Seeds of Doubt (Jadeite)

Seeds of Doubt (Jadeite)
Date of Cutscene:	28 July 2023
Location:	Various
Synopsis:	Jadeite engages in damage control.
Cast of Characters:	Jadeite
Tinyplot:	Midnight Tokyo

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After the talk on the roof with Darien, and some time spent just hanging out and talking a little bit longer before going back to work, Jason was ready to put away his human identity and be Jadeite again. He started with the damage control he should have already been taking care of. He found the name of the employee who had been injured, and teleported into her hospital room. A nurse looked up, startled, but Jadeite just gestured with his head towards the door. The man got up and left, standing watch outside the door to the room. Controlling people was becoming so much easier, all the time.

Rana something-or-other was the name of the patient. Jadeite only took the time to put a finger to the woman's forehead and scan her memories. He wasn't going to bother waking her up unless she knew something worth the effort. Her memories were jumbled, but she never actually saw the creature that emerged from the rift at the mall. However, Jadeite did note that she was sensitive to Dark Energy. Well above average, for even a latent psychic. He would have to consider whether he could use her or if she was better 'made redundant', in a very final sense.

She did see some of the people who were present at the site of the disaster. Jadeite committed their faces to memory as he continued perusing another's mind as though it wasn't a horrible violation that he committed regularly and casually without the notion of it being 'wrong' ever occurring to him. A girl with red hair, a blonde, a darker-skinned girl with reddish-brown hair, another blonde with... Hair buns? That one was running off so Jadeite couldn't see the girl's face in the memory. There was Darien and Himeko, though the memory of them was very vague and blurry. They were in the background, not something focused on enough to remember.

There was also...

Jadeite nearly mentally stumbled when he caught sight of the raven-haired girl sitting alone at a table. Violet eyes, gorgeous features. Attractive, to be sure, but also familiar in some way that did not make Jadeite think they had met before, however that works. He wasn't the type to become captivated by a crush, so, reluctantly, he did not linger on that vision. The girl was blurry, another background figure. That she was that striking even so really said something.

Finally, with everything he needed, he decided redundancy would be the course of action to take, just as a precautionary measure, and wiped Rana's memories completely, leaving her essentially a vegetable. And if there was some way to heal her mind or save her at the last minute, he made sure to prevent that as well when he telepathically ordered the nurse back inside, and had him unplug the girl's life support. He erased all memory of having been there from the young man's mind, and then teleported away to deal with the rest of the fall-out. There were more rooms to visit.

No loose ends.

--

The remains of the broken Black Jades had been put in a warehouse for proper disposal, at Jadeite's insistence. There was no way whatsoever he was dumping all of that into a general access trash dump where anyone could find it and start examining it and find out the secret at the heart of them. The Black Jade devices had some magic, yes. A small amount. Very small. Not enough to hurt or control anyone, or do anything malicious. That was very deliberately calculated and by design. They were not weapons or infiltrators, even if five-hundred of them had been specially modified: the five-hundred that were handed out for free at the mall to anyone who filled out a survey.

Kicking around the smashed plastic, metal, and electronics, Jadeite could only scowl in anger at the waste of time and resources. Finally, he found one sufficiently intact that he could take the Black Jade apart without breaking what he was looking for. Even with this mess, almost all of the five-hundred had been given away, and Jadeite had already confirmed that at least two were active and had been taken in by students at Radiant Heart Academy, where the electronic assistants would cause no problems, exert no dark influence, and would simply improve the lives of their owners by keeping an orderly home, facilitating online purchases and being a companion of increasing complexity and personality the more they were interacted with. The control of household and the artificial intelligence were what the magic was for. Skipping over the need for technological advancement, he just had magic built into it to do the same thing without waiting for humans to figure it out the slow way.

Jadeite's question, however, was whether the way he chose to infuse that magic had unintended side-effects.

He put his finger to the black and silver core of the Black Jade he had picked up, unlocking it with a complex series of glowing sigils and glyphs. And... There it was. The proof he had been looking for.

A strange black seed, with odd grooves on it, spiraling inwards towards its center, where a tiny red crystalline pod was visible.

"Huh." Jadeite let out into the large warehouse. "So the one at the mall was what an adult version looks like." It seemed he owed Hematite an apology. It turns out that all of that mess was Jadeite's fault, indirectly. The parent must have come looking for its young seedlings after Jadeite took the liberty of killing the other one of its kind that was guarding them in the Dusk Zone, and it sensed its young at the core of the Black Jades.

"Oh, well. No harm done." he said as he put the Black Jade down with the rest of the ruined devices, and swallowed them all up into a space-time anomaly. He'd leave it in his pocket dimension for later examination and possible repairs. Having it out here would just invite more attention from that... Teeth-and-ooze creature. Just before he could leave, Jadeite heard a female voice call out to him from behind, with frantic shushing coming from a second person trying to stop the ongoing justice speech.

Sighing, the weakest of the Shitennou, still enough to kill a couple Magical Girls by himself, turned around and got ready to deal with this situation too.

No loose ends.