Kirunax
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Chapter 26
🕑 Added 2025-07-20 20:11:01 +0000 UTCShe studied her reflection in the mirror, fingertip brushing the cool glass. The faint scent of her shampoo still clung
Chapter 26
Lisa
She studied her reflection in the mirror, fingertip brushing the cool glass. The faint scent of her shampoo still clung to the bathroom air, sharp and clean, undercut by the distant hum of the fridge in the next room.
Confident body language — but no swagger. The kind that came from knowing you could handle any problem. Controlled, refined, graceful… yes, grace was the important part. Lisa needed to radiate not just confidence, but a pride in solving problems with elegance.
Some kind of high-society upbringing? Lisa tilted her head, watching the light catch on the glass, dust motes drifting lazily in the air. No, that didn’t feel right. More like a general idea of how a lady should behave. Self-taught. Or maybe...
Education on the subject of appropriate social behavior commonly observed in traditional upper-class families. Formative years. Terminated early.
So enough to internalize and mimic it, but not enough polish.
The woman Lisa had in mind was one who wanted to be seen as aristocratic… but lacked the pedigree.
A self-fashioned noble, then. A wannabe.
The kind of girl a certain type of boy might still see as authentic.
It had taken Lisa weeks of quiet observation to construct a persona with any chance of cracking Shirou Danvers’ shell.
Finding Armiger’s identity wasn’t the hard part — his trigger event had been messy and public. A little poking around and she uncovered the whole story: Shirou and his sister had kicked off the infamous New York insurance fraud scandal.
But what started as simple got complicated fast.
Shirou’s daily life was a boring and predictable routine. Clinical even. He went to school, sometimes ditched lessons to visit the Docks, and then returned straight to the PRT headquarters.
No trips to the movies. No side hobbies. No hanging out with classmates.
School. Docks. PRT.
Rinse, repeat.
And he didn’t just tolerate the routine — he seemed to prefer it.
Like the absence of fun was a feature, not a bug.
The lack of a social life made sense once you understood one core fact: Shirou Danvers didn’t have friends.
It wasn’t because he was awkward and it wasn’t because he was shy. It wasn’t even because people didn’t try to befriend him.
Shirou was just… disinterested.
Lisa had watched him through a dirty apartment window, balancing binoculars on a windowsill, watching him zone out in class as if auditing middle school out of pure obligation.
He wasn’t struggling — he was bored.
Not just ‘I’ve seen this before’ bored. More like ‘I’ve studied this before, in depth, at a higher level bored’.
Her power, ever helpful, concluded he was functionally college-educated despite having never set foot in college.
Even weirder, it traced the patterns in his phrasing and terminology to London.
Despite also confirming that he had never left New York.
And her power still insisted that he was no Stranger, Master, Mover, Thinker or any kind of parahuman.
At this point, Lisa had no choice but to assume some kind of Thinker interference — maybe even passive defense of some kind. Not an absolute one, but enough to throw a wrench in Lisa’s own power.
Either that or her power got sentience and was actively gaslighting her.
That aside, in the eyes of his classmates, Shirou Danvers was an uncrackable cipher.
He ignored them completely — again, not out of malice, just sheer indifference — despite somehow being weirdly popular. Especially with the girls.
Lisa had watched it all unfold from a distance, amused and vaguely horrified.
Friendship offers? Met with polite disinterest.
Bullying attempts? Treated the exact same way, to the point that he couldn’t distinguish between the two.
Flirting? Like tossing pebbles into a void.
Shirou wasn’t simply rejecting the social ladder — he was levitating outside it, wondering why people were gawking at him. Sometimes. The usual rules didn’t seem to apply.
He was too detached to dominate the class, too intimidating to be stepped on, and too interesting to be ignored.
The hierarchy didn’t know what to do with him.
And Shirou?
It was like watching a particularly unmotivated alien half-heartedly struggling to fit into human society.
Lisa figured the odds of him ever showing up to a party or going to the movies with the others were about the same as Alec volunteering at an orphanage.
Not zero, but if that ever happened you knew something was up. Something bad, probably.
