Flipside: Assessement and Revelations - Part 2

“Contact? You know she’s full of these, right? Like, a fucking ton of them.” Colette shot down right away. “Or you think someone decent would be supplying that girl? You know how illegal are half the things she uses and how military-exclusive are the others?”

“Now that you say… By the heavens, Annabeth’s quite sketchy, isn’t she? I mean, I knew that, but…”

“Wait, you both. Why can’t you just request enhancers and whatnot from a depot and get it with your ammo and all else? Isn't their usage commonplace in the army?”

“What?! No! Why would we be supplied with dangerous things like what Annabeth has? The most you can get are some painkillers, and in small quantities too.”

“That’s only for her though. In the Federation you can get a wide range of things I don’t even know the name of, you see? Anna only goes way too overboard, and we’re technically in enemy territory, so supply’s bad to come by…”

“That’s for real?! Are you people insane?!”

“Do you remember that we’re, like, ten times weaker than the average spirit, right? Heck! The whole ‘human’ thing is cheating and using numbers, so what the fuck do you expect? Even an outlier like me sometimes needs an elixir to heal fast enough.”

“Not going to lie and say I’m proud of it, but that’s indeed how we teach whoever we could to fight. There would be no way to beat those monsters otherwise...” Michael also added to the explanation, with some extra weight on his words as someone that was actually there at the time. “What’s a spirit, by the way?”

“Huh?! Are you dumb or something?” Colette turned to the kid-looking old man and then pointed to Karim. “She and the other people like her are spirits or do you know them as demons?”

“Why would I call a person a demon? Those things are only big and somewhat smart beasts that the devils made. This girl’s a hybrid human and that is all. She even has a lot of angel blood in her if I’m not mistaken…”

“Say what?”

“Say what what?”

Both the old boy and the young woman started a staring contest as their knowledge clashed somewhere unexpected. One of them lacked the information to make the connections and the other wasn’t good at it, so they were in quite a stalemate.

One that was only broken because the other person in the room could link the dots somewhat and translate the information for them.

“We may have found something that’ll destroy society here, but if I’m not mistaken... Are you saying that we’re both human to some level?”

“Yes? Isn’t that obvious?”

“Why fucking would it?! C’mon, we’re even different in how we survive!”

“Yes, Michael, you may be messing up things here… For one, humans are matter that’s moved by a soul while spirits are only a soul with pseudo-matter around. It can’t be that…”

“What kind of nonsense are you spouting, young girl? Have you ever visited a higher or lower realm? Can you rebuild parts of your body if you lose them? Can you vanish if you don’t have an ‘anchor’ to the material plane? Or more even, were you born or you ‘came to be’? Only if all of these apply, then you can say your body isn’t proper matter.”

“I don’t think I get it…”

“My head hurts. I give up.”

“Sigh… I can’t believe we went backward instead of forwards after some millennia...” The self-proclaimed angel scientist shook his head in negation. “I will try to explain it in a simple way, understood? First, we have humans, they’re kind of weird and appeared out of nowhere, but they are more stable and versatile than any other living being. Then, there are angels and devils, both are apparitions that create vessels with souls when they appear, but are limited in what they can do. We never found from where the devils came, but angels were always around.”

“But that’s exactly how spirits function…”

“Then, you are not a spirit at all! I don’t even need an appraisal skill to know that this body of yours has proper biological functions and isn’t made only to hold a soul. My bet is that you could even get energy from eating food like a human…”

“A little, but… but then… then, why do we vanish when we die? A material body wouldn’t turn into…”

“Of course it would. It is just like decomposition. Only that with the high percentage of spiritual energy interposed with the material, the whole thing turns to dust instead.” Michael cut in and explained even further without giving time to counterarguments. “You can even replicate this effect with a simple destruction spell or by killing a saint vessel. Which is why I said that vessel girls should be dead if she vanished.”

“That’s a lot for a tangent… If you’re true, then we could even get some academic awards for finding out about all this…”

“Getting an award for something this basic would taste terrible to me.”

“You really don’t have an idea of what you’re talking about…”

“If you want something interesting, then write about ‘soul anchors’. Much more impressive subject for sure.” The wingless angel went on, turning to a subject he seemed more interested in. “Everything needs one to synchronize their soul and body, and more importantly, to differentiate one another. Souls are somewhat too simple to create proper personalities and skills, so they need some help. Angels have their wings, devils have both their wings and horns, and humans have all kinds of them because theirs are not necessary. But still, without one they would not have a single innate characteristic... The theories that came from removing an ‘anchor’ are very scary too.”

“I… I don’t even know what to say anymore…”

Even for Karim, this was way too much groundbreaking information to be reasonable. It was already hard enough to keep up with the conversation pace, so comprehending the situation was beyond her right now.

The best the petit girl could manage was to try and memorize the most she could and then leave it to think later before changing subjects.

“You know what? I think we should go back to the main subject… We still have to recover Annabeth before going back to the city.”

“Oh, sorry. I forgot we were in the middle of something…” Michael apologized and then tried to put his mind back on the goal. “Then, our current theory is that someone helped the vessel girl and made her able to warp around, right?”

“That’s pretty much it, yes.”

“What if we tried to replicate the spell then? Different from her, we have the time and there should be traces still in the explosion area.”

“Can you do it? I’m not sure if you noticed, but neither of us here knows how to handle sorcery, and you’re an angel, so…”

“Well, I cannot cast it per se, but I can draw the circle even if it is not something I could understand. Humans learned the theory from trying to copy us back in the day either way, so it would be like reverse engineering myself.”

“Setting you to talk on television would cause such a massive uproar in the population...” Karim sighed as she thought of all the implications of the information she had learned from a living witness. “Anyway, we should move on if we don’t want to risk losing these traces you talked about… Can you move already, Colette?”

As she turned to where the brunette should be though, the two other occupants of the bridge finally noticed how she was right now. Or to be more precise, they noticed that their brawler was currently sleeping while stuck in her hiding spot away from the sights of the sea.

And by the looks of it, she wouldn’t be very easy to wake up.