Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Bane Sidhe ❯ Bane Sidhe: Index ( Chapter 2 )

I slept in. It had been a long night, filled with worries. I don’t often get the chance to break causality, or adjust it like this. My door was knocked upon. I rose from the futon, sweaty and stinking and looked through the peephole. It was Kamijou. He looked frustrated.

“Morning, Kamijou. Who’s this?” I asked.

“She says her name is Index Librorum,” he said. I noticed safety pins.

“Touch her hat,” I ordered. He looked hard at me for a moment then did so. There was a noise, like glass breaking. The girl looked at me, perturbed.

“Okay. Now go stick this sign on your door.” He looked at the single sheet of printed paper, jaw working before it opened further in shock. “C’mon. You’ll be late. Just do it and get to school. I will look after your little sister.”

Kamijou left, shutting the door behind him.

“What are you?” she asked me.

“Eh. Irish, technically,” I answered with a shrug.

“Black Irish, if I’m any judge,” she said, accurately.

“Yes,” I admitted. That was the other name for the changelings like me. Some of us could tickle trout. Others could ride horses bareback without injury. Some could tame dogs with a whistle. Some were expert marksmen. Many could survive terrible injuries and recover fully.

“What brings you to this place?” she asked, in a very adult voice. Not sounding anything like the 14 year old she appeared to be.

“During the Dark Ages, it was Irish monks who hand copied Bibles and kept your church alive. They lived in towers, where Vikings were unlikely to attack. And those who did couldn’t break in or burn the books. Western civilization owes a great deal to those monks, friars, and priests,” I told her.  

“We remembered what could have been lost. Do you want to remember, Index Librorum?” I asked her, very seriously.

“Remember what?” she asked.

“More than a year?” I clarified.

She thought about this for a while. “Is that possible?” she finally asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll cook you breakfast, but we need to go to the market. And we can’t have you wandering around dressed like that. Normal clothes so you won’t draw so much attention.”

“A disguise?” she asked.

I handed her some clothes and pointed her to my bathroom to change. She shifted around behind the door for a while and eventually emerged. She looked like my cute little daughter, complete with pout.

I checked outside the door and found three more runes placed in my hallway. I sighed, picked up the bucket and quickly dunked each of them till the ink ran, then balled up the papers and threw them over the side. I looked around for the two people I expected, spotting the girl perched on the top of a building nearby. I waved to her, gesturing to come down.

I waited, and Index emerged from my apartment, spotting me. The elevator door dinged. She was dressed as a young woman would going out to the Mall or otherwise not school clothes. She looked like anyone else.

The guardian was attractive though strangely dressed, with one pant leg full length and the other cut off short. She wore a rumpled teeshirt over a pair of full breasts and no obvious bra, which was even more ridiculous since there was no sag. No woman should be that pretty. She looked angry, first at me, then at Index, then at me again.

“Can we talk?” I asked her, loud enough for her to hear.

“What did you do to her gown? That was protective,” she complained.

“I’m Irish. We know how to protect books,” I said. This gave her pause.

“What did you say?” she growled.

“Hey, don’t confuse me with Father Anderson. Besides, a .454 is a rimmed cartridge. It would NEVER work in an automatic, no matter how big you made it.” Now she just looked confused.

“Young people these days,” I complained under my breath. “Do you think your church always tells the truth?”

“What?” she asked, even more confused.

“The truth. To low level mooks like you. Though to be fair, your ability is similar to Touma’s.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Touma, the guy who is looking after this girl since this morning. She fell onto his landing running away from you. Did you know she can use magic?” I mentioned.

“What? No she can’t,” denied the woman.

“How did she get up there otherwise?” I asked her. This put her off even more.

“So I wanted to go to the market and buy some food. Index is pretty hungry.” Her stomach grumbled loudly. “You want to come along?”

“Kanzaki. I’m Kanzaki. What’s your name?” she asked me. I told her. I locked my apartment door and the three of us took the elevator. If I hadn’t been here she would have cut Index by accident, then plagued by guilt would have attacked Touma after her partner set my building on fire. I wasn’t having that. This building is convenient.

