Prompt: What if Charmeine possessed Scout instead of Columbus and learned about Sariel''s situation that way?


    Look, Manakel, you’re just going to have to trust me on this one. Even as she sent that mental message to her superior officer, Charmeine felt a rush of annoyance. She didn’t like explaining herself. Not when it came to things like this. She was the assassin, he was the doctor. Yes, their people were all suited for infiltration, for obvious reasons. But having the technical ability to do something didn’t mean one had the feel for it. I know the boy was one choice, but not the best.


    While she was sending that, the Seosten woman gave one last glance around the dark school grounds from her vantage point on the roof of the girls dorm. Her gaze settled on the nearest pair of security guards passing the nearby boys building. One of them looked directly at her, but between the darkness, her invisibility spell, and the fact that she was literally programmed to be completely undetected by all of the Crossroads defenses, he would see nothing. The Boscher never had the slightest chance. After a second of squinting that way, he turned back to his companion and the two of them continued on their way to check the next building on their route.


    You are the expert, of course. Despite his actual words, the tone of Manakel’s reply indicated nothing of the sort. Yet I can’t help but notice the fact that the boy would still provide access to the Chambers girl through her emotional connection to his sibling. Your proposed target is merely a member of the same team. A friend at best, and a new one at that. Columbus Porter is both that as well as the sibling to a budding romantic partner. The advantage seems to be his.


    Rolling her eyes, Charmeine pivoted away from the edge of the roof, pacing off the distance she needed to go. Just leave it alone. The girl will be better. She’s quiet and stays in the background, no one notices her most of the time. I can influence her twin, which gives us two votes on the same team. Her rifle scope will make it easy to track any of them when they try to separate for any reason. And if any of them get out of line, it’ll also make it easy to… handle the situation my way. Now leave me alone, go back to raising a zombie army or whatever you’re doing. I’m busy.


    In most respects, Charmeine didn’t care for humans. But there was one thing she envied, and that was the ability to slam a phone down onto the receiver when they were done talking. Simply tuning out whatever Manakel wanted to say after she was done with him wasn’t the same. Even their actual communicators only had buttons to press. It lacked the same satisfying tactile effect.


    Actually, come to think of it, the humans had switched to a system much like the Seosten communicators, hadn’t they? The one single communication advantage they’d had was that whole slamming thing, and they’d thrown it away. Never mind, humans were worthless after all.


    Positioning herself in the right spot, she knelt down and plucked another spell coin from her belt. That one made her intangible, allowing the woman to descend through the roof. The first room she reached, that of a Crossroads senior, was empty, its normal occupant off on a mission. The next two beneath that held their sleeping students, none of whom paid the intangible, invisible figure any mind. The alarms that should have woken them the moment an intruder entered the building, let alone came within feet of them, had been compromised since the school was created. Let them sleep, utterly incapable of even fathoming how much of their education was simply preparing them for an existence as tools for the Seosten to throw against the Fomorians.


    Finally, she was there, in the Mason twins’ room. Both girls were sound asleep, Sandoval splayed out sideways on her own bed with one leg hanging off and her actual pillow pressed into the corner of a partly-open drawer of the nearby dresser so her head could rest on that. It looked supremely uncomfortable, yet she snored peacefully away with no apparent issues whatsoever.


    She was also irrelevant to the mission at hand. Turning away as soon as she was satisfied that Sandoval was still cluelessly slumbering, Charmeine focused on the actual target. Sarah Mason, or Scout as she preferred to be known (that was important to remember if she was going to adequately portray the little girl without arousing any suspicion), was at least sleeping in the bed in a normal position. More evidence that the Seosten woman had chosen the right twin to target.


    Then something… strange happened. Even as Charmeine took those last few steps to the girl, Scout’s eyes opened. She sat up, staring directly at the intruder. It was… impossible, to say the least. Charmeine was invisible, intangible, and plugged into any and all security measures the facility had. And yet, Scout was looking right at her. It was enough, in that moment, to briefly unnerve the woman. She, one of the Seosten Empire’s best infiltrators and assassins, stopped short, caught entirely flat-footed as this human child woke up and stared at her unblinkingly.


