The Simulacrum

I could already see it in my mind's eye. I could literally see it. I mean, not literally 'literally', but literally in the 'figuratively' sense… Language drift is messed up, isn't it? Anyways, the important part is that I could totally picture it both literally and figuratively, dictionaries be damned!

Somewhere, in a very public and well-lit parking lot, Labcoat Guy appears out of thin air flanked by a small army of ridiculous robots randomly waving their limbs around. On the other side of the parking lot, Josh, Elly, Angie, Snowy and Ammy dash into the frame only to immediately come to an awkward halt as the camera frantically zooms in on their surprised faces.

Then Josh, as the hero ought to do, exclaims something along the lines of, 'It's Doctor Robatto! We must stop him for great justice!'

When he hears that, Labcoat Guy lets out a shrill laugh and says, 'Kihihi! Look at that! Five overbearing and overly emotional teenagers! Your do-gooder antics end here!'

Then Josh would reply, 'Die monster, you do not belong in this world!', to which Labcoat Guy answers, 'What is a man, but a miserable pile of SCIENCE! But enough! Have at you!', and then he transforms into a giant bat and… wait, wait… wrong franchise.

It's Josh who then transforms. Or maybe Angie? I mean, if someone put a gun to my head and demanded to tell them who was the one amongst our little group who'd be the most likely to engage in the typical sentai brand of limb-flailing-fu and related tomfooleries, I would've named her in a heartbeat. She'd probably also have a huge grin on her face while doing it too.

But back to the scene that I could totally picture: at Josh's command, they would all strike a weird but strangely dynamic pose, pull out their cheap off-brand morpher, the camera would frantically zoom in and out as if the cinematographer was attacked by a swarm of angry bees and couldn't decide what to do, and then, finally, at last, in the very end, ultimately…

"Okay, time out! Time the bloody hell out!" I yelled out while holding my hands in the internationally accepted 'T' position, visibly startling the gang as they were still in the middle of discussing the finer details of their shiny new totally-not-copyrighted toys.

"What do you mean by 'time out'?" Ammy responded without missing a beat, her brows already in the process of descending into a frown of the most critical variety.

"It means I can't deal with this right now, so..." While I talked, I walked over to the briefcase on the bench with firm steps and picked it up before anyone (read: a certain class representative) could get in my way. "For the moment, I'm going to confiscate these for a safety inspection. Please put yours back into the case."

"Oh? Okay." Elly complied without even the merest hint of objection. It was probably because of her prompt agreement that the others followed suit as well and obediently placed their magic gadgets back into the case. Everyone, except for the class rep, of course, and she didn't bother to hide her misgivings about the prospect.

"Why? Do you think I would hand these out if I thought they were dangerous?"

"No, of course not. I'm only doing this because everyone's safety is paramount."

"Since when do you care about safety?" my dear assistant threw a sulky jab at me, and I responded by flashing a toothy grin in her general direction.

"I always cared about safety! What do you think the 'S' in my middle name stands for?"

"Wait, you have a middle name?" Josh blurted out in surprise.

"Well, maybe not legally, but in spirit. Leonard S. Dunning sounds pretty good, doesn't it?"

"Does the 'S' stand for 'seducer'?" Judy wrestled my attention back to her with an outrageous proposition.

"No! It's 'safety'!" I retorted just a dash indignantly before facing Amelia again. "Since I'm all about safety now, it's only natural that I should double-check these artifacts or what have you. Better to be safe than sorry, don't you agree?"

"And how exactly are you going to do this 'safety inspection'?" she pressed on with her inquiry without letting go of the thingie in her hand, though the glance that accompanied said question was much less hostile than I originally expected.

"Trade secret," I answered her while forcing out a wink, for which I really wasn't in the mood, but I had to do it because the situation demanded so. She was obviously less than thrilled by that, so I quickly amended, "Trust me, I know what I'm doing."

Of course, I really didn't, and I was just doing my best to create some breathing space for myself at the moment, but she didn't need to know that. Or maybe she already did, as she looked quite skeptical, but in the end she let go of her 'Transmorpher' with a small, noncommittal grunt and a warning of, "Don't break them."

"Thanks," I said with a smile I deemed reasonably genuine, especially considering the circumstances, and I immediately snapped the lid shut and turned on my heel. "All right, I'm now going to study these for a while, let's say… over there! I'll be right back, so you can eat your lunch; no need to wait for me."

After saying that, I gestured for Judy to follow me and we hastily made our way over to the other end of the roof.

"Chief, what are you doing?" my assistant inquired once we were out of earshot.

"Isn't it obvious?" I responded with an equal measure of relief and exasperation. "This is our ground zero. If these things really do what Ammy described and in the way she described it, then the moment I allow them to transform into brightly colored bodysuits, we are irrevocably going to be locked into a sentai universe with no way out. We can't have that."

"So you're stalling," she stated emphatically, and I confirmed her deduction with a nod.

"Yes. Even if it's just a few minutes, we need to figure out how to defuse this situation. Any ideas?"

"Depends. First, let's pinpoint the problem before we start looking for a solution."

"The problem?" I repeated after her with my brows set to one hundred percent incredulity. "The problem is that these things don't make any sense in context," I blurted out while shaking the container in my hand, but since the items inside were secured, it didn't make any noise.

"Please elaborate," my dear assistant prompted me, and after taking a deep breath, I did just that.

"Okay, let's start from the beginning. We've already established that we are on the cusp of a genre shift, right?"

"Yes, like the time when Eleanor and Neige fought."

"No!" I exclaimed while pointing at her, which apparently startled her a little, so I quickly tone it back with an apologetic (and probably quite awkward) smile and continued, in a more subdued voice. "Sorry. What I meant to say was that we didn't genre shift back then. This world was always on the shounen battle harem spectrum, it just wasn't readily apparent because we were also fooled by the masquerade into thinking this was a mundane school life harem dramedy or whatever setting. We've seen the clues, but because we didn't have the full context yet, we didn't realize that they were clues at the time."

"You were also in denial."

"… Yes, I was in denial. Thank you for always reminding me of my foibles," I told her very politely, and I swear my words weren't dripping with sarcasm at all.

"You're welcome."

"Yeah, anyhow, the point is that this time around I wasn't in denial. The reason why we're on the precipice of a genuine genre shift is because all the sentai elements came out of bloody nowhere and they are taking over. There were no clues, no hints, nor any of the staples of the genre present before Labcoat Guy showed up out of the blue with his stupid spiky hair and inane cackling."

"To be fair, our group does possess five suitable teenagers with elemental affinities who fit right into the mold."

"Elemental affinities?" the question slipped out of my mouth before I could catch it.

