Plank Sinatra

Nova Lux: A Magical Girl Game

---

Nicole felt an electric thrill lance up through her chest as pride, a superior's approval, and the excitement of flirting all mingled together into one pleasant sensation. She grinned back at the praise from Aiya and then stepped up to the cargo doors. The door opened for the Ars Magi with a hydraulic hiss, albeit one that was lost in the noises of the storm as the hatch yawned open to greet it. A sheet of rain was bisected into strips by howling wind, and one such strip splashed across Nicole's face and chest. She licked her lip to taste the rainwater, remembering vividly how storms like these had blanketed the neon of her home. It felt good, knowing that even on the other end of the planet, the rain always found its way to landing on the lights of Hasta.

The wind is on my back.

It was only talked about in stories, of course, but in the days before the First Void humans had leapt from transports like this for fun. Skydiving, it had been called, in the days before the skies had become a hunting ground of the Void. People had jumped in tandems or groups, taken pictures, posed garishly as they plummeted to earth like missives from God. Of course, for anyone not guarded by an Ars Magi, a recreational jaunt through the lower troposphere was just as likely to end in meeting God as it was to greet your family on the ground - and the Ars Magi, even those who guarded the nobility, usually had better things to do than guard their charges on a ship-less flight. If they didn't, doubtless Aiya would have tried it by now.

May my sword cut like my smile.

But Nicole Cognoscenti, unique among all the girls in the world, had a chance to take her one day. Maybe when it was sunnier, but to a girl who commanded the winds and welcomed the rain, no inclement weather would have made a difference to her. In her heart, she felt like she could jump and fly right now, just as gracefully as their plane.

"Vi faccio vedere come lotte un Hastano."

And at her murmured declaration, made husky by her native tongue, the wind began to howl backwards. A small crease of concentration formed on the redhead's brow as the wind began to blow the rain into the direction of the drones, buffeting the sensors of the drones intent on making their evening harder. She couldn't make many of them out with the naked eye, but with the other officers in the corps and Dana providing spotting, Nicole was confident she could keep them blind.

"Cordelia!" she called out to her roommate, voice radiating strength even over the noises of the storm. "Shine for me, babe!"

Nova Lux: A Magical Girl Game

---

It was hard for Nicole not to bob in place, a buoy rocked and animated by adrenaline, at the outset of their first group combat exercise. It was controlled, of course, but that took none of the fun or anxiety about it; during the weeks at a time their training was limited to classwork or limited class exercises, it often felt like it would be a cold day in hell before they were even allowed to head to the MEZ again. How did her friends see fit to celebrate the occasion with her?

By mogging her over her popular phase, of course! Their good-natured ribbing brought a sheepish grin to Nicole's face throughout their briefing, as they ragged on her for her date with Aiya. Not that Nicole would return fire, of course! She was, after all, a cool, down-to-earth kind of girl, flippant in social situations and composed on the job. She was an Ars Magi, an example to humanity - hardly the kind of girl who was going to stick her tongue out and nag Penny and Dana about their movie date to see the new Altea movie, or to harass them about not being given an invite. Especially not after she'd devoted some of her precious off-time to catching up on the Alteaverse too, manga, spinoffs and all. She was nowhere near that callous to act like that in front of nobles like Vanna, Aiya or Cordelia.

But the wink she gave them both in response to their teasing was proof she was capable of it, at least.

She weighed all their suggestions and stood, stretching a long limb and brushing her fingertips against the roof of their transport. The briefing weighed heavily in her mind, and though it was nice to know they weren't expecting Void combat, her memories of the nasty shock they'd received during their last trip to the Exercise Zone were heavy in Nicole's mind. So was the scrape she'd taken along her midriff, which had scarred her spirit if not her stomach.

"If it comes to that, Cordelia, I can draw them off," she appraised, looking over Team 3. It was nice and simple, in her mind. Would it be cool to have a team name or emblem? Probably. But it was also a lot of effort to design that sort of stuff, and she only really trusted Dana to come up with something suitable anyway. All her stuff would look like old stills from horror movie productions, or remind people of devils and succubi more than Ars Magi. "I can outfly anyone here, and with all this rain I could probably blind their sensors by blowing sheets right into them. But they're trained to detect our magic output, too. So we can't just throw Penny at the problem and hope for the best."

