The darkly clad and aptly named Kira Nocturne sat on the couch next to her teenage apprentice. The new furniture smell hadn't had time to wear out its welcome. She watched as her fellow Hermetics worked on the new sanctum; a new place that the Obsidian Cabal did not know about (/yet/, she thought privately). She glanced over at Allen, the aforementioned apprentice. He was holding a photo of a man in a U.S. Army uniform. "Somebody important?"
    "Yeah, it's my dad. He died a few years ago while out on deployment."
    "Oh! I'm sorry, I didn't know..."
    "It's okay. He carried out some of the other soldiers when the convoy was attacked. His CO visited and told us what happened, that dad was a hero."
    "Sounds like you want to be like your father, Allen." Kira noted that Allen's Maho Prime form strongly resembled the teenager's father and wondered if that was a subconscious desire that fed into the transformative spell Mephy had performed.
    "Mom says the problem with heroes that they're all dead."
    "I don't know about that. You were pretty heroic this week; I think somebody would have died if you hadn't broken Luna's armor."
    The memory of Luna's spiteful suicide made Allen scrunch up his face. "Why do you think she killed herself, Kira?"
    Kira's brows furrowed. "If I had to guess, it's because she had a backup plan. Metallia Luna has been around for a few centuries. You don't live that long without being one step ahead of your enemies."

    The official story was a gas leak causing an explosion; certainly a story the public would buy in light of all the excesses of the state-sanctioned energy company that had been revealed. A single black obol had been covered by debris in the ruins of the accountance office, and it caught the eye of a clean-up crew member who uncovered it.
    She picked it up, dusting it off out of curiousity. She felt a twinge, like something had been driven into the back of her head, and her eyes became black starfields. Looking up, she saw ghosts with shadows of starfields and highlights of the full moon. The closest one had a crown with stag horns. Caressing the crew member's face, the ghost of Diana Jaeger, the former wielder of Metallum Noctis whispered "Welcome, child. We have much to teach you."