"Yes," Judy nodded as she glanced over to the rest of our group chatting around the lunchboxes and she began to stealthily point at them one by one. "Eleanor is fire because she is related to dragons, so she's red. Neige has ice magic, so she's blue. Amelia has her golem, which is earth, so she's green. Angeline can fly, so she is air, which means she is white."

"What does that make Josh?" I asked, mostly out of bile fascination.

"He is the heart of the team, so he is obviously the pink one. Obviously." After stressing that, she glanced back to me, and I swear to god she looked straight up smug for a moment. "You have to admit it Chief, it fits."

"Yeah, and by the same logic, we could receive magical rings from the goddess of the planet at any moment and then be sent on a wild goose chase to stop some mustache-twirling rich guy from polluting the environment for shits and giggles. Face it; these elemental tropes are too common to be called clues for the world being intended to be a sentai from the beginning. Hell, I'm pretty sure that full elemental coverage is just as common in battle harem narratives."

"Point taken," Judy relented at last, but only to turn around and say, "Do you think that this time it's the narrative forcing the genre shift?"

"Precisely," I told her with a firm nod, and for a few seconds, she looked at me as if I told her I was the second coming of Elvis and I needed to borrow her vuvuzela to fix my spaceship.

"You actually mean that," she stated after looking me in the eye for a second, and I nodded again.

"Of course. Things like these," I paused here and shook the briefcase in my hand again for emphasis, "don't just randomly come to be. Someone or something had to consciously design our current scenario to push us towards sentai."

"Hold on, I need to process this," Judy stopped me in my tracks and she theatrically crossed her arms in front of her chest. "All this time you pushed back against me whenever I advocated the narrative hypothesis, and now you are just accepting it as if it was obvious all along. What gives?"

"Because it was obvious. The tropes, the genre conventions, the prophecies being possible routes, they all point at there being a pre-planned narrative in the works. It is also obvious that said narrative is now, for some reason, trying to twist the genre of the world. It has to be an outside force, because the only possible Watsonian explanation I have for all of this is that it could still be part of Lord Grandpa's secret master plan, but I sincerely doubt that he would even know what sentai is, let alone put all of this together based on it."

"So you accept the existence of the narrative influence now?"

I had no idea why my assistant looked so expectant, but I had to let her down by shaking my head.

"No, not that. It is one thing to accept the existence of a grand conductor that creates and forces various events on us, but an intangible force that's constantly influencing all of our actions and thoughts is another thing entirely. That said, we are getting grossly off-topic. We should focus on how to screw the literal plot devices for now."

"Oh. I see what you did there," Judy stated while giving me a thumbs up, though I wasn't entirely certain how serious she was because her face stayed even more expressionless than usual.

"Thank you. So, any ideas?"

"Let's get the obvious one out of the way first: do we really have to avoid this genre shift?"

"I think we've already discussed this in detail, but to reiterate: yes. We really want to avoid ending up in a sentai, as it would negatively affect both our day-to-day lives and our long-term research."

"And these transforming artifacts would directly lead to that."

"Precisely."

"So leaving them alone is not an option." She paused for a long moment, and then at last she proposed, "I am against property damage on principle, but you could always just break them. They are magical artifacts, so your anti-magic skills could theoretically work on them."

"Yes, theoretically…" I repeated after her, albeit a little uncertainly. "There's regrettably a serious problem with that idea."

"Is there?"

"Yeah. Let's disregard the genre-shifting implications of these morphing thingies for a moment, and look at what they are: they are magical armor. Silly and made of spandex, but armor all the same."

"Ah," Judy let out a grunt as she recognized what I was getting at. "I suppose breaking them wouldn't be a good idea when the people using them could be in danger at any moment."

"To be fair, they wouldn't be in a lot of danger either way, but yeah, robbing them of their armor would be kind of dick move, especially under the current circumstances."

"So we are back to square one."

"Indeed."

I must have sounded quite disheartened, as Judy fell silent alongside me, and for a couple of seconds neither of us said anything.

No matter how I looked at it, I had to get rid of these things, but getting rid of them could potentially increase the threat of injury Josh and company would face, including my sister and girlfriend. No matter which option I would choose, I would have to make a major compromise.

…

Okay, let's approach this from another direction. Breaking the morphers and not breaking them are both bad, but which is the lesser of two evils? If I don't break them, then the cat's going to be out of the bag for good, and no matter how hard I would try to avert it, it's guaranteed we would get dragged more and more deeply into sentai shenanigans. Breaking them would indirectly harm my friends, and could result in the class rep getting really angry with me, but it would at least temporarily alleviate the threat of sentai, and I could actually take some counter-measures to keep them safe by using my surveillance on Labcoat Guy.

In short, if we looked at this objectively, disabling them was definitely the better option.

"Okay, breaking it is," I whispered while exhaling a long breath. "It should buy us some time, and then we'll use it to get rid of the problem at its roots by taking down Labcoat Guy, so that they wouldn't be needed anyway. Any objections?"

"None on my part," my dear assistant agreed with me, which made me feel a little less unsure about my decision. There was only one tiny detail that we neglected to test so far.

"Can I even break these?"

Judy didn't respond to my mutters, and after an exceedingly long instant of hesitation, I put down the case and opened it. I looked over the five oversized wristwatches and decided to pick up the green one that belonged to Ammy. To my surprise, it was a bit more substantial than I expected, and while it looked like it was made of cheap plastic, the actual material felt really solid; some kind of ceramic or glass, I reckoned. Now that I had it in my hand, I took note of a few smaller details, such as that instead of a dial, the front of the 'watch' had an etched insignia of the school on it. As in, Blue Cherry High's, not the magi institute's. It was probably some sort of disguise, I ventured, but I didn't dwell too long on it.

I raised the morpher to my eye level to see if there was any trace of the characteristic magical glow on them that only I could see. When I squinted really hard, I could actually see a faint corona of blue-ish light around the edges, but nothing as overly visible as, say, the needlessly bright spear in Sebastian's office. Still, magic is magic, so I wrapped my hand around it and tried squeezing it.

"How is it?" Judy inquired while doing a horrible job of trying to hide her interest.

"Nothing," I admitted after giving it a few more squeezes. A short while later, a time period which I spent by poking the thing in my hand and thinking in tandem, I proposed, "Maybe the actual enchantments are on the inside? If I can't touch them, I cannot dispel them."

"Can you take them apart?" my assistant inquired while standing on her tippy toes to take a closer look at what I was doing.

"I don't see any screw holes or assembly marks…"

"So it's a no then," she stated as she finally let her heels touch the ground again.

"Well… I cannot take it apart, but that doesn't mean I cannot get inside," I told her maybe a smidgen mischievously. It took her only a second to figure out what I was hinting at.

"Your phantom limb," she stated as if it was entirely self-evident. Well, maybe it was in retrospect, but I still expected at least a tiny bit of enthusiasm.

