04

Disclaimers still apply.

Major thanks to Kerrik Wolf for proof-reading and offering spelling and grammar abuse corrections for this chapter. All corrections are his, all mistakes are still mine.

[Chapter 4]

It was a day later, the night and some of the morning having been spent between Micah and Anya alone, the two getting acquainted with one another both physically and mentally.

Still, reality had a nasty way of intruding on even the most intense moments of sybaritic luxury. And as much as both would have enjoyed staying in bed together, both knew that they had things they needed to do.

Which was why they were both currently working on picking up all of Anya's things from her dorm room on campus, one of the many set aside for University-owned personnel that she shared with three others.

"You don't -have- to leave the university just because you're in my harem, you know," Micah noted aloud even as he helped her carry a number of her books over to a neat and orderly pile.

Anya smiled, looking very improved considering the condition she was in yesterday. Micah had a sneaking suspicion that the StarMystic's light feral state had been working overtime for her. Or, it could have simply been a byproduct of actually having a reliable male owner who was willing to tame her at more-than-regular intervals. Who knew? "I know," she leaned against one already neat pile as she rested momentarily from the mild chore. "But if all that you said is true, then the safest thing for you to have is me by your side at all times."

"Yes-ssss," Micah drew the word out carefully as he set the pile down. "But I can't help but feel a little guilty at ripping you away from your life as you know it. I mean, it wouldn't be that difficult to keep my correspondence with you a secret."

"I know," Anya walked over, gently running a hand along Micah's jaw, the smoothness of her hand feeling at-odds with the rough stubble along his face. "And it's because you're offering, I think, that I want to go with you. If that makes any sense."

Micah's face went through several successive expressions as he tried to parse her words. "I... think so," he replied slowly.

Anya smiled weakly. "Good. Because I'm not sure even I understand it." She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and hugged him close. She let out a faint sigh. "I shouldn't be this happy. I even had a modicum of recognition from some of the staff here, did you know? I'm throwing that all away, and all I can think about is what we were doing last night. And this morning." She regarded him, another sigh escaping her lips. "It's been so long since I've felt this way I'd forgotten entirely about it."

Micah glanced curiously at her. "You've managed to remain un-bonded all this time?"

Anya nodded absently. "I'd steal a quick taming here and there, mostly with my college-sisters. Sometimes I'd have to go out, and those were never fun." She returned his curious look. "There are reasons Tamer literature advises taking an entire day to make sure a pokegirl is completely bonded, you know. Instant Recognition and Delta-bonds are pretty rare."

Micah chuckled softly. "Makes sense." He wrapped his arms around her middle, absently rocking in place. "Mmm. Reminds me. If you don't mind me asking, how did you end up working for the university, anyways?"

Anya winced. "That..."

Micah blinked. "If it's too sensitive a topic then I shouldn't have brought it up."

Anya shook her head. "No, it's just something I've been trying to ignore for the past several years." She took a deep breath. "When I evolved, my Tamer wasn't... happy any longer with the way I looked. His father was a Professor, so I was given as a gift."

"I'm guessing he didn't have much time for you," Micah replied, picking his words carefully, due to being mindful of the potential emotional land mines.

Anya shrugged. "No. It was easy enough to convince him to simply donate me to the University. He stopped having to look after me and it gave me some freedom to do more of what I wanted."

Micah quirked a grin. "And then I arrived."

Anya laughed. "And then you arrived." She leaned against him, laying her head on his shoulder. "World-wide conspiracies, pokegirls that don't need to be tamed, an attempt to re-write the world to their whim. It all sounds so insane."

Micah smiled faintly. "How do you think I feel? Previously, I was just a college student with delusions of sanity. Now I've got a group of man-hating individuals after my hide because they claim I'm one of the primordial creator-gods of this world."

Anya patted his cheek. "I think primordial creator-gods are supposed to be clean shaven."

Micah laughed. "I like to think of myself as an 'old testament' sty-" His words ceased like a string had been cut, his brain feeling as if the world had taken a 270 degree turn and 90 degree shift to the right.

Anya stared at his expression. "What's wrong? You look like Typhonna just ran over your grave."

"I... I don't... -know-." Micah looked around in open confusion mixed with a frisson of terror. "I'm.. what... -something- just happened. I..." Unthinking, he peeled himself away from the blond StarMystic and made his way from the shared dorm common room into Anya's bedroom, peering outside the window.

