Baa-Ram-Ewe!

-Pokémon Realm, Ransei Region, King Evan-

I worked my way north out of Viperia.

Learning of Viperia politics was… an interesting thing to say the least. An overpriced Pecha Scarf bought from the Kecleon Brothers Merchants Guild was worth the cost while I dealt with that and the threat that was the Evil Mystery Dungeons from the Moon Cell thing.

People in Viperia had tried to poison me no less than five hundred and sixty three times… at least from what I managed to count and probably more attempts that I didn’t even notice.

Like Dragons Types were prideful, Poison Types could be a bit deceitful so it helped to always boil the water in this swamp filled region of Ransei. Don’t honestly know how I’ll handle the Ghost types as a Normal type… they also don’t know how they are going to handle me either!

Jiri was acting as my bodyguard, still a Buneary and was getting ever closer to becoming a Lopunny as we continued north along the east side of the continent. Her Bear Buster unit have proven to be quite intimidating despite none of them having achieve their evolutions… yet. I’m betting the battles with the monstrous and mysterious Moon Cell will quickly change that through our efforts.

Now I needed to take care of Dragnor and Spectra, also I needed to send information of what I wanted my friends back home in Aurora to do.

Already heard from Valora that Pom is in the thick of it, creating a beachhead to reach into Moon Cell’s inner realm and we have no idea how successful they currently are. Violight apparently sent them support from something called the Mirage Collective, so hopefully that’s going well.

“King Evan, can I just say that from the sound of it getting Dragnor and Spectra to cooperate is going to be like pulling teeth. By which I mean both messy and exceedingly painful.” Yes it is Dragoon Jiri, but we had to unite all of Ransei or else we wouldn’t be able to get Arceus’s limited support with a world ending threat. Some say that when Ransei fully unites under one banner Arceus appears and challenges those for something like a wish. “I’m glad to be away from all that skull-daggery.”

Hopefully Maiden Jig and Geoff have everything under control back home.

“Yes, I have nothing against pointing out the obvious.” I said with a weak smile, really didn’t like Viperia politics or all the assassination attempts that didn’t involve poison. They really go for the throat if they think they smell weakness, its little wonder that Dazzle doesn’t like her homeland and why I will continue to welcome her in Aurora. “Being a king is… really tiring. Also don’t you mean skullduggery?”

“That’s what you have good friends for Evan.” Jiri stated pleasantly as she raised her shield and spear, ready to continue marching forward. “As for Viperia, no, I definitely meant the words ‘Skull Daggery’ since that seems where they keep wanting to plant a knife. I’m fairly sure they are impressed you survived long enough to actually leave Viperia without any serious injury… all those flying knife traps were a bit hard to spot. Thank goodness for Greenleaf healing herbs.”

That brought a small smile to my face, hopefully Pom and the others from the Valora counter invasion detachment were okay. They were what was hopefully slowing down the invasion of Ransei, the Fairy Dust Islands were said to be clean within an hour or two of the Evil Mystery Dungeons appearing.

I wondered why we couldn’t be just as organized and then realized that we were stretched quite thin with everyone fighting for their lives. So uniting wasn’t exactly everyone’s first thought when an alien invasion was occurring and I don’t mean the general Deoxys kind that happens every once in a while.

-Moon Cell Realm, Midgar City, plains outside the walls, several ‘digital hours’ later, Ocellus-

“Okay, their air force is really messing us up here, please tell me we’re moving soon Ozzy.” Smolder was fairly impatient considering the onslaught of aerial forces attacking us, it was fair to be a little angry.

The nonstop sound of the missile trucks firing in the courtyard was kind of deafening as missiles continued to blast enemy EPs out of the sky.

“We’re working on it and the new AP we’ve been given. Welch and Cid gave us the approval to use the Berserker Moogles when we’re ready to start summoning them. Apparently they give off the feeling of…” I tried to put it in nicer words.

“Dumb muscle?” Smolder stated flatly with her arms crossed. “I think that’s just from looking at the things.”