"Yes, my phantom limb," I followed up by poking her nose with it, but since she couldn't see or feel it, my actions naturally had no effect.

This extra, invisible limb of mine was definitely my most underutilized supernatural ability, but for a good reason. It was necessary for Phasing with others in tow, and it could also be used to dispel all sorts of magical odds and ends, it didn't really have much use outside of those circumstances. If it could pick up things or even just mark people, it would've made my life infinitely easier, but instead I didn't even dare to let it carelessly touch anything or anyone lest I would have the misfortune to once again make acquaintance with the mother of all headaches.

Anyhow, after I had my fun poking her, I sharply exhaled and once more focused on the thing in my hand. My phantom limb, still as jointless and tentacular as ever (though I wasn't sure if the latter was a real word), was carefully poised over the morpher.

Frankly, I had my fair share of misgivings about utilizing it, as the memories of the last time I tried to directly use it on an object and its aftereffects were burned into my mind in vivid detail, but I hoped a quick poke was probably not going to hurt too much. That said, I figured it was better to err on the side of caution when it came to this particular ability of mine, so I decided to sit down on the nearest bench before doing anything else.

"Listen, Judy," I addressed my covertly fidgeting girlfriend while tapping the spot beside me for her to sit down. "Hopefully this won't become a repeat of the last time I tried to reach inside an object, but please still be on the lookout in case I'd have a seizure. If it looks like something went wrong, yank the stupid thing out of my hand. I mean, I'm sure that nothing bad will happen, because I will be really cautious, but just in case, okay?"

"You are already jinxing it," my dearest assistant grumbled as she sat down beside me, but she didn't actually make a serious objection, which I decided to interpret as her silent approval of my plan.

"Nah, I'm just being super prudent and careful right now. Please remember to praise me later."

My girlfriend rolled her eyes, and with that as the signal, I held out the device on the top of my palm again, poised my invisible extra limb right on top of it, and after holding my breath in for a moment, I used its tip to stab down and into it.

I really hoped I would experience nothing more than the characteristic tinkling sound of the magic breaking. That was my best-case scenario, and I've apparently missed it by a country mile. On that note, I also missed my worst-case scenario by about the same margin. That was supposed to be reassuring, and it might've been, if not for the sight in front of me.

How should I even describe this? The sensation was similar to when I had 'interacted' with my mug, except subtly different. It was like I was disembodied and floating inside a vast space, yet at the same time it felt suffocatingly tiny. What would be a good analogy to illustrate the sensation? Let's say… it was as if the last time I was inside an enormous ocean, with all of its weight pushing me down, while this time I was inside a single teaspoon's worth of water. It felt considerably more manageable. Somewhat restrictive, even.

I tried to look around, and maybe I even managed to do so, but I had no way to tell because there was no left or right or up or down in the space I beheld. Not just that, but I also felt that the mere concept of 'spatial directions' was an alien notion here. Strangely enough, even though if someone asked me what I'd do if I suddenly found myself disembodied in a space without any frames of reference, my first pick would've been a complete freakout, yet I was oddly calm. This… felt right somehow. I wondered if this was what being asleep felt like.

Putting such philosophical questions aside, I had to wonder what exactly was going on. However, even before the notion of being curious could really take root in my thoughts, I was shocked and surprised to realize that I knew the exact answer to that question.

I was, for lack of better words, linked up with the morpher, or rather the enchantment inside it. Wait, no. Even that wasn't entirely correct. What I was interfacing with was the underlying structure that supported the phenomenon that manifested as an 'enchantment' on the surface. I had no bloody idea how that worked or what exactly it meant, but the whole thing felt so intuitive that I decided to question it later, when I was in a slightly less bizarre situation.

Oh, but speaking of intuitive, I somehow also knew that this imaginary space was something of an… interface? Menu? No, nothing as crude as some kind of transparent panel with buttons. It was more organic. For example, let's say you imagine a person. Now, imagine that person, but with their head twice the original size. You didn't have to open up some menu and pull a slider or write in some large numbers into the 'head size' field. It just happens naturally, because that's how imagination works. This place felt kind of like that; the inside of my head, except somehow more tangible and less prone to stray thoughts messing things up.

So, for example, I imagined the morpher that was supposed to be in my palm, and 'pop', it was suddenly floating in front of me… except not really, because I was somehow looking at it from all possible angles at the same time, so… would it have been more accurate to say it was inside of me? This was all kinds of screwy, but at the same time it all felt entirely self-evident, which only made it all the weirder.

Anyways, since I already had it in front… inside… whatever! The point is, since the morpher was here, I immediately began to digest it. Digest? I wanted to say analyze, though that made it sound fancier than what was actually going on. Semantics aside, it took me an indeterminate amount of time, which was neither especially short nor particularly long, to completely understand the structure of the device, except I didn't understand it at all. Except I did, on an intuitive level.

Okay, I think it's analogy-o-clock again, because there was no way in hell I could properly explain this. So, my current familiarity with the device was akin to moving a part of my body, such as picking up something with my hand. You don't control every single individual muscle, nor are you even consciously aware of most of them, yet you still have full control over your movements and can pick things up without a second thought. It's like… your conscious mind makes the decision to move, and your motor cortex takes care of all the minutia involved with the action. It wasn't a perfect analogy, but it was close enough.

But back to the morpher, which I knew as well as the back, front, and everything in-between of my hand. Because of this, I already knew that Ammy's description of the thing was mostly correct. It used a fairly complex procedure to remove anything designated as 'clothes' from the person using it and to replace them with the suit stored in its… well, I wanted to say 'memory', but that wasn't the right word, but I didn't know what the right word was, so memory it is.

Where was I? Ah, right, the transformation. As I thought about it, the image of the device twisted and suddenly I found myself face to face with the full bodysuit stretched out on an anatomically correct but invisible mannequin. It looked just as campy as I feared, and let that suffice for a description for now.

I spent only a short while observing the suit, but I had to note that the class rep was apparently even better developed in the chest department than I thought. What was the measurement unit for these things? D-cup, I think? I had to admit, the skintight suit put quite a bit of an emphasis on her assets. Not only that, but when I proceeded to further observe her measurements, the fabric actually seemed to tuck in even closer to her skin, which was both hilariously random and a major revelation at the same time.

If I could tweak the appearance of the outfit just by paying a little too much attention to Ammy's secondary sexual characteristics, then what was stopping me from changing the design of the outfit? Or even switch it out for something else entirely!

If I had a mouth at the moment, I would've been grinning like a well-fed kitten as I tried to change the outfit, and I found it actually fairly simple to do so. Well, at least as simple as rearranging the complex molecular structure of a macro-object, but that was for something for my motor-cortex-analog to worry about. For a trial run, I imagined the class rep as I saw her just a couple of minutes ago, and in a matter of seconds, the garish green jumpsuit metamorphosed into our school's standard female uniform. The whole process was so simple and straightforward that I was almost disappointed, but not really, because getting rid of the sentai suit filled me with such bliss there was no place for any other emotion.