The pokegirl dormitory was a building several stories high; Anya's room was near the top. Micah glanced down at the open areas surrounding the building; something nagged at him until it clicked that there was no random foot traffic around the dorm building. Even in the middle of the day with everyone at work there should have been -something-. Instead, there seemed to be a loose grouping of individuals ringing the building.

One individual he could see glanced up at him. Micah found himself on the floor with no recollection of how he got there, the wall and window in front of him looking like someone had taken a massive fist and slammed it against the side of the building, mortar and wood and steel deformed and caved in without destroying the wall entirely.

Anya physically picked him up and hauled him out of her bedroom, pausing in the common room with a look of concentration on her face that quickly dissolved into one of confused fear. "I... I can't teleport out!?"

"Euphemia!" Micah pulled out his harem's pokeballs and toggled their release, the three appearing in a blaze of dimensional decompression. "We can't teleport out. Find out why."

The G-splice's dusky flesh paled, even as she muttered the incantations to her scanning magics, her expression falling even further at the results. "Oh, no. A teleport lock."

"Break it," Micah replied calmly.

"We can't, unless we find the casters holding the spell and kill them," Euphemia looked at him with an agonized expression. "This isn't something they could put up on a moment's notice. This was planned!"

Micah fell into silence for a moment, then looked over at his StarMystic. "Anya. Fire the building."

Silence, his entire harem looking at him as if he'd gone insane.

"But... Ma-Micah, what about everyone else in the building?" Anya looked as if she was torn between following his order without thinking or physically backing away from him in fear. "If I do that, then-"

Dull thuds echoed throughout the building - explosions or simply someone taking down the front doors, Micah couldn't tell. "Whomever is leading this assault is doing it in the -middle of the day- in one of -largest college campuses- in the Capital League!" He replied in a tight, low tone. "If it's Sanctuary, that only makes it worse, because it means that they don't care about witnesses because -no one is going to be left alive-. Anya, this decision is not your responsibility to make. -Fire the building-, on the ground level and the one above us."

Anya paused, and something in her entire manner seemed to shift from a harmless college assistant to something far, far more dangerous, as years of battle experience in a traveling harem came back to her in an adrenaline soaked flood. With a gesture, a large card appeared above her hand. She held it like a shield, and then gestured at the common room door - a massive blast of fire so intense that Micah felt as if the front of his face had been flash-burned erupted from the card. It seethed and twisted, a writhing, living thing as it sheered through the wall and continued down the hall-way.

Neither Micah nor the rest of his harem got to witness the end result of Anya's attack. The torrent of raw, intense fire simply blew through the stairwell doors, immolating concrete and steel as it divided into two separate paths, one up, one down.

-[***]-

Viva was one of the few Dameosaurs in Sanctuary's retinue that actually operated extensively outside the Dark Continent. Time after time she had gotten called to be part of a killing group whenever certain problems needed to be dealt with. She grinned, the gesture rather horrible in her battle form, as she licked the blood from her teeth of a poor Ingénue that had been present when she led her sisters through the front hallway of the dorm building. The taste on her lips was enough to get her wet, and while she and her sisters had orders to take the male alive, surely her superiors wouldn't fault a little celebratory feasting for a job well done, right?

Then, above her, she heard a rumble, and canted her head to the side in confusion, her battle-sisters unconsciously mirroring her. What was that?

-[***]-

Thera regarded the dorm building across the street from the impromptu command center of this entire operation. She glanced venomously at the S-Goth, Michelle, whom had informed her of the creator presence. It had been sheer, dumb luck on Michelle's part that she had learned of his location. It hadn't even been her job to look for him. Instead, her role was to keep political tabs on the more interesting professors in one of the more respective colleges of the Capital League.

The fact that they had trouble locating him in the first place was even more worrying. This... -creature- had far too many co-incidences about him, acting completely at odds compared to all the others, and the notion of 'enemy action' sat in her brain uncomfortably. This... -thing- had a fucking volcano erupt right on top of him. Something that they should have had a weeks warning of, at best! He should be -dead-.

And then he showed up.

Here.

The third S-Goth in the room seemed fit to rub salt into Thera's metaphorical wounds, the woman possessing enough piercings both visible and not to forge a suit of armor from. Her entire attitude was damningly laconic, sucking voraciously at a dying cigarette and vomiting up copious amounts of blue smoke from her pursed lips into the air.

That she -needed- Jove to pull this off was even more grating.

"They need to move faster, dammit," Thera snarled with an expression that would make a Panthress think twice about moving against her.

Jove didn't flinch. "They know their job. Let's let them do it and let us worry about the fucking fallout of this, eh?"