“Yes, that Smol… apparently it’s a pervasive feature, meaning that no matter which Berserker Moogle you’re looking at, you’ll get that feeling. In fact it’s so pervasive that Sid, Welch and Torneko couldn’t figure out how to remove it from their overall programming as Allied Programs. In fact it seems to be intentional to an absurd level that they wouldn’t work as well as they do without it, though we should be careful as they have been termed extremely literal minded when it comes to interpreting orders… probably why they have the ‘Berserker’ classification in the first place.” Well she did call me Ozzy, so it’s fair play that I call her Smol and make her blush. “Our current objectives are to draw as much attention to ourselves when we hit the upper city once we’re given the go ahead to use the limited flight mode by Cid. We’re doing this to give the now known Artoria and Mash an opportunity to fight through the lower city and reach the tower from below while we’re drawing all the heat from the enemy, their forces will have to be the ones to hold this realm once we take it. Once we are at the edge of the upper city layer, we’ll release a team to investigate what happened to Pom, Shanty, Dolly and Dormarch. I’m fairly sure they are alive, either they are fighting a losing battle or they’ve gone to ground… above ground I mean.”

“Yes, I understood what you meant Ocellus.” Smolder stated with a slightly grumpy manner. “So we send them out on Skein Flyers?”

“Not necessarily, Sami has given us the access to replicate her digital motorcycle quick build system bar. So we’re trying to see what happens when we give them to Rider Zealots… it might actually make production of combat vehicles go several times faster. In any case we’re expecting heavy aerial offensive from the enemy and Moby Dick to come at us when we go up there.” Here I was sitting safely in a seat guiding defenses and being safe, while Pom was continuing to get the snot beaten out of her mentally, physical and spiritually… plus the whole thing with being a Chrysomallus still likely bothering her immensely and other things like eating meet. She has had so many canine familiars that I wouldn’t be surprised if she was actually an omnivore now instead of a mostly vegetarian. Even Lambkin eat eggs for their high protein value and a majority of Lambkin are farmers... mostly sheep farmers, but still! “Still want to keep some manufactured stuff like the Magitek Armors though, those have been fairly useful find before Mare Melum reset or rebooted, the terminology Metabee gave me about it was kind of iffy and existentially dreadful to think about happening while we were in the middle of it. We’ll set up on the edge of the city and slowly press forward while trying to capture as many PLANTs over a wide area as we can, Canard, Jeanne and Rokusho will be doing that while they set out to find and secure Pom’s safety. They really didn’t have much food or drink before going up there, they must be starving…”

“Are you hungry?” Smolder asked kindly and sweetly, she was always so affectionate. Her very presence alone was doing that, even her friendship alone could keep me going for years. If I didn’t know what dragons were actually like, I’d swear Smolder was the actual standard being set by her kind. Their stories of strength and violence aside.

“Oh I’m fine love and friendship is definitely keeping me filled up quite a lot, I hope Canard and the others are getting enough rest… we’re kind of throwing them back into the thick of it once we make our way to the upper city. Rokusho in particular has made sure we had the ability keep the Assassin Class EPs out of the castle indefinitely with Metabee’s help… apparently he had Metabee think about the dumbest ways to get past our defenses and found every leak point in Castle Alexander that way. I don’t think Metabee even realized why Rokusho asked him about it in particular.” Our defenses were currently holding and solid, most of our troubles were in the upper city from the aerial forces. The EP ground forces… the left paw of Castle Alexander smashed down and crushed a manufactured EP, there have been less of those lately given how many we’ve destroyed. The normal summoned from a PLANT EPs were still coming though and the only way to take care of them was to take territories in the realms. “I think they deserve being placed in more defensive positions, but our APs inability to take territories is the only reason we can’t. The Commandramon will focus primarily on PLANT acquisition and sending them immediately back to us… provided they are spread out and trying to play keep away like with the lower city. We’re going to be relying on APs, the Gazimon Gang and the Valora contingent entirely for our defenses at that point while some of our greater personalities go out. We need at least me here to keep everything running smoothly, to think I’ve sadly become a bit too accustomed at being a necessary part of our command structure…”

“Speaking of territories, the lower city is practically filled with Bombs on the opposite side from us, EPs flood the side we’re on since we pulled our forces out, Fou coming in from our left in which I’m fairly sure we heard the collapsing of a large section of the lower city wall from that direction and from our right are some much needed allies that are trying to put a hopefully more discreet hole in the wall.” Smolder was just summarizing what we knew and the lower city was just not tenable to us, the enemy servant basically had most of the city set up to stall and death trap us to death before we could ever reach them. It was working so far, but we’re not out of this fight yet even if we hadn’t gotten Castle Alexander to breach the wall! “That Fou guy actually scares me and would probably scare any dragon too, considering the level of destruction he’s causing gleefully. As long as he doesn’t collapse the upper city down onto the lower one we won’t bother with him.”