With the trial run over, I considered what the final form of her armor should be, but then I paused and thought things through. Did the transformation actually have to 'transform' anything? What if I left it as their school uniform? That way, they could wear it all day long without anyone being the wiser, and even during battle, they wouldn't look nearly as silly.

I looked into the idea, and by that I meant I rapidly deepened my understanding of the suit and the morpher by… well, I'll be damned if I knew, but it almost didn't feel like learning but recalling something I already knew, and once I considered the feasibility of my idea in light of what I knew at the moment, I couldn't help but be a little disappointed.

First off, these things apparently ran on the user's mana reserves, which could be substituted by tapping into their barrier. Quite a clever design, I had to admit, but it had a few downsides: while it allowed the user to fight without their 'natural' transformation, and doing so consumed much less of the equivalent of magical stamina. In exchange, their specs were considerably lower than when they were fully transformed, but due to the combination of natural barriers and the passive and active defenses the suits themselves provided, the users would still end up incredibly tough. In other words, using the suits exchanged offense for defense, but since the members of our group have already outgunned what Labcoat Guy threw at them, I figured this was supposed to even the playing field a little.

Unfortunately for me, it was also readily apparent that there was no way to make the outfits permanent, since they imposed a constant magical drain on the user. Whatever laws magic had in this universe, it was still operating under some variation of the law of conservation of energy, and although changing the design of these outfits was bafflingly easy, there were things that I couldn't change.

…

Or could I? I mean, as I mentioned before, I wasn't really operating on the 'enchantment' itself, but more on the underlying reality that housed the magic… I think? It's complicated. Anyhow, what exactly was stopping me from changing the principal effects so that the suits would have an infinite battery? Or to make take away all their negatives and make the users invincible?

Although it was intended as a rhetorical question, something in me instinctively shrunk back by the mere mention of the idea. It was weird, so I tried to focus on the source of my doubts. It wasn't exactly a fully formed thought or idea, more like a series of disjointed, fragmented flashes of insight. I spent a few minutes assembling them, and while I had a hard time contextualizing most of them, I managed to 'recall' something from them.

There was a kind of gut reflex embedded in those thought fragments, something similar to a fight or flight response. It told me that I should be wary and that I was only able to act freely as I could because I was tampering with the insides of a… gland? Sack? It was probably supposed to be 'a container'. Maybe it referred to the morpher device?

It also told me that I should not, under any circumstances, try to muck with the underlying principles of the… somethingsomething. It was not really a word, but more of an abstract idea, like the sound of the color blue. It was something that they created, and I didn't want them to know learn of my existence.

I naturally had no idea what any of that meant, but if fragments of my own psyche and memories were telling me to stop messing with things I didn't understand, I had no choice but to oblige. I mean, if I couldn't even trust myself, then who could I trust?

With that, I gave up on trying to create a magical perpetuum mobile and instead I focused on other, more practical things. For example, I decided that I would stick to the school uniform, as it was not only unassuming, but it was a big 'screw you' in the face of the genre shift as well. However, if I was already at it, I decided I might as well let my creativity free to frolic on the blank canvas of the class rep's outfit first. … It was a mistake.

After the third failed experiment resulting in a maid outfit of all things, I decided that my creativity needed to be locked up in a dark corner for the time being so that it would learn discipline, and so I returned the outfit to its school uniform roots. I contemplated tweaking it a little further, but in the end all I added were a few TRON-style glowy lines around the sleeves and the lapels, mainly so that it could be quickly told apart from the regular uniform at a glance.

I've also, maybe against my better judgment, tweaked the actual enchantments a little. Not too much, just to give the wearer even more of an edge, only stopping whenever I was warned by a sense of apprehension that I was pushing things too far. Oh, right, and before I forget to mention it, I've also erased two tracking spells and a sound recording charm thing. Lord Grandpa was nothing if not consistent.

Overall, when I finished, I was quite satisfied with my handiwork… though if someone asked what I did or how I did it, I could only shrug my shoulders and make weird, confused noises.

With that said, I proceeded to withdraw my phantom limb, and when I did so, I immediately found myself on the rooftop. Unlike when I was phasing, the transition was instantaneous, and while it didn't cause any nausea, the sudden change in my range of senses still left me disoriented for a couple of seconds.

"Chief? Is everything all right?"

I glanced over at the worried girl at my side and told her, "No problem, I'm just a little dizzy at the moment. How long was I in?"

"In?" she repeated after me while curiously tilting her head to the side. "If by that you meant to ask how long you were staring at the artifact in your hand without even blinking, it was a little over three minutes."

"Really? It felt a lot longer," I muttered while I loosened up my neck. "Though it does explain why my eyes sting."

"So? Did you manage to break it?" Judy inquired in a whisper after checking that the others were still out of hearing range, and I couldn't help but grin in response.

"No, I did one better. I hacked it."

"How?"

"With my l33t hacking skills." My irreverent answer (or the fact that I actually spelled out the numbers in 'l33t') seemed to confuse her, so I sheepishly added, "Also, with my phantom limb. It turns out it is unexpectedly handy."

This time Judy outright rolled her eyes in exasperation, but I didn't sweat it. I just successfully counter-attacked the genre shift, simultaneously figured out a way to interact with a deeper layer of this world, and I didn't even get a migraine in the process. I think I deserved a dad joke or two.

I reappeared on the rooftop and quickly dashed over to the closest bench and more or less fell onto it butt first in my hurry. Once I was seated, I hastily put the silver briefcase onto my lap, opened it up, removed one of the morphers, and raised it to my eye level with a suitably profound expression forced onto my face. My setup was done not a second too soon, as a mere moment later the access door opened up and Amelia stepped into the open with a disapproving expression.

"Careful class rep. If you keep frowning like that, you're going to get wrinkles."

"You really skipped afternoon classes up here," she stated, completely disregarding my comment.

I shrugged my shoulders as I placed the modified morpher back into the case and told her, "I told you I would, didn't I? I hope you covered for me."

"I did," Elly wedged herself into our conversation by pushing Ammy forward and skipping up to my side in one breath. "I told the teacher you had stomach problems and had to go home. I also took notes for you."

"Thanks, princess, you're a gem."

"You're welcome," she replied with a grin while she simultaneously reached out and grabbed hold of my free hand, but then her expression quickly changed into a puzzled one. "Your hand is warm."

"Thank you?" I told her, a little puzzled myself.

"I thought you'd be cold after staying up here since noon, but your hand is really warm," she reiterated while holding my hand in both of hers.