She even surprised herself with how authoritative she sounded. Instinctively, what she knew of politics told her she should be letting Vanna dictate all this, but...something about what Cordelia's words when they'd first met, the unsung leader of the team, had stuck with her somewhere. Even if she didn't see herself that way, if others did, wasn't it her job to live up to that standard? "You heard what they said in the briefing, the second one drone sees us they all do, and they'll harry us the rest of the way until we're home free. We should keep the element of surprise as long as possible somehow. Harsh their sensors, use Cordelia's glass, and if it comes to a fight I know I can bank on Dana's support at range. Especially if their sensors are goofy. Penny, you can do what you do best, babe."

She pumped a fist at their bespectacled highlander and winked again. She tried not to look at Aiya or the Officers Academy cadets, for fear of blushing in their direction. The quiet one was kinda cute, too.

"Vanna, you're our nuke. The long we can keep you from exerting yourself, the better - you can help Dana and Cordelia if our VIPs are being pushed too hard, but ideally we'll really be able to let you cut loose at the end, so we have a clear trip to the finish line. That make sense to everyone?"

Nova Lux: A Magical Girl Game

---

“Come and find me later. I’ll introduce you to some of the officers—but you won’t like any of them as much as me.”

It was surreal to see a member of the Duodecim coming on so strong. Nicole had always flitted through life pretty flirtatiously, casually keeping everyone on their toes with signs of her interest. She was an engaging girl who liked to show her interest in people, but it was as much a form of conversation to her as jokes or heart-to-hearts full of sisterly advice. Aiya was something altogether different; she was a girl who had the whole planet at her disposal, cut from the same staggeringly lucky cloth as Vanna, conceived as part of a grand cosmic plan and born within the winner's circle. It was Nicole's luck that she had been born a carefree girl, a meandering pirate captain whose childhood had been spent navigating a sea of technicolor xenon, with good vibes and cheap street food at every port; it was Aiya's divine right to dance and rule and flirt the way she did.

In that moment, some terrified part of Nicole screamed what Astrelle had been screaming aboard the Laurus at Penny and Dana, with their heads full of cartoons - grow up. No fun allowed.

But that didn't seem like much of a way to live, either. Would the others have made her 'heart of the team,' as Cordelia had put it, if she wasn't working overtime to be their sister figure? It was still work to make people love you, wasn't it?

She'd been having a lot of these thoughts over the past couple days. Not for the first time, Nicole missed Astrelle. Aiya had been taken aside by her own set of responsibilities - responsibilities in this case being defined as stocky, well-groomed guards straight from central casting, a cabal that was uncannily comely and disquietingly faceless, each bodyguard utterly indistinguishable from each other. So following dumbly in her stead, while tempting, was also a no go. Besides, being clingy wasn't a good way to get girls to keep thinking you were hot.

---

For a while, Nicole sought the company of the other remaining noble in her life. Vanna had survived enough of the pleasantries of the Duodecim over her own life that she was afforded some leeway the other cadets were not; she had found her way out onto one of the balconies adjacent to the ballroom, nursing a single flute of champagne that her pale fingers in a way that reminded Nicole of a woman clutching her a throat. She cajoled and schmoozed her teammate for a bit, trying to get her to come out on the dance floor, but Vanna seemed content with the breeze and the moon for companionship. Nicole's presence was tolerated, maybe even with a hint of warmth, but in the end the Hastan realized that her light wasn't really necessary in such serene company, and she bade Vanna a goodnight.

A dance with her lilac-haired coffee queen was the next highlight of her night; the two chatted about mochas and music for a few minutes, Nicole twirling in her arms, before her counterpart was pulled away for an introduction. Another, less engaging conversation or two followed before she managed to extract herself; Aiya had caught her eye again, gesturing for her to meet some of her compatriots from the officer's academy. On the way, Nicole found herself stopped by a leonine blonde boy, blue-eyed and grinning impishly. He pushed a flute of champagne from his family's table into her hand, along with a napkin containing two chocolate-coated strawberries. "She's the girl!" he called out to Aiya's table straining to be heard over the upbeat swing of the band changing tempo. Nicole giggled; she raised her voice to match his, tingling all over, buzzed and alive. She felt like her whole body had become her Ars Armagus. Maybe it had.

"I'm the girl!" she crowed, taking a big sip of her drink and feeling her arms tingle again at the taste.