Thera was about to say something whenever the entire ground floor of the dorm building erupted in a shockwave of fire that scattered Dameosaurs like ninepins and sent them scrabbling away from the heat.

Silence.

"Well, shit," Jove commented. "Wasn't expecting -that-."

Thera's mouth gaped like an open fish. "What the hell just... -happened-!?"

"Guess he decided to kill himself," Jove replied calmly as she watched the flames merrily eat at the building. "Ballsy way to go."

-[***]-

"Done!" Anya announced. Micah had to stifle an edge of worry, wondering if it was his imagination or if it was actually getting hotter.

"Good," Micah noted aloud. "Euphemia, Nunnally, both of you are going to return to your pokeballs. Cornelia, whenever I give the word, fire a hyper-beam at maximum power to clear a path for us to outside the building. Anya, we're going to use your flight card to escape. I don't know the max speed you can manage with that, but I want to see speed records broken."

-[***]-

Only Jove had the presence of mind to witness the creator's escape in full, the S-Goth looking up at the building with a type of clinical curiosity, wondering how long it would take for the entire thing to go up. Thera was having the metaphorical equivalent of a nervous breakdown - not only was the lines of communication with the S-Goths managing the dameosaurs and warding line around the building in disarray due to panic, the explosion had likely been heard by half the city - which meant civil service individuals would be out in force trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.

A daytime operation by Sanctuary in the Capital League was manageable. Deniable, even, so long as no evidence was left behind. Pass the buck over to some Team or Anti-pokegirl Terrorist Group, and call it a day.

So long as they weren't caught.

Thera was busy telepathically giving orders to her sub-ordinates, telling them to move to evacuation stages and silence the Dameosaurs that couldn't be managed. Messy, but sensible.

Jove saw a massive bar of light erupt from the side of the building as if it had been run through with God's Own Sewing Needle, the intensity of the powerful attack not even having the decency to taper or gutter out like other attacks normally would as it ceased, leaving a perfectly clean hole.

Then, the tale-tell signature of a manifested magical creature flared above, a magnificent white bird that would have done shame to any Bird Legendary that choose to fly beside it by sheer size alone. It hovered in place on briefly - Jove caught sight of several bodies leaving the building by the clean-cut hole - before accelerating hard, hitting such speeds in such a short distance that it caused the buildings around to actually rattle from the shockwave. And then it was gone, the distant CRACK of an object going past mach one the only evidence it had ever been there.

Silence. Blissful, -awful- silence, beyond the distant sirens of emergency vehicles headed in their general direction, the fire merrily burning at an accelerated pace, and the yelling of various S-Goths trying to manage their assigned teams.

"What the fuck just happened?" Thera asked, her calm voice somehow more terrible than the low-simmering anger that had been prevalent moments ago.

"I'm guessing.... Shrine Maiden, CardCaptor-type, or an Archmage," Jove grinned merrily. "Maybe a Hild, but we'd hopefully know about that, right? Your boyfriend is packing some serious fucking firepower, Thera."

"Why didn't I know about this?" Thera's gaze ignored Jove and instead focused on Michelle, whom looked like she was seconds away from teleporting away by sheer fear alone.

"Hurt her," Jove noted aloud as she finished off a cigarette and pulled out another one, "And I will be unhappy."

That brought Thera up short.

"Care for a fag?" Jove offered Thera the open end of a rumpled cigarette carton.

Thera ignored her in favor of stomping out of the command center.

"Man," Jove noted aloud, "The McMahon guys are going to go fucking -nuclear- over this."

-[***]-

Micah tried to calm the beat of his heart, the burning rush of adrenaline in his blood that ravaged his body, making it shake as the poison relaxed it's grip on flesh and bone. He felt like his stomach had been left behind in the mad rush to exit Vancouver, Anya's desperation-driven departure giving rise to the idea that maybe she really -had- broken some speed records.

They had recovered the equipment from the hotel room by two quick successive teleports. The fact that the hotel hadn't been trapped meant that Euphemia's electronic countermeasures had been in full operation, protecting his identity in the cybernetic ether.

Yet, they had found him. How?

Micah ordered Cornelia and Nunnally to setup camp, ignored the slightly lost look Anya wore on her face before she fell into a self-appointed guard detail around him. The free time gave him a chance to simply think and pick apart just what the hell had happened. Rather important, when such a thing concerned your own survival.

