"Which suit combo do you think I should wear?"

I'd brought Cassandra to my bedroom to get her input on the outfit I would wear to the club where I'd be doing my first night of guard duty or whatever it was actually supposed to be. There was no uniform specified, which meant there was no option other than to crack out the lesbian pimp attire.

Cassandra considered it. "For this, I think I'd go with the violet suit option. It has the right over the top, trashy but luxury look."

I nodded. "Yeah, makes sense."

There were three combinations based on rotating around the common color scheme. There was the violet suit, which paired with a silky black shirt and a silver tie, a white suit, to pair with a violet shirt and either white or black tie, and a dark gray, faintly striped suit to go with a white shirt and violet tie.

The third was the most sensible, the kind of thing that you could wear into an office without anyone rolling their eyes.

The first two were equally dramatic in my opinion, and, as Cassandra put it, trashy. I felt like the white one would be better suited to either broad daylight or a more formal venue, though, and my understanding was that the club I'd be going to was not high end.

I also added the hat and the cane. If anything, it was those two items that really boosted the whole getup into a zone somewhere in the interior of a triangle formed between sexploitation, organized crime, and Nice Guy syndrome.

Kind of weird how that last one is the worst to have as an association. Like, aesthetically speaking.

As there was still a little bit of time left before we needed to leave, I decided to suck it up and check the media coverage of my Kaiju incident.

Oh, woah. It took, like, two seconds to realize that there was going to be a lot of coverage. Just typing the two letters 'la' into the search bar caused several of the autofill suggestions to be about me. Damn.

The first links I clicked were the ones that looked like they had good videos. Seeing my Kaiju self from an outside perspective was a treat. I look so absolutely terrifying. If I didn't know better, I would never guess that the titan in the video was a mere Tier 4.

Tier 7, probably? That would be the equivalent of a Tier 6 Guardian. Yeah, probably that. I would guess that if I didn't know, that I would guess somewhere between 6 and 8 in Anathema terms. However, six seemed a bit low and eight was crossing an extremely significant qualitative barrier.

A Tier 8 that big probably wouldn't have gone down so easily to Aurora like that. Not that Aurora would struggle, just that a Tier 8 mega-titan would put up more of a fight and not just stand around until it got cut in half.

After checking out some of the other video angles, I moved to reading the opinions of random people and bots on social media. Honestly, that was even more fun than seeing the videos.

Flipping through the reactions and opinions of thousands of strangers all speculating about me? Yes, please. Give me more of that. It was so entertaining that I lost track of time.

"Hey. Hey. Come on, it's time to go."

I blinked. Wait, what—oh. I realized Cassandra was talking to me, and then I remembered that I had originally been killing time before it was time to leave. Blinking some more, I turned off my phone and slipped it into my pants pocket. "Okay, let's go."

As soon as we were in Cassandra's car, I pulled out my phone and continued to read through social media posts related to what I'd done the day before. I was beginning to get the feeling that the taste of attention I was getting would do bad things to the trajectory of my impulse control and my ego.

Oh well. There were healthier ways to satisfy such hunger. Like maybe I'll actually try to become a pop star. That sounds cool. That was something I'd considered early on, back when I was first experimenting with my new, alien voice and learning how to not sound like a robot that swallowed a calliope.

With enough money, the connections I had with the Bouquet, and my growing musical capability—I think it might actually be possible? The problem was my identity. When in my original appearance, like I was right now, I could no longer stop myself from having a blatantly inhuman lower face and giant metal claws.

But that was problematic, because my original appearance was much better suited for making a career as a pop singer. Damn. I mean maybe I could just get Dr. DeVille to change things up again, but…

Well, it would be a massive hassle in multiple ways, and the experience was not something I was keen to relive.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I decided I would figure something out. I mean, it's not like Vonnie is ugly. She's not. She's actually really hot, but—hmm. Maybe I could work with that. A whole celebrity body positivity angle, but of course with someone who's still conventionally super attractive and is like, super curvy and stacked, you know?

I started to snicker. That is what celebrity bullshit is like, isn't it?

The rest of the ride was super boring, and it took way too long on account of heavy traffic. That was unfortunately a typical LA experience, but one that I was somewhat used to. I didn't like it, but I assumed I tolerated it better than I would have if I grew up in some small town in the middle of Maine or some shit.

I even got bored of screwing around on my phone. My head thunked against the side window, and I stared off into the darkening sky. We both have special powers. I can literally use mine to piggyback off her own teleportation. Did we seriously have to drive?

David Huntingfield

Luna was quite literally bouncing off the walls as she and Katherine's group of friends prepared for their night out. "Well at least someone's excited," the businessman overheard Mr. Hallison mutter.

David shook his head. It was an odd gathering taking place in his home—many things had been odd lately.

In the end, he was happy to have them. He didn't think it would be healthy to live alone anymore, especially at a time like this.

To a degree, David had known what he was getting into when he accepted the deal to raise Alex, and while some things had been a surprise, he'd always known more than he'd let on to anyone—that he still didn't let on.

What he didn't expect was to become as attached as he had, and perhaps, if he had never accepted the proposition, he would have been fine with keeping his personal life a fairly solitary affair.

But that wasn't how things turned out, and now that the initial shock was behind him, he was happy to have Ms. Legato and her niece around, as well as the other—David had never liked thinking of them as experiments, or test subjects, or even hybrids.

For a similar reason, he disdained using language like 'neutralizing' instead of just 'killing.' He spoke the way he had to, of course—that was one of the basic responsibilities of his position within the defense industry.

But in private, David much preferred saying it like it was. Weapons didn't neutralize, they killed, people didn't pass, they died, and he had an elevated amount of culpability in that.

Regardless, Luna was no replacement for Alex, but David didn't mind her staying around either. It kept the place lively, and while he wasn't a fan of crawling around the walls and ceiling in a way that gave him flashbacks to horror movies he saw at an age he really shouldn't have—well, there wasn't really any harm in it.

As for Mr. Hallison—David didn't quite trust the man yet, but he didn't have anything against him—well aside from being a musician, that is. David didn't consider himself to be one of the ghouls who had no appreciation for art or creativity, and boy, were there a concerning number of those in his professional life.

But still—not just a musician, but a famous pop musician? David felt like he was justified in starting off a little wary.

Someone in the living area clapped their hands to get attention. David peaked out of the kitchen, shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation. "Alright," Katherine said, "who's ready to go party?"

???

Aaron had by this point watched, rewatched, read, and reread every scrap of unique coverage of the recent mega-titan incident in Los Angeles. He didn't limit himself to the news media, but trawled through hundreds of social media posts and forum threads.

He downloaded all of it. Everything went into a hierarchy of organized folders, and at one point, he went so far as to create a collection of scripts to automate the task of searching and downloading related content.

Aaron was certain of it after the first hour—the titan was like him, that she was still alive, and that her name was Alexis Huntingfield.

That Saber intervened was telling, as was the lack of response from the military. Assuming, then, that the titan was indeed a hybrid like himself, there was no reason to believe that she had died.

The amount of damage Aurora inflicted before being chased off was unlikely to have been fatal for any Anathema that powerful, not without anyone else taking advantage of her vulnerable state to finish the job.

From there, the reasonable thing would be to focus on returning to her human form to escape undetected

If his initial assumptions held, and if that was the case, then the next step was to work on tracking down her human identity. That should have been where things got difficult, and Aaron expected them to—but to his surprise, doing so turned out to be easy.

It took all of five minutes for his surface level digging to reveal recent coverage of someone named Alexis Huntingfield, also in Los Angeles. There were several pictures of her wearing what appeared to be a suit of armor.

In one of those photos, metal wings 'feathered' with sharp blades sprouted from her back, causing her to live up to her chosen alias, 'Valkyrie.' What caught Aaron's attention most was the winged, metallic theme.

Comparing the images of Valkyrie to the recent mega-titan, the connection wasn't obvious—but Aaron's research had already uncovered earlier footage, where the mega-titan was still just a regular titan.

When compared to those images, the link was strikingly obvious. The nature of her wings was identical, the texture and color of the metal was similar, and both versions had thin veins of what looked like Adamantite running across their surface and plating their jaws and the tips of their claws.

As a Death Knight, Aaron was intimately familiar with those same materials and with a similar pattern of construction.

It was more than enough to convince Aaron that the mega-titan was none other than Valkyrie, real name Alexis. After that, he worked on identifying which Anathema type must have been used in her creation.

While Death Knights like himself were the most famous Anathema with a solid metal form, Aaron recalled that there were several others with a similar composition. A few searches later, Aaron identified her as an equally rare type known as a Chamelium.

There was no doubt about it. The pictures he found matched the early, smaller titan form perfectly, and in fact, one of the top results for pictures of Chameliums was the exact same picture, recently posted on an Anathema sightings forum.

Curious, Aaron searched through his stored social media data, which turned up several different comments from various posts on a few different sites also identifying the LA mega-titan as a Chamelium.

Aaron spent most of the rest of the day researching Alexis and Chameliums. He was always on the lookout for any females like him, and Alexis looked very promising. Given the magnitude of power she demonstrated in the videos, she might even be a Tier 8 like him, and so he decided to travel to LA to meet her.

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