“You can ask your friend to come along, but no smoking in the market, okay?” I reminded her. She sighed.

A little later as we walked down the street to the grocery store, a guy in black smoking a cigarette showed up.

“Stop trying to light my building on fire. I like living there. It’s where I keep all my stuff,” I warned him. He looked exasperated. “And stop the glowering. Transference is childish, and you’re old enough to know better.”

We arrived at the grocery store. I only went there on my weekends, or when I decided I didn’t want to work that day. This was important stuff. Feeding these three would require…. I put a long moment into my skill and began picking up veggies, meat, cat litter and kitten chow and a bowl, onions, garlic, ginger root, beer, sake, cigarettes of Stiyll’s preferred brand, a ream of cheap copy paper, several other things.

When we returned to my apartment, the power had been restored and my fridge was empty but working. The A/C worked too. I put some of the things away and started cooking the rest.

“Why did you reference Hellsing?” asked Kanzaki. It had been two hours since then, and we were all eating what I’d cooked, with triple portions to Index and double to Kanzaki.

“Something Stiyll will have to deal with soon,” I answered, not looking up from my wok. It was aluminum rather than steel. I used plastics and wood for most of my utensils. And my knife was ceramic.

“You have foresight, don’t you?” asked Kanzaki.

“God made this universe,” I agreed.

“You aren’t catholic, or protestant. You’re a Calvinist,” she realized, shocked. 

I laughed. “I’m in a position to know.”

“Speaking of that, use a rifle. A big one. 50 caliber would be a good idea. That alchemist is a giggling nutjob. No mercy for that guy. Tell your Catholic knights to stop screwing around with plate armor and try a team of snipers. He keeps standing in front of those big windows. Pop him one and end it.”

“What about approval from the city?” asked Stiyll.

“Crowley will approve it. That building is full of victims already. Though Himegami is in need of rescue, hopefully before Index gets kidnapped.”

“What about Index and her memories? She has to be reset in three days.”

“Ah well, remember the guy whose balcony she landed on? He can fix this.”

“Huh? How?” asked Index.

“You’ve got a seal tattooed into the back of your mouth. All he has to do is touch it, and hopefully not activate your St. George defenses. Or get his memory wiped by Dragon’s Breath feathers. That will shut down the failsafe that forces the memory wipes.” And be very inconvenient to the hero trying to save you since he’d forget Misaka and most details of his life.

“But won’t her mind explode if she doesn’t wipe her memories? 85% of her brain is taken up with the grimoires,” insisted Kanzaki. Well, at least she looks good. Dorm manager remains my best girl.

“Did you know that 83% of all statistics are made up on the spot?” I goaded the sexy woman. “Didn’t you get suspicious at that silly number they threw you when humans live 140 years, on average, and store them three different ways? Including the long term storage as protein strings called Memory Engrams? So those numbers? Not so much. That was just something they made up to keep you doing their bidding. The Americans dropped Puritanism before 1700. And they had the largest colony of that extremist faith. It was axes versus being your brother’s keeper, and the axes won. Manifest destiny won over the population, and the sort of controlling madness the puritans liked was discredited out of existence.”

“So, this guy can help cure Index and she won’t forget about us anymore?” verified Stiyll.

“Yes.”

“Well, okay. I think I’ll have another beer and a nap.”

Later they would have a whole big scene in Touma’s apartment, curing Index of her curse and managed not to blow a hole in the roof or erase his memory in the process. It was a win for everyone. Two days later, a mad alchemist was turned into bloody chunks by a single rifle shot through the window glass of his penthouse study, with full approval of Aleister Crowley, still alive after over a century and a half. Touma was not involved so didn’t meet a nice girl in a shrine maiden outfit, nor did he get his arm cut off and need it sewed back on by the frog-faced doctor who teased him about wanting to get near sexy nurses.

Me? I was busy dating the dorm manager, whose name was Sachiko, from Tokiwadai. There’s upsides to being Irish.