She spent the rest of the night there, surrounded by young men she'd never met before and a Duodecim who seemed to hang on her every word. It made Nicole think again about their different life experiences, but this time she hit upon another truth - to Aiya, and to all of them, an Ars Magi must have been equally exotic. The nobility among them had grown up with them as a faceless, powerful fact of life, more beautiful than the guards who had escorted Aiya to her next engagement but equal in purpose and obstinance. They were there to be mysteries, not to be explored and bantered with. So she broke the ice the way Nicole Cognoscenti did best, telling stories from home, mining them each for more things to do in Palmyra, and even explaining again her superpower of free samples magnetism. One cadet had been as skeptical as Penny before another Nova Lux cadet drifted up with some delicious-looking bread and spread. Nicole took a bite out of it and silently freaked out when she felt the familiar texture and flavors of pesto on her tongue; she'd had a humiliating pine nut allergy all her life, and for a few minutes she desperately tried to play it cool...before realizing that nothing was happening, and it was safe to take another bite. A passive effect of her metamorphosis into a magical girl?

Holy crap. Holy crap!

Aiya had been half-right; for the rest of the night, the de Mars' heiress' table was the one she'd stuck with, and she liked each cadet equally, but none so much as her one-time dance partner herself. When it was finally time for the glittering jewels of Nova Lux to return to their chambers, Nicole did so with smuggled armfuls of pesto bites, strawberries, and a rich girl's number.

---

The Ars Magi had partied with various levels of enthusiasm, and for a time they relaxed in the common room, with Nicole sharing her snacks, stories, and plenty of giggles with Penny and Dana. Somewhere in all that mingling, one of the many unseen Powers that Be that made the campus run must have moved Cordelia's things into Nicole's empty dorm. The butler's things had all been meticulous tucked in and the sheets on both beds had been freshly changed - obliterating any traces of Astrelle Lennox that might have remained, save perhaps in memory or races of aura that Nicole was not yet attuned to. With that in mind, and as the buzz of the evening turned to a general feeling of drunken sleepiness, she tried her best to make her shower prompt - and made sure how to explain to Cordelia beforehand the necessity of fiddling with the shower knob to get the best potential water temperature. It would save her from going through the scalding initiation that Nicole and Astrelle had.

As the water plastered her scarlet hair to her forehead, her fingers brushed her bare stomach and touched the emerald inlaid there. Maybe the rest of her life wouldn't be filled with nights like this one...but that was all the more reason to treasure them. That thought - and the hot water - teamed up to cut through her drowsy, inebriated haze, and she focused hard on the feeling of every droplet that broke or clung to her bare body. Through trial and error, and endless curses, she had found the dark alchemy required to coax a perfect shower out of this damn thing every morning and every night. Such a perfect shower deserved to be remembered, and she wanted to commit every second of it to memory - every second of the whole night to memory.

She focused hard, biting her lip and smiling dreamily, until she felt like she'd succeeded. Only time would tell if she was right. Tomorrow morning would be the first test. She turned off the shower and dried off, only barely remembering before opening the bathroom door that she actually had to begin getting dressed before bed again.

After all, she had a roommate to consider.

Nova Lux: A Magical Girl Game

---

"Me? Psssh. I was almost getting trampled in raves before I could walk. This is the same principle, just more champagne."

Nicole let out an easy laugh, a chiming giggle that lilted with all the grace of her element. She immediately liked her dance partner. Her parents had always been politically-minded, sure, but Nicole had never really put much thought into the workings and lives of the nobility before. Having rubbed elbows with so much of it lately...

It turned out she just had a thing for noble girls. Curious.

Curious!

She looked around for Penny, Dana and Vanna, catching each of their eyes for a second as they engaged and bantered politely with their own dance partners. She wondered if any of them had managed to find the fun in this. For Vanna, galas like these had probably come with the territory that was her whole life, endlessly polite chat that led to no engagement and no connections. From the way she talked, that was probably how Aiya felt about them too.

"That sucks," she sympathized with a playful grin and the same conspiratorial whisper. "You would think those are the moments that make guarding someone easier and make you better at it. Dances, inside jokes...the intimate stuff, right? The things that make you give a crap about life."

Aiya was a master of closing the distance between them and then widening it again - constantly keeping Nicole on her toes, as the distance between them bounced back and forth from hairline fracture to gulf.

"The lights or the boys..." she mused playfully during one of the hairline fracture phases. "Well, in all the movies, they say that the people of Hasta are its real lights, so I guess I've got that covered." She winked. "Palmyra has plenty of neon if you know where to look. It's not the same, but if I work hard enough and crank up the charm, I can turn any place in the world into Hasta. The boys..."

Golden, surly eyes beneath bangs plastered down by the rain - they prowled left to right like tigers, discontent inside of cages. Droplets rolling down his full lips. The nostalgia-filtered snapshots that led to what-ifs, and would probably make her feel alone even in the arms of her final, truest love one day.

When she blinked, it was Aiya's face she saw again - exotic and feline, gorgeous and amused at her own exotic partner. Nicole's own playful grin glinted with the sheepishness of the Best Friend Next Door.

"The boys kinda had a catchphrase for babes like me - Ti voglio bene."

Mass Effect : Project Bastion

---

Not for the first time, he missed the feeling of shooting at batarians - a human pastime that had become a sacrosanct duty, ever verging the edge of becoming a birthright.

The last four years of Jackson Pulliam's life had been spent amid the relative, if spartan comforts of the Systems Alliance's black ops squadrons. From the fringes of Alliance space into the Attican Traverse, with even a few toes illicitly dipped into the Terminus Systems, he had served as one of humanity's sterling tools, tasked with strenuous jobs along the frontiers humanity had not yet sucked dry. Between those jobs his arrangements were caring and careful alike, stored properly and maintained often the way a master craftsman would store and maintain the unique set of tools he had bonded with.

He found solace in that definition of care. He had tried other definitions in his life and found them all unsatisfying.

In the weeks between his assignments, the ships or backwater ghost towns he was posted to offered him a form of solace, too. He found something of the ragged old pioneer spirit in the horizons of empty worlds, barren planets freckled with only the occasional Alliance prefabs across the face of what was otherwise a seamless, unending vista. Space was beautiful in the same way, a blank canvas dotted with more history and chemistry and quirks of existence than Jace could ever understand. He had given up on understanding it all as he grew up. Now he preferred to just look out at it from an observation deck and find silence in his mind, where once he had churned with questions.

Tayseri Ward offered none of those comforts. The Citadel was the great cardiovascular system of the galaxy, its relays connecting to the home clusters of almost every political presence in the galaxy, asari and salarian and turian and hanar and elcor alike. Its Wards were all multicultural, some to greater extremes than others. But it was the asari that functionally ruled the galaxy, and it was the asari who ruled Tayseri. Tayseri Ward was a beacon of asari culture tertiary only to Thessia and Ilium. Concert halls bearing the names of Matriarchs who had been old when the first nations of Earth were young, nightclubs that teemed with maiden dancers and mercenaries, and most of the streets and lights were aglow with the famous asari color palette - purples and oranges like the lips of sunrises, and blue everywhere. It saturated every level of Tayseri Ward and clawed its way through any surface with a hint of translucence. When Jace looked at his hands, sometimes he caught himself shocked that they had turned blue too. It was only the lights - and the asari.

He didn't like the idea of meeting any contact here - especially with the sparse intel he had been given in his briefing from the brusque Rear Admiral who had assigned him this mission. Tayseri was a known destination for parties and cultural events alike throughout the Citadel, but it had been struck hard by the geth attack. Concert halls, biotiball venues, and entire city squares had been obliterated by wreckage from Sovereign and the assorted Citadel ships that escorted that monster to Hell. If this extraction became heated in a hurry, it would become difficult to move his contact anywhere with any degree of speed - let alone get a viable route to the Presidium, which was only barely habitable even months after the battle. He could see the wisdom of meeting in an asari dominated Ward, at least; after all, it would be easy to pick out other humans like him, discern who was there for partying and who was there with a goal in mind. But it was humanity's fleet that had rescued the Citadel and it was humanity that was starting to dominate many walks of life on the Citadel. Citadel Security, embassy staff, transit authority, even the cleanup crews working district by district...Sovereign's apocalypse had forced gentrification upon many of the Wards, and that bell couldn't be unrung.

It also made his job of parsing the threats out of everyday new arrivals that much harder.

At least he found the doctor where he was supposed to be. Sometimes contacts liked to get a little loose where brokered meetings required strictness; it was a whiff of uncooperativeness that would never quite waft away, and usually led to jobs gone wrong. He sat down across from the scientist and took the man's measure. The aliens liked to make a big deal of humanity's genetic diversity, but the doctor seemed particularly nondescript to Jace. Older man, anxious and uncertain of himself. He got the feeling that even if he was a necessary presence to the doctor, he certainly wasn't a welcome one.

He ran a lazy finger along the bottom rim of the doctor's cup, feeling the slickness of condensation on glass beneath his fingertip. A drop pooled on his nail. He waited for the code phrase - one the doctor had suggested, likely with far more pomp in the face of the admiral than he seemed capable of delivering it with now.

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. If those weren't the first words out of the jittery man's mouth, Jace was leaving.