    That continued just long enough for Charmeine to very nearly make a move to silence the girl before she could do more than stare. Then she realized Scout wasn’t exactly staring at her. She was staring toward her. She didn’t actually see her. It was as though something had prompted this human child to wake up and look at least in her general direction. Against all odds, despite all of Charmeine’s advantages, Scout Mason still had at least some vague idea that she was there.


    Now there was absolutely no question about it, she had definitely chosen the right one to target.


    Nothing happened for several long seconds. It was as though the child felt like there must be someone there, but didn’t quite entirely trust that it wasn’t her own paranoia, or the product of a dream. Scout simply sat there, staring in Charmeine’s direction, while the Seosten woman remained frozen. She had no idea what she could’ve done that would have woken the girl up, and now she was arguing with herself about whether moving before her target settled down would cause more problems than it solved. Especially with her twin right there in the other bed.


    Not that silencing both of them and erasing their memories would be difficult, but still. It was better to avoid any possible complications. If nothing else, the idea that Manakel would be able to say he told her so was enough to make her stand still for several hours if that was what it took.


    Sure enough, only another handful of seconds passed before Scout began to lie back down. Or rather, made a motion as though she was lying back down. If she had been any less focused, any less perceptive, any less trained, Charmeine might have missed it. But she could read the girl’s body language. She wasn’t actually lying down. She was pushing herself into a roll that would take her off the bed and onto the other side, allowing her to use that as cover for a precious second while she grabbed the rifle that was leaning up against the wall right there.


    Charmeine was still certain that the girl couldn’t literally see or detect her exact position. But apparently she trusted her instincts enough to believe something or someone was actually there, and now she was going to try to--well, shoot her or something. That part wasn’t as clear. Either way, she couldn’t let it happen. This wasn’t going as nearly as smoothly as she’d planned, but she absolutely was not going to allow this tiny human child to completely derail everything. After what she’d said to him on the roof, Manakel would never let her live something like that down.


    Scout was also attempting to shout something, but her voice had been completely muted by a quickly-triggered spell in the very instant that Charmeine realized what was happening. The entire room was covered by a dome of silence that would ensure no one inside or outside heard anything. Or saw anything through the window, for that matter. The human child was on her own.


    She was also very quick, but not quick enough. By the time she’d landed on the floor and had her hand halfway to the rifle, Charmeine was already there. The Seosten boost allowed her to leap straight over the would-be obstruction, landing next to the child before her hand snapped down to touch her neck. And just like that, the entire ‘conflict,’ such as it could be called that, was over.


    At least, the physical one was. There was, of course, still the process of dominating the child’s mind and forcing her to submit to control. But that was hardly an issue. After all, Charmeine was an Olympian Seosten, empowered by Tartarus with thousands of years of experience. Scout Mason was a human child who had become a Boscher Heretic barely a couple months earlier.


    The very instant she possessed that child, Charmeine froze her motor functions. Scout’s fingers stopped barely a hair’s distance from her rifle. She stopped completely, at least on the outside. Inside, she bucked like a wild Korgnok. Similarly, her voice, which had been silenced by the muting spell, screamed almost painfully loud inside her own head. The sudden fierceness of it actually startled the Seosten woman briefly, and she felt--she felt a push against her. Oh, it was nowhere near enough to actually expel her. Not even close. But she shouldn’t have been able to even feel that much. This small human child, so unremarkable in every way, had actually, for just a second, managed to make her stumble slightly. It was just that scream, that deafening mental scream that came in the second she possessed the girl. That caught her somewhat off guard. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    And that was the point, she realized just as quickly. The child had actually realized, somehow, what was probably about to happen and had come up with the only defense she could in that brief second. She had tried to take Charmeine by surprise with a deafening mental scream at the very moment of the possession, hoping to shove her back out before she could actually recover.


    It didn’t work, exactly. but it did make the Seosten stumble in her control. It was a punch in the nose from something--someone that she had absolutely never believed could land such a blow.


