The someone inside her apartment was sitting on her bed. She wasn’t all that much taller than Scarlett. Yuriko’s current body, which was just a couple of inches shorter than her true body, had nine inches on the other woman.

She was clad in what Yuriko could only call, obfuscating clothes. Baggy trousers, dirty white sneakers, and an oversized hoodie that probably felt sweltering hot. It was less than a cycle until the Season of Fire, and there were already bouts of hot weather.

Still, there were just some things that Lilibeth’s sister couldn’t leave behind or hide. She was sitting primly, with her back straight and hands folded on her lap, fingers crossed at just the right angle. The hood was off her head, of course, since she was indoors and private. Her blue eyes were darker than Lilibeth’s original orbs but were even more so compared to Yuriko’s.

She was beautiful. A bit more so than Lilibeth, as if Emma was the template the younger sister had been imperfectly copied from.

Emma Lawson-Daublin gave a demure smile when Yuriko entered, but it faltered a moment later, her eyes turned sharp and calculating, and her face perfectly flat.

“Sister? No…who are you?”

Yuriko blinked, then shrugged as she entered the room and closed the door behind her. She walked up to Emma, who was frozen stiff on her bed. She didn’t want to invade the smaller woman’s space, so she pulled up a chair and sat across from her, their knees almost touching. “Who do you think I am?”

“Lilibeth…” Emma said softly, wonderingly. “You’re Lilibeth. I can feel it. But…you’re also, not.”

Yuriko nodded sagely. “I guess I’m not.”

Emma raised her hand to Yuriko’s cheek and she stroked down towards her chin with a gentle finger. “Altered?”

“No.”

Emma shook her head. “I don’t believe that. You being an Altered is the simplest and most straightforward reason.”

“If it helps you feel better,” Yuriko shrugged.

“Lily. You’ve never acted like that.”

“Like what?”

“So smooth. Nonchalant. As if nothing mattered and nothing could affect you.”

“I see.”

Emma drew a shuddering breath, then continued. “I wanted to see you before the party.” Before she had to put the mask back on, Lilibeth’s subconscious remnants said.

Yuriko didn’t say anything but nearly started when Emma leaned forward close enough that their noses nearly touched.

“You’ve…changed,” Emma whispered and there was a glint behind her eyes.

Wait. Oh no…

She felt the other woman’s thread stick into Yuriko’s Mien, hard. “Perhaps you’ve changed enough.”Then Emma’s lips pressed hard against Yuriko’s, and she was too startled to respond in one form or another. Emma pulled back, stood up, and walked away. But before she left the apartment, she left behind a few words, “Just wait a little more. Nothing will stop me soon.”

The door slammed shut and the only thing Yuriko could say was, “Eh?”

Oh Ancestors. What messed up relations did Lilibeth have with her family? She didn’t have access to the most recent ones before the ritual killed the woman, but what about the rest of her life? Yuriko was tempted to look, but somehow, the remnant psyche made it a bit more difficult.

Her fingers brushed against her lips. As herself, she didn’t mind since she and Emma weren’t related at all, but the body that was Lilibeth’s, what remained of it…was oddly also fine with it.

Yuriko’s mind skittered away and she grumbled to herself. “Whatever, I’ll just ignore this.” She glanced at the door and sniffed. “And I need to change my lock.”

She touched her lips again, then shuddered at the memory of what happened. She didn’t have any sisters but she was quite sure what happened wasn’t normal, right? Or perhaps that was just a friendly goodbye? Yeah, that must be it. Her Mien might have affected Emma strangely. Yeah. She pointedly didn’t use the connection to peek at her sister’s emotions.

She spent the rest of her evening studying and meditating, then turned in by midnight. She woke up early to run the dog. Five hours of sleep was more than enough for her, and she could probably push herself for a week or more without sleep, but when it came to studying and meditation, it was better to have a fresh mind every day.

After returning Nessa to her owner’s house, she had her breakfast, then she went to Trinity for her morning classes. There were less than four weeks to the end of the semester and most of her classes had final exams of sorts, except for Creative Writing, anyway. Most of the rest of the sessions involved the workshop of their short stories. Lilibeth had a fair hand and a keen sense for telling stories, though she was less on the creative, imaginative side and more on the interesting way to convey events. She was in the Journalism Course after all. Yuriko was on the fence about shifting her course, especially since she had none of Lilibeth’s penchant for telling or writing stories. Hmm, she should just shift out and save herself the trouble.

Either way, Lilibeth’s piece had already been workshopped and, despite Yuriko’s reading problem, she did enjoy her classmates’ pieces especially since none of them were more than ten-minute reads.

In Walking for Fitness, Jenna wouldn’t meet Yuriko’s gaze after their talk in the Occult Research Club. It had been three days, but her friend had been quite pensieve. Yuriko wondered what the girl really wanted. She had her guesses, of course, based on earlier topics of conversation and glimpsed memories. While Jenna probably wouldn’t mind getting prettier, what she probably wanted was to become an Altered. Not just any garden variety Altered whose powers could run the gamut from changing the colour of a spot on their skin to being able to control electronics from a hand’s reach away. No, she probably wanted to become an Altered who had real and immediate combat power.