Nova Lux: A Magical Girl Game

---

Nicole was a little flummoxed by Cordelia's dancing at first. She'd always been fantastic on her feet, sure, but her expertise in that area came from years of floundering in mosh pits or bouncing up and down, working up a sweat beneath the disorienting strobes of Hasta's club scene. They were different beasts than something as elegant as this waltz, and girls like their new teammate weren't usually the kind of guys or girls Nicole was pressed up against in the writhing throngs of partiers at home. The social aspects of this whole affair - helping all the girls look their fashionable, neomilitaristic best, helping them with what to say to mingle, maybe some winks at the fellas and some compliments for the girls - she could nail. But like at a club, there was always the anxiety that she could roll an ankle and completely eat shit while trying to look sophisticated.

Cordelia's whispering might have gone a long way in that regard, but she felt the noble-born girl taking the lead in their dance and decided to cede control to her for the first phase of their dance. Her words made Nicole think of Astrelle again with a twinge - it was hard to believe that her roommate had disappeared in the night the way she had, or been reassigned away from them. Had her family pulled some strings at her own insistence to get her pulled out? Was that even possible at this point? Had she struck someone a little too closely for comfort with her conspiratorial mindset?

“But that won’t happen with me. I’m here to stay. Please count on me.”

"Ha." The storm cloud over Nicole's head broke, and the redhead grinned impishly at the new girl's oath of loyalty. "Alright, roomie. I've got your back, you got mine. Score."

The waltz brought them closer together; she felt the gems inset in their navels touch like the tines of forks, sending a tingle through her body that sent her teeth burrowing into her lip.

“Would you like to try taking the lead, darling?”

Nicole laughed aloud and decided to give the second phase of their dance a whirl; thankfully, the song was a bit livelier, and as with many casual applications Nicole found herself more graceful and fearless when performing precise movements. It was as though she was now permanently in her element, fleet-footed and incapable of falling. It felt fantastic. After a while, even waltzing did too. She was about to ask Cordelia if she was into a drink when someone tapped her new teammate on the shoulder and offered to take her - Nicole Cognoscenti, perennially friendzoned just a month ago - off Cordelia's hands. She looked the girl offering to trade out Cordelia's place in their waltz - exotic-looking, with eyes that twinkled and hair that drank in the light around them. Nicole looked over to her own partner and felt her heart lurch slightly at his appearance - golden-skinned, amber-eyed, serious and surly, so like her own childhood best friend she had seen off with a knuckle touch. For a second she was tempted to run over to him and double-check it wasn't him in disguise, trying to fuck with her a little; she wanted to quiz him about weapons, music, or mocking passers-by based on their appearance, all favorite pastimes of his. She remembered the last time she had seen him, in the soft shadows, hazy lights, and pouring rain at the top of the White Tower. Jericho's hair had been plastered over his face, the color of dark chocolate with midnight streaks, and a single streak of crimson that he so carefully and regularly dyed. He chewed on the soaking-wet ends as he wished her goodbye.

She searched this cadet's hair; there was not a single trace of red. She felt bad for sizing him up like a replacement puppy. He was handsome, incredibly so, but he wasn't quite material for bumping fists in the courtyard.

She giggled, both out of amusement that she was being so heavily courted and from imagining how her torch song would be reacting to her attitude right now.

Goddamn it, Nicole. All the girls in the world who are capable of saving it, and the gods pick the one that thinks every boy from Osca looks alike. You're a danger to yourself and humanity in this shape. If I could go back in time ten years I would throw you from the monkey bars and save us all.

Ohhhh, yeah, she could hear him loud as day. That probably just proved her subconscious point - which meant it was worth taking under advisory. She grinned at the girl so gallantly offering to take her off Cordelia's hands, and outstretched her own to the almond-eyed cadet.

"I'd love to, babe," she said amiably, with a similar twinkle to her own partner's in her eye. "Nicole Cognoscenti - Hasta Vice."

Mass Effect: Kingslayer

Personally, Liyah might have loved to spend all day bantering with brash asari maidens and telling all sorts of jokes about vorcha doctors. But she had directed her attention to the killer robots that they now knew were awaiting them inside Daezike's nerve center. Her new commander's intel had certainly dropped the ball, but for the most part she'd expect everyone to go in knowing that there would be home security for a big-shot accountant anyway. Verifying that security's existence was trivial. Dealing with it was going to be the trick.

Their turian had a slick, salesman-like quality to his confidence, the kind of guy who had honed his smooth talk bantering with squadmates and pushing his luck at Citadel bars. Liyah could recognize another bullshitter at a glance. But to question a turian's martial or infiltration skill would usually be a losing bet, and she found herself curious what exactly he could be capable of. It was better to find out what everybody in this brash group of assholes could do sooner, rather than later.