"Well, I was working hard, so my hands didn't have time to cool down," I told her a little white lie with the practiced ease of a seasoned professional.

It was only natural that my hands didn’t go cold, as I didn't actually stay on the roof until now. Once I recognized the insane possibilities of this new and unexpected discovery, I convinced the others that I needed some time to finish examining the artifacts and so I stayed behind on the roof after the lunch break. However, once they left, I immediately phased over to the secret base (much to Brang's surprise) and I spent all my time until the end of school with experimenting with our new toys.

To say that the implications of what I discovered were staggering was an understatement, and it was the first real breakthrough in the nature of this world we had since… well, it might've been the very first one, actually. I couldn't decide if this was more hilarious or infuriating, but the fact that I stumbled onto something so absurdly significant by accident was certainly something.

I felt like I could spend days just poking the magical innards of these artifacts, but at the same time I didn't forget to keep an eye on the gang with Far Sight, if only so that I could quickly come back the moment school was over. I never thought I'd say this, but I was actually a little reluctant to part with them, though I didn't have much of a choice in the matter. I went through all the trouble to tweak and fix them, so it would've been a waste not to let the guys use them. It was also the most beautiful way to give the middle finger to the genre shift, and that was enough to lessen the pain of separation, if only a little.

That said, I made a mental note to ask the class rep if she could set me up with their 'artificers' in the future. Getting access to more devices like these would probably allow me to penetrate into the systems governing this world even deeper. But then again, the fact that I tweaked the options of the morphers would probably already put Lord Grandpa on guard, so maybe I shouldn't. After all, I still had my self-appointed in-laws to exploit. I bet they would have a hoard of magical gadgets and gizmos, as dragons tend to do, and I'll have the perfect opportunity to ask Abram about them during dinner this evening. Speaking of which, the irritating butler certainly had a lot of fun toys in his study. Maybe I should try to poke around there as well, pun intended?

But that is for later; let's get back to the current situation for the time being. After a minute or so, the rest of the gang also assembled on the rooftop, with Judy being the last and closing the door behind her. I looked over our little group and cleared my throat to get their attention.

"Listen up guys, I've got some news," I told them using my best salesman smile.

"News?" Angie at the front tilted her head to the side and gestured for me to continue.

"Good news, actually," I reiterated while holding up the briefcase for emphasis. "I checked these things, and they should be perfectly safe. I've done some modifications as well, though they should be self-explanatory."

"Wait! What kind of modifications?" the class rep interrupted my explanation, so I sent her an annoyed glance, and she actually backed down.

"As I said, they should be fairly evident when you try them out. I also removed the magical bugs on them while I was at it." At this point I paused on purpose and sent another pointed glance towards Ammy. "Speaking of which, please tell your grandfather to stop trying to be clever with his surveillance, or I'll be forced to take direct action."

"Hold on Leo! You can't do that!"

The objection, much to my surprise, came from the princess of all people.

"I can't do what?"

"You can't just threaten the Arch-mage of the island," she emphasized with her arms akimbo. She was also glaring at me, for some measure of the word, but for some reason I found that kind of cute instead of annoying like in the past. Weird.

Anyhow, I subtly rolled my eyes and told her, "It wasn't a threat per se. It was just a reminder that I already warned him not to try to spy on us, and so if, say, one day he woke up only to find all of his liqueur stolen and his beard dyed neon pink, he would only have himself to blame." At this point in the conversation I turned to Ammy again and added, "By the way, you can tell him what I just said verbatim."

"Grandfather doesn't really appreciate jokes like that."

"It's not a joke. I already bought the hair dye. You know, just in case?" The class rep also didn't seem to appreciate my definitely-non-joke, so I quickly changed the direction of the conversation by lightly shaking the case in my hands. "Never mind that; let's just see if these puppies work as advertised! Who wants to be the first lab rat?"

"Volunteer, Chief. Volunteer," Judy corrected me, and I gave her an expression that roughly said, 'Isn't that the same thing?'

She was oddly adamant about my terminology, so I quickly gave up.

"Fine, let's go with volunteer then. Anyone?"

"Me! Let me try it first!" Angie raised her hand high over her head, her boundless enthusiasm about as vibrant as it was predictable.

"Come over then," I told her as I retrieved one of the color-coded devices and handed it over to her. "Yours is the white one."

"Can I try it out?" She asked me, her eyes all but sparkling with excitement, and based on the expectant looks the rest of the group was giving us (with maybe the exception of Judy, who was busy taking notes), she wasn't the only one.

"You have to put it on your wrist like this," Ammy abruptly took the lead and helped the Celestial girl out with the arduous task of equipping a glorified wristwatch, but since she was just trying to be helpful, I decided not to complain. However, I had to butt in after she began to explain, "You have to hold your arms like this and then recite the activation phrase to—"

"Actually, no," I cut her off before she could put any silly ideas into Angie's head, like posing. I put the case aside and stepped up to the two in order to explain, "I took the liberty to streamline a few things while I was investigating the internal workings of these 'transmorphers'. There's no need for any complicated activation sequences, you just have to press on the top and insert a trace amount of magic into the device, and bam, you're done."

"Really?"

"Try it if you don't believe it. It should be super-intuitive."

The Celestial girl looked just a smidgen skeptical, but I urged her to try, and in the end she obediently did as instructed. There were no flashing multicolored lights, nor any silly robotic spirit animals swooping in for dramatic effect. I made sure to remove anything even remotely resembling a sentai morphing sequence, with extreme prejudice, so all that really happened was a brief gust of wind rustling Angie's hair as the enchantment displaced her clothes and replaced them with a more or less identical-looking set of enchanted garbs.

"Did anything happen? Did I miss it?" Josh muttered while looking understandably confused.

"Wow… This is so weird…" Angie muttered under her breath as she dramatically stretched her arms.

"This doesn't look right," came the next confused comment from the class rep as she looked over our volunteer.

"This is amazing!" Angie exclaimed, completely disregarding Ammy's comment. "I have my barrier, and yet these clothes don't explode! Look, Josh! I can even get my wings out without fully transforming!"

"This looks waaaay more convenient than I feared it would be," Joshua mused aloud as she conspicuously looked over his childhood friend from head to toe. "Can you use your bow too?"

"Let me try… Wow, look! I can! This is almost as good as my Celestial transformation!"

"And it covers more skin too," Josh said with a sagely nod.

"And why is that a problem?" the Celestial's girl's eyes abruptly narrowed into suspicious slits.

"It's not a problem, it's just… you know?"

While the two childhood friends were having their awkward discussion about the finer points of the distracting effects of stripperific transformations, Amelia hijacked my attention by grabbing hold of my jacket; not in a cute romantic way, but more along the lines of a mafia enforcer getting hold of their mark before the beating commences.

"Care to explain what's going on?"