No, Shirou Danvers didn’t do parties or movie nights.
He ditched class to do charity work on ABB’s turf.
Right in the Lung’s backyard.
Lisa had watched locals crossing the street if there was a suspicious congregation of young men and women in the way, saw them stiffen in the wake of the hollow thump of bass speakers from a passing ABB car. Shirou moved through it like he was walking to a corner store.
And not out of ignorance—he knew exactly where he was. He just didn’t care, didn’t consider the gang a threat.
That was where Lisa saw her chance.
Not through his school, not through his peers, but through that strange little window where danger didn’t apply and boundaries didn’t matter.
If he wouldn’t let anyone into his world, then she’d go through the cracks in it.
Lisa’s plan was simple — emotional assault.
Build a persona that hit every weak point in Shirou Danvers’ psychological armor.
But first she had to figure out: how does an older girl get close to a boy like him?
At first, Lisa planned to tailor her approach in a way that would remind the boy about his mother. Sensible, right? A young boy, orphaned at an early age...
Turned out, he didn’t have particularly strong feelings about the woman.
Her power couldn’t even detect resentment or longing — just a flat emotional plateau where his mother should have lived.
Sumire Danvers, as it turned out, was a textbook case of should-not-have-been-a-parent.
An accidental fling — with Armsmaster, of all people — a reluctant pregnancy... And then the woman had discovered to her delight that being a single mother wasn’t that hard. Babies grow fast and they become self-sufficient soon enough for the woman to return to her full-time journalistic career in under half a year.
They grow up so fast, in fact, that Sumire stopped hiring babysitters when the baby in question was at the ripe age of two and a half years old.
It was borderline criminal neglect. No — scratch that. It was criminal neglect. Lisa had seen what that kind of parenting did to Rachel.
But Shirou didn’t crack.
He’d just… adapted. Quietly and efficiently. To the point that he could raise a baby sister solo by the age of eight.
And now he didn’t need anyone. Not really.
Armsmaster not giving a shit about him or his sister? Shirou was very much fine with that. Comfortable even.
So, making herself look like the boy’s mother would be both pointless and grating on Lisa’s sensibilities.
So she turned the page. She needed a different template — another female presence in his life, someone he’d actually cared about.
Lisa’s findings were... confusing.
After weeks of watching Shirou at school and on patrol, after mapping his micro reactions to different women, she’d narrowed the field to six archetypes he actually responded to.
One of them stood out immediately.
She labeled her Rose-Tinted Glasses.
Lisa’s shorthand for the impossible.
Appearance-wise, she was the perfect fit for Lisa. Or so it seemed.
But every time something — a phrase, a hairstyle, a tone of voice — reminded Shirou of her, he immediately dismissed it as inadequate.
Whoever she was, she’d been placed on a pedestal so high it might as well have been orbital.
It wasn’t even about looks, though she must had been an absolute babe.
No — the issue was deeper. Shirou had idealized this woman to an absurd degree. Lisa wouldn’t just be competing with a memory. She’d be competing with a fantasy. An impossible ideal that the boy had built up in his head
And the kicker? It looked like a case of unrequited affection. Which yeah, a crush would explain the awe-inspiring image of perfection in his head.
Lisa’s power insisted that Shirou had deeply loved her — maybe still did — but it never went anywhere. And worse, he seemed to think he’d failed her and felt guilty.
But her power also pinpointed the woman’s age at approximately thirty but with looks of a fifteen years old, so... Lisa wasn’t sure about that part.
Still, a memory preserved in amber. Unreachable and untouchable. It also came with a lot of heavy emotional baggage.
Lisa couldn’t replicate that. She didn’t even want to try to replicate that. And besides, nothing about this half- hallucinated ex’s personality matched Lisa’s own.
So that option was out.
There was another blonde Lisa could have gone for — but her personality was so ridiculously over-the-top that Lisa doubted she could pull it off for more than five minutes.
Her power also helpfully pointed out that Lisa’s tits were too small.
Follow-up inquiries revealed that Narwhal’s tits were too small, though the heroine got points for overall proportions. Lisa had labeled that one Designation: The Cow.