“Completely neutral to the rest of us at least, Fou’s outright been stated to be hunting Pom to eventually possibly force her into a fight to the death when she’s at her strongest or is just going to keep continue playing with her like she’s a chew toy. There’s also how little we know about Artoria and Mash aside from their names, but they are definitely helpful in the fight against Moon Cell and don’t seem bad aside from attacking Pom. Really should have had Mundo ask about that…” Any ally we could get would be a good one, even with Mirage Collective and Harmony Programs support we hadn’t exactly cracked the city… if anything is doing that, it’s the Bombs which are hardly being contained by the enemies own forces in the lower city. I shook my head and focused on the console as I watched the fighting from our allied forces. We couldn’t carry them all to the upper city with us… we’d have to leave them behind to secure the plains at the very least. “What’s the ETA on the flying mode so we can get to the upper city Cid?”

“Quite you’re worrying young’un, three minutes until we complete preparations and we can’t rush this stuff! So get you’re ducks in a row and set out some orders for our friends staying on the grounds out there on what they should be doing.” Cid Highwind stated with a following gleeful chuckle. “Flying is a passion and I’m going to make this castle airborne with the added PLANT power we got flowing through Castle Alexander’s veins… just so long as we don’t fire a Divine Judgment we’ll be fine with flying high enough and working the defense turrets at the same time. Whoever designed the Divine Judgment thing made it a serious energy hog of it for all the power it has! Honestly the missile trucks are what’s really putting in all the work we’re doing here, might want to deploy a few artillery in the upper city when we get there and secure them with some APs.”

Cid was full of good ideas, it’s like he’s been through war before multiple times over.

“Yeah, we need to break the defenses the servant has around them…” Apparently they were enough to shoot down Metal Hound 002 after what looked like a hectic fight to watch on the sensors. Welch wanted to make a third one already, but she didn’t have the necessary schematic to make the jet assisted armor so it could possibly fly as fast as those enemy air units had that Pom definitely ended up destroying somehow considering that the explosion was detected from all the way down here. “The fact that they’ve managed to stall us out despite all the pressure we’re putting on them is killing our morale something fierce.”

It was a surprise that any part of our underground tunnel team made it back alive at all, much less all of them except for Pom’s inner circle of friends and family… of which I felt somewhat happy to be a part of.

“Ba-lamb Drive ready, give the orders Ocellus and we’ll get her in the air!” Did it really have to be called that Cid? Pom already have enough issues with Castle Alexander being a giant dog… she doesn’t need to know the true flight device includes a double pun! Maybe this is what they meant by the better part of valor was not telling someone something in friendship school if it doesn’t actually affect them in the slightest?

“Take us up Mr. Highwind!” The entire castle shuddered as it started pulling in its legs to enter hover mode and then the Balamb Drive would activate and give us flight. It all felt so shaky and a bit off. “Cid, what’s the status on the Balamb Drive?”

“Shaky, but we’re doing it, we’re flying!” The NPC Cid seemed quite ecstatic when Castle Alexander surpassed its hover mode height and kept going up. “I’m going to even out things a bit and get her purring like a cat on catnip sleeping in a warm sunbeam.”

Note to self and a reminder, don’t mention what happened with Opalescence to anyone when I was left alone with her while cat sitting for Rarity. I thought Spike had been kidding somewhat about those escapades, but he was fairly spot on with his description of Rarity’s familiar. It’s been so long since I saw one of my nicer teachers who taught compliments and politeness in general, the Harmony Programs aren’t exactly the same even if they do have my teacher’s voices.

The castle rose up next to the wall and continued rising higher towards the darkened stormy skies of Midgar City.

-Upper City, Mog Wash, bedroom second floor, Pom-

“I really need to go to the bathroom…” I whined, Dormarch just snuggled even deeper into my embrace and continued snoozing on.

That was followed by Dolly stretching and continuing to laze about me. She was finding humor in my current position and was just being lazy.

Dolly now is not the time to be a jerk to me just because I’m the most comfortable thing around to lay on. Even the pillow my head was resting on couldn’t quite compare to a fluffmancer’s wool.

It was a minute later that Shanty started stirring.

“Uhn… Pom, why is everything being pain?” Shanty moved a bit and slowly try to move her front legs.

Given how tightly they were splinted and what Dormarch said about them being broken, it was probably for the best that she couldn’t move them.

