Hidden by Fog

“And Mel— Melki— Chicka—” Kasumi stammers, tripping over her words as she reads.

“Melchizedek,” Momo corrects, her pronunciation as flawless as her stance as she draws an arrow and takes aim at the target. The March 11th sun is barely over the horizon, turning the dense spring fog gold. The pair are at the Hattori residence’s archery range, Kasumi reading from the Bible as Momo performs her morning practice. Despite the thick fog choking the neighborhood streets, the archery range is clear as glass thanks to Kasumi’s power keeping the fog at bay.

“Melchizedek,” Kasumi resumes, correcting her pronunciation. “Who was king of Salem and also a priest of the Most High God, brought bread and wine to Abram, blessed him, and said, ‘May the Most High God, who made heaven and earth, bless Abram! May the Most High God, who gave you victory over your enemies, be praised!’ And Abram gave a tenth of all the loot he had recovered to Mal— Melciz— Mel-chi-ze— Momo!” Kasumi whines, dropping the Bible to her lap and turning to Momo.

“Yes, Kasumi?” Momo asks, keeping her sleepy eyes focused on her target.

“Can’t we do something else? I’m too tired to learn anything like this.”

“Too tired for scripture but awake enough to perform your ‘dailies,’ I believe you call them?”

“That’s different,” Kasumi pouts. “I wasn’t able to do them last night because of…” The words catch in her throat as fog spills over the range wall. “Because of what the Metropolitan said last night,” is what she’d wanted to say, but even thinking about it threatened to reopen the fresh emotional wounds. “Because I was busy last night,” she says, pushing the fog back over the wall.

“Oh, I’m well aware; you weren’t the only one awake till the ungodly hours of the night,” Momo scoffs. Though I suppose in your case it wasn’t because you had to console a certain someone bawling uncontrollably till her tears ran dry.” She releases her fingers, sending the arrow flying.

*Fthmp*

The arrow buries itself deep into the straw target’s bullseye, fighting for space among the other arrows already making the bullseye look more like a porcupine than a target. “Someone who shall remain unnamed,” she continues, finishing her form and raising an eyebrow at Kasumi, who looks down at the book in her lap. “Despite her adamant refusal to explain why she was so distraught, despite my begging, I might add.”

Momo takes a moment, staring holes in Kasumi while Kasumi refuses to meet her gaze. The fog begins creeping onto the range again as the words hang. After a deep yawn, Momo steps from the archery line toward the chair Kasumi is sitting in. Kasumi continues staring at the floor where Momo’s feet stand resolute. Momo’s bow twirls in her hand as she fiddles with it.

“Kasumi… I won’t pretend to know what set you off last night.” Her tone is calm and consoling, like a mother comforting a crying child. “But I can’t, in good faith, simply stand by doing nothing while someone I care about is suffering.” She leans on her bow like a shepherd’s staff as Kasumi still refuses to meet her gaze. “Reading scripture always helps me when I’m feeling down. If it doesn’t help you, then why not tell me what will, so I can help you?”

The air is still between them for a long moment. Neither says a word nor moves as the fog slowly creeps its way back onto the range. Finally, Kasumi takes a deep breath and opens her mouth.

“The king of Sodom said to Abram, ‘Keep the loot,’—” Kasumi says, resuming her reading.

“Ugh!” Momo scoffs, turning from Kasumi and snatching up her empty quiver. She stomps over to the target, yanking the arrows free and tearing off the marksman paper. The thick construction paper tears like tissue in her hands, so she doesn’t bother replacing it with a new sheet. Instead, she stomps back up the range, slams her bow back on the rack, and heads to the entrance.

“I’m taking a bath,” she declares, not turning back to Kasumi. “You can jump through after me.”

With that, she slams the sliding door. The clack of wood on wood echoes through the house, followed by her thumping footsteps. As the footsteps grow farther and farther away, Kasumi sighs, closes the book, and leans back in her chair to look up at the cloudy sky.

“I definitely lost some affection points there,” she thinks, processing the exchange in the only way she knows how. Despite the rocky start, they’ve definitely grown closer over the months, especially after her baptism on Theophany just after New Year’s. If asked, no doubt any of their classmates would peg them as friends, even best friends, and for a while, that has felt like an adequate term to Kasumi.

“But that just doesn’t feel like the right word anymore,” she concludes, leaning back in her chair. Their relationship has changed, especially since she became a Maiden. They’ve begun going on missions together and meeting almost every day, even outside school. “Can you really keep calling them a friend when…?” Kasumi wonders, thinking about examples of friendship she’s seen in anime and games. “Is ‘friend’ the best word when you care about them most in the world? When you go into life-or-death battles with them, trusting they have your back? When you have pleasant dreams of embracing her from behind while she’s cooking in nothing but an—”

“Ah—oof,” Kasumi groans, falling backward with her chair. The fall is more shocking than painful, so she feels no compulsion to roll or get up. Instead, she lies there looking up at the sky. As the fog slowly consumes her, she watches a plane leave a line in the sky and has an epiphany.

From her perspective, the plane seems small and slow, even though she knows planes are both huge and the fastest way to travel. But if she hadn’t learned that from TV or someone telling her, then there would be no way for her to know.

“So since Momo is my first and only friend (if ‘friend’ is still the best word to use here), I have nothing to compare it to.” It makes sense, to her at least, much like how riding a horse would seem slow and uncomfortable to someone used to driving a car, yet be the height of speed to someone who’d only ever traveled on foot.

“I just need to compare to other examples,” Kasumi concludes, pulling out her phone. In no time, she is scrolling through a list of favorite shows, movies, and games to find ones she can use as references. It’s a struggle at first. She has never been that fond of magical girl media, and the few she is familiar with never seem to take the time to explore the bond of friendship between the characters. In her experience, the shows usually spend more time depicting bombastic fight scenes or indulging in drawn-out fan service. The idea that this sentiment said more about the media she consumes than the genre as a whole never crossed her mind.

As she scrolls, she also realizes her Bible is no longer on her lap. She knows it has to be on the floor somewhere nearby, but the dense fog makes it difficult for her to see her phone screen, let alone where the book has slid to. Furthermore, even if Momo comes back, it’ll be a simple matter for Kasumi to detect its exact position in the fog and snatch it up before Momo is ever the wiser.

Kasumi finally pulls herself away from her phone once she feels a faint twitch in a new source of fog she hadn’t felt before. Kasumi smirks, unable to control her glee at discovering a new application of her power. She’d been disappointed with it at first, who wouldn’t be when your partner can summon divine weapons while you can only manipulate fog? But the more she experiments, the more applications she finds.

“So I can detect the position and movement of man-made steam, handy,” she thinks, adding it to her log. She concentrates further and begins mapping out the position of every water molecule in the air. Reading it like a sonar picture gave her an idea of where the fog was and what was around it from the gaps. The image itself was rough, but gave her just enough detail to picture the dimensions of the room containing the steam, the tub of water that generated it, and even the person moving within that room. Her ability to manipulate and perceive through fog already makes her an exceptional stealth class. She still struggles to move silently through the fog, which prevents her from sneaking up undetected and launching a surprise attack. Still, once she masters generating electricity within her fog, Momo assures her she’ll be able to take out hordes single-handedly before they ever know she’s there.

“Guess I should try and regain those affection points,” Kasumi whispers to herself. “Wouldn’t want to miss my next opportunity for a— Gah!” she groans, feeling a thin trickle of blood flow down from her nose. She tilts her head back and sniffs, holding pressure on the bridge of her nose.

“Why’s this been happening so often lately?” she wonders, stumbling into the house in search of tissues, leaving her Bible on the floor where it fell.