Magic? Didn't fit. If it was magic, then why not before now? Any time in the wilderness would have been perfect to send out an entire fucking fleet of S-Goths with Tyrannodame Battalions at the ready to simply sterilize his presence from the face of the planet, or cow any violent response from his harem if they wanted to - horror above horrors - take him back alive.

So, magic was out - had to be out. It didn't make sense otherwise. Second option. Electronics? Didn't fit, either. The hotel while he was sleeping would have been easier - assault in the middle of his sexual escapades last night, as neither he nor Anya had been really fit to care about anything beyond what lay between the sheets. No, the only connection was the University -

'...that gossip is going to be across campus via pokegirl express...'

- FUCK!

"Master?" Euphemia glanced worriedly at Anya, both sharing some concern over the expression on his face.

"I'm going to get us all killed," Micah said without thinking, hands rubbing at his face underneath his glasses.

"Master!"

"No, you're not," Anya said as she gripped his wrists, forcing him to look at her. "Tell us what's wrong."

Micah took a deep breath, elaborated on his current thought process. "The only way I can explain how they found us was through my little slip of the tongue. Which meant Sanctuary had a near full-time presence at the university, and which means I almost got us all killed." He took another deep breath. "If experience is the best teacher, I just had a -very- valuable lesson." He frowned suddenly, glanced at Euphemia. "Did you enact magical protective measures on me without telling?"

Euphemia blinked, shook her head. "No, Master."

"If they could summon me from across worlds, then why can't they utilize magic to track me in this one?"

"That's a very good question," Anya noted softly. "If they... had you as long as they did, they should have had ample opportunities to secure links to track you with."

Euphemia fidgeted. "I think... there's another possibility."

Micah glanced at the redhead. "What?"

"I never got a clear picture of everyone else that was summoned," Euphemia murmured. "Who lived, who died. Who escaped - none said they did, but knowing what I do now... But there were rumors, about something else. Some of the Sorceress-Engineers remarked in their study - those they summoned tend to be... very hard to locate. Almost the reverse of what one would expect, but their research wasn't conclusive. If they did any."

Micah felt a cold chill creeping down his back.

Anya frowned. "Which means..."

"Nothing, beyond that I'm thankfully difficult to locate. Why, is anyone's guess," Micah quickly replied. "Now -" he began, and found his hands filled with a mug of hot chocolate, and Nunnally's firm expression haloed by her thick silver hair.

"Now," the Armsmistress firmly took his arm and guided him over to where she and Cornelia were feeding a small fire, a pot of hot water boiling merrily above the flame. "You need to rest, and feel like you're safe, if only for while."

Micah tried to protest, wanted to protest, yet as soon as he sat down he felt very, very cold, his body crashing from the tension of battle and all the demands he had put into it, and found the small fire to be a near godsend as he huddled close.

Right, Micah thought to himself. Battle was stressful. Humans weren't really suited to it - oh, they could -play- at it, adapt to it, train, but in the end, humans were far from the bloodthirsty psychopathic monsters so many painted them to be. The fact that Pokegirls could flow in and out of it like a seal through water without many long-term consequences spoke more heavily than anything the type of engineering Sukebe had to perform to manage all of -that-.

And I... just had my first -battle-...

Deep, even breaths, he thought, as he suddenly found himself short on oxygen. The mug was something to focus on, as was suddenly being flanked by the comforting presence of Euphemia and Anya. It was enough to keep him calm as the incipient level of panic slowly drained away, leaving him boneless with lethargy.

He forced himself to take a sip of the hot chocolate, the taste making him recall countless weekends in the woods as a teenager, in weather pleasant and both ends of the spectrum of miserable. "Right. Next thing on my agenda..."

Euphemia glanced over Micah to Anya. "How long?"

Anya looked from Euphemia to Micah and back. "I honestly don't know. I need to run both tests and studies. -Saying- I can do something and actually performing it are two different things, and crafting a Card to perform something like this? It could take... months. Years." She glanced at Micah, suddenly worried, reassured whenever he nodded in understanding.

Micah quirked a smile. "I'm guessing you can't do your research in the field amid catching ferals?"

Anya frowned, hesitant. "I -could-, but..."

"But it wouldn't be perfect." Micah nodded. "So."

Nunnally glanced at him across the fire with her sightless, closed-eye gaze. "So?"

"So for the research, we need somewhere quiet, remote, with privacy yet the infrastructure to set up a home," Micah noted. "And before that, locate someone that can tutor me in the ways of the Force."

Silence.

"Sorry, old 21st century reference I couldn't resist making," Micah replied as he took a sip. "Magic. I need a source of magical education."