That put her at odds with Scarlett most times; her family raised her to hate Altered on principle. Well, Scar was pleasant enough as long as they avoided the issue.

Yuriko contemplated teaching Jenna spellcasting. Even a simple Cleanse spell more than paid for the effort to learn it. There was enough ambient Elemental energy that a complete novice could reasonably learn to cast in less than a year. Still, she let that impulse remain idle since she didn’t really know if she could trust Jenna with power. Lilibeth might have, but she wasn’t that girl.

After class, they bid each other farewell.

“You want to go clubbing tonight?” Scarlett asked hopefully.

“Perhaps another time.” Yuriko said, “I’ve got a new gig later and I’ve still got to feel it out.”

“Oh, alright. Tomorrow?”

“I’ll be at my sister’s birthday party.”

Scarlett sighed and left it at that. Yuriko hurried back to her scooter, stopped by her apartment to change out of her clothes and pick up a sandwich, then she was off. The photo studio she was in central Neo Prism, Winderfield, which was built on an eponymously named island in the middle of the Santana River. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the river split on Winderfield’s northern shores and converged beyond the southern tip? It certainly looked that way rather than an actual island.

The Burmington-Winderfield Bridge was a long suspension bridge built nearly a century ago and it had been rebuilt to accommodate more vehicles just a decade ago. However, it still meant that traffic was slow as Yuriko rode through it. There was a tunnel road being dug to increase traffic flow, but from what she read it would still take a couple of years to open. As it were, she barely made it to 23rd Street before one o’clock. Thankfully, there was street parking available though she had to pay a Torry every hour to the parking timer machine.

The building had five storeys and was a charming, red brick affair complete with wall-crawling ivy and ornate metal grills. The ground floor only contained the mailboxes and a directory. It was also a mixed commercial-residential space, with apartments on the fourth and fifth floor, while the first through third were filled with offices and studios. The entirety of the third floor contained Hilfast Studios and was where she was headed.

She took the lift and when it opened on the third floor, it was into a bustle of frantic energy as gofers and assistants rushed across the space while a couple of photographers took pictures of a young man standing in front of a green curtain. The man, the model, Yuriko supposed, was clad in heavy, cold-weather clothes, though they looked quite stylish to Yuriko’s eye.

The place was so busy that nobody noticed her exiting the lift, except for a runner who glanced at her, gasped then tripped over his feet. Thankfully, he was nimble enough to catch himself before he took a nasty tumble. The yelp and the clatter caught the attention a black-haired man who was just watching the hullabaloo with his hands folded and his fingers on his chin. When he turned to look at the clatter, he caught a glimpse of Yuriko. His eyes widened in seeming recognition, then his face went into an aha moment, and he walked over.

“You must be Lilibeth Lawson. Madeline Mendez is a friend of mine.” He extended a hand to shake and Yuriko complied. His hand was calloused, but more towards the fingertips than the palms. “Lance Hiller, at your service, and I must say,” he continued after he released her hand, “I thought Maddie had been exaggerating when she said you were too beautiful to hide away.” His smile widened into a smirk. “If anything, she was understating your beauty. Ah, forgive me for being so forward.” He gestured towards one of the doors. “The dressing room is over there, Bianca will hand over the first outfit. We have more than a dozen to go through today.”

Nodding, Yuriko followed his directions and wound up in a tiny dressing room. Bianca was a mousy girl who was just a little bit taller than Scarlett. She handed over a pale blue jacket, black tights and brown boots.

Yuriko put it on. It was warm but she wasn’t too bothered. She had enough control over her body to stop herself from sweating. She emerged and followed Bianca’s directions to a different photography station. There she was directed to stand and pose naturally as if she was waiting for someone.

Hmm, waiting huh? Normally, Yuriko would simply sit down and meditate if she was in a safe place, but if she were in the wilderness or in hostile territory, she would be keeping a sharp eye out. Unless she used her perception aura, of course, but she didn’t think that was what they wanted. Sharp-eyed, then.

She relaxed her body, keeping her hands loose at her side. She tilted her head slightly back and turned to look around, her eyes taking in everything around her.

“A hand on your hip, please,” the photographer said, and Yuriko followed.

Click, clack, click!

Yuriko held the pose for a bit, but she sensed that they wanted more than a static stance, so she complied. She brought her hand up over her eyes as if to shade from the sun, then pulled it down and acted as if she was leaning on a post. There was nothing behind her, of course, but her balance was supreme.

That the cloth hung freely kind of ruined the image, but unless she used her Animakinesis, it would have to remain that way.

Her perception was still spread out, and she noticed the folds moving slightly on their own, adjusting so that it gave the illusion of something behind her.

That had not been her doing.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep