As it turned out, Lord Death's decision did indeed extend to Witch's Souls. When she absorbed it, she could literally feel the power boost, especially to her magic. She was pretty sure the others noticed the power boost almost immediately, especially Maka, who told her that her soul had visibly grown. That was the problem with Soul Perception or whatever she was using as she wasn't convinced that was what it was, it was difficult to look at your own soul as ordinary mirrors did not reflect souls. Lord Death's was an exception, but she didn't want to bother him over something so trivial.
At any rate, she decided to explain her story to them on Sunday (the day after tomorrow). Soul getting hurt like that had gotten her thinking. Next time something went bad on a mission, one of her friends might die. She needed to tell them before something happened.
Besides, she was getting close to completing medicine that applied the effects of her buff spells, and it would be difficult to explain about those without revealing something that would inevitably lead to more questions about her past. Though the effects only lasted 3 minutes as opposed to the 5 they lasted when she cast the spells, and the pill needed a few seconds for the effects to kick in. She was having trouble with the Bar and En buffs, as well as making slow progress transferring her Cure spell into medicine form. Still, if she was successful, then the DWMA could provide it's operatives, including her friends, with medicine that doubled their combat abilities and was the ultimate battlefield medicine.
Cure could replace entire lost limbs with enough power behind it, albeit with scars if large areas were replaced. Sure, it didn't work on poisons or genetic issues (like cancer) but there was plenty of damage that could be repaired by her newly dubbed 'Potion.' Certainly not a very original name, but people without actual knowledge of the topic wouldn't be able to follow the conversations about it well. Wouldn't want the Witches getting their hands on universal healing magic, or worse, magic that temporarily doubled a person's magical power.
Part of the reason it was taking so long was that she was making sure that people could create the medicines with Soul Wavelength rather than magic. Using magic to create the medicines only took a couple weeks to figure out with the materials Lord Death was giving her for the research she was conducting. Of course, she was storing the paper research in a section of the vault in the DWMA building for restricted or dangerous materials, while keeping the Datalog (and another copy of her notes) she'd gotten from Cocoon that had the information stored on it in a vault inside of her personal pocket dimension, which she had with her at all times, being inside of her purple backpack.
Datalogs normally stored information in encyclopedia form automatically, but she'd gotten one that let her personalize the entries she made and edit them as she wished. It also had far more memory than a normal Datalog would be expected to as this was for long-term research and storage. She was hesitant to tinker with it beyond maintenance as she only had 2 of these left, and if she messed-up, she wouldn't particularly have a second chance. Still, the computer in here was a lot more advanced than the ones currently used by this world's branch of humanity, and she saw no reason not to give them a sample. She'd ended up giving Lord Death the third one to see if it could be used to update the computer tech of the local branch of humanity, and while an exact duplicate was not feasible with today's resources, a much more powerful processor was, and a number of supercomputers had at universities and research facilities that had more than double the processing and memory of their predecessors had been made thanks to the tech she'd provided. She was offered a hefty sum for it, but she turned it down. She wasn't doing this for money. She just wanted to help people.
Lord Death wasn't keen on the idea of Witches getting their hands on the research either, though he was going to allow the Potion's recipe to be released as the benefits of a medicine that could restore entire lost limbs with sufficient use outweighed the risks of a Witch reverse-engineering the original spell. She'd decided to put some effort into simplifying the process upon learning that, since she'd been intending to avoid doing so to keep it from being too simple and thus easily-copied before then.
Her next project was the manadrives. She'd gotten a few of each type, and was planning to see if she could get an alternate way of casting spells out of them. Of course, since she didn't have any anti-matter on hand, she couldn't use that. It was exceedingly dangerous anyway. She was going to examine the basic principles to see if it was possible to create 'batteries' of a sort that could fire off spells as long as they had charge. That would come later though.
Anyway, she started to compile her journals of what had happened ever since she'd left Equestria. She'd started keeping them since shortly after arriving in this world. She'd realized the details of her escapades would start to escape her over time, so she'd written down everything she could remember of her journey up to that point, and everything she'd deemed of any importance since. Partially to chronicle her adventures, partially as a precaution against memory wipes. She'd be letting them read these to tell her story to them beyond a brief explanation of her origins.