Honestly, who were these women?
And where the hell had Shirou Danvers found them? New York society of implausibly hot disaster women?
The next candidate was an older-sister type — close to Lisa’s build, which made her a possibility.
Unfortunately, the woman was manic. Not just energetic, but deranged-in-a-fun-way manic. Lisa could fake a lot of things, but this one would require a trip to Archer’s Bridge for some chemical assistance.
Shirou seemed to think of her mostly when entering ABB territory — because he was comparing the gang to the Japanese Yakuza and wondering for some reason how she’d react.
What struck Lisa as odd was that despite emotional connection Shirou had forgotten about her until recently.
Had only just remembered because of a practice sword.
If she was that easy to push out of mind, was there really any point in chasing the resemblance?
Lisa wasn’t betting her infiltration strategy on second-tier nostalgia.
The remaining entries on Lisa’s mental dossier read like a list of characters in a young adult novel:
First, a little sister — not Argent, but weirdly parallel. The emotional overlap was dense, almost suspicious.
Second, a painfully shy wallflower. The soft-spoken kind, who’d blush up a storm if you complimented her shoes.
And finally… a gun-toting nun. Or a special forces operative who moonlit as a nun.
Lisa wasn’t entirely convinced that last one was real.
Either way, hard pass.
In the end, Lisa picked the role that fit like a glove: the prideful, brilliant overachiever.
Smart, smug, sharp-tongued, and attractive — Lisa didn’t have to stretch much.
Sure, the cadence and posture needed fine-tuning, but every conversation with Shirou helped sharpen the imitation.
And it worked.
A flash of recognition here, a flicker of nostalgia there.
Lisa had managed to trigger the right kind of memory.
Specifically — the memory of a lover.
Yes, apparently Shirou Danvers had a shockingly active love life for his age.
According to her power, half the women on her shortlist had romantic involvement with him.
Women.
Not girls.
Women.
Lisa had once again considered the idea of him having a passive defense that fed her power deliberate nonsense.
It was becoming a frustrating trend with the boy.
Another one of Lisa’s working theories was that his Thinker power constantly distorted his body language — feeding her power misleading cues.
Someone who moved like a martial artist with thirty years of experience had to be at least that old, right?
From there, her power skewed everything else to match that false baseline.
Age, education, relationships — all viewed through a false lens.
Garbage in, garbage out.
It didn’t explain everything, but the pattern was familiar enough for Lisa to recognize.
It didn’t matter for now.
But whoever this girl was — the one Lisa was trying to evoke —she was real. That much was certain, at least.
Shirou reacted to Lisa in ways that confirmed a strong, positive association.
Based on his subconscious comparisons — which Lisa had lost in certain areas but was probably another case of Rose-Tinted Glasses — the original had been around Lisa’s age.
And they’d been apart for a long time — long enough that the details were fairly worn off.
The timeline didn’t support an active romance.
Which meant Lisa’s power was probably wrong about that part.
Or misled.
Or, more likely, being fed junk data by the living contradiction that was Shirou Danvers.
Shirou Danvers has had romantic involvement with Designation: Twin-Tails.
Emotional reactions suggest long-term attachment.
Physical familiarity indicates detailed knowledge of subject’s anatomy.
Lisa stared at her own reflection.
Yeah, that kind of junk.
Except... no.
No, no, and no!
None of it lined up. Not the age. Not the timeline. Not the psychological profile.
The only other possible explanation was Brian’s unfortunate misunderstanding of Shirou’s business model being true. Lisa still had to deal with her teammate being weird about the boy’s last visit; and struggled to invent an explanation that did not involve a confession about blowing a Ward’s identity or her own preferences.
The doorbell interrupted Lisa’s thoughts.
Showtime.
“Hi, Danvers-kun! I knew you wouldn’t leave me in trouble!” Lisa opened the door with a teasing smirk.
“Lisa,” he said with a face set to factory-default annoyance, and walked in like he was punching a timecard.
Lisa’s hair and the red cardigan briefly caused his eyes to flicker. Not a stare, just a heartbeat of recognition. It was subtle but, with her power, Lisa didn’t miss subtle.
