Cereza fidgeted with her personal scroll anxiously, one hand in a pouch and the other tapping one of the magazines for Droed Gwyn strapped to her thigh, as she stared out the window to the city of Vale below. This was it, the penultimate culmination of everything she had been working for since she had turned thirteen. She was going to fulfill Midas’s dreams.
She should be excited and joyful, but the blonde really just felt kind of sick. What if she failed the entrance exam? Cereza didn’t think she could bear going back to her brother and facing him after failing to become a Hunter. Not after all he had done for her.
The airship was slow, almost agonizingly slow for a tech savvy girl who was used to the fast-paced circuits of computers. For a moment the tall teen deliberated reaching out with her semblance just to try and make it fly faster, but logic won out. It was highly likely that it wouldn’t work – the airship was very large and possibly had multiple CPU’s, and that was if it was even run electronically. And there were already too many processing chips pinging at her semblance, distracting her as they constantly moved about with their owners. Scrolls, the anti-social girl hazarded as she flicked her neon eyes around the ship, as it was highly unlikely that anyone else had weapons like her own. The aura-chips she’d installed into her own technology sat heavily in her mind as well. Normally the weight felt comforting but right now it felt like a burden, reminding her of the weapons her brother had helped build and the time he had dedicated to her, the dream he had sacrificed to raise her. It should have been him standing here on this ship, flying towards his destiny.
Cereza breathed a sigh through her nose. The slow speed of the airship was allowing her to dwell on things she only peripherally understood – the messy-haired blonde knew that the concept of sacrificing your own desires for someone else was foreign to her, though she could appreciate the sentiment in this case, and thinking about it wouldn’t increase her understanding. The only thing she could do was repay him, and that was why she was here. She needed to become a Hunter, to achieve Midas’s dream for him since he no longer had the opportunity.
The adolescent almost ran the messaging program on her scroll to send a text to her only father figure, but cancelled it at the last second. The computer-lover was here now; she couldn’t be texting her brother at the drop of a hat. He had his own problems to deal with, such as getting his new hacker’s guild up and running. He would text her if he needed her.
The young hacker slumped down onto the nearest bench and drummed the blades of Llaw Du impatiently. The metallic tapping soothed her impatience a touch as it occupied a small part of her mind, and the wannabe-Huntress decided to fill her time by running a diagnostic on Droed Gwyn even as she checked her lien balance. Her scroll stayed in her pouch though, as she simply ran the executable file using her semblance.
‘2000 lien.’ That should be enough for the year, especially since the lithe girl would be studying full time. It wasn’t like she couldn’t get more anyway.
A group of teenagers chattering off to her right let out a peal of raucous laughter, and she twitched in annoyance. It was perhaps the thing Cereza was dreading most – the crowds. The airship was packed with people, and Midas had told her there would be classes and a cafeteria and shared dorms, as well as a team who would be together almost constantly. After a childhood spent living in various safe houses where it had just been Midas and herself and the occasional new recruit for Midas’s gang in the later years, the sheer amount of people around her was crushing.
She would persevere though; Cereza had to become a Huntress. There was no other option.
‘Run Beacon.exe.’ she thought to herself, quirking a small grin as her scroll whirred in response but did nothing. There was no Beacon.exe installed on the tech; maybe in her downtime she could create it?
(Round 1)