Chapter Text
My servant that exists somewhere in this vast universe, my divine, beautiful, wise, powerful servant, heed my call! I wish from the very bottom of my heart - add to my guidance and appear!
A flash of light, hot and blistering, puncturing through layer after layer of armored crystalline flesh.
A fleeting moment of calculation- almost too long, the light had broken through another six meters even in the mere nanosecond the calculation took. A thin slice of green cutting across higher dimensional space, just shy of enveloping the core of its being.
A mere hundred meters before certain death at the mercies of physics and a heated packet of light and antimatter burning through its defenseless core.
Calculation after calculation, its core heating up as its processing unit considered every factor, every variable.
A bare instant before death would take its core, it chose to allow the sliver of warped space to take its core, its whole being, into itself. With a tiny puff of light and the loud roar of light superheating the atmosphere around it, the being vanished from its world and into a swirling cacophony of higher dimensional space.
Buffeted around by minute shifts in the dimensional fabric, the being withdrew its mass from the space around it- it had lost a not inconsiderable amount from the damages it had taken in those few seconds before its destruction, but enough remained that structural integrity was not compromised.
Calculations upon calculations piled up, mapping out the dimensional path, mapping out its internal systems, considering all paths of logic.
A searing bolt of light struck through the dimensional tunnel and left its visual sensors blinded.
It screamed, withdrawing more and more mass around itself, piling on layers of geometrically perfect armor that were stripped away by its uncontrolled tumble, leaving its core bare and unprotected, its mass just barely out of reach as the emptiness of the fracturing hole through space tore away its energy.
Still, though, it calculated. It would bide its time- it was alive, it was not taking unacceptable damage. It had a partial path back to its own plane of existence.
Ramiel, the sixth angel, fell through a hole in space and vanished from Earth, with nothing more in its mind but endless numbers and a promise that it would return to fulfill its duty.
Ramiel, the sixth angel, fell through a hole in space heralded by a massive explosion that cloaked its spheroid core in dust and smoke, landing in a grassy plain full of children.
It was inert.
<>
Louise exhaled in frustration as her spell produced a by now familiar explosion. She could already hear the disdainful whispers of her classmates.
‘Figures it would explode...’
‘What else would you expect from the Zero?’
‘Wait, what the hell is that?’
Strange, they seemed to be dying off. Louise waved the smoke away from her face. And then she caught sight of what she had summoned, and forgot to breathe.
There it sat, in a shallow crater where the summoning circle had been. A mountainous orb of red crystal, over seven meters in diameter and utterly dwarfing everyone in the area, even the larger familiars.
What in Brimir's name...?
She stepped forwards. I summoned... This?
“Miss Vallière?”
She started. “Yes, professor Colbert?”
The balding man cleared his throat. “You can, ahem, complete the contract now. As it is.”
Louise turned her gaze at the sphere. “Right.” She took out her wand and cleared her throat.
"My name is Louise Françoise Le Blanc de La Vallière. Pentagon of the five elemental powers; bless this humble being, and make it my familiar."
She pressed her lips on the sphere. Oh Founder, I feel ridiculous.
Glowing runes started etching themselves on the crystal orb and it screamed. The runes burned into its surface lifted off and began to spread, repeating in two rings that spun around the orb as it lifted into the air. Its inhuman screeches shook the earth with their intensity, sending the familiars in the area into a blind panic as a crushing presence slammed down. This orb, whatever it was, was no mere inert object. It was a monster, a predator, an existence so powerful that its mere presence seemed to darken the sky and chill the air.
Louise stared up at it, dread mixed with an odd resignation resonating within her. Oh, look. My familiar is a force of terror. Bet we'll end up blowing up even more of the Academy together. “What are you doing!” she screamed.
It stopped. The orb oriented itself with a motion almost too fast to track, the two rings of runes slowing their rotation and shifting such that they created almost a cross-like shape, intersecting at two points with each other. One intersection pointed down at Louise, giving the impression of being caught under the eye of an angry god.
The presence of the orb changed suddenly, going from an ancient and unknowable terror to a cold and unfeeling aura. It seemed to be curious as it stared down at Louise, drifting lower until the rings of light that surrounded its core were barely more than a few feet from her face.
A sudden thought crossed her mind. A name, loose as it was, a fleeting feeling of divine fury and endless roars of light and sound. An imprint of a name that held no meaning, but held all the meaning it needed.
R A M I E L
“Your name is Ramiel? I like that name,” she offered. “Wait, you're sentient? What are you?”
Another imprint in her mind, a crushing weight, a divine command, holy light, destruction, a song that could only be heard by her. A single word, bearing the meaning of the divine. The sphere, Ramiel, shuddered as it began to vibrate, a thousand crystal voices letting loose in a choir of song as its core became hidden away in slowly forming plates of crystal that shone sky blue in the morning sun.
M E S S E N G E R
The words slipped out before she could catch them. “I don't think you're going to fit into my room.” She immediately slapped her hands over her mouth, eyes going wide. “I'm sorry! I-”
The humming stopped.
Ramiel looked down at Louise impassively, though it was difficult to discern any emotion on a nearly ten meter tall cube of blue crystal with an orb inside of it. Silently, its crystalline flesh rippled away, taking its core with it as everything seemed to shrink in size, slipping out of reality in a headache inducing manner before all that was left was a two meter tall octahedron of the same sky blue crystal, with a core about the size of a peach just barely visible in its center. The question was clear, though Ramiel stayed silent and still to the point where it was almost unclear if it was even ‘alive’.
Louise blinked. Ramiel had just violated reality by collapsing itself to a ‘human’ size... Because she had wanted her familiar to fit into her room? She couldn't help it, she glanced at Kirche. “I told you my familiar would be cooler than yours, Zerbst.”
<>
It felt.
In and of itself, that was not strange. Its touch sensors had always functioned just fine. But this feeling was not touch.
It was introspection.
It could feel. It could think. It could make its own decisions, and it found itself heeding the orders of this lowly human, this being spawned by- no, this being with an existence that was neither of its progenitor’s white moon nor the other progenitor’s black moon. It could not sense either moon, no matter how far it sent out its signals, waiting for a reply.
It- Ramiel, floated silently in the girl’s- Louise- room, expending just the barest amount of energy as it considered the new sensory data filtering through the ring of text surrounding its core.
A connection via its soul to the soul of its summoner. It was weak, though the strange energy readings within Louise seemed to improve the quality of the connection with every passing second. A mingling of energies, the mass of quantum energy that made up its power source being converted into the strange, unquantifiable stuff that seemed to pool inside Louise’s body.
Ramiel found itself confused, a first for itself, as it normally had no emotion nor capacity to be confused. It also found itself capable of using language created by beings not of its flesh, capable of using words like “stuff” and “Louise”.
Ramiel decided that it quite liked words, though they were limited in scope and did not relay information in a timely, complete manner as well as its normal methods of communication- though the normal method seemed to cause some manner of distress in beings that did not share in the quantum energies that allowed it to function.
Curious.
Perhaps the communication it preferred caused unwelcome changes in the processing cores of those beings, Ramiel mused, then paused as it realized then that its processor core was now capable of thought tangents and multiple lines of calculation.
Interesting.
Ramiel vibrated, almost overwhelmed with the sheer amount of new things its sensors and processor core could experience. Entire cycles became devoted to assigning previously archived memories to these new experiences, with its vibrations growing in intensity over time in a sound that its new language profile decided to call “giggling”.
All through the night, with the moon high in the sky, Louise slept fitfully while Ramiel’s haunting giggles echoed through the room and into her dreams.