"None of the -" Anya began, and was gently cut off by Micah.

"No," he replied. "Trust me. None of the schools I know off are suitable for one reason or another. We've already seen evidence that my knowledge isn't perfect, as well - how many of those schools have S-Goth minders in the form of students? It could be none of them. Or all of them."

"Which means you need an independent, private tutor." Anya looked at him. "Micah. Do you know how hard it is to -find- one of those?"

Micah grinned back, some of his energy returning. "Oh, I can guess. Never mind the problem of finding an independent magic user with a degree of power - finding one of those willing to teach? Difficult. Very, very difficult."

"Finding a pokegirl who's actually skilled in teaching magic would be more worthwhile, if complicated," Nunnally said.

"Agreed, but it's more than that," Anya noted. "Such a pokegirl would be valuable. What Tamer in their right mind would be willing to give something like that up?"

"Maybe more than you would think," Nunnally pointed out calmly. "Different priorities. Not every Tamer has a modicum of magical capability, and among that selection, what number has the will? Not many." She smiled. "And among those, how many would survive the tutoring? Magic, like the art of the blade, has it's dangers, just as any skill that trains one in the art of killing."

"So you're saying, we need to find a mage-in-training that just offed himself and locate -his- source of training." Euphemia looked ready to say something more, then paused as the implications sunk in. "That's... brilliant. Why didn't I think of that?"

"Note it down," Micah replied, "For later research. Obituaries are a wonderful thing. Rumors, as well. Don't limit yourself to the Capital League."

Cornelia rolled her eyes. "Why don't we just steal the pokegirl that we need?"

"Polite society tends to frown upon theft," Micah noted with a smile.

Cornelia smiled. "Why don't we simply find a pokegirl that 'polite society' won't mind us taking?"

Micah blinked. "...how many of the Teams have access to magical tutoring?"

"I'll add that to my research," Euphemia replied.

"There's another, final option," Anya pointed out with a sly smile. "How do you think magic came to this world in the beginning, with Sukebe's armies?"

Micah blinked back curiously. "Magical spellbooks and artifacts that were utilized to teach the various leaders of his armies that later fell into human hands via one method or another?"

Anya blinked, her thunder stolen unexpectedly. "Yes. How did you know?"

Micah gave a shrug in reply. "I've given the matter some consideration in the past. It seemed the most logical course of action as opposed to just saying 'magic occurs here'."

"Well, yes," Anya said, then went on, "And while such artifacts are in typically in the hands of others, not all of them are. Some are rumored to be buried in evil places that no one wants to venture too. If we can locate a reasonably reliable rumor and backtrack to see if it has any veracity..."

Micah smiled. "We're going to be busy, then." He took a sip of his hot chocolate and gave out a small cough whenever some of it went down the wrong tube; frowned whenever the coughing didn't stop. A look of concentration etched his face as he tried to focus on his lungs, to will muscles to relax and start working properly.

Something wet came up with a particularly nasty cough, and Micah tried not to inwardly sigh as he wrestled with the coughing fit, having been well and determined to keep that hot chocolate down where it belonged; then his eyes caught sight of his hands flecked with red, and realized that liquid hadn't been hot chocolate at all. Then a nasty spasm of muscles wracked his chest, and he felt as if he was trying to hack up an organ even as his harem was mobbing him, trying to figure out what was wrong, and -

Darkness.

-[***]-

Consciousness returned, brutal and hard. He felt awful in a way that made him think back to that horrible time whenever he had still been in Sanctuary's good graces. For a brief moment, he panicked, panicked worse whenever he felt impossibly strong limbs -grip- and -hold-, and he couldn't figure out -why-...

"Shhh. Shhh, Master, it's alright, you're safe."

Micah blearily opened his eyes. Nunnally regarded him calmly, the Armsmistress having employed her superior strength to keep him from doing something less than intelligent, cuddled up against him, a warm, clean, -safe- presence that warred against the sensation of heat and chills. That told him a lot - not only was he running a fever, it was a very -bad- one. His entire throat felt raw, his head felt -awful-, and for some reason or another it felt like someone had taken a baseball bat all up and down his back for the bone-deep soreness that radiated from it, above and beyond simple, flesh-scarred pain.

What the hell was going on?

Micah worked at his mouth, tongue trying to wet things enough to speak. "What...?"

He felt more than saw Euphemia settle next to him, the redhead applying a cold clothe to his forehead that felt as if it sizzled upon contact. "You've been out for more than twelve hours."

Micah quirked an eyebrow. "Mind telling me... why you didn't heal me?"