While that might've sounded like a request on the surface, the class rep's tone made it blindingly obvious she wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. First things first, I carefully pried her off me, and only then did I respond.

"I told you I made some minor tweaks, didn't I?" It was easy to see that my coy answer wasn't to her liking, so I exhaled sharply through my nose and proceeded to give her a slightly more nuanced explanation. I mean, poking her every once in a while was fairly amusing, but I didn't want to antagonize her for no reason. "You told me that your artificers put these together in a crunch, right? Since I was already poking around in the insides of their work, I decided to patch up some of the corners they cut so that they could be finished on time. The look of the suits was one of them, so I fixed them."

"Since when can you do that?"

"What can I say? I'm a man of many talents," I told her with a humble little smile.

"That's my line," Judy abruptly cut into our conversation while simultaneously stepping on my toes.

I flashed my dear assistant my best toothpaste-commercial smile and told her, "Yes, and it's a good one. That's why I borrowed it."

"It's not borrowing if you don't ask for permission. It's copyright infringement."

"So? Are you going to sue me?"

"I might do just that," Judy huffed with faux indignation. Or, at the very least, I sincerely hoped she was just pretending, but before I could further observe her, there was a sudden curveball thrown by the unexpected voice joining the fray.

"Do you want me to introduce you to a good copyright lawyer?" The princess' comment threw both of us on a loop for a moment, and since we didn't respond, she hastily added, "W-What? Father works in the record industry! It's only natural that I know a lawyer or two!"

"That's not really the issue... " I began, only to be immediately interrupted by Judy.

"I will take you up on your offer. Let's sue the Chief and split the profits 60 to 40."

"Hmm." She raised her index finger to her lips as she considered the offer in front of her, and after a short while, she lightly nodded. "It's a little on the low side, but very well, I will take the 60."

The princess' reply was so serious it seemed to take even my assistant aback, but not for long.

"Did you hear that, Chief. Prepare to be served." She employed a dramatic pause here, and after a few long seconds she added, "Of course we can always settle out of court, so long as you are willing to pay the appropriate compensation for your heinous wrongdoing."

"... Since when did copyright infringement become a 'heinous' crime?"

"Chief, you have to keep up with the times. Copyright infringement is the worst thing you can do to someone. It's worse than kicking their dog."

"Truly?"

"Definitely," Elly wedged herself into the conversation again, accompanied by a frighteningly intense nod.

"Woe is me, then. How can I ever pay for such terrible crimes staining my once pure soul?"

"You can start by paying reparations," Judy proposed with the utmost seriousness.

"In what? More sandwiches?"

My dear assistant shook her head at once and told me, in her usual deadpan voice, "Sandwiches are a defunct currency, Chief. Now we only take payments in kisses."

"But you are already getting a lot of those..."

"But not enough."

"You can never have enough," Elly agreed with another huge nod that made her hair cascade back and forth, and yet it still returned to her previous tidy hairdo afterward.

"Oh fine! You have a deal," I grumbled with mock reluctance as I offered a hand, and Judy promptly shook it.

"It's a pleasure doing business with you," my assistant parroted a clichéd line, and I was just about to roll my eyes when I noticed that the princess was uncharacteristically fidgety at our side.

"Is there a problem?"

"Was this a skit?" she asked, her tone just as uncertain as she looked.

"Yes," Judy confirmed with a slight nod. "You also participated well. We are making progress."

"Thank you, I think, but... If that was a skit, does that mean we aren't actually getting extra kisses?"

"That's a salient question if I've ever heard one," Judy stated before she turned back to me with an expectant, "Chief?"

"What? You seriously want me to pamper you even more?"

"Little sisters are for spoiling, girlfriends are for pampering," Judy stated in a way that almost made her words sound profound, even though they were anything but.

"Oh fine," I gave up without much of a fight, though I did add a quiet, "You make it sound like I'm frigid or something…"

"Are you quite finished?"

The class rep looked about as far from pleased as it was humanly possible, so I deemed it was time to stop playing around, ignore my girlfriends giving each other a high five for some strange and wholly incomprehensible reason, and instead focus on addressing whatever questions she might have had.

"Yes. Sorry for the intermezzo. Where were we?"

"You still haven't told me since when you can modify enchantments," Ammy answered while readjusting her glasses. She looked like she thought I was still keeping secrets from her… which was true, of course, but this one really wasn't one of them, as I was also unaware of my Phantom Limb's extra capabilities until just a few hours ago.

"It's a skill a developed recently," I told her with all the confidence and authenticity only a technical truth can provide.

"How 'recently' are we talking about?"

"I learned how to do it within the last two weeks."

"You can't learn how to make artifacts in two weeks," Ammy stated quite emphatically while looking me right in the eye. She was probably trying to put some pressure on me to see if I would slip up.

"Hold on for a moment. I didn't learn how to make these things," I clarified while I picked the green morpher out of the case. "I can only tinker with already present stuff for now. By the way, here is yours, give it a try."

She still looked more skeptical than a NASA engineer at a flat earth conference, but at long last she took her device with a soft grunt of disapproval.

"I still don't understand why you changed how the outfit looks," she grumbled as she buckled the morpher onto her wrist, and while it might have been a rhetorical question, it didn't mean I couldn't answer it.

"Okay class rep, let us be serious here for a moment. Did you actually look at how those suits originally looked like?"

"… No," she admitted after a long gap, and I couldn't help but let my mouth bend into a victorious smirk.

"In that case, let me explain to you why I changed things in meticulous detail. First and foremost, the original suits were conspicuous as all hell. They couldn't be used in emergencies because they would draw all the attention to us. The closed helmets, while provided some extra protection by serving as binding-point for more defensive enchantments, were actually very restrictive and would prove more of a hindrance than help in a high-speed close combat situation. Most importantly though, they just looked silly and really uncomfortable."

"If you say so."

Ammy's response to my explanation was fairly non-committal, but at the same time she didn't object either, so I figured she gave up the argument. I was just about to say something when she also activated her morpher and… well, saying that she 'transformed' wasn't exactly correct. Speaking of which, since that is the case, maybe I should come up with another name for these gizmos. Something that better reflects what they do, like 'Quick Change System', or 'Dress Alternator' or something similarly sufficiently removed from anything even remotely related to sentai.

I decided I should workshop the names later with Judy and Elly. For the time being, I focused my attention on Amelia, who was in the middle of very carefully inspecting her sleeve with her other hand on one of the temples of her glasses.

"The wards seem to be intact. No looping or leaking either. The performance is…" She suddenly raised the hand that was fiddling with her glasses and she slapped down hard on the sleeve. The impact let out a soft crackling noise and she immediately hissed and shook her hand. "It seems there is no problem with the wards' reaction times or output either."

"You could've tested it in a better way, you know?"