Hmm, that confirmed that as long as she stuck to the red top and black bottom look, it wasn’t particularly important what she was wearing. So long as it looked smart and classy at least.
Not Lisa’s preferred aesthetic — she liked calmer tones and casual wear — but she could deal. The real problem was the skirt. Lisa liked her legs, sure, but she also liked jeans and not freezing to death in early April. Still, sacrifices had to be made for tactical appeal.
“Why, Danvers-kun, with that surly face it’s almost as if you aren’t glad to see me at all,” she singsonged.
“I’m thrilled, I assure you,” the boy replied, dry tone and the resting bitch face not changing a bit. “Just show me what you need done.”
Faking an exasperated sigh, Lisa led him to the living room. A thoroughly trashed laptop sat on the coffee table, looking like it had been chewed by a particularly vindictive mutt.
Shirou gave her a flat stare. “How?”
“I had a friend over. Her dog got curious.” Lisa gave a helpless shrug. “Now I can’t even turn it on.”
Convincing Rachel to have Brutus gnaw it just enough for plausible damage without making it a paperweight had taken time. But Lisa wasn’t about to hand him a prop damaged by herself. She wasn’t sure how far he could stretch his object reading, so the cover had to be airtight; with several layers of separation.
“Tell me you can fix it,” she said, dialing her voice just shy of panic. “All my assignments are on there. If I can’t hand them in, I’m toast!”
“I’ll see what I can do. Now, give me space. Go make yourself a drink or something.”
“Thanks, Danvers-kun!” she chirped, heading to the kitchen.
She flicked the kettle on; the first low groan of heating water filled the silence. Steam soon hissed soft and steady, wrapping the kitchen in a damp warmth. Lisa leaned against the chipped laminate counter, faintly sticky under her palm, and kept Shirou in her peripheral vision while the smell of boiled tap water mixed with fancy black tea leaves bought at Captain’s Hill hung in the air.
Shirou pulled a few basic tools from his bag — pliers, a screwdriver — nothing that could fix the carnage Brutus had inflicted.
Of course not. The real work would be done by his power. Lisa saw how he operated back at the Ichirou’s. The boy had to be careful, because his matter-alteration power had a distinct visual effect. He went around it by avoiding outer layers and making sure no one was too close to notice.
Shirou gave her a suspicious glance when she brought him a mug of tea.
“Do you mind?”
“Relax,” Lisa said, holding up her hands. “I’m getting out of your hair.”
She made a show of plopping onto the couch, taking up space but angled just so she couldn’t see what he was doing behind the laptop. She watched as the faint tension in his shoulders receded when he started work in earnest.
The tactically placed mirror on the bookshelf remained undetected.
Subject exhibits behavioral shift preceding power activation.
Micro-muscular relaxation. Breath control. Focus convergence.
Physiological pattern resemblance: meditative trance.
Pattern consistent with ritualized self-induced altered mental state.
Trigger, vocalized: "Trace on."
Possibility: vocal command
Possibility: cognitive anchor.
Function: initiation of power protocol.
No obvious energy build-up. No corona activity. No known tinkertech interface.
Energy source – unknown.
Subject has initiated internal alteration of the device.
Observed variables: no tool interaction, no electronic interfacing, no welding or circuitry work, no *** connection.
External change minimal; internal configuration shift detected.
Thermal and vibrational signatures inconsistent with physical repair.
System state shift: damaged components rerouted, restructured.
Effect output exceeds expected result for tool-based repair.
Result: functional state restored.
Repair bypasses standard engineering constraints. Suggests matter manipulation via internally stabilized framework.
Level of control suggests touch-based molecular manipulation.
Hypothesis: unknown Striker-Tinker hybrid power.
Contradiction: subject lacks Corona Pollentia and Corona Gemma, lacks apparent *** signature.
Conclusion: insufficient data.
Activation schema: subconscious ritual imprinted via conditioning.
Possibility: cognitive implant.
Possibility: self-taught neurological power conditioning.