“Well you’re front legs are broken, apparently you fainted from the shock while riding with Dolly on her skateboard and well… things happened.” Given that I was trying to stay calm as possible, Shanty looked dazed and wincing every few seconds trying to move. “Probably won’t be able to fix it quickly until we can get some Sitrus Berries… unfortunately we’re out Dolly got the last one and all we have is a reviver seed. Don’t know where the last one is, but I’m fairly certain Jeanne had it.”

“Oh right, cool pants girl.” Dolly mumbled with a grin as she leaned her head back and licked me on the nose before rolling off the bed. “Dormarch, Pom needs a scan immediately, there might be something wrong with her!”

“Huh, what?! Scanning… oh… she needs to use the bathroom.” Well that got Dormarch up quickly and they both looked at a pained Shanty. “Well good to see you’re awake, but… how are we going to do this?”

“I believe my lug and I can be of help.” Cait Sith got his Magitek Moogle Monster to gently lift Shanty off of me with a rapid fire amount of coaxing and I quickly rushed to the bathroom.

One very relieving bathroom break later, for me, Dolly and Dormarch we all looked to Shanty to see why she wasn’t going to the bathroom and realized she’d need help with her broken legs and hooves.

“…” Shanty looked quite vulnerable in this moment and I sighed as I had Cait Sith and his Lug carry Shanty to the bathroom and I was left helping the goat to deal with things afterwards while Cait SIth waited outside.

After the episode and Shanty looking embarrassed with what I helped her with, we finally sat down together.

“Okay Shanty, we currently have the time, because I really doubt we can attack that tower just yet.” As embarrassing as it was, I knew Shanty was glad that I was there to help her with several issues that a young goat with broken front legs might be going through. “What did you want to talk about?”

“I’m being afraid that I’m not being a goat…” That… was completely ridiculous Shanty.

“I’m afraid that I’m not a sheep, but a Lambkin is close enough that it’s hard to tell the difference really.” I didn’t mean to come off as insensitive, but I hoped Shanty understood that this doesn’t change how I feel about her being my charge. “You look like a goat and act like one too, bar shaped eyes, scraggily little beard, what makes you think you’re not a goat?”

“I can be breathing underwater…” Yeah, that was a bit of an eye opener from Shanty.

“But you don’t have gills, not from what my scans show, you are one hundred percent goat as far as I can tell… unless this is a magic thing.” Probably was a magic thing Dormarch, kind of like how Chrysomallus was a magic thing for me and it was worsening give my left hind leg was the only leg not completely covered in golden wool at the moment.

Given that my legs take up most of my body… well I’m no longer horrified about the implications, because I think I can fully stop the transformation from happening when I hit the eventual edge of it and my body is completely covered in golden wool and my eyes go from blue to gold as well.

While I did want wings, I didn’t want them at the eventual and highly inevitable impossible to stop cost of my life from sprouting them. There were some things I’ve yet to tell anyone and I’ve only given Ocellus a hint of what she will eventually feel if it does come to pass that I have to go through the transformation process, but since she can’t feel it yet I’m in the clear of having to explain it or why exactly being a Chrysomallus is basically an eventual instant death for every Lambkin that has been through this process before.

Notably the ones who have been through this were said to have been much faster than mine is currently going, I should consider myself lucky that I’m forcing it to be so slow with every ounce of will I can muster. Thankfully I have not passed the ‘crossing the Rubicon’ point yet and I can hopefully stop myself exactly on that point of no return and hold on for my literal dear life, because there is no stopping the inevitable once the wings come in.

“I think my body be growing them when I need them… around the base of my ears…” Shanty said a second later feeling confused about Dormarch’s scans.

Sure Shanty wasn’t exactly sure what she was, but I at least knew who she was and she was. A brave little goat that was going to eventually be pirating around some world regardless of anyone wanting her to or not. She was going to be someone else’s problem that’s for sure, I would miss her if I was still alive to send her off on her adventure.

“Well that would be one way to connect them to your esophagus and filter oxygen out of liquids through a nervous system membrane.” That got looks from all of us and Dormarch ducked his head slightly. “It’s perfectly viable.”

“Don’t care, Shanty’s my buddy as much as you are Pom!” Which was high praise coming from Dolly, that and she could remember Shanty’s name correctly.

