First Person: The Defense of the Cosmic Idiot
Chifuyu's sentence hung in the air, cold and heavy: "I don't know if I should lock you up for life or put you on a petri dish and study you."
Both options sounded terribly unpleasant.
The silence that followed was my cue. In any interrogation, silence is a weapon. It's used to make the subject uncomfortable, to make them fill the void with information. I had used that technique hundreds of times. Now, they were using it against me. But my brain, finally cleared of alcohol fumes and filled with the lucid clarity of terror, saw an opportunity. A very, very small one. The opportunity to speak.
I lifted my head, meeting Chifuyu's gaze. "I should probably start by apologizing for... well, for the vomit," I said, my voice sounding surprisingly stable. "And for the party. And for the rooftop. And for stealing the Mop-Bot. It's been a very weird week for me."
My attempt at humor was met with glacial silence. Tough crowd.
"Look," I continued, leaning forward as much as the cuffs allowed. My tone shifted, becoming more serious. "I don't expect you to understand. You just saw a recording from my world, or at least the stupidest part of it. Where I come from, life is... different. We don't have giant robots or floating academies. We have bills, traffic, and constant pressure. And sometimes, people need an outlet."
I gestured with my head towards the now-black screen. "That party... it was an outlet. A stupid, chaotic, dangerous ritual to release pressure before it makes you explode. Was it a smart decision to drink something called a 'Particle Accelerator'? Clearly not. But at the time, it seemed like a good idea. Most bad decisions do at the time."
My gaze moved from Chifuyu to the girls in the back. "And then, the rest... waking up in a hotel, in a world that isn't mine, with a complete stranger and a cat in a hat? There's no manual for that. There's no FBI training protocol for accidental transmigration. I was acting on instinct, and my instincts were severely compromised by sake and existential panic."
I tried to appeal to their logic, to their trained pilot mentality. "You have rules. You have parameters. You live in an ordered world. I was ripped from mine and thrown into yours without an instruction manual. Every action I took, from the takoyaki to the stupid dare to climb your building, was the action of a drowning man, desperately searching for something to cling to."
I paused, letting my words sink in. It wasn't an excuse. It was an attempt to contextualize the madness. To frame myself not as a villain, but as a tragic idiot.
For a moment, it seemed to work. I saw a hint of doubt in Houki's eyes, a spark of empathy in Charlotte's. Even Ichika seemed to be nodding slowly, as if the idea of acting without having any idea what was going on felt very familiar.
But not everyone was convinced.
"Unacceptable!" a voice with a clear British accent exclaimed.
Cecilia Alcott stepped forward, her face flushed with indignation. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides.
"An outlet? A ritual? What we witnessed was barbarism! A complete lack of decency, honor, and self-control! To blame your 'circumstances' for such deplorable behavior is the height of cowardice!"
She strode to my chair, her index finger pointing at me like a weapon. "In my country, in any civilized country, a man your age would be held responsible for his actions, not hide behind excuses of parties and culture. You are not a victim. You are a vandal. A barbarian!"
Her face was inches from mine, her blue eyes blazing with righteous fury. She was so engrossed in her sermon that she didn't notice how close she was.
And I, in my attempt to seem more sincere, to connect with her, made a mistake.
"Miss Alcott, Cecilia, I..." I began, trying to rise slightly to meet her gaze at her level, to show respect.
But I forgot the cuffs.
The movement was clumsy. The chair wobbled. I lost my balance, and my body pitched forward and to the right. My hands, joined by the cuffs, flailed in the air, uselessly searching for something to break my fall.
And in that awkward, pathetic movement, the back of my fingers brushed against something at her neck.
Something small, metallic, and warm.
Her pendant. Her IS standby device.
Third Person: The Light That Broke the World
The contact lasted less than a second.
But it was enough.
The instant Leo's skin grazed Cecilia's intricate device, the sterile white interrogation room was flooded with a blinding blue light.
A high-pitched, piercing whine, the shriek of a million kilobytes of data being forced through a channel they shouldn't, filled the air. The overhead lights flickered and died, plunging the room into momentary darkness, broken only by the supernatural glow emanating from Cecilia.
The girls shrieked, startled. The guards instinctively raised their weapons.
Particles of light, the famous "glows" that signified the deployment of an Infinite Stratos, surged from Cecilia's pendant. But they didn't swirl around her in an orderly, graceful fashion. They exploded outwards, chaotically.