    Perhaps it would have been odd to some that Charmeine wasn’t angry about that. Many who had only the slightest understanding of her would have assumed she would be apoplectic about a small, pathetic human child doing the possession equivalent of punching her in the nose. And yet, it was that simple thing, as much of a failure as it might have been in the long run, that truly made this child intriguing. What in the Void could she have gone through that would make her so adaptable, so ready to defend herself against even something like this? She had sensed the presence of Charmeine, and had acted on that instinct. Then, in the second she was actually possessed, she had tried a long-shot defense that actually managed to bruise the woman.


    The truth was that Charmeine had had very little to no interest in the child’s mind or history up until this point. She was a means to an end, a convenient body to take over and use to get close to the Chambers girl and find out what method she was using to protect herself against being  possessed. Not to mention finally finish their mission with Hannah, or Avalon, whatever she called herself. Scout had been completely inconsequential beyond her physical proximity to those two. But now? Now Charmeine was intrigued. She needed to know more. She needed to know everything that had happened to make this girl be what she was. She needed to dive deep into her most important, vital memories to understand exactly who Scout Mason really was.


    Maybe some of her crewmates (heh, still thinking of them as her crewmates even so many centuries after most of them had split up probably said something about her) would have taken the time to say something to the human girl they had just possessed. Some would reassure her, try to make a deal with the child to calm her down and keep the peace. Others would taunt her, just because it was an easy way to provoke the target into getting emotional and tiring themselves out, or exposing any secrets they had. Charmeine did that sometimes. But right now, the only thing she cared about was searching this girl’s memories, not actually talking to her. It was doubtful that she would have anything interesting to say anyway. At least until she got it through her thick human skull that she was trapped and there was nothing she could do about it. Charmeine really didn’t feel any desire to sit through listening to all those protests and pleas. Once the brat had had plenty of time to wear herself out with all the meaningless ranting and whatever else she thought would get her out of this, maybe it would be worth talking to her. But for the moment, digging directly into her memories was the best way to find what she needed.


    To that end, she reached for emotional feelings, things that had made a dramatic impression on the girl. Her mother had disappeared at sea, hadn’t she? Something about a monster on the boat, which this girl had been there for and witnessed. Honestly, Charmeine had barely paid attention to that info dump when Manakel had gone through the irrelevant team members, but she was pretty sure it was something like that. So it was probably a good place to start digging.


    Where… where… okay there it was. Right at the forefront of her mind, actually. She had been thinking about it at the exact moment when Charmeine took her. Which only proved it would be important. Though she was dwelling on some moment just before the actual trip, back in the bedroom when her sister had chosen to stay behind because she was too tired to go on the boat. The human child kept replaying that moment over and over again, thinking about what would have changed if both she and her twin had convinced their mother not to go out that day.


    Sitting in her mind, the Seosten woman impatiently pushed the memory forward. She didn’t care about sitting through a human child’s emotional recriminations and what-ifs, she needed to see what had actually happened that day. There just had to be something important to see in that.


    Okay, finally, they were on the boat. The child was babbling on about whales, but just as Charmeine was about to shove the memory forward once more, the child’s mother thankfully interrupted and told her they were going to talk about something serious. She wanted the child to keep a secret from everyone, even her own sister and father. This sounded like it was important.


    If it had anything to do with whales, Charmeine was going to scream. And maybe kill something.


    But no. No, it was something else. It was a person. The mother wanted the child to meet some ‘friend’ of hers who had helped her a long time ago. Someone she had to keep secret from everyone else. She had to keep them a secret because this person was a Stranger, someone who had clearly taught this woman entirely too much. This, this was what Charmeine had been waiting for. Obviously, the mother had met someone who had been involved in the old Boscher rebellion, who taught her about the Seosten. They’d probably given Scout some very rudimentary possession resistance tricks. Hell, maybe the mother wasn’t even actually dead. Maybe she had disappeared intentionally to go with this rebel for whatever reason, and Scout had only become so quiet and withdrawn for so long due to the pressures of keeping that secret for so long. Yes, that made sense. Now all Charmeine had to do was find out who this person actually was and maybe track them back to whatever nest they were hiding in with… with all the… with the…


    Sariel?


    It was her. It was Sariel. She was right there, appearing with a beam of golden light before greeting the other woman by name. Larissa. She called her Larissa, then embraced her. The two murmured something to each other, before separating.