"The mechs will probably all be networked together to share combat data and alarms," she told Sivus. "Disabling them would work, or maybe even screwing with their IFFs if we're worried about anyone following us in through the open door. I might be able to help in that regard, but since we have a quarian babe--" she beamed at Key "--you might be in safer hands than mine when it comes to that little trick. She could cook something up for you to upload in her sleep, whatever we choose."

Mass Effect: Kingslayer

Liyah had spent a little too long shackled to the Alliance military to be particularly offended by brusque jerkoffs whose orders preceded them on their way through the door. The quarian seemed to be cut from the same shithead cloth, too, and she still had no idea what to make of the wrinkly, toothy new arrival - if that was what passed for exotic in the galaxy, Liyah could understand why some of the less adventurous among humanity might be happy settling down in Terra Nova or Eden Prime. The turian and the shaved meathead both seemed a little full of themselves, too, but she would be grateful for the banter at least. The asari...well, there was no chance of objectivity there. She had a legendary weakness for asari anyway, and they had a weakness for her. Like the hopeless, horny idiot she was, she winked at Lantea's reassurances about the vorcha lifespan, but that was about all the charm she was able to inject into the room before their CO stormed in.

Honestly, even he didn't really bother her. Henriques may not have been interested in making friends with anybody in the squad, but one look at him told Liyah that she wouldn't really have been too thrilled to be his friend either. Besides, if someone from the Alliance really felt like being unpleasant, they were more than capable of doing so - this barely qualified as impolite considering some of the meatheads they had watching military prisons. Freelance starship captains were even worse, all obsessed with the idea of being dashing gunslingers to the point where they were dicks to their crew for no reason and to no effect.

Liyah bounced off the couch at the end of their briefing, fully satisfied now with why she'd been drafted for this. Would it have been nice to have a break, go off chasing rogue turians at the far edges of space? Sure. But that wasn't really what she was equipped for or being compensated for at the end of the day; busting nerdy accountants and shitty books was what had sprung her out of jail in the first place, and she was more than happy to keep delivering as long as it kept her on the Citadel. Even in a shithole Ward like this, street food abounded on every corner, right?

Her main disappointment was that she wouldn't get to drive; her mouth quirked a little in disapproval as the quarian called dibs before she did, but she shrugged it off. At least there weren't any krogans or anything to crowd up the Skyhawk's backseat. In fact, she was even able to squeeze a seat next to the asari. Fuck yeah. If you have to go one day, it might as well be at the hands of a hot woman who turns you into soup in a nightmarish fusion of biotics and malfunctioning tech. Beats cancer.

Something that had been bothering her from the briefing pulled her out of her distractions.

"Well, it is the Presidium. I'd be surprised if we ran into an army of mechs, and home security systems should be a cinch to get past," she mused, "but we should expect her to have some kind of panic button on standby - if she hasn't already started mashing one. Any idiot who feels C-Sec bearing down on them can wipe files from off-site, right? Do we have a backup plan for retrieving anything if that happens?"

Nova Lux: A Magical Girl Game

---

If you had given the Laurus team an anonymous poll on which of them would be most excited for the Inaugural Ball, it was likely that all of them would have put Nicole at the summit of their ranked choices - save perhaps Nicole herself, who thought it was pretty goddamn egotistical to list herself at the top of anything like that and listed Dana just to be humble. Still, the Hastan girl had made no secret of her excitement about the upcoming event, and had fussed over the perfect subtle ornaments for Penny and Dana to wear without clashing with their official uniform. It was great to shop with Vanna, too - Nicole had never hurt for money growing up, but that didn't make her family outrageously wealthy, either. Having a daughter of the Duodecim to do brunch with made things like footing the bill for rings or piercings a cinch. Her anticipation had mounted in tandem with Penny's anxiousness at the prospects of a party, with plenty of hot guys and babes to take runs at wooing a fully-fledged Ars Magi.

Then, one night, she had arrived back at their dorm from a jaunt to the city with a pair of gyros for her and Astrelle to split and found the Lennox girl, and every one of her material possessions, gone from the dorm. Nicole may as well have spent every night there alone. Not so much as a black hair in the shower. She had munched on both gyros alone and tried every technique under the sun to try and get some sleep, from quiet songs on her phone to sleeping naked to every idea in between. Nobody she texted, nothing she listened to or touched or tried to think of, lulled her to sleep for more than an hour. The next night was much the same, and the night before that. Had she failed the test somehow after all? Did her parents pull some strings to get her home after her near-brush with death against the Class C? ...Had it been Nicole's fault? Or was it something to do with the questions that her roommate had posed of Nova Lux and the Ars Magi since the day they'd met?