Since today was Friday, and the party was over with, leading to everyone leaving to do as they chose over the weekend, she decided to try and crack that last obstacle in making the Potion. She'd made it possible to make the Potions with Soul Wavelength, but it was exorbitantly draining as you were trying to infuse medicine with enough energy to regenerate lost flesh, which was even more exponentially costly than the spell itself. Normally this wouldn't be too bad, but it was to the point that Lord Death himself couldn't make more than a dozen before it started negatively affecting him. She'd nearly blacked-out making one, and it was hours before she was able to cast properly again. It simply wasn't feasible to have them this costly, so she was trying to make the process more efficient.
After 30 hours, several cups of coffee, and a couple hallucinations (Note to self: Black Blood definitely exacerbating personal vulnerability to the Madness Wavelength) she managed to get the process 25% more efficient. That would have to do for now, she'd been sticking her hand into the Soul-Sapping water when she was doing pure calculations, so she'd managed some training too.
She got her usual 6 hours of sleep, waking up at about 6:30. She went to the DWMA building to tell Lord Death about her breakthrough and wait for the others. The meeting had been arranged for 8 AM, which gave her enough time to grab breakfast, teleport her way to an alleyway near school, and present her progress.
She'd only herself to blame for not being able to directly teleport inside the school. She'd helped set up some wards for the school that prevented direct teleportation into the building. Someone on Lord Death's Level would be able to ignore them, though teleporting inside would be more draining, but anyone weaker than about twice Professor Stein's level wouldn't be able to bypass them from the outside. The perimeter of the wards matched the perimeter of the building itself. Considering the deliberately confusing internal structure, that had taken some effort.
At any rate, Lord Death said that being able to make 15 a day himself would do for the DWMA's needs, though he would appreciate it if she could get it any less draining. Stein could make a few at this point, and if she wanted she could make one, but other than that only Death Scythes had the kind of power you'd need to make one without completely exhausting yourself, even with the improvements she'd managed. Thanks to the Wavelength component, they also restored your Wavelength, though it was all from the same energy, so it tended to focus on the one (of your body or soul) that was in worse shape.
At any rate, she'd ironed out the last few bugs in her Haste, Protect, Shell, Vigilance, Auto-Esuna (a spell that set Esuna to use itself as soon as some kind of negative effect was inflicted on the target), Faith, and Bravery medicine, though that only took a couple hours. Those took about 1% of the effort of a Potion. That meant that they could be mass-produced by the students who could understand the theory. Granted it wasn't that complicated, but somehow she didn't think Blackstar or Soul would be making any anytime soon.
Since she had nothing better to do, she made a Potion with the new formula. Since it was 25% less costly and she was significantly stronger than when she'd tried to make a Potion the first time (A Witch's Soul would do that.) she was just 'pretty drained' by making it, as opposed to 'about to collapse'. She put it in her backpack/personal pocket dimension, then started making a piece of the buff-medicine for each of them. Since each piece was all the buff spells besides the Bar/En spells, that meant 7 not counting herself, or about a tenth of a Potion in total.
Not long after she finished, the others arrived. "Hey Tara, what's this about?" Soul asked.
"I think it's time I told you guys a few things about myself." Tara said.
"Hm, you know, now that I think about it, I really don't know much about you beyond your name and some of your personal preferences." Kid noted. They didn't really know much about Tara's personal history. It wasn't really something you asked about unless there was something obviously wrong or they opened up to you. Plenty of people at the DWMA had troublesome pasts.
"Huh, he's right, you've never really told us about yourself." Black Star said after blinking in confusion.
"Well that's all about to change. First off, a question. Have you ever heard of Parallel Worlds?" Tara asked.
"What now?" Black Star asked, even more confused.
"Parallel Worlds are supposed to be various versions of reality that exist 'next to' ours. They don't have different laws of physics or anything, but history would be completely different, or even the dominant species, or the Earth might just be devoid of life, or not exist at all. They haven't been proven to exist yet though." Maka explained.
"Yes, well, I can confirm their existence, not being a native of this world myself." Tara said, deciding to drop one of the real bombshells now so that the others wouldn't cause a total freak-out.
"Wait. What?" Liz asked, summing up the others thought processes.
"Yeah, this is actually the second one besides my home world I've visited. Helped save the other one, but that can wait." she explained. "Another thing I should mention is that I wasn't originally human, apparently crossing worlds changes you to match the dominant species. How willing the travel is doesn't seem to matter." Tara mentioned.
"Is there anything else we should know?!" Soul asked, exasperated.
"A few things actually, first, I changed my name from Twilight Sparkle because I'd garnered a reputation as a Witch before I joined the DWMA. As for the second... well, I have a bit of a... problem with my soul." she said, bracing herself to explain.
