They might have been working together, but it felt like the distance between her and them was impossibly vast.
The twins cocked their heads in almost perfect unison.
“Huh? Of course we need you.”
“Yeah, what’re you talking about? We can’t have our princess going all mopey on us.”
They smiled warmly to show her how wrong she was.
“Every revolution has to have a spark. We might have you become a genuine princess, you know?”
“………?”
“And even aside from that, we’re gonna be bringing in more people at some point. You’re gonna be the relay station keeping everyone on the same page. Don’t go saying you’re not important. That’s ridiculous.”
Hearing the twins say that filled her heart with warmth.
She didn’t know everything there was to know about them. At first, she’d only been helping them in order to repay them for saving her and in the hopes that they could save her country from the despair it was drowning in.
Now, though—now, she loved them.
They cherished her and treated her like a teammate, and she was overjoyed whenever they looked at her.
“Say, isn’t it high time we got ourselves a team name?”
Lukas gave Wille’s suggestion a big nod. “The group’s about to get bigger, yeah. Why don’t you pick us out one, Princess?”
When the twins turned to Suzie, her cheeks went red.
She could hardly even think straight, and the proposal she blurted out was to take one letter from each of their names. She immediately realized that putting their personal information in the name defeated the whole purpose of a secret society, but the twins were immediately on board. “Sounds magnificent.” “That’s magnificent, all right.”
That was how Suzie ended up donating an “S” to their moniker.
“The LWS Troupe.”
And just like that, a mysterious secret society that would eventually force King Benoit to abdicate the throne was born.
The Inferno twins sowed many seeds.
Those seeds included “Meadow” Sara, the animal lover that Lukas once scouted.
Aside from her, though, three other seeds had begun sprouting as well.
There was the LWS Troupe, a secret society they founded that Nike regarded as a maximum-priority threat. There was a girl with overwhelming levels of talent that Wille once scouted himself. And there was their de facto little brother who they worried about more than anyone and treasured dearly.
In time, all of those seeds would have the power to shake the Lylat Kingdom to its core.
She lit the fireworks.
She did it to pray for the souls of those who’d risked their lives striking in the Bertram Mines. The ringleaders would be executed, no doubt, and everyone else involved would be punished so severely, the ensuing despair would keep them from ever defying the government again. Either that, or they would get threatened into following the Genesis Army’s orders.
However, she wasn’t going to let their resistance be in vain.
Someone would understand. They would see that a proud secret society still existed in Lylat to that day. It pained her not to be able to shout it from the rooftops. Instead, she set off fireworks. Surely, someone would know what they meant. They would dig up the truth that had been buried by time and discover that the king had been forcibly ousted.
“Fire is our symbol,” her group’s leader had once said, and the second-in-command had followed up. “Keep lighting fires. You do that, and our teammates will be sure to find you.”
It was the last thing they told her before they died.
The girl had dutifully followed their instructions.
The two of them had taught her how to make fireworks. She got the gunpowder from her comrades in the army, and she built delayed-launch mechanisms out of wristwatches. By the time the fireworks went off, the person who lit them would be long gone.
The girl finished her preparations and headed to a far corner of the Friedrich Industrial Zone to observe her handiwork. She sat down in the desolate cemetery and looked up at the night sky.
“Lukas… Wille…”
As she watched the fireworks explode in the sky, she let out the faintest of sighs.
“…How much longer am I going to need to wait?”
Two whole years had passed since the twins died, and the girl was still waiting.
A pigeon came and landed on the roof of a high-rise in Pilca’s first arrondissement.
The plump, familiar-looking bird had seen better days. His feathers hadn’t been groomed recently and looked downright filthy. He’d clearly been separated from his owner.
“Ashes” Monika removed the letter that had been strapped to his leg.
“Looks like Sara’s been captured.”
After reading the encrypted report, she set it ablaze and tossed it out into the darkened city. The paper burned away before it hit the ground, and the wind carried the ashes away. Nothing in the letter was news to her, but she sighed a little at the reminder of what had happened.
The woman beside her smiled. It was “Dreamspeaker” Thea. Thea picked up the pigeon in both hands and lovingly stroked his head. “And that’s got your blood all boiling, has it?”
“Hm?”
“You are her mentor, after all. Planning on going and getting vengeance on behalf of your student?”
“That’s not it.”
Monika took the pigeon from Thea and hurled him out into the darkness. The bird—which was to say, Aiden—flew off over Pilca and disappeared into the night sky.
“It’s just that the whole plan was for them to avoid Nike and set up the revolution quietly. If they’re gonna butt heads with her like that, it sort of defeats the whole point.”
Thea laughed in agreement. “Well, no plan survives contact with the enemy.”
“Eh, it is what it is. I guess it goes to show how hard revolutions are to pull off.”
Monika combed back her hair to defend it from the wind and smiled.
“So screw the revolution—I’m gonna go find out what the Nostalgia Project is the old-fashioned way.”
That plan that had never been meant as anything more than a distraction.
It would have been great if they could pull it off, but there was a reason Klaus had built their strategy around rendering Nike powerless via a revolution. The only reason he’d even assigned a team to attack her directly was so they could restrict her options.
However, Monika had little interest in his projections.
“Now who’s not following the plan?” Beside her, Thea smirked. “As I recall, our job was just to serve as decoys and roadblocks.”
“Yeah, I was always planning on ignoring that.”
“I love it. With the two of us working together, Nike won’t know what hit her.”