Shanty wasn’t paying Dormarch or Dolly as much attention as she was to my reaction, I calmly and carefully coddled her while avoiding jostling her front legs. My soft squeeze made her feel comforted at least while she was in pain.

“Pain medication?” Dormarch offered a second later seeing the look on Shanty’s face, even with how careful I was being it was still obviously painful for Shanty.

“Yes, please!” Shanty stated with a nod, I was about to let her go, but she then addressed me. “Please be holding me a little longer Pom.”

“As long as you need me to, well until we need to leave, but we have time.” I said softly while affectionately nuzzling the top of her head and nosing her hair a bit.

“That is being good, that we be having time I mean.” We needed to get Shanty back to Castle Alexander. She was sniffling and tearing up quite a bit. She was snuggling into me for comfort and I was willing to give her that and more as her caretaker, but her injuries means she can’t experience any form of combat until we did get to Castle Alexander and in the middle of EP controlled territory… yeah… not looking good.

I kind of needed a lot more than the comfort I would always give freely to Shanty, she really just had to ask for help or comfort and I’m always willing to be there for her.

As for me, I needed an entire team of psychiatrists and therapists at the rate I’ve been going. Sure I mostly know what’s wrong with me, but I doubt that’s going to help. My taste for meat was one of the more worrying things happening now.

“Shanty, you’re probably going to want to look into getting a good doctor for your crew.” I felt Shanty nod tearfully and Dormarch came back, scrutinized Shanty a bit by likely scanning her biology, then pulled out a dosage for her.

“Take it with this water.” Dormarch offered the glass and watched as the water flowed up, turned into a full liquid bubble, the bubble surrounded the pills on his other paw and they quickly flowed down Shanty’s open throat. “You’re going to feel a bit drowsy in a number of minutes, until then the pain should soon become numb.”

“I’ll just say this Shanty, I know you want to protect me… but I want you to focus more on your dream than me, even if I know you don’t want to lose another important person in your life. Try as hard as you might, if I have to, then I will being giving my life for everyone around me should the situation warrant it.” What I wasn’t saying is that Shanty might not be strong enough to prevent the situation from warranting it. “However I doubt I’ll needing to become a full on Chrysomallus for Moon Cell. I can hold on for as long as everyone wants me to and all of you being at my side will keep me going, but don’t hurt yourself for my sake. You’ve got a much bigger and brighter future ahead of you even if I might not be a part of that future, did you expect me to become a pirate and travel the world with you? When the time comes and I do happen to grow wings… Ocellus will at least be able to put it into words what is going on and why you won’t be able to save me at that point, if not then just ask any unicorn she truly trusts with all her heart about it. At that point, there is going to be no going back and no saving me, but that point isn’t now. Dolly take care of Dormarch if this occurs.”

Dolly narrowed her eyes at me, but she still nodded with a very firm look on her muzzle to let me know what she thought about the idea of living without me being around.

“It will not be happening if I be having anything to say about it.” Shanty did have a say, one of the reasons I was resisting it was to get Smolder and Ocellus home, but I also had Shanty to worry about. Also Dormarch and Dolly too, Dolly was stubborn and Dormarch, for all of his intelligence, was still a child.

My familiar bonded companions were giving me a look that said they felt the same way as Shanty.

“I’ll appreciate all of your effort at the very least. While I would rather outright die than become a full Chrysomallus, but if I had to become one to save you and everyone I love, it wouldn’t even be a contest of what I would choose.” Now for me to broach the topic and change it to something that Dolly mentioned earlier. “So why didn’t you use your water colossus against Lu Bu?”

“It wouldn’t be working, I be feeling it in my bones… the rain, it didn’t be slowing him down one bit. Also I be needing momentum to even be doing the attack I be using against Lu Bu.” The attacked that messed up your front legs so thoroughly Shanty? “The first swing be going fine… it is being the second one that is being really hard to do, since I be cutting directly into my own cutting arc to do it and those are generally hard to keep physically in place in front of me while moving forward!”

“Hey, aren’t her cutting arcs like… you know… able to repel or cut through almost anything?” Yes Dolly, that’s exactly why Shanty was fairly dangerous. Any edge around her becomes fairly dangerous if she wielding it correctly, including the points of her small horns.

Cutting through her own cutting arcs though, apparently it had a bizarre unknown backlash and effect and I was getting a front row seat to what you saw Dolly happening.