"Perhaps I should take over here. As you know, the most common way of becoming a Kishin Egg is to devour a human soul. However, those who commit sufficiently horrific crimes and especially those who do so repeatedly such as rapists and serial killers can become Kishin Eggs as their morals decay. Twilight is a special case in that while she killed hundreds of people, almost all of them were trying to kill her first. Thus she is one of the only unwilling mass murderers to ever live. This resulted in a portion of her soul Kishinizing and splitting off from the rest into a distinct personality, formed of all her worst traits.
Twilight named it Arcana, and it would like nothing more than to kill every living thing in existence. Twilight managed to seal it away before it managed to gain the power to take over permanently, but it's not gone forever." Death explained, causing horror to flit across his listener's faces.
"So what? It's not anything special then. Kishin eat souls and they usually have to kill people to do that right?" Black Star asked obliviously.
"There are several reasons why Arcana is more dangerous than Twilight, as she possesses all of Twilight's abilities, only she's stronger. First off, Twilight's never gone all-out against you. As a non-native, she can use magic despite not being a Witch, and she can double her physical and spiritual abilities in addition to attacking with flame, ice, electricity, water, wind, earth, or non-elemental magic, and she can do the reverse for her opponents. She has never once used magic in your spars beyond enchanting her weapons with elemental magic. Want to fight her when you're half as strong as normal and she's twice as strong as she usually is?" Death asked, cocking his head. Black Star lost his usual confident expression.
"Not only that, but she can conjure objects into existence and direct them with levitation." Death said as Twilight demonstrated by conjuring up a pen and making it dance in midair. She would admit to having thought of conjuring a storm of knives, though if the target wasn't ludicrously resistant to direct magic, then it was unlikely to be worth it to do so over throwing a higher-tier spell at them. "Besides, she knows quite a lot about physics and can create pocket dimensions to store objects inside, how did you think she fits so much into that one backpack?" he asked as Twilight pulled out a pole that couldn't possibly have fit inside her backpack. She'd put it inside that morning specifically so she could demonstrate her pocket dimension.
Maka perked up. "So that's how you do that." she said, thumping a fist into her open palm.
Twilight nodded and turned her hands towards them, palms up. "Yeah, there's something else too. You know how I'm always wearing these gloves? Well there's a reason for that. Arcana's influence, among other things, turned me into a sponge for Soul-Wavelength, and when I touch people with my bare hands I involuntarily start sucking out their Soul Wavelength, like soul-sapping water in person form. I enchanted these gloves to prevent that, while still letting me use Soul Force.
Soul Force doesn't work as well on me either because of my absorption abilities, which is why Stein needed to go all-out on me with his Soul Force attacks, and even then he needed three attacks to completely short me out, it usually takes you 5 to significantly weaken me Black Star. The worst part is that Arcana said what happened to me is a common mechanism for dealing with trauma which means any sufficiently traumatized being can develop one of her." Twilight explained.
They were starting to look a little freaked-out. "Don't worry, it took hundreds of deaths and... murders to even create Arcana, and hundreds more for her to get strong enough to take over even temporarily. Besides, with my origins, I wouldn't be surprised if it was significantly easier for these things to appear in my species." Twilight said, attempting to ease them.
"What do you mean?" Kid asked.
"Well, I'll need to give you a bit of a history lesson to explain. I started out as an equine, and about 2500 years ago, we were extremely paranoid and violent. Like, anything larger than three family groups would end up killing each other in less than a month. By the standards of that time, I would be considered one of the most well-balanced of my species to ever live by anyone who didn't know about Arcana, despite my neurosis. That should give you a pretty good idea how bad it was.
Eventually, the other races got so fed up with or frightened by us, they formed an alliance and attempted to exterminate the pony races. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, having been beating the crap out of each other since before they were capable of forming intelligent thoughts made said ponies really good at war, causing the alliance to suffer hideous losses relative to them. It was to the point where despite the fact that they were fighting each other half the time, the minute forces from the alliance showed up, the ponies would curbstomp them, then likely as not go back to what they were doing beforehand. A few races were pushed to the point of extinction before they managed to appease the violent maniacs they'd managed to annoy." At this point the others were wearing genuinely horrified expressions.
"There were some good effects though. The ponies with clearer heads were horrified by what they'd done. A few decades of research went into a spell that would permanently curb their tendencies towards paranoia, violence, and psychopathy. They were able to successfully use it on themselves, but they had difficulties with the vast majority of the population, who were understandably suspicious of a spell that modified behavior. Though finally being able to build a proper civilization now that they wouldn't start killing each other was tempting.