Silence.

Euphemia carefully did not look at him. "We... tried. I tried, Anya tried, even Cornelia attempted to use imitate on both our healing techniques."

"...and?"

"You started screaming. A lot. We thought you had woken up, but... And your... symptoms only got worse."

"Ah." Well, that explained a good deal. Unfortunately, he knew one -could- scream in one's sleep. He could only imagine how they'd reacted to -that- kind of sound coming from him.

"How... how do you feel?"

"Back... hurts."

Euphemia blinked. "Your back? Nunnally, help me..." Together they easily turned Micah over, a sharp hiss of breath exhaling past clenched teeth as he realized just how much pain he'd been in.

Euphemia drew up his shirt and nearly leapt away in blind panic, not believing what she saw. His entire back was a mass of purple and black bruises, like a Herochan had decided to pound his back into raw burger. Worse, two fluid-filled lesions marred his flesh, from shoulder down his back to near the kidneys.

She'd -never- seen anything like this before. Ever.

Worse, she wasn't certain how to deal with it. A healing should fix this, but given the amount of energy they'd been forcing into his body, something like this shouldn't have happened. Hell, by all rights, between the three of them they'd metaphorically rammed enough healing magics down his gullet to regenerate everything below the stomach. -This shouldn't be happening.-

"Master, you've got a series of bruising on your back," Euphemia forced her voice to be calm. She wasn't a healer, couldn't even pretend to be one, for all that she'd done in her life, but if ever she needed to pretend to be a NurseJoy, -now- was the time. "I'm going to try and heal them so you can get some rest, okay?" Hopefully, if she limited her application - a scalpel as opposed to a sledgehammer - it wouldn't trigger those attacks he'd been suffering. "Alright?"

Micah nodded, did as she asked, tried to clear his mind of anything, tried to even forget where he was...

Euphemia nodded, half to herself, glanced at the Armsmistress to make sure she was ready, focused, and -pushed-, gently, -there and thusly-...

Euphemia wasn't certain which occurred first - Micah screaming, or something -shifting- underneath the surface of that lesion, the blister-skin stretching taunt, then peeling back like the skin of rotten fruit as -something- pushed -up-, stretching, dripping with pus and blood and liquid.

Euphemia tried to catch her breathing from several feet away. Nunnally hadn't moved at all, hadn't even flinched. Euphemia's brain tried to work out that her Master wasn't screaming any more, that the -thing- jutting up weakly from his back was a set, black-fleshed with a hint of finger-like soft bone in it...

Wings.

Micah had -wings-.

Something gripped around her throat, and Euphemia found herself staring down the length of an energy blade. At the end of it, Cornelia -snarled-, showing teeth. "YOU-!"

And the edge of a magically summoned blade, impossibly sharp, kissed the Demon-Goddess' throat as Anya leveled the manifested Blade Card against it. "No."

"He's not transforming into a pokegirl," Euphemia rasped from around an abused throat. "It can't be that."

Anya looked curiously at her, seemingly forgetting that she had someone at blade-point. "You've seen such a thing?"

Euphemia nodded her head fractionally, tried not to cough. "If he... if he was, then his genitals should already have begun to atrophy. They haven't. And no pokegirl has a wing structure like that."

Anya looked over curiously. "Hmm." Glanced at the Demon-Goddess.

Reluctantly, slowly, Cornelia let the blade gutter out, releasing her grip on Euphemia's throat. Let out a sound that could have been a snarl, and stomped away.

Anya helped her up. Euphemia nodded, grateful, then carefully went over to Micah. "Master?"

Micah was trying desperately not to fall asleep. He felt... He -hurt-, that was beyond a doubt, but more than that. He felt -raw-. "Did it work?"

"...um."

Micah glanced at the redhead, sleep forgotten. That hadn't been the answer he expected. "Euphemia?"

Anya leaned in close, gently ran a finger along the hard outer edge of one small wing. "Do you feel that?"

Micah tried not to gasp even as he felt his toes curdle. "Yes!"

Anya blinked. "Oh. Micah, you have wings."

Silence.

"Actually, they're rather cute," Anya noted clinically. "You'd probably freak out a Megami or an Angel if you showed it off to them, but any Demoness would be all over you."

More silence.

Micah twisted his head around carefully. Stopped. Stared. With a little work, managed to his arm twisted to where he could gently poke, and bit back a scream whenever he -felt- that. And slowly, carefully, dropped his head back into Nunnally's lap.

"...master?"