Secondary hypothesis: subject uses trance state to bypass emotional interfere...
Lisa put a lid on her power, to stop the veritable flood of information. It was entirely involuntary, and went into depth she wasn’t all that interested in.
Another weird thing about Shirou Danvers was that Lisa’s power latched on him aggressively. It wasn’t just the usual leaps of logic anymore. Whenever the boy used his power in Lisa’s proximity, a whole stream of data passed through her mind. She could, in real time, observe how conclusions were being drawn from disparate data points and hypotheses evaluated. Far cry from the usual ‘end-results only’, with the side benefit of giving Lisa additional precision. Usually, she had to pursue additional avenues to cross-reference the results. Here, Lisa could observe it happening automatically.
On the flip side, Lisa had to fight to keep it under control. Figuring out the mechanics of the boy’s power was not her priority.
And it almost felt like her power fought her back.
Was it another facet of Shirou’s weird Thinker defenses? Power interaction going haywire?
These questions did not trigger the flood of precise data.
“How’s the school?” she asked after a moment.
“Last time it was my family. Now it’s school. Why?”
“It’s called making a conversation.”
“Feels like an interrogation,” the boy complained flatly.
Lisa shrugged like he’d said something obvious. “Well, yeah. You’re an interesting guy, Danvers-kun.”
Shirou gave her a side-eye. She smiled sweetly.
In a lot of cases, blatant audacity was the best way to discourage suspicion.
“I mean, who ditches class to do charity work in gang territory?” she pressed. “That’s not something you see every day. Ichirou might be too grateful to pry, but I’m a curious girl.”
“It’s not charity,” he grumbled.
But you’re not surprised I came to that conclusion.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh? So it’s business, then?”
He ignored her.
Lisa cocked her head. “Let me guess — bartering services for ingredients? Because the Asian grocers in ABB turf stock better spices, wines, sauces, the good stuff?” she added a healthy dose of sarcasm to make it obvious how little she believed in it.
But that was how the boy explained it to himself, and the twitch of his eye was all the confirmation she needed.
“I can do math, Danvers-kun. You’re losing money on those trades. And I know you know it. So… why bother?”
Again, he didn’t answer. Just continued with quiet, deliberate focus on the laptop.
Lisa’s power prickled at the contradiction. She slowly eased her grip, focusing and keeping it on important topics.
Shirou Danvers wanted to help. That much was obvious to Lisa, to Ichirou, to Ayame and Lisa would bet all her payout from the casino job, that every vendor and stall owner in that market thought so as well. The boy went out of his way to help, even if it was inconvenient, stupid or dangerous.
But he also didn’t like being called a good person for it. There was the distinct feeling of displeasure rolling off him, whenever Ichirou or Ayame implied that.
Or rather, he didn’t want to acknowledge that he was helping. Why?
Cognitive friction: altruistic behavior minus emotional reinforcement. Internal dissonance unacknowledged. Subject derives satisfaction from success in others but is unable to contextualize that as personal value.
Lisa filed that away.
“You’re weird,” she prodded.
All she got in return was a grunt only her could read as confirmation. The boy knew he was weird.
“You ever actually enjoy it?”
He glanced up. “What?”
“Helping people. Making stuff work for them. I mean — I know you didn’t smile or look happy when you helped Ichirou, but… does it feel good? Just a little?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Lisa knew he would, though. The question was too provocative for the boy to leave it unchallenged.
“I don’t do it to feel good. It’s business,” he stressed.
Lisa smiled to herself.
Lie. Repressed emotional motive. Statement reflects internal rule: personal fulfillment equals invalid. Root structure: emotional reward conditional on external outcome.
Justification serves as a defense mechanism. Negative associations with altruistic behavior.
“Uh-huh,” she said aloud. “Sure.”
He shot her a look.
“I’m just saying,” she continued, “some people volunteer for credit. Some people do it for fun. Some because of guilt. You? I haven’t figured you out yet.”
“Don’t try.”
“Too late~,” Lisa sent him a mischievous smile.
She watched him work for a moment longer.
Perhaps she should try another angle.