    Sariel was there, seven years ago. That was impossible. It was impossible. Charmeine knew for a fact that Sariel had been taken into custody by the Seosten authorities for turning her back on their mission ten years ago. She was enjoying what amounted to a ‘retirement’ of sorts, until she could be convinced to rejoin her people and fight the Fomorians once more. She had gone native, married a human, and… she needed help. So she was getting that help. At some point in the future, she would be released and would come back to the fold, once she was finally better.


    Except she was here. Or she had been here. Three years after she should have been safely in the hands of the Seosten doctors so they could help her, she was right here back on Earth. But how? How could she possibly have come back to Earth three years after being imprisoned? And why wouldn’t Charmeine and the rest of her former crew have heard about her escape at all? This was wrong, it didn’t make any sense. What in the very pit of the void was going on here?


    Shocked into--well she had been silent the entire time, but shocked into simply absorbing what came next, she watched as Sariel interact with this human child, who claimed she wasn’t afraid of anything. That seemed to amuse the Seosten woman. At least for a moment, then she was suddenly ordering Larissa to take the child and get off the boat, just before… just before everything went wrong. Suddenly, a tentacle shot into view, caught Sariel by the throat, and flung her into the deck.


    Fomorian. It was a Fomorian, here, a Fomorian here in the Crossroads pocket dimension!?


    The helpless human child was being thrown across the deck by her mother to the cabin and told to hide. Sariel was right behind her, urging her to hide under the bed and stay there no matter what happened.


    And she did. Through the Fomorian copying her mother’s voice and trying to coax her out, through Sariel apologizing, through… through all of it, through the monster, her mother, and Sariel herself disappearing permanently, the girl stayed under the bed. She stayed there until her father came. Then… well more things happened, the memories probably continued. But Charmeine wasn’t looking at them. She took the memories back to when Sariel had been on the deck, before the Fomorian arrived. Sariel and Larissa had embraced, then said something. Scout had been too stunned and confused to really pay attention, but some part of her had heard their words. The voices were there in her memory, and with effort, Charmeine could tune out all the other noise, the ocean waves, the ship engine, the child’s own distracting thoughts. She could mute all of it and focus only on those very soft words.


    “Is she still keeping you locked up in the same place?” Larissa asked.


    “Kushiel is not someone who changes her mind,” Sariel replied. “As long as they allow her to continue her breeding experiments, I will be there.”


    That was all they said. It wasn’t nearly as much information as Charmeine would have preferred, but it was enough to… draw some conclusions.


    Kushiel. There was only one Kushiel she could be referring to. She had Sariel locked up in… in some breeding lab? What? That wasn’t--Sariel was supposed to be getting help. She was supposed to be… not… not with Kushiel. Kushiel hated her, and always had. She hadn’t made any sort of secret about that. Why would their leadership leave Sariel with her?


    Slowly, Scout’s body straightened up. She stood next to her bed, turning to look at her sister for a moment before sitting down. Finally, Charmeine stopped ignoring the girl. She had been saying things that entire time, but none of it had mattered.


    Be silent, human, Charmeine interrupted, cutting the girl off entirely. I have questions for you, and you will answer them. But count your blessings, because I had thought to suppress you entirely. It seems, however, that you may have your uses beyond my mission.


    She paused then. For a moment that stretched on longer than it should have, both of them were quiet. Finally, she took a mental breath, as the image of Sariel, and that of Kushiel both appeared in her mind. She saw them as they had been the last time Charmeine had witnessed them together. Then she thought of Kushiel having Sariel now, having her trapped, imprisoned, breeding her in some lab. She thought of how much that… creature had always hated Sariel. She thought of everything Kushiel had ever said about the other woman.


    She thought of Sariel being at the mercy of Kushiel.


    Something had to be done. Sariel was… she was something adjacent to a friend. She couldn’t be left in the hands of that woman, not when she had made her intentions for Sariel so clear. But if Kushiel had Sariel in a prison lab, it was because the authorities were allowing it. Which meant she couldn’t go through the proper channels. Which meant the only way to find any more information…


    Scout… Sarah Mason, you will be silent and listen to me. My name is Charmeine.


    And we are going to find your mother.