"I'm sick, tired, and I admit getting to be just a -little- cranky," Micah replied, voice muffled. "I'm going to try and sleep and forget about this."

Now Cornelia was back, and she alongside Anya and Euphemia all stared at him. Nunnally simply ran a gentle hand through Micah's hair, petting in a slow rhythm.

Once Micah's... injury had been cleaned up as best as possible and left to rest, Anya caught Euphemia by her arm. "Can we talk a bit?"

Once they had sufficient privacy, the StarMystic looked curiously at the G-splice. "Why did Cornelia think this was your fault?"

Euphemia let out a despairing sigh and explained, slowly, while Anya listened with dawning horror in her eyes. "Oh my god."

Euphemia nodded bleakly. "The idea was to somehow turn him into an S-Goth, but when that didn't seem to be working, we tried more... unorthodox techniques." She gave a weak giggle. "Honestly, considering all that we put inside him, I'm surprised he didn't have more of a reaction!"

Anya looked at Euphemia warily. "Why didn't he?"

Euphemia sighed. "Who knows? He's a pure blooded human. For all we know, they don't exist any more. We've never exposed all the nightmarish stuff that we take for granted to such a thing. Maybe they can't affect something like him. Maybe they never did, and it was breeding with pokegirls that made humans susceptible."

"Something," Anya mused softly.

Euphemia nodded, then caught herself when she realized what Anya was suggesting, a chill running down her spine as her eyes went wide. "You don't think...?"

"You said he wasn't thresholding," Anya replied. "Then -what is happening-?"

"I don't know," Euphemia whispered.

"Can you find out?"

Euphemia sighed. "Sure, if I had access to some state-of-the-art biology equipment, some genetic sequencers, time on a supercomputer."

Anya's eyes glinted merrily as she smiled. "And if you did?"

Euphemia blinked.

-[***]-

"Oh, praise the holy Bunsen burner," Euphemia whispered, almost in tears as she took in all the bright, shiny new equipment that the biology labs of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver possessed.

"A moment," Anya replied. Euphemia had hacked security access to the lab, and this late at night, no one was present, but that was feeble security in the StarMystic's opinion. Drawing out Time and Maze, she began focusing her will through the two cards, combining the magic in a way that would make an Archmage's hair on the back of their neck stand on end.

"What did you just do?" Euphemia blinked, even as she shifted the strap of the bag containing samples she'd taken to a more comfortable resting position.

Sweat beaded down Anya's face. "I sealed the labs inside it's own sub-dimension. In addition, I also accelerated the flow of time within, allowing us greater opportunity to find out what's wrong with our master."

"You can -do- that?" Euphemia asked over her shoulder as she walked toward the necessary equipment she'd require like a moth to a flame.

Anya nodded. "Yes. Worthless for battle. Rarely do such magics have a use. But right now, it's perfect."

"Could you time-travel with that thing?" Euphemia asked, her mood vastly improved with access to new toys.

"Only forward," Anya replied wryly. "And I didn't say I could manage such a thing for very long, relatively. So -hurry-."

"Good science takes time."

"I was doing high-level physics before you came out of a test-tube."

"Hey!"

-[***]-

Micah -hated- being sick. Loathed it, as a matter of fact; that feeling of in-between helplessness. Just conscious enough to think, but weak enough to not really -do- anything.

Worse, he was trying to keep his temper under control. Fighting for him, bleeding for him, he could accept, even be supportive of. He was perfectly content to rest behind the metaphorical shield his pokegirls offered, chivalry be-damned.

The idea of them playing nursemaid to him, however, he wasn't quite sure how to handle.

Which was flat-out stupid. But there it was.

The other element as sheer embarrassment, combined with something akin to awe by the fact that his harem had applied themselves to taking care of him without complaint. It was, to quote some of his stories, flat-out scary. Normal people just didn't up and -do- that, in Micah's world view.

And yet, here he was, using Nunnally's lap as a pillow, the Armsmistress having supported him without a hint of a complaint.

A noise, and Micah glanced up to find Cornelia looking at him with a blank expression. He smiled faintly. "Hey." A little help from Nunnally and he managed to get into a sitting position. "Come to see the invalid?"

Cornelia began to cry.

Oops, Micah thought. That was the wrong thing to say. Micah reached up and gently tugged at the Demon-Goddess' hand to pull her down to sit with him, but ended up with her instead burying her head in his lap and sobbing heavily. After a moment of surprise, Micah gently petted her hair, absently murmuring words of comfort.

"I don't want to loose you," Cornelia sobbed out. "I won't, I won't..."