“Well the damage is fairly consistent at the very least, with it being something magical and not mundane like say a vacuum wave Mom can shoot by jabbing at the air really hard or firing off her coiled wool.” Magical damage was never quite easy to heal Dormarch, but at least it doesn’t seem to have done anything irreversible to Shanty. “At least the backlash only seems to be physical…”

I’m glad, because the Chrysomallus thing is quite irreversible as far as I know, but survivable as long as I keep it contained at that one point I know I can fully stop it. I would reject it for as long as possible.

“Good news, it’s nothing we can’t heal at the very least.” I sighed, not like we’re getting much of that, we’re not even facing Moon Cell directly yet and we’ve been taking a lot of beatings to get this far.

“If you want some really good news, then maybe I should tell you your friends are causing quite a stir at the edges of the upper city district and they just sent out a search party for you.” Cait Sith stated as he came in. “If you have to ask, Mog Wash does have a surveillance room and I can see quite a bit of the city around here. Can’t really miss the large castle that floated up and deployed several motorcycles along with Berserker Magitek Moogle Monsters. They are getting a pretty good foothold, but they are already running into the literal minded problems that the Berserker Moogles are known for. Hope they iron that out quickly. Now as for how you’re going to get by Shinra Towers defenses… well… you’ll need to get me in contact with your friends so I’m a VIP and you need to get me a PLANT before I can think of going anywhere.”

“So not only do we need to get a PLANT, we also need to protect it and you while getting you to Castle Alexander before you can lend us aid on how to break the tower?” The cat grinned and I rolled my eyes. “Is that all?”

“Oh yes, not much more I want than being out from under Moon Cell’s metaphorical thumb, follow me please!” We did so and I gently place Shanty on my back and carried her protectively as I tromped down the stairs with Dormarch and Dolly at my sides.

“So this secret agent stuff you did for the evil corporation that used to exist…” I started, it was apparently called the Shinra Corporation and it did a lot of horrible things. We watched as a washing machine swing inwards along with a section of wall leading us to a large room full of monitors showing various situations.

“Already gave your friends the Berserker Moogle access up front and my… look at them rowdy lugs go!” They were tearing through the Elite Brute EPs with rather ridiculous efficiency, which was ridiculous considering how tough the Brutes were to destroy even if you target their cores directly. “I suppose you’re wondering why they are appearing to be effective even against those particular assault programs.”

“They are tearing through those Brute EPs.” My voice sounded off flatly, we all had two eyes.

“EPs? Enemy Programs, fair name and I suppose you call your program forces APs?” Cait Sith got up onto the chair and started showing various scenes that were happening in real time. Merak wasn’t making it easy for Castle Alexander to take the edge of the upper city, that was a lot of Moon Cell Watchers and Gunships, on top of Heli-troopers, Guard Hounds and motorcycle equipped regular Troopers. Even as pressured as the city of Midgar was from all sides in the lower city and this one side in the Upper City, there was no forward progress into actually making a huge foothold in the city. “As for calling them Brutes, that’s exactly what they are… a slight upgrade from the basic heat axe wielding Berserker Vikings and are an elite version of them with little imagination included into the stiff mechanical design. The Magitek Moogle Monsters are far more effective because they existed at once point and one in particular fought monsters far larger and scarier than those Brutes, it was personally under my previous Cait Sith’s guidance even! They aren’t just any generic programs and most of your forces seems to be cobbled together from already pre-existing powerful concepts of something that existed at some point. When dealing with magical programming like you are here, the stronger the concept the stronger the fight you get from it. Magitek Moogle Monsters were kind of my design, so what you’re getting are some really good, if fairly dumb, berserkers. My mechanical wonders were mostly made for grunt work stuff… that and running a resort called the Golden Saucer. Have a lot of stories about that place…”

“Well that just confirms that the magical part of ‘evil magical soul sucking computer’ thing.” The dryness in my voice was met with a giggle from Dolly.

“Yep, that’s why I want in on what you have going on.” Cait Sith said as he turned towards us.

“Dormarch can you go out and seek the nearest PLANT we can take and be discreet about it? When we take it, it’s going to alert every single EP in the area to where we are and Merak will drop whatever he’s currently doing and will try to focus us down to prevent our successful recruitment of Cait Sith.” We really needed him after seeing what his Berserker Moogles can do in action and I think that’s why he’s showing us this, he wanted to join us and he’s showing us what he can do. “What are the chances that Moon Cell can trace those Berserker Moogles back to you?”