The questions had consumed Nicole's sleep, and they had come to visibly haunt her in both demeanor and with light circles under her eyes that she'd resorted to expertly covering up with makeup. Tonight, her eyes glittered with scarlet shadow and she'd made sure to put her nostril and navel piercings back in, to give the big city girl a little bit of exotic flair. But her eyes lacked the glitter of her makeup and studs, and they kept scanning the crowd for a familiar shock of black hair - or at least a telltale shade of violet.

"Nicole Cognoscenti. Considered by many to be a leader among her peers, with a discerning eye and a lightness on her feet. It is my utmost pleasure to make your acquaintance. My name is Cordelia Whittaker, and I am to join this team. It would be my greatest honour that you afford me a dance.”

The fifth girl they had been seated with broke Nicole from her reverie, and she felt her heart leap like a panicked gazelle for a moment. She looked around for someone else who the elegant-looking cadet may have meant to refer to, and found only the curious stares of her team in response. Did one of you girls tell her I was leader? No, no, Vanna's our leader, right Vanna? But when her eyes traced the gorgeous bone structure of their illustrious Duodecim teammate, Nicole quietly blanched as she realized that Vanna had no intention of throwing her the lifesaver.

"Teaaaam leader," she repeated. "Yeah, that's me?"

"Wait, are you Astrelle's replacement?"

Nicole's fingers closed tightly around her skirt as Dana and Penny got up to leave. She had half a mind to go with them at first, to seek solace in their boundless optimism and exasperation respectively, but as she surveyed the boys they'd scoped out, none of them really...struck Nicole as her type of guy. There were no brooding golden eyes, no full lips with haughty, arrogant smirks, not even a shade of skin darker than a barbecue potato chip, let alone a rich mocha. No fists worth bumping there.

She smiled at their new teammate and stood up.

"Yeah," she agreed amiably, taking her hand and lacing their fingers. "Dance my socks off, babe."

Mass Effect: Kingslayer

"Get up," the asari urged her for the third time, with an even more forceful shake of her hookup's shoulder.

The young human, her beauty only slightly marred by the open mouth and trickle of drool upon the chic pillowcase, stirred feebly at the imagined assault on her sleeping form. Her eyelids only rose, with great reluctance, at the implicit tingle of biotics that made her hairs stand on end and roused her to wakefulness. Her eyes rolled back into her head sleepily for a moment, with a yawning "Huh?" as she sat up and rolled her shoulders. Her black hair fell into her face, and when she lowered her arms she parted it over her forehead with a sleepy grin at the owner of the apartment she'd shacked up in for the night.

"Ahh, hey," she yawned again, craning her chin up and her neck back until she heard a pop. "Breakfast already?"

"You need to go," her one-night stand said forcefully, the telltale blue aura of a biotic wave slowly dissipating around her right wrist. "Now. My bondmate is getting off work in an hour, and she is never, ever going to know you were here."

"...Oh," the human mumbled, reaching over her shoulder and scratching her cocoa-colored neck half-heartedly. "You're really shouty this morning, huh. Do asari feel bad dreams worse than we do or something?"

"I didn't sleep at all. I was up half the night listening to you playing Galaxy of Fantasy next to me in bed. On a work computer, by the way, all that traffic goes back to the asari embassy. So thank you for that headache this morning."

"Okay, alright, I get it..." Lorena Aaliyah Negasi grumbled, standing up and scanning the floor of the apartment for her clothes. Through the window that stretched along the length of the bedroom wall, she could see the hustle of Citadel traffic; something in her tired mind sent off an alarm, warning her that she had, indeed, made her commute to her new assignment that much harder on herself. Her plan had been to pull an all-nighter and leave a few hours early, after some drinks and some fun at a club here in Tayseri Ward. Tayseri was an asari-dominated arm of the Citadel where drinks and fun seemed to come cheaply. But asari were much nicer at night, when they were looking to blow off some steam on humans they thought guileless, than they were when it came time for those humans to hit the road. She was learning that lesson to her chagrin now. Her punishment for drifting off in the middle of a game, she guessed. Her eyes located her outfit near where she had left her packed bags.

"Is it cool if I at least shower?" she asked, stifling another yawn as she padded over to where she had drunkenly left her clothes six hours prior. The asari's eyes followed her as she walked, which only reinforced the smug, if only semi-conscious grin on the human woman's face.

