hayate's Bureau. It needed to be brought down first, and had to be done within two months if she was going to do this. As she dried and combed her hair, she realized that since Yuuno and Shari seemingly plotted this much out, they had to have some idea of how to accomplish that.

She hook Raging Heart's necklace cord around her neck and left the bathroom, searching through the corridors looking for her hosts. As she approached what looked like an indoor arboretum, voices lightly drifted through the trees.

"Are you going to tell her?" came Shari's voice.

Curious, Nanoha paused, listening in.

x~~*~~x

"I'm not sure, actually, but I don't think it makes a difference, honestly," Yuuno replied as the two sat together under their favorite cherry blossom tree. "At the most, it might just hurt her more. And that's not something that I want to do; I've already hurt her enough."

"You still have feelings for her," Shari stated, still leaning against him. It was a fact, and not a question; she knew him too well.

"Which is why you know I hate doing this, but it's the way things have to be, I think," he told her, his arm around her, gently rubbing her far shoulder. "And I told you why."

Shari smiled. "I know, because you saw her for a brief moment that one morning. And you're right, you know. The one you saw, and this one... they both have short hair. But it still doesn't mean she succeeded; and if one of those theories is true, it means she didn't."

"But I have to believe that it did," Yuuno replied, adamant as he closed his eyes, remembering that time.

He wasn't sure what it was about that morning, only that he sensed someone else in the room, other than his first wife in the bed next to him. He turned as his eyes opened, and that's when he saw her, standing next to the bed and gazing fondly down at him. At first he thought he might have been a ghost or just a hallucination especially since the figure promptly faded from sight, but two things stuck in his mind that morning, the first being her short hair. Why would he hallucinate that?

He spoke the second thing softly. "She smiled...."

x~~*~~x

Nanoha's eyes widened at the revelation, not sure how to take it; did that mean she didn't have a choice, and would end up taking the time travel option? She wasn't quite sure, but she wasn't about to take anyone withholding information on her now. She strolled into the arboretum and approached the pair.

"I need to know everything," she told them as she gazed at them evenly, hands on her hips. "How am I supposed to take down Hayate? I'm guessing you know already."

The pair glanced at each other, then Yuuno sighed, nodded, and stood up. "You're right, we do have an idea. Come with us."

Curious, she followed them as they headed down another side passage and Yuuno glanced at Shari, an unspoken signal traveling between them.

"During the war, Carim kept trying to see exactly how it was supposed to end, but it was never very clear," Shari began to explain as they walked. "Since Yuuno brought me in to help study her ability, I eventually made a device for her, which helped her better control her 'future-gaze' for lack of a better term. Because so much information comes out of the rift, her linker core is mostly overwhelmed, which is why her prophecies were always pretty vague and limited. But the device I made for her assists her linker core to filter through the terabytes of data that comes through, partly allowing her to actively look for specific things, if they exist. It's mostly junk data, but major events affecting Mid-Childa come through stronger than the rest, which is what she usually picked up on."

Yuuno continued for her as they entered a side room. "Shortly before the end of the war, Carim finally found the prophecy she was looking for, the one that would signal the end of the dark times and return what she was looking for; "The long night ends and a new day dawns when one who has returned from the grave leads the army of the d-”

An explosion to Nanoha's right cut off Yuuno's words, and sent her her flying against a wall where she felt her head hit something, and then the world became blurry, while the bang from the blast had left her ears ringing. But she cold make out a new person standing in the wreckage from the newly formed hole, someone with long golden object that matched her hair, and that surprised her almost as much as the following discussion that she could just barely understand.

x~~*~~x

“I figured I'd find my ex-husband here, but not my old aide as well,” Fate stated, glancing back and forth between the two as the dust settled and she took stock of the situation. “You're both under arrest for aiding and abetting an enemy of the state. My enforcers are covering all exits; there is no escape.”

She noticed subtle apprehensive glances pass between the two instead of responding to her which left her wondering what it could mean, until a feminine groan sounded to her left. The figure her peripheral vision detected forced a second look as the world around her stopped.

Fate's skin tingled and her mouth dropped open as the woman slowly tried to sit up, a ton of feelings and emotions pouring through her in a fraction of an instant. “Nano...ha?”

“Fate...chan?” Nanoha questioned blankly, holding her head while staring back.

“Nanoha!” Fate exclaimed, beginning to run in her direction; but before she got to the other, green chains ensnared her arms and legs, and her head snapped around with a snarl. “Yuuno!”

His hand outstretched and glowing the same emerald green, Yuuno shifted in front of, his face showing visible strain to maintain the spell. “Shari, do it!”

“Right!” the other woman agreed, quickly moving over to help Nanoha up.

“Yuuno, what are you...” Fate started to say, slowly breaking the binds, gripping the handle of Bardiche's Zanbar form tighter. “Stop it!”

“This is the first time in a long time the three of us have been together in the same place,” Yuuno reminisced with a sad smile, as the sounds of boots running in the halls got louder signaling the approach of her Enforcers. “But I'm sorry, I can't let you stop her. Hurry, Shari!”

A clearly dazed Nanoha had been helped up by Shari, who had draped one of the former's arms across her shoulders and was now leading her across the room to a teleporter. Fate grit her teeth, realizing what they were up to, and in Yuuno's eyes she could see that he had come to a similar conclusion: it was a race as to whether Shari could get Nanoha out, Fate would break the binds, or that the Enforcers would back her up. Fate had a barrier setup over the place, but Yuuno was an expert in teleportation and Shari was a master technician; between the two of them, they might very well be able to get out.

The bonds finally dissolved the instant Enforcer's appeared in the door, but Yuuno leapt back and cast his next spell. “Steel defense!”