“You know,” she drawled, after a bit of silence, “Maybe I understand why you do it after all. I’ve met people like you before.”
She hadn’t and she didn’t. No one helped others just for the sake of it. Money, favors, emotional validation — there had to be an incentive. This boy wasn’t an exception.
But it was the first time when Lisa saw someone going to such length for a comparatively little reward. Venturing into the ABB turf, losing money and actively not allowing himself to feel good about it?
Going out of his way to invent self-serving justifications for himself for why he couldn’t? Who does that?
Shirou pretended to grab another tool. “No, you haven’t.”
Lisa blinked.
There was a strange quality to that statement. Self-depreciating and final. Like a death sentence.
His uniqueness was a known quality to the boy. Only that quality equaled being defective in his mind. No, it went further than that. Not defective – unnecessary, excessive, redundant. Lisa struggled to find the right word to describe that.
And the way Shirou had said it was as if it wasn’t tragic. Just a fact.
A fact he was actively supporting.
Her power flared again.
Null reference for self-worth. No internal metric for emotional success. No intrinsic reward structure. No capacity for self-derived contentment.
Proxy validation system active: happiness routed through observed wellbeing in others.
Causal schema resembles inverted codependency model. Self-worth contingent on usefulness. Happiness inaccessible except through proxy.
Behavior consistent with operant conditioning or indoctrination. Timeframe unclear. Scope extreme.
Holy shit.
She sat in the silence of her apartment, the faint hum of her fridge the only constant underneath the sound of tools pointlessly scraping the laptop. The mug of tea was cooling in her hand, steam already gone, porcelain leeching the last of its warmth into her skin. The silence pressed down like insulation, making the ticking of her wall clock sound absurdly loud as her power gnawed at the edges of her thoughts.
Her hand reached for the phone just to hold it without checking. Something to ground her while her power continued unfolding possibilities like a deck of knives.
Primary anomaly: Subject exhibits habitual altruistic behavior but simultaneously rejects altruist identity.
Compensatory behavior when presented with contradiction: escalation of effort.
Compensatory justifications employed: 'pragmatism', 'necessity', 'utility', 'profit'.
Feedback loop: incomplete. Result: permanent dissatisfaction, suicidal tendencies
Lisa’s hand tightened around her mug.
A loud click broke her out of it. A moment later, cooling fans started to make noise, and the laptop chirped weakly to life.
Lisa blinked. “You actually fixed it?”
“The damage was mostly cosmetic,” Shirou lied. “I just fixed some internal connectors.”
Cosmetic her ass. The hard drive was bitten through.
“Glad to know I’m not failing my semester,” she said, pitching her voice breezy again. “Guess I owe you something.”
Shirou fixed her with unamused glare. “You owe me money.”
She leaned back on the couch and crossed her arms, studying him.
“I think you hate that people like you.”
That earned Lisa another sharp look.
“People at school. People at the market. Your friends. Your family.” She gestured with her mug. “They think you’re a good person. And it gets under your skin, doesn’t it?”
“I have no idea what are you talking about, Lisa,” he was starting to get irritated. “What’s your problem?”
“You know what your problem is?” she said cheerfully, like she wasn’t dissecting his soul in real time. “You’ve got this whole Terminator thing going. Like you’re trying to logic your way through morality.”
He arched a brow. “Terminator is that ‘Earth Aleph’ robot movie, right?”
Subject is deflecting the conversation.
Subject denies the existence of Earth Aleph.
...Not now.
Refusing to let the conversation go on a tangent, she sat back and tapped fingers against her shoulder.
“You fix broken things. You help people. You don’t take credit. You don’t want thanks. You act like you don’t care.”
“I don’t need to care. It’s business, Lisa. You get your stuff; I get your money.”
Partial truth used to mask incomplete self-awareness.
“You say that like caring is optional,” she countered.
He looked at her with great patience. Like someone explaining gravity to a toddler.
“Some people just do things because they want to, with no regards for consequences or what others think about it. Whatever you think I’m doing, I don’t do it because I care.”