"No," the asari said firmly nonetheless, as Liyah lifted her clothes up in an artless pile under her arm and began sorting through them. "I don't want you leaving hairs in my shower, she'll figure it out the second she sees one. Volus have an eye for details like that."

"Wait, she's a lady volus?" Liyah asked curiously, pulling on her pants legs. The asari's lips - mmmm - retraced the last three words incredulously; she couldn't have looked much more shocked if Liyah had told her that her bondmate was killed in a traffic accident that morning. The human shrugged defensively as she wriggled the previous night's shirt back on, fingering the small stud in her navel just south of where her top stopped covering skin.

"I've just never seen a lady volus!" she protested. "I just didn't know they could be a thing. ...Why would she check the shower, then? How does the shower situation work around here? Actually, how does that work when you two-- "

"Get out, Lorena."

"Ahh, ehh...actually, just Liyah, I don't really like when--" she started, before the asari put hands on the small of her back and began physically guiding her towards the door. When she was in front of it, Liyah dug her heels in for just a moment and turned back. The asari had used Liyah's alabaster jacket as a buffer between her palms and actually being forced to touch the skin of the human she'd spent the night with, and when Liyah was within a boot's distance of the apartment's exit her one-time lover relinquished the jacket back into Liyah's waiting arms as though it were poison. "Okay, okay! Just really fast--you did log out of Galaxy of Fantasy before you turned the computer off, right? You're really not supposed to turn it off without logging--"

"Out." The teal fog of death had begun to congeal around the asari diplomat's arm again, and Liyah, taking her final hint, performed her walk of shame with arms raised placatingly all the way to the elevator, back to a CRT station.

---

Thankfully for Liyah, the cab ride to Bachjret Ward required little effort on her part apart from staying awake. Even if that had been a problem for her by the time the cab arrived, the view of the Citadel, even from the lens of stop-and-go traffic that she viewed it through, was more than enough to keep her transfixed. She had thought herself no stranger to the congestion and bustle of space stations, but even Tayseri Ward alone was busier than ten Arcturus Stations. And that was the seat of Alliance power!

Whenever she got too sick of looking out the window at the same skycars, she made idle chatter with her cab driver, a gruff turian who she nonetheless managed to charm out of his shell after a few minutes of earnest questioning about the volus sexuality and gender spectrum. It turned out the confusion that the idea fostered in her was galactic, not just limited to her ignorance as a human on the galactic scene. That made her feel a little better, even if afterwards she started to wonder if the turian had really been ignorant, happened to be an idiot, or was just fucking with her. She liked the idea that they were all equally stupid.

Her driver seemed skeptical that she had the district name right, and to prevent herself from looking like a hapless tourist she doubled down on the name Batia even though she had no idea if that pronunciation was anywhere close to right. Right or wrong, that's where he took her. The traffic lessened up here considerably compared to Tayseri or even Zakera Wards, although here and there Liyah could see telltale signs of the gentrification that had apparently begun to plague the latter. The inner workings of the five arms of the Citadel meant little and less to her right now, although subconsciously her brain was cataloguing the info her driver rattled off to her for future use. That was a habit she'd picked up even before her time onboard starships as a Corsair, back when she was skimming money off the top from clueless assholes in Arcturus who wouldn't miss it. It was always the smallest nuggets that gave the game away.

She found Livilla Towers in short order, and after a cheerful goodbye and generous tip to her driver - footed for her, knowingly or not, by her asari lover from the night before - she managed to breeze by the complex's security guards and into the elevator with zero fuss. Recalling the door code for the relevant apartment listed in her dossier, the human inputted the digits and walked in to find a small bustle of noise. Clearly, she had been among the last to arrive - with a little luck, not the very last. She dropped her bags at the first space that seemed unoccupied and used a boot to push them out of anyone's walking path.

"It's pretty crazy out there, huh?" she asked brightly, leaning against a wall and out of anyone's way. "Traffic from Tayseri was--oHHHH fuck."

She had turned at the rasping voice that came from the entrance of another room and jumped slightly to see a vorcha standing before them with a toothy grin. She jumped slightly; having spent the last year and change in the Terminus systems, she had encountered only a scant few of the aliens, but she had hoped each encounter would be her last. Quickly she managed to parse the use of proper pronouns and, overwhelming her immediate adrenal response, she realized this must be one of their teammates. With a little chagrin, she plopped down on the couch, kicking one leather-clad leg over the armrest of the well-worn furniture.

"Hey yourself," she grinned sheepishly. "Sorry, you're totally cool. I thought I saw a bug back on that wall, and I'm not great with bugs, so...okay, you freaked me out."