Chapter 21

Marie was interesting to be around most of the time. If one managed to ignore how she was jumpy around everything, always kept looking at corners, and looked at you with disgust, you'd see she was actually good at her job.

It was like having a grumpy cat… If said cat hated you too. Still, it was interesting to see how she did her job. How magic worked still eluded me, but I saw it in action so that's a plus in my book. She didn't usually use magic like I expected her to though. There were no flashy spells. I'd expected some more… magical shit to occur, but it appeared like her only really blatant spell was her time skip thing.

Most of the stuff she had done since I met her had been just stuff you could do with stuff bought in a thrift shop, like create a little fire to light her cig. There were one or two spells that she did that were obviously unnatural, but she seemed to avoid those types of spells.

The GOC had us go in another 2 assignments that actually went pretty well. The first one was a balloon anart that floated without any external help and actually moved pretty fast. I had destroyed it while Marie erased the mind of anyone who had seen the balloon. The second anomaly we had encountered had actually been a ghost. It wasn't special or something, it was just a ghost, which Maire had exorcized.

I didn't get how she could do that but not call on some spirits but whatever. 'Magic has rules and no longer works on mystery' and all that. I thought it was lame, but at least stuff made some modicum of sense. Magic was no longer justified with 'mystery powers it' was good in my opinion. Nasu got away with a lot of asspulls because of 'mystery'.

Apparently when mages realized how physics worked their spells stopped working. It was hilarious from an outside perspective, but it must have been devastating to many mages.

In my free time I had taken to practice transformation in private, and discovered that 'scanning' other beings and then replicating them was easier than just trying to transform into them. I hadn't scanned anything mystical other than the ghost, so I was still trying the dragon transformation without any blueprint.

Transforming into perfect copies of anything I scanned felt like I was plagiarizing nature, but who was going to sue me? Gaia?

I heard Marie open the door to her door and turned to see her get inside.

"Any new mission?"

She grunted as she turned on the car. "No, there is nothing at the moment that needs our attention."

I hummed. "Is there another team we can help then? There must be another team that needs assistance."

I noticed how Marie tensed and did her best to not show any reaction to my question. "We are not helping other teams. They can handle themselves just fine."

For some reason Marie really disliked the idea of helping other teams. Everytime I brought it up she always seemed on the verge of panicking. Maybe we should visit a psychiatrist and get her some meds. It would be annoying to deal with a panicking partner… Nah, she'll get better.

"So, what are we doing now?" We usually just roamed around when we had nothing else to do, but this time I felt the need to do something else. Being in a Strike team had so far been way more boring than what I thought it was going to be.

"Patrol." Marie finally grunted out after a while.

I hummed once more. "How about something else this time? Let's relax a bit, I saw a sign a while back about a comedy show."

"No, we have a job to do."

"That sounds like an excuse to continue working. C'mon, I know you are a workaholic, but let's do something different this time."

Her permanent frown worsened and she stopped talking.

Bitch.

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"So like… she doesn't like you? That's it?"

I looked up at ceiling guy and nodded. "I think that, for the most part, it's because I'm not human. She has this hate boner for everything non-human. It's tolerable but sometimes I feel like taking her to therapy."

Connor raised an eyebrow at me and I sighed.

"She also has some sort of trauma. It's annoying to pussy foot around her issues."

He nodded at that and placed another tile in the connect four board.

"I see, I see." No, he didn't see. He didn't have to deal with her nonsense. "Do you have any other games? This one is getting repetitive."

Ungrateful bastard. How did he get bored of every game so fast?

"Do you have one I can play? One that I can play from over here?"

Poor guy, I just didn't expect Connor to be roommates with the floating man again. I hadn't considered the fact that Connor would be sent back to his original site once he was not needed in site 19.

"I'm sorry man. I only brought tabletop games."

He sighed and waved us off. "It's alright, I'm used to it."

Oof.

Visiting Connor had been impulsive of me, but if the Foundation didn't notice me nothing bad would happen. Making everyone in the site ignore my presence wasn't hard. It wasn't even a challenge.

"So." Connor got up and walked up to a very expensive looking chess set, the very expensive looking chess set I had bought a couple of hours ago. "How do you play chess?"

I smiled and began explaining the basics so we could play. Hey, maybe floating guy could play this if he shouted out his moves!

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I sighed as soon as I made it back to the camp Marie had set in the wild. I thought she would take the opportunity to try to hide from me once she realized I wasn't around. Turns out, she was just so burnt-out she fell into a pretty deep sleep.

Maybe I should really take her to therapy. Falling asleep in a forest in the SCP world seemed like the perfect way to be replaced by a skinwalker or something similar. Her suicidal tendencies never ceased to amaze me.

Still, she had been very rude when she explained that fairy tales lied and that monsters not only came out at night but also during the day. She made a bunch of excuses of why it being dark wouldn't hinder her ability to kill threats and whatnot, but at this point I was begging to think she was just waiting for someone to finally kill her.

… Wait, she might actually be doing just that.

With a grumble I sat down on the floor and reclined on a tree. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like I was taking care of a particularly irritating cat. Was it normal to compare a human with a cat? Yeah, people did it all the time.

I began to humming and though more on the conversation I had had with Mr. Justice. He had chosen to be a vigilante to fulfill his desire for justice. I didn't feel the impulse to do anything that had to do with domination, but maybe it would be fun to experiment some more with my domain. Self domination was getting kinda old.

It'd be easier to choose what to do if there was a profession I could be dominant at without it feeling boring.

I could do some kind of sport, but what is the point in that if I would be limiting myself so much just to seem like a very, very talented person instead of something supernatural. I'd get bored no matter what sport I chose. Maybe I could enter chess competitions? Connor complaining about me being too 'good' at it was funny. I wasn't really good at it, but against someone who had never played it before it was very easy to win.

I sank into the bark of the tree a bit more as I thought about my options. I did not want to be part of the S&M community. The smut they had was nice, but it was just not my thing. Sport was not an option either.

Maybe I should just conquer this universe? Dominate all of it? Nah, it sounded like too much work.

… But what if I just dominated one thing I set myself to do? It didn't really have to be anything special. I'd just have to change goals once in a while. I had already completed my goal of dominating myself enough, maybe I should let my emotions out a bit and concentrate on something else, just have some boundaries and that's all.

In what thing could I just absolutely dominate at?

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AN

> Wakes up.

> Prepares for the day.

> Checks replies in the middle of breakfast.

> Wtf.png

Alright, so with all replies, I noticed I really had to start thinking how I wanted the story to move on. So far everything I've written is just one giant plot bunny, with nothing planned. This chapter is a build up to something I've been cooking.

Also, thanks for all the comments. Sure some sounded harsh, but that is what I am looking for, right? Some criticism and all that.

Ps. No, I did not procrastinate. I did not. You can't prove it. This chapter took me this much time to write. It's not because I began reading the Berserk manga. Nope.

Pps. I re-wrote this chapter like 3 times. I'm not happy with how short it is, but I feel like if I don't post right now I'll never do it so… yeah, enjoy?

If any of y'all find a spelling mistake, has questions, has some criticism, or whatever, please leave a comment. I enjoy reading them.

Thanks for reading.