Subject exhibits signs of self-dehumanizing behavior. Denies own capacity for human behavior, denies own capacity for human empathy. Considers previous comparison to the fictional depiction of machine intelligence apt. Subject does not perceive his own behavior as altruistic because altruism implies capacity for the opposite behavior.
Lisa bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from saying something sappy. Like “I see you.” Or “You have value.”
Instead, she made a face and stood.
“Tea’s cold,” she said pointing at the untouched cup. “You want anything else? I think I’ve got hot chocolate.”
He stood too. “I should go.”
Lisa didn’t argue and walked him to the door without pressing. She had already pushed as far as she could. A little more and he will start avoiding her.
Let him keep his pride. Let him believe he was leaving because he chose to and not fleeing because Lisa touched on something sensitive.
But before he left...
“Thank you, Danvers-kun!” she gave him a wicked smile. “You saved me!”
Shutting the door before his dumbfounded face, Lisa pressed her head against the wood and took a slow breath. She counted three seconds before she let herself breathe out.
For a about a minute, she just stood there, forehead pressed to the door, listening to the footsteps fading down the stairwell. Each step hollowed by concrete, growing fainter until all that remained was the ticking of the clock and the faint smell of wood polish from the doorframe. The apartment felt miserably cold.
“…Holy shit,” she repeated out loud.
She turned and leaned against the door, staring into her apartment like it might provide answers. Her mug sat abandoned on the table. The miraculously intact laptop was neatly closed and returned to its original position. A farewell tidy-up. Of course.
Lisa’s power was still running in the background.
Emotional logic framework established. Subject behavior consistent with maladaptive emotional conditioning.
Projection: subject requires external emotional response — happiness in others — as necessary precursor to personal affect response. Absent this trigger, subject defaults to emotional null state.
Self-worth: functionally hollow.
Motivation: not internally accessible.
Behavioral mode: ritualized altruism.
Internalized belief: altruistic trajectory leads to despair.
Solution: avoidance, denial.
Result: emotional null state.
Emotional feedback loop corrupted. Motivation detachment evident.
Perceived solution: self-termination.
Anomaly: self-termination considered impossible unless specific, unidentified conditions are met. Internal belief: Subject effectively cannot die.
Lisa closed her eyes and tried to trace the steps, shutting her power off.
There was clearly something deeply wrong with his head. Initially, Lisa thought she was dealing with someone passive and apathetic, in line with depression she had suspected the boy suffered from.
Turns out it went so much deeper.
He went out of his way to help, because that was the only way he felt good. No self-worth meant he derived sense of purpose from being actively useful to others, right? At the same time, he dislikes people pointing out his altruism, because it makes it harder for him to justify his behavior as self-serving. To himself, not others.
Why though? Why all these mental gymnastics? Because he got burned on his goody-two-shoes behavior? That doesn’t explain the rest of it!
What could have twisted a person’s mind into a pretzel with a bite taken from it? His trigger event wasn’t the reason, it was the first thing Lisa had checked!
If the mall was even his trigger event in the first place. Shirou was too well put together for his mental state to be a recent thing. Her power supported the idea the Teeth attack wasn’t his trigger event, but then it denied a trigger even took place at all!
The only sure thing was that Shirou was starving for the sense of self-fulfillment. He also denied himself the only source of that.
Why? What the fuck happened to him? It wasn’t his mother, or his sister, or the Adepts, or the Teeth, or Armsmaster... What then?
Why is he so fucked up?
Lisa slid down the door until her butt hit the flooring.
The worst part of this shitshow was that no one suspected anything. To everyone else, Shirou Danvers was all kinds of weird, but not a suicide case in the making, held back only by delusions of immortality. If that ever changed...
No one would see it coming. They’d miss it until he was gone. Until his sister entered his room one day and saw...
Lisa hid her face behind her knees and sniffled.
It was up to her again.
It had always been her belief, that if only she had realized Reggie was spiraling, if only she hadn’t missed clues, she wouldn’t have failed him. This time she was aware of the problem. This time she was older, smarter, and she had her power.
This time she had all the clues—and none of them made sense.
A/N
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Comments
Greisvandir
It's Luvia. As for her figure, it's not really exaggerated by anime standards, but compared to Worm's more realistic human looks... And that might not even be Prime Luvia, considering her age.
Wun Wong
Who is supposed to be the 'Cow'? It's not Kiara because she's not blonde and her personality is not crazy. Maybe Luvia? She has the over the top personality but she's not usually described with an exaggerated figure. Artoria Lancer in FGO Chaldea?
Jackal Zirson
As Eric said, this duplicity in Lisa's chosen persona actually puts her even further into the character Archetype Rin fulfils. I'm also really excited to see how Lisa responds when she figures out Archer wants to kill himself via paradox, and see her panic as the implications of that become clear.
eric
The most ironic part about all of this, is that even if Emiya finds out about the duplicity he wouldn’t even be mad. As much as she’s emulating Rin here, there’s still a good chunk of overlap between the two in the personality sense.
___ol___
It's "Fate Stay/Night", but it has multiple adaptiations, continuations, and was an eroge at start. My local Fate expert told me, it's a "Fate" (i.e., Saber arc) Shiro, who got to be a Counter Guardian. We see a bit of him in "UBW" arc (spoilers, sweetie!).
Gryfonides
What exact show is this Shirou from? I tried serching on the net, but the show has a dozen versions and none of them fit.
MeowMen
It is interesting, but I do think that you are stretching her powers past what it actually is. There could also just be that her shard is running overtime in finding something completely unknown.
___ol___
Ok, I did it again. Probably contradicts a bit, how Lisa's shard works. And I stole that like about Saber from someone's comments either here or on SB. *** There was a lot to unpack. The emotional state of a fifty-something burned-out hero, who did not got enough appreciation for his sacrifices. The burn-out was so deep, it seemed like he died multiple times, but still lived. Ac-tu-a-lly. Lisa thought, she was dismissing all the red flags because they contadicted with the obvious. The kid got an burned-out Eidolon psyche, but he is just a kid. The kid had multiple enormously gorgeous lovers, but he is like 13. The kid has got the proficiency and combat ability of a veteran soldier, including the ability to kill and vast experience of doing so. Ok, he killed during his trigger, but by far not enough. And he is a kid. All the signals, he is not a parahuman, but him performing all kinds of a parahuman act---fully according to his internal PRT ranking. Too many red flags. So, what if all that is not a false reading, a trigger-induced psychopathy, a noise signal by his power to throw her power off. Well, just some, like that "no power" fakeness. But not everything. This just means, the readings and infered information pieces are mostly correct. It's just that the kid is not actually a kid. It is obvious in the hind site. Shiro triggered around some capes affiliated with the Butcher. The Butcher himself might have been somewhere around. Trigger interference was a thing. So, a gloomy kid who grew up alone and somehow managed to bring up his sister, got _replaced_. Replaced with someone even broodier. Someone with a similar first years of life. Might it be a prerequisite? But someone with a much waster experience. That guy lived in London and got some education there. That guy slept with all that women, and with some of them for a longer period of time. That guy got the character of Eidolon on steroids, because he did not get enough appreciation. That guy did so much killing, that a murder does not move him at all. That was the guy, she was trying to tease. Damn. Lisa dialed in her power on a higher rate. She needed to check her conclusions. "Shiro is a reincarnate. Shiro has been reincarnating over at least ten thousand years of history to solve problems. His reincarnations were discarded afterwards. Shiro wants reincarnating to stop. Shiro acquired his psychological problems in this first life. Shiro was betrayed in his first life. The betrayal led to his death. His execution. Shiro had all previously inferred sexual relations in his first life. Shiro lived in a modern world in his first life. Shiro has sex with King Arthur in his first life. Shiro had sex with King Arthur and another woman at the same time in his first life. That woman was often wearing red and black. Shiro was the sole male during this sexual act. Shiro thinks, he has betrayed the ideals of King Arthur." "Oh, shut up. It's glitching again!"
Lord Fire Drake
Great chapter! Though I wonder what’s going to happen plot wise with Lisa’s focus on Shiro moving forward. Since this is another chapter dedicated entirely to this plot development.