It took 5 centuries to completely administer the cure, but it's used with every birth now. When genetics came along it was discovered that the spell worked by turning off a number of genes that led to the violence and mental disorders, while increasing emphasis on their opposites. Of course, it tended to have reduced effectiveness on powerful mages, and dark magic tended to 'repair' the changes and that was disastrous on people who weren't used to suppressing their violent urges, so there was the occasional evil overlord over the years. Hence the outlawing of dark magic.
However, it paved the way for the ponies to more or less unite into three tribes, divided along sub-species lines, so it was a good thing overall. Granted, it would be roughly another millennium before they merged into a cohesive nation, but they were not nearly as bad then as they were before that point.
The point I'm trying to make is that my species' basic genetics tend towards 'completely insane and very violent' being the gist of a psychological profile, and I'm pretty sure that carried over as a human. Which means that Arcana is probably what I'd be like if I'd gone through my life without those modifications to my genes. I'm not saying that's exactly what I'd be like, but I probably wouldn't be all that different." Twilight explained, somewhat unnerved by the thought.
"If you were trying to make us feel better it didn't work." Kid said, calmer than the others, but still disturbed.
She nodded sheepishly. "Yeah, in retrospect I don't know why I thought that would be reassuring, but there's more. You may remember me mentioning trouble sleeping, that's because I'm more vulnerable than most to the Madness Wavelength and it causes some pretty nasty nightmares. It's gotten worse recently too." she said, she had yet to mention the Black Blood, as she didn't want to guilt-trip Maka on top of all the other things she was dropping on the group. She'd just started to recover from her guilt over Soul.
"These tell my story up to now if you want to look them over." she said, pulling copies of her journals out and handing them out. She'd been careful to edit the most recent version, giving them one that had been sanitized slightly while her real one sat in her pocket dimension with the rest of the set of originals. "I've also managed to make medicines that have the same effects as my buffing spells and Cure. These little pills here double your abilities across the board for 3 minutes and having a decaying effect for the next minute or so. It takes a couple seconds to take effect though.
The method for making the Potion will be released shortly, since we're confident we can get plenty of use out of it even if it gets copied by Witches. It's simply too useful for us not to use it. Of course, it requires imbuing it with magic or Soul Wavelength, so it's not something ordinary militaries or the vast majority of Kishin Eggs could do." she said as she pulled out the pills, then the Potion.
"This thing heals wounds and restores your Soul Wavelength, though it tends to focus on the one in worse shape. Keep that in mind before you use it." she warned, holding the Potion up.
"Are there any side effects?" Kid asked, examining the pills.
"Not unless you use enough of them to get a straight hour's worth of use out of them or more than one at a time, but don't try and push it beyond double your normal abilities when you make them. Not only does the cost increase exponentially, but any more than twice your baseline is really hard on your body. Trust me, I've checked." she had the barest hint of a healing factor thanks to Arcana and all the souls she'd absorbed, so it was slightly safer to experiment on herself. Even if one of her experiments drove her unconscious, she'd be in better shape than almost anyone else who wasn't a Shinigami.
"You should really stop experimenting on yourself. One of these days you're gonna get hurt." Soul said with some concern.
"I'll be fine. Anyone want to test your E.P. out with a spar?" she asked.
"E.P.?" Maka asked, glancing between the pill in her hand and Twilight.
"Enhancement Pill, it was the best name I could come up with, I'm not very good with naming things. It's pretty hit-and-miss." Twilight said, shrugging. Spike was one of the exceptions.
"I'll do it!" Blackstar said, before popping the pill. Tsubaki followed suit as they readied themselves. Twilight decided to go all-out this time, starting with removing her gloves, then teleporting next to the pair of ninja.
Blackstar would barely have had time to deflect the Soul Force normally, but having effectively had Haste cast on himself he was able to smoothly avoid the blow. Since Haste doubled movement speed and halved the speed of his perception of time, it more or less cut reaction time to one quarter of the norm, and with double speed that made dodging a relatively slow fighter like Twilight rather easy.
On the other hand, Twilight went in knowing the effects the pill would have, so she was prepared to teleport away from him, not trusting her normal speed in this situation. She dodged several blows this way, before slashing at him with the flat of her sword. He ducked under it, but that left him open to a straight punch from her other hand which just barely connected, followed by a Fire spell that he dodged hastily.
