The turbulence rattling my seat was a minor inconvenience. Overhead, luggage racks trembled, and two seats back, one compartment jerked open on its own, slamming into the head of a man who had been chattering non-stop for the past fifteen minutes.
I glanced back once. A thin, barely perceptible silver thread gleamed along that compartment's inner edge.
Returning my gaze to the laptop resting on my knees, I gave Irisviel a flat stare. Her avatar returned the look with a blank expression, head tilted at a slight angle, a movement characteristic of every Justeaze-type homunculus.
Our stares remained locked for two seconds. Then, she swiped her arm. A new window popped up on screen, pushing her avatar and the wallpaper behind.
That window displayed a blueprint of an Einzbern homunculus's internal structure. Each component was highlighted in a different color, shifting across the screen to illustrate their real-time movement.
My fingers flew across the keypad, the clattering of keys echoing through our surroundings.
Passengers from nearby seats glanced over: a woman with a raised eyebrow, a child trying to copy me by flicking his fingers through air, and a man who chuckled incredulously at my typing speed before shaking his head.
I didn't want to be disturbed.
"Irisviel."
Her avatar flickered at the top of that window. With hands clasped in front of her, she walked from one edge of the screen to the other, her white dress trailing behind.
Mid-stride, she raised a hand and snapped her fingers. Silver light bled from the laptop keys for a brief moment as her threads rustled beneath them.
Instantly, the sound of my typing vanished, restoring calm to our cabin.
Beside me sat Medusa, settled into a corner seat, watching a group of passing clouds through our cabin window.
For hours, she had remained like this, gazing at the world passing by outside, one finger curling her purple hair into a tangle, while her other palm rested calmly against glass.
A chime cut through the silence, disciplined and pre-recorded, followed by a voice.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We've reached our cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. Current flight time to Narita International Airport is approximately four hours."
Medusa's shoulders flinched at the words 'four hours', her head swirling around to land on my side, then snapping back to the window.
"Local time in Tokyo is 6:40 PM, and skies are expected to be clear on arrival. We do ask that you keep your seatbelts fastened while seated, as we may experience some light turbulence along the way. Thank you for flying with us."
That chime sounded again. Then quiet.
Four hours. I let that number sit in my mind for a moment. Not because calculations to reach back home required any meaningful effort. Flight time, fuel consumption ratios, and arrival trajectories had already been processed and filed the moment I booked our tickets.
Instead, that number sat there because I had noticed something else entirely.
Her flinch.
Medusa's shoulders had risen by approximately four millimeters at the announcement. Her head had turned toward me before snapping back with the forcefulness of someone caught reaching into a cookie jar.
One more thing: she was sitting slightly farther away from me than she had been at the start of our flight.
I noted this, and resumed typing.
The blueprint on my screen shifted alongside Irisviel's gestures, isolating its circulatory network and rotating it in a three-dimensional diagram. A cluster of anomalies near the throat region were flagged in red, marking areas for possible improvement I had identified hours ago.
My fingers continued. But those clouds outside Medusa's window were uniform, stretching in an unbroken white blanket around the aircraft, their tops curving and evenly lit by evening sun.
Weather-wise, they were unremarkable. From a visual standpoint, they were—
She's been staring at them for five hours and thirty-seven minutes.
My fingers paused over the keypad.
This thought line wasn't relevant to the blueprint or any homunculus circulatory analysis. So how did I arrive here?
Splitting off a portion of my thought stream, I let it chase an answer to that irregularity.
Then, I shook my head once, already typing again.
Her finger is still curling her hair.
The rate of curling has decreased in the last thirty minutes. This suggests a reduction in idle fidgeting, which in turn suggests—
Stop.
I blinked.
Those whispers had come from the same thought stream I'd split off to chase that irregularity, and instead of reaching a logical answer, it had become corrupted.
She moved away fromme.
I had told it to stop. It didn't listen.
She moved away from me, and I noticed. I noticed, and am thinking about it while there is work to be done. This is a deviation. This is—
"A problem?" Irisviel's voice came from my laptop's speaker, neutral and questioning.
I looked at the screen. Her avatar had turned toward me again, camera blinking green, cataloguing my breathing pattern.
"I didn't say anything."
She remained still at my words. "Your typing speed decreased, and you exhaled twice in succession. By your behavioral baseline, this indicates internal conflict."
A beat.
"Should I be concerned?"
"No," I replied.
"Understood."
Irisviel shifted away. But her threads twitched beneath the keypad, once.
Returning my attention to the blueprint, I watched its circulatory network rotate on screen, each zoom revealing deeper areas with possibilities for refinement. My fingers found their rhythm again, each keystroke a controlled impact against muted keys.
Time passed as I edited one location after another. It was especially easy, as I had already scanned Justeaze with my senses, providing me a framework to work from.
Another chime.
"Ladies and gentlemen, current flight time to Narita International Airport is approximately two hours."
Medusa squirmed in her seat, pulling her palm away from our cabin window to rest on her thigh. Her other hand slid her glasses back up.
I took a deep breath, and my senses pulled back one by one. Sound I could hear and catalogue from across the whole plane faded to nothing. The omnidirectional awareness and vision I always kept spread around me receded like a tide, halting centimeters from my body.
A mixture of a hundred different scents I had been processing, some pleasant, some not, went flat, like a tightening noose.
Finally, my touch dulled. Whereas before I could feel the air displacement of a person moving twenty seats behind the moment they moved, now I could barely feel the air conditioner's breeze.
With every sense suppressed and my focus sharp, I returned to that diagram.
More time passed.
Chime.
"Ladies and gentlemen, current flight time to Narita International Airport is approximately thirty minutes."
More fidgeting from my side.
A refinement near the spine might result in an overall increase in mobility by ten percent.
From nearby came the shuffling of movement, a slight hitch, the kind of pause that preceded a decision.
I didn't look up.
A slightly trembling hand tugged on my sleeve.
I turned in her direction.
"Ye—Mmmh."
Medusa struck.
There was no other word for it. One moment, the space near my lips was empty air. The next, there was warmth, soft, sudden, and gone.
It lasted for a fraction of a heartbeat. Her mouth pressed against mine. Lips on lips.
By the time my fingers stilled on the keypad, Medusa had already pulled away, once again looking out at those clouds.
Her long violet hair cascaded down her back like a curtain she was hiding behind, hands at her sides, fingers digging into the edge of our cabin window.
I stared at the back of her head, fingers hovering motionless. The cursor on screen blinked, once, twice, thrice.
What was that.
It wasn't a question.
Contact duration: 0.6 seconds. Location:Lower lip.Pressure: light. Temperature: warm. Lip texture:—
No. That wasn't the data that mattered. The data that mattered was something I couldn't quantify. A warm pressure sitting in the center of my chest, heavy and utterly, infuriatingly unclassifiable.
Medusa still hadn't turned around.
Her ears were red. The tips of them, just visible through her curtain of violet hair. Her shoulders had risen by a fraction of an inch, the only visible sign that she was anything other than a marble statue.
She was embarrassed after kissing me. An underhanded sneak attack, hit-and-run, and now she was sitting with her back to me, ears burning, pretending that the last five seconds hadn't happened.
...Interesting.
In our cabin window, her reflection was visible against the glass, flushed, the corner of her lips tugging upward by an inch.
Her reflection stared back at me.
I stared at it.
She was not looking at the clouds.She had not been looking at the clouds.
An inhale.
She had been looking at my reflection in that window.
From the very start.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
If Artoria and Medea knew, both would probably cry injustice. While they were fighting among themselves, someone got one up over both of them. Hahahaha!
Have a fun day, everyone!