She disregarded my criticism and instead she did a couple of warm-up stretches. I'm not going to lie, I was a tiny bit confused, but I figured she must've been doing it for a reason, even if I couldn't think of one. I wondered if that's how the others felt whenever I used refuge in audacity to bullshit my way out of a situation, but before I could get too deeply absorbed in that, she abruptly addressed me.

"The performance of these suits seems to be even higher than I hoped for. It's not as good as my personalized robes, but closer than I thought. I only have two questions."

"Shoot."

She once again raised her arm and pointed at her sleeve.

"What are these green lines for?"

"Fashion," I told her without a moment of hesitation. She didn't seem to appreciate the joke, so I clarified for her, "It's so that you can tell it apart from your regular school uniform. You can turn off the glow with the switch inside your lapel, in case you want to be sneaky and don't want to glow in the dark."

"Can we try it out now?"

I turned to the source of the question and found an unusually impatient Josh flanked by Snowy. I glanced back to the class rep (though it wasn't like I needed her permission or anything) and once she nodded, I handed the devices out to their owners.

"Listen Josh, just a bit of a heads-up," I called out to my friend before he could put on the no-longer-morpher. "Your device is slightly special. Since you have no mana on your own without first transforming, I tweaked the settings so that it would activate as you transform. As a side-effect, it suppresses your physical changes, but on the bright side, at least you would no longer have to run around in just your pants whenever you do that. Oh, and on the same note, make sure that you only transform into an Abyssal for the time being."

"No problem. I am the most comfortable with that one anyway," Josh told me with a childish grin betraying his excitement. It was weird how much he resembled Angie sometimes. I wondered; were all childhood friends this similar? Or only the tropey ones? Anyhow, I handed Snowy her own device as well, and Josh immediately dragged her away, no doubt so that he could transform and try out his new gadget.

"Can I ask my second question now?"

"Yeah, sure," I answered as I turned back to the class rep and saw that she was awkwardly pointing behind her back. Or rather at her back.

"What is the ward on the back? Around… here…?" she struggled to reach behind her, until eventually she noticed Angie standing nearby, and before the hapless Celestial girl could get a word of objection in, she already dragged her over, turned her around, and pointed a finger at the area just under her clavicles. "Here! What does this one do?"

"Thank you for asking," I replied to her inquiry while simultaneously handing out the last device to my draconic girlfriend. "Remember how we discussed that barriers had no protection against grappling?" Ammy nodded in the affirmative, so I continued, "I figured if I was at it, I might as well try to do something about it. So, if say, someone grabs you and puts you in a full nelson…"

To illustrate my point, I carefully grabbed hold of the princess and she obediently let me put her into the hold, though she did make some nostalgic noises of embarrassment in the process. I naturally completely overlooked them and continued my explanation instead.

"As I was saying, if someone puts you in a full nelson, or some other kind of hold from the back, all you have to do is to snap your finger three times in succession, like this." I let go of Elly to illustrate my explanation by three snaps, though since I wasn't wearing a magical uniform, nothing happened. "When you do this, it creates a strong concussive blast from the area you were pinpointing on Angie. I didn't have any way to test it, but unless I forgot to carry the two when I did my calculations, it should be about as strong as a solid uppercut from an average heavyweight boxer. Not enough to kill someone, but more than enough to make the person behind your back rethink their life decisions."

"How did you do that? I thought the wards on the suits were all defensive ones."

"What makes you think it's not a defensive ward?" I responded to the class rep's question with a coy question of my own. "It's actually a repeller array, except with its area reduced to the minimum, its output cranked up to eleven, and with a manual trigger added on top. Nothing fancy."

"Can I try it out now?" Angie asked me with a suitably angelic look on her face, but I firmly shook my head.

"No. You will have the opportunity to play around with it on your way home. Speaking of which…" I cleared my throat and raised my voice to get everyone's attention. "Gather up guys, I have an important announcement to make."

"An important announcement?" Snowy repeated after me as she and Josh came back.

"An announcement? Sounds official," Joshua mused while rubbing his chin. "Did you get engaged?"

"No, not that kind of announcement." I rolled my eyes as I grumbled before I cleared my throat one more time and proclaimed, "Listen up. I want you guys to stay in your new magic uniforms." The moment I said that out loud, I realized it was kind of silly, so I hastily whispered to Judy, "Remind me to come up with a snappy new name for these things."

"Roger."

"Naming aside, the reason why I want you to keep them on is that, on your way home, you're going to be ambushed again."

"We are?" Ammy blurted out in surprise. In fact, she was so surprised that even her glasses slid down and balanced on the tip of her nose, which was pretty funny. It didn't last though, as she quickly pushed it up the bridge of her nose and spoke up again, this time in a considerably more collected voice. "Are you certain?"

"One hundred percent." My response, coupled with my firmest nod, still didn't seem to ease her doubts, so I decided to elaborate. "To be more specific, once you leave the school, you are going to be pulled into a purple zone… let's see… around the crossroads with the antique store and the shop with the big fat fisherman logo."

"How do you know?" came the next question of the incredulous magi.

"I put surveillance on Labcoat Guy." It appeared my casual answer confused her a bit, so I let out a small sigh and told her, "The guy who ambushed the group the last time."

"This sounds serious," Elly muttered by the side, and Ammy was in fervent agreement with her.

"Yes, it is! Why didn't you warn us sooner!" After she said that, she let out a frustrated groan and declared, "I'll have to tell grandfather about this."

"Don't bother. He already knows."

My words stopped her in her tracks and she looked at me with a genuine sense of appreciation for the first time in a while.

"Have you already contacted him? Good."

"No, you misunderstand me. You don't need to tell him, because he is the mastermind behind the ambushes."

Aaaaaand her appreciation immediately switched over to suspicion and annoyance again. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

"Ammy's grandpa is behind the attack? Seriously?"

"Yeah, I find it hard to believe too," Josh agreed with his childhood friend's objection, and both of them looked at me expectantly to see how I would react.

"Trust me, I'm about eighty-nine percent sure he had a hand in every single headache we had in the past couple of days. Plus or minus twelve percent."

"You can't be serious," Ammy whispered in denial, so I addressed her directly.

"Okay, then if you don't believe me, just do what I say: All of you should go home together and go to the crossroad I talked about."

"You want us to get ambushed?" Josh spoke up with his critical brow raised sky-high.

"Since you know about it ahead of time it won't really be an ambush by the dictionary definition, but yes, that's exactly what I want you to do." He looked less than convinced, so I argued, "You all probably noticed, but those idiotic robot things are not exactly a mortal threat to any of you. Labcoat Guy is going to bring along a few improved models as well this time around, but as far as I could gather, 'improved' only means they have a different color scheme and don't make clanking noises while they wave their arms around like a bunch of imbeciles. This should be a good opportunity for you to familiarize yourselves with the uniforms' capabilities and, maybe most importantly, you don't even have to wreck the robots. You just have to play around with them for a good ten or so minutes, maybe even pretend to be struggling, and then Armband Guy will swoop in to heroically rescue you and chase away Labcoat Guy."