'Jeez, she wasn't kidding about draining people, she barely touched me but I could feel her sucking out my Wavelength.' Blackstar thought, a grin spreading across his face despite himself.
'I was right, absorbing that Witch's soul seems to have strengthened the absorption ability.' Twilight noted, the barest hint of a feral grin on her own face. That entire exchange had taken all of ten seconds after Twilight's first teleport.
They flew back into the fight. Twilight relying on teleportation to avoid Blackstar's temporarily boosted speed, and Blackstar avoiding direct contact as much as possible. Tsubaki's weapon form was resistant to the draining effects, and Twilight's sword had never had any such ability. Plus since she wasn't using her pistol, as it was nearly impossible to avoid causing injuries with it, she could use both arms to swing her sword. That contributed a great deal of extra speed and strength to her swings.
Still, she was alright with sending low-end spells at him, mainly Water to avoid causing overt amounts of harm, that Fire had been an accident. She tended to default to the Fire-chain if she wasn't paying enough attention. She had a theory about that, but she wasn't really sure.
She'd noticed that her Fire spells seemed stronger than her other spells, and her Blizzard spells were a bit weaker. The stronger her magic got, the more obvious the difference became. She also seemed to have much more of a problem with cold than she used to, while heat bothered her much less. If she was right, she had a Fire Affinity, and her strengthening magic was causing it to manifest to a degree.
Affinities for elements allowed for the casting of spells not normally possible, and provided a boost to power of the same type of spell, while weakening spells of the opposite element. They would also make you more resistant to spells of your Affinity. Of course, opposing spells would be more effective.
Considering it would give her a major weakness and any significant strength to her Affinity would take months to build up, even after the l'cie brand made her immensely more powerful, it hadn't ever seemed like it was worth the effort. Then again, she didn't use Blizzard all that often, and she had yet to encounter a being that could use much ice magic that wasn't a fal'cie or l'cie. Maybe she ought to give some thought to training up the Affinity.
3 minutes later, the effects started wearing off, Blackstar noticeably beginning to slow down. She gave him a shallow cut as his speed abruptly started to fall, then backed off as she was not keen on fighting him while his speed, toughness, and reaction time were all falling like rocks. He'd hit her with a Soul Force just before the effects started wearing off and she was still recovering, so her control was rather off right now.
"Did you get faster for a second there, or did I get slower?" he asked with a confused look on his face. From his perspective, it must have looked like she sped up all of a sudden. Haste allowed him to talk normally despite the speed boost and temporal manipulation as part of the spell.
"You got slower, the pill's wearing off. Watch out for that. It can really throw you off if your abilities are weakening mid-fight. I've gotten used to it after using these a few dozen times, but you aren't." she explained. She'd tested these on herself as soon as she'd made sure they were safe for human consumption, and gotten used to their effects. How else would she know how many you could take in a row before negative side effects started showing up?
"Still, that was an impressive display. These pills will be useful, and using your magic against us will help us get practice in for fighting Witches." Kid noted. Blackstar had reacted to attacks he'd normally have had trouble following.
"That's really impressive, but why didn't you tell us about this stuff sooner?" Liz asked.
"Well, one, it didn't seem like it was all that important when Arcana is the only thing that could end up involving anyone else and I told Lord Death everything pretty much the moment I met him, and Maka and Soul already knew about my magic, so it's not like I didn't tell anyone." she explained.
"Do you mind explaining more about the pills, and that other vial you pulled out?" Maka asked. She was curious as to the pill's exact effects.
"It needs roughly 5 seconds after you swallow it for the effects to take hold, so keep that in mind when you start using it. It mimics the effects of several spells. Protect, which halves the physical damage you receive. Shell, which halves magic and energy-based damage. Haste, which doubles movement speed while halving the rate one perceives time. That one is why Blackstar's reaction speed got so high. There's also Faith, which doubles spiritual power, Bravery, which doubles physical power, Vigilance, which doubles the power and range of your senses, and Auto-Esuna, which will automatically dispel any negative effects used on you. To be specific, most poisons and spells that cause negative effects will be removed. The pills are different from the spells in that the latter immediately wears off after 5 minutes have passed. Unlike it's healing-related counterpart, the E.P. takes far less energy to create, so it's going to be fairly easy to mass-produce." she explained before pulling out said vial with red liquid inside, the Potion.