“Decent enough if it remembers little old me even exists at all, us NPCs are kind of under the radar of suspicion if you catch my drift and that even includes NPCs that can do spy work apparently. Moon Cell is probably not able to employ us directly, unless it thinks we’re incredibly compromised and I’m very much resembling that remark at the moment. So you can imagine how existentially terrifying my currently precarious position is. It’s not going to be able to do it in the amount of time I’m giving you, by then it should be far too late to stop me from joining you properly. Also you’re fortresses ability to produce random APs will probably be a temporary buffer to thinking I’m even remotely involved for a time, until it realizes that the Berserker Moogles are far too powerful to be a part of the completely normal random call ups you’ve been getting from accessing the PLANTs and putting various bits of data into them to get out some much needed assault programs out of them in the seven base specific classifications you can access.” Cait Sith grinned for a moment. “You’re very lucky you had a hacker that could even access those PLANTs. It would take something that’s a part of the system itself to get by the level of hack proof Moon Cell should be, and if you have that then I’m fairly sure you have a chance of saving whatever world needs it here. It’ll be like old times for me lass. So it wouldn’t be hard for that data to randomly pop up in this world unannounced with all the PLANTs that have been stolen from the lower city recently, so it was just them getting lucky with their choice of Berserkers truly. Not like they had the ‘Berserker Triple M’ data given to them from a specific highly anonymous source.”

“You’re just adding on to the fact that you know how to upgrade APs, make them work better or at the very least know how to get a specific result that isn’t a random grab bag when calling up a new AP type to wield against Moon Cell.” It was rather obvious and I glanced at Dormarch who was technically part of the system and messed up the PLANTs so they were capable of being usurped. Unfortunately usurped by anyone and this meant Fou and anyone else here that could actually beat them. There’s also the fact that the base seven classifications didn’t account for the weird classification Dormarch kept coming up with for himself as a pseudo-servant spirit core he had. He was currently a… ‘Ruler Shielder Beast’ as of right now when I silently queried him on it through our bond. He’s been fairly stuck on ‘Shielder’ and ‘Beast’ for a while, both made sense, but ‘Ruler’ was a weird one as far as the implications of what a classification like that could mean. “Not to mention your mentioning of knowing how to at least get one or more of the extra classifications I kind of know about in AP form, ones that we likely wouldn’t normally get from taking any of the PLANTs we come across. All this… in the effort to make us work that much harder to help save you?”

How many people would be able to fight a whole army generated by the PLANT completely by themselves? Well… the servants we’ve been fighting would have been able to I guess, they are ludicrously powerful souls brought about by Moon Cell. Merak was almost on par with Gilgamesh in terms of threat level and only his limitations of his ten portal limit were holding him back, so Hoopa Gilgamesh hadn’t been lying when he said we needed to step up and somehow knew about all of this specifically happening eventually. That or it was a very good educated guess that we’d be fighting someone like him again eventually, at least Merak didn’t lazily spam shooting infinite weapons at us.

“So… is it working?” The curious Cait Sith crossed his arms and tilted his head at me.

I sighed audibly.

“Yes.” We desperately needed his help when it came to making the Archer class APs something memorable. “Yes it is… and I was going to do it anyway, but thank you for providing far more obvious and largely good reasons as to exactly why we need you specifically beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt.”

“You’re welcome!” With the way Cait Sith was smiling at me, why am I reminded of a grinning Jaded La Perm who likely had a piece of tasty fish in her mouth while stealing from the grand palace at the top of Huoshan? That was a day that went down in infamy…

-Equus, Ponyville, Jaded La Perm-

My left ear twitched, my tail curled into a heart shape and my spine felt all warm and tingly like I was being hugged.

“Huh, my Jaded Sense is tingling, someone I’m friends with must be thinking fondly of me… got any Jacks?” I said as Pinkie frowned at me and threw me the card.

“Isn’t that something like a rare occurrence with you?” Ah Applejack, you knew me so well. “Would have thought it was someone thinking of you doing your general annoying varmint thing… speaking of feline varmints, got any queens?”

“Darn it!” I hissed audibly as I passed Applejack the card with a friendlier looking version of Queen Chrysalis on it, I was quickly learning why no one ever wanted to play cards with Applejack. She was really good at Go Fly and the less said about how stupendously great she is at poker the better… I may in fact be quite jealous of her talent at the game.

How does someone who’s got so many ‘completely honest’ tells beat everyone at poker without a working poker face?!