"Armband who…?" Ammy uttered with an incredulous grimace, but then her eyes opened wide and she exclaimed, "Wait, do you mean Pascal?"

"Yes, I obviously meant him," I affirmed, the statement drawing a small sigh from my assistant.

"Chief, you should really stop giving nicknames to everyone and start using their names. You can be really confusing sometimes."

"Hush Dormouse, we are discussing serious things here. We have no time to argue about nicknames, right, princess?"

"Umm… Sure?" Elly agreed, though based on her surprised visage, she probably didn't know exactly what she was agreeing with.

"You see? So, back to the topic: Armband Guy is going to chase off Labcoat Guy. When they leave, the robots will become disorganized and ripe for you to beat them up, and just as you finish, Armband Guy will come back and tell you that his target got away and he was under orders from Lord Grandpa to look after you. He will also tell you that you should reconsider joining the School, which you shouldn't do. Everyone following me so far?"

"Barely," Josh griped, but I decided not to grace his complaint with a retort, but instead I addressed Ammy.

"So, here is my proposal: please go ahead and let yourself be 'ambushed' and 'rescued'." When I said that, I involuntarily made air quotes with my fingers, a bad habit I probably picked up from Sebastian. It was definitely his fault. "My evidence of your grandfather's involvement is the script I just described."

"You are telling me that if things will happen as you said, it proves he is conspiring against us?" she reiterated my words, and I could only nod, since it was literally what I just said.

"Precisely."

"But… why would grandfather do something like this?" Ammy blurted out in a confused, almost pained voice. That took me aback for a moment. I thought she would argue against me, defending her grandfather to the bitter end, and I even prepared a few additional arguments just for that, but based on her reaction, it almost seemed like she already more or less believed me. Maybe she trusted me way more than I thought?

Either way, I quickly explained to her, "I still don't have enough intel to explain his motivations for choosing such a roundabout and, frankly, silly method, but I can say that Labcoat Guy is more or less just a glorified scarecrow. He is supposed to harass us, and Josh in particular, to the point where we would take his offer and join the School as affiliates. They are being a good sport about it though. Labcoat Guy is not allowed to target any of you individually, he can only attack you inside Purple Zones, and he cannot take hostages or even cause distress to anyone else but you guys. Just another proof that he is supposed to be loud, startling, but mostly harmless. It's the main reason why I'm still only at the stage where I'm warning your gramps about the dangers of pink hair dye."

That, and the fact that I didn't really have the leverage yet to casually kick down his door, but one thing at a time.

"Where did you learn all this?" came the next question, and for a moment I couldn't help but pause and think. I naturally couldn't tell her that I had Labcoat Guy under almost constant Far Sight surveillance and so I have overheard their entire plan for today's 'surprise attack', but since I didn't want to reveal my cards just yet…

"That's also a trade secret," I answered while holding my index finger in front of my lips. "But I can tell you, that my information is about as trustworthy as if I saw it with my own two eyes."

"Let me guess," Josh suddenly spoke up while he crossed his arms in front of his chest, his face already plastered with a cocky grin that didn't quite reach his eyes. "You said you got injured last night while infiltrating Robatto's lab. I bet you overheard all of this back then. No, wait! I would bet my left leg you even bugged the place and that's how you know all this!"

"Maaaaaaaybe?" I responded as ambiguously as possible while simultaneously flashing him a roguish grin. "Putting my source of information aside, all you have to know is that it's credible. So, I want you guys to leave school as a group, like everything is fine, and get totally surprised by the oh-so-unexpected-and-absolutely-shocking ambush, then go wild! Get familiar with your gear, test its limits and just let out some steam until Armband Guy shows up to gallantly save the day. And as for you, class rep…"

I turned to the conflicted girl in the middle of our group and told her, "You should go along and see if things will proceed as I described. All I ask is that, whether you believe me about your old man's involvement or not, please do not confront him about it for the time being. If I may be honest with you guys for a moment, I'm still fairly early in my investigation of his motives, and I don't want to poke the hornet's nest until I'm sure I have a long enough pole for the job."

"All right." Amelia once again proved unexpectedly docile. "I'll go and see it with my own eyes."

I decided not to look the gift agreement in the clause, so I just smiled at her and said, to the group as a whole, "Great! You should get going before your dastardly attacker gets bored waiting for you."

"You're not coming with us?" Snowy spoke up for maybe the first time since she came to the roof, and she immediately pinpointed the crux of the situation. Just as I have expected from my little sister.

"No, I have a prior appointment. You are supposed to go to the school nurse for a checkup, but since you are unfortunately preoccupied with something else, as your big brother, it falls on my shoulders to go and have a long, long chat with a certain annoying old man. Speaking of which, why are there so many annoying old guys in my life?"

No one seemed to want to answer my rhetorical question, nor would they have the opportunity, as the class rep immediately followed up by saying, "Okay, how do you know that? Mr. Peabody told me just last break to tell Neige to visit him." She looked me in the eye, but when it became obvious that I wouldn't answer to her satisfaction, she let out a shallow groan and said, "Let me guess? Is it another trade secret?"

"Bingo!"

She didn't appreciate my irreverent grin, as she rolled her eyes and turned on her heel. Following her example, the others have also started to head towards the roof access, except for my two girlfriends, of course.

"Do I have to go home alone again?" the princess nagged with the pout to end all pouts, and in response I chuckled and rubbed the crown of her head a bit.

"Sorry, but I really have to stay back a bit. If it makes it any better, I can go to your place a little earlier and we can cuddle a bit before dinner?"

"Ah, right!" The pout, which looked as firm as basalt on her face, melted away in a split second to be replaced by a sunny smile. "I almost forgot you are coming over! I have to make sure everything's prepared right!" After saying that, she rose to her tippy-toes and planted a peck on my left cheek before she dashed after the rest, passing by Ammy on the way. For some reason she lingered behind even though she was the first person to get moving.

"I don't get you, Leo," she told me when the only three people left on the roof were us plus my dear assistant. "I don't know how you can do so many things, but one day I swear I'll get to the bottom of you."

Saying so, she finally turned around and also left through the door. When it was finally only Judy and me, I glanced down at her and asked, "That sounded mildly ominous. Do you think I should be worried?"

"You better be," she mumbled while stepping closer until our shoulders met. "If I learn that you let any girl lay her hand on your bottom, other than us, I'll kick it."

"Her hand or my bottom?"

My girlfriend glanced up at me with an odd intensity in her eyes and she simply said…

"Yes."