Fate's golden blade met the barrier covering Yuuno, Shari, Nanoha and the teleportation pad, the same moment her Enforcers opened fire. “Nanoha, stop!”

Nanoha looked up from where she sat on the platform, as Shari activated the machine. “I'm sorry... Fate-chan. I-”

The whole building shook, and lights began blinking out all over the room.

“The generator is down!” Shari announced in alarm. “There's not enough power to send her all the way!”

Yuuno grunted under the strain of maintaining his shield. “Do the best you can, Shari! Nanoha, find your daughter; find Vivio!”

“Vivio!” Fate exclaimed, her eyes widening, feeling a surge within her as the barrier began to crack under the strain of her sword and the Enforcer's fire, and the teleportation machine began it's start-up whine. “STOP!”

The shield finally shattered as Nanoha vanished in emerald light. Fate whacked Yuuno aside with her blade and then bound Shari as she reached the control panel, but the coordinates of the transfer weren't listed; the database appeared to be blank.

“You won't find her, as the machine doesn't record where it sends people,” Shari informed her. "Neither of us knows exactly where Nanoha is now. I know it probably pains you, but it has to be this way; Yuuno told me how close you were to her and your daughter.”

Fate turned her glare on the woman. “You have no idea what I'm feeling right now, but you'll soon find out.” She turned around and strode towards her Enforcers, pausing to bind Yuuno. “And for both your sakes, you better hope I find them.”

x~~*~~x

“[Linker core completion at 100%,]” Rein intoned from within her mistress. “[All magic particles have been gathered, but there is some minor distortion I cannot account for.]”

“Steady,” Hayate stated, as the glowing crimson sparkle grew brighter in the center of the elaborate magic circle. “Just focus on the restoration. Reinitialize Signum program.”

The hovering sparkle in the middle of the room flashed once and a crimson Belkan magic triangle spun underneath, a transparent form rising from it and materializing around the core. With a final push, Hayate completed the spell, then leaned on the nearby book podium to rest, as Signum blinked her eyes open.

Hayate allowed herself a smile. “Welcome back, Signum. I thought I'd lost you there for a bit. Are you okay?”

“I seem to be intact,” Signum stated, glancing at her hands. “Though as before my memories seem to have-”

Her sentence was interrupted by an exclamation from behind. “What the hell!?”

x~~*~~x

Nanoha suddenly found herself face down upon soft grass after the teleportation. Her mind head still felt a bit cloudy, but she could feel the cool water against her legs as her loose trousers slowly soaked up water, making her realize she had materialized partially into a babbling stream; but most of her thoughts were on Fate, Yuuno, and Shari, wondering what had become of them. The former, in particular, seemed as shocked as Nanoha, to see the other, and genuinely appeared to be distressed at Nanoha having to leave so abruptly.

She blinked her eyes, suddenly feeling saddened for some reason, and attempted to get up. She was only moderately successful, getting her hands underneath her body before the dizziness made her collapse again.

As her vision began to go dark, she thought she spied a rather tall individual approaching her through the bushes and trees, dressed in tanned leather.

Xx~~*~~xX

Author's notes:

Raiser knew about the Yuuno/Shari angle back when I told him about this fic and showed him my very early notes, but it was only coincidence that he had started work on his own Yuuno/Shari fic. So neither of us copied the other; it was just random happenstance, heh.

Just a note about the time travel angle: it may or may not be the solution, or may only be partially the solution. I'm not telling at this point. =)

I'm expecting to get raked over the coals for this, so don't let me down!

Poor Fate, every time she get close to Nanoha, her favourite brunette always run away from her and don`t mentoing her luck with Vivio... or Yuuno.

Hm, maybe she used interogation as excuse to make up for every years of forced celibate with her ex-husband.

[Kaijo]

Made the corrections people sent me, and uploaded Chapter 15: Triumvirate Reunion to ff.net.

Originally Posted by Nanya01

Hmm... Didn't see this coming, nope. But, still... Arrrgh! Now I have to wait for more chapters!

Assault the base! Row Row! Fight da powah!

Is Nanoha going to have to use her power to pierce through destiny?

Guess we'll find out.

Her staff is the staff that will pierce the heavens!

Originally Posted by vic-vic

Poor Fate, every time she get close to Nanoha, her favourite brunette always run away from her and don`t mentoing her luck with Vivio... or Yuuno.

Hm, maybe she used interogation as excuse to make up for every years of forced celibate with her ex-husband.

I knew I was probably going to get at least a few angry people for Fate's all-too-short reunion with Nanoha, heh.

[vic-vic]

I knew I was probably going to get at least a few angry people for Fate's all-too-short reunion with Nanoha, heh.

No-no, actualy i feel some sort of sadictic pleasure from this. Hey, maybe it can be turned into the runing gag of the story: whenever Fate got opporotunity to meet Nanoha, she got away.

[Rising Dragon]

Originally Posted by Nanya01

Hmm... Didn't see this coming, nope. But, still... Arrrgh! Now I have to wait for more chapters!

Assault the base! Row Row! Fight da powah!

Is Nanoha going to have to use her power to pierce through destiny?

Guess we'll find out.

Originally Posted by Kaijo

Her staff is the staff that will pierce the heavens!

Nanoha used Strike Flame against heaven. :V

[Arkeus]

Originally Posted by Nagumo

Hello guys, I was wondering what you thought of this fanfic on Fanfiction.net

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5707992/1/Nouveau_Terra

I personally like it a lot. I'm just dropping it here to hear your opinions.

one of my old favorite that isn't updating

Liking quite a few aspects of it, but i do wonder what the hell the author can do with it now.