"You're not going to loose me," Micah replied calmly, pushing aside all feelings of being sick and weak to try and emotionally sort out one distraught woman in his arms.

Cornelia looked up at him with her one good eye, cheeks blotchy from crying. "You don't know that."

No, he didn't. But ruminating on that fact did no one any good. "I have both Euphemia and Anya working on the problem," Micah pointed out. "If any one can find a solution, they can." He glanced up for a reason he couldn't tell, and blinked as he saw both Anya and Euphemia having returned via teleportation. "Speak of the devils." He quietly throttled the stomach-fluttering sensation of panic, as neither of the two had an expression on their faces that could be called 'joyous'. "Dare I inquire as to what you found?"

Euphemia fidgeted. "Um."

Anya sighed. "We found good news, bad news, and complicated news."

Micah blinked as Cornelia picked herself up from his lap. "O...kay. Go in whichever order you think is best."

"The good news," Euphemia began. "Whatever is affecting your body has nothing whatsoever to do with pokegirl genetics."

Micah paused. Re-went over what his G-splice just stated. Went over it again, for good measure. "-What-?"

"That's the bad news," the redhead went on with gathering steam. "We don't know what it is that's causing your body to react the way it is. I didn't have time to do anywhere near a complete workup on your genetic code, but I couldn't find any of the more common site markers that would signify you're a pokegirl. Or have bloodgifts. And while pokegirl cellular structure can look... odd... at times, yours didn't look anything like them."

There was something Euphemia wasn't saying, but Micah let it slide. "So... what's the complicated news?"

Euphemia flicked a nervous glance at Anya, looked back at Micah. "If you recall, we had taken some marrow samples. This... whatever it is, it was present in those samples. Which means-"

"Shit," Micah murmured, half-surprised, half-shocked at the implications.

"-which means whatever it is that's affecting your body, it's done a complete infiltration of your systems. Even if we could somehow purge it from your body, your bone marrow would just work to replace what genetic material we took -out-."

"But we do have a theory," Anya noted softly.

Euphemia nodded slowly. "We think... whatever's gotten into your system is trying to -change- it. Into something else. Which is why our healing magics just made things worse - they accelerated the process, and you were caught in the middle."

"But that doesn't make any sense," Micah whispered, half to himself. "It's like this came up from out of nowhere-"

No. It -did- make sense, Micah thought, thinking faster than his mouth could keep up. The headaches, all the little aches and pains, sore throat. So what if you woke up feeling just a -little- bit too hot for comfort when you were nestled underneath the blood-warm awning of an angel's wings? Put all the -little- things that could make up a very nasty big picture aside due to changing from a sub-tropic to a sub-arctic environment, never mind being -tortured- on top of that, until his body hit a very -nasty- patch of stress...

"...may have a solution, though," Euphemia had gone on, ignorant of Micah's inner dialogue.

Micah glanced up, the pair suddenly having his full attention. "Yes?"

"If we can't change the process, can't affect it, then the only feasible alternative is to speed it along," Euphemia murmured softly.

And Micah found a bundle of hatred and fear at his side in the form of a dark-blue-haired Demon-Goddess. "-No-," Cornelia spat out, even as Micah felt a surprisingly powerful grip on his arm in the form of Nunnally holding onto it, as if she was ready and willing to physically haul him out of there, if necessary.

"Stop," Micah ordered softly.

Cornelia looked at him with an expression edging toward despair. "Master..."

"This isn't a decision you have to make, Cornelia, and I won't have you getting angry at Euphemia just because she's giving me all the options on the table," Micah said calmly. He glanced up at the pair. "Do it."

"NO!" Cornelia screamed.

Micah looked at her. Held the gaze, inexorably, until she finally calmed down to the point that she wasn't threatening violence on any of his harem members. "Cornelia," Micah explained, softly, quietly, "What they're proposing will go much quicker and with a greater safety margin with three magically-inclined pokegirls assisting in the healing. Even assuming I had the luxury of time for whatever it is that's affecting me, I have no guarantees that, left to it's own devices, that this process won't try to -kill- me even as it's trying to -change- me." He glanced at Euphemia, gratified from her expression to see that she had apparently considered that, as well. "And time is something I do not have."

Slowly, Cornelia nodded. "...Alright, Master."

Micah nodded in return. Looked at Anya and Euphemia. "Whenever you're ready, you'd best begin."

Anya nodded slowly, even as she drew a card. "First, I'm going to use Dream to put you into a magical coma..."

-[***]-