"As for this vial, I call it the Potion. Yes, yes, I know. Not a good name, but it's pretty hit-or-miss with me. Basically, it's portable healing in a bottle. It can restore physical wounds, or an exhausted Soul Wavelength, though it's all from the same energy, so it tends to work on whatever's in worst shape. It can heal up to losing a finger, but that's the limit per bottle, and I wouldn't recommend more than 2 or 3 over an hour since we're not sure how multiple uses over a short time would affect a person. It's derived from my Cure spell, which has the same effect.
It's harder to tell if this has side effects since it's so much more draining to make. I can literally only make one at a time, so testing if multiple uses cause side effects is kind of hard. Granted Lord Death can make 15 of these things before he starts feeling drained, but we're kind of saving them. These things should improve mission survival and casualty rates by a lot, you'd be surprised how much a little less blood loss can help." she noted. She'd learned more than she ever wanted to know about how much damage the human body could take before it gave out while researching these things. She also didn't really want to know the exact figures for casualties during missions, but now she did.
It wasn't like there were a whole lot of deaths during missions, but injuries were common, what with the targets generally being homicidal at the best of times. There was a good reason most students weren't allowed on missions until they graduated. The EAT Class (Especially Advantaged Talent) was the exception, and represented the talented combatants of the school. The NOT Class (Normally Overcome Target) was ostensibly for those who simply wanted enough control over their powers to avoid hurting others, but about half of them would either become teachers or end up serving under Death in some other capacity, usually as adult hunters. On the occasions where there were epidemics of Kishin Eggs, it was not unheard of for more talented members of the NOT Class to participate in hunting them down.
"These really will be useful, but what about your pocket dimensions? Those sound like they'd be useful for holding these in the first place." Maka asked. She was very interested in the idea of personal storage spaces that were bigger on the inside. Since it wasn't in this reality, the weight wouldn't transfer to the object that served as the door between the pocket dimension and their universe. You could carry heavy gear in a pack you could normally barely lift without problems.
Twilight scratched her head sheepishly. "Yeah, I'm not able to make these things very often, because doing so makes me pass out for the next couple hours. I basically have to create a miniature universe, which is incredibly draining. Even after I wake up, it's hours before I can cast again at all." she said with an embarrassed shrug. She supposed that that may not be an accurate assessment of how much it drained her since she hadn't tried since absorbing the Witch's soul, and for some time before. She doubted it made a massive difference, but she'd probably be out a bit less time.
"Oh, so much for that idea." Maka sighed.
"Actually, I've been working on getting some for you guys for a couple weeks, usually just before bed when passing out is what I'm supposed to do. I've got a duffel bag that's smaller on the outside than the inside for each of you." Twilight responded cheerfully, causing Maka to do a complete 180.
"Really?! Let's see!" she said eagerly. They might not look like much, but they'd be so useful. "I've also enchanted them for increased durability. Still, be careful with them. Severe damage to the outside makes the pocket dimension collapse and spew it's contents into the environment around them." Specifically, she'd enchanted them with the l'cie spell. That provided a base boost to durability, which increased over time. They wouldn't block bullets, but they would survive things that would rip giant holes in a normal duffel bag. The red one was for Soul, the green for Maka, the yellow for Tsubaki, the blue for Blackstar, a black one for Kid, and a light brown and dark brown one for Patty and Liz.
"I'll finally have a place to put our mission supplies!" Maka said happily as she took hers. She usually traveled light because heavy supplies would slow her down, which could be fatal in a fight, but now it didn't matter.
"Symmetrical, I approve." Kid commented, looking his over. Yeah, she'd been expecting him to say that. She'd specifically gotten duffel bags with 2 smaller straps parallel to each other, because she knew that Kid would start to freak out over it if she got the normal single strap ones. Of course, the fact that one of straps getting torn would still leave the other one available to grab the bag with, preventing it from being overly awkward to carry, was a nice bonus.
"That should be everything. You guys can keep those copies of my journals, I have 2 other sets just in case." Twilight announced.
"Ah, Stein's waiting for you two. Best get going." Death told Maka and Soul as they all started to leave. Twilight was planning to talk to Kid about the mission she was going on with him in a few days. Ever since the incident with the Demon Sword, involving Soul nearly dying, and Stein and herself being minorly injured, Lord Death had required that students take missions in groups of at least three, or 2 teams. Whichever was more convenient. After that, she was planning to do some training in a new pocket dimension she'd made for that purpose. The 'walls' of a pocket dimension were nearly indestructible from the inside, and even if she broke it down somehow, she'd just be ejected. Things were looking up.