Inside Leo's mind, it was a violation. He felt an avalanche of incomprehensible information flooding his brain. Telemetry data, sensor readings, combat protocols... it was like trying to drink from a fire hose. The System in his head screamed a single word before overloading.
[ANOMALY!!!]
Around Cecilia, the IS "Blue Tears" tried to materialize, but it was a corrupted, fragmented manifestation.
A massive shoulder thruster, designed for space maneuvers, appeared over her right shoulder, flickering in and out of existence like a poorly tuned television image.
One of her drone "bit" units, the Blue Tears' primary weapon, formed in the air beside her. It was solid for an instant, then dissolved into a shower of blue static.
The barrel of her Starlight Mk. IV sniper rifle, one of the world's most precise weapons, appeared halfway, translucent and distorted, before vanishing with a sound like shattering glass.
It was a failed deployment, a technological abortion. But it was, undeniable and unequivocally, a deployment.
Cecilia stumbled backward, hand clutched to her neck, her eyes wide with shock and a profound sense of violation. Her IS, an extension of her soul, the pride of her country, had responded. It had responded to the touch of another man. A man who shouldn't even be capable of registering on their sensors.
The blue light faded as quickly as it had appeared, plunging the room back into the harsh white light of the now-restored fluorescents. The ghostly pieces of the Blue Tears vanished, leaving only the smell of ozone and a thunderous silence.
The silence of a paradigm that had just shattered.
Second Person: You've Crossed a Line You Didn't Know Existed
And there you are, back in your chair, blinking against the spots of light dancing in your vision. The hangover headache is child's play compared to the data migraine that just assaulted your brain. You don't understand what just happened, not really. You just know the air in the room has changed.
It's no longer tense. It's volatile. It's the air of a room where a bomb has just been activated, and no one knows when it's going to explode.
You look at the faces around you. Disbelief is the universal emotion.
Lingyin is agape, her scientific eyes darting from you to Cecilia, trying to comprehend the impossibility she just witnessed. Laura has adopted a combat stance, seeing you no longer as an intruder, but as an unknown weapon of unlimited potential. Houki, pale as a ghost, simply shakes her head, muttering "impossible" over and over.
Ichika Orimura, the only man in the world capable of piloting an IS, stares at you with an expression of complete and utter astonishment.
"You... you also...?" he whispers, and in his question there's a universe of implications. His only quality, the one that defines him, that makes him special... is no longer unique.
You look at Cecilia. She's still backing away, hand clutched to her neck, looking at her own hands as if they aren't hers. The expression on her face is one of pure horror. You've touched more than just her pendant. You've touched the core of her identity as an elite pilot.
But all those reactions pale in comparison to Chifuyu Orimura's.
She has moved to the center of the room. Her previous exasperation has been erased, replaced by a terrifying calm. It's the calm of a hurricane's eye. Her face is a granite mask, but her eyes... her eyes burn with an intensity that chills your blood.
You realize a terrible truth. The party. The drunkenness. The stupidity. All that was manageable. It was a disciplinary problem, a security incident. It could have ended with a cell, deportation, or strange experiments.
But this... this is different.
You have broken the fundamental rule of their universe. You have demonstrated an ability that, by all the laws of their science, you should not possess.
You are no longer an idiot. You are no longer a prisoner.
You are an anomaly. You are a turning point in history. You are the most dangerous secret on the planet, and you are chained to a chair in the heart of the world's most secure facility.
Chifuyu doesn't look at you. She looks at the security guards who are still pointing their weapons, indecisive. Her voice, when she speaks, is low, but it cuts through the air like a diamond. There's no trace of emotion in it. Only absolute authority.
"Secure him."
The guards hesitate, looking at the scene.
"NOW!" she roars, and the word is a thunderclap that shakes everyone to their core.
The guards rush, not at you, but at the exits. One of them sprints to a panel on the wall.
"No one enters. No one leaves this room," Chifuyu continues, her voice returning to a lethal whisper as she turns to face you. "Cut all external communications. This facility goes into full lockdown. Initiate 'Eclipse Protocol'."
The room's door slams shut with a dull thud and the sound of multiple bolts sliding into place.
You are sealed in. The outside world no longer exists.
You've gone from being a problem to being an extinction-level crisis. And the only person who holds the keys to your cage now looks at you as if you